The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  Their clothes melted away. When the AC clicked on, he yanked the comforter up over them and she filled herself with the smell of his skin, an odor of untamed wildness, Sheppard the traveler, the seeker, the nomad. He sculpted her with his hands, played her like a piano, explored her as though she were an exotic country he had landed in and intended to savor.

  His fingers slipped into her and out again, seeking the perfect rhythm, finding it, driving her to the edge. She gasped at the exquisite sensations, feelings she hadn’t known since Tom had died. Her body moved against his, arched into his, begging, pleading to be taken over the edge, into some dark, pulsating sea of unimagined pleasure. But he held her there, trapped her within the almost unbearable pressure, and let his mouth glide down the center of her, pausing at her hip, a freckle, her navel.

  Her senses had been hurled open by then and impressions rushed into her and through her like a warm, salty tide. Sheppard the serious kid, the rebellious teen, the young adult with big questions in his heart. She glimpsed his days on the Miami streets, his years with the FBI, his failed marriage, his travels, his threatened job, his debts.

  Mira knew he felt her inside of him, zipping herself into his skin. She knew because she sensed him quickly nailing shut a place he didn’t want her to visit. He pulled away from her physically and she locked her hands in his hair and pulled his head toward hers. “No,” she whispered hoarsely. “No walls. I don’t want walls.”

  He slipped away from her, his tongue in a slow freefall, circling a nipple, licking at the sweat on her belly, falling lower. His mouth fastened against her, his tongue slid over her, into her, claiming her. And just like that, she was gone, her body stripped and raw, a mass of nerve endings that twitched and jumped and leaped like an impaled frog. Her hands fell away from his back, her fingers sank into the mattress, a white heat filled her head. No more no more no…

  She started to shudder, her bones collapsed, her hands flew away from the mattress, and clutched his head, holding it there. She cried out when she came, a long, broken cry that echoed eerily in the quiet room, but Sheppard wasn’t finished. He hadn’t even begun.

  He slipped into her with the unconscious ease of a man who had been there before and moved with a maddening slowness, a salmon swimming upstream against impossible currents. Her awareness blinked off and on like a strobe, her body turned inside out, the world spun crazily inside her head. She soared.

  She liked the fact that he didn’t roll over afterward and fall asleep. He held her hand and they talked. “Have you ever been to London?” she asked.

  “I spent two days there, then left the city.” He glanced at her. “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “You ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s just another city. The best part about England is Stonehenge.”

  Long before she had read Brian Weiss’s Other Lives, Other Masters, her past life impressions of people had been vivid but infrequent. She rarely trusted them unless she also got names, dates, details that might be verified. In all these years, she’d found concrete confirmation only once, with a life her daughter apparently had lived in New York in the late 1880s. She’d been a minor player in the suffragette movement, a footnote in a history book.

  She felt tempted to dismiss the earlier image as fantasy. But she couldn’t shake the impression of Sheppard in that cloak. Give it to me, she thought, and the images leaped into her head, disconnected and erratic, like frames of a poorly made film.

  “You lived there,” she blurted. “In London. I think you were a merchant trapped in an unhappy marriage. You just wanted to be at sea.”

  He looked—what? Stunned? He lifted up on an elbow and, to her complete astonishment, asked, “Do you have any idea what year it was?”

  Timing, Christ, what was the timing? “Early 1800s, maybe the 1820s, I’m not sure.”

  “Queen Caroline died in the 1820s. So did John Keats. Simon Bolivar defeated the Spanish army at Carabobo and ensured Venezuela’s independence.”

  She laughed. “You sound like a history lesson.”

  “I’ve always had a fascination with that period of history. After I left the FBI, the first trip I took was to Great Britain. I wanted to see Stonehenge. I had to go through London and from the instant I stepped off the plane, I had trouble breathing. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out.

  “I rented a car my second day there and left the city. I got lost and ended up at a bed and breakfast, a three-hundred-year-old house somewhere in the boonies. As soon as I walked into the building, I knew I’d been there before. That night I dreamed about this guy who wore a black cloak and traveled between London and South America selling spice or something. I’m pretty sure I was him. Or he was me.” He shrugged, offered a sheepish smile. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told that to.’’

  And suddenly, the air between them surged with that weird electrical charge. “You make me nuts,” he said hoarsely, and started to kiss her. Suddenly, he jerked back, hands mashed to his forehead, a low, terrible groan issuing from his mouth.

  Mira bolted upright. “What is it?”

  “My head.” He stumbled to his feet, hands still gripping his head. “Jesus, it feels like—” His knees buckled and he sank to the floor, his body doubled over. A drop of blood bloomed like a rose at his right nostril. And then another drop. And then a stream of blood poured from his nose.

  Mira, alarmed and terrified that he was having a stroke or something worse, helped him into the bathroom, slammed the lid on the toilet, and told him to sit on it. She jerked a towel off the rack, soaked it in cold water, and pressed it to his nose.

  “Put your head back, Shep. It’ll stop the bleeding.”

  His head dropped back, he held the towel in place, and raised his eyes. Something or someone else peered from his eyes, a malign presence that brought goose bumps to her arms, a chill to her spine.

