Runaway

new-model coupe. He nodded to Nancy and Ollie with the brief respect and deliberate lack of curiosity he might have shown if he was holding the door for them as they came out of a doctor’s office.
    Tessa’s door was not long shut behind him when another car appeared at the far end of the lane.
    “Lineup,” Nancy said. “Sunday afternoon is busy. In summer, anyway. People come from miles away to see her.”
    “So she can tell them what they’ve got in their pockets?”
    Nancy let that pass.
    “Mostly asking her about things that are lost. Valuable things. Anyway, to them valuable.”
    “Does she charge?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “She must.”
    “Why must she?”
    “Isn’t she poor?”
    “She’s not starving.”
    “Maybe she doesn’t very often get it right.”
    “Well, I think she must, or people wouldn’t keep coming to see her, would they?”
    The tone of their conversation changed as they walked along between the rosebushes in the bright airless tunnel. They wiped sweat from their faces, and lost the energy to snipe at each other.
    Ollie said, “I don’t understand it.”
    Nancy said, “I don’t know if anybody does. It isn’t just things that people lose, either. She has located bodies.”
    “Bodies?”
    “There was a man who they thought walked out the railway track and was caught in a snowstorm and froze to death and they couldn’t find him, and she told them, look down by the lake at the bottom of the cliff. And sure enough. Not the railway track at all. And once a cow that had gone missing, she told them it was drowned.”
    “So?” said Ollie. “If that’s true, why hasn’t anybody investigated? I mean, scientifically?”
    “It’s perfectly true.”
    “I don’t mean I don’t trust her. But I want to know how she does it. Didn’t you ever ask her?”
    Nancy surprised him. “Wouldn’t that be rude?” she said.
    Now she was the one who seemed to have had enough of the conversation.
    “So,” he insisted, “was she seeing things when she was a kid at school?”
    “No. I don’t know. Not that she ever let on.”
    “Was she just like everybody else?”
    “She wasn’t exactly like everybody else. But who is? I mean, I never thought
I
was. Or Ginny didn’t think
she
was. With Tessa it was just that she lived out where she did and she had to milk the cow before she came to school in the morning, which none of the rest of us did. I always tried to be friends with her.”
    “I’m sure,” said Ollie mildly.
    She went on as if she hadn’t heard.
    “I think it started, though—I think it must have started when she was sick. Our second year in high school she got sick, she had seizures. She quit school and she never came back, and that’s when she sort of fell out of things.”
    “Seizures,” said Ollie. “Epileptic fits?”
    “I never heard that. Oh”—she turned away from him— “I’ve been really disgusting.”
    Ollie stopped walking. He said, “Why?”
    Nancy stopped too.
    “I took you out there on purpose to show you we had something special here. Her. Tessa. I mean, to show you Tessa.”
    “Yes. Well?”
    “Because you don’t think we have anything here worth noticing. You think we’re only worth making fun of. All of us around here. So I was going to show her to you. Like a freak.”
    “
Freak
is not a word I would use about her.”
    “That was my intention, though. I should have my head kicked in.”
    “Not quite.”
    “I should go and beg her pardon.”
    “I wouldn’t do that.”
    “Wouldn’t you?”
    “No.”
    That evening Ollie helped Nancy set out a cold supper. Mrs. Box had left a cooked chicken and jellied salads in the fridge, and Nancy had made an angel food cake on Saturday, to be served with strawberries. They set everything out on the verandah that got the afternoon shade. Between the main course and the dessert Ollie carried the plates and salad dishes back to the kitchen.
    Out of the blue he said, “I wonder if any of them think to bring her some treat or other? Like chicken or strawberries?”
    Nancy was dipping the best-looking berries in fruit sugar. After a moment she said, “Sorry?”
    “That girl. Tessa.”
    “Oh,” said Nancy. “She’s got chickens, she could kill one if she wanted to. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a berry patch too. They mostly do, in the country.”
    Her burst of contrition on the way back had done her good, and now it was over.
    “It’s not just that she isn’t a