69
Julia knelt on the floor, her heart beginning to pound as Courtney slid a long plastic storage container from under the bed. It had a blue lid and its sides were opaque white, so they couldn’t see what was inside.
“Whoa.” Courtney turned to Julia, her eyes flaring. “I didn’t know she kept anything under here. How did you?”
“I’m not sure, I just wondered. Look, it’s not that unusual. People store things under beds. Maybe it was just a good guess.”
Courtney waved her off, excited. “Julia, stop with the denial. Did Grandma Kay tell you? Is she communicating with you?”
Julia felt her chest tighten. She couldn’t quite believe it was true. “Possibly.”
“Where is she?” Courtney started looking wildly around the room. “I don’t see her! Grandma Kay? Grandma Kay!”
“Courtney, no.” Julia put a hand on Courtney’s arm, and Courtney nodded, jittery, wiping her eyes.
“Okay, let’s open the box.” Courtney wedged the blue lid off the container and shoved it aside.
Inside were a bunch of crumpled white paper bags that had the address of an online needlepoint store in San Francisco.
“Oh, I know what these are. These are her pillow projects, she called them. She loved stitching pillows and she gave them away as gifts, but her arthritis would act up and she couldn’t always finish them.
She said they would take a lifetime.” Courtney blinked puzzled tears from her eyes.
“She wants us to see her needlepoint? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Julia answered, puzzled yet feeling a preternatural calm. “Let’s look through the bags.”
Courtney reached for the first bag and opened it. Inside was a rolled-up needlepoint scrim and a variety of yarns in different colors, each wrapped with a rubber band. She unrolled the scrim, a floral pattern with bright yellows, oranges, and whites completed, but the rest undone. “I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either. May I?” Julia opened a bag that held another needlepoint scrim, a small farmhouse that had only the white clouds and pale blue sky finished.
“What does this mean? Why does she want me to see her needlepoint?”
“Let’s keep going.” Julia reached for the next bag and opened it to find another needlepoint scrim of a bucolic scene, and Courtney did the same thing.
No vision came and nothing odd happened, so they kept going, opening bag after bag, and in no time an array of unfinished needlepoint pillows lay on the rug.
Courtney looked up, hopeful. “Well? What was the point?”
“I don’t know.” Julia’s heart sank. She didn’t know why she’d felt the urge to look under the bed anyway. Maybe she wasn’t a real medium, after all.
Then her gaze fell on one of the last few bags.
“What are you looking at?” Courtney asked, breathless.
“That one,” Julia answered, pointing. “Open it.”