Last Safe Place, The (42 page)
Read Last Safe Place, The Online
Authors: Ninie Hammon
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Psychological Thrillers, #Religion & Spirituality, #Fiction, #Literature & Fiction, #Religious & Inspirational Fiction, #Contemporary, #Inspirational, #Thrillers, #Psychological, #The Last Safe Place
She and Pedro had talked and talked about it, and they always wound up at the same place. And that was nowhere at all. There was no explanation, not for any of it.
They wondered what they’d find if they dug farther down in the rock slide than the authorities had dug to recover Yesheb’s body. If they dug out where The Cleft had been—would every pebble she and Garrett had tossed into it that summer be changed on the inside, too? Be just as beautiful as—?
“The impossible rock—no way!” Ty said. “It’s the best present I ever got! I’ll keep it my whole life.”
Her eyes were suddenly moist.
“Then what …?”
“I painted a picture last night with the oil paints. I didn’t know it’d still be wet this morning. We can’t take it with us.”
“Put it on the refrigerator.”
Ty grinned. “And we can get it when we come back next summer.”
She nodded, then made a shooing motion. “Go on now, go get it. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
They went back into the cabin and Ty bounded up the stairs with P.D. a step behind him.
Gabriella turned to Pedro.
“Pedro, I’ve been trying to think of a way to say—”
“Shhhh.”
“But—”
He pulled her into his arms. “Call me when you get back to Pittsburgh.” He held her tight and she breathed in the soap smell of him as he whispered into her hair. “We have many things to talk about.”
They heard Ty’s footsteps like the rumble of a stampede down the wooden stairs. He held a piece of paper from the art tablet in his hand, 12 × 16 inches. He went to the refrigerator, pulled off four magnets and carefully affixed them to the unpainted edges of the paper and positioned it below the watercolor he’d done of the view from the front porch of the cabin the day Yesheb—
The room went airless. Gabriella looked at the piece of art paper and the world slowed down and stopped. Didn’t move on its axis. For a breathless, eternal moment nothing in the universe stirred.
Below the little-kid-drawn watercolor of the valley was an oil
painting
of a single, perfect bristlecone pine tree—a tree that glowed. Somehow, Ty had captured the incandescence, the light from within. Each needle on every branch was a golden firefly. Around the tree were hundreds of points of light, sparkling, each a star, a universe of its own. The glow spread out into the shadows; the rock walls curved protectively around it.
It was stunning, a work of art!
Gabriella dragged her eyes from it to the picture above it—a child’s scrawl on a refrigerator door with the Mona Lisa. She looked at Pedro, saw his eyes go from one picture to the other, watched him make the same comparison, reach the same conclusion. He turned his eyes toward her, opened his mouth, but no words came out.
Ty was completely oblivious to their response. He stepped back, adjusted his baby-owl glasses on his nose and looked it over himself.
“I wish Grandpa Slappy could have seen it,” he said, his voice thick with unshed tears.
“Me, too,” Gabriella managed to gasp.
Then Ty turned around and saw that his mother and Pedro were gaping at him.
“What?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “What’s everybody standing around for? I thought we had a plane to catch.”
THE END
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On the pages that follow are previews of my other books. If you have a few moments, I'd love to tell you a little something about each one. Just click the video links.
Thank you!
Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her, JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
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talks briefly about FIVE DAYS IN MAY.
On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents; each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh has lost his wife and his faith and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, all four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the crossroads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
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to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about HOME GROWN.
Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
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to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about
THE MEMORY CLOSET.
Something happened to Anne Mitchell when she was 11 years old so horrible her mind erased the whole first decade of her life. Twenty-five years later, she has come home to a dried-up Texas prairie town to live with her crazy grandmother in the rambling old house where she grew up in a final desperate effort to remember.
Unless she remembers, Anne will never understand the meaning of the anguished confession her mother choked out as she lay dying. And Anne will remain forever a slave to what she calls the “Boogie Man”—strange images from her lost childhood that haunt her dreams, stalk her waking hours and leer at her from the shadows behind her reflection in mirrors, windowpanes and wine glasses.
Though Anne has finally summoned the courage to face her past, she really doesn’t understand how expensive remembering will be. The cost of her memories could very well be her sanity. She might very well have to pay for her childhood with her life.
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to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about SUDAN.
