Leaning forward with her hands braced on her knees, Viola traded her smile for a look of solemn expectation, for she knew why I must have come. "It's my dream, isn't it?" she said softly.

I spoke quietly, too, in respect of the sleeping children. "Tell me again."

"I saw myself, a hole in my forehead, my face… broken."

"You think you were shot."

"Shot dead," she confirmed, folding her hands together between her knees, as if in prayer. "My right eye bloodshot and swollen all ugly, half out of the socket."

"Anxiety dreams," Stormy said, meaning to reassure. "They don't have anything to do with the future."

"We've been over this territory," Viola told her. "Odd…he was of that same opinion this afternoon." She looked at me. "You must have changed your mind, or you wouldn't be here."

"Where were you in the dream?"

"No place. You know, a dream place…all fuzzy, fluid."

"Do you ever go bowling?"

"That takes money. I have two colleges to save for. My girls are going to be somebody."

"Have you ever been inside Green Moon Lanes?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Did anything in the dream suggest the place might have been a bowling alley?"

"No. Like I said, it wasn't any real place. Why do you say the bowling alley? You have a dream, too?"

"I did, yes.”

"People dead?" Viola asked.

"Yes."

"You ever have dreams come true?"

"Sometimes," I admitted.

"I knew you'd understand. That's why I asked you to read me."

"Tell me more about your dream, Viola."

She closed her eyes, striving to remember. "I'm running from something. There are these shadows, some flashes of light, but none of it is anything."

My sixth sense is unique in its nature and its clarity. But I believe that many people have less dramatic and undiscovered supernatural perceptions that manifest from time to time throughout their lives: presentiments that come sometimes in the form of dreams, as well as other moments of uncanny awareness and insight.

They fail to explore these experiences in part because they believe that acknowledging the supernatural would be irrational. They are also frightened, often unconsciously, by the prospect of opening their minds and hearts to the truth of a universe far more complex and meaningful than the material world that their education tells them is the sum of all things.

I was not surprised, therefore, that Viola's nightmare, which earlier in the day had seemed likely to be of no consequence, had proved to be a matter of importance, after all. "Do your dreams have voices, sounds?" I asked her. "Some people's don't."

"Mine do. In the dream, I can hear myself breathing. And this crowd."

"Crowd?"

"A roaring crowd, like the sound in a stadium."

Baffled, I said, "Where would such a place be in Pico Mundo?"

"I don't know. Maybe a Little League game."

"Not such a big crowd at one of those," Stormy noted.

"Wasn't necessarily thousands of voices. Could've been a couple hundred," Viola said. "Just a crowd, all roaring."

I said, 'And then, how is it that you see yourself shot?"

"Don't see it happen. The shadows, the flashes of light, I'm running, and I stumble, fall on my hands and knees…"

Viola's eyes twitched behind their lids as though she were asleep and experiencing the nightmare for the first time.

"…on my hands and knees," she repeated, "hands in something slippery. It's blood. Then shadows whirl away and light whirls in, and I'm looking down at my own dead face."

She shuddered and opened her eyes.

Tiny beads of sweat stippled her forehead and her upper lip.

In spite of the electric fan, the room was warm. But she hadn't been sweating before she began to recall the dream.

"Is there anything else, any other details?" I asked. "Even the smallest thing might help me. What were you… I mean your dead body… what was it lying on? A floor of some kind? Grass? Blacktop?"

She thought for a moment, shook her head. "Can't say. The only other thing was the man, the dead man."

I sat up straighter on the sofa. "You mean another… corpse?"

"Next to me…next to my body. He was sort of tumbled on his side, one arm twisted behind his back."

"Were there other victims?" Stormy asked.

"Maybe. I didn't see any but him."

"Did you recognize him?"

"Didn't get a look at his face. It was turned away from me."

I said, "Viola, if you could try hard to remember-"

"Anyway, I wasn't interested in him. I was too scared to wonder who he was. I looked in my own dead face, and I tried to scream, but I couldn't, and I tried harder, and then I was sitting up in bed, the scream squeezing out of me but, you know, only just the wheeze of a scream."

The memory agitated Viola. She started to get up from the chair. Maybe her legs were weak. She sat down again.

As though she were reading my mind, Stormy asked, "What was he wearing?"

"What-him in the dream? One foot bent back, the shoe half off. A loafer."

We waited while Viola searched her memory. Dreams that are as rich as cream while they unfold are skim milk when we wake, and in time they wash out of our minds, leaving as little residue as water filtered through cheesecloth.

"His pants were splattered with blood," Viola said. "Khakis, I think. Tan pants, anyway."

The slowly swiveling fan stirred the leaves of a potted palm in one corner of the room, raising from its fronds a dry rustling that made me think of cockroaches scurrying, and rats, and nothing good.

Reading the last details of her dream that yet remained in the cheesecloth of memory, Viola said, "A polo shirt…"

I got up from the sofa. I needed to move. I realized that the room was too small for pacing, but I remained on my feet.

"Green," Viola said. "A green polo shirt."

I thought of the guy behind the shoe-rental counter at Green Moon

Lanes, the blonde drawing beer behind the bar-both in their new work uniforms.

Her voice growing even quieter, Viola said, "Tell me the truth, Odd. Look at my face. Do you see death in me?"

I said, "Yes."

TWENTY-FIVE

ALTHOUGH I'M UNABLE TO READ FACES TO DISCOVER either a person's future or the secrets of her heart, I could not look a moment longer at Viola Peabody's face, for I imagined what I couldn't truly read, and in my mind's eye saw her motherless daughters standing at her grave.

I went to one of the open windows. Beyond lay a side yard overhung by pepper trees. Out of the warm darkness came the sweet fragrance of jasmine that had been planted and tended by Viola's caring hands.

Ordinarily I have no fear of the night. I feared this one, however, because the change from August 14 to August 15 was coming express-train fast, as if the rotation of the earth had drastically gained speed by the flicking of a godly finger.

I turned to Viola, who still sat on the edge of her armchair. Her eyes, always large, were owlish now, and her brown face seemed to have a gray undertone. I said, "Isn't tomorrow your day off?"

She nodded.

Because she had a sister who could baby-sit her daughters, Viola worked at the Grille six days a week.

Stormy said, "Do you have plans? What are you doing tomorrow?"

"I figured I'd work around the house in the morning. Always things to do here. In the afternoon… that's for the girls."

"You mean Nicolina and Levanna?" I asked, naming her daughters.

"Saturday-that's Levanna's birthday. She'll be seven. But the Grille is busy Saturdays, good tips. I can't miss work. So we were going to celebrate early."

"Celebrate how?"

"That new movie, it's a big hit with all the kids, the one with the dog. We were going to the four-o'clock show."