In Medias Res

Unexplainable things were happening to and around Bella. She couldn’t talk about them with just anybody. There were only a few trusted insiders, the brain stormers, who would take her seriously. In their absence, she had no one to confide in. In the past weeks she had been unable to have a telepathic conversation with Maddie or Gran, and couldn’t seem to get her energy back. Her gift was changing, and she attributed it to her journey into and out of the vortex.

The closest examples to what Bella experienced were the sun miracles reported at Medjugorje, a phenomenon explained as a religious or mystical experience. What happened with Bella could be described similarly, but she wasn’t praying when it happened. She was sitting in a boat underneath a bridge at sunset. Two things these experiences had in common were the extraordinary sunsets and the feeling of being transported somewhere else for a short time.

It’s funny how you can play with words to manipulate meaning. Bella could say that she had experienced something without admitting that she’d participated in an event. But it was splitting hairs. It was impossible to define what took place. If things were as they appeared, she took a trip. But where did she go? Did she travel in time, to the past or future? Or did she drift downstream into some remote off-chute along the Mississippi? An even bigger question was, could she ever go back?

Bruce was frustrated because he felt that Bella shut him out completely. Why would she do something like that? They were a thing. There must be more to the story. Maybe she was hurt or in some kind of trouble. After careful deliberation, he contacted the brain stormers to see what they were able to intuit. It was another dead end. As a last resort, he flew to St. Louis to find out what was going on.

When he arrived at her home, Bruce found evidence that she’d left in a hurry. For one thing, her packed bags were sitting by the door. Where would she go for weeks without them? There were fresh foods spoiling on the counters and in the refrigerator. She didn’t do things like that. It didn’t add up.

Lounging by the pool and drowning her sorrows in chocolate, Bella wondered why Bruce just up and left without a word. Even though they weren’t legally committed to each other, they were inseparable, best friends. They joked about being friends with benefits, but they both knew they were a matched set. She understood why he hadn’t reached her in the past two days, her phone was dead. But what about the weeks prior? These past months were magic. There was no forewarning, no hint that he needed space. It wasn’t like him.

Returning to business as usual was difficult. As it turned out, other members of the mastermind group had been channeling a string of numbers, too. Each of the psychics had received them in different fashion, but it was the same group of numbers Bella receiv...