Death Omen Read online

  “Could you find us? What if we hid?”

  “I could find you if you were lost. At least I’d try.” Mae gathered the crystals. “But don’t start hiding to make me find you. Having the Sight is serious. It’s not a toy. I’m putting these away in my room and I don’t want y’all going in there looking for them.”

  The girls scowled.

  “I’ll be back in a minute to tuck you in.”

  Mae put the crystals in the dresser inside her walk-in closet. When she came back to the children’s room, they were gone. She held still and listened, undecided if she was annoyed with them or charmed by their persistence. Maybe she hadn’t explained the issue well enough, but she didn’t want to distress them with the secrets she’d uncovered with her gift, from crimes to witchcraft. They would learn in time how badly adults behaved.

  A stifled giggle came from the closet. Mae turned down the bed and did the routine Jamie had insisted she learn as part of life in New Mexico, checking for scorpions.

  “Okay, you can come out now. I know you’re in the closet.”

  The girls emerged. Brook asked, “Did you do that with your rocks?”

  “I did it with my ears. Now get in bed.”

  After she kissed them goodnight and closed their door, she heard a whisper. “That was too easy. We’ll have to hide better next time.”

  “No, you won’t.” Mae put on her sternest mama voice. “Don’t even think about it.”

  The next day, Mae left the girls with her father while she went for an interview at one of the spas in the historic district of Truth or Consequences. Though she had little time to devote to working as a psychic and healer, an enthusiastic client was talking her up and she was getting requests. She needed a location to do the work.

  Entering the Charles Motel and Spa, Mae warmed to the place in spite of her pre-interview jitters. The spacious lobby and gift shop of the old building smelled faintly of essential oils and was filled with soft Native flute music and the cheeping of a pair of parakeets. A startlingly handsome man, slender and dark-eyed with touches of gray at the temples of his short-cropped hair, rose from the desk behind the counter with a warm smile. “Hello. How can I help you?”

  Mae’s voice, not loud to begin with, came out even smaller than usual. “I’m Mae Martin. I have an appointment with the manager.”

  “That’s me. I’m Derek.” He came out from the office and shook her hand. “Let me show you the energy room while we talk. You come well recommended. One of our regulars, Daphne Brady, says you’re a great healer. She claims you helped her quit smoking. Got her hooked on hot spring soaks and massages instead.”

  Derek led her to a small room to the right of the office, and Mae fell in love with the space. A bright, striped cotton blanket in oranges and browns covered the table where clients would recline, and a stylized portrait of a Native woman, someone Mae sensed was a medicine woman, hung on the wall beside it.

  Turning on a row of salt crystal and selenite lamps on shelves near the door, Derek said, “It’s painted to look like a healing cave.” He indicated the ceiling, where an artist had rendered golden-brown rocks with an opening to blue sky. “That’s what clients see when they’re on the table.”

  Mae’s attraction to the room deepened. “I love it.”

  An enormous amethyst cluster on the shelf above the lamps drew her attention. There had been a display case of smaller crystals in the gift shop. It was like she was meant to work at The Charles. “I use crystals in my healing. And as a psychic, too.” Had that been awkward? Being psychic was always so hard to explain, but she had meant to bring it up at some point in the interview.

  Derek frowned. “Daphne mentioned that about you, but I would prefer you only do energy healing here.”

  “I used to do both in Virginia Beach before I moved here. I can give you references.” Mae had to hang out her shingle as a psychic and be a professional again. The last time she’d used the Sight as a favor to a friend, the results had strained that friendship. But if being a psychic was her job, it would have built-in limits. No one close to her would ask her to use it for them again, no more than they’d ask a psychologist friend for free therapy. “I expect most people would want energy healing. But sometimes people need me for things like finding lost pets or missing people.”

  “The police find missing people, not psychics. Lost pets, yes, I can see that’s a valuable service. But is it worth my offering a psychic? It’s going to put some people off.”

  “I can use the Sight for medical intuition. I’m studying with Mary Kay Dieffenbacher in Santa Fe next week. Have you heard of her?”

