“Because he’s your partner and I socialize with him, dimwit!”

“Well, you kind of don’t, you know,” he pointed out. “You haven’t been over to visit with us in forever. When I try to set you up on a date, you won’t go. As far as I can tell, you don’t socialize at all. That’s the problem with brooding, silent Marlboro Man types. They’re not much for talking.”

Mary closed her eyes. It would do no good to ignore him. He cheerfully refused to acknowledge any silent messages that didn’t suit him.

She snapped, “Today is my first day off in a very long time, and I don’t want to spend it in a doctor’s waiting room.” She paused. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with me.”

The lie reverberated in her throbbing head. She was cracked down the middle to her foundation. Whatever her mysterious internal ailment was, it was getting worse. If she didn’t figure out what was wrong she was going to break into pieces, deep inside where nobody could see but where the most vital part of her lived.

He ran a hand through his hair and glanced at his watch, looking hassled. “I don’t have time to argue with you.”

“Good,” she retorted. A belated curiosity struck. “Why did you come over this morning anyway?”

“Oh. Yeah. I wanted to know if you could dog-sit Baxter again. I needed to know, and you weren’t answering your phone.” He hesitated, and she listened to nuances shift in the silence. “Tony and I got invited away for the weekend, but we don’t have to go either.”

“I didn’t answer my phone because the battery is dead. It didn’t ring.” She repeated it with as much patience as she could muster. Then she remembered what she was doing and poured a second cup of coffee for herself. She held it to her nose, closed her eyes and let the steam warm her chilled skin.

He was right. Somehow between her work and preoccupation, Justin, Tony and that dog had become her entire social circle, and she hadn’t been to see them in months.

She would have to add another item to her to-do list. Fix toilet. Fix lamp. Fix self.

Out loud she said, “Of course I’ll watch Baxter for you. I love that dog.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got a deposition and I really have to run. But I’m coming back, and we’re going to duke this out later. I’ll see you at two thirty.”

She felt the bones in her body compress with the urge to smack him over the head. She gritted her teeth instead. The quicker she stopped arguing with him, the quicker he would be out the door. “Hurry or you’ll be late for work.”

“Oh hell.” He bent forward, kissed the air by her cheek and dashed out of the house.

Mary moved to the large living room window to watch with narrowed eyes as he drove away. She tapped a fingernail against the glass. “You can come,” she whispered to his retreating car. “But I’m not going to be around when you get here.”

* * *

SHE FOLDED HER laundry, put it away and straightened her bed. There was another load of colorful cloth scraps waiting in the laundry room. After she put the scraps in the washing machine, she tidied the living room.

Since she lived alone and the two-bedroom house was more than big enough to suit her modest needs, she used the living room as one of her workrooms. She had four quilts in varying stages of completion. The most colorful piece, by far, was the patchwork crazy quilt. She fingered the cloth, but the quilt wasn’t speaking to her. It seemed a lifeless fact, separate from her existence, as though some stranger had left it in her house.

She moved down the hall to the second bedroom, which she had turned into a studio. There she spent two hours trying to capture on canvas something of the elusive imagery from her dream.

Those creatures had shone from within. The colors that had shifted within their bodies and flowed outward in whorls of light were too delicate and strange for her to capture on paper. The colors seemed indicative of emotion or personality, as if the creatures had senses so different from humans, they could actually see the pheromones their bodies released.

She had been plagued with strange dreams for as long as she could remember. The one she had labeled the sacred poison dream was only one of several that recurred on a regular basis. Sometimes the details of the sacred poison dream were vague or just different, but several details remained constant. There were seven people or creatures, of whom three pairs were mates, and an escaped criminal. They always drank poison, and she always felt terror and a sense of appalling loss when she awakened.

She shook her head and frowned. Some people believed each person had a soul mate, but she didn’t. The concept was too convenient, too romantic, without real substance. Since she didn’t believe in it, she could never understand why that was a major recurring theme in her dreams.

People met other like-minded people because they shared things in common and engaged in similar activities. Birds of a feather really did flock together. Either that, or they met by accident.

At least she could be grateful that, no matter how violent or overwhelming the sense of loss might feel in the aftermath of the sacred poison dream, it held her in its grip for only a brief time before fading away. No one could endure that kind of raw anguish for long, at least not that Mary had witnessed. People seemed to suffer intense grief in waves.

When she had been a child, the dreams had not been as intense or vivid, but they had always been unsettling. They had gained in color, detail and emotion as she had grown older.

As a med student at Notre Dame University, in an attempt to put whatever demons existed inside her mind to rest, she’d taken advantage of the counseling offered through the university. For over a year, she and her counselor had explored her childhood and the possible symbolism involved in the dream imagery.

Justin was right. She had lived an entirely normal childhood. She had fallen out of trees, tripped and misspoke in school plays, made cupcakes for bake sales and had sleepovers with friends. She remembered her childhood with detailed clarity. Other than the death of her parents when she was fourteen, there was simply nothing for her to be haunted about. Even then she had gone to live with a loving aunt who had been attentive to the needs of a grief-stricken child.

She wasn’t interested in sex, although for a while she wanted to be. The concept, while intriguing, was less than compelling in execution. Instead of finding intimacy to be emotionally and physically rewarding, she felt clinical, detached and rather repulsed by the act, and she loathed casual dating.

At first she had been relieved that Justin hadn’t seemed to be very interested either in physical intimacy. During their marriage, their sexual relationship had been perfunctory at best. When he had finally faced the truth about himself and admitted that he was g*y, she had made an almost seamless adjustment into the role of supportive friend. Their split-up had been a relief for the both of them.

She had tried for a brief time to blame her tendency to isolate on the early loss of her parents, but she couldn’t convince herself for long. There was a reason why she didn’t have a social life, and it wasn’t just because she had a hectic job with irregular hours.

