The Calling (Mae Martin Mysteries Book 1)

by Amber Foxx

  The photos, and also the props, suggested he had traveled a lot. Rattles, dream catchers, a long staff with carved faces along its length and a strand of black horse hair dangling from its tip, a drum with images of eagles painted on its sides, masks ranging from carved wood to wild sequined and feathered Mardi-Gras types filled the spaces between books and pictures.

  Mae thought of her mother’s opinion of the course Patsy was taking. Witchy. Those props fit the description. “Is this the guy that teaches the alternative medicine class?”

  “That’s him. With Dr. Pena.” Randi stepped over a box and turned out the light as she and Mae left the professor’s office, then locked the door. “I guess you could tell, looking at his stuff.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some of those masks are spooky.”

  Mae thought they were fascinating. To her, something was more amiss in the way the man displayed things than in the things that he had. The real mask seemed to be the room itself.

  Chapter Three

  As they walked across the now dark campus, Mae asked Randi about her various jobs. The fitness director job sounded exciting to Mae, but the teaching assistant job surprised her. It had never occurred to her that professors might have other people grading their papers, but when Randi described the televised courses, it made sense. She also explained that a TA got discounted tuition and a small paycheck, so it was well worth the extra work.

  “Do you grade papers for the alternative medicine class?”

  “No. I’m Charlie’s TA, but not for that course. Only for undergraduate classes. I took both classes, though—the CAM class and the non-Western healing. Pretty cool, fun stuff.”

  Randi sounded so casual about the content, as if it were a good movie she’d seen. No one in Mae’s family would react that way. “What did you learn in the non-Western one?”

  “The course is mostly for nurses and doctors, to be aware of things, like maybe Mexican patients wanting to see a curandera or Native American patients seeing a medicine man or woman. So they’ll understand customs and folk healing and not put it down as unscientific superstition.”

  Mae thought of Hubert’s view of her having the sight, and Sallie’s and Jim’s skepticism. “You mean, so they’ll respect it, take it seriously.”

  “That’s Bernadette’s goal, for sure. I think Charlie likes to shake people up for the heck of it.”

  On a couch in the hall outside the classroom where Patsy’s class met, Randi graded papers online on her laptop, waiting to see Charlie, and Mae tried to concentrate on learning the bones in the human body. Too bad your humerus wasn’t your funny-bone, it would have been easier to remember than ulna. The skeleton was interesting, how all its bones worked together, but her mind frequently drifted to wondering what was going on in the class on the other side of the door.

  She finally asked Randi, “Would it be rude if I eavesdropped?”

  “You really want to know about this stuff, don’t you?”

  “I’m seriously curious.”

  Randi thought for a moment. “I could take you to the control room. When I took the class, once in a while one of the techies would chime in with a question. Gus likes the woo-woo stuff. He’ll understand.”

  Leaving her laptop running, Randi led Mae down a short corridor and around a corner to a room where several young men and women worked with a bank of television monitors and an array of recording equipment.

  “Hi. Gus is working this class. Gus, this is Mae. I told her she could watch the rest of CH 530 in here. Is that okay?”

  Gus, a pudgy black man with thick glasses, rolled an office chair towards Mae. “As long as you don’t touch anything,” he said. As Mae took the seat, quietly thanking the technicians, Randi left with a cheery wave. Gus returned his attention to the sound recording equipment.

  On the screen, Mae saw a student in the lecture hall leaning forward to hold down a microphone button. The attractive young woman, sandy-haired, trim, and in a military uniform said, “I’m not convinced. I mean, the remote viewing studies were too subjective. Saying the pictures the subjects drew really looked like the target places could be biased. I’m not convinced.”

  The camera’s view shifted to the professors, Charlie Tann and a slim, brown-skinned woman with threads of gray in her long dark hair. This must be Dr. Pena. Both started to speak, then Dr. Pena deferred to Dr. Tann, who clearly was going to keep talking if she didn’t.

  He placed his forearms on the desk in front of him and looked at the student, not at the camera. Something about him made Mae think of a huge gray wolf, with the icy blue eyes of an Inuit dog. “What would convince you?”

