Indigo Springs Page 6

  The ladder trembled beneath her. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the attic floor again.

  “Good, good. And your friend Cherry Lugan, how’s she?”

  “She’s dead, Sahara. Stroke.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Was it sudden?”

  “I’ll say. Her nephew was visiting at the time. He took her dogs back to Vermont with him after the funeral.”

  Astrid squelched a groan.

  “Valuable dogs,” Ev added suggestively.

  “Do you think he should’ve let them starve, Ev?” The vibrato in Sahara’s voice intensified, the mermaid flickering as if it was living flesh instead of metal.

  Ma licked her lips. “I expect you’re right.”

  Sahara gave Astrid a furtive thumbs-up.

  Right. Jump in, try again. “Ma, have you seen your doctor lately? Maybe you should get a referral. You could talk to someone about how you’re feeling.”

  Menace returned to Ev’s expression. “I’m fit as they come.”

  “She means a therapist, Ev,” Sahara said, and Ma’s glare softened. “When Albert died—”

  “Albert had a therapist? That’d make…make a good lead on his murder.”

  Sahara shook her head. “We’re talking about you seeing a therapist, Ev.”

  Astrid’s heart revved and she tried to guess what Ma might hurl next. But Ev frowned, mouth working silently.

  “Okay, Ev? You’ll call around and find a doctor?”

  “You have my word, young lady,” Ev said.

  “Soon, Ma?”

  Eyes flashing, Ev shoved the window open. Fresh air gusted into the room and dust swirled. “Don’t nag, son.”

  “She’s right,” Sahara said. “You’ve got to do it right away.”

  “Right away.” Ma tucked away her handkerchief and straightened her hat. “Absolutely.”

  Sahara coughed. “Uh, what I meant…I mean, are you going now?”

  “Right away.” Ma strode across the attic, each footfall echoing, her anger gone. “Sorry I upset you, son.”

  “It’s okay, Pop.” The words came out in a whisper. Astrid stepped down to the hallway floor, getting out of the way. Ma reverse-marched down the ladder just as the teapot began to whistle.

  With another hat-tip, Ev turned on her heel and trotted downstairs. Astrid followed as far as the kitchen, flinching as her mother slammed the door on her way out.

  “Jeezisgawd, are you okay?” Sahara snatched up a rag from the kitchen sink. She soaked it in hot water, wrung it out briskly, and began wiping vinegar off Astrid’s limp hands. Even after they were clean she didn’t let go, turning the wash into an impromptu massage.

  Astrid had to close her eyes to keep back a surge of emotion. Sahara, looking so polished and assured, made her feel grubby and clumsy. It felt like an eternity since anyone, even a friend, had touched her.

  The hand-massage brought back other things, too—Sahara in a ballgown, kissing her, hinting that maybe there was a chance for the two of them; discovering, the next day, that she and Mark had left town….

  “Breathe,” Sahara said. “It’s okay.”

  “She’s eccentric,” Astrid said. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself.”

  “Why didn’t you say she was so bad?”

  “She was never like that before.” She shook her head wearily. “I asked you to get the chantments out of sight.”

  “Sorry. I was trying, but I couldn’t think of a safe place and I heard things getting nasty downstairs—”

  “Whenever I’ve tried to talk to Ma about her Everett Burke charade—”

  “No euphemisms!” Sahara tossed the rag away and kept kneading Astrid’s hands, wringing tension away. Her hands, damp and warm, slowly pinched into the heel of Astrid’s hand, easing numbness she hadn’t known was there. Despite everything, she began to relax.

  “When I brought up Ma’s delusion, she glossed over it. Acted like it was a joke. There was the Petey and Pop thing, the clothes, but she seemed to be getting better. Faking. She wanted me here so she could snoop on Dad—”

  “She ever get physical with you before?”

  “I’d never have moved if she’d been losing it, Sahara.”

  “Yeah, you’d hang in to the bitter end,” Sahara said. “I was trying to help—you know that, right?”

