to set up the front area attractively for whatever retail business she might garner had been a good one. It was easy enough to tote the bins to the rear area to fill mail orders, and she considered every face-to-face sale a bonus.
“Life is a bowl of cherries,” she said, then laughed. “Or whatever. Get to work, Ms. Shatner.”
Over the past two years, she’d perfected the knack of being able to count with one section of her brain, and think about whatever struck her fancy with the other part of her mind.
A fact, she thought merrily, that had probably kept her from turning into a blithering idiot from spending her days counting two, four, six...
Life is a bowl of cherries? she mentally repeated, as she slid blue beads from one side of the mat to the other. Now that she really thought about it, that didn’t make much sense. What if a person didn’t like cherries?
The bottom line was that her life was in shipshape order. She was happy, fulfilled and contented. Her fledgling business was doing well, and she had marvelous friends in the store’s shabby, run-down neighborhood. She had everything she wanted and needed.
Well...
Nancy frowned slightly as she continued to count the beads.
There were moments...not often, but once in a while... when she was a tad lonely. Sitting alone in her little apartment above the store, watching a romantic movie on her minuscule television, sometimes caused her to wistfully yearn for a special man, a wonderful man, to take her into his arms.
“Hush, Nancy,” she said. “Eighteen, twenty,” she added, completing a pile of beads.
She stared into space.
It was perfectly understandable, she reasoned, that she’d have fleeting thoughts of being loved and loving in return, of having a child that was a miraculous result of that love. She was, after all, a normal, healthy twenty-five-year-old woman.
But the fleeting thoughts were just that... fleeting. She valued her hard-won independence far too much to relinquish it for any reason. To enter into a relationship with a man would require her to give away a part of her being, and to be accountable to someone other than herself.
No.
Never again.
“Stop it,” she scolded herself. “You’ll make the bowl of cherries gloomy by thinking about that stuff.”
Blanking her mind beyond counting, she began to hum a peppy tune.
Tux stood across the street, frowning as he stared at the store with the sign hung on the top front that read Buttons and Beads.
It was a typical June morning in Houston, hot and humid, but Tux was oblivious to the trickle of sweat running down his back beneath his cotton shirt.
It had been ridiculously easy to find the store with the sign he’d seen so clearly in the images in his mind. He’d simply opened the Houston telephone book to the yellow pages, and there it was.
He folded his arms over his chest and leaned one shoulder against the chipped bricks of the front of the deserted building behind him, sweeping his gaze along the street.
It was a mishmash of structures. Some, like the one he’d propped himself on, were empty, the whitewashed windows and crumbling brick walls covered in spray-painted graffiti. Others had professionally produced signs like the one announcing Buttons and Beads, sparkling clean windows and walls, and nicely painted front doors.
He could see a variety of businesses—a bakery, a used clothes store called The Second Time Around, a pawnshop, a small grocery store, and some others he couldn’t quite decipher from where he stood.
The height of the buildings, combined with the curtains in the upstairs windows of the occupied ones, indicated that the owners, or possibly other renters, lived above the stores.
There was pride of ownership there, as well as evidence of broken dreams and a failure to succeed. But the effort of sprucing up that the tenants or owners had made couldn’t erase the section of the city they were in.
Dangerous.
“Damn,” he muttered.
He did not want to cross that street and go into Buttons and Beads. There was a knot in his gut the size of a bowling ball caused by the dread of what he might find.
Tux shook his head in self-disgust.
Some former government agent now a private investigator he was. He was shaking in his shorts over what he might discover beyond the door of that shop. The woman he’d seen in the visions, that beautiful, gypsylike woman, had been in danger, had been pleading for help as she cried tears of fear.
His psychic powers didn’t see into the future, never had. He could glimpse only what was taking place at the actual moment, or had very recently occurred.
Why the foggy and confusing images of what might have taken place in that store had reached him without him bidding them to come, he didn’t know. Hopefully it was a fluke that would never happen again.
Maybe... Yeah, that was a comforting thought. Maybe the scenario he’d witnessed had occurred years before, and had accidentally landed in his brain.
. Granted, the card on the door of Buttons and Beads said Open, but it could very well be that he’d walk in there and find a little old man running the place.
The old guy would relate a sad tale of a robbery years before that had caused the young woman, who then owned the shop, to be slightly...very slightly....harmed. She’d hightailed it out of there after recovering from minor injuries suffered during the assault, and was now happily married with five kids.
Tux blew out a puff of air from a pent-up breath, then told himself to cross that street.
Now.
Mumbling several earthy expletives, he pushed himself away from the wall and started slowly forward.
The brass bell above the door tinkled, alerting Nancy to the fact that someone had entered the store. She continued to count, cocking her head to listen for a greeting from a friend in the neighborhood. They all knew to call out a hello of some sort, then wait until she had finished counting the beads into a pile of twenty.
Realizing that a real customer was out front due to the absence of a familiar holler, she dropped the frosting spatula and got quickly to her feet to hurry from the rear area.
As she came through the doorway, she was smiling pleasantly.
Tux’s shoulders slumped in defeat when he saw the woman who had emerged from the back of the shop.
It was her, he thought dismally, the woman from the visions. There she was, with her wild tumble of shiny black curls, big dark eyes and lovely features.
She was wearing a white peasant blouse that accentuated her slender throat, and a multicolored skirt. There was a gypsylike aura to her, just as he’d seen in the haunting images.
