Foreword III

Saturday morning — well, closer to afternoon than morning by the time I dragged myself out of bed. There was that phone with the clock moving slowly across the screen like a new toy for the bored house cat that I was.

I tapped the screen to life and gave a good long look at Miss Alice before the screen faded to black. I tapped the cracked surface again, glad that the spiderwebs were localized on Mister Handsome, with only a stray fissure touching Alice’s shoulder.

Something about her eyes as they looked into the camera made me want to know more about someone who would abandon both car and phone. She didn’t have the look of someone who would just go with that kind of flow.

Alice Donovan.

Foreword II

I waited until I got settled in my apartment to give the phone a closer look.

When I tried to turn the phone on, I got a whole lot of nothing aside from a flashing battery icon telling me the thing was out of juice in a critical way. No surprise there.

When it finally charged enough to turn on, the corner of the screen read “Emergency calls only.” A large clock sat over a picture of a woman, the grey just beginning to show through dark, shoulder-length hair loosely tied in a small ponytail. Younger-looking than she probably was. Beautiful in a natural way, not made up or phony.

Foreword I

This is not my story.

I am only the momentary caretaker of the story. It is one of those stories that drops in someone’s lap without warning. Except, in my case, it made its appearance by being underfoot.

A recent transplant to the Twin Cities, I had been warned by a friend that January and February were bitterly cold, and buses were less dependable on those frigid days. His advice: just buy a decent car and an engine block heater and plug the car in at night so it would start the next day. That way, he said, I wouldn’t find myself standing in twenty-below wind chills waiting for a bus that may or may not come.