The Calling (Mae Martin Mysteries Book 1)

by Amber Foxx

  Of the approximately forty people in the lecture hall, almost half raised their hands. Still holding his microphone button, Charlie then raised his own hand, sat back with a satisfied smirk, and released the button without saying any more. He’d been making the camera go to him.

  “If anyone would like to crunch the numbers, we can get data on intentions from our remote sites as well,” Bernadette said, “and calculate the odds of any particular student’s item being selected randomly. Thank you so much for helping us demonstrate, Mae. I’ll free you now from having to be on television.”

  “Can I ask you one question before I go?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are y’all saying that what everyone hoped would happen would make it happen? Make me pull that watch out of the envelope?”

  “Not necessarily. Charlie suggested it, but I’d hesitate to put a human being’s choices in the same category as a random event generator machine, as far as being influenced by others’ intentions.”

  “Good. Because that idea is a whole lot spookier than anything I can do.”

  Returning to the sofa in the hallway, Mae picked up her personal trainer manual and held onto the book as if its practicality and physical content would make her feel the world was normal again, but she felt too distracted to open it and study. Part of her wished she had never stopped studying it, had not gone nosing into this class. She hadn’t learned much about what they were studying—they’d studied her, instead. And what little she had learned made her uneasy.

  “So, are you going to tell me?” Randi asked.

  It would be uncomfortable to be in Randi’s class for the next six weeks if what Mae had just done seemed wacky. “I hope you don’t think I’m crazy or anything.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m Charlie’s TA. I’m used to crazy stuff.”

  “Patsy told them I’m psychic and they asked me to do something to prove it.”

  “Wow. Cool. So, did you?”

  Seeing how enthusiastic Randi appeared, Mae described the experiment and the part that had bothered her the most—the suggestion that she’d done what the majority wanted her to do when she picked Dana’s watch.

  “Or what Charlie wanted you to do.” Randi’s voice dropped low, and she turned off and closed her laptop. “He can do some mojo.”

  “Like what?”

  “With me, he cheats at golf. We played a lot last summer when I actually had some free time, and I swear, he could just look at my ball and make it not go in the hole. I’m a good golfer, and I could beat Rick, my boyfriend, all the time. But I always lost to Charlie.”

  “Did he say he was doing something to your ball?”

  “No. He’d look at it and give me this wicked little grin. And if we played with Rick, and Charlie’d have a date, he wouldn’t do it. I could hit right onto the green and I could putt, no problem. Rick doesn’t believe it. He thinks I’m making it up.”

  Mae knew what that felt like. Still, she didn’t want to believe Randi’s interpretation of the golf game. The idea that a man could decide what he wanted to have happen and simply make it happen, even if did amount to nothing more than cheating at golf, troubled her. “I’d rather you were.”

  The classroom door opened, and the first students out the door passed in a laughing, chatting cluster. Then a gray-haired woman in a long purple dress and a clunky wooden necklace stopped in front of Mae. “That is so marvelous, what a gift you have. Have you been to the Edgar Cayce Center?”

  Mae shook her head and stood up as the woman began to expound about the great Virginia Beach psychic. A few other students lined up behind her and others clustered around her, apparently wanting to talk to Mae. The attention, especially when it was centered around this gift she’d spent thirteen years trying to stifle and hide, embarrassed her, and she felt pressured by the crowd and the intensity of the woman’s interest in psychic skills. As politely as she could, Mae excused herself to find Patsy, and Randi followed Mae into the classroom.

  Patsy stood up front in conversation with Bernadette, and Charlie sat several rows above them in conversation with Dana. Taking a seat in the first row, Mae settled down to wait, and Randi climbed the steps of the lecture hall to join Charlie and Dana. “Here’s the book.” She handed the old paperback to Charlie, who smiled and theatrically handed it off to Dana, who looked at it for a moment.

  “Reincarnation?” She drew back her head and re-examined the title with a frown. “Come on, Charlie, what are you trying to do to me?”

