Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  “I didn’t hear anyone.”

  “Jamie is very quiet.”

  “Jamie, quiet?”

  Yeshi chuckled. “His walking, not his talking.”

  Sierra was unobservant. But still, she would notice she’d lost a shoe. Jamie put it on the windowsill under the strands of the plant, undressed, and lay in a few inches of hot water, the back of his body relaxing in the heat, the front feeling the breeze from the window. A few minutes of peace, and then he could sneak out with the shoe.

  Outside, a group of skateboarders were talking, their boards rolling in the lot between the A&B Diner and the back of the spa. Probably the same people who’d seen Magda fall. Something landed on the roof with a thud and a clatter, then directly behind the spa a man grunted while a girl laughed somewhere above his head. Feet landed on the roof and the girl began skateboarding on it, wheels rumbling like thunder. So much for peace.

  Jamie clambered out of the tub, shoved the window open wider and shouted, “You bloody fool. Get off the fucking roof. People are relaxing in here.”

  The skaters guffawed, and the girl jumped down. “Sorry, Jamie,” she sing-songed, more amused than apologetic.

  Ezra stopped singing. Yeshi and Sierra conferred in low tones, their words lost to Jamie. Fuck. They know I’m here. They’ll know who took her shoe. Now what?

  He shoved the shoe out the window and got back in the tub with his phone.

  Misty Chino, her skateboard at her feet, her new boyfriend Refugio Baca at her side, was waiting on the blue bench outside Jamie’s motel room. The other skateboarders lingered in the A&B parking lot, the sound of their wheels and their voices drifting over the fence. The slim Apache girl, her hair styled in an uneven bob that tolerated occasional fire dancing accidents, had snuggled up and was kissing her companion, stopping only when Jamie and Ezra drew near. Not long ago, she’d ended a long-term relationship with another young man, and Jamie marveled at her resilience in her rebound. He wouldn’t bounce back like that if he and Mae split up.

  Misty broke her lip lock with Refugio and grinned. “That was so funny, hearing your voice come out of the spa.”

  “Figures that it was you on the roof.”

  “Yep. I’m going back up when we’re done here.” She looked him over. “Wow, you really lost some weight.”

  Refugio smiled. He was wiry, small, and sweet-faced, young-looking for his eighteen years, a similar type to Misty’s ex but with shorter hair. “Mae working you out?” There was teasing innuendo in his tone.

  Jamie answered by juggling imaginary balls and leaving them suspended in midair. “Got something for me?”

  Misty took the folded canvas shoe from the pocket of her denim jacket. “What’s this about? This is way too small to be Mae’s shoe. Her feet are huge.”

  “Need it for ... never mind.”

  In July, Misty had asked Mae to do some psychic work Jamie hadn’t liked. It had been intrusive, in his opinion. And then Misty had been so upset about the results she might still be angry with Mae. The Apache girl raised her chin, her long narrow face hardening. “Psychic stuff?”

  “Don’t be mad about that.” Refugio jostled her in his embrace. “It all turned out okay. For us.”

  Misty looked down, and he rubbed her neck.

  Jamie and Ezra sat on the other bench, closer to the uneven sticks of the coyote fence and to the A&B’s dumpsters in the alley. Jamie asked, “You see a lady fall in the alley the other night?”

  Misty nodded. “I called 911.”

  “It was Magda Stein,” Ezra said.

  Misty and Refugio, apparently fellow fans, exchanged worried looks. “Is she okay?” Refugio asked.

  “She’s alive. But she’s in bad shape.” Jamie explained about Sierra as best he could, and how she could be exploiting people like Magda. “Thanks for getting her help. Glad you were there. You still work mornings at Passion Pie?”

  “Yep. And then I go home for my second sleep.”

  “Still go running with Mae, too?”

  “Not lately.” Misty avoided Jamie’s eyes.

  “Talk to her. We’re in a weird place right now. Not exactly split up, but ... she could use a friend.”

  After a whisper in her ear from Refugio, Misty surrendered with, “I guess.”