  “Of course. Anyone interested in healing has.” Derek turned off the crystal lamps and led the way back to the gift shop and lobby. “We carry her books.”

  “It’s a joint workshop with Fiona McCloud on energy healing. Do you carry her books, too?”

  Derek nodded and walked to the bookshelf. “The energy worker we have here now studied with her.” He bypassed Fiona’s books and took Mary Kay’s Seeing the Illness in the Aura and Origins of Disease in the Spirit back to his desk, where he sat and flipped through them.

  “I’m looking for her ethical guidelines. How she handles what she finds as a medical intuitive. I know they’re in one of the books. I want to make sure you’d follow them.”

  “Of course I would.”

  Derek paused, read some back pages, then marked his place with a slip of paper. “I’ll think about it. Tell me more about your work as a healer. Is everything you do like helping Daphne quit smoking?”

  “No. Well, in a way, yes.” Mae stood straighter and reminded herself to be calm and confident. “I don’t cure illnesses or anything. I help people change and move on. But it can be anything where they’re stuck, not just a bad habit.”

  “And your training?”

  “I ... I come from a family of healers and seers, but I don’t really have formal training yet.”

  After studying the planner on his desk, Derek asked, “How many hours would you be available?”

  Was this an offer of work? Mae thought about her schedule. “I’m in college, and classes start again at the end of August, and I work part-time at the college fitness center. And my stepdaughters are visiting until school starts. Gosh, I guess not a lot of hours.” She blushed at how unprofessional she sounded. “But I really do want to do this. Maybe three or four hours a week? Mostly weekends.”

  Derek wrote something in his planner. “Can you do Saturdays? We need a weekend person who can be flexible—mornings, afternoons, depending on what the clients ask for.”

  “Does this mean you want me to work here?”

  “After I get your references from Virginia Beach and after you finish that workshop, yes. Daphne raves about you, but I want to see a certificate from the training before I promote your services.”

  “You’ll do the marketing?”

  “That’s my job. You do the healing. Come see me again when you’ve finished the training and we’ll work out the details.”

  Mae gave Derek her former employer’s contact information, thanked him a few too many times, and left.

  Broadway, one of T or C’s two main streets, was almost deserted, typical for an off-season weekday. The sign on the Bank of the Southwest read ninety-six degrees, hot enough to keep most people indoors. It didn’t bother Mae. If she hadn’t already run a few miles in the desert that morning, she might have run all the way to her father’s house to share the good news.

  When she arrived after a brisk walk, she found him in his yard with the girls, pitching a ball to Brook. He was a coach, on a short break between summer softball camps and the brief autumn softball season at College of the Rio Grande in Las Cruces. Brook missed his pitch with a wild whiff and put the bat down.

  “I struck out.”

  “It doesn’t count in practice,” Marty assured her. “It’s just for fun.”

  “Can we watch Mama hit?” Stream asked.

  “Not in
the yard, baby. She’d break a window. Maybe the neighbors’ window. Your mama’s one strong lady.”

  He’d taught Mae hitting and pitching and fielding as soon as she was old enough to swing a bat, and she’d been a top player on her high school team.

  Stream picked up the bat and gave it a lackluster swing. “We’re not strong.” She put it down, losing interest. “Can we go in Niall’s studio, please? I want to watch him make the rabbits.”

  Brook’s face lit up. “Yeah. Can we?”

  Marty strolled over to the corrugated metal outbuilding. He was tall and rangy, with freckles and sandy brown hair touched with gray, and a way of moving that suggested nothing could hurry him. He knocked and called out, “Niall. The young’uns miss you.”

  Niall’s gruff, Maine-accented voice replied, “They can watch. If they stay out of the way,” and the twins scurried in.

  Mae and Marty sat across from each other at the picnic table. He said, “He’s making bunnies from old garden tools. It’s a commission for some garden center.”

  “I’m so tickled the girls like Niall. I never thought he’d be good with kids.”

  “Not most kids. Brook and Stream just happen to fit.”

