Revelations Read Online Free PDF

portrait photo, someone had written, Anne LeRóy with a sharp accent mark over the o. While Jane couldn’t be certain, it looked like her mother’s handwriting.
    Her mother’s hometown of Willcut, Colorado, was as small town as you could get and had long ago been absorbed into Jasper, Colorado, which sat on the rim of Larimer County north of Denver. Reading that yellowed engagement announcement, Jane sensed a strange incongruity between the photo and the text. This somewhat fresh-faced, chaste woman named Anne LeRoy was going to marry a cop named Dale Perry. Did she think she would be moving up in the world by doing such a thing? Did she feel he would make her life better? Maybe so. But by the time the grim honeymoon photo was snapped, she certainly learned that she’d made a terrible mistake.
    The gardenia scent lingered, almost becoming cloying to Jane’s senses. She replaced the box of photos back on the shelf and removed the second box titled, KIT’S/MISC. Jane knew this would be anything but normal viewing as her friend was a believer in all things metaphysical, esoteric and New Age. Jane tossed off the lid, expecting to find a spilled bottle of gardenia essential oil. Instead, she discovered a mishmash of items including incense burners, ear candles, a few mood rings from the 1970s, a bag of sacred dirt from Chimayo, New Mexico, a small satchel of stone animal totems and a deck of tarot cards. Jane fondly recalled the bag of animal totems that had played a freakish, pivotal role in her life 15 months ago. At Kit’s urging, Jane drew a stone from the bag and uncovered the snake—“the symbol of radical transformation,” as Kit so enthusiastically
exclaimed. That stone had indeed signaled a shedding of the old skin for Jane Perry and was subsequently tucked underneath a mat of grass next to her father’s headstone. As much as Jane didn’t want to believe in all the boojey-woojey —New Age crap as she called it—there was no denying the palpable significance of how that silly stone led Jane to solve a headlining kidnapping.
    The aroma of gardenias sunk around Jane, shouting its presence. Jane lifted the deck of tarot cards out of the box and set the box on the carpet. “Fucking ridiculous,” she muttered as she slid the rubber band off the deck. She didn’t have the guts to inquire as to her demise. But she just wanted to know…know something…what that something was, she wasn’t sure but she needed an answer to…
    Jane didn’t think she’d moved her hand, but the deck of cards slid away, cascading downward and sprawling across the carpet. Every single card fell face down, save for one. Jane picked it up and stared at it. A drawing of a middle-aged woman with flowing hair and ribbons of light encircling her body emerged from the center of a blue lotus flower. A single word bordered the card: MATER . Jane’s negligible education in Latin decoded the translation: MOTHER .
    Abruptly, the scent of gardenias evaporated.

CHAPTER 4
    The noonday whistle ripped through the seam of silence. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Jane when her alarm clock rang at 5:15 am. With one hand, she slapped the OFF button while the other hand covered her ear. It took a few seconds before the reverberating echo drifted away, leaving her in stony, sweet silence. Jane had experienced this acute sense of sound after a night of hard drinking and then the expected pounding
head and sick stomach accompanied it. But this… this was entirely different. It was as though her auditory function had suddenly shifted into the realm of a dog’s aural ability. Jane lay on her back and listened. She heard a slight tick-tick of a clock, but the one beside her bedside was a digital. The only clock with a second hand was located in the kitchen, down the hall thirty-five feet and around a corner.
    Jane threw back the covers and traced the tick-tick sound to the kitchen clock. It didn’t make sense. Last night, she smelled gardenias