Prologue Hello 1 Ava Fisher was a flamboyant mess. Everyone said it no matter what the occasion. This doesn't necessarily mean that she was an unkempt person. It denotes that in spite of her being basically pretty and in her late thirties, she was the sort who gave bottle blonds their bad name. She had just enough of the tart in her to get on people's nerves after about five minutes. The only person who didn't seem to mind was her husband Danny, who obviously believed he had won the grand prize when it came to wives. Also her black and white cat Gomez was a fan of hers too. Her thirteen-year-old daughter Heather didn't exactly see eye to eye with her mother and really couldn't be called a fan.  Ava often said she was a lousy parent and if it weren't for Danny, she didn't know what would happen to Heather. Of course she said this as though she were joking and most people assumed she was. . . . Her cell phone rang and in her excitement to answer it, she knocked over a little jar of teal blue eye shadow, which she was in the process of applying. "Hi there. Who's speaking?" she said in her most dramatic mid-Atlantic accent. The voice on the other end identified itself and in a large coo, she said in an excited voice, "Oh, it's you, you sweet thing. I'm here all alone and waiting for you. I hope you have a present for me." Obviously the caller gave her the answer she was seeking because she cried out in glee, "Oh you precious thing. Two presents? You're too good to me. Now hurry on over, you hear?" She blew the person a kiss over the phone, pressed the end button, put the phone down and finished doing her eyes as quickly as she could without making some kind of calamitous error. Before long, the doorbell rang and she jumped in anticipation. She stepped back, looked at the finished product in the mirror, smiled as though quite pleased with herself and then ran to answer the door. She opened the door with a big smile and in her best Ava voice sang out, "Hello." Hello 2 A group of campers ranging in age from 14 to 18 were seated in a campsite open-air theater in Lake Arrowhead, California. The surrounding area was very beautiful and the tall pine trees shaded the little amphitheater. On stage several adults of varying ages were seated. A serious man in his mid-forties got up and walked to the center of the stage where there was a microphone. "Good morning, science campers," he said in a loud voice. . . .  At age 4, we moved to my great- aunt’s house in Okolona, Mississippi. She had died and left it to my father. The structure was built shortly before the Civil War in the late 1850s. In the 1870s two of my father’s great aunts, Aunt Nanny and Aunt Kitty, turned it into a young ladies finishing school, which went out of business toward the turn of the century. After these two extremely dramatic women died, they left the place to their niece Mattie.