Micanopy in Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘Shot.’ He might go over the facts with you. He never learned much. I didn’t hear from him in over a year. Then he moved to Micanopy and bought a house a few streets away. He called to give me his new phone number.” She reached for a pencil and pad on the kitchen counter and a small directory. “He won’t be in the phone book yet. I’ll jot it down.” She handed Brandy the slip.
    Then she straightened her back, clasped her hands together, and looked hard at Brandy. “We’ll never find a living informant, but I have an answer to that. Promise you’ll listen. I’ve been reading laymen’s books about physics—trying to learn more about this strange universe.”
    Brandy stirred, puzzled. What was the connection? “I’ve got to leave soon, Grandmother. Brad will need his supper and I need to relieve the sitter. When Brandy mentioned her son, she made a connection of her own. Brad was two, almost three—the same age as the abandoned Hope.
    “Hear me out. Did you know that Brian Greene—a physicist who won a Pulitzer Prize—says that past, present, and future are illusions? The fact is, Einstein agreed. I’ll show you.”
    Brandy slung the straps of her bag over her shoulder, but stayed seated and watched as her grandmother rose and picked up a paperback on the counter. Brandy could read the title above a filmy green band on the cover, The Fabric of the Cosmos . Hope flipped to a page with a bookmark and read aloud, “Reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.” She laid the page open before Brandy and pointed to a diagram. Her eyes were lively now. “We all exist in space and time, of course. They’re inseparable. Greene explains that spacetime’s like a loaf of bread; each person’s every moment is an ultra thin slice. The loaf is always there. Every event that has ever happened is still there.”
    Brandy began to glimpse where this topic was leading. Her grandmother must believe that Ada’s drowning still existed somewhere in the continuum of spacetime. “But where does that get us in this investigation?”
    “Don’t you see?” Once again Hope was a teacher, Brandy a slow student. “Spacetime doesn’t appear and disappear. It doesn’t really flow at all.”
    The cat leaped down from the chair, flattened her shiny black ears to the sides, and crept under the table. Apparently she didn’t like to hear that time didn’t flow.
    Hope leaned forward, her voice earnest. “We cannot go back in time. Physicists haven’t worked out the equations to explain why.
    But events that seem gone forever still exist. We just can’t access them.”
    Brandy smiled and cocked her head at Hope. “I’m impressed that you spend your retirement reading physics instead of playing bingo, Grandmother. But dead end there, if there’s no way to access the past.” She stood to go. It was 4:00 and the bird clock poured forth the mournful call of the loon.
    Her grandmother did not concede. “Not at all.” Her steely expression reminded Brandy of the defiant stone face in the cemetery. “Because we can’t access events in the past doesn’t mean no one can. That’s exactly what really good mediums do.”
    With a triumphant flourish, she took a note card from her pocket and showed it to Brandy. “Here’s the name of an excellent one in Cassadaga. I saw her once. She held a ring of your grandfather’s and astounded me with a message from him. And about him. Well, the truth is, both were right on target. This woman may help us find out what happened to Ada.”
    Brandy stiffened. She’d heard about Cassadaga, the oldest spiritualist center in the Southeast. She also knew what John would say. Mediums know only what their customers know. They deduce their apparent knowledge from cues. Hope was listening to New Age science. The leap was huge between Einstein’s theory of time and the claims of mediums.
    But Hope was continuing. “I don’t feel up to the long drive there yet. You’re more