Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged

by Andrews

  Wade seemed worried a little too quickly for a cop. As I ended the call an alarm was already going off in my head that said Wade knew something he wasn't telling me, and something Ramona knew had gotten her into trouble.

  We pulled up in front of the cabin Ramona had described the evening she'd visited and saw her black Mercedes parked in the driveway, which made me feel somewhat more relaxed. I bounded up the steps and knocked on the door, but no one answered. The interior lights were off, the cabin dark. I circled it once but saw nothing unusual.

  "Do I break in?" I asked Callie, looking around.

  "Yes," she said nervously.

  Careful to keep my fingerprints off the doorknob, I took out a credit card and popped the lock that apparently our cabin's locksmith had installed with equal haste and waste, since it was useless as protection. I flipped on the lights and we looked around: everything tidy, no signs of struggle, nothing that indicated she'd left hastily.

  In her bedroom, the down comforter was tossed back as if she'd gotten up and decided not to make the bed. It crossed my mind that she and Barrett had probably warmed those sheets. The kitchen had a few orange and yellow Fiestaware plates with leftover toast and eggs stuck to them, communicating only that she wasn't the quickest to tidy up. Feeling awkward now that we were definitely breaking and entering, I suggested we leave and lock up.

  "Doesn't look like anything weird. What if she simply went shopping?"

  "Maybe give Barrett a call and see if they're together," Callie said.

  After ringing Barrett and getting no answer, I left a message for her to stop by our cabin or call us the moment she got this. Then we drove by her cabin to see if she was there with her cell phone off. Her car was gone, and we decided it was possible she'd picked Ramona up and they'd gone off for the day.

  Relaxing a little, I decided that maybe Dwayne-Wayne was some local guy who was mentally two bricks short of a load.

  "I mean, what was all that stuff about Manaba having the wolf with her like a trained attack dog? The whole wolf thing's got me baffled anyway," I said. "The wolf is a woman with really nice eyes, next thing you know the wolf is Luther Drake, now the wolf is the shaman's attack dog, then he's the phantom that sent me over the cliff—hell, this is the busiest damned wolf in the woods. So do you think this Luther is—"

  "Don't keep saying his name."

  "Why?" I was a little irritated, the hocus-pocus level having about pegged out on my fun meter.

  "If you say a name, you give it energy. You communicate with it."

  I rolled my eyes so far up in my head they were in danger of getting stuck there.

  "If you say, T wish my mom would call' and then suddenly she calls, you say, T was thinking about you.' That seems normal. You said her name and drew her to you. Why is it abnormal if I don't want to say the name of someone because I don't want to draw him to us?"

  I didn't have an answer and drove back to the cabin.

  Stepping out of the car, I saw movement by the creek and quietly approached the pine trees as a figure came out of the woods a few feet from us. I spun and grabbed it by the arm, and the scream was instantaneous and high-pitched. I let go immediately, having attacked Fern Flanagan.

  "Jeez, Fern, I'm sorry."

  "You almost blew out my pacemaker!" Fern panted.

  "Are you okay?" Callie asked.

  "Do you have a pacemaker?" I asked, worried.

  "No. All my body parts are real. I got no inflated boobs, hair plugs, bacteria in my lips, fat outta my hips, no Botox, fake cocks... only what the good Lord gave me and I'm usin' it up at a great rate." She loped over and plopped down on the steps. I glanced at the tightly rolled pink fabric in her hand.

  "Came to give you this, my boy found it down by the creek." I recognized it as the L.L. Bean shirt jack I'd bought Callie.

  "Thanks, Fern. Must have fallen out of the car and something carried it off. Tell your son thanks, too."

  "Aw, he's workin' today at the grocery." She laughed good-naturedly and the sun picked up a glint of red in her graying hair.

  "Is your son redheaded? I think he was our checker the other day." I left out the part about him being so damned dumb he couldn't ring up carrots, because from the light in Fern's eyes, I could tell she thought her son was the Second Coming.

  "Yeah, I work a few extra hours each week to help him out, till he gets on his feet," Fern said proudly, and I wondered what the hell it was about grown boys that kept a mother happily in bondage her entire life.

