by Amber Foxx
“I guess I should talk to Paula and Bernadette. I hate having them think I’m really involved with him.”
Mae hesitated, but she had to say this. “You’d better talk to Dana, too.”
“Dana? Oh my God—you didn’t tell her?”
Randi’s expression was so pained, Mae wished she hadn’t told either of them anything. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I thought she needed to know he wasn’t faithful.”
“I wouldn’t have asked him to cheat on someone. They’re not lovers.” Randi went from hurt to stunned. “That was a rumor that got all the way to the dean, but—no, Dana’s still married. She’s still living with Dave. Charlie is counseling her though her marriage problems but ... Oh crap. You mean—I talked to the dean for him and it’s true?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Wow. You bet I’m talking to Dana.”
Randi strode out, her expression stormy. I’ve just ruined their friendship. It seemed like there was no end to the side effects of truth. No wonder Charlie didn’t like it.
When Mae got home after Oceanfront Wellness closed, Bernadette was already asleep. The Yellow Gentleman slid out the bedroom door, rubbing through the narrow space where it stood ajar, and trotted to Mae. He sat, wrapped his tail around his feet, and lifted a paw with his chirp-meow. Mae shook hand and paw, and unfolded the sofa bed. She was exhausted, and sadly aware that she had missed her regular call to talk with Brook and Stream. After a quick call that woke up Hubert, to explain and apologize, she changed into pajamas, straightened out the sheets from their folded-bed scramble, and lay down with a book.
Instead of reading, though, she found herself drawn to the Ga’an painting on the wall to her right. The dancing gods, the mountains, the infinite stars. Bernadette’s traditional religion and culture.
Charlie had made jokes about it in private, yet he was plagiarizing Bernadette’s spiritual life publicly and getting away with it. Abuse of yet another kind that she’d put up with. He’d used it to trick Randi into thinking he was holy when he was wicked. From the sound of the music and the smell of the sage, that was probably what he was doing with Marla Gresczek, too.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The next day Mae called Pamela, explaining that she was concerned about Charlie Tann and Pamela’s younger sister. Mae also felt obligated to tell her about Charlie’s heart attack.
Pamela’s reaction was sharp and quick. “At least it’ll keep him off Marla. I need to see a buyer right now, but meet me at Spirit Body at ten. And don’t be late. It’s the only time I have all day that isn’t scheduled.”
Outside Spirit Body on West 21st Street, Mae paused and looked in the window before going in. A huge drum with padded beaters sat on a deer skin, and beside it a carved table was draped with scarves that looked like they might have come from India. Next to that, a fat jade Buddha sat on a tree stump, surrounded by wooden shelves displaying a pantheon of smaller deities from around the world.
So this was the place Charlie and Pamela had created, or that Pamela had created with some of Charlie’s money.
Stepping inside the store, Mae was bathed in a complex scent—leather, a faint trace of incense, wool, new cottons, even smells of metals. The panpipe music that played from speakers in the corners of the ceiling suggested the Andes—home of one of Charlie’s shaman teachers. South American, Asian, and African textiles, clothes and jewelry filled the first floor of the store and exotic art was displayed in the gallery she glimpsed upstairs. In spite of the early hour on a weekday morning, shoppers were already browsing.
Mae went to the main counter at the front and spoke with a sweet-faced black woman who wore jewelry that obviously came from this shop. Mae introduced herself and said that Pamela Giardi was expecting her at ten.
“I’ll let her know you're here.” The young woman picked up a phone and called. “Hi. Mae Martin-Ridley is here.” Something Pamela said made her employee smile. “I’ll tell her.” She hung up. “She congratulates you on having exactly sixty seconds to walk to the back of the store and find her office. It’s to the left, next to the alcove with the musical instruments.”
Mae didn’t stop to admire anything, but made sure she arrived at the office door at ten on the dot. Pamela stood by her desk in low-heeled but pointy black pumps, dressed in a black dress and heavy black and silver jewelry.
“First things first,” she said. “My legs are killing me. Thanks to you. Close the door.”
Mae closed it. Pamela’s office looked like the store, only sparser.
“All right. So how do I get this cramp out?” Pamela swung a leg onto her desk, made a face. “Damn.” She massaged the back of her thigh.