  The barking dog announced Sierra and Yeshi’s entrance to the alley. Jamie wanted to see her limping along with her bare foot on the gravel, but he couldn’t afford to draw her attention to him and Ezra. Sierra knew they’d been at the spa. He handed the shoe back to Misty.

  “Do me a favor. Drop this off at Mae’s place. Don’t want to have it around, y’know?”

  Agreeing to the errand, Misty jammed the shoe in her pocket. The young couple vaulted a low stretch of the fence, landing in front of Sierra and Yeshi with quiet, understated war whoops, and rejoined the other skaters.

  Jamie and Ezra went inside and turned off all the lights.

  To Jamie’s surprise, the darkness didn’t bother him. He lay in bed, exhilarated despite the weakness in his body. Not only had he stolen Sierra’s shoe, but he’d enlisted allies. Been strategic. He pictured Sierra coming after him in the morning, whining and pitying at the same time, warning him of impending bad karma, asking to search his room, asking him why he’d done it, and he began to laugh. He put a pillow over his face to stifle the sound so Ezra, on the living room couch, could sleep. Then the knocking came.

  “Go away.” Jamie projected his voice, making sure she couldn’t fail to hear him. “We’re sleeping.”

  The gentle tapping persisted. “Please,” Yeshi said, “let me in. We must talk.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Mama! There are people coming up on the porch!”

  Mae jumped out of bed and rushed to the twins’ room to find them standing by the window that looked out on the driveway, peering under the bottom of the shade. She crouched beside them. It was hard to see. The streetlights on Marr were dim, and her driveway was shaded with mesquite trees.

  “Don’t wake her up,” said a youthful male voice with what Mae thought of as a reservation accent, not like a first-language Apache speaker, but influenced by growing up around them. Like Bernadette’s speech. “We need to go to bed.”

  “We’ve already been in bed,” replied a female voice with the same accent, her words rippling with a suggestive chuckle. “Anyway,” she became serious, “how else am I going to explain a shoe?”

  Mae told the girls to go back to bed. “I know them. It’s okay.”

  She tucked the children in and went to the door. Misty and Refugio were still quietly arguing over whether to wake Mae up.

  “It’s okay. You already did.” She met Misty’s eyes. For close to four months, they had only spoken politely at Misty’s workplace, but not socialized the way they used to. “It’s ... it’s good to see you. Even if it’s whatever time it is.”

  Misty kept her hands in her pockets. “Yeah. Jamie said I should get over it and be friends again.”

  “And so did I,” Refugio added. “But don't stay all night having a reunion.” He flopped into one of the metal chairs, closed his eyes, dropped his chin, and made snoring noises.

  “We’ll get together when he goes back to Mescalero.” Misty handed Mae the shoe. “Jamie says you’ll know what this is about. It’s Sierra’s. He stole it and threw it out the back window of the spa while she was soaking.”

  “That was,” either really stupid or really resourceful, “a real Jamie thing to do. Thanks.”

  “How come he’s not at your place? Are you guys okay?”

  Mae wanted to tell Misty everything, but not now. The girls might be listening. “He’s working at the retreat at the Pelican. He didn’t explain that?”

  “A little. He and Ezra told us about Magda Stein.”

  Refugio popped out of his caricatured snooze. “Yeah. If it’s this Sierra person’s fault she’s sick, we’re going to be really pissed. She told Ezra she would do a book with Apaches, and we’re
waiting on it. Next one in the Afterworld series.”

  Misty shot him a scowl. “You make it sound like it’s all about us.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. She’s a really cool lady. Ezra showed me her letter.”

  Mae’s curiosity and hope sprang up. “Did he bring it with him?”

  “I don’t know. He shared it when I was passing one of the books to him. I give them to him when I’m done.”

  “I’ll have to ask him.”

  Mae thanked them, promised to call Misty and make plans after the weekend, then watched the couple collect Misty’s skateboard from the driveway and walk off hand in hand. Finally, Mae was getting her friendship with Misty back.

  It was the aftermath of Mae’s psychic work for Misty that had made her decide to be a professional and stop using the Sight to do favors for friends. Searching out secrets to help one person almost always hurt another, and yet here she was again, doing the same thing.