She just knew she had this desperate need for . . . something . . . but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She only knew that other people couldn’t give it to her. She had to find a way to heal herself, to fill her own needs. Maybe then she could make a meaningful connection outside of herself.

When she realized that the therapy didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, she had terminated the sessions. Then she got accepted into med school, and she and Justin divorced. Now she lived in her ivory tower. As far as she could tell the attempt at counseling had been a complete failure.

The painting she was trying to work on was a failure as well. No matter how she tried she couldn’t replicate the impression from her dream.

She lifted the canvas from the easel and set it against one wall to dry. Then she took up sketchpad and pencils, hoping that the change in medium might help her convey some of the delicacy that she could see so clearly with her mind’s eye.

As she worked, an old memory shook itself out of a dark recess in her mind. She paused to let it solidify.

She had always drawn as a child. As soon as her fingers were big enough to clutch a crayon she would draw, over and over again, people in cages.

It became an elaborate secret project over the years. The people acquired names and personalities. They had rooms in their prisons. She would draw crude beds, chairs, bookcases, kitchens, all behind bars. They were her people, and she would never let them go.

Over time, she had stopped with that obsession but she had never spoken of it to anyone, and she’d always destroyed the pictures with a hot sense of shame. What kind of monster was she to daydream about caged people?

Seven. Her breathing hitched. She had always drawn seven people.

How could she have forgotten that?

She sketched, her movements slow as she struggled past the adult’s acquired finesse to approximate something of the child’s crudity as she worked to recapture the details from years ago. A simple triangle of an ankle-length dress, the long sleeves, the curl of hair . . . she hesitated at the hem of the dress and her forehead wrinkled. If she remembered right, she had never drawn hands or feet.

Her college counselor would have had a field day with that imagery. She shut the sketchbook with a sharp slap.

Chapter Four

THE DAY WAS filled with blades.

The thin spring sunlight knifed through budding leaves on trees. Sharp yellow light and green shadows surrounded the old woman as she tore slender shoots of weeds from the garden bed by her front door. She regarded the dark and light that dappled her gnarled hands, savoring the fugitive promise in the sunlit warmth even as a frigid wind blew off the lake and tore through her battered jacket with invisible talons.

Breathing deep, she lifted her face and sat back on her heels. The serrated wind held a hint of moisture from the vast, restless body of nearby water, the trace of perfume from early wildflowers, the scent of pine and damp loam, and news.

She cocked her head. Using senses and skills alien to the elderly human female she appeared to be, she attuned to the patterns of energy swirling around her. Then she started down the path in the woods toward the small bay where Lake Michigan lapped at a pebbled shore.

She stood waiting at the pier when a battered, sturdy motorboat chugged into view and coasted to a gentle stop. The boat carried two dark-haired occupants who bore a clear family resemblance to each other, their indigenous ancestry revealed in the strong, broad angles of their faces.

A handsome, slim boy-man sat at the motor’s helm. A much older man hunched on the floor of the boat, his dark, graying hair pulled into an unruly ponytail. He leaned against the young man’s legs, wrapped in blankets against the slicing wind.

The old woman studied the pair, her wrinkled face impassive. A miasma of intense grief hung over the pair. She had never seen the boy before. Usually the older man piloted the boat, his eyes squinting against the smoke of a cigarette that hung perpetually from one corner of his mouth.

Now the older man huddled under his blankets, his normal rich copper skin a pallid gray. His lips were a cyanotic shade of blue.

“Jerry,” she said in greeting.

“Grandmother,” the older man whispered. It was a title of respect, not ancestry.

Aside from Michael, Jerry and Jerry’s son Nicholas, no one else knew how to find her home. Clearly Jerry should be in a hospital, but instead he had risked his life to come here, so the news he had brought was urgent and important enough to warrant such a sacrifice.

She jerked her chin toward his companion. “He one of your boys?”

“Grandson,” Jerry gasped. “Name’s Jamie. Figured it was past time I showed him how to get here.”

She studied Jamie. He wore his hair long and pulled back in a ponytail, and leather and silver bracelets on each wrist. His hair gleamed black like a raven’s wing, and he had the same rich copper skin as his grandfather, along with the same strong, proud features, only his were molded with a sensuality that Jerry’s did not have. Those large, dark eyes and full, shaped lips must have come from his mother. He was older than he appeared at first glance, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three. Tall and rangy, his body had yet to finish filling out the promise of power in those wide shoulders.

Jerry had to have had good reasons to teach Jamie the way to her home. That meant he trusted his grandson. It also meant he would have given the boy other sacred teachings as well, old, secret ways that were passed down to only a select few. Jerry was grooming Jamie to take his place when he died. But just because he trusted his grandson, that didn’t mean that she would without questioning. Jamie would have to pass her own scrutiny before she would let him leave this place with the knowledge of how to return.

As she considered the boy, he held a bundle out to her, the whites of his wide eyes gleaming. His grandfather Jerry’s skin carried an unhealthy pallor, but the boy’s face was whitened underneath the copper hue, and smudged with tears. The package he offered was wrapped in a length of protective red cotton cloth and tied with undyed twine.

The old woman looked at it for a long moment. She knew what was wrapped inside. The packet was a traditional petition to a native elder for help. It would hold tobacco, and white sage, and whatever cash they could afford to scrape together. If she took it, she undertook a sacred obligation.

She did not take it. Instead, she asked the boy, “Can you carry him up the path to the cabin?”

Jamie nodded. His outstretched hand, and mouth, visibly shook.

She steeled herself against the heartbreak in that mute entreaty. “Then help him up.” She looked at her old friend Jerry, who was an elder himself in a nearby Ojibwa community. “You know I can’t make you any promises, but of course I’ll do what I can.”