  “I think you did help. But how did you know? The mermaid, it—”

  “Darling!” With a flourish Sahara produced a crinkled yellow page from her sleeve. Flattening it, she cleared her throat dramatically. “I read as follows: ‘Buy seedlings, call greenhouse at Wallowa…’”

  “Sahara…”

  “Oops, wrong side. Here, we go. ‘Kaleidoscope—sees through walls. Lipstick…’ what’s this word here?”

  “‘Dud.’”

  “Oh.” Sahara scrubbed at her lips, smearing the orange onto her sleeve. Her hair and skin dimmed to normal luster, and Astrid could look her friend square in the face again. “At least it looks good on you. ‘Mermaid—made cat mind me’…you’ve written ‘Miraculous!’”

  “I was joking.”

  “I heard you say it. ‘Henna, go bother Jacks,’ in a ringing ‘don’t mess with me’ voice.”

  “You were asleep.”

  “I woke up. You sounded contentious.”

  “Hmmm,” Astrid said. “It changed your voice, too, whenever you said Ma’s name.”

  “Well, Henna spent the night with Picasso. Which not only means the mermaid works, but the cat speaks English.”

  “That’s disturbing.”

  “Let’s hope the subtleties elude her.” Sahara referred to the note again. “‘Knife dangerous’—that’s a bit vague. ‘Pencil sharpener…’ and there the note peters out.”

  She tried again. “You were playing with the chantments. I asked you to hide them.”

  “I couldn’t help myself.” Sahara leaned close, rubbing Astrid’s nose with her own. “I’m a spoiled brat, you know.”

  “You can’t flirt your way out of this, Princess.” Astrid snatched the page.

  Sahara sighed, deflating as she pulled the mermaid pendant off her neck. “Do I sound normal now?”

  “Yeah.” She cupped a hand over the necklace; it was skin-warm.

  “Okay,” Sahara said. “Tell me everything.”

  The back door slammed. They jumped; Sahara tipped the sugar bag, spraying crystals across the table and floor as Jacks burst into the room.

  “What kind of weirdo mystic crap was Albert into?” he demanded.

  The women burst into nervous laughter.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Great,” Astrid said. “I wait all night and morning to share my news and now you both know.”

  There was nothing left to do but demonstrate the chantments. She started with the kaleidoscope, explained about the pocketknife, then brought out the pencil sharpener and her bag full of gold flakes.

  As the show-and-tell continued, she realized her fatigue the night before wasn’t coincidental. Working magic this way—one small miracle after another—was draining.

  She pointed this out and Sahara nodded. “Yeah. I’m starving and ready for a nap.”

  “I could eat,” Jacks agreed, reaching for a bunch of bananas. They peeled the fruit in silence; Sahara dipped hers in the spilled sugar. After a second, the others followed her example.

  “Are you guys…okay with this?” Astrid said between bites. “I mean, magic. It’s not supposed to…”

  Jacks shrugged. “We saw what we saw, and we aren’t crazy, so…yeah. I’m okay.”

  “I’d be ecstatic if I wasn’t so tired,” Sahara said.

  Astrid said. “You’re tired from using the mermaid on Ma.”

  Jacks raised his eyebrows in query and they filled him in on Ev’s visit. Then Sahara said, “What about you, Eligible? You disappear, then when you turn up, you want to know about Albert.”

  Jacks held up his wrist, showing off the watch. “Earlier when you came downstairs, Sahara, I got a
n urge to trot over to the fire hall and pick up my final paycheck. You were upset; I figured it would take Astrid a while to calm you down.”

  “You spun on your heel and walked out,” Astrid remembered.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was a strong urge. Go. Do it. One less errand. So I started walking and, and suddenly there’s a kid dangling off the balcony of one of the houses.”

  “Did he fall?” Sahara asked.

  “I caught him. Gave me a scare, though, and getting away from his mother—”

  “Shouldn’t you have hung around to see if somebody’d give you a medal or a cash reward?”

  “We’re not all glory hogs, Sahara.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He held up his hand, displaying the burnt and broken finger. “I did the hero thing before, when I pulled Rick out of the Volcano Café fire.”

  “Ah, yes. Astrid sent me clippings. ‘Shucks, ma’am, I was just doing my job.’”

  “It’s not as gratifying as you’d think.”