  No, this was different. Sierra’s followers were risking their lives, or at least their health and their money. What if Jamie had kept on believing?

  Sleep beckoned, but Mae knew she wouldn’t be able to relax. Before Misty and Refugio had showed up, she’d been tossing and turning, thinking about Jamie and about her conversation with Hubert. If she was going to be awake, she might as well do the psychic journey.

  She settled on the living room floor, leaning back against the couch, with several crystals and Sierra’s shoe. Posey’s calligraphy lay on the coffee table. Should Mae try to see the women together? It would be more focused than seeking only Sierra.

  “Mama?” The twins pattered out of their room, wrapped together in a quilt, creating the effect of a four-legged, two-headed being. Brook asked, “Are you being psychic?”

  “Yes, sweetie. Go back to bed.”

  “Can we watch?”

  “All you’ll see is me sitting here with my eyes closed.”

  They squirmed onto the couch, rearranging the quilt cocoon. “That’s okay,” Stream said. “You can tell us what you see.”

  “Is it my imagination,” Mae asked, “or have you gotten kinda disobedient since you traveled with Jamie?”

  “No,” Brook replied with a giggle. “We started that with Jen.”

  Stream gave her a small shove inside the quilt. “That’s not funny. We had to disobey Jen. She wasn’t fair to us. We didn’t disobey Jamie.”

  “And what about me?” Mae raised her eyebrows.

  The girls didn’t move. After a silence, Brook conceded. “We’ll go to bed. But can I ask a question first?”

  “Okay.”

  “Stealing is wrong, but Mrs. Moo is bad. Does that make it okay that Jamie stole something from Mrs. Moo?”

  “That’s a deep question.” Mae turned around and rubbed the girls’ quilt-covered knees. “I hope I can answer it.” She took a moment to think, looking into their eyes, then continued. “Sometimes you have to do something that breaks a law in order to do something bigger that’s right. Like you deciding to disobey Jen when you thought she wasn’t fair to you. And running away. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to get your point across, but you broke a rule because you thought it was the right thing to do.” The girls nodded, and Mae went on. “Jamie needed to get something from Sierra for me. Unless I’m real close to someone, I can’t connect with them as a psychic without holding something that they touched a lot. And I need to find out what she’s doing, like if she’s using sick people in a way that’s going to hurt them. Find out what she does with the money they give her. Once I’ve done that, she’ll get her shoe back.”

  The girls murmured a few words of understanding and then wriggled off the couch as a four-legged quilt creature. Mae walked them back to their room and tucked them in. As she returned to the living room, she heard them singing, off-key but sweetly, the goodnight song Jamie loved to sing.

  Tears took her by surprise. Jamie. He had so much of what it took to be a good father, but lacked the judgment or stability. What if his illness was as serious as she was starting to fear? How would the girls handle it? How would she cope? She already felt guilty, even though they hadn’t fully broken up, and she didn’t know for sure what was wrong with him. How long would it take them to work things out? Could they succeed?

  It looked like Hubert and Jen weren’t going to. Mae and Hubert couldn’t go back and start over, but he’d sounded open to something different. The prospect triggered a downpour of pain and confusion. It was unthinkable to let a possible renewal with Hubert have space in the tiniest corner of her heart while she was worried about Jamie’s health. Nonetheless, it had set up camp, claimed its place without her consciously welcoming it.

  Shoving the thought away again, she sat cross-legged at the same spot on the floor as before, picked up the crystals, and struggled to calm her mind as she rested her other hand on Sierra’s shoe and Posey’s calligraphy. You can do this. It’s important. Someone—maybe Bernadette, maybe Ezra’s grandmother—had told her that she had her gift for a reason. That she was a finder of truth.

  She hoped she would know what to do with the truth she found.

  Focusing on her breathing, the crystals, and the energy from Sierra and Posey, she set an open intention for the journey, trusting the Sight to show her what she needed to know.

  The tunnel swept Mae’s vision to a new scene, a kitchen. The off-white appliances were old but clean, the floor red tile, the walls a faded yellow. One wall featured a batik picture that also looked old, a mandala filled with images of what Mae guessed were Buddhist myths or heavens and hells. From outside came a dog’s shrill, persistent barking. Sierra and Posey stood at the counter, Sierra removing a tea strainer from a large mug. Her hair was short, a pale gleam of abundant stubble. “These herbs taste terrible, by the way.” She slid the mug to Posey. “I took them for my arthritis pain for a year.”