  She felt an overpowering urge to cover herself and yanked the other towel off the track and wrapped it around her body. Just that fast, the other withdrew. It was as if some massive shadow had dissolved.

  Sheppard leaned forward, turned on the faucet, and ran the towel under the water. “A nosebleed. Christ.” Then he glanced at her and grinned. “See what you to do me?”

  Mira’s laugh sounded forced, even to her. “Is the pain in your head gone?”

  “Except for a twitch right between my eyes.”

  “Has anything like that ever happened to you before?”

  “Nope.” He wrung out the towel and draped it over the top of the shower stall to dry. “I was feeling sort of queasy, so I got up to get something to drink. Then suddenly my head felt like it was going to explode.”

  “This is going to sound nuts, but when you raised your head, I had the distinct impression that someone else was looking out at me through your eyes.”

  “Great. Now I’m possessed.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. It was…” What? Now she couldn’t say for sure what she’d seen or sensed.

  He approached her, ran his hands over the towel she had wrapped around herself, then unfastened the top and the towel slipped to the floor. His hands slid over her hips, she locked her arms at his neck, and surrendered to the soft nuzzles at her throat.

  “If I get another nosebleed,” he said, “I’ll know it’s you.

  Sheppard’s voice, Sheppard looking out of those eyes, and yes, the hands that raised heat in her blood definitely belonged to Sheppard, not to the other. Yet, she felt a sudden urge to get out of here, run from the bathroom, the apartment, and flee back to the safety of her own world.

  But now they stood in the shower, hot needles kneading her shoulders and back like fingers. Steam drifted up around them, a jungle heat. The night that Tom had died, the heat had been like this, so intense she’d tasted it in the air as she waited in the car for him. The parking lot had been awash in the glow from t
he sodium vapor lights, crickets had cried for rain, and suddenly the man had hurried outside…

  Sheppard, perhaps sensing that her thoughts had left him, cupped his soapy hands at the sides of her face and kissed her. And just like that, she knew why she’d tuned in on the murder of a man she hadn’t known.

  Mira jerked away from him, her hands fumbling for the spigot, shutting off the water. She backed up to the wet glass door, her head spinning but her thoughts utterly clear, singular, as though she peered through a telescope that snapped the most minute details into complete focus.

  “What’s wrong?” Sheppard asked, frowning. “What is it?”

  Her words slapped the air. “When were you going to tell me?” She groped behind her for the latch to the shower door. “Or were you going to tell me at all, Sheppard?” The door swung open and she backed out. “You could’ve said something. You could’ve told me about the goddamn shoelaces.”

  Fighting back tears, struggling with all the old pain, Mira hurried into the bedroom and scooped up her clothes.

  “Hold on a second, will you?” Sheppard followed her. “Give me a chance to explain.”

  “Explain what?” Her voice hit a high note that made him wince. She yanked on her clothes and he danced around on one foot, trying to pull on his gym shorts. Tears coursed down her cheeks, he blurred. “It’s not like you didn’t have a chance to say something.”

  “I didn’t even find out until I was going through the file on your husband’s murder.”

  She slung her purse over her shoulder, wanting only to get away from him as fast as she could. “Then you should’ve told me before we even stepped foot inside Steele’s house.”

  “How the hell could I do that, Mira? ‘Oh, by the way. There’s one little detail you should know. The guy with the green shoelaces also killed your husband.’ When could I have said that to you?”

  “I can think of several times since we got here when you could’ve brought it up.”

  He grabbed her arm as she started out of the room. “That’s unfair.”

  She jerked her arm free. “What’s unfair is that you knew and didn’t tell me.”

  She shot out of the bedroom, her wet hair plastered to the sides of her head. Sheppard didn’t follow, didn’t try to detain her or argue anymore. When she reached the parking lot, she remembered she hadn’t driven here. But she refused to go back inside and ask Sheppard for a ride to the store.

  So she started walking, walking fast through the afternoon light, out of the complex and into the neighborhood. She didn’t pay any attention to where she was, she had no destination. Only physical movement mattered, the hard concrete under her feet, the sun’s warmth beating against her head. Her anger rattled around inside of her like a loose metal ball. But it had less to do with Sheppard’s omission than it did with her own bad judgment.

  The bottom line hadn’t changed: she shouldn’t have gotten involved in the murder investigation and she shouldn’t have slept with Sheppard. Never mind that she had enjoyed it; he had spelled trouble since the morning he’d walked into One World. Because of him, she now knew what she didn’t want to know, that Tom’s killer was alive and linked to her life once more through another murder. She had her answer about why she had picked up on Steele’s murder, but what the hell good did it do her?

  When she finally got tired of walking, she glanced around for a public phone she could use to call a cab and realized her feet had led her into the past. The convenience store where Tom had been shot stood right in front of her.

  Even though she had driven past this place in the last five years, she hadn’t been here since that night. It looked unchanged, stuck in a perpetual twilight zone where it catered to the same endless stream of humanity—blacks, Cubans, Haitians, Anglos, even a spattering of Asians. A wino shuffled out clutching a brown paper bag, climbed onto a rusted bike, and weaved off into the late afternoon. Tourists didn’t wander into this neighborhood unless they took a wrong turn off the interstate.

