The Calling (Mae Martin Mysteries Book 1)

by Amber Foxx

  Jimmy filled in for her. “... is a blueprint. That’s what Maloo always says. It’s a blueprint that hasn’t been built yet.”

  Apparently he frequented psychics, and Breda was hardly the most colorful name in use. “Yeah. And ... I’d say that blueprint looks good. I see you getting all spruced up like it’s gonna happen.”

  He left happy, and she closed the door and leaned back against it, drained and confused. She hadn’t set out to be a phony, but she had been, passing off common-sense advice as if it had been some kind of vision. And this poor guy had loved it.

  Her next appointment was more congenial, a well-groomed middle-aged woman asking about her romantic prospects with online dating. But in the same way, the time and money pressure left Mae at a loss. She could barely sense anything from the client’s belongings other than an eager, optimistic mood. No visions came to her, so again Mae guessed, based on the feeling she picked up.

  After the client left, Mae wondered how bad a job she’d done. She’d probably given the woman reasonable expectations of what would happen—lots of losers but one good guy out there if she’d be patient. Maybe these folks felt more confident after they talked to her, but she hadn’t been psychic. She’d been a fraud. And that was her morning’s work before her lunch break. Two fifteen-minute fake-outs.

  Closing the door and turning out the pink and purple lights, Mae went down to the café. She ordered the cheapest sandwich on the menu, filled a paper cup with water from a dispenser, and sat at the table nearest to the window to the street. Waiting for her food, she took the book and the crystals out of her purse. Something had to give here. Either she’d have to quit, or this idea of Bernadette’s had to help.

  The first chapter of the book described the properties of quartz crystals, something about a piezoelectric effect, whatever that was, and also communication with spirits. Focuses the mind, relieves negativity. She needed that. And amethyst should enhance the properties of the other crystals. It also told her to cleanse her crystals from the energy of other people and her own work after each use, using salt water or sunlight. Work with stones you are drawn to, the first chapter also suggested. When the server brought her sandwich, Mae put the book back in her purse, leaving the crystals in front of her.

  She’d read a few pages. She hardly knew anything. As she ate she contemplated the crystals. Gleaming in the sunlight from the window behind her, they still spoke to her. The rest of the day couldn’t get worse if she used them.

  “I’m trying to decide about taking a job in Minnesota,” the pale, plump woman named Margaret said. Her eyes looked puffy and shadowed, as if she hadn’t slept well.

  “Is that your main concern, then?” Mae asked.

  “Yes. It pays much better, but I’d miss the beach.”

  The future. Mae held the client’s watch in one hand and a clear quartz point and the small amethyst crystal in her other. This time, she didn’t even have to visualize a ball game to focus her mind. Immediately, she sensed something of Margaret’s energy from the hand holding the watch, a mixture of fatigue and hope, and the tunnel opened, carrying Mae's vision into its darkness, bringing her out on a stretch of beach. The scene looked like summer. The client, in shorts and a T-shirt, looked healthier and happier. She was tossing a Frisbee with a dark-haired, tanned, slightly paunchy man about her same age. A dog ran back and forth and stole the Frisbee, making them laugh and chase him. What about this man? He didn’t look like a relative. Did they break up, or were they not a couple? Why only miss the beach and not him?

  Asking whatever guided her to show her more, Mae found herself back in the tunnel. The vision she entered made no sense at first until she recognized the structures inside a human body, the muscles and fat and tendons and organs. It was nothing like a picture in an anatomy book—it was alive, wet, and three dimensional. A spot in the woman’s belly towards the right hip glowed, as if one of her ovaries was burning. The fire spread, and the vision shut down.

  Ovarian cancer. Mae felt sure of it. If only she knew how to go back to the seed moment and change it. If only she really was a healer.

  Feeling frightened for the client, Mae looked for a way to broach the image safely. She hoped her voice didn’t shake.

  “If you had only a short time to live, where would you rather be? Here, or in Minnesota?”

