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which was soaked with sweat. I knew they were ghostie people because they had faces like old apples and the<br />
moon shone right through.<br />
By the following afternoon Abra had been running and playing and laughing with her friends<br />
again, but Lucy had never forgotten the image: dead people riding that little train through the woods,<br />
their faces like transparent apples in the moonlight. She had asked Concetta if she had ever taken Abra<br />
on the train during one of their “girl days.” Chetta said no. They had been to Teenytown, but the train<br />
had been under repairs that day so they rode the carousel instead.<br />
Now Abra looked up at her mother and said, “When will Daddy be back?”<br />
“Day after tomorrow. He said he’d be in time for lunch.”<br />
“That’s not soon enough,” Abra said. A tear spilled from her eye, rolled down her cheek, and<br />
plopped onto her pajama top.<br />
“Soon enough for what? What do you remember, Abba-Doo?”<br />
“They were hurting the boy.”<br />
Lucy didn’t want to pursue this, but felt she had to. There had been too many correlations between<br />
Abra’s earlier dreams and things that had actually happened. It was David who had spotted the picture<br />
of the one-eyed Raggedy Ann in the North Conway Sun, under the heading THREE KILLED IN<br />
OSSIPEE CRASH. It was Lucy who had hunted out police blotter items about domestic violence<br />
arrests in the days following two of Abra’s people were yelling and hitting dreams. Even John Dalton<br />
agreed that Abra might be picking up transmissions on what he called “the weird radio in her head.”<br />
So now she said, “What boy? Does he live around here? Do you know?”<br />
Abra shook her head. “Far away. I can’t remember.” Then she brightened. The speed at which she<br />
came out of these fugues was to Lucy almost as eerie as the fugues themselves. “But I think I told<br />
Tony. He might tell his daddy.”<br />
Tony, her invisible friend. She hadn’t mentioned him in a couple of years, and Lucy hoped this<br />
wasn’t some sort of regression. Ten was a little old for invisible friends.<br />
“Tony’s daddy might be able to stop it.” Then Abra’s face clouded. “I think it’s too late, though.”<br />
“Tony hasn’t been around in awhile, has he?” Lucy got up and fluffed out the displaced sheet. Abra<br />
giggled when it floated against her face. The best sound in the world, as far as Lucy was concerned. A<br />
sane sound. And the room was brightening all the time. Soon the first birds would begin to sing.<br />
“Mommy, that tickles!”<br />
“Mommies like to tickle. It’s part of their charm. Now, what about Tony?”<br />
“He said he’d come any time I needed him,” Abra said, settling back under the sheet. She patted<br />
the bed beside her, and Lucy lay down, sharing the pillow. “That was a bad dream and I needed him. I<br />
think he came, but I can’t really remember. His daddy works in a hot spice.”<br />
This was new. “Is that like a chili factory?”<br />
“No, silly, it’s for people who are going to die.” Abra sounded indulgent, almost teacherly, but a<br />
shiver went up Lucy’s back.<br />
“Tony says that when people get so sick they can’t get well, they go to the hot spice and his daddy<br />
tries to make them feel better. Tony’s daddy has a cat with a name like mine. I’m Abra and the cat is<br />
Azzie. Isn’t that weird, but in a funny way?”<br />
“Yes. Weird but funny.”<br />
John and David would both probably say, based on the similarity of the names, that the stuff about<br />
the cat was the confabulation of a very bright little ten-year-old girl. But they would only half believe<br />
it, and Lucy hardly believed it at all. How many ten-year-olds knew what a hospice was, even if they<br />
mispronounced it?<br />
“Tell me about the boy in your dream.” Now that Abra was calmed down, this conversation seemed<br />
safer. “Tell me who was hurting him, Abba-Doo.”