Warren Murphy: Blood Ties

"We were both lucky," Maria said and went back to her own car, leaving the young man standing in the middle of the road with a puzzled expression on his face.

It was the second time the gift had saved Maria. She had been driving the first time it happened too, on her way to Newark Airport to catch a flight. But there was traffic on Belmont Avenue and while she fretted and waited, the same black crisscrossing lines swept her vision and suddenly she saw a jetliner lift into the sky, then drop like a brick across the bay to crash and burn in Bayonne Park. Maria knew that it was her flight: She didn't know how she knew; she just knew. She also knew that the flight had not actually taken off yet and there was still time.

Maria had leapt from her car, ignoring the honking horns and the cursing of motorists, and frantically called the airline terminal from a pay phone. But no one at the airport wanted to believe that a jetliner was about to burn on takeoff. Was there a bomb on the plane? they asked her. No.

Was she reporting an attempted hijacking? No.

Then how did she know the plane was going to crash when it took off?

"I saw it in a vision," she blurted, knowing that it was the wrong thing to say.

Oh, the people at the airport said. Thank you very much for calling. And the line went dead.

Maria walked back to her car, tears streaming from her eyes, knowing it would have been better to have lied, to have said anything else, just so they delayed the flight. She should have told them that she was a hijacker and demanded a ransom.

She eased her car out of traffic and turned around to return home. She had gone only a few blocks when the plane appeared in the sky. It looked like any other jet but Maria knew it wasn't just any other jet. The plane climbed laboriously, hesitated, the sun flashing on its tipping wings. For a moment, she thought everything would be all right. Then it fell. Maria squeezed her eyes tightly, twisting the steering wheel in her hands, trying to block out the sound. But she couldn't. It was a dull faraway explosion that might have been distant thunder.

All 128 passengers died that day, but Maria was not one of them.

For Maria, the gift had begun in childhood with the ability to know who was on the other end of a ringing telephone. As she grew, the gift got stronger, but she did not take it seriously until her senior year in high school.

Then, in art class, Mr. Zankovitch had assigned everyone to work in clay. Maria found a soothing pleasure in kneading the moist gray material in her hands and out of her imagination fashioned the bust of a young man with deepset eyes, high cheekbones, and strong handsome features. Everyone was amazed at the realistic quality of the face, including Maria, who had never worked with clay before.

Maria took the fired-clay head home and set it on a bookshelf and did not give it another thought until the day she brought her fiance home to meet her family. Her mother had remarked at the close resemblance the young man bore to that familiar bust. Before the young man became her husband, Maria destroyed the small statue, lest the young man ask embarrassing questions to which, truthfully, Maria had no answers.

She misjudged her husband. He would have asked no questions, just as he answered none about his "business" that kept him away more than he was home. They were intimate strangers and when Maria could bear it no longer, she shocked and humiliated her family by getting a divorce. There had been a baby but he went with the father and Maria never saw her son after that. And now he lay buried in a small New Jersey cemetery, with only Maria to bring flowers to his grave.

She was fifty-six, black-haired, with the full figure of a thirty-five-year-old. Her eyes were the color of Vermont maple syrup and there was pain and wisdom in them in equal measure. She wore a pale lavender coat as she stepped from her car at the entrance to Wildwood Cemetery, slipped past the wrought-iron gates and down the grass-lined path she had walked so many times before. She clutched the flowers tightly in her arm. The air was sweet with the scent of fresh pines. And as she walked, she thought about death.

Much of her life, she realized, had involved death, because of the gift. It had been a mixed blessing, her ability to see into the future. Sometimes it had been useful, but when she began to foresee the deaths of friends and relatives-often years before the fact-it could be depressing. Maria had known the exact hour of her mother's death three years before the cancer claimed her. Three long years of holding that terrible secret in her heart while she pleaded with her mother to go for that long-deferred physical examination. By the time Maria had gotten her mother to the doctor, it was already too late.

So Maria had learned to keep her visions to herself, learned that some things were just meant to be. But she had seen her own death twice and had avoided it both times. Yet one day, Maria knew, death would not be denied.

Maria passed behind a man standing with his head bowed before a grave, but she scarcely noticed him. She was thinking of another death-her son's. The gift had not been with her then and she had not foreseen it, never imagined that her son would be arrested and die in prison for a crime he never committed.

There was nothing she could have done. She had let her husband have the boy when they were divorced, thinking he would be better able to give his son the advantages he needed to succeed. At that time she told herself it was for the best. Who could have foreseen that it would turn out like this?

I should have, Maria said to herself.

One final visit to the grave and she would go to the police. After that, it wouldn't matter. Nothing would. Maria's heels clicked on the black asphalt as she came to the fork in the cemetery path. She knew it well. There was the desiccated old oak tree and beyond it, the marble shaft with the name DeFuria cut on its face. The sight of it meant she should leave the path.

She picked her way to the grave of her son.

As she walked toward the familiar stone, measured footsteps sounded behind her and Maria, stirred by an, impulse that was at first surprise and then intuition, turned on her heel and saw death walking toward her.

Death was a tall man in a gabardine topcoat, a man with deep-set eyes and a hard face, made harder by a scar that ran along his right jawline. She had never seen his face look so uncaring before.

"You followed me," she said. Now there was no surprise in her voice, only resignation.

"Yes, Maria. I knew you would be here. You always are at this time. You never could let go of the past."

"It's my past to do with as I will," she said.

"Our past," the man with the scar said. "Our past, Maria. And we're stuck with it. I can't let you go to the police. "

"You killed our . . . my son."

"You know better than that."

"You could have saved him," Maria said. "You knew the truth. He was innocent. And you stood by. You let him die."

"I'm sorry I ever told you about it. I wanted you back. I thought you'd understand."

"Understand?" The tears were flowing now. "Understand? I understand I let you have the boy and you let him be slaughtered."

The tall man held his gloved hands out, palms up. "All I wanted was a second chance, Maria." He smiled at her. "We're not young anymore, Maria. It makes me sad to see you like this." His smile was wistful and sad. "I thought we could be together again."

Maria held the flowers to her chest as the man casually drew a long-barreled pistol from under his coat.

"If I didn't know you so well, my Maria, I would trade you your life for a promise of silence. I know your word would be good. But you would not give me your promise, would you?"

The smooth fleshy pouch under Maria's chin trembled, but her voice was clear, firm, unafraid.