  “Oh, here, of course. I’d retire here in a heartbeat. But I’ve got to work for twenty more years before I can do that.”

  “Is there anyone you’d ... I don’t know ... spend more time with? Something you’d do differently if you knew you were—running out of time?”

  Still unaffected by Mae’s choice of words, Margaret appeared to be taking it as an exercise in clarifying her values. “I suppose I could have made better friends here.”

  “Is there a dark-haired man with a dog? Guy about your age?”

  “My neighbor Greg.” The woman frowned. “We’re friends. I suppose he’s one of my better friends, really. I didn’t make that many here. I’ll miss him if I take the job, certainly, but we’re not dating or anything ... What are you getting at?”

  “Get a check-up. Ask the doctor to look at ...” Mae tried to remember which side the fire had been on. “Your right ovary. I can’t explain what I saw, for sure, but I saw something there, and I saw you on the beach with this man and his dog, and y’all looked happy. Might have been last summer. I don’t see the future. Just what’s been and what is. So I reckon that thing in your belly, that’s there, that’s not the future. It’s now. Unless you had something there before.”

  The client’s gray eyes opened wider, then narrowed. She pressed her back into her chair, working her lips in and out along her teeth.

  It hurt to keep pushing the issue, but Mae felt she had seen something important and needed to explain. “I think what I saw is telling you, if you were sick, seriously sick, you’d rather be next door to your friend Greg and have the beach right there, you wouldn’t want to be somewhere new and strange. I hope it’s not serious, ma’am, I really do. But please get it checked soon.”

  Tears starting to spill, the client said, “I will. Thank you. But—God, I hope you’re wrong.” She rose and started for the door, and then stopped. “Because if you said this to me and you’re wrong, if you put me through this for nothing, I’m coming back to make sure you never work here again.”

  Chapter Nine

  When Mae came in for her day’s pay, Deborah wore a solemn and worried expression. “Your feedback surveys from your clients are strange.” As she pulled a few pages from a stack on the side of her desk, Deborah nodded towards a chair, and Mae sat. “The first two are very satisfied, but the last three ... ‘Disturbing and terrifying if she’s right, arrogant and cruel if she’s wrong’.”

  That had to be Margaret. “It upset me, too. The lady has cancer. I could see it.”

  Deborah frowned, as if she didn’t believe this, and read the next one. “ ‘Intrusive. Not what I asked for.’ ”

  “That girl was bulimic. I could see her doing those things to herself. She asked about changing her major in college, but that wasn’t gonna matter if she kept doing that to herself, and I told her—as nice as I could, but I said she’s got to see a psychologist.”

  “She probably already knows that. And then this last one, ‘None of her business’.”

  “The guy asked if I could find his estranged son and gave me something to hold—and I could see him being really awful to his son. I had to find out if he was ready to see him—I had to talk about that stuff.”

  “People don’t come here to have their dirty laundry thrown in their faces or to be scared out of their wits. They come to hear what they want to hear. If you see something terrible, you don’t tell them. You say, ‘You could derive growth from counseling,’ or ‘Your health wants your attention,’ you don’t say what disease they have. Do what you did for the satisfied clients.”

  “I didn’t even have real psychic input for them. Just picked up a little o
f their mood, that’s all. And guessed.”

  “That’s what a good intuitive does.” Deborah shook her head. “Maybe you’re different from other people and love to look at the ugly truth, but in my experience, most of us don’t. We like our reality custom-made to fit.”

  “If I freelance downstairs, do I need to be so wishy-washy?”

  “If you want repeat business you do. Think about it before next weekend.”

  Between Deborah’s warnings and the clients’ inner troubles, the day’s work left Mae feeling dirty and drained, as if she’d been in the crawl space under her house.

