Leap - Prologue

                                  Thursday, November 8



         The night was warm for November and the only window in the second-floor room was open in the hope of catching a stray breeze.  The sound of feminine laughter drifted up from the front yard.  Grace Rockwell sighed with resignation.
         Thursday was ladies night at the Firehouse, the local icehouse, pool-hall, college hangout, and most of the girls in her dorm were going out.  Grace however, had a paper due tomorrow on corporate dissolution for Business Law, and she’d put it off till the last minute.  Not that it was a problem, she could pull an A, or at least a B, with minimal effort but she wasn’t in the mood to be chained to the computer for the next three hours. 
         She sighed again, powered up her laptop and opened a word program while sitting at the cluttered desk she shared with her roommate Caren.  Before she had typed the opening sentence, she heard the chime that told her she had unread e-mail.  She clicked on the icon and saw that it was from her sister.  The message lacked a subject line but she was pretty sure she knew what it was about anyway.  She opened the message.

         You have to come Gracie – you have to do it for me.  I miss my sister.  Please.  I’ll make sure we have fun and I promise to keep Mom and Dad off your back.  Please Gracie. 

         She was about to fire off a hot response to the effect that it was not cool for Anna to try and guilt her into this like their mother would, when her cell phone began playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  She flipped it open and said hello.
          “Hello, I’m calling for Grace Rockwell.”
          “That’s me.”
          “Miss Rockwell, this is Deputy Evart with the Harris County Sheriff’s office.” Grace’s heart skipped a beat. “I’m sorry to have to inform you ma’am that there’s been an accident.” She tightened her grip on the phone and jumped to her feet; her knees felt like rubber. “At 7:15 this evening, a Chevy Tahoe had a blowout and the driver lost control of the vehicle.  It crossed into the next lane where it collided with your parent’s BMW.”
          A sensation of vertigo pushed through her, making her dizzy, before it settled as a hot knot in the pit of her stomach and she fell back in the chair, no longer able to hold herself up on her jelly-legs. “Are my parents ok,” she interrupted.
          “No ma’am. There were no survivors. The young woman, your sister. . .”
          “Oh God, not Anna!”
          “I’m sorry ma'am. She was conscious when the EMTs arrived; unfortunately she died en-route to the hospital.”
          Grace could not respond. She could not make sense of what she had just heard.
          “Ma’am, are you there?”
          “Yes, I’m here,” she said through numb lips.
          “We found a business card in your father’s wallet and contacted an associate. The gentleman came down and made the necessary identifications, but he said that he had never met you, so he asked that we inform you as soon as possible.”
          She was barely aware of what the Deputy was saying.  She wanted to run – hard and fast - all the way home to Kingwood, and throw the kitchen door open where she would find her mother and father having coffee after supper.  She wanted to show this Deputy-what’s-his-name that he was mistaken, her parents were fine, and he owed her one huge apology.
          “Are you all right ma’am?”
          “No, I . . .” she started to yell at him, to tell him how wrong he was, but she could not get the words past the constriction in her throat.  “I don’t know,” she breathed.  She had to go home. She had to see for herself. 
          “Thank you officer,” she flipped the phone closed, grabbed her purse from the back of the chair, and ran down the stairs to her car. The deputy had to be mistaken. He wanted a different Grace Rockwell. Her family was not dead.  That could not happen.
          She pulled out of the parking garage, tires screeching on the asphalt, grateful that traffic was light as she made her way through the maze of downtown. With luck, the highway would be clear, and if she pushed it, she should be able to cover the 250 miles between Dallas and her parent’s house in Kingwood in just over three hours.