Those 70ish Girls

“I’m cold and I’m scared,” Alice said as she and Vanessa trudged through the growing snow drifts. “How do we even know if we’re on the road? I can’t see anything.”

“We’re on the road,” Vanessa tried to assure her little sister. “I saw a sign about a half mile back that said Danfield is five miles ahead of us. It has to be a town. All we can do is keep going…and Alice…if you see car lights behind us, get off the road and hide. It could be Mrs. Morris.”

What the girls didn’t know was that Mrs. Morris wasn’t going anywhere right now. The loud noise that woke her in the night was from the explosion of a gas cylinder that was sitting just inside the kitchen door. It must have been leaking and a spark from the little heater she had turned on before going to bed, had started a fire.

Regardless, the fire was spreading fast and Edith Morris was so stunned, that at that moment, she didn’t have the presence of mind to get out.

Annette was on her way to the cabin and had made it as far as Danfield. She saw a little cafe on the side of the road and decided to pull in and wait out the storm with a hot cup of coffee. It probably wouldn’t be long before they closed the road to the cabin, anyway. She only hoped her mother and the girls were safe inside. It seemed that more and more her mother’s mind drifted back to the past and that was not a good place for her mind to be.

The last thing Annette wanted was to do harm to anyone. She only hoped to bring Jack Stein down a notch. She really didn’t care about Kat one way or the other. And then there was dear Aunt Claire. She died and left a mess for everyone else to clean up.

Jack and Kat left Kat’s house and went back to join the two FBI investigators at Jack’s home. They brought all of the files on the members of Project Truth or Consequences with them just in case. Stella was at her wits end. She was left there to take care of the two dogs and the house. To pass the time, she decided to go up in the attic and start to clean out some of Miss Claire’s boxes. It was a project she had planned to start weeks ago. The first thing she opened was a box of photographs.