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Chapter 83 - Mindspeak

Tamara looked at Winnie with a smile. “Just what brought on that idea, dear?”

“Well, I thought about how much fun I have at the resort and how much all the girls like v-ball,” Winnie said. “I thought that they’d like to have the experience too.”

Barbara laughed. “That’s a sweet thought, Winnie. But think about it for a second—they’d all need to be nude, right? How do you think they’d react to that?”

Winnie didn’t take more than a second to answer. “Well, we wear skin-tight uniforms when we play and they don’t hide much. Everyone strips off for showers afterwards. and no one seems to be modest...”

Tamara laughed. “Would they strip off for showering with boys around? Think of the showers at the resort pool, hello?”

“Well ... um ... maybe not,” Winnie giggled. “I’m so used to nudists now that I can’t believe that everyone doesn’t think like me. Still, maybe they’d want to do it. Knowing those gals, a few have no modesty. Maybe they’d think it would be a hoot to give it a try.”

Barbara grinned at her. “Okay, but there are some logistics to consider, assuming you get a few gals to try it out. They’ll all be under eighteen, so the biggie is getting parental permission. I can persuade Ron to extend a special rate to the girls and their parents too if they come. If a gal comes alone, the office needs a notarized document giving parental permission and designating a responsible adult. If they stay overnight, they’ll need a place—or at least a tent—to stay in. Still interested?”

“Oh sure. I think so. I have the cell numbers of the team. Coach too. I’m gonna call everyone and sound them out. Hey, is there a web page that they can look at to see what the resort looks like? I never thought to ask about that.”

Barbara gave her the web address and then mentioned the Superbowl and suggested that Winnie look up that site too and tell the girls about it.

Winnie couldn’t reach everyone immediately; including herself, there were ten girls on the varsity team. She decided to just contact the varsity members, not the JV members. Of the girls she reached, all were dubious but wanted more information; Winnie told them that she’d call them back on Sunday.

On Sunday morning, Winnie called her teammates back to invite them to her home to learn about the resort. It would be a tight fit, but Tamara had told her that anyone who wanted to come, could meet at their apartment. Tamara was surprised that just two of the team members had decided that they weren’t interested. Her coach had declined too, pointing out that if she attended, then the team’s participation could be construed as a high-school sanctioned activity, which could cause all sorts of problems. That meant eight girls were in the apartment, causing Peter to flee the place to maintain his own sanity.

Winnie had prepared well for the gathering—she had set up a video session with Barbara, Dawn Simpson, the Maryland v-ball team coach, and Naomi, one of the two college girls who had gone to the Superbowl with the resort team when Barbara and Tamara couldn’t. Winnie had her virtual guests tell the team members what they thought about nudism in general and what it was like playing the sport while nude. Their enthusiasm was evident and infectious and they answered a lot of the girls’ questions. After the video chat was done, Winnie and Tamara told the girls about their own experiences and Tamara spoke about her two appearances at the Superbowl.

Again there were many questions, but, as several of the girls there pointed out, their volleyball uniforms weren’t overly modest.

One of them laughed, “Yeah, wearing my bun-huggers feels like I have nothing on my bottom unless I twist a certain way. It doesn’t cover much.”

One of the other girls pointed out, “I think that athletes in general have far less modesty than other kids like the gals I see in the locker room at school. They huddle behind towels and rush to get dressed. I’m really intrigued at the idea of playing naked. Look at how they play beach volleyball—those suits cover almost nothing.”

Another girl mentioned the now-defunct ESPN Body Issue. “Remember how the female athletes posed for those pictures? Maybe that was just being exhibitionistic, but I think that they liked doing that.”

After a lot of discussion, and after what Tamara recognized as a lot of self-persuasion and possibly a bit of peer pressure, all of the girls agreed to do it.

Winnie was delighted and gushed about how much fun they’d all have. But, as she pointed out to them, the next step was to convince their parents. Winnie told the girls that, of course, their parents were invited to come too. That caused a bit of consternation for several girls.

“Uggh,” one moaned, “I don’t care if they see me naked, but I think seeing the ‘rents’ privates all hangin’ out there would wig me out.”

Most of the other girls were either amused or horrified at the thought of seeing their parents naked. Then the girls started discussing how to break the news to their parents. That’s when Tamara spoke up.

“Hey guys, I’ve met most of them at your games; they’ve been dedicated fans at your games all season and they know that you all have the potential of getting a college sports scholarship. So I think that they’d support you in any kind of off-season practice.