“Back off.” Mae felt close to laughing, but wasn’t sure if she should. Pamela’s attire and behavior clashed in a way that struck her as funny. “The stretch shouldn’t hurt. Don’t push it.”
“Then what’s the point?” Pamela began to lean towards her desk, facing halfway towards her leg.
“Do it right, face your leg. You’re short-cutting the stretch by twisting. And don’t lift your hip or bend your knee—just go as far as you can without hurting or cheating.”
“That is against my religion.” Pamela did the stretch as directed, dropped her leg to the floor, and sat at her desk. “Sit down. Have some tea.” She nodded towards a pale green porcelain teapot and tiny handle-less cups on a silver tray on the table near Mae’s chair. “It’s white tea. I assume you drink the stuff?”
“I’ve never had it.” Mae poured a cup, handed one to Pamela, then took one for herself. The delicate cup reminded her of the Ridley family antiques, but the tea was nothing like what she normally drank. For someone used to southern sweet tea, it was disconcertingly dry.
“It’s good for me, so I pretend to like it, but I like the ritual better than the tea.” Pamela sat back, handling her cup. She sipped her tea and admired the cup again. “So, hit me with it. Charlie and Marla?”
Finding Pamela at first absorbed in herself rather than her sister hadn’t surprised Mae, but she was glad to finally get to the reason for her visit. Mae described what she had seen: the door opening, lights off, music and sage, and Marla’s attitude and tone.
Again, Pamela took Mae off guard. “So what were you doing there?”
“I was meeting a friend for lunch. Bernadette Pena. Her office is next to his.”
“I don’t know her. So you hang out with professors? Are you a student?”
“No.” Mae wondered if she should explain how she got to know Bernadette, that she was a psychic who had been studied in her class. After her Tylerton experiences, it was not something she shared readily, but Pamela’s office, while neat and clean, had artifacts like those in Charlie’s. She had to be into shamanism and magic, too. And she’d been his girlfriend. Mae dared tell the story.
Pamela leaned forward, elbows on her desk, then set her tea down and gently stroked her enormous diamond. “So ... the psychic sees the old fart going after the innocent student. Could you use your powers to tell if he’s fucking her?”
“No, I didn’t try to find that out. But I know he’s used all sorts of spiritual-seeming tricks to get other women interested in him. And he has had sex with them.”
“Marla,” Pamela picked up her tea, took a tiny sip, and caressed the cup before setting it back down, “is mystical. Poor fool. We’re Southern Baptist on my mother’s side and Polish Catholic on my father’s. Turned me off to anything, but it turned her into a seeker.” She rolled her eyes, laid prayerful hands to heart. “Oh, what is God? What is the meaning of life?” She dropped the act. “I swear she’s tried out every religion on the planet on top of the ones we were raised in. She’d be a sucker for a guru.”
“Can you talk her out of him?” Mae tried the white tea again, then gave up and put it aside on the tray. “And I want to talk someone else out of him, too. He’s got another student even more in love with him.”
Pamela frowned. “Is he using the s
piritual bait on her, too?”
“He is. And it seems so wrong. It’s like a preacher having affairs with his church members.”
“What makes you think that?”
“He makes himself sound like he’s a shaman or something. I saw his talk about these shamans he studied with in South America. There was the jaguar shaman of the Yanomani, and then there was Don Alfonso, the Quechua guy in Peru. What is it they pray to, up on the glacier—Pancha Mama?”
“Oh yeah, you asked if I was the girlfriend on that trip. Why did you want to know about all that?”
“Um ...” Mae wanted to ask about the wolf spirit, but if Pamela had been part of Charlie’s learning to do that, she might want to hide it. “I’m hoping it will help me talk this other student out of seeing him.”
“It will if she isn’t an idiot. But how are you so sure it was me?”
Mae did not want to reveal how much she knew about Pamela from her visions. “Intuition.”
“You’re psychic. You know. Don’t do that Southern-sweetie-beat-around-the-bush with me. I’ve seen you be kick-ass. I’ll tell you what I know, but if I ask you something, you’d better tell me what you know.”