  “I guess you can take the boy out of the Fire Department, but you can’t take the Fire Department out of the boy.”

  “Are you saying people can’t change?” There was a challenge in his gray-green eyes. Sudden tension crackled between them, like electricity.

  “Do people change?” Sahara said, rolling it over.

  “Once a jerk, always a jerk? Once a diva…”

  Sahara colored and looked away, fluffing her ravaged hair. “I hope not, Jacks.”

  “I hope not too.”

  “Speaking of firefighting,” Astrid interrupted. “Lee came by.”

  “When?” Jacks asked. “After I left?”

  “Pretty much right after.” She crunched sugar crystals under the heel of her hand, mashing them to powder on the table before peeling another banana. “Good timing.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “I felt compelled to jog onward, so I headed down Striken Road, and there’s Reggie Fitzwilliam. He asks if I want to run some white-water rafting groups through Mistico Park this summer.”

  “You got a new job?” Astrid asked.

  “Just like that,” Jacks said. “Reggie was paging through his mobile phone directory, wondering who to interview, when I came by. Then I’m hurrying back here and I knock over the new man in town,” Jacks said smugly.

  “What do you need with a man, Eligible?” Sahara asked.

  “He’s middle-aged, dapperish, in a recovering hippie kind of way. Name of Thunder Kim. I dust him off, and he asks if there’s a bookstore. I walk him over to my mother’s shop. She comes out to say hi and voilà! Instant chemistry.”

  Astrid’s throat closed. “Already? Dad’s only been dead…”

  “Albert’s been gone a year, Astrid,” Sahara said. “That’s long enough if Olive likes the guy.”

  “There you go,” Jacks said. “The expert speaks. Anyway, I took off the watch to wash my hands and saw Albert’s note, and I started thinking it couldn’t be a coincidence.”

  “That was the end of the run of luck?” Astrid asked.

  “Unless you count my missing the scene with Ev.” He was glowing, and she knew why—bad luck had kept him out of art school for years.

  And he showed up just when I was going to tell Sahara everything, Astrid thought, staring at their excited, awestruck faces.

  “Anyone else still hungry?” Jacks asked.

  “Me,” Sahara said. “Let’s grab some grub and plan our next move.”

  • Chapter Seven •

  “You threw a party?” I shouldn’t be shocked, I know. It is only in hindsight that their discovery seems unworthy of celebration. Still, I feel outrage that Astrid was partying as my orderly world began to fray.

  “Best night of my life,” she says. “Sahara started coming up with names, people she wanted to see. ‘Call this person. Call that person.’ Mostly people from high school, because she and Mark left right after Grad. Jacks thought of people too—folks I’d gotten to know after I dropped out of school, my ex-girlfriend. He invited his gang, guys he played poker with, hiking buddies—”

  “How did Sahara feel about his inviting people?”

  She doesn’t answer, but a painting of the three of them gathered says it all—the wary lines of Jacks’s and Sahara’s bodies show them clearly at odds. “We told everyone to meet us at a local bar, the Mixmeander….”

  “Did they come?”

  “Sure. It was Saturday night, and town’s pretty dull. Eineke Glassen started giving me a song and dance about how she couldn’t make it, so Sahara dropped the mermaid pendant around my neck. But it didn’t work on the phone. Which was fine—forcing someone to come seemed…”

  “Creepy?”

  “Yeah. I took it off right away.” She scratches her neck. “Sahara loved the mermaid. She named it Siren.”

  “She can’t still have it?” Ever since Sahara escaped from Indigo Springs, she has been wooing people to her cause, not forcing them.

  After fleeing Oregon, she’d appeared at a women’s music festival in California, arriving on a flying carpet she’d purportedly woven herself. There she proclaimed an Age of Miracles and founded the Alchemite cult.

  Audience members with camcorders filmed her as she worked magic for the incredulous crowd. She’d healed the sick and disabled, created baskets of fruit and flowers from thin air. She read minds, and immersed herself in the waters of a nearby lake for over an hour without drowning. Clumsily playing a harmonica along with the festival’s headline band, she spread what witnesses described as “a feeling of safety, goodwill, and utter peace.”

