The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  “A housekeeper, Augusta Lee. They probably also had a gardener. Is there anything special you need? Anything in particular I should do?”

  “Just answer my questions. Otherwise be quiet.” She got out of the Porsche and they started up the walk. A cool breeze blew in from the ocean, thick with the odors of salt and sun and sand, the lure and promise of the Atlantic. With enormous relief, she realized it would be easy to open up in a place like this, surrounded by beauty, the ocean almost close enough to taste. The proximity to water facilitated her abilities, which explained why she lived on a lake and worked near a river.

  Her shift in consciousness happened quickly, smoothly, like an autonomic reflex. Before they reached the door, she felt a gentle tug to the left. Mira went with it, stepped off the wood chip path, and went over to the rope swing hanging from the branches of a tremendous banyan tree. She sat on the wooden seat, grasped the ropes, pushed her feet into the leaves.

  Don’t like it when they fight, it scares me, Daddy shouting, Mommy crying… Mira shut her eyes and fixed on the residue of the child’s energy, his feeling tone, so that she would recognize it once she got into the house. She kept moving her feet against the leaves, pushing the swing, but not very high. Don’t want to go high. It scares me to go high because when I look down the world is shrinking.

  Mira removed her hands from the ropes, the impression dried up. She walked over to the stoop, where Sheppard waited. He already had broken the crime tape and unlocked the door. She briefly told him what she had picked up. He jotted it in his notepad and turned on his tape recorder.

  Inside the house, their footsteps clicked against the marble tile, echoing eerily in the unnatural silence. But beneath that silence she sensed people, voices, confusion. She couldn’t sort them out, couldn’t find just a single strand to follow. Her chest felt tight, constricted. She had trouble breathing.

  Pull back a little, not so close, ground yourself.

  She rubbed at the center of her chest, entered the living room, and stopped. Her eyes went to the chalked silhouette on the floor. She moved toward it and immediately felt resistance, as if she struggled to move against an invisible rubber wall.

  She turned right. The constriction in her chest eased, she could breathe again. As she climbed the stairs, her hand slipped over the banister, reading the feeling tones of the many people who had touched this wood. But the strongest tones belonged to the people who had lived here. The boy, the father, the mother, each tone distinct

  Rae Steele. She repeated the name in her mind and focused on the texture of Rae’s energy. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated, felt a tug to the right, followed it. She was vaguely aware of Sheppard behind her, of the floor’s hardness beneath her shoes, of how cool and still the air had become. A part of her floated inside of Rae’s energy like a fish in a bowl of water.

  Mira slipped off her shoes before she entered the bedroom, twisted her bare feet against the floor. It helped ground her. Then she stepped inside and moved where the energy directed her, toward the dresser.

  She flipped open the lid on a wooden music box and strains of “Für Elise” drifted out. Her eyes wandered over the jewelry inside: a watch studded with sapphires, a ruby ring, a pair of ceramic earrings studded with chips of lapis. She felt drawn to the earrings, picked up one, held it against the light. She closed her fingers over it and felt heat rising in her palm.

  A highway flashed through her head, homes and trees blurred in her peripheral vision. The image moved too quickly to grasp details, so she shut her eyes, deepened her breathing. Slow it down, she thought. Way down. There.

  A major highway. The interstate or the turnpike? Which one?

  Interstate, whispered a voice inside her.

  She had a sudden image of woods—Florida pines?—and a pond. She sensed its importance and froze the image in her mind. Then, very slowly, she distanced herself from it and tried to take in a wider view. “I’m seeing a small house or a cabin.” She described what she saw.

  “Are there any other cabins or houses nearby?”

  Mira scanned the interior picture. “If there are, I can’t see them.” She kept stepping back from the cabin until she had the mailbox in sight. She tried to see the name on the mailbox. Instead, two images came to mind: a heart and a man. “Heart. Man. I think that’s the name.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just getting images.”