  “Speaking of which—” Randi kept her voice low, but Mae still heard her. The volume suggested she not look as if she were listening, so she turned away. “You should probably keep a lid on it. I got grilled by the dean.”

  “And?” Charlie’s voice stayed cool and noncommittal.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  He sounded satisfied. “As it should be.”

  Randi preceded Charlie and Dana down the steps and stopped to say goodnight to Mae, then left. The other two followed, in quiet conversation. Charlie laid a hand on Dana’s shoulder, let go, and looked pointedly at Bernadette. She stared back with equal force, resuming her conversation with Patsy as Charlie and Dana left the room.

  Mae’s attempt to puzzle out the meaning of the exchanges she had overheard and witnessed hit a wall. It looked almost as if Charlie and Dana might be flirting, but it was hard to believe with their age difference. Still, Randi had warned them off something, or maybe protected them. It didn’t fit with Mae’s first impression of Randi to protect an inappropriate relationship. One of those women in that conversation Mae had passed on the stairs must have been the dean, who had been questioning Randi about something related to Charlie. If it wasn’t about pursuing a married student, what was it? And why did Bernadette look at him like that? Mae hadn’t expected a college to be such a soap opera.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Patsy said to Mae. “We’re talking about you.”

  Mae didn’t want to be the center of attention. She’d wanted to slip in quietly and learn. Unsure how to handle the situation, she said nothing.

  Bernadette sat beside her. Before she spoke, she took a moment to study Mae, as if taking in her feelings, and thinking. “I want to apologize for putting you on the spot,” Bernadette said. “I had no idea until Patsy talked with me after class that you were so inexperienced with your gift. Or that your family was so set against it. When she said you were psychic, I jumped to a conclusion and asked you to do something. I’m sorry if it was stressful for you.”

  “Thanks. It kind of was. I guess Patsy told you what my Mama thinks, and my husband and in-laws think it’s all my imagination.” Bernadette nodded. “I’ve been careful about doing anything like this, or even telling anyone I could.”

  “But your grandmother was a healer.” Bernadette’s tone implied that there was more coming.

  “Yes, ma’am. She was.”

  Again, Bernadette paused and looked past Mae to some point in space where her thoughts seemed to be assembling themselves. “How have things gone for you, while you’ve been avoiding your gift?”

  It was funny. The really good thing that had come around recently, the job and the certification course, had come right after her experiments to prove she really had the sight, after she’d used it to find Mack. Of course, since she had Hubert and Brook and Stream, she could hardly say things were bad, but her life with Rhoda-Rae and the unlucky, unhappy Arnie, and with the self-defeating Mack, had been hard. And it was still hard at times, even though it was better. “I can’t say it’s all good or all bad. I mean, I live in kind of a challenging place, I guess you’d say.”

  “I grew up on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico.” Bernadette smiled slightly. “I think I know what you mean. Challenging.” She looked up at Patsy. “Can you give us about five minutes? I don’t want to make you late getting home. Just a few minutes.”

  Puzzled, Mae watched Patsy leave the room, then looked back to Bernadette. What did the
professor need to say that she didn’t want Patsy to overhear?

  “If I’m out of line, please forgive me,” Bernadette said, resting her small, folded hands on the desk. No wedding band, no engagement ring. She wore a single piece of traditional Indian turquoise jewelry, a large bracelet that looked a little too loose for her thin wrist. Looking into Mae’s eyes, she said, “If this doesn’t mean anything to you, set it aside. But I think it might mean a lot.”

  Mae nodded.