  Sahara clinched her claim to godhood by bestowing mystic items upon her most zealous would-be worshippers. She gave a pair of shoes to a runner that helped her sprint at about sixty miles an hour—until they wore out, anyway. A midwife from Sacramento got a plastic pill bottle that relieved women’s labor pains. Sahara gave a private investigator a book that helped her locate the bodies of long-lost murder victims. A musician got the harmonica. Indigo Springs’s own Jemmy Burlein was there, and she got a set of tweezers that could short out anything electronic.

  As the California State Police converged on Lake Shobogan, Jemmy killed their cars, computers, and communications equipment. Before the law could regroup, Sahara told her followers to scatter.

  Within twenty-four hours, footage of Sahara’s so-called miracle-working was spreading across the Internet. She was dropping in on raves, playing the harmonica, trancing out the crowds, and preaching. The private investigator was calling in tips on open murder cases to TV stations around the country.

  A week later, people could download Alchemite podcasts, purchase T-shirts and philosophical tracts, and even get a CD of affirmations recorded by Sahara herself. Police arrested the Sacramento midwife when one of her patients was admitted to hospital with postnatal complications; they claimed the pain-relief chantment may have caused the bleeding. A mob almost broke her out of jail.

  In early July, a month after Sahara’s first appearance at the lake, pilgrims were headed in the thousands to the forest outside Indigo Springs, where a grove of trees near a sewer outfall had begun growing to a height of five hundred feet. They’d see Sahara there, it was rumored. So many people showed up looking for their goddess that police barricades couldn’t contain them.

  Savvy marketing: her success has been frightening. But if Sahara had the magic mermaid, she could simply force people to join her, couldn’t she?

  “Sahara doesn’t have Siren anymore,” Astrid confirms.

  “What happened to it?”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  “What was your favorite chantment?”

  “At that point? I’m not sure I had one.”

  “Did you wear the lipstick to the party?”

  She blushes. “I wiped it off. It made Jacks babble.”

  “Did Sahara wear it?”

  “She didn’t know it was a chantment—I’d given her the impression it wasn’t. Neither she nor Jacks knew.”
<
br />   “Didn’t you tell them?”

  Once again she chooses not to answer. “When we got to the Mixmeander, a yowl rose from the back. I saw two dozen people jammed in the booths across from the bar.

  “Sahara was in her element. In ten minutes she’d weaseled us an invitation to a camping trip in August. She signed me up for a softball league. She had talk going about book clubs, dinner circles, movie outings. Penny Gonzales needed people to help with a fundraiser for the hospital and we volunteered. I’d said I wanted a social life and she tossed one together like it was salad.”

  “And Jacks?”

  “Surrounded by women, as usual. He was trying to avoid the pack, but gracefully.”

  “Was he avoiding Sahara too?”

  Astrid flushes: the friction between Sahara and Jacks is clearly a sore point. “He’d run into the guy who owns the store next to the Mixmeander.” She points to a photograph on her wall—herself at age seven or eight, standing with her parents beside a bicycle, posing in front of a concrete building. Its paint looks like it might once have been bright blue, but has faded to an uneven gray.

  “And?”

  “Once or twice a year some kid sprays dirty words on that wall. Then the Dispatch crime report carries on like that one act of vandalism means we’re headed for a school shooting. Jacks had been wanting to paint a mural there, and he was making his pitch.”

  “He caught the owner in a receptive mood?”

  “Perfect timing,” she says. “Nathan was nodding and smiling and agreeing to buy him paint. People gathered around, telling them both how brilliant they were.”

  I scan the scattered cards with their painted images, but there is no picture here of the gathering Astrid describes. I wonder: If she lies to me, will the painted images back up her story, or reveal discrepancies?

  Then I see a party scene on the card in her hands.

  “Did your mother come?”

  “Yes. She asked Jacks about those papers of Albert’s—the clippings—but she did it without making a scene. And she talked to our next-door neighbor.”

  “You’d invited your neighbor?”

  “Sort of. She had a job washing dishes in the Mix kitchen. She was this ancient Native woman…this must be in your files. Mrs. Skye?”