  "Well, I'm betting your son will grow up to make you real proud, Fern. It'll all be worth it." I made myself say it, wanting Fern to feel like her life was rewarding.

  I caught Callie looking at me sweetly as Fern said, "Well, thank you. Better get a move on." She hoisted her frame off the porch steps, caught her balance, and bounded off into the woods after wishing us a good day.

  "I love you, Teague Richfield," Callie said.

  "Because I occasionally proffer the kind lie?"

  "Maybe," she said as I handed her the slightly battered pink jacket.

  "It's a great color. And I even like the teeth marks."

  I snatched it away from her to see if the wolf had touched the jacket.

  "Only kidding." She giggled and this time I threw the jacket at her playfully.

  An hour later, in response to my call, Barrett Silvers burst into the cabin, talking as she hit the door and not giving me a moment to tell her why we were searching for her.

  "I'm glad you've come to your senses. I was going to phone you as soon as I got dressed—slept in due to a very late night because Jacowitz rang me at two fucking a.m. and wanted to go over his thoughts on your damned pages. That conversation lasted until nearly four so I'm a little sleep deprived, and excuse me if that comes out as pissed off with you.

  "A note you might want to jot in your diary—I put my personal life on hold at two a.m. in order to go locate your e-mail with the pages you sent to Jacowitz and proceed to sweep up your crumbling career, and here's all the man is asking. He likes your writing, he likes your style, he likes you. Give him ten pages on the alien sex scene with the housewife. Ten fucking pages. Would it kill you to try it?"

  "We can talk about that later—"

  "No, we talk about it now." Her tone dropped an octave and she shifted into a soft, seductive approach, since yelling was obviously not working. "Nun sex, hooker sex, alien sex, who-gives-a-flying-fuck sex. Write the scene between any two people you like, make it sexy, then change one of the names to Alien. I don't care. What I care about is that you complete this movie and get your picture on the screen, and I know what you're going to say. You're going to say you don't want a movie on the screen if it sucks. Well, sucking is at least a sound. Right now your career is silent."

  She flopped onto the couch and finally took a breath.

  "Barrett," Callie said softly, "a man named Dwayne, some guy we've never met, was here and said Ramona is missing and that it happened right after you left her cabin this morning."

  It was clear from Barrett's expression that her brain had stripped its gears; she couldn't get from Jacowitz and aliens, to Ramona and missing, in that short time frame. We watched her as she sat silent, blinking, her mind seeming to leave her body as if time traveling to the last place she'd seen Ramona. She got to her feet, and for a minute I thought she was hyperventilating.

  "Why did I leave? Why didn't I stay over?" She paced, clasping her hands, rubbing her palms together in a masculine wringing of them.

  "Obviously you left to help me with Jacowitz," I said, but she wasn't listening. "And we don't even know for sure she's missing."

  "We have to find her." Barrett looked genuinely distressed.

  For the first time since I'd known Barrett, I saw a vulnerability, a chink in her business armor, a spot that the older, more sophisticated, more elegant Ramona Mathers had apparently penetrated, among other spots, I was almost certain.

  "I'm hiring a PI," Barrett said and execut
ed a one-eighty, leaving the cabin in an over-the-top reaction typical of stressed studio executives.

  "A private eye? How about you call her cell phone first before you marshal an army?" I shouted after her.

  "I've been calling her cell phone all day, and I drove by several times. I thought she might be...blowing me off." So, after a night of sex with Ramona, Barrett is hooked and worried that Ramona isn't and, worse, that Ramona is avoiding her.

  Barrett jumped into her car and peeled out of the gravel drive.

  "What next?" I asked Callie.

  "I think we should meditate together. Combined energy has great power."

  I didn't know about that, but I never turned down an opportunity to get into bed with Callie, especially for mutual vibration.

  We lay flat on our backs next to each other, our arms touching, and she told me to close my eyes and ask our guides to tell us what they wanted us to know. I did it kind of halfheartedly and then, tired, found myself drifting off. In a twilight sleep it hit me—I was falling backward off the ravine, weightless and terrified, spinning, falling, grasping, about to smash into the floor of the riverbed when suddenly—I sat up in bed and gasped for air.

