Five years earlier, Cora had completed a training course with Dixie Belle that qualified the dachshund as a therapy dog. Since then, she’d taken her best friend to school every day. Her students were all special-needs kids suffering developmental disabilities and a wide range of emotional problems. With her well-feathered tail and soulful eyes and vibrant personality, Miss Dixie did heroic duty in the classroom, letting herself be petted and hugged and teased while invariably calming the children, assuaging the fears that afflicted them, and thereby helping them to focus.
Indeed, Cora took Dixie with her everywhere.
In the small laundry room off the kitchen, the dog stood under the perfboard from which hung a few collars and leashes. She wagged her tail and looked up expectantly at her mistress. If she cared little for the outdoors, Dixie loved the classroom and going for rides in the Ford Expedition.
Cora took down a red collar and a matching leash. She knelt to dress the dachshund…and found her hands shaking too violently to match the halves of the collar clasp and click them together.
She was meant to bring the dog. She understood that she was meant to bring precious Dixie. Understood that having the dog with her was for some reason a crowning detail, part of the portrait of herself that she was meant to paint on this eventful day. But her hands would not obey her; the collar clasp defeated her.
The dog whined and backed through the open door into the kitchen, where she halted and watched and did not wag her tail.
“I don’t know,” Cora heard herself say. “I don’t know…I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I should do.”
The still, small voice—which she had thought of as being the expression of her intuition and her conscience—had not heretofore been audible. Rather, it had been more like a text message, words of light forming compelling sentences across a virtual screen in some dark office of her mind. But now the message translated from light into sound, and a seductive male voice whispered inside her skull.
No time to delay. Move, move, move. Do what you were born to do. Fame escaped you as a writer, but fame will be yours when you do this that you were born to do. You will be famous and adored.
She could resist the urge to take the dog, but she could not resist this voice. In fact, she was overcome by a desire to obey her conscience, her intuition, whatever it was—God?—that spoke to her and stirred her heart with a promise of the fulfillment that had been so long denied her.
When she returned the leash and collar to the perfboard, her hands at once stopped shaking.
To Dixie, she said, “Mommy won’t be gone long, sweetheart. You be good. Mommy will be back soon.”
She opened the door between the laundry room and the garage, and a cold draft washed over her. She had forgotten her coat. She hesitated, but she must not delay. She needed to move, move, move.
“I love you, Dixie, I love you so much,” Cora said, and the dog whimpered, and Cora closed the door as she stepped into the garage.
She didn’t bother to switch on the fluorescent panels, but went directly to the driver’s door of the snow-white Ford Expedition that stood softly glowing in the shadows of the only stall.
She got behind the wheel and started the engine and used a remote to put up the big overhead door.
Wintry daylight flooded into the garage as the segmented door clattered upward on its tracks, and it seemed to her that this was akin to the scintillant influx of light in movies that always announced a wondrous arrival, whether a fairy godmother or a benign extraterrestrial or some Heaven-sent messenger.
In her quiet, mundane life, momentous events were impending, and she thrilled to the expectation of some not-quite-defined moment of glory.
The faintest smell of gasoline induced Cora Gundersun to turn and peer into the back of the Expedition. The rear seat had been put down. In the expanded cargo space, fifteen bright-red two-gallon cans were lined up in three rows. The previous evening, she had unscrewed the top cap and the spout cap from each full can and had replaced them with double-thick swatches of plastic wrap secured with rubber bands.
She forgot she had made these preparations. She remembered now, and she was not shocked. She surveyed the cans and knew that she should be proud of what she had done here, for the seductive voice praised her and spoke of what she had been born to do.
On the front passenger seat stood a large metal stockpot in which she had cooked many soups and stews over the years. In the bottom of the pot were green bricks of the wet foam that florists used as the foundation of their arrangements, which she had bought at a garden store. Standing upright in the foam were two bundles of long-stemmed wooden matches, ten per bundle, each group held together by two rubber bands, one under the match heads and the other toward the bottom of the thick stems. Beside the stockpot lay a small butane lighter.
She thought the matches looked like three bunches of tiny withered flowers, magical flowers that, when a bewitching word was spoken, would bloom into bright bouquets.
Scattered among the gasoline cans behind her were two hundred match heads that she had scissored from their sticks.
When she drove out into the gray day, she did not bother to pick up the remote and put down the garage door behind her. The lovely voice said that time was of the essence, and Cora was eager to see why that might be so.
By the time she reached the end of the driveway, the heat issuing from the vents took the chill off her bare skin, and she had no need of a coat.
At the end of the driveway, she turned right onto the two-lane blacktop county road and drove toward town.