  Posey nodded and gazed down into the brew. “Can I put honey in it?”

  “No. That dilutes it. You have to drink it as it is.”

  Posey took a sip and cringed.

  “Don’t be a sissy.” Sierra walked away. “This is the easiest part of healing yourself. If you can’t do something as simple as put up with a bad taste, how are you going to be a role model? An inspiration?”

  Posey took another sip and her middle convulsed. “I don’t think I can be. I’m weak.”

  Sierra grabbed the back of a chair, gripping so hard her knuckles paled. “Then find me someone strong. If you want to be sick, be sick. It’s your life.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try.” Posey gulped the tea, gagging again, and wiped her eyes. “Can I bring Baby in now?”

  Sierra’s expression changed from angry to dazed to fascinated, her eyes narrowing and her lips parting as she studied her guest. “A dog,” she whispered.

  “What? Of course he’s a dog.”

  “You. I meant you. It’s ... it’s in your aura. I can see you as a dog.”

  Did Sierra have spontaneous visions? Or was she putting on an act?

  Mae lost her concentration and the vision fell away as she began to analyze, but she let her mind keep probing the puzzle. Posey was small like her pet, and like a dog, she was eager to please and would cling to someone who was mean to her. Sierra had seen Kate as a predator, a pink river dolphin that had scary legends linked to it. Kate was formidable, assertive, and independent. Sierra might be a little afraid of her. According to Sierra, Jamie had been a too-worldly monk. He’d called her on it right away, arguing that she’d seen his personality and improvised, not seen a past life. Assuming Sierra intuited past lives in this questionable way, could she be deluding herself when she did it?

  The journey had raised so many questions. Mae set Posey’s poem aside and started over with only Sierra’s shoe and the crystals. Before she could figure out what was going on between the two women, she needed to better understand Sierra.

  The tunnel moved slowly this time, and the new vision opened on the front steps of a house so de
crepit it looked like something from the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression. A woman in a faded denim sundress limped out the front door, leading a little blonde girl of about eight years old clad in a loose-fitting paisley dress. The woman was around thirty, with a sad oval face and long brown hair. She carried scissors, and the child held a framed photograph.

  At one side of the stretch of pink-red dirt that was the front yard, chickens strutted and pecked their way through a vegetable garden. The juniper-studded red hills in the middle distance reminded Mae of the empty country roads through Sierra County, outside of T or C. Sierra County. Coincidence?

  Before too much thinking could break her trance, Mae refocused.

  The woman combed the child’s soft yellow curls, provoking a whine. “Ouch. You’re pulling.”

  “That’s the best my hands can do. You know Mommy’s hands hurt.”

  Mae sought a closer view of the mother’s hands. Her knuckles were swollen and several of her fingers deformed. Her toes, showing in her sandals, were afflicted the same way. Mae couldn’t see the woman’s knees, hidden by her sundress, but the way she moved suggested pain. She began cutting the child’s hair close to the scalp. “Daddy had beautiful hair, didn’t he?”

  The child mumbled something, rubbing at the glass over the photograph, making a smudge worse instead of cleaning it. The picture was of a man with blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, long and thick and wavy. He smiled, his young face deeply suntanned around his big blue eyes. Except for the tan, he looked like his daughter. Mae was sure she was looking at Sierra and her father.

  Sierra sniffled as strands of her hair fell on her father’s picture. “Are we going to do this every year?”

  “Of course, honey. Until I can’t do it anymore. We’ll always remember your father.”

  The woman continued shearing her daughter’s locks. When Sierra complained, her mother said, “I’m sorry, but you know it's hurting me, too.” She handed Sierra the scissors. “Now you cut mine.” When the little girl had finished, they let their fallen tresses blow away into the yard. Hands together at her heart, the woman intoned a prayer in a language Mae didn’t recognize, and the child answered with a brief, hesitant chant.