  “Maybe if it happened right before my eyes.” The camera returned to the student. “But I think the drawings could be coincidence. And the studies with the random number generators—that seems like it could happen by chance, too.”

  Dr. Pena spoke, “Dana, is it actually the data you question? Because these are well-designed studies. The PEAR lab’s work was scientifically sophisticated. There was a trillion to one chance the REG machine outcomes were by chance, and a three in ten billion chance on the remote viewing outcomes. Deviation from randomness in a random event generator, at a statistically significant level—”

  The camera moved back to the prim military woman. “All right, it’s significant. But I don’t believe it. Honestly, I’d have to see someone move something with their mind or see something they can’t see, or this doesn’t work for me. That’s just how my mind works.”

  Charlie Tann smiled and shook his head with a twinkle in his eyes. “Dana, Dana, our resident skeptic.” He glanced at Dr. Pena. “This sounds like a case of ‘I wouldn’t believe it even if it were true.’ ”

  Bernadette Pena said, “Has anyone had any experience with remote viewing or influencing events? We’ve got the hard data, which is what’s supposed to convince the skeptics, and anecdotes aren’t good science. But what we personally see is still what we believe more easily. Can anyone illustrate the data with experience?”

  A voice came over the speakers. “This is Bob in Yavapai.” Someone taking the course online. The camera stayed on the professors, and they looked into the lens as if they could see the person who spoke, though of course they couldn’t.

  Bernadette smiled broadly, showing big teeth. All her features seemed a little too large for her face. Her bone structure was prominent, and her figure more planes and angles than curves. She seemed to make no efforts at conventional prettiness. It was a rare thing in the south, Mae thought, to see a woman who seemed truly at home in her age. Not like Rhoda-Rae, who went to great lengths to color her hair and make up her face to look younger.

  “Hi Bob, how are things in Yavapai?”

  “Good. Hey, I knew a guy that could make his corn grow by thinking about it. I swear it grew better than anyone else’s. I know that won’t prove anything to Dana, but I dreamed something once that happened the next day. The exact thing. Dreamed my son would hit a home run, and he can’t hit a ball, and then he did.”

  Dana pressed her button. “Sorry, Bob. Not sold.”

  Patsy pressed her button. “I have a friend who’s psychic, and I think she’s probably out in the hallway waiting for me. Maybe she could demonstrate something.”

  Mae felt her heart jolt. Patsy volunteered her to be on TV doing something like that? Randi had said there were over three hundred people in these classes when you counted all the remote sites. “Oh my God. She’s talking about me.”

  Gus seemed to mistake her surprise for enthusiasm, because he spoke to the classroom. “Hello, all, this is Gus. She’s in the control room with me.”

  Bernadette conferred with Charlie. “We could do an experiment—ask her to see something she can’t know.”

  He nodded.

  “Patsy’s friend. What’s your name?”

  Gus showed Mae how to turn on the mic to talk. “Mae.” She didn’t dare say anything else in case her voice cracked or shook. This was a college c
lass, and she had no idea what they were talking about other than the remote viewing. She didn’t understand about random event generators or statistics and significance. Not only did she feel out of place, but she wasn’t sure she could use the sight like a science experiment, even though she had done it a few times at home. She hadn’t been under any pressure then, except to win a bet with Hubert.

  “Can you tell us how you know you’re psychic?” Charlie Tann asked with a playful, teasing tone. “Not that I’m doubting Patsy, of course.”

  Claiming this in front of all these people made Mae’s mouth go dry and her hands damp. In her mind she could hear her mother saying it was devilish, and Hubert saying it was all coincidence and she was fooling herself. “I haven’t done it much. But if you give me something someone’s held or used a lot, I can see them from holding it. I found ...” She didn’t want to say the details: ex-husband, drunk, beer cans in pick-up truck, trespassing on in-laws’ property. “... a man that got lost while he was hunting. I saw where he was in the woods.”