  She walked down to the ocean. The day had grown cloudy and cooler, but a few warmly clad people played and walked on the beach. Remembering that the book said to cleanse the crystals in salt water, Mae took off her shoes in spite of the cold and waded in the shallow edge of the waves. She dipped a handful of the crystals she had used into the ocean and then dried them on her sweatshirt. Maybe she needed to use the crystals to clean herself off, like the way Bernadette had described doing with the sage smudges. Holding one of the clear quartz points, Mae imagined brushing cobwebs off. People were going to think she was crazy, but it felt good to use it. The dirty feeling eased, and she felt more like herself. After dipping and drying the crystal, she put them all in the velvet pouch and into her purse, and walked.

  The movement of her body and the sensation of bare feet in the sand felt cleansing as much as the crystal had.

  She picked up a stone, a white round rock with a sparkly band running through it. Its surface felt good in her hand, smooth, cool, and damp.

  Amazing that only a week ago she’d been so curious about Bernadette and Charlie’s class, and had fearlessly declared to Ronnie and to Hubert that she was “coming out” as a psychic. She’d had no idea what she was getting into. Seeing people’s problems didn’t seem like much of a service when she couldn’t do a thing about them. Maybe these clients she’d seen would go to doctors and psychologists and get treated, once they got over being so upset. Or maybe they’d just stay upset. What if she’d done more harm than good?

  Mae tossed the rock as far out to sea as she could. That throw would have gotten from center field to home. If she threw out all these crystals and the sight, and went back to being who she was before, her old self would walk on the beach and simply walk. Her old self would go home and be able to talk to Hubert easily about whatever she’d done in a day.

  But her old self still would have had that fight with Rhoda-Rae about finding Daddy, and would still need the money for the course. There was no turning back.

  At dinner that evening, Sallie announced her decision to run for mayor and declared Hubert her number one asset in coming across well to the town. Being Ronnie’s next door neighbor was an awkward business, but anyone would agree that Hubert was one of the best-liked citizens of Tylerton. All he had to do was keep being himself and he’d influence votes in Sallie’s favor.

  On the way home, Hubert seemed withdrawn, and Mae wondered if it had anything to do with his mother’s announcement. She waited to ask until the twins were in their room, occupied with their mock garage and tow truck business, and she and Hubert were beginning their workout in the weight room.

  “Something bothering you?” she asked, watching him grab the pull-up bar in the doorway. He had his back to her and she couldn’t see his expression.

  “Might come to nothing.”

  She rolled a fitness ball to the center of the room and started a set of push-ups with her ankles on the ball. “Is it about your mama running for mayor?”

  “Kind of. Don’t give Joe anything else to talk about, all right?” Hubert touched down at the end of his set and turned to face Mae. “He’s saying you witched Ronnie’s cat onto a grave—that you witched those wounds into it, and then showed it to Ronnie all bloody. I didn’t want to say that at dinner.”

  “That’s crazy—and it’s awful. Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s Joe.” Hubert hung from the door frame, stretching his back and sides. “If you’re a hundred years old and still working, you do anything you damn well please.”

  “Joe’s not a hundred.”

  “He likes to say he is. It gets a better reaction.” Hubert took hold of the pull-up bar to start another set as Mae rolled carefully off the ball. “That’s what he lives for. One time a bunch of church ladies came to his door with pamphlets when he’d been drinking, and Joe answered the door buck naked just to make ’em scream. He likes to tell that story, too.”

  “But Ronnie can tell the truth.”

  “I don’t know. Could be like those rumors in politics. True or false, the more you bring it up, the more folks’ll think there’s something to it.”

  Mae selected dumbbells for a chest fly set and lowered herself onto the bench, lying down on her back and carefully holding the weights close to her chest. As she extended her arms and slowly lifted the dumbbells, she pictured a campaign between Ronnie and Sallie. And then it hit her. She froze with the dumbbells poised together above her, two fists with heavy objects facing off.

  “Ronnie.”

  “What?”

  “He knows Sallie wants to run against him, doesn’t he?”

  “She’s been threatening it for a while, yeah.”

  “I think he’d never tell Joe to be quiet. Joe is a weapon.”

  “Shoot.” Hubert dropped from the pull-up bar again. “You’re right. You’d better be the most normal person in the world until November.”