  “Where is the nearest town or city?” he asked.

  She hesitated, searching inside herself for the information. “All I know is you head north on 1-95. A man gave her these earrings. I don’t think it was Steele.” Her eyes opened and fixed on Sheppard. He looked like a man who had just been punched in the gut and was about to gasp for breath and double over with pain. “Does any of that tie in with something you know?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah, it does. Rae supposedly has a cabin she goes to sometimes. No one seems to know where it is. Steele must have known about it, though, because he mentioned it to his son.”

  “There should be property tax records.”

  “Not in Steele’s files. But I still have to check through his computer and tomorrow I’ll check with the county.”

  She shut her eyes again, grounded herself with her breathing. Is there anything else on the cabin? she asked.

  Silence. No new images welled up.

  Mira moved across the room, hooked into something else now, following the tug into one of the huge closets, Rae’s closet. Her hand trailed over the clothes, soft expensive fabrics that yielded nothing. She stopped at the far end and gazed through a small window as round as a porthole. Ocean. Beach. Sunbathers. She touched her fingers to the cool glass and felt, suddenly, like a prisoner longing for the world that had been denied.

  Rae’s feelings about her marriage? No, she thought, that was a left brain conclusion.

  She shut her eyes, pressed her thumb against her right nostril, breathed in deeply through the left, exhaled through the right. She repeated this several times, then switched nostrils, breathing in through the right, exhaling through the left. She kept doing it until she felt the shift deep inside her body, a radiant heat that burned at the base of her spine. Mira imagined the heat rising upward, spreading through her.

  Grounded now, she walked back through the closet until she felt a sharp tug to the left, to the shelf that ran the length of the wall just above the clothes. Mira moved along it, her hands extended, seeking heat. She stopped when she felt it, heat like a blast of dry, desert wind that seemed to be coming from a large cardboard box. She lifted it off the shelf, Sheppard took it and carried it over to the bed.

  “What’re we looking for?” he asked as they opened it.

  “Beats me.”

  She reached in and removed three large photo albums. She and Sheppard each took one and sat down at the side of the bed to page through them. Although he wasn’t sitting particularly close to her, she picked up his exquisite energy pattern.

  It reminded her of a complex mosaic, like that of a stained glass window, except it consisted of part music, part color, and part something else infused with sensuality. She wanted to explore it, to glide into it like a mote of dust. But it would distract her too deeply and she might blow whatever chance she had of picking up more information about the Steeles. So she directed her attention to the photos in the album.

  Labeled with names and dates, most depicted a younger Rae during the years she had worked at Manatee Correctional. In one photo, Rae sat in an office, laughing and hamming for the camera, surrounded by eight young men in prison blues. The photo was labeled: me & education aides, 6/79.

  “Look at this,” Rae said, handing him the picture.

  Sheppard studied it a moment, then pocketed it. “Now look at this.” The photo he passed her showed a small cabin shrouded in pines. “Is it what you saw?”

  She looked at it more closely. The pines seemed taller than what she ha
d seen, and the cabin looked smaller, more compact, older. “Damn close.”

  He glanced back at the album and read the label: 112 Pirate’s Cove Lane. “No city, but it’s a start. You feel like continuing?”

  “Is this stuff useful to you?”

  “You’re doing fine. My job is figuring out how things connect, then putting them together into a whole.”

  Rather like a tarot reading, she thought. The cards spoke in an archetypal language that the reader had to interpret and then connect to the client’s life.

  The Hanged Man. The Lovers. The Tower. The eight of swords, the eight of cups, the ten of swords, the Wheel of Fortune. She kept the cards in mind as Sheppard picked up the box and got to his feet. She shut her eyes, grounded herself again. Heat throbbed like a heart at the base of her spine. She pulled the heat up, pushed it into her limbs.

  Downstairs, the internal voice said.

