Sea Glass Summer by Dorothy Cannell

situation’s bad enough without you falling completely to pieces and leaving me to dig us out of this mess on my own.’
    Until that moment Oliver had been both scared and angry. Now there was only room for fear.

Four
    Sarah was an early riser, a morning person. Even so, she didn’t wake as early as Oliver Cully had done that Saturday morning. It was only a little after six when she emerged from a muddled dream which featured Nellie Armitage climbing a tree to rescue one of the furniture movers, while a cat watched from the bushes. Surprisingly there was no nightmarish quality to the semi-transparent images, no revisiting of a car hurtling toward her at annihilating speed, no volcanic eruption of headlight glare disintegrating into doomed blindness. No heart pounding terror to jolt her upright.
    As the scene faded into drowsy consciousness, she was vaguely aware of lying in a constricted position, knees drawn up, elbows pinned to her side and lacking in covering. She opened her eyes to fuzzy unfamiliarity. Not surprising given yesterday’s move to Bramble Cottage. She must have fallen asleep on the sofa. Then uncertainty filtered in. The feel of the fabric under her was soft velvet, not the linen of her slip covers; also the soft glow from a mulberry-shaded lamp wasn’t right. Elbowing up into a sitting position she realized with a jolt that the whole room was wrong.
    The pewter-stemmed lamp stood on a secretary desk along with a cluster of small silver-framed photos and a fountain pen lying across a sheet of writing paper on a leather edged pad. Sarah had never owned a fountain pen, didn’t know anyone who did and only recognized it as such because the cap lay beside it exposing the nib.
    The room’s ambience could have been culled from a period novel; of the sort her ex-husband, Harris, would have termed ‘junk food for the mind.’ By his standards Jane Eyre was a bodice ripper. Forget his opinions. Sarah knew where she was now: in a house on Ridge Farm Rise. It belonged to Sonny Norris and his mother Gwen. Sonny was the driver of the car that crashed through her fence. She had driven them back here last evening, and ended up spending the night. Wrapping herself in the blanket that had fallen off the sofa while she slept, she looked toward the doorway into the foyer. Were Sonny and Gwen still asleep, or lying wakeful in their upstairs bedrooms? Was either one reliving the nightmarish events of the night before?
    Sarah shivered at the memory of seeing death coming for her, surprised she had slept at all. The car had been a silver gray Cadillac. It had taken a moment for her to absorb the silence that had followed its coming to a stop, indicating the engine had stalled or been cut off. Then something had clicked on inside her, and she had darted forward to get at the driver’s-side door. What if it were locked? Thank God it wasn’t. Wrenching it open, she had willed her heart to slow its thudding. Thankfully there was still sufficient light to reveal the driver, the lone occupant, slumped against the steering wheel. A gray-haired, gray-faced man with eyes eerily wide open in an empty stare. She was sure he was dead; he looked dead. Then a muscle twitched in his cheek and he blinked, the vacuity supplanted by bewilderment.
    â€˜Where am I?’ A thin voice that sounded to Sarah to be directed not at her but into some clouded void. He was in shock, poor man.
    â€˜It’s OK,’ she’d soothed, ‘you’re safe. Anything hurt?’
    He didn’t answer. Just stared, those eyes drained of color like the rest of him.
    â€˜Let me help you out of the car.’ There was no resistance when she reached in to draw him back against the seat. He must be eighty or more, she thought, no longer fit to drive. A heart condition, high blood pressure or something of the sort could explain his losing control of the car, and he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Why hadn’t