  “Mae,” Dr. Pena said, “if we send you something that belongs to someone in the class and you don’t know whose it is, could you tell us something about the person?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I believe I could.”

  “Thanks. I’d like every other row, every other person, to pass something small down to the end of your row, something uniquely yours so we can identify it and you’ll get it back. Obviously nothing with your name or picture on it. And please don’t press your buttons to talk while you’re doing this. We don’t want the camera on you, so Mae is truly blinded in the experiment.” During the silence while they did this, Dr. Pena picked up a large manila envelope from among a stack of books and papers at her side, emptied it, and asked a student in the front row to collect all the objects in it, close it, and then take it to the control room. “Then Mae will randomly select something from the envelope and tell us something about its owner. Dana, if it’s strong enough information, will you be convinced?”

  “Maybe.”

  Charlie mocked her answer with an imitation of her serious frown and firm tone. “Maybe.” And then he grinned, as if pleased with some reaction Mae couldn’t see.

  The class continued discussing the implications of these studies Mae didn’t understand—remote viewing and random event generators. To get ready for the experiment, Mae tuned out the class and focused on calming herself so she could concentrate, as if she were waiting for a pitcher to throw a ball. The student who delivered the envelope, a thirtyish Asian woman in a suit, watched Mae reach into the envelope and draw out a woman’s watch on a thin gold-toned band.

  The student said, “Okay, Gus witnessed that I didn’t tell you whose it was,” and left. The class paused for Bernadette to speak with Mae, asking her if she was ready. Mae got on the microphone. “I have this item I picked. Give me about five or ten minutes to work with it.”

  “Take your time. Just get on the horn when you’re done,” said Charlie, and resumed the discussion where it had left off.

  Mae moved her chair to a corner of the control room, away from the TV monitors and the other people, and leaned back, eyes closed, resting her head against the wall. There was so much going on around her—several classes on the TVs, and occasional conversation among the technicians monitoring them. How could she filter out all the distractions and find the energy traces from this lady’s watch?

  If she were waiting for a pitch, she wouldn’t think at all. She’d just clear out, get her noisy mind out of the way, and know intuitively when to swing, how to make contact. Concentration became empty, nothing in it but seeing and aiming, when she was in that zone.

  She sat up straight and held the watch in both hands against her heart. The emotion that came through felt anxious and tight but also excited, and as the tunnel drew her vision into its depths, Mae saw the woman’s small white graceful hands, a wedding band and a diamond ring on the left hand, fidgeting with the edges of a photocopied article that was marked up with yellow and blue highlighter and penned comments. Her view moved to the woman’s arms and shoulders, then her face—it was the woman who had doubted, Dana. No one would believe this. Mae looked for something no one could see on camera. Her shoes were perfectly polished, and she had her ankles crossed, then uncrossed. Not much to tell, so Mae opened her empty mind even more—and felt the shock of hearing voices and seeing other people at the end of the tunnel.

  Dana was starting out the front door of a small, square white house that looked like it might be military base housing. She paused in the open doorway to listen to someone inside and said with exasperation, “No, honey, I’ll be late.”

  A boy of about six ran to her and she knelt and hugged him, running a hand through his strawberry blond hair. “Be good for your father, Paddy.” She kissed his forehead, and the boy ducked his head and hugged her again, then ran back into the house. “Dave?” She waited as if expecting an answer, but none came. “Dave, I have to stay late to work on a project. For God’s sake, don’t look at me like that.” After another moment of staring back into the house, Dana closed the door forcefully as if stopping short of a slam and stomped down the steps, then made a cell phone call as she walked to a small black car. Mae pulled out of the vision. She’d caught something that was none of her business.

  Dana and her husband had an argument, and her son might be disappointed at her being out late. Was that the source of the fight? Hard to tell. Mae knew about being angry and trying not to fight in front of children. She felt for Dana, and wished she hadn’t dropped in on her life like that.

  Mae returned to her spot beside Gus, waited for a pause in the class, and came on the microphone. “If you’re ready for me, I can tell y’all what I saw.”

  “Come in and join us,” said Charlie.