  Moving too fast in her irritation, Mae accidentally banged the weights together on her next lift. “What do you think I’m gonna do? Witch Joe’s mouth shut and put a hex on Ronnie’s peanuts?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It makes me mad. At least I can make a joke about it—since you don’t believe this stuff.”

  “But other people do. If Brook and Stream hear you talk like that and they repeat it at school—”

  Swinging the weights down, Mae sat up. “This is so stupid. I wish we didn’t even live in this town.”

  Hubert had bent down, about to pick up a weight. He straightened up, a hurt look in his eyes. “You’d better not mean that.”

  “I halfway do.”

  “I hope not. This is home.”

  “I know.” Mae resumed her exercise more slowly, and so did Hubert. “But it doesn’t feel like it.”

  Mae could only look at the crystal book when she was alone. She didn’t like being secretive, but she needed to learn. In the morning, after Hubert had gone to work and the girls had gotten on the bus, she went for a run alone, then came home and spread out her crystals on the kitchen table. She took out the book and looked up what each was called and what it was good for, intrigued by the complex spiritual, psychological, and physical effects attributed to each. She tested some of the stones, holding them to see if she felt anything like what was described in the book. They did seem to have a kind of signature, a little buzz, or a sense of weight or energy, varying from one to another. Turquoise, like clear quartz and amethyst, seemed to be a kind of master crystal.

  A meow sounded from the porch, and Mae looked up. To her surprise, Privilege was back. Slowly, so as not to scare the sunbathing cats, Mae opened the door. The black-and-white ones scattered, but Privilege remained. Mae took the empty water bowl, noticing the shaved spots on the cat’s back where he’d had stitches.

  After rinsing and filling the bowl, Mae started to bring it back out, and then remembered the endless list of things the stones were good for. It would be a harmless experiment if she tried some that were good for skin conditions and healing wounds. She put the moss agate and the turquoise in her pocket, then stepped back out on the porch and sat down by the white tomcat. Privilege rose to drink the water, favoring a bandaged paw, ignoring her.

  “Good to see you, Priv.”

  Not sure if he was tame enough to let her touch him, she reached out her hand in slow motion. To her surprise, he turned and rubbed
the side of his head against her and began to purr. She put her other hand in her pocket and held the crystals, imagining the cat’s wounds getting better. Of course they would anyway, but she seemed to feel a little something move into him from her.

  How did healing work? Would she see the wounds close up like a zipper? They didn’t. If she really could do this, would Margaret’s cancer be zapped away, and would the bulimic girl stop sticking her finger down her throat, and would the abusive man suddenly become kind and patient? The ideas seemed as ridiculous as expecting Priv’s wounds to zip closed instantly.

  She wished she could ask her grandmother or someone who knew. Bernadette, maybe. Since Mae had to keep doing readings at the Healing Balance Store until she had her tuition money, it would feel better if she weren’t so powerless in the face of people’s miseries.

  This reminded Mae to read the article Bernadette had recommended. She rose and left the cat in his sunny spot, and went back to reading. She dipped the crystals in a bowl of salted water, laid them in the sun on the table, and found the interview with the Navajo medicine woman among her heap of things to read.

  At first it inspired her, because there were pictures of the healer with a family—obviously leading a normal life. But as she continued reading, Mae felt discouraged. The woman in the article came from a culture that accepted her gift. She had known many medicine men as a child and had married one. Her father-in-law had also been a medicine man who trained her. It only made Mae more aware than ever of how hopeless it was to have this kind of gift in a place like Tylerton or Cauwetska, and she was ready to stop reading.

  Then her eyes skipped down to a heading midway through the article: Trying to Run from My Calling. This was the part Bernadette had wanted Mae to read.

  The medicine woman described being overwhelmed with people wanting help. She and her husband had even tried moving to Denver to get away from the demands, but people still found them. “I found that if I tried to get away from helping others, I would get sick. That’s why I stopped running.”