“Winnie, you’ll have to convince the parents that the resort is safe, you know,” Tamara told her.

“Ah, Tamara, since you’ve met most of our folks—could you talk to them?” one of the girls asked.

Tamara had each girl phone their parents and each explained about going to the resort. Then they turned the phone over to Tamara who spoke. It took about an hour, but finally the parents of five of the girls were satisfied with Tamara’s assurances of the resort’s safety—in fact, those five sets of parents actually said that they would go to the resort with their daughters. Five of the families had a younger child, three were boys and two were girls, ranging in age between 9 and 13. They were all going to come. Several girls had older siblings, but they chose not to go.

Two of the girls had parents who were more hesitant. Actually one was a single mom whose work as an LPN didn’t allow her to get to many games, so Tamara didn’t know her very well, and she didn’t know the other girl’s parents that well either. Tamara spoke to all three of those parents but they still seemed hesitant; they said that they needed time to decide. The meeting over, Winnie’s teammates left, and the final two teammates said that they’d work on their parents to get permission.

Several days later, Claire learned about Winnie’s volleyball plans and that there were a couple of holdout parents. Claire thought Winnie having her team come to the resort was a stellar idea, so she decided to call the three reluctant parents herself. She identified herself as the mom of Winnie’s guardian and told the parents that she was a part owner of the resort and a Navy officer, a professor at the Naval Academy, and could vouch for the safety of their daughters. She mentioned that four of the resort members were on the county police force too and that the resort was perhaps one of the safest places in the entire state.

The reluctant parents were persuaded by Claire’s comments and asked her if she could be the responsible adult for their daughters and she agreed. Winnie was in heaven; her idea was taking shape.

The first volleyball clinic would be on the second weekend of August and that was when the high-school team would be there. Tamara let the resort’s volleyball team members know that they were going to have a big crowd. She needed to find accommodations for the team members, siblings, and parents so that everyone could stay for the full weekend and enjoy all of the resort’s facilities.

The resort had three cabins available so Tamara reserved them. She decided that the rest of the beds would be in bunkhouse campers—using tents would be unwieldy and require too much additional camping equipment. The resort had a number of full-service camper-trailer sites available and Tamara reserved enough for the campers she’d need to rent. Since the Winsbergs were expecting a big family crowd and all of Tamara’s friends would be there as well, the Winsbergs’ lodge and cabins couldn’t accommodate all of their family and guests too. However, their site had a space designed for a camper-trailer unit and, although it would be tight, two camper units could fit there.

Beginning of July

About a week later, Nadine called Tamara with news she had received from her Haitian contacts. The mystery person who was behind the organized gang violence had been identified and located. He was now in custody and the additional policing support from the Benin and Togo “advisors” was bearing fruit; the urban gangs were slowly being rooted out. Those in the rural areas were still causing problems, though, so the national police had begun to turn their attention to those problems. Haiti’s police force was slowly getting rebuilt.

