Deep in the Valley Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jessica’s hair.
    The girl was some kind of Goth, as she called herself. Black clothes, lots of piercings in oddball places, black nail polish and lipstick. There was no evidence she did any of the scary things her appearance seemed to imply—like take human sacrifices. But today she had reached a pinnacle. Her head was shaved but for the multicolored Mohawk plume that stood up proudly on top. Bold stripes—purple, blue, red, orange, yellow—waggled as she moved.
    June wasn’t sure how long she stared, but it was long enough for Charlotte to return to her post. June met her nurse’s eyes and saw only grim misery. And a warning: Don’t give her the satisfaction. When June looked into the small waiting room, she saw that all six eyes were focused on the colorful Mohawk, in slack-jawed, fascinated stares.
    “I’ll be just a few minutes,” she said to the waiting room. “Good morning, Jessie. New do?”
    Jessica looked up from her filing, smiled beautifully, for she was a beautiful girl, and nodded. The action set her many pierced hoops in motion—on ears, eyebrow, nose and places June didn’t want to think about.
    June picked up a stack of charts Charlotte had set out and made her way back to her office, her nurse on her tail. Charlotte closed the office door behind them.
    “I’m at the end of my rope,” Charlotte announced.
    “Take it easy. It’s only hair.” June bit her tongue against the temptation to remark on Charlotte’s own hair, a dark red with a purple hue that always looked two weeks overdue with its telltale quarter inch of gray against her scalp.
    “You cannot let this go on!” Charlotte insisted.
    “Charlotte, she’s a very sweet, very efficient girl.” June struggled not to laugh out loud. “She lends color to the place.”
    “How can her father allow this…this… insanity? ”
    Charlotte and Bud had raised six children, none of whom would have dared part their hair on the wrong side, much less shave and color their heads. But Jessica’s father, Scott, a good-natured, broad-minded artist and widower of only forty-two, chose to let his daughter find her own way. June approved more of the latter parenting style, though she wouldn’t dare admit that to Charlotte.
    “What did you say to Jessie?” June asked.
    “I am committed to not reacting.”
    “You have a lot of unnecessary stress over Jessica’s clothing and hairstyles, Charlotte. Maybe you should talk to someone about it. Have you given any thought to seeing Dr. Powell about this?” Jerry Powell was the local shrink—a Ph.D. psychologist with a specialty in family counseling. He had relocated to Grace Valley in search of a quiet, peaceful life, after a stressful, twenty-year Silicon Valley practice.
    “Why would I talk to that nutcase?”
    Jerry Powell was probably an excellent counselor…with an unshakable belief that he had once been abducted by aliens.
    “His beliefs are not so different from some of our own townspeople’s,” June pointed out.
    “We don’t any of us believe in spaceships, for God’s sake!”
    “Oh no,” June laughed. “Not spaceships! Angels, buried treasure, Indian spirits, hidden caverns and Big Foot. But not spaceships.”
    Charlotte pursed her lips. “I think you’re enjoying this,” she said, and left June’s office in a huff.
     
    Jerry Powell took his coffee to his office, where he would wait for his first client of the day, Frank Craven. This was an emergency intervention—the boy had been in a fight at the school bus stop.
    Jerry had lived in his three-bedroom rambler for just a few years, and while in one sense he would be a newcomer for at least twenty years, in another sense he was already accepted in Grace Valley. That was not to say he’d been pulled into the warm bosom of the town and cherished, but rather accepted as the San Jose shrink who’d admitted to Bay Area media about twenty years ago that he’d been for a ride in a spaceship. The Spaceship Shrink, they called