  “Is he welding with them in there?”

  “Don’t worry. He makes them stay back. I think they like watching him better than playing sports.”

  “I’m not surprised. They like helping Hubert fix stuff and watching him work on cars. Funny how I keep expecting them to take after me, like they were my flesh and blood.”

  Marty rubbed a chipped place in the paint on the table. “So do they. They’ve been trying to be psychic all afternoon.” He smiled. “So far it looks like they’re not, except for that twin business where they say the same thing at the same time.”

  “What did they do to test it?”

  “First they had me hiding pennies and they’d try to tell where I put them. And then they hid from each other and tried to guess. They had fun trying, but they couldn’t do it.”

  “Last night, they hid and tried to make me use the Sight to find them. I told them not to, but it seemed like so much fun to them, I don’t think they understood that it’s not something I play with.”

  “No, it sure isn’t.” Marty scratched his chin. “Did you find a place to do your work?”

  “I did.” Mae felt lighter and warmer as she finally shared her good news. “I’ll be a professional again.”

  “Congratulations.” He smiled. “Maybe if you tell the kids you do it for work, they’ll take it more seriously.”

  Chapter Two

  Jamie rolled over in bed to answer his phone, displacing Gasser, his obese orange cat who had been sleeping on his chest. As he’d anticipated, the call was from Mae. “G’day, love,” he said. “Be down in a second.”

  Her arrival gave him a surge of vigor, an actual eagerness to get up. Mornings had been harder than ever lately, as if years of insomnia had finally caught up with him, but now he sprang out of bed, ready to run downstairs to greet her.

  “I’m pulling in at the workshop, sugar.” Her soft, sweet voice held a puzzled note. “You sound sleepy. You’re not just waking up, are you?”

  “Um, yeah, thought I’d let you be my alarm. Rather wake up to you than a clock, y’know?”

  “I wish you’d told me. I’d have called sooner. There was a lane closed on 25 through Albuquerque and the trip took longer than I’d thought. I’ll bring my stuff to your place when the workshop is over today. There’s no time right now. It starts in ten minutes.”

  “Bloody hell.” Jamie sat on the bed so abruptly it creaked. If she could have come up the night before, they would have woken up together, started the day with love instead of hassles. But he’d registered them for the workshop before he knew the dates of her stepdaughters’ visit, and, understandably, she’d wanted to spend as few nights apart from them as possible. He loved her for being such a devoted mum. No objections to her choice. It was himself he was annoyed with for not thinking ahead. Not setting an alarm. A sense of pressure closed in on him. “I need coffee, need food, have to brush my teeth, let the parrots out ...”

  “Relax, sugar, they’ll have coffee here. You better skedaddle.”

  “Yeah. Love ya. Catcha.”

  Skedaddle? Was there such a thing as skedawdle? Jamie’s mind was awake, but his body had sunk back into morning torpor. He craved another minute of rest. Beside him, the cat lolled on his side, as curled up as his girth allowed, blinking lazily. Jamie patted the hemisphere of furry flank and started to lie down—just thirty seconds—then stopped. Jesus. I’m turning into Gasser.

  Forcing himself to hurry, Jamie dressed, brushed his teeth, and went down to the living room to uncover and open the parrots’ cages.

  “Only got a minute for you. Give me a pep talk, will you, mate?” Jamie offered his wrist to Placido, the green Eclectus. “Step up.”

  The bird stepped up to be petted and kissed, and then climbed his owner’s arm to his shoulder. “I love you,” Placido said quietly into Jamie’s ear.

  “Yeah, love ya, too. I’m doing this for you, right?”

  When he’d signed up for the healing workshop, Jamie had wanted to expand beyond his current routine of giving Reiki to his pets. Medical intuition would enable him to take better care of them, and so would stronger healing skills. The challenge was going to be practicing on people. His healing and visionary gifts were hard to control, and the parrot soul, though sensitive, was peaceful compared to the human spirit. Mae could handle it, and the workshop had been a present for her. So as long as she benefitted, Jamie was happy, but he couldn’t help feeling a little anxious. On the bright side, maybe someone practicing on him would heal his lethargy. But he could be getting in over his head.