Back in Maryland, the construction of Tamara’s permanent manufacturing facility was well underway with a projected completion date in the following summer; the headquarters building would take an additional six months because of the specialized laboratories that Tamara had specified to be included in its design. And the school site preparation work had begun; the rough grading of the landscape into gentle hills and dells had begun and topsoil was being trucked in to cover the exposed rubble fill. Soon landscapers would be able to bring in transplanted vegetation. The site design used a gentle hilly topography and a tree barrier to isolate the school building site from the research park area. For the social planning part of the project, the school, Jay had his law-firm colleagues contact the agencies that they worked for and they circulated the information about the proposed school project. A meeting of all of the interested parties was scheduled for mid-September.

~~~~

All during the past year, Tamara had been working with Winnie to help her to develop her emotion-projection abilities. Now that the summer was here, Tamara had decided to use the weekends in July to try to see if Winnie could sense the world-energy entity that Tamara had found during her kouche. Since that experience, she had used her pwen skill in meditation to commune with the lwa, generally with Ayizan, but at times Papa Legba seemed to be the focus. But it seemed to her that after her kouche experience, her sensing the differences between the lwa had become blurred. It was as if she had developed an affinity for all of the lwa.

Now Tamara wanted to see if Winnie could also sense what she herself could, but it wasn’t feasible to find a sufficiently remote place where they could tune out all of the emotional background noise of a highly populated area, so the best alternate to use would be the natural area adjoining the nudist resort. So every weekend in July, Tamara and Winnie spent the two days at the resort with Peter. On the second Saturday in July, for their morning run, Tamara and Winnie decided to take a trail which mostly paralleled the river for a distance but was rarely used because it was dead-ended at a marsh, but its end was further from the resort than any other trail. On the river bank close to the trail’s end, the two runners came upon an open clearing with a large flat rock partially in the water. The area reminded Tamara somewhat of the waterfall glen near the cabin in the mountains. When they finished their run and were back at the cabin, Tamara told Winnie her idea.

“That big rock on the river bank?” Tamara asked. “Remember? That place reminded me of my retreat and a little waterfall and pool I found there. I told you how I connected with that world-energy being there. Want to try doing one of our meditation sessions out there?”

“Sure... I felt something there as we passed by, Tamara. Something very old. Also, when I’m walking through the woods up there in the natural area, I sense ancestral spirits. So last week I looked up this area on the internet and learned that it was occupied for many hundreds of years before the white men came. For most of that time, the Patuxent tribe lived in this whole region and the nearby larger tribes included the Piscataway; they’re all part of the Algonquian peoples. That spot we passed must have been used for sacred rites. It had a special feeling to me.”

They showered and returned to the site. After they settled themselves on the flat rock there, Tamara asked Winnie if she still sensed anything like she had before.

“Just a feeling of peace ... And maybe welcoming too. I can sense the forest spirits when I’m in the deep woods; this is a feeling like that.”

“Let’s lay back and meditate then,” Tamara suggested. “Hold my hand; look at the clouds, and try to see the patterns that form in the air between you and the clouds. When I look in a special way, the patterns seem to start where the breezes move the leaves on the trees and spread out upwards.”

They spent a while doing that and then Tamara felt Winnie stiffen as suddenly she felt an unusual voice in her mind, a voice that sounded like Winnie’s.

“What’s happening?” it seemed to say.

Jeez, Tamara thought. Is that Winnie?

“Tamara?” Winnie asked aloud.

“Shhh, go back to where you were,” Tamara whispered.

A minute later, there was a definite question sense in Tamara’s mind so Tamara “poked” at that thought and responded, “This is Tamara. Is it possible that you can sense this thought?”

Winnie’s hand tightened again and a thought formed in Tamara’s mind, “Papa told me legends of some medicine men and women doing this but the art was long lost. Have you really found it?”

Amazing, Tamara thought and Winnie’s thought returned, “It is amazing!”

Tamara could even feel-sense Winnie’s emphasis. And suddenly, the energy not-voice she had heard during her kouche was in her head too.

“Greetings, daughters,” came the thought and Winnie jerked but didn’t let go of Tamara’s hand.

“Yes, Awinita, I am real but not what the Algonquians regarded as the Great Spirit. The Patuxent, whose holy site you currently occupy, were closely related to the Algonquians. God, the Great Spirit, or the Bondye—that entity is as real as the entity now communicating with you and is a metaphysical construct which is made real by personal beliefs, so therefore also exists. We are pleased, Awinita, that you have achieved the needed sensitivity to connect with our energies.”

