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  Ardra typed, Trade u.

  lol appeared in the chat window a split second later and that was that.

  The smell of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread was soon drifting down from the kitchen. Ardra’s stomach let out a mighty growl that startled the dog awake.

  She couldn’t help but laugh as he cocked his head to the side and tried to spot the creature that had made the noise. The attempt didn’t last long. As soon as he caught the scent of the spaghetti sauce, he stood up and stretched before sauntering up the stairs to the kitchen, clearly having forgotten all about the strange noise.

  Her mother was suddenly his new best friend.

  He sat at a distance and waited patiently, his tail beating a steady rhythm on the floor, for her to drop something.

  “Give it up, buddy!” Ardra called to him from her perch on the couch. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there! She’s not going to drop anything. You should try to sweet talk dad into a snack. You’ll have better luck.”

  Her mom turned away from the stove long enough to slip the dog a chunk of ground beef and stick her tongue out at Ardra.

  The dog was already changing the dynamic of her family. Maybe not in a big way and definitely not in a bad way either, just different. They were simply adjusting to having him around and he seemed to fit in quite well, matching the steps of their dance effortlessly.

  The dog stood in a silent vigil next to Anne’s feet the whole time she stood at the stove. Ardra had gone back to focusing on her homework and didn’t see her mother slip the dog a slice of sausage and a few more chunks of hamburger.

  She finally walked away from the stove to give Frank a time frame for dinner. The big yellow dog sniffed once more at the air before huffing out a breath and sulking his way back to Ardra’s feet.

  “The traitor returns.” She muttered to him as he lay his head on her feet.

  He licked her ankle as if to say, “I’m only a dog! I’m hungry!”.

  She reached down and scratched his ears before returning her full focus to her homework.

  Her mother had dinner on the table at seven. Ardra typed up a quick goodbye to Piper and shut down her laptop. After her father had said the blessing, they ate in silence.

  Spaghetti was the one meal that her father never uttered a word during. He didn’t have time. It was one of those mysteries of life as to whether or not he even chewed it before swallowing. Nobody knew for sure, and nobody was brave enough to get inside his eating bubble to find out. Getting sucked into his maw was the last thing anybody wanted to have happen to them after seeing the way he devoured spaghetti.

  The food coma that ensued sent them all off to their respective areas. Ardra retired to her bedroom, Frank to his office, and Anne to the den to watch her shows.

  With the dog snoring from the floor at the foot of her bed, Ardra settled in to watch some I Love Lucy reruns. Something about that era of television touched her. The shows were all so happy. It was never about killing and slaughter and jail like all of the shows that her generation seemed to be obsessed with.

  When she was a little girl, she had always gone for the biggest, fluffiest, softest dress she could find. She wanted to be like the women in the old movies—poised, elegant, refined. Belles of the ball! She was convinced she had been born in the wrong century.

  That belief had gone out the window when she was old enough to learn about commodes, the bustier, garters, corsets and the plague. She felt firmly that she was not made for such primitive things. Hot running water, microwaves, computers, and televisions were far too important to her life.

  She had decided that she could still like the clothes though.

  Her parents both poked their heads in to say good night at around ten-thirty. For the first time in weeks, she was actually looking forward to going to bed.

  She pulled her hair up into its bed time position, laid out her clothes for the next day, shut off the light and climbed under the covers.

  As she was drifting off to sleep, she felt the dog climb onto the bed next to her. The weight and warmth of him was comfortable so she decided to let him stay.

  As her mind shut down, the dog shifted his nose ever so slightly and touched her hand. The last thing to go through her head was, Hey, someone’s pinching me again.

  When his mouth came down on hers this time, she welcomed it. His hands ate up her flesh at a pace that her inexperienced body just couldn’t keep up with. Every dig of his fingers and thrust of his hips shot waves of pleasure from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair.

  She could hear the guttural pleasure in the hungry growls that escaped his throat and forced their way into her mouth where they mingled with the soft moans that drifted up from her chest.

  The sound made her open up for him.

  She let him into every part of her being and he was all too happy to rush in like a tidal wave. He overpowered her and swept her away in a single swell that hovered for both an eternity and the briefest of moments before sending them both crashing back to the earth in a tangle of limbs, sweat-soaked hair and hot, slick flesh.

  She woke up after the sun for once and stumbled her way down the stairs into the kitchen to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table. Her father was pounding away at the keyboard of his laptop. Her mother was on the phone with what sounded like a hotel receptionist.

  “Yes!” her mother shouted into the receiver. “For the third time, we’ll be there tonight. We want a room with a king sized bed, non smoking, for an undetermined amount of time. Is this really so hard to understand?”

  Neither of them looked away from what they were doing to greet her. It was the first time she recall that her parents hadn’t told her good morning when she had stumbled her bleary self into the room first thing in the morning.

  She shrugged it off and grabbed a yogurt and banana out of the fridge.