  She opened her eyes, scooped up her shoes, moved out into the hall. She felt an internal nudge that caused her to pause in the doorway of Carl’s room. Except for the size, which was at least 20 x 20, the room might belong to any small child—the pet net jammed with stuffed animals; the posters of unicorns and Disney figures; the Power Rangers; the kid’s beanbag chair; the baseball bat and balls and toys. She didn’t have to step inside the room to read it. Carl’s energy breathed everywhere, curious and exuberant.

  But fear suffused this room. Fear that something might happen to his mother or father or to both of them and that the only life he knew would collapse like a house of cards. This kind of fear in someone as young as Carl usually came from the parents, psychic debris the child absorbed like a sponge.

  Mira turned away from the room and went downstairs. In the living room, she twisted her bare feet against the floor again. Nadine had taught her to do this. She claimed it helped create a kind of psychic circuit with the earth which rooted you, replenished you, kept you from burning out. Mira didn’t know if it actually worked. But she did it because she felt a need for ritual.

  She circled the silhouette on the floor, rubbing her hands together to work up a heat. She imagined a white light around herself, a buffer between her and whatever physical sensations she might pick up. Then she knelt at the silhouette’s head and pressed her palms to the floor within the chalked lines.

  Mira immediately felt a pressure in her chest, a tightness that she knew was the gunshot which had killed Steele. But this wasn’t the agonizing pain she had felt Thursday morning; this was only its phantom. She rolled back onto her heels, stood, moved around the room until she found the residue of Rae’s energy, a slipstream, tendrils that drifted through the air like an invisible fog. She stepped into it, moved with it.

  And suddenly she is swept up into a maelstrom so fierce, so violent, she can’t breathe, can’t scream, can’t move. She struggles against him as he pins her arms behind her. Kicks as he slaps a wet cloth over her face. Shrieks into the cloth as he lifts her off the floor, lifts her from the back with one arm squeezing her waist and the other hand holding the cloth over her nose and mouth.

  She is still shrieking when he carries her outside, but the chloroform on the cloth is beginning to work and her shrieks weaken until they are choked, pathetic whimpers. Some deep pocket in her mind remains alert enough to order her body to stop struggling. To hold her breath. To fool him.

  And just when she is sure her lungs will explode, the cloth slips away. She gasps, sucking at the fresh air, and twists her body savagely to one side and jerks her arm back hard and fast. It sinks into the man’s gut, she hears him grunt, a pig’s grunt. For seconds, precious seconds, he loses his hold on her and she lurches away from him, stumbling through the dark, a scream frozen in her throat.

  If she can get to the end of the driveway. If she can reach the street. If she can flag down a car. If if, faster faster faster… He tackles her. She slams down into the bushes and he rides her like a horse, his fingers knotted in her hair, yanking her head back, back, back until she is certain her neck will snap.

  Then she plunges through the looking glass, into a dark silence, and shrinks until she is a tiny white dot, floating in a black vastness.

  Chapter 14

  Sheppard felt like a character in an existential play, the guy who knew he wouldn’t find a way out but went looking for it anyway.

  He helped Mira up and walked her into Steele’s house. Her legs worked, her eyes were open, she was conscious, but she didn’t seem to be here. After she settled in the recliner that faced the ocean, he went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Upon his return, pink splotches dotted Mira’s cheeks and the inside of her left wrist looked as if it had been burned by rope or metal. Sheppard had seen this kind of injury on shackled cons during transfer from one jail or prison to another.

  “Drink this,” he said. “It’s cold water.”

  Her fingers closed around the glass. She sipped, paused, sipped again. “That hasn’t happened in a long time.”

  Even though he had a clear impression of what had happened—the physical events, her rapid movement from the house to the outdoors—he knew she referred to her total immersion in her impressions.

  “Rae Steele was kidnapped by the man who killed her husband. I think she and Steele had had an argument and she took off and was nabbed before this guy killed Steele. It was dark when it happened. He had a cloth soaked in chloroform or something, but she fought it and got away at one point. He ran after her and caught her. Now she’s surrounded by water.”