  "What did you see?" Callie asked as I tried to breathe but could only pant like a nervous pup and then shake my head as if that would knock all the fearful images out of my brain.

  "I keep having that falling-off-a-cliff sensation." I clutched at my heart. "Feels like I'm suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome or something. If I'm meditating and asking for answers and I'm getting that horrible image, then what does that mean?"

  "That the message is about the fall. We need to find the Indian man who pulled you out. I think he's involved with Ramona, and other people are looking for both of them."

  "Why do you think that?" I drank water from the bedside table.

  "Dwayne-Wayne—he doesn't care about Ramona. He wants the Indian man but he knows we'll want Ramona. So by engaging us in the search for her, we'll help him locate the poor Indian guy he's after."

  "I wouldn't want to be wanted by Dwayne-the-insane," I said. "Why do I have the feeling that Manaba's not coming clean with us?"

  Callie didn't defend her, seeming to know I was right. The shaman's truth serum was obviously a quart low.

  First we drove the short distance down to Ramona's cabin, which still looked calm, quiet, and vacant. But in the melancholy light of late afternoon, it looked less like Ramona had merely made a trip to the grocery store and more as if she'd left permanently.

  Callie suggested we find Manaba and see what she could tell us, and I sensed that my needling about Manaba's on-and-off truthfulness was in the back of her mind. I turned the car toward the cemetery and headed northwest of the goat path, where the sunlight cast lengthening shadows on the scrub brush.

  Finally, Callie said we should park the car and walk. I wasn't so hot on leaving my Jeep in the middle of a sand dune and traipsing out over the desert, but Callie was already walking ahead so I locked it and jogged to catch up with her.

  "Where the hell are we?" I asked, annoyed at the sand and grit seeping into my shoes as my feet sank in the soft ground.

  "It's the place where Manaba's grandmother raised her. No one ever comes out here."

  "Yeah, not a great time-share. So are we one thorn tree and two iguanas from where we're going?"

  Before I could come up with another smart remark, I glanced up from the sandy soil and right in front of us was a small, but beautiful, oasis, as if the LPGA had decided to underwrite an incredible putting green in the middle of nowhere.

  A gnarly old tree bent over the small pool of water, the grass was thick and green, and rocks that were obviously used as chairs could not have been more artistically arranged if Hermann Miller had stopped by and placed them himself. Embers burned in a tiny rock circle, and something was steaming in a pot outside the dome-shaped earth-and-bark hogan, supported by four posts representing the Navajos' four sacred mountains.

  "It was her grandmother's. The hogan is never deserted." Callie walked ahead of me making a slight clicking sound. Moments later Manaba stepped out of the hogan.

  She said something to us in her native language, which could have been a greeting or simply Navajo for "What the hell are you doing here on the ninth hole?"

  Callie asked how she had been, and Manaba replied she had been participating in a healing ceremony at the hogan to help her deal with danger and restore balance. She looked a little more settled to me—maybe that meant balanced.

  "A guy named Dwayne came to see us," I said. "He claims that Ramona Mathers, a friend of ours, is missing."

  Manaba nodded to her right and Callie seemed to know that meant "take a rock," so we sat down. Manaba produced two wooden cups that looked like they were carved out of half a croquet ball, but were lightweight. She dipped them into the liquid in the pot and handed one to each of us.

  I had no intention of drinking from a dripping bowl, particularly since I couldn't see what was in it, but Manaba indicated I should drink, and somehow I felt rejecting the offer would be a personal insult. Taking a sip, I had to make myself swallow, imagining this bitter brew that looked like green tea and tasted like pond scum was good for me.

  Callie didn't drink any of it and was signaling me not to, but it was too late—my Midwestern manners had overridden my common sense. I'd slurped some of the scum to avoid offending my hostess, and for a moment I wondered why not offending someone was more important than my own safety. My upbringing could have conceivably killed me, Midwesterners preferring death to social disgrace.