  As he moved Bouquet, the hyacinth macaw, to her perch, she gazed at him with one of her enormous yellow-rimmed eyes and ruffled her blue feathers. He stroked her breast with the back of his fingers. “Don’t suppose you have any advice?”

  She bowed her head. He hadn’t expected much. She knew three words, and none of them were wise.

  Gasser came clumping down the stairs, his belly dragging. This was the animal Jamie worried about the most. The one who really needed what he would learn in the training. The parrots were young, healthy and happy. Gasser was not only fat but also struggling with the stress of no longer being an only pet. He had required extra love since the birds had moved in. Jamie put Placido on his perch and scooped up the twenty-pound feline to give him a hug. “You’re my best mate. Don’t tell the parrots.”

  He knew he was procrastinating, but he held Gasser until he felt calm, confident and motivated. It was perverse, but being late gave him energy.

  The workshop was meeting in a former dance studio on a side street off Cerrillos, a few blocks from Jamie’s apartment. He rode his bike at top speed, but still arrived after the opening talk had begun.

  Out of breath, he took a seat beside Mae, dismayed to find there were no chairs, only folded blankets. Even after several months of yoga classes, his left hip objected to prolonged floor-sitting. Leaning back on his elbows in a half-slump, he kissed the middle of Mae’s back, resisting the urge to put his arm around her bum. He loved the firmness of her curves, strength rounded out with just enough feminine softness, the body of a goddess. A goddess who didn’t know she was one. Her face free of makeup, her hair straight and unstyled, she wore scuffed athletic shoes, a baggy old T-shirt, and shorts that revealed long, well-muscled, blindingly white legs.

  She glanced down at him with a smile, smoothed his hair back, removing one of Placido’s tiny fur-like feathers from the tangled mess, and returned her focus to Fiona McCloud’s introduction to the class. A silent reminder to Jamie to pay attention.

  Fiona, a plump, vigorous woman with short pewter-colored hair and rosy cheeks, radiated confidence and solidity despite her ethereal occupation. “None of you are beginners, according to your registrations, so the work we’ll do today will involv
e only a minimal review of subtle energy anatomy. We’ll spend most of our time refining and deepening our skills. Mary Kay and I came up with a mnemonic for what we want you to achieve: the five Cs. Compassion, clarity, concentration, competence, and control. Each lesson will involve all of them.”

  The central lesson of the morning was how to move one’s ego out of the way and become an open channel. Jamie was too open. As he worked with a series of partners, he kept losing his boundaries in his urgency to relieve their sufferings, seeing more of their souls and feeling more of their troubles than he could cope with.

  The other workshop participants spread around the studio floor, kneeling, sitting or squatting to do their work, with the person receiving the healing lying on a blanket, but Jamie had to work standing up so he could hug people. If they were sad or wounded, it soaked into him, and he needed to hold them. Both he and the person he was healing ended up crying. His partners said they felt wonderful afterward, and he was amazed and glad he had helped them, but the process exhausted him, leaving him full of their pain. Compassion, but no control. He couldn’t clear himself of what he’d taken on.

  The third time he got overwhelmed with his partner’s healing, Fiona took him aside and escorted him to a blanket in a corner. “You need to lie down.”

  Too drained to argue, he obeyed, and she laid her hands on his heart and lower belly. Though her palms were hot, her touch put something like a soft, cooling gel into him, quieting the tremors, filling the aching hollows. Once he was steady, she moved her hands to his diaphragm and forehead and sent something different, like a warm bath.

  When she let go, Jamie opened his eyes. Fiona squatted back on her heels, studying him. “That’s enough practice for you, for now. Rest. Learn by listening.”

  She crossed the room to Mae, who knelt beside a young man with flowers tattooed on his shaved scalp. Something radiated from her as she sent healing. Jamie, his inner vision still open, picked it up as a pink rose wrapping the client in its petals. Jesus. Even her soul was beautiful.