  She sat down next to her father at the table. “Are you guys leaving for Illinois already? I didn’t know you were planning on leaving so soon.”

  “Well, we weren’t, but something came up and the church called on us to help out.” He replied absently, still clicking away at the laptop.

  “What happened?” Ardra pressed, taking a bite of her banana. She wasn’t used to her parents being so detached and didn’t like it at all.

  In lieu of using his mouth to answer her, he pushed a copy of one of the local newspapers toward her. She searched the front page, not quite sure what she was looking at. It appeared to be a field covered in ash. It couldn’t have been a fire. There was always some remnant of the structure left standing after a fire. Well, any fire she had ever heard of.

  She read the caption under the photo and the banana dropped from her hand.

  Kirkland, Ohio

  Temple mysteriously burns to the ground.

  She snatched the paper off of the table and unfolded it to read the article in its entirety.

  While her mother continued arguing with the poor soul on the other end of the line and her father continued to pound at the keyboard, she focused on the words in front of her face. She sent up a silent prayer that the building had been empty.

  An unusual burst of anger welled up inside of her after she finished reading the article. She felt like she should have been there. Logic told her that there was nothing she could have done to stop it and that her feelings were absolutely unwarranted. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her from feeling them.

  She put the newspaper back on the table and folded her hands on top of it to keep them from shaking. The anger was quickly growing into rage. It was like someone else’s emotions had jumped inside of her and taken over. Exactly like when she had yelled at her grandmother over Christmas break.

  Her father stopped typing at the same time that her mother yelled, “Darn you, vile woman!” into the receiver and ended her phone call. She tossed her cell phone down on the table, clearly determined to relieve some stress on an inanimate object instead of her family. “Good morning honey. Sorry about t
hat. That woman was about as intelligent as a box of rocks.”

  “It’s fine. I’m kind of in shock anyway. Do you guys know anything about what happened that the paper didn’t print? This is just awful!”

  “We have no idea what happened.” He shrugged his broad shoulders and let out a long, sad sigh. “Actually, I don’t think anybody knows. It’s very strange. Even the local authorities haven’t been able to come up with an explanation.” He shrugged and let the confusion in his eyes speak the words that he couldn’t seem to find. “It’s like the building just got tired and disintegrated.”

  “Well why have you guys been called? Aren’t there people closer that can handle it?”

  Her mother interjected, “The church knew we were planning on visiting Nauvoo, so they asked if we would change our plans a bit and head out today. We had nothing else going on, so we agreed.”

  “I see.” Was all she could manage as the shock continued to settle in. She still didn’t understand why her parents had to be involved, but she also didn’t understand why she was so concerned about it. People needed help and her parents had offered their time. There shouldn’t be a problem with that. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on. Something dark.

  “We’ll only be gone for a couple weeks. You’ve got the dog here with you and you can have Piper come stay with you too if you want.”

  Her mother had mistaken the look on her face as fear of staying alone. In reality it was worry for them. She couldn’t justify the emotion, so she chalked it up to shock and put it in the same category as the anger and guilt: strange and unusual.

  As if he had heard Anne mention him, the dog came down the stairs on cue to sit and stare at the back door. Ardra rose from the table and opened it for him. She stood in the doorway and watched him run around the back yard sniffing and marking. Still nothing to clean up for Ardra. Another prayer of thanks ran through her mind.

  The dog ran back in the house and she closed the door behind him.

  Detached thoughts of her pet’s need for food made their way to the fringes of her mind. However, there were more important things to worry about at that moment and he didn’t look like he was hurting from the lack of food. He actually looked quite healthy as far as she could tell. His coat was shiny and mat free, his blue eyes were crystal clear and he was full of energy.

  She took a seat at the table where her parents had started talking about their itinerary.

  “So, what will you guys be doing for the church while you’re down there?” She asked during a break in their conversation.

  Her father tore his eyes away from the schedule her mother had worked out to explain, “We’ll be providing some comfort to the brothers and sisters who are in need of spiritual guidance during this tough time. That temple was the first that Joseph Smith had built and it was where he and the first members of the church had worshiped. Some people are taking it very hard. We’ll also be helping to get the temple rebuilt as quickly as possible.”

  It made her feel better that something was being done so quickly. She took comfort in the fact that her church was more like a close knit family than a large corporation like some other churches had become.

  She sat and listened in on her parents’ planning while thinking, once again, over the last few weeks.

  She had yelled at her grandmother, had an out of body experience, been tortured by nightmares and she had become the slightly confused owner of a dog. All the stories she had heard about people’s lives making a one-eighty were put to shame by the last few weeks. The experience had left her shaken and unsure of herself for the first time in her life.

  It had taken her a long time to come to terms with the fact that she had actually traveled outside of her body. It simply wasn’t something that she believed could happen. Especially not to her. Unfortunately, it was the only explanation that she could come up with. If it had been a dream, the hair that she had ripped out of his head as he reached out for her would have stayed there. In dream land. Where it belonged.