  “I don’t much care to be on TV. If you can let me talk from here I’d be grateful.”

  “You don’t want your fifteen minutes of fame?”

  “Not really.”

  “I haven’t cracked the camera yet. If they can stand the sight of me all these years, I’m sure you’ll be fine for a few minutes. Come on in.” He seemed so sure she was joining the class that he ended their conversation and returned to his discussion with his students.

  The assumption annoyed Mae. It felt as if he expected her to do what he wanted. If it weren’t for Patsy she wouldn’t have agreed to do this at all, and might have argued. But for her new friend and driver’s sake, Mae felt obligated to cooperate. Reluctantly, she walked down the hall and opened the door to the classroom.

  Randi looked up from her laptop. “What are you doing? You can’t go in there.”

  “I got asked.”

  Randi’s eyes widened.

  “I’ll tell you later. It’s weird. All I wanted to do was listen, but I got myself into a lot more than I asked for.”

  “I’ll let you handle this,” Dr. Tann said to Dr. Pena. He removed his clip-on microphone, leaving it with his colleague, and gradually made his way to the back of the room, detouring through the aisles to place his hands on students’ shoulders, chatting in a serious-jocular tone about their attendance or attentiveness, asking how they were doing. Mae stood inside the doorway and watched him, not sure how she should fit in or where she should go next. Dr. Tann reminded her of a salesman, the way he pulled up little tags too obviously—the kids, the job, the military—and addressed people by name too often.

  When he got to the sandy-haired young woman in uniform, he didn’t do any of that salesman stuff, but simply looked at her, and she looked at him, and he said a long, rich, “Y—es?” in his buttery baritone. She tossed her neatly bobbed hair in an exasperated way, at which he laughed and then switched his style, speaking softly. “We’ll talk. After class.” She nodded. “You all right?” he asked. She nodded again. He meandered on, greeting, patting, teasing, and then chose a seat at the top of the auditorium with no one directly next to him. He used his size and his space consciously, Mae noted, like every sin
gle thing he did was on purpose. Somehow she was reminded of Rhoda-Rae—always onstage for an audience.

  As Bernadette invited Mae to sit beside her and helped her attach the microphone to her shirt, Mae felt something, as if the sight hadn’t been quite shut off yet. There was an edge to Bernadette’s energy, something sharp and bright like the edge of both a weapon and a wound. Not wanting to see more than she should, Mae cleared her focus and did her best to turn off her gift.

  “Thanks for doing this experiment.” Bernadette’s warm eyes, a mixed brown and gold-green color, rested on Mae. “Sorry to spring a televised appearance on you. Did you see the owner of the object?”

  Mae set the watch on the desk. She still felt slightly disoriented from her vision. “Yeah, it’s Dana. The lady that was talking earlier.”

  An Indian or Pakistani man with a strong accent pressed his button and spoke into the microphone. “Pardon me, but wouldn’t you have seen her watch on her wrist, if you saw her on the screen in the control room?”

  Mae tried to remember. She had no recollection of seeing it. “I reckon I might have, but I don’t think I did.”

  Dana turned on her mic. Her voice shook slightly. “Is this the whole experiment?”

  “I ...” Mae hesitated. She felt she could say a little, but not all of what she saw. “I picked up a little more about you. You got a little boy named Paddy, maybe around five or six years old. His hair’s lighter than yours and kinda reddish. Your house is white. Your car is black. And your husband’s name is Dave.”

  Charlie Tann sat taller. While all other heads turned towards Dana, he fixed his ice-blue sled-dog eyes on Mae.

  “Is that correct?” Bernadette asked.

  Dana nodded. Forgetting to press the microphone button, she said, “It is.” Bernadette mimed pressing the button, and Dana did. “And my watch clasp broke. I had it in my purse. I wasn’t wearing it.”

  With a dawning smile, Charlie lifted his hands and very slowly and deliberately applauded. Then he pressed the microphone button at his seat and said, “One more part of this experiment. Raise your hand if you hoped Mae would pick out Dana’s object from the random collection.”