It was before Clara helped find the missing girl being held by her captor in the cabin by the serene lake. And before Clara had any notion of a ripple effect to Virgil’s disappearance. It was before all this. 

But it started with truth. 

* * * * 

At first, the truth that Clara knew had ceased to exist. This is because she was unaware of it.

That is not to say though, that it had not come to her for many years.

When she was a child Clara would practice the piano everyday for one hour. She was gifted how she could learn to play Bach, Beethoven, even Chopin, simply by hearing.

She had short hair, but would grow it long sometimes. She had bangs she had cut herself. Her hair was wavy and the color of chestnut. She had hazel eyes like her mother.

Of course Clara would learn her scales, all of them in fact. Even A minor. And she would actually learn her music theory. She knew the difference between a half note and a quarter note.

She knew how many sharps were in the key of A major.

Of course she did.

And she knew the characteristics of Baroque pieces with the ornate trills that echoed architecture of the time in Europe.

But when she would play the notes, her hands felt the music independent of her mind. Her fingers would fly. It was like her hands had a mind that was shared and was just for her arms. She could hear the music even before she would play the next stanza.

It was normal for her. And she thought nothing of it.

It was during one of those afternoons that she had her first clairvoyant vision.

She was nine years old.

It was just an ordinary spring afternoon. There had been no need for sprinklers in the yard yet, the light rain was coming down again. The green just starting to become more vibrant within the grass and leaves.

The light that day, as she would reflect upon years later, was different though.

It came in through the windows sideways, and quickly filled the room with a golden glow. The ions were unworldly, sparkling with brightness.

Clara would not know for years to come that the vision was of Sallie.

Sallie had already been dead for forty years by then.

She stood on a grass hill. It appeared she was looking for someone as she gazed out over a valley. She was calm and somewhat resigned.

But the yearning was still there.

Sallie had been looking for Virgil after all those years.

* * *

Virgil was dead.

Darling Virgil. Only nineteen years old.

Fine brown hair crusted to his face and dried blood on his lovely cheekbones when his body was found slumped against the car door, in the desert.

He was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt.

The youngest son of Sallie. And much to her dismay, she nor anyone back home knew what happened to him after he disappeared.

They had not known he was on the Arizona-Nevada border.

It was 1930, and Annie never told Sallie that Virgil had a son named Sawyer. By the time Annie realized she would never make it out to Georgia, Sawyer was eighteen years old.