  “The reason I ask the students to look at these studies of random event generators and remote viewing is to get them used to the idea that the world really isn’t what our ordinary mind thinks it is. That we can see with something other than our eyes, that maybe our spirits go out and travel. And that sometimes we can change things with our prayers or thoughts, not just our hands.” Bernadette waited for a sign of understanding from Mae, seemed to see it in her eyes, and continued. “My spiritual teacher at home, a medicine woman, likes to remind me that the world is fifty-percent physical, fifty-percent spiritual. That the spirit world is real, and if we don’t pay attention to it, it will do something to get our attention.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe little things, like that miraculous near-miss accident you don’t have. Maybe mischief, like hiding things you know you didn’t lose and putting them back. Or if you have a calling and ignore it, maybe something big.”

  “A calling?”

  “Like your grandmother. Like a medicine woman.”

  A calling. Mae felt as if the brightly lit modern lecture hall had opened a huge space under her feet and dropped her down to another level. A dark, still place. In that place there was nothing but Bernadette Pena’s voice and gaze.

  “In another culture, Mae, you’d be a shaman.”

  Chapter Four

  On the ride home, Mae felt lost in space, watching the flying lights of the highway, then the black tree walls of the country roads. Patsy said little, listening to classical music on the radio, and Mae was grateful for Patsy’s silence. A shaman. A calling. Like her grandmother or a medicine woman. Why Mae, of all people? She wasn’t religious or spiritual at all. She didn’t pray, didn’t even meditate or do yoga like Sallie did. She didn’t think about healing people. The idea of a calling was off the map. Psychic, yes, she really was, like it or not, and she might have to figure out what she was going to do with that and understand it better. But it wasn’t a calling. Anyway, Bernadette had said, in another culture.

  But not in northeastern North Carolina in the twenty-first century.

  “I guess you’re not going to tell me what Bernadette wanted to talk to you about.”

  “No ma’am. I’d rather not.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am. I’m Patsy. You do still want to read what I’m reading for this course?”

  Mae thought for a moment. Part of her wanted to go backward, to not have been told she had a calling, to not have seen Dana’s private life, or seen that line of people all excited about what she could do. This gift had a shadow.

  But staying ignorant wasn’t going to make that shadow, or the gift itself, go away. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Good. I’ll have copies of the articles for you Thursday.” Patsy glanced at Mae, and her voice softened. “I’d like to think there’s one talent you have that won’t get thrown away.”

  Studying at home the next morning, Mae heard her neighbor calling over and over. “Puss pusspuss! Come on, Priv, where are you? Come to Daddy.”

  Ronnie had names for his cats? He’d know if one was missing? Mae thought of them as semi-wild. They roamed the neighborhood and the peanut fields, mousing for this stretch of town and probably the peanut packing plant as well, like field hands with a job to do. Although certain ones had a liking for her small porch and sunned themselves there in a friendly crowd, and sometimes the males went under her house in the crawl space and marked territory noticeably, Mae had never realized that they were tame enough that Ronnie related to them like pets.

  Mae knew Ronnie Farmer, the mayor of Tylerton, only from neighbor-to-neighbor talk across the hedge. She’d learned that he thought Sallie and Jim were a “pain in the ass” with their complaints over crop dusting and GMO pollen drift contaminating their organic farm. To say nothing of their suggestions for what the town should do about it, which was in Ronnie’s opinion, nothing. “No offense to you and Hubert, Mae, but his parents ought to move to Vermont.” Still, she liked him well enough.

  She set down her book and went out to the small back porch of her house. Over the low hedge, she could see Ronnie, a heavyset, red-faced man with a shock of white hair, standing in his yard surrounded by at least half his cats.

  “Did you lose somebody?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen him for two days.”

  Ronnie shoved his big hands into the pockets of his windbreaker and gazed out over his back yard into the fields leading up to the woods. Tylerton was barely a town, all farmland behind the four streets whose intersection formed its center, and Ronnie’s land spread behind not only his house but Mae and Hubert’s and the preacher’s next door as well. The cats had come in from the fields for the rare meal they were given in dishes. The majority of them were black-and-white, and Mae could never tell them apart. Only a few looked different enough that she knew them, and she had to ask which one was missing.

  “My white tom,” Ronnie said. “Privilege.”