  He wanted to dismiss her impressions as colorful fiction. But the event she described might be a possible version of what had happened. He couldn’t discount it because it bore too many similarities to what Carl Steele had told them.

  He didn’t comment when she finished; she apparently interpreted his silence as disbelief. “Shit, this is why I hate working with cops. We don’t speak the same language.”

  “Then teach me your language, Mira.”

  “Right.” She drew her fingers through her hair, pulled her knees up against her chest, looked away from him. “Spare me the Mr. Sincere routine, okay? That was what Guy Hotchkiss used to pull. ‘Tell me what you see, Ms. Morales. Describe it to me, Ms. Morales.’”

  “Hotchkiss is an asshole.”

  “At least we agree on something.”

  The angles of her face seemed less sharp now, her eyes looked less black, her expression had softened. Sheppard hoped she wouldn’t choose this second to poke around inside his skull, because the green shoelaces would be the first thing she found. He touched her left wrist and turned it over, exposing the abrasions.

  “What’s this about?”

  Mira drew her fingers over the skin. “He restrained her with handcuffs that have injured her wrists.”

  “But why do your wrists look like raw meat?”

  She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand; he sensed she’d explained this to people before. “I’m empathic. If the emotions are strong enough, I feel what other people feel and sometimes take on their physical symptoms. It’s gotten better than it used to be, but I still can’t disassociate myself completely.”

  “Like a stigmata.” As a lapsed Catholic, he could at least relate to a stigmata, even if he didn’t understand it.

  “Sort of. Except there’s nothing religious about it.” She smoothed her hands over her jeans. “When my husband died, he had this rash under one of his eyes. I think it was from stress. Anyway, the rash appeared on my face about a day before he was killed.” She paused again. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

  Crouched in front of her like this, her presence swept him up. Her scent drifted toward him, a different cologne than what she’d worn yesterday, light but erotic. It stirred the slumbering beast of his libido, deprived too long. He had an overpowering urge to run his hands along the sides of her denim-clad legs and press his face into her lap. He quickly stood, jammed his hands into his pockets, and walked over to the hu
ge picture window. Ocean. Beach. Sun. Zen, for Christ’s sakes. His continued employment depended on it.

  When he was sure he wouldn’t do something stupid and offensive, he turned. “I’m curious about how this ability of yours works. If Steele or his wife had come to you for a reading, would you have picked up on his murder?”

  “If anything, I might have seen violent death as one probability. But nothing’s written in stone, okay? At any point, the soul has a choice.”

  You choose your parents, your siblings, and your death? Sure thing. And you also choose imminent unemployment, credit card debt, and the other depressing details that prevailed in his life now. Yeah. And if he believed that, he might as well hang it the fuck up.

  Something of what he felt must have showed on his face, because she asked, “You think everything is external, Shep?”

  “Some things are.”

  “Like what?”

  He gestured toward Steele’s chalked silhouette on the floor.

  “Like Steele’s murder. It was an external event, something thrust on him from outside forces he had no control over.”

  “And what I’m saying is that Steele’s deepest beliefs attracted this experience and at some level he chose to die this way. Our core beliefs create our reality. Everything begins inside.”

  He shook his head as he paced the length of the window. “I don’t buy it. It means the guy living in a box under the bridge has chosen to be homeless.”

  “At some level, yes, he’s chosen it.”

  He stopped, looked at her. His physical attraction to her had obviously impaired his judgment; she was a complete nut, a fruitcake. “C’mon. No one would choose that.”

  “You wouldn’t choose it and neither would I. But we can’t speak for other people. The homeless person, the battered wife, the homicide victim: their core beliefs attract particular experiences. But at every step of the way, we have the free will to make choices, to alter those beliefs, which alters reality.”

  He shrugged, hands at his sides, palms turned up. “A lot of people would disagree with your basic premise.”