Mae felt a cross between relief and alarm. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not old enough to be ma’am.” Pamela picked up the phone. “Cynthia, don’t let anyone interrupt me.” She hung up and held out her cup, asking Mae to pour her more tea as if Mae were a servant. Mae endured it to get the story, and keep her client.
“So, here’s our shaman story.” Pamela settled back in her chair, kicked her shoes aside, and sipped her tea. “Charlie and I started a few businesses while we lived together. I pushed him hard on that. God, he was so unworldly when I met him, all romantic about women and the Universe, totally off in space. If he hadn’t confessed he’d been screwing his students for fifteen years I’d have thought he was a virgin. Anyway, when we were getting ready to open this store, we decided we could do a trip to South America basically for free if we did two things. One, we would look for new vendors, find some really unique crafts, and make it tax deductible business travel. Two, he would get research funding to study indigenous healing practices.”
“So you really did it, then?”
“The vendors? Yes. We did that. The study? Hell, no. You want to study with these shamans, even the ones that are kind of half-quacks, you have to fast, and abstain from sex, and live in the jungle for a week. If they’ll even talk to you, the real ones expect a lot. So we brought along all these back issues of Shaman’s Drum journal, and Mark Plotkin’s book on being a shaman’s apprentice, and some other, more obscure stuff. And once we’d seen the scenery and met the vendors, we went to a resort in Brazil and we made it up. It was good fiction, a real work of art, if I say so myself.”
When she’d watched the DVD, Mae had believed the story. Even though she didn’t like or trust Charlie, it had never occurred to her this was all fake. But if it was, where had he learned this wolf-spirit power? “So you didn’t study with anyone at all on that trip?”
“Absolutely not. While some poor spiritual tourists somewhere in the Amazon were fasting, we went to good restaurants, and sailed and fished, and lay on the beach and drank rum. It was perfect. I never laughed so hard in my life, especially when we came up with the Jaguar Shaman, because we figured that if we pulled this off, we were getting a Jaguar.” Pamela smirked. “I bet he misses that car. I kept it when we split.”
Mae thought this might be enough to discourage Dana. If Pamela told Marla, it should do the trick for her, too. Still, a big question remained unanswered. “Y’all had a great vacation. Is that all that happened?”
“And a good business trip for this shop. I still use some of those vendors. And it sounds like he still uses some of those stories.”
“He sure does.”
“When I was living with him for a couple of years after that trip, I sat in on his classes a lot. It was hilarious, after I’d heard him at our resort, deadpan practicing the story of his first meeting with Don Alfonso. How the old shaman wouldn’t accept him at first, and Charlie had to be more humble.”
“And when he got altitude sickness, Don Alfonso—”
“Said Charlie had been laid low by the heights.”
“And began to teach him.”
“You got it. He doesn’t change a thing.” Pamela smiled, suggesting some admiration for Charlie’s ability to pull off the act. “He taught meditation and Eastern philosophy, too, and he hadn’t practiced that for years. But he could still teach it like he was the greatest guru of the east and had been there learning his Qi Gong yesterday. So that’s Peru and the Amazon, and pretty much everything else. Everything he said once, he said again. He is the best liar on the face of the planet, I swear.”
No wonder he team-taught with Bernadette. She had new ideas, she did research, she read—she was doing his work for him. “Didn’t he give a big talk to the whole campus when he got back? I think he mentioned that.”
“He did. He had slides of the scenery, but he said the ceremonies were sacred and couldn’t be photographed, so he would only show the shamans’ faces—a couple of random old men we met. One of them ran a street cart in Sao Paulo selling some kind of awful greasy food, and the other was a farmer in the Andes who had no teeth and a funny hat. It made him look far out and exotic, so we made him Don Alfonso. I could hear a few anthropology professors at the reception being a little critical that Charlie’s work was sloppy, but no one, no one questioned that he’d really done it.”
Mae tested her ground for asking about the wolf. So far Pamela didn’t seem to be into witchcraft, but Mae didn’t want to jump right into it. “Y’all never studied with any real shamans, then? I could swear he’s got some kind of power.”
