The Long Way Home by Karen McQuestion Page A

you,” Jazzy said.
    “But it was a young woman.” Rita didn’t even try to keep the excitement out of her voice. “And it came through the deer.”
    “I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” Jazzy said, carefully. “Sometimes it’s totally random, not connected to anything around me.”
    “No, it was Melinda.”
    “Why do you think so?”
    “I’ve been at that wayside with Melinda many times. We always stopped there on our road trips. And using deer?” Rita felt something light up inside of her. “That’s so Melinda, you don’t even know. She collected deer figurines and stuffed animals. Her friends nicknamed her Bambi because she cried when she saw the movie for the first time when she was in high school. She told me once that she hoped she could be reincarnated as a deer.”
    “Wow,” Jazzy said, but somehow Rita didn’t think she was all that shocked. A person who got messages from dead people couldn’t be surprised by too many things.
    “It was Melinda,” Rita said, almost to herself. “It’s exactly what she would do.” A wave of raw emotion came over her and she had to swallow hard to keep from crying. The feeling was similar to when she first held Melinda as a newborn. Awe and wonder and hope. Now, like then, a miracle had happened. Heaven had split open and allowed her daughter to send down a message.
    From the backseat, Marnie said, “What are you two talking about up there?”
    “We were talking about the deer,” Jazzy said, with a nonchalant wave of her hand.
    “What about the deer?” Marnie asked.
    “I was just telling Jazzy that they reminded me of my daughter,” Rita said, willing her voice to stay level. “Melinda collected them.”
    Laverne perked up. “She collected deer ?”
    “Stuffed animals. Plastic figures. It was sort of her thing.”
    “Oh,” Laverne leaned back. “That’s real nice, I suppose.”
    When Rita glanced over, Jazzy gave her a knowing smile, a signal between them. There was no need for the other two women to know their secret.

Chapter Eighteen
     
    Riding in the backseat for hours gave Marnie too much time to ruminate. It was only the first day on the road, but she was already questioning the wisdom of driving to Las Vegas. If it were just her, she might have turned around and gone back by now, but it wasn’t just her. The other women had already eased into the kind of camaraderie you usually only saw among longtime roommates or agreeable coworkers. Jazzy was the impetus, teasing a smile out of Laverne, threatening to make everyone play car games if they didn’t talk. Laverne opened up pretty readily, telling how she met her husband at a high school dance. Rita had a better story. Her husband, Glenn, literally bumped into her at a diner, spilling the contents of his coffee cup down the front of her best blue blazer. The only reason she’d stopped at the diner was to kill time before a job interview. “Glenn was so embarrassed,” she said, laughing. “And he turned beet red. He was so cute it was hard to get mad at him, although I was a little, at first.” She didn’t get the job, but she said that by then she didn’t care.
    “How did you meet your guy?” Jazzy asked, turning the conversation to Marnie.
    Marnie had hoped the fact that Brian died recently would make them believe it was a raw subject, but no such luck. She cleared her throat. “I don’t have a great story,” she said. “We met at work.”
    “So you worked together?” Laverne said.
    “No,” Marnie said. “I met Brian because I had his son Troy in my kindergarten class. His wife left him and moved to Las Vegas, so he needed someone to watch Troy after school. He asked if I knew of a babysitter, and I volunteered to do it.”
    “Wow, that was nice of you,” Rita said, her eyes still on the road.
    Marnie shrugged. “I wasn’t doing much else anyway, and he seemed to be in a real bind.”
    Jazzy said, “I think that’s an awesome story. What did you think when you