Betsy saw her hands clutching the steering wheel. She looked over the edge of the cliff, to make sure she wasn’t too close, and then she saw the blue truck suddenly in front of her as it barreled around the curve. A woman was driving.

She drew in a breath, then turned the wheel hard to the right and drove her car straight off the cliff. The car bounced down, glass smashing, metal clashing, the noise a screeching, splitting cacophony. She saw herself banging around in the car, her body thrust into the airbag. She felt the heat. She saw the flames. Was she going to burn to death? Was the car going to explode?

Why did she turn her steering wheel and drive straight over the cliff? There was still ten feet at least between her and the oncoming blue truck.

Did she die?

It looked like it. Her head was out the window, hanging like a rag doll. She sensed someone coming down the cliff, rocks slipping. She heard a scream of alarm, then another scream from pain. Had the other woman fallen? Was she okay? Had she died?

Betsy shivered.

One of them dies, she thinks. She felt the black claw of death, but the death was murky, blurry, and deaths were never blurry in her other premonitions.

Was it her? Was it the other woman?

Who was the other woman?

She pulled herself into a ball on her prison cot. She was cold, utterly depressed, and worried about her baby Rose. Was she healthy? Were her new parents kind and patient with her?

But if the premonition was correct, if the accident happened, she is released from prison at some point in time in the future.

She held on to that faintest glimmer of hope yet again.

She did not sleep at all that night. Prison is never conducive toward sleep.

Plus, her new roommate jumped her and beat her face up.

* * *

In response to Johnny Kandinsky’s claim that his father had murdered his mother in Idaho, before they moved to Oregon, the police in Idaho searched the Kandinskys’ abandoned home up in the hills. They searched below the home in the crawl space, the barn, and an outbuilding. They saw no sign of a crime, no blood splatters, no body. They never moved beyond the immediate property to search the acreage that Peter Kandinsky owned.

No one had ever claimed that Gabriella Kandinsky was missing. Plus, she was an illegal Mexican. She shouldn’t have been here in the first place, even if she did marry an American, right? She had never applied for citizenship. She had simply snuck into the country. In all likelihood she had moved back to Mexico with her lover and was working there. She went home, they said.

There was no body, no signs of violence.

And, again, she was illegal. . . .

Case closed.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19