A thought appeared in Tamara’s mind: “Is this a dream?”

She thought back, “No: just listen—oops, wrong word. Attend.”

Winnie “attended” and Tamara followed along while Winnie learned a few things about her ancestral forebears’ capabilities and Winnie even got a faint sense of a loving embrace that felt like her grandfather’s used to feel.

Soon, “Now, daughters, it is time to return to your lives. Rapport will come easier in future need. Farewell.” And the “voice” was gone.

“Is it over?” came the thought in Tamara’s mind; Winnie had risen up to a seated position and was staring at her.

“It is,” Tamara said aloud, but in her thoughts, said, “Can we now speak in our minds?”

Winnie winced and then a big smile broke out on her face.

“Papa said this was something that only a few wise men and women could do but was lost countless generations ago. The voice told me that it was a secret tradition that came when they understood how to talk to the spirits. That must have been what we were doing, right?”

Tamara nodded and remarked, “I’m sure your version of what happened is better than mine, dear. When it first happened to me, I had no idea—but something like this is in your traditions, so obviously it’s real. And I feel something new; a feeling I never had before too...” she trailed off, thinking.

Winnie was alarmed. “What do you feel? Is it bad?”

“Um, no... very strange, though. It’s Peter; he’s worried and wondering where we are. Let me try to think at him...”

Tamara gathered her thoughts, focused on Peter’s image in her mind, and formed a thought: “We’re near the river and returning. Twenty minutes.”

Tamara felt a sense of “Oh, good, thanks” followed by a flood of confusion.

She giggled, “I sent a thought to him and I think he got it and now he thinks he’s gone crazy.”

Winnie laughed and they got up. Winnie did a complex motion with her hands over the stone, then got three twigs and three pebbles and placed them in a pattern at one end of the rock; then she stood up.

“I was thanking the spirits for the use of this place; let’s go,” she told Tamara.

On the way back, Tamara was lost in thought; one after another, they tumbled through her mind.

This was intense... I was right; Winnie is very special... And she apparently has shaman training too... Jeez, I heard her—Peter too—in my mind...! Damn, I bet that’s how Barbara knew when Peter needed help—so Peter and Barbara must have the ability too... Wonder if it can be taught... Shit, that NSA guy was actually right; mind-to-mind communication is possible...

The thoughts were tumbling over and over, each clamoring for a share of her attention.

Does this mean I can read minds...? Can I speak in just anyone’s mind...? Is there a maximum distance...? Can I command someone in their mind—don’t go there, Tamara...! How does it work...?

That last thought worried her. If she went off on that tangent, she’d never get to her list of priority projects.

If Peter and Barbara can sense thoughts, I’ll bet that they inherited that from Greta... So she might have a latent ability... Maybe Peter’s a sender and Barbara a receiver...? No, Peter “heard” me and they both sense each other’s emotions... But I’ll bet that that’s just the tip of the iceberg...

“Tamara? Tamara! Are you there?” Winnie was insistent.

“Oops, sorry, Winnie. I was lost in thought.”

Winnie giggled. “I could tell. Um, we need to keep secret what we do, right? Papa said...”

“Oh. Absolutely. My thoughts are all over the place and I’m trying to get them all straight. Jeez, Winnie, yes, I ‘heard’ that thought. ‘Papa said that knowledge like this could be dangerous.’ I ‘heard’ you send that. Listen, we’ll need to see if when we talk mentally, whether it’s a direct channel or if others can ‘hear’ too, right? Or, say, if there are others with the ability, can they listen in. So you’re right. Outside of those already adept, this needs to be top secret.”

“Tamara, can you tell what I’m thinking now?” Winnie asked tentatively.

“You asking if I can read your mind? No, I sense your close presence, but I don’t have any foreign thoughts. Can you sense my thoughts?”

“Uh unh, no, can’t. Maybe you need to focus and, ah, project it?” Winnie suggested.

“We need to do lots of testing, honey... ah, we’re here and Peter must have sensed us coming, ‘cause ... here he comes.”

They were still a few hundred feet away, coming up the trail and not yet in view of the cabin.

They watched as Peter came into view at the trailhead; he then ran up to them and hugged Tamara, then Winnie.

“You guys were taking longer than you said that you’d be, so I got worried. Then it got so crazy—you told me that you were returning and your voice was in my head!”

Tamara smiled at him. “That was real, darling. We had a mini-kouche, a version two-point-oh. I told you about the encounter with the energy voice—well, Winnie got her welcome now and maybe it’s related and maybe not, but we can speak to each other mentally too now. And speak to you that way too.”

“Damn, that’s so frikkin’ crazy, Tamara! How’s that possible?”

“Come sit down.”

