Micanopy in Shadow Read Free Page A

sheriff’s office didn’t find them helpful. I have more faith in your intuition, and that’s a fact.”
    Brandy sighed to herself. A tall order, Grandmother. She couldn’t depend on her intuition, although sometimes she did have feelings she couldn’t explain. In the Tavares case she’d felt so close to a dead woman that she really thought she saw her. John blamed an over-active imagination. Then there was the strange, globular light near the Suwanee River and Cedar Key—others saw it, too. That light had helped her. In Homosassa she felt in tune with long ago Seminoles—even the settlers they preyed on. Brandy shivered. But she couldn’t summon intuition. It wasn’t like ringing a buzzer for a maid.
    When they reached the end of Cholokka Boulevard, Hope mashed down on the accelerator and whipped around a corner to the right, past a tall Queen Anne house with a circular turret. Hope took Brandy there once when she was five. She’d disgraced herself by spitting watermelon seeds on the polished floor. Brandy hoped different people lived there now.
    Hope rounded another curve, stopped in a narrow road, and cut the engine. Farther down the block, Brandy could see the church with its towering steeple surrounded by a white picket fence.
    “The pond’s down there,” Hope said. She gazed to the left. “This month there’s water in it. When the weather’s dry, there isn’t.” Her eyes softened again. The small pond was coated with green scum, its edges choked by weeds and grasses. Turkey oaks shaded the dark water.
    “It doesn’t look large enough for anyone to drown in.”
    “Of course, it doesn’t. Would you pick that place to kill yourself?” Hope gunned the engine and headed down Smith Street toward the cemetery.
    A few minutes later they passed between the pillars. A sign read Micanopy Historic Cemetery, Est. 1826.” On each side of the road headstones stood in untidy rows for several acres, some barely thrusting above the brown grass, others tall and well cared for, some discolored with age and moss-grown. A few in a newer section gleamed white, their bases decked with artificial flowers. The only fresh blossoms lay withering on graves. Overhead, thin bands of sunlight drifted down through the branches of oaks. The first scent of autumn hung in the air.
    Brandy’s grandmother parked the pickup and both women stepped out into the hushed grounds. Hope retrieved the yellow and red gladiolas from the back of the truck.
    Brandy frowned. “Should you be walking on this uneven ground after your operation?”
    “Lord a’ mercy, I’m fine,” Hope snapped. “Still strong as an ox.”
    Brandy knew better than to argue with her grandmother, but she knew Hope had trouble with arthritis in her joints and spine. She’d had a knee replacement two months ago. At least Brandy would be with her if she stumbled or fell.
    They threaded their way among the headstones, brushing past a few pines and a thick cedar. Copper-colored leaves crackled under their feet, and cicada whirred in the shrubbery. How many lives, Brandy wondered, lie hidden under these weathered stones, lives that still make a difference to the living?
    Ada’s burial place was easy to find. It stood near the front of the cemetery and faced the street. On Brandy’s visits to her grandmother, they had often come to this monument that looked down on a cluster of ordinary markers. Low fences enclosed the plots of many families, but no relatives gathered around this memorial—not yet. The life-size stone figure of Brandy’s great-grandmother rose above the rest, poised on a large block of granite, its young face lifted toward the road as if in defiance. On the base was carved “Ada Losterman, est. 1899–1921,” and below those words, two verses of a poem. Time had dimmed the letters, but as a college student, Brandy copied them and discovered they were from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. She would get the file out of her desk and read them