  Mira knew she should turn around and walk in the other direction, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Her legs carried her forward. A pulse beat in her throat. The night Tom was shot, she had lowered the windows in the car because of the heat. The air had felt slick and sticky, she remembered. She had been beat from Annie’s birthday party, her eyes had begged to close.

  It had been noisy that night, too. Cars whizzed past on the road, music blasted from radios, distant laughter trilled through the air. And yet inside the store, Tom had been shot with a silenced 9mm. These two extremes, one containing the other, had always bothered her. There should have been noise, the shock of an explosion, the shattering of glass, something to warn her. Instead, she’d felt only a sense of utter wrongness, of time stretched to almost unbearable proportions.

  Since Annie had been sleeping in the backseat, Mira had stayed in the car longer than she would have otherwise. Perhaps that had saved her life. But after a certain point, the wrongness had started to eat away at her and she decided to lock Annie in the car while she went into the store. Just as she rolled up the windows, the man in the mask hurried out. A Big Bird mask.

  He had whipped it off, broken into a run, and sprinted around the corner of the building. She never got a good look at him. But she’d recognized the familiarity of everything and realized the dream that had haunted her during her pregnancy with Annie three years earlier had sprung up around her. She’d known what she would find when she burst into the store.

  She almost expected to see the same thing when she entered the store this time, as though the violence had been suspended all these years, lost in some sort of dimensional warp. But no bodies littered the floor, no black man sprawled at the end of an aisle, there was no Tom lying in a pool of blood. The stink of burned coffee tainted the air, the floor looked scuffed and dirty, customers waited at the register. The store could have been anywhere.

  Mira stepped into the aisle closest to where Tom had been lying that night. She remembered the angle his body had made against the floor, the blood that had turned his shirt from yellow to crimson. She’d known immediately that he was dead because his phantom self, his soul, his spirit, whatever you wanted to call it, had hovered just over the body, visible to her, as transparent as glass.

  She’d screamed and Tom’s phantom self had looked up, eyes stricken with astonishment, shock. And then he had started to rise like a balloon and she’d watched until he vanished through the ceiling.

  Mira rubbed her eyes and struggled against the urge to flee. She needed to work through this, to understand whatever she was supposed to understand. She picked up a Peppermint Patty so large it would catapult a kid into sugar psychosis, and got in line.

  She thought about the young clerk who, five years ago, had gone into the freezer to get ice cream and had come out to find two people dead and a woman weeping hysterically over one of the men on the floor. The clerk had been in the right place at the right time, so she had survived. Tom had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, so he had died. Hotchkiss had written it off as a random act of violence and chalked up the death to another miserable crime statistic on the Florida peninsula.

  She paid for her merchandise and hastened outside, her head aching with indecision. She dug into her wallet for a quarter to call a cab and moved toward the phone. Then she saw a silver Porsche parked at the far side of the lot. Sheppard stood out, leaning against the door, hands in the pockets of the navy slacks he now wore.

  They regarded each other across the concrete that separated them, neither of them moving nor speaking. She was suddenly certain that he hadn’t simply followed her, that somehow he’d known where she would go, known it even before she had. “Want a lift?” he asked.

  A simple question, with simple choices. If she shook her head and continued to the phone, the door to her husband’s killer would shut ever so softly. There would be no definitive closure to the past. If she accepted the ride, then she would be agreeing to
see this through to the end. Her choice, either/or, a crossroad. She hesitated, but not for long.

  “Yeah, I’d like a lift.”

  For the first few minutes in the car, she felt awkward, tongue-tied. Then Sheppard broke the ice. “Twenty minutes after you’d left, I figured out where you were going.”

  “That’s more than I knew. I was just walking.”

  “I intended to tell you, Mira. I just didn’t know how.”

  She gazed out the window, unable to forgive him. “It explains why I tuned in on Steele’s murder.”

  “There has to be a personal connection for you to pick up something like that?”

  “No. But my impressions were so vivid I figured there had to be a connection of some sort.”

  “It couldn’t just be random.”

  The derisive note in his voice pissed her off. “No,” she snapped. “It couldn’t just be random.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.”

  She rubbed her hands over her face, regretting that she had snapped at him, but not quite able to forgive his omission, either. “Ever since Tom died, I’ve been grappling with the notion of random anything. If I accepted his death as random, as something over which he had absolutely no control, then I have to integrate the random factor into everything else, too. In the most personal sense, that would invalidate what I do.”

  “As a psychic, you mean.”

  She nodded. “A psychic connects with certain patterns and deciphers them. No patterns are fixed. They’re constantly shifting, changing, in the process of becoming something else. But the strongest patterns represent the strongest probabilities, the events that are most likely to occur as a result of the person’s root beliefs. Like we were talking about yesterday, I believe that birth and death and everything in between are choices the soul makes. Nothing is random or accidental.”

  “If you really believe that, then it means at some level Tom chose to die as he did and you, as his wife, agreed to those conditions.”

  She nodded.