Dead Echo

  *

  Elizabeth Tanksley sat alone over the biscuits at her kitchen table, thinking. Her insomnia had been off and on over the years, but as eighty-one of them had passed her by she took to noticing patterns, something she’d not had experience enough to recognize when she was younger. The loss of sleep always signaled a revelation. Sometimes it’d only be a day’s warning, other times a month or more. But they always went hand-in-hand. She recalled her years as a fortune-teller and the little sleep that allowed and then the years when she consciously tried to rein the power in. Between the two, she had to admit now, she’d always felt better, more comfortable, when she’d let the Thing loose.

  And now she hadn’t slept in almost two months.

  She felt sure, she knew in the hollows of her bones, that whatever was coming had something to do with the young woman who’d moved in just across the street. She was single, it appeared, and didn’t work. Strange. Her car seldom moved from the driveway and even when it did, it didn’t stay gone long. She looked at the clock above the pantry. Of course old women got up earlier, she reckoned, than most unattached young ones, but even the young ones got hungry. And her biscuits had always been one to satisfy. She nodded her head and smiled at the clock on the wall. Now all she had to do was let the Sight tell her when the time was right.