Snow Way Out by Christine Husom

smaller ears with attached earlobes. And I’d gotten a pair of colored contacts to make my green eyes blue. Decked out as Marilyn from head to toe, I looked quite authentic, and almost fooled myself.
    • • • • • • • • • • • •
    B oth Pinky and Erin were walking around in the coffee shop like chickens with their heads cut off when I got there at ten minutes before nine. Actually, in the bird world, Pinky was more like a swan, with her long, skinny legs and elongated neck, and Erin was more like a baby chick: small and compact. Pinky wore black leggings with a pink-and-purple-striped top that hung to her knees. Erin was in her usual outside-of-work outfit of jeans and a sweater.
    Pinky opened her shop at eight o’clock for her clients, but I rarely had a customer before ten, so that was when the curio side opened. An occasional coffee shop customer would wander in and look around, but we were lucky if Pinky sold an item for us once a month.
    As soon as she spotted me, Pinky grabbed my shoulders and steered me to a table. “You sit right down here. I’ll get your coffee and scone.”
    Erin sat down opposite me. “You’ll have to talk between bites.”
    Pinky plunked food and drink on the table, then slid onto the chair between Erin and me. “Shoot.”
    I gave each detail I remembered, starting with looking at my e-mails, using the bathroom, finding the snowing snow globe . . .
    “Wait a minute. Say that again,” Pinky said and reached over to check the temperature on my forehead. “You’re not spiking a fever.”
    “One of your old snow globes just started snowing?” Erin asked in an “I want to believe you but can’t” voice. Her frowning expression backed up her tone.
    “Not one of the old ones. It was one I’d never seen before. . . .” I filled them in on the scene, and how it looked like a snow globe made of the same materials we’d used in May’s class. They glanced at each other in a way that made me curious if they knew more than they were admitting to.
    “Did you see the globe?” Both Pinky and Erin shook their heads, but neither answered. I continued my story. When I got to the part of touching the body with a stick, and having it topple to the ground, they grabbed my hands—Pinky my left and Erin my right—and squeezed. “Ouchy, you’re cutting off my circulation.” They eased their grips a tad.
    “Cami, you were alone with Jerrell Powers’s dead body in the park at night and you lived to tell about it. I’d have died of fright,” Pinky said. Her hazel eyes were as round as the moon had been the night before.
    Erin slowly shook her head back and forth. “That is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
    When I relayed that Clint and I had discovered the snow globe was missing from the shelf, they both squeezed my hands again. Pinky spoke. “And you’re sure you weren’t having some sort of premonition? Like when your mom comes—”
    “I’m sure. More than sure. Positively sure.” I hadn’t used that expression since we were teenagers and I was trying to convince the others I was right. “And my mother’s visits are not premonitions or hallucinations. And they are not even real visits . . . oh, never mind. After I’d watched the last of the snow settle, I picked up the globe and studied it. I know what I saw.”
    “Yes, but if you were having a premonition, you would see the scene. I mean, what if it was really one of your other globes, but the scene changed to show you what had happened, or was about to happen?” Pinky said.
    I felt my eyes squint slightly. “Uh, no. I will say it one more time. I don’t have premonitions.”
    “Then how do you explain it?” Erin asked.
    “I have a theory.”
    “And that is?” Pinky said.
    “Someone planned the murder, captured the scene in the snow globe, and realized they’d accidentally left the globe. They saw me in here at the computer, waited until I went to use the bathroom, slipped