A truck was coming toward her. She swerved her car to the right, closer to the cliff, but in that short expanse, with the tight road, there was no chance of not hitting the truck. She hit the brakes to lessen the impact, terror filling her heart, as the back of her car fishtailed. There was a woman inside the truck. She could not see much more than that.

The truck and the car smashed together with a reverberating, echoing bang, metal on metal, glass shattering, brakes shrieking, tires twisting.

One of the vehicles went over the cliff. She thought it was hers, but the premonition ended in a blur. It could have been the truck. It could have been her car. But this particular premonition shifted sometimes; it was the only one where the scene altered. One of the women died, she thought. Probably. There was an air of death. She didn’t know who it was, though, or if it was both of them. It was fuzzy, and her premonitions were never fuzzy.

Was it she who died?

Or did the other woman die?

Was it her fault that the other woman died?

She couldn’t live with that.

She took note, yet again, of the scene. The weather. The time of day. The place. The poppies.

She could change the outcome of premonitions with other people; she could interfere sometimes, she had done it her whole life. Because of the fuzziness, did that mean the end result of this premonition was undecided?

And, if she changed the premonition for herself, if she reacted quickly to save herself from crashing into the truck, and she didn’t die, would the other woman die? That wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. She could never hurt anyone like that.

If this was set in the future and she was older—she thought, because her hands, on the steering wheel, were all she could see of herself and looked older—and the other woman was younger, the younger woman should live, not her.

As she lay miserable in that grimy infirmary, the leather straps tight, her body throbbing, her fever spiking up again, her legs hot and sticky from blood and sweat, she tried to sort things out through the excruciating depression in her mind.

If the premonition was correct, she was out of prison. She was not here. She ended up on a winding road near fir trees and orange poppies.

Maybe she would not die in prison.

Even if she wanted to.

Chapter 7

I have a lot of animals, I know this, I do. I am not an animal collector. I am not an animal hoarder.

I simply love animals.

Jane Austen, my brown horse, was almost dead when I saw her on the western edge of the island on a farm. You could see her bones. My friend, Amy, saw her and called me. The farm was owned by a mean son of a gun named Doc Haurley. Doc used to be a doc, but he lost his medical license and was sued because he was a negligent, drunken doctor. He was a urologist. One man ended up wearing a colostomy bag the rest of his life. Another woman ended up incontinent. One almost died.