VEILED MIRROR Read Free

shadows from building clouds. “These old shafts are easy to miss,” she said, putting an arm around Ellie.
    Silver and copper mines had dotted the southern Arizona landscape back in the late 1800’s, and few of them were mapped or marked. Beth remembered a news report about a man who’d stopped by the side of the road not far from Tucson, taken a few steps away from his car to relieve himself, and fallen to his death.
    “This doesn’t make sense! What was he doing here? He said he was going to check fences to the south—”
    The equipment set up over the three foot wide shaft clanked and the stony-faced men working there stepped back from the edge. A few glanced over at Ell, then quickly turned away. No one wanted to look too closely at her distress, especially since somehow word had already gotten around that she was pregnant.
    “Okay, pull him up!” a sheriff’s deputy shouted. The winch on the truck bumper jerked to life. “Easy!”
    “Be careful with him!” Ellie tried to step forward but Beth held her back.
    Beth tried to swallow past the stone that seemed to fill her chest. The mic had picked up no breath sounds, but there was an ambulance standing by just in case. Still, everyone knew the rescue had become a recovery. Everyone but Ell. She kept talking like Chris might have survived the fifty foot drop.
    Toby came to stand between Ellie and the shaft. “Come back to my vehicle. Let your sister do the I.D. This isn’t how you want to remember him.” He put a hand on her arm and she shook him off.
    “No.”
    Beth squeezed her sister’s hand. “Please, let me do this for you.”
    “No.” Ell reached for Beth’s hand. Her fingers were like ice, in spite of the humid, ninety-plus temperature. “He’s my husband. I have to see him.”
    “You can see him later, at the mortuary,” Toby said.
    But Beth understood. Ell had to know . Now. When their mother had died they hadn’t been allowed to see her. It was because of the crash. No one thought two eleven-year-olds should view something like that. Their father had been too broken up to have a memorial service and it was as if their mother had just left one day and never returned.
    Ell had to see Chris, or she would be waiting forever for him to come home.
    It took almost a minute before the aluminum framed stretcher with its bloody burden cleared the edge. Chris was clearly dead. Beth hugged Ell but her sister stood rigid and unresponsive.
    And then she collapsed in Beth’s arms.

CHAPTER TWO
    H ello?” Beth said into the telephone, then sighed as the perky soft rock resumed. She was on hold again.
    When Ell had collapsed two days ago, the ambulance crew had taken her forty-five minutes away, to the emergency department at the nearest hospital. The doctor said Ell and the baby were fine, but she should take it easy for a while. So while Ellie sequestered herself in her room, Beth worked off the invitation list for the wedding reception, calling everyone to let them know about Chris’s death. It was an awful job, breaking the news to old friends, but it would be even worse for her sister to do it.
    She’d called Palmer, Chris’s cousin, first. After a moment of stunned silence, he’d taken Beth off guard with his question, “Do you know if he’d accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior?”
    This wasn’t the response she’d expected, but then she remembered he was preparing to become a missionary. “I—I’m pretty sure he believed in God.”
    “But was he born-again? When I talked to him last, he was still denying his need to have his sins washed away in the blood of the Lamb.”
    “I couldn’t say.”
    “And Eleanor? You must assure her that God will not abandon her in this, her hour of grief. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’”
    “Uh, I’ll tell her.”
    “Tell her she may call me at any time. I can’t