She wanted to figure out something that was going to end the dispute in their family. But what that something was . . . she had no clue. So because she spent the most time of everyone alone with Ralph, she used those chances she had to connect with him. His whispers were limited mostly to banks and houch. His visions were more varied. On one occasion she’d picked up the sensation of being in a car, she’d seen Grand’s hands clearly on the steering wheel, and the course he drove looked like a dirt road through forest deep with shadows thrown by mostly untrimmed cedars with lacy branches screening the way. On another occasion, she’d seen a house with cedar shingles that were blackened by the Pacific Northwest damp. On a third she’d once again walked up a stairway on the outside of a building with him, also cedar shingled. He’d gone through the screened door she’d seen once before, and there was a woman behind a desk strewn with papers. She’d looked up, smiled, made a gesture toward a chair against a window.