They had reached the cabin’s porch and Tamara and Winnie, still holding hands, sat in the swing chair, while Peter pulled another chair closer.

“Darling, our mental talking is nothing new, you know. You and Barbara have been doing it all your lives,” Tamara said gently.

Peter shook his head. “That’s crazy; why do you say that?”

“It’s one of your own superpowers,” Tamara giggled. “Remember, we discussed that a few years ago? Think of how Barbara always seemed to come to you when you got in trouble, right? She knew you needed help. How? You called to her. Eventually she became so attuned to you that she showed up any time you were distressed—once even when you just had a cramp. Remember that? When she met Terence? Apparently there are bunches of people that can do that; they can call to others mentally. It probably has to be someone that they’ve made a bond with, I assume, but the ability is real. Hey, we want to try something. Go get a paper and pen, okay?”

Peter went into the cabin, muttering “crazy,” but fetched a pad and pen.

“Good... now write something weird on a page,” Tamara instructed him. “Maybe two sentences, but off the wall things. Nothing that I could guess.”

Peter scribbled for a bit as Tamara got up and walked off the porch a distance

Then she said, “Give the page to Winnie and let her read it to herself. Then, Winnie, think it to me.”

Peter handed the sheet to Winnie, who read it and giggled. Then she looked at Tamara and scrunched up her face, concentrating.

Tamara laughed. “You didn’t have to make a face, Winnie. It came through loud and clear. Peter, you wrote, ‘Twas brillig and the walrus and the carpenter gyred with the slithy toves. Then the oysters gimbled on the wabe.’ Now that was totally weird. ... Peter, what are you doing?”

“Shit, Tamara, I’m looking for the hidden cameras. How did you guys do that?”

“She thunk it at me, is all,” Tamara grinned. “Say, could you ‘hear’ her doing that?”

“Hear her how? She didn’t say anything... Um... Damn, honey, was that you? What sounded like your voice suddenly said, ah, ‘The sun was shining on the sand, his boxes of clothes left on the strand. The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, ‘cause he’s a nudist, the Bellman nattered.’ That’s really funny—you came up with that on the fly... shit! That was in my head!”

Tamara clapped her hands. “It works! Peter, you can ‘hear’ me when I think something at you. Winnie and I can do that too. Now you try. Make a mental picture of me and think of something. And nothing dumb, like ‘Mr Watson, come here; I want you.’”

Peter laughed and screwed up his face trying; nothing happened.

Tamara told him not to try forcing anything. “Try it with a little emotional content; that might help. I think that the skill involves the limbic system, so emotions might help... Giggle... Oh, sweetie, that was so nice! I certainly will kiss you!”

And she did.

“So, Peter, you convinced?” Tamara asked after their kiss.

“It’s so crazy, but yeah, I am. This stuff is weirding me out. Hey, remember the NSA? If they get wind of this...”

Winnie laughed. “Peter, she already thought of that. This is top secret.”

“Tamara, what you did to twist Lewis Carroll ... Verses from The Walrus and the Carpenter mashed up with The Hunting of the Snark, making it rhyme, and damn, giving it a nudist twist too ... you’ve got one scary mind to do that on the fly,” Peter grinned at her.

“Hah, I needed to do something better to counter your own scrambling up of his Jabberwocky with The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

“Do you think that the people who you ‘powered up’ will be able to talk in their minds now?” Peter asked.

Tamara shrugged. “No idea. But Winnie told me that in her traditions, the wise ones—those who could speak to the spirits—had a similar ability.”

Winnie nodded. “This is so exciting—a lot of things that Papa told me were lost, but Tamara can still do them. So that means that my beliefs are all real,” she sniffled.

Tamara hugged her. “Sweetie, of course they’re real; all of your beliefs make them the reality. That’s why there’s no such thing as the ‘right religion’; all religions are ‘right.’ Just remember what you learned from the world-energy voice. And Peter, we can try the mind-speak with others but need to be extremely careful about keeping others from figuring out what we can do, or else the NSA will come sniffing around again. Say, Winnie, those twigs and pebbles you set out? What...?”

Winnie blushed. “When the spirits help, they must be thanked. The twig triangle is for ‘home’ and the pebble triangle represents ‘sky’ or ‘existence’ and can also stand for ‘spirit.’ My prayer was for thanks and the symbol I made marked the place as a spirit home.”

Tamara nodded. “Our heritages have much in common, Winnie. My mom’s rites have many similarities.”

“Yes, Papa taught me a lot of the Cherokee beliefs and practices. Um, Tamara, Theresa’s family is supposed to be here now; I’m gonna go find her,” Winnie said.

She had met Theresa the previous summer and they had become friends. Mike was delighted that Winnie and Theresa had connected, because he liked Winnie too, while Winnie thought that Mike was fun to be with and she thought Mike and Theresa were so cute, acting like two lovebirds, always cooing together.