  She had lost faith in her assertion that it was all a nightmare and she would wake up any moment and the world would be back to normal. She had tried to convince herself that that was what was going on. She didn’t want to believe that her life had changed into a twisted, sick joke.

  After slamming the door to those thoughts closed she excused herself from the conversation in favor of a shower.

  As the hot water teased the stress out of her knotted muscles she envisioned all of her issues being carried down the drain along with the soap suds. As her head began to clear, she started to feel her old attitude rise to the surface. A decent outlook for the day bloomed inside of her. By the time that she stepped out of the shower and toweled off, she had decided to call Piper up and ask her to go snowboarding. Dinner afterwards was beginning to look probable as she got dressed.

  She placed a quick call to Piper’s cell phone to set her plan in motion and came out of her room into the silence that had become all too familiar since New Years. She made a quick pass through the house and her heart fell a little bit when she realized that her parents had left without saying goodbye.

  It was one of the few times in her life that her parents had gone on vacation without her and it was the one and only time they had ever left for longer than nine hours without saying goodbye. She told herself that she was plenty old enough for them to go out of town without her. She also assured herself that they had just left with more important things on their minds. After shaking off the unwelcome feeling of abandonment, she grabbed her purse and a jacket, chained the dog up in the back yard and headed out to meet her best friend.

  The excitement of hitting the slopes soon replaced the gloom that had crept inside of her. There was nothing quite like getting a good point on her board and letting gravity do the rest.

  She picked Piper up in front of the old house that her sorority leased and headed for the freeway. A quick drive south on Interstate 15 and twenty minutes up Fort Union Boulevard into Big Cottonwood Canyon, she was parking her car in the parking lot of Brighton Ski Resort.

  Both of them had season passes, so they bypassed the long line where people stood buying lift tickets. They had decided to start big and work their way down during the drive. Mt. Millicent was the first run on their list.

  While riding the lift up to the 10,452 foot peak, Ardra shared the story of her parents leaving without saying goodbye to her. It was all she could do to refrain from chewing her fingernails off through her gloves.

  “Really?” her best friend asked before following the rhetorical question with, “They’ve never done that before! Heck! I usually get a goodbye out of them any time they’ve gone anywhere without you! I can see why you had your back up about it.”

  “Yeah, but I really was over reacting, right? I mean, I’m an adult after all. If it wasn’t for school, I’d probably be out of the house and married by now. Then it wouldn’t even cross my mind if they left town without calling. I don’t know that saying goodbye to my twenty-one year old daughter would be very high on my list of things to do if I were leaving town under these circumstances either.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would be a little low on my list, too. But hey! At least you have me!”

  Piper put an arm around Ardra’s shoulders as they continued the ride up the steep slope in silence. Ardra stared down at the board dangling from her left foot and smiled when she saw the erratic movements of the board strapped to her best friend’s left foot.

  As kids, they had both been terrified of the ski lifts. Ardra would nearly chew her fingers to nubs by the time they made it to the top of a run and Piper was always swinging her board around nervously, which usually ended up in a twisted ankle before the day had even really started.

  Now she found the feeling of being up in the air with nothing to catch her if she fell to be exhilarating. She enjoyed the rush and the slow buildup to the moment they would get their boards back in the snow and plummet back down
the slope at breakneck speeds.

  Snowboarding was the only form of entertainment during the winter months in Utah as far as she was concerned. Luckily for her; the snowboarding season lasted about seven months.

  As they came to the peak, Piper removed her arm from around Ardra’s shoulders and made sure that her jacket was zipped up tight. They both slid out of the lift, leading with their left feet and letting their right foot land on the “stomp pad” at the back of their boards. They slid off to the side so that the next couple could get off without crashing into them and strapped their loose feet into the bindings.

  They mounted the lip of the run, the familiar butterflies fluttered around in Ardra’s stomach as she stared down the nearly vertical slope of Mt. Millicent. They touched their fists to each other and leaped off the hard packed snow into the powder.

  As Ardra got her bearings and pointed her board in the direction she wanted to go, she caught sight of Piper doing the same thing. The two girls accelerated down the face of the mountain at breakneck speeds. They were always aware of the each other’s location, effortlessly criss-crossing paths like a seasoned figure eight team. They dodged boulders, jumped fallen logs and flew past other boarders and skiers that were taking the run at sane speeds.

  The feeling of the icy wind whipping her face and the adrenaline caused by obstacles on the slope were more than enough to keep her mind focused on the task at hand and off of all the other things that had been going on in her life. She welcomed the break and embraced the rush that was pumping endorphins through her veins.

  As they reached the bottom of the run, both girls turned their boards sideways and dug in their heels. Snow went flying everywhere as they came to a stop.

  After some girly gushing about the run, Piper took charge and lead them over to the lift that would take them up to Clayton Peak and the beginning of the run named The Western Trail. It was a mellow trail in comparison to Millicent, so they took it easy and talked back and forth as their boards slid over the soft snow.