“The past has driven me back here,” Beth Gray says when she returns to Wilder with her little girl, fifteen years after being convicted of murder. Sheriff Les Kendall advises her to leave, but he doesn’t know Beth can’t escape her nightmares. (more…)

My husband told me this morning about a dream he had of a parakeet and a myna bird. I won’t go into the details, they weren’t important to what I’m writing here. Just the fact that those two birds were in his dream. It didn’t carry meaning for me until later. Some interesting facts that stand out now regarding his dream: My mom used to raise parakeets. His mom used to have a pet myna bird. Both species can be trained to talk, at least to repeat words and phrases (the myna bird is able to replicate a specific human voice).

A couple of hours after he mentioned that dream to me, I was researching my current novel. I needed a quick refresher about the kinds of things people record in business planners. For an example, I took three months worth of planner pages of mine from two years ago, when I worked fulltime in a busy office as a manager. I chose a random three month period. Perhaps my subconscious was at work, and still influenced by the Reagan funeral coverage on TV, because the three months I chose happened to be from the time of my mother’s death. I chose March through June of 2002 for my planner sample. She died in April of 2002.

Mom in Orange Dress 1925

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