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Lottie was quieter than usual the rest of that evening. Unlike Becca, she did not seem to have been shaken by what had happened. Rather, there was a peacefulness about her, something pensive in her mood that quieted Becca as well.

Becca might have dismissed the whole eerie encounter as something dreamed in the night had she not awakened the next morning to a steady fall of rain and a newly painted image of the lightning ball on the inside of the front door, exactly where it had made its entrance. And though Becca generally viewed herself as the practical counterpoint to Lottie's whimsical nature, she was left with a sense that the odd visitation, which surely had its basis in science, was, somehow, portentous.

Six months to the day after the lightning ball rolled through the living room, Lottie's long-held theory—that in the hereafter, all souls, raised to their most exquisite states, are equally and blissfully at home—was tested. The pilot of a towboat pushing a barge up the river sighted Lottie's body in the water, lodged in a tangle of wood debris on the east bend at Mapleton, and as he hastily marked the location, a current caught her up and set her free. Becca was bereft.

It was Dr. Carson who delivered the news to her. He rang Becca's nearest neighbor in possession of a telephone in Kendall, where she and Ben had been renting an apartment in a divided house since their marriage. It seemed, the doctor told her in his practiced, clinical manner, that a man walking atop the levee had seen Lottie earlier on that tragic afternoon, sitting at the foot of the levee, close to the river's edge. Too close, the man had suggested. A comparison of that man's account and the description reported by the towboat pilot had satisfied the sheriff that the woman seen in the river was Lottie.

There was more that Becca should know, Dr. Carson said. Sensitive issues best addressed in person. And Ace Harper would need to speak with her when she was up to making a trip to Mapleton. Ace had drawn up Lottie's will. There would be papers to sign.

"Take whatever time you need," the doctor told her. "No immediate arrangements are necessary." Meaning, Becca realized, that there would be no funeral arrangements to make, no tombstone to order for Lottie, no gathering around a grave in that town that had not deserved her. In her dazed state, Becca thought that was just as well. There was a morbid mercy in Lottie's beloved river having given her passage to the beyond.

"Of course, rumors are going about, as is usual in these situations," she heard Dr. Carson say through the fog that had engulfed her. "I hope you won't take them to heart."

NELL

As children, we shared the same small spaces, walked the same dusty roads, woke to the same views outside our windows, but Evie's world had more colors than mine.

"Mama is red," she announced to me one day, "and Maggie is lavender. And you," she said, pointing at my reflection in the mirror over the sink as I brushed my teeth, "are clear."

That about summed things up.

"What color are you?" I asked her once, and she hesitated before whispering "turquoise," as if there were something shameful, or marvelous, about being blue-green.

Evie's friends all had identifying colors. Every number, every letter, every musical note, anything that could be touched or smelled or heard or otherwise experienced had, for Evie, the extra dimension of hue. She would try to explain it, and I would try to understand.

"It's like summer," she might offer. "What color is summer, Nell? Just try."

"Green, I guess."

Her eyes would light for a second, then she would fire off something else. "And sky?"

"Blue?"

"Oh," she would say, and any hope that I might ever understand her beautiful mind would be dashed for us both.