Missing Bessie (The Bessie Series Book 1) - Jody Overend

Missing Bessie (The Bessie Series Book 1) by Jody Overend

Book excerpt

Bessie lies on a grassy hillside peppered with wildflowers, pillowing her head on her arms. Her eyes close, dreamlike. Her thoughts drift like clouds in a breeze, as they always do when she’s alone. She loves being in Heaven, adores it, but she can’t help feeling a sense of anxiety, a kind of dread of not knowing how she had ended up here. And when. Was it last week? A month ago? A year? Longer? And why is Ash here, too? They are only fifteen. Way too young to be in Heaven. So, what happened to them? And why can’t she remember?

Fragments of memories drift across her mind but nothing holds together. A warm breeze lifts her pale red bangs, revealing an inch-long scar over her left eyebrow in the shape of a small bird.

From somewhere behind her, a fluttery voice materializes disrupting her thoughts. “Bess, where’d you go? Bess!”

She turns her head to catch the familiar sound. Hunching up on her elbows, she looks back up the hill from where she has just been. In the distance, a school bell rings. She ignores it, starting to giggle.

“Bess? You over here?” The girly-girl voice is attached, finally, to a stunning beauty of mixed heritage in a blazing hot pink mini skirt. Lean as a stick, her poodle-like hair flowers ten inches around her movie starlet makeup; and her copper complexion glows. She stumbles over the hilltop in one lime green platform, carrying the other. Plopping down beside Bessie, she tosses the broken footwear on the grass. “Stupid shoe, anyway.”

“Ash, focus. How many deaths will there be on this flight from, say, traffic accidents?” Bessie picks up a blade of grass to chew. “Guess how many accidents, not how many dead people.”

Ash leans back, her elegant hands displaying a remarkable color of cerise nail polish, complete with rhinestones. “Just this next flight coming?” she asks. “Okay, I say thirty to forty car wrecks, maybe three trucks. Does a bicycle count as a vehicle? One bus, and … my feet hurt.”

The school bell rings again with neither girl acknowledging it. Ash leans forward to rub the toes of her left foot before stretching her leg back out. Pulling from her giant shoulder bag two cans of Hector’s Nectar: a heavenly honey and nectarine soda that was concocted by Angel Hector eons ago, Ash snaps the tabs and hands one to Bessie. “Then there’s the suicides,” she adds. “Murders, of course.”

“Don’t forget the obvious,” Bessie reminds her, taking a long gulp and turning to her friend, smiling.

They stare into each other’s eyes and chime in unison, “War.”

The girls, still slurping their sodas, gaze out over the lush hillsides spreading out around the airport in the valley below. The word “airport” is somewhat of a misnomer; the building resembles more of an open-air platform. A pine floor is attached to a peaked cedar-shingled roof with four sturdy posts at each corner, but without walls. On the top of the roof, an impressive crystal tower houses a magnificent golden bell. At one end of the platform furthest away from the girls, a crystal door is suspended in midair, glowing with a colorless aura. Outside the door, an airport runway is clearly visible. The front entrance is located at the opposite end of the platform — an arched doorway wreathed in flowers. Above the entrance, a carved plaque hanging on chains modestly announces: “Heaven Interportal”.

Gardens of extraordinary beauty surround the platform like a flowery hug. Winding away from the structure, small flagstone walkways bordered in stout hedges thread through the valley and up into the surrounding hills.

As the girls creep down towards their usual hiding place behind a particular hedge running horizontally about halfway down the hill, clusters of spirit people stream along the walkways to join an excited crowd gathering at the front of the airport. They look very much like their former selves, except for their air of weightlessness and ageless incandescence; and like Bessie and Ash, they cast no shadows.

Angels materialize amongst the crowd, some in their spiffy, powder blue Air Heaven uniforms, and others in regular street clothes. Unlike all other beings in Heaven, angels are distinguished by their silvery auras that sparkle and glow in any light.

Still moving in a crouched position, Bessie hisses at Ash behind her, “News flash. Over there to your left. Angel Mel.”

Huge and bald and dressed in jeans, sandals, and his hallmark Hawaiian shirt over a rotund belly, Angel Mel clasps a half-inch wad of typed paper held precariously together with two brass fasteners on the top and bottom. Talking excitedly to a fellow angel, his voice booms so loudly that it carries up to the girls. “Yeah, so, I’m going to channel it tomorrow to that young actress Goldie Hawn during her yoga session. She’s very spiritual. She’ll love it, I tell ya. Luh-ve it.” He listens for a bit. “What’s that? Oh, I call it A Bouquet of Reincarnations, haha. Get it? Pretty on-the-pulse if I do say so myself, which I just did, haha.”