  "She is alive," Manaba said, and as I wondered if she knew for certain that Ramona was alive, she gave me a signal that meant drink up.

  The second sip of the tea wasn't as bad, perhaps dread being the bitter taste and the tea only a drink. Manaba stoked the fire with large pieces of wood, then lit a long pipe and blew smoke into the sky. I was beginning to relax and nearly forgot why we were here.

  "What do you believe happened to her?" Callie asked.

  "With a man who knows her," Manaba said and looked deeply into Callie's eyes.

  "Okay," I said, drunk enough not to care, "I'm tired of you looking at Callie as if she belongs to you when in fact she belongs to me." There, I thought, the truth will out.

  Manaba looked at me without expression. "I look deeply into her and see what she is thinking and who she is. You look only at her surface. If you believe her heart and mind are yours, then perhaps you will travel there more often."

  The truth of her words stung me as my head spun and I lay down, looking up at the sky, which had become a backdrop for the stars that slashed across the dusky darkness. Then pulsing lights and flickering images burst across its vastness: women of long ago in native costumes dancing across the land, quick-cut images of a white man, a struggle, the rape of a young woman, the moaning of an old Indian woman clutching her heart, dissolving to a powerful dark-haired young Navajo girl pressing her body to Manaba's, deriving pleasure from the earth that breathed beneath them, breasts touching, souls igniting, transporting Manaba to places even a shaman cannot go alone, the energy around them whirling like a prairie fire.

  The dark-haired young woman swung her head in my direction as an animal would upon hearing a twig break behind it in the forest. And when her eyes met mine, I gasped, a chill ricocheting back and forth across my body. It was the wolf-woman, then the diabolical face of the man who hit our windshield. As I tried to see more, I blacked out. Or perhaps I was already out and the images merely went black.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I woke up, I was lying beside Callie, who was sitting on a rock facing east as the light came over the hills. Manaba had disappeared. Callie had a small fire burning in front of her, that I imagined Manaba had set, and a lightweight Navajo blanket draped around her shoulders. Apparently Manaba had placed a blanket on the ground for me as well, but now it was wadded up in an unrecognizable shape, thrashed and pummeled in the ni
ght as I must have attempted to ward off crazy images dancing through my head.

  Staggering to my feet, I knocked the sand off my pants. Callie tilted her head to kiss me when I approached and handed me a cup.

  I eyed it suspiciously, staring into it. "What was I slurping in the croquet ball?

  "Peyote juice—from the cactus—induces hallucinations." When I refused the coffee she assured me she'd made it herself. "And don't ever drink something you haven't examined. Not that I think Manaba would ever hurt you."

  "Speaking of our hostess, where is she?"

  "I don't know," Callie replied, her mind elsewhere. "Did you dream?"

  "If you can call it that. I remember something about the land, and then Manaba was boffing this great-looking Indian girl. I hope the boffing part is true because it means she's got someone on her mind other than you. What did you dream?" I turned the question on her.

  "The same."

  "What do you mean, the same?"

  "The images were made available to us simultaneously. This spot is very powerful so they came through for anyone here. We may have seen a few things differently but we had the same vision. Yours was helped by the drink. I needed only to open my mind."

  "Which would imply that not only do you think we had the same dream, but you know what I dreamed, so what was the white guy doing in my dream?"

  "He raped a woman—an Indian woman."

  I stumbled as she said it. Can people really have the same dream, like a simulcast?

  "It's all out there, you merely tune in," Callie said, reading my mind. "Words or sounds exist forever, floating in the universe. Scientific instruments can pick up those frequencies in the atmosphere and rebroadcast what was said over forty years ago. Images are out there too."

  "We need an image of where Ramona is," I said, changing the subject, not ready to go down the pictures-are-forever rabbit hole.

  "She wasn't in the dream."

  We wandered away from the strange lush scenery as one would a desert soundstage after the production is over, and I slipped my arm around Callie and held her close as we walked to the car. Inside, I turned on the heater and warmed the car up for her, mulling over what Manaba had said.