Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One Read Online Free Page B

stepped up to the podium and opened his Bible.
    "Katherine Belanger," he began, "if she were
here, would thank each of you for your presence today to celebrate
her graduation into glorious everlasting life. I've known Kathy for
many years, and as I prayed about what I would share today, the
word that kept coming to my mind, was love." Guy slipped his
reading glasses on and bent slightly to read from the Bible.
    "So, I thought we'd start
today by defining love. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us that love is
patient…"
    Guy had continued to speak, giving each
definition of love, followed by an example from Katherine
Belanger's life, but Cassie heard little of it, and barely felt
Grace's rhythmic squeezing of her hand. In her mind, she was ten
years old again, and she and her mother were sitting in the shade
of the willows, along the edge of the river. Kathy was reading to
her daughter from that same letter to the headstrong people of
Corinth.
    "This is the Bible in a
nutshell, Baby," her mother had
said. "Love is something we are, not
just something we do. Love Jesus, remember what love is, and try to
be that everyday; everything else will work itself
out."
    Cassie couldn’t say how long she sat there, looking down on
Interstate 10. She was still rocking gently as the sun disappeared
and long, purple fingers of night began to stretch across the
desert, her face hidden from the world and her mind enveloped in
memories. Her mother's smell, the touch of her hand on Cassie's
face as she brushed her hair, the strength of her arms as she held
her daughter.
    When Cassie's tear-stained face did finally
rise, her cheeks damp and puffy with crying, she was able to take a
deep breath of the cool desert air, the scent of hot asphalt and
bitter junipers mingling in her nostrils. Her heart ached, and she
longed to wake up and have the last week be nothing more than a
terrible nightmare. Wiping her eyes, Cassie shouldered her duffel
bag and resumed her hike in the fading amber glow of sunset.

    *

    The temperature in the desert drops quickly
with the setting sun. Luckily, for Cassie, there was a great,
glowing, full moon rising, so she could leave her flashlight in her
bag, following the highway in the strange, shadowed monochrome that
washed across the plain as far as she could see. Soon she was
shivering as she buttoned the jacket to the collar and stuffed her
hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Just as she was debating
pulling more clothes from her bag, Cassie topped a small rise and
saw a broken-down pole barn, slowly collapsing into ruin a dozen
yards north of the highway. Growing up on the outskirts of
civilization, she knew better than to sneak silently up to the
building. Cassie whistled and scuffed her feet as she approached
the sagging door, kicking up a few rocks that bounced noisily off
the side of the nearest wall. This would alert anything on more
than two legs to her presence and, if it hadn't already caught her
scent and done so, it would turn tail at the sound of her
approach.
    Either the barn was vacant or whatever had
been living there fled unseen, as the interior was stark and empty
in the beam of Cassie's flashlight. The floor was the same hard
packed dirt as the desert outside; drifts of dust had blown up one
wall from the nightly east wind, partially burying the tumbled
remains of a couple of stalls.
    Beneath the rotting wood rails, Cassie found
several long forgotten bales of hay. These she eyed suspiciously,
poking and prodding with a stick until she was satisfied there were
no mice or rats hiding inside.
    Taking a small Leatherman multitool from her
pocket, Cassie clipped the brittle twine of the first bale and
began to spread the hay around for a bed to lay her sleeping bag
on.
    Gathering another handful of dusty straw and
kicking one of the weathered boards to pieces, she used an old
Zippo lighter that had been her mother's (and, she suspected, her
father's before that) to start a small fire in