  Mae swallowed a laugh. He’d really named the white male Privilege? “He’s a sweetie,” she said. “I hope he’s okay.” The white cat was one of the friendly ones, one of the top users of her porch. She kept a water dish there for him and his companions, and he tended to show up in the morning looking at her through the glass door if the water wasn’t freshly refilled yet. “I can see if he’s in the crawl space.”

  She didn’t like going under there, especially in the coldest months. She and Hubert had started putting insulation under the house and she had not developed any liking for that job.

  “Would you?” Ronnie looked at her, then down at his flock. “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Give me a minute. Let me put on my dirt clothes.” She started into the house and had a second thought. She could hold Privilege’s water bowl. That cat loved his fresh water. She could skip the whole grubby, spidery crawl and find him wherever he was. Before she went in, she dumped the water, took the bowl with her, and sat on the floor with her back to the glass doors where the cat often sat and gave her that where’s-my-water look. The others who used the porch used the bowl, but surely some of these little white hairs stuck to the plastic were his.

  She didn’t think she should let the mayor know what she was doing. It might not work, and even if it did, he might not understand it.

  As she focused her energy and quieted her mind, Mae tuned into the white cat as best she could, trying to feel him rather than all the other cats. At first after the tunnel she saw several cats, the typical scene on her porch on a sunny day, and then she picked the white male out of the crowd and began to feel something through her hand. Pain. The cat licked his front paw, tried to lick his back. There were bloody spots on his back, matting his fur. The black spot over his eye looked larger, as if dried blood had congealed there, too. Cat fight? Dog attack? Escape from a hawk? Mae tried to see the location.

  Behind the cat she saw a solid slab of stone. He leaned his side against its warm surface in his attempt to bathe his injured back, then lay down in dry grass and a few prickly holly leaves and licked the wounded paw again. Stone ... Where was a big slab of stone that would catch the late morning sun? Where was there a holly tree near some big stone? The graveyard at the old Episcopal Church, the little church that only got used once a month. It was on the wrong street for Ronnie’s cats. You’d have to go through someone else’s back fields to get there, places where one family had some scrappy dogs and another kept guinea fowl. Privilege had struck out a long way from home and through some dangerous territory.

 
Mae opened her eyes. Now what? She could say she was going to go look, and bring back the injured cat. But how to explain not checking under her house? Even though it's the most logical place he’d be, I’m not looking there, I’m going where your cats don’t go. Then she caught herself. Why did she care so much what anyone thought? What mattered was the right thing to do, and that was to go get the cat as quick as possible so Ronnie could get him to a vet.

  She rose and hastened out the back door, sliding it shut, and jogged over to Ronnie’s yard. The black-and-white cats scattered except for two of the tamer ones. Ronnie was holding one of the speckled cats in his arms. “What is it?” He looked at her with a frown.

  “Get a cat carrier. You're going to need to take Privilege to the vet. I know where he is.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I just know. Come on. He’s hurt. I’ll explain it later.”

  In the mayor’s old Cadillac, they proceeded to the corner opposite Buddy’s garage, taking the right turn away from town. Three blocks later, they came to the old stone church. It had been around as long as the Ridleys’ house, back when the town was more plantation than village and almost no one lived there but Tylers and Ridleys and their slaves.

  As Mae and Ronnie got out of the car, she could see the top of the stone at the side of the cemetery away from the church, its sunny side facing the street, most of it hidden behind a few other stones.

  “I think he’s on that grave near the holly bush.”

  “I hope he’s not dead. What a place for him to end up.”

  Carelessly walking over graves, they came to the one where the bloodied cat lay. He looked close to dead. When Ronnie arrived, Privilege lifted his head and meowed and tried to sit using one front leg.

  “Look at you, Priv. What in heck happened to you?” Ronnie knelt and lightly petted the cat. Privilege cringed and almost clawed his owner when Ronnie touched the cuts on his back. One of the paws that shot out was gashed.