~~~~

During late June and into July, Winnie was taking summer school classes, catching up from her missed year while she had been living in the group home. She had been doing a combination of on-line and in-person classes at her high school and after she completed her classes this summer, she’d have earned enough credits to be an incoming senior in the fall. She had also decided that she was intrigued by the parts of Tamara’s work which had extended into neuroscience. Winnie wasn’t interested in the physics that Tamara did; she wanted to concentrate more on brain structure and function—physiology.

Tamara and Peter were both busy on two fronts: Tamara on her APL dark energy research projects and on the manufacturing operations being developed by her engineers and Peter, on his doctoral control systems research and on the synthetic muscle project.

The projects in Haiti were slowly progressing, but Tamara had turned most of the development work over to a project manager in the country. Tamara’s consultants had identified a suitable factory site and her project manager had the contractors begun the site preparation work. The college engineering training programs were functioning now, and the country’s public safety and security were gradually improving. Nadine had used her windfall fortune to set up a charitable foundation which was getting ready to offer micro-loans to prospective entrepreneurs and her Haitian contacts were recruiting local Haitians to set up an office in Port-au-Prince to administer the program.

~~~~

Late in July, Tamara and Winnie heard from Mason about the results of Winnie’s suggestion that her kidnapper’s photo be shown to the rescued girls.

“Hi, gals,” he greeted them when they both got on the phone. “I heard this from my Virginia contacts; a whole hornet’s nest got stirred up over there with that kidnapping situation and the FBI got onto this big-time when you guys caught that guy who took you, Winnie, out of the group home. He was indeed part of a human trafficking ring, this one wasn’t related to those foreigners, but the groups were aware of each other. Without going into a lot of detail, your kidnapper’s gotten some prison visitors. He’s had an attorney visit, working on the appeal of his prison sentence, plus two additional visitors who’ve been to see him several times. The FBI’s photoed them and some of the rescued girls ID’d their photos as having seen them visiting the group home.

“A lot of the details are still confidential, but it looks like the FBI’s got much of this case cracked. Looks like this second ring was paying some foster home operators for teen girls. They’d take only true orphans—not kids where a parent was incarcerated or judged incompetent, so there’d be no one to miss them—and paid off the social services workers, or sometimes judges or magistrates, to ‘lose’ the records or close the kids’ files on a false ‘adoption’ record. Or, in several cases, just claim that the missing kid was a runaway.

“The ring was working in rural areas, mostly in the Appalachias, and I heard that so far, several girls have been recovered. These had been trafficked to prostitution operations in several cities in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Obviously, you mustn’t talk about this to anyone because the FBI operation is still going on, tying up loose ends now. I did get clearance to tell you both about it, since you were affected and provided the info that cracked that operation. I know that you will keep quiet about this news.”

“Oh, that’s really great news, Mason—thanks a lot!” Winnie exclaimed.

“Yeah,” Tamara echoed. “It was really considerate of the powers that be to let you tell us about it. Do you think that if he should get an appeal hearing, would Winnie have to appear?”

Winnie looked alarmed at that.

“Very doubtful. Not with her minor status, first. And it wouldn’t be in open court if she were needed. But the FBI has other evidence against that guy that wasn’t used in his state trial. I wouldn’t be concerned about that. Oh, and from West Virginia, the AG tells me that the involved people in that county were convicted of multiple counts of human trafficking, accessory to kidnapping, and endangering. All the remaining girls are in stable foster home situations now too.”

“That’s great news,” Winnie told him. “Thanks so much, Mason.”

“So I hear you’ve organized a big volleyball tournament at the resort,” Mason said, and the humor was evident in his voice. “How’d you ever get a bunch of textile girls to agree?”

Winnie laughed. “I’m not really sure... Most were hesitant at first, um ... three of the girls were really excited about doing it and they helped persuade the others, I guess.”

“Well, it should be a nice game, then. Good volleyball is fun to watch—almost like ballet, the way the women play. Graceful. The guys’ play is mostly smash, slam, and bang, two, maybe three rallies, and point. Okay, nice talking to you; Angie and I will see you in two weeks.”

They disconnected and Winnie hugged Tamara. “Thanks so much again for helping me. And those girls too; you got things going to help them too.”

Tamara rubbed Winnie’s back. “It was your own bravery and skills that got it started, dear. Now after what Mason said about your teammates—you sure you didn’t ‘help’ them decide to come to the resort?” she asked, grinning.

Winnie frowned. “I wouldn’t do that deliberately, Tamara. You know that. But maybe it was a ‘side effect’ of my desire? They were egging each other to do it, almost like dares. But both you and I wanted then to agree to do it, so maybe our positive attitude helped them decide. Hey—you told me once, when you started teaching me how to ‘push’ an emotion, that if it wasn’t in someone’s nature to do something, then they’d reject the suggestion. Didn’t you say that?”

Tamara nodded. “You’re exactly right. So that means that your teammates were predisposed to the idea, I’d guess. That’s interesting. Well, as Mason said, that volleyball event should be fun.”

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