Carolina Mist Read Online Free PDF Page B

mirror. Her face was gaunt and her color more pale than usual. Too much stress, she told herself.
    Abby finished cleaning out her closet, carefully hanging in quilted garment bags those few suits and dresses and good slacks and blouses that sti ll fit. Her few casual outfits— sweat clothes and two pairs of jeans—would travel south in her suitcase. She had boxes for other items, and she fervently hoped all—her Calphalon cookware, her collections of old perfume bottles and cookbooks, and two small boxes of well-played Motown tapes—would fit in the back of the small car along with her PC, her 20-inch television, VCR, and small CD player. She bagged her discards for the homeless shelter six blocks away. Highly pleased with her efforts, she stood back and surveyed the stack of boxes.
    “Thank you, Aunt Leila, for loving me.” She spoke aloud with all the reverence some might reserve for prayer. “Thank you for remembering me in so generous a fashion. Thank you for giving me options. Thank you for forgiving me for having stayed away so long.”

 
     
     
     
     
    4
     
     
    T he first of November could not have been more gray. The sun struggled to break through sullen clouds—themselves gunmetal gray in a bleak sky—barely dispelling the fog which wrapped around the city in an insistent tangle of wispy arms. Abby finished loading boxes into the car, having dropped the backseat to double her cargo space, carefully fitting her clothes and the boxes between the electronics before tucking the e nvelope filled with cash from the sale of her furniture into the glove compartment. She leaned over the front seat to root through a box, looking for some tapes of old favorites to keep her company as she drove.
    After popping the Four Tops into the tape player on the dash, Abby started the engine and, without a backward glance, pulled into the morning traffic and headed for the interstate. Once she was on I -95, the city’s skyline rose, shaded in mist, on her right. To her left, the Delaware River flow ed choppy and muddy green. She drove past the exits to Veterans Stadium and the Spectrum, neither of which she had ever visited. Just beyond, the flat-roofed warehouses of the food distribution center opened their wide doors to the truckers who would transport produce all across the metropolitan area. A few of those trucks were already competing for her lane of traffic. She pulled to her right as the first of the tractor-trailers sped past on the approach to the huge double-decked bridge that spanned the Schuylkill River. Planes almost close enough to touch seemed to float past on their way to the airport just to her left.
    Beyond the city limits now, Abby accelerated and moved into the passing lane to go around a small red pickup with Delaware plates. The City of Brotherly Love, along with all her dreams of corporate bliss, was lost in her rearview mirror, shrouded in the haze of a misty early-autumn morning.
    She stopped in Delaware for breakfast and, later, had a leisurely lunch in Virginia. She’d expected to be in Primrose by dinner but zigged into North Carolina where she should have zagged, somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Dismal Swamp, and wasted an hour trying to get back onto the right road. A friendly restaurant across the street from the county courthouse in Elizabeth City served up wonderful crab cakes, a fresh salad, and a warming cup of coffee. Fortified, she set off on the last leg of her journey.
     
     
    I t was shortly after nine when she exited the highway, following, with a certain caution, the signs to the darkened road that led to Primrose. Though in her youth she’d known every bump on every road for ten miles in any direction, years had passed, and she was no longer definite. Overhead lighting was virtually nonexistent on this approach to the small town, and memory told her that there were at least two sharp curves somewhere ahead. The acres of dense woodland on either side of the narrow road