Halos by Kristen Heitzmann

her car, but … interesting. She just had to be patient. She might get a call from the state patrol any time now if the thief had taken it on the highway. If the car was in Charity, it might take a while for Sheriff Roehr to question people, but sooner or later it had to turn up. Didn’t it?
    She could already tell her thoughts would not quiet easily. She went into the store and considered playing solitaire on the computer, but Steve had it all shut down and it was probably password protected, and he wouldn’t want her on it anyway. She did turn on the radio, and sultry jazz filled the air. So Steve was a jazz man. Ed had liked big band, but she had introduced him to ska.
    She preferred classical and especially the romantics Beethoven, Mendelsohn, and Viotti. So much emotion, so much life. But there was emotion in Steve’s jazz too; it just tended to be heavier. Maybe that was why he liked it. She half smiled, then pulled a scowl like Steve’s and imitated him nodding to the rhythm, taking the dark tones inside. Suddenly she shook it off and found the classical station and strains of Berlioz. She’d never been to a symphony concert, but she knew the composers from the radio.
    Chin high, fingers waving to the notes, she moved between the shelves, thankful there were no motion sensors. At least Steve hadn’t mentioned any. She started to search the rare book aisles for a reading selection, then considered the potential buyers who might not want her reading them. She went to the new books and chose Dickens’ Bleak House . She loved Dickens because he cared about the plight of people. He knew what it was like not to have a home or people who cared, to be trampled and insulted.
    She carried the book to the cot and settled in with the single fixture overhead for light. She knew how to read without bending the spine. Ed used to laugh at her peeking between the pages. She wondered how he was doing. Had he learned to speak again? It must be so frustrating to lose your abilities. Maybe it was a good thing not to grow old. She sighed and opened the book.
Chapter 1: In Chancery
    London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
    Alessi smiled. There he was painting the ultimate picture of gloom, and into it, plop , a humorous image as real as it was fanciful.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
    At least the snow in Charity was white. She could hardly imagine black, sooty flakes being anything but bad luck. A flicker of insecurity licked up inside. Her white crystalline dancers had not proved overly helpful either—yet.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers…. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering on the rigging of great ships….
    Alessi lost herself in the world of London drizzle, reading until her own eyes grew foggy. Then she turned off the light and pulled the covers tightly under her chin.
    Life was a complicated business. Why should she expect it to change now? Time washed over generations of troubled lives, remarkable only in the struggle to keep going on. There were moments of transcendence, but the rest was just hard work. She closed her eyes and dozed on the hard, unfamiliar cot. She couldn’t even count the