Wild Orchids Read online

  “Before or after I research a book for you?” She put two potato pancakes (cooked in some no-calorie spray) on my plate. “Before or after I get an auctioneer to clean the excess furniture out of this house? Before or after I cook three meals a day for you?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said as I bent my head and filled my mouth with food.

  After breakfast, I suggested we also buy a dishwasher and hire someone to install it.

  “Good idea,” Jackie said, drying her hands on a paper towel. “And when do we start trying to find out about the devil story?”

  “Let’s talk about it in the car,” I said, and minutes later we were driving.

  I must say that buying things with Jackie made me remember my childhood. She was as in awe of spending money as I had been when I was a kid—or I was at her age, before my books were published.

  Jackie’s delight at being able to buy several major appliances at once was infectious. She made me understand how good dirty old men felt at buying their young mistresses bags full of jewelry. We bought vacuum cleaners (one for each floor), lots of knobs for the kitchen cabinets, and enough cleaning supplies and equipment for a hospital. I was getting bored until we got to the gardening and tool section where I felt more comfortable.

  “I thought you hated machines,” she said, leaning against a shelf and flipping through a book on landscaping.

  I didn’t answer but just smiled.

  “What?!” she said.

  “I never said that so you must have read my books.”

  “Never said I didn’t,” she replied, wedging the book into the already-full cart. “Who’s going to do the cleaning and the gardening? And don’t look at me. And, by the way, you still haven’t told me how much you’re paying me or what my hours are.”

  “Twenty-four/seven. And what’s the minimum wage now?” I said, just to see her sputter.

  But she didn’t sputter. Instead, she turned around and started walking toward the front door of the store. She was moving so fast the big glass entrance doors had slid open before I caught her arm. “Okay, so what do you want?”

  “Nine to five, twenty dollars an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But are you on or off the clock at breakfast and dinner?”

  After a look of disgust, she shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t figure out anything about this job.”

  “Excuse me,” said a woman loudly.

  Jackie and I were blocking the exit and the woman wanted out, so we stepped aside.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “How about a grand a week and we play the hours by ear? If you want time off I’ll stay home and take care of the furniture.”

  I got a tiny smile out of her at my joke, and we went back to our overloaded cart.

  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was putting up with her cantankerousness. I hadn’t put up with anything from the other women who’d worked for me. One second of bad temper and they were out of there.

  But each time Jackie bit my head off, I remembered her story about the Pulitzer prize. That had been insightful and creative. And I remembered the way that lovely little Autumn had sat down in the middle of the room and cried—and I wondered if she’d done it just to get Jackie to tell a story. If so, what other stories had Jackie told?

  As I looked at weed whackers, I thought, Jackie can research the devil story and I’ll research Jackie.

  We had lunch at a fast-food place, where Jackie had a salad and I had about four pounds of sandwich and curly fries. Through the whole meal, I could tell she was dying to lecture me on fat and cholesterol.

  By two, we were on our way back to that monstrosity of a house, the car loaded nearly to the ceiling, appliances to be delivered tomorrow, when I couldn’t resist telling her she should eat more. It was like I’d turned the crank and the jack-in-the-box sprang out. She started in on arteries and saturated fat until I was yawning and wished I’d not said anything.

  But we both came alert when I drove around a hairpin curve and there before us was an overturned car. In front of it were four laughing teenagers, obviously laughing in relief that they hadn’t been hurt in the accident.

  For a second both Jackie and I sat frozen to our seats; we were seeing her dream come to life. The next second we had thrown open the car doors and were screaming, “Get away from the car!”

  The four teenagers turned to look at us, dazed from having just been tumbled about, but they didn’t move.

  When Jackie started to run toward the kids, I ran after her. What the hell was she going to do? Get torn apart with them?

  I don’t think it occurred to me to doubt that, any second, that car was going to blow up, and anything near it was going to be sliced into pieces. When I reached Jackie, I grabbed her by the waist and held her on my hip like a sack of cornmeal. Even in that position, she didn’t stop screaming at the kids, nor did I, but I wasn’t going to let her get any closer to that belly-up vehicle.

  Maybe it was that I wouldn’t get closer to the car or that I wouldn’t let Jackie run toward them, that finally got through to one of the kids. A big, good-looking boy with lots of black hair finally seemed to understand what Jackie and I were saying and moved into action. Grabbing one of the girls, he nearly threw her across the road, where she began rolling down the steep hillside. The other boy grabbed the hand of the girl beside him and started running.

  Like something in a movie, the three kids leaped toward the far side of the road just as the car exploded.

  I got behind the safety of a big rock, holding Jackie’s trim little body against mine, and covering her head with my arms. I bent my head and ducked under an overhang of tree roots.

  The sound of the explosion was terrifying, and the brilliance of the light made me close my eyes so tight they hurt.

  It was all over in seconds, then we heard pieces of steel falling onto the road, and the car began to burn. Still holding Jackie, I waited to see if it was really over.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said, struggling to lift her head.

  It was finally hitting me that she’d seen all of this. And her prophetic dream had just saved the lives of four kids.

  She seemed to know what I was thinking because when she pushed away and looked at me, her face was beseeching. “I didn’t know the dream was real. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. I—”

  She cut off when one of the boys came over to say thanks for saving their lives. It was the boy whose fast actions had saved all of them. “How did you know?” he asked.

  I could feel Jackie looking at me. Did she think I was going to betray her? “I saw a spark,” I said. “By the gas tank.”

  “I sure do thank you,” he said, putting out his hand to shake as he introduced himself as Nathaniel Weaver.

  “Let’s call the police from your cell phone,” Jackie said. There was so much gratitude in her voice that I didn’t dare look at her or I would have turned red in embarrassment.

  In the end, it took the rest of the day to straighten everything out. The girl Nate had thrown—“Like a football,” she said, looking up at the boy with eyes full of hero worship—had a broken arm so I drove her to the hospital while Jackie stayed with the other three kids until the police arrived. The police gave her and the kids a ride home.

  After the girl’s parents arrived at the hospital, I drove back to the scene of the explosion and looked around. The wrecked car had been towed away, but I picked up a piece of metal from the side of the road and sat down by the rock that had protected Jackie and me from flying metal.

  For the last two years I’d been reading ghost and witch stories that were littered with tales of fortune-tellers and people who could see the future. This morning Jackie had told me of a dream of something that was going to happen. Yet she said she’d never glimpsed the future before.

  Was it just my writer’s imagination or was there a connection between the fact that Jackie had returned to a place she seemed to remember and he