“Hell yes, we studied with a shaman, it just wasn’t a good one, or in South America. It was this scary little woman who came into this shop and started talking about some of the masks.” Pamela paused “If I’m going to tell you this ... I never told anyone before, and I’ve sometimes wanted to, but it kind of freaks me out at the same time. You had to learn all that confidentiality stuff and it applies to your training clients even out of the gym, right?”
“I won’t talk about you, if that’s what you mean, no. I might need to tell someone something about Charlie, though. If I don’t say you’re the source, is that all right? I really don’t want this woman to move in with him.”
“Move in with him? She’ll be sorry. Tell her anything you have to. So ... The mask lady.” Pamela leaned in closer, lowering her voice as if others might hear her. “She scared the crap out of me sometimes, but she was our shaman teacher.” Taking time to breathe, sip tea, and adjust her hair and her bracelets, Pamela settled again to her secret-telling posture.
“It was a little before closing, after we’d just gotten back from our buying trip. Our research sabbatical. And we had a lot of masks that we’d just put on display. Some we’d bought at various stops on the trip, some we’d ordered from a guy that got cheap tourist-trade African stuff, and a couple of really nice Northwest coast Salish and Haida masks. Real art, junk, and in-between.”
Pamela recounted the event Mae had seen in her vision, where the strange woman tested Charlie’s powers. At the end of it, she shivered, finished her tea, then studied the empty cup for a moment. “He started going to her house pretty often, but I only went twice—that was enough for me. She had little statues from all different religions and countries, kind of like my shop, only dirty and creepy, and this big peacock feather fan like a weird halo over a big armchair in her living room. She used to sit there and smoke these little cigars and go into a trance sometimes. Charlie loved it. She had this fat little pug dog that really liked him, and he used to scratch its head and it would sort of snore. Disgusting. Anyway, after he’d been studying with her for a while, he told me he was good at this stuff because he’d done all those spiritual disciplines in his youth and trained his mind. He sure hadn’t done any
thing like that as long as I’d been with him, but I figured maybe it was like someone who used to be a dancer—they’re still graceful even when they’re out of shape.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that. They never lose that sense of where their body is in space.” Mae thought of Paula, who still moved like a dancer. That might have been Pamela’s thought as well.
“I guess Charlie had that sense of where he was sending his mind in space, or something like that,” Pamela went on. “Anyway, one of the times I went to Mrs. Childress’s place with him, she told us what kind of animals we were, and that we could ‘run out’ in those bodies. That’s what she called it.”
Mae hoped Pamela wasn’t a witch like Charlie. “Did you do it?”
“Once. Picture it. We’re in this creepy, old, damp, moldy house with her, with the feathers and the cigar, and the wheezy little dog. And she opens her eyes through the cigar smoke and looks at me, and says, ‘You are a condor.’ And she goes quiet for a while. Then she looks at Charlie and smiles, not even opening her eyes, just facing him, and she sounds very, very pleased. ‘And you, my friend Charlie, are a wolf.’ ”
“Did you believe her?”
“I didn’t have to. She told us to close our eyes, and she started singing, not real words, just noises, nonsense syllables, and blew some smoke on us. I started to feel like I was floating. Not flying, just riding the wind, riding thick, warm air. Floating. And I could see way down ... tiny, tiny land and trees. And I could smell stuff. I could smell animals. I could smell blood—that an animal had just killed an animal—and I looked down, it was what drew me. I mean, I was a condor.” She drew herself up straighter. “I circled. I could see a wolf, way down below. It had killed something small like a rabbit ... and then it looked up at me. It had Charlie’s eyes.”
“That’s incredible.” Mae felt alarmed. Pamela could do what Charlie did. “You really felt like you were the condor?”
“I didn’t just feel it; I was it. I know that sounds weird, but there’s a difference.” Pamela looked over Mae’s head, as if remembering that flying vision, then dropped her gaze to meet Mae’s again. “Anyway, I looked up more about them later. They fly high, they have great perception. They’re big and strong and really rare. Yeah, I’m a condor. But I never did that again. I didn’t like turning into an animal. It didn’t feel right. I could see having it as sort of a symbol, or a guide, but not being it. I don’t go to church now, but I was raised with all that religion, and that animal business just felt a little too much like witchcraft.”