The Calling (Mae Martin Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  His beat-up truck leaned into the dry grass on the roadside facing the Ridley farm’s fields. Mae had seen it this morning when she dropped her step-daughters off with her in-laws on the way to a job interview, and it was still there in the evening when she and Hubert brought the twins back to his parents for an hour so they could get some free time for a long run together. After her day at home with the five-year-olds and his day at the car repair shop, they needed the time outdoors and the time together.

  Hubert’s parents’ three dogs sniff-trotted ahead as Mae and Hubert jogged down the farm’s tractor lane past corn stubble in the unseasonably warm evening air.

  “Reckon we should call the cops on Mack?” Hubert asked. “You know he’s probably shooting on my folks’ place just to piss you off.”

  “I don’t know. Mack’s probably on probation for something. Drunk driving. Bad checks. We need to get him rescued, but maybe not arrested.”

  “Rescued? From what?”

  “His truck’s been there all day. He could be passed out, and it’ll get cold overnight. Or he could have shot himself or tripped and got hurt. Dogs might find him if we let ’em.”

  “And what if he shoots the dogs? I don’t want them going after a drunk with a gun.”

  She considered the familiar rear view of the random assortment of ugly mutts. “You’re probably right. We’ll call the cops if he doesn’t come out by the time we’re done.”

  “One of us might have to go with ’em. They’d get lost out there trying to find him. I hope he comes out.”

  As the sun sank lower, Mae and Hubert ran two miles into the fields, staying away from the woods in case Mack was shooting, while the dogs digressed, finding smells to roll in and puddles to drink from. Then they all turned back towards the old Ridley family house. No sign of Mack emerging from the woods. Seeing the red truck still sitting as darkness crept up, Mae had a third thought about Mack.

  I could find him.

  After all this time not using the sight, it made her nervous to try. How would she explain to Hubert what she’d done, if it worked? He wasn’t religious like Rhoda-Rae, in fact the opposite. He didn’t believe in anything besides common sense and science. But what were the options? The trails were long and twisting, and somewhere in those woods was a man who might need help. If she looked, dared to use the sight again, the police would at least know where he was and what shape he was in.

  “Honey, what are you doing?” Hubert watched her swing herself up into the bed of the truck.

  “I think I can find him.”

  The feeling came on strong, like the intuition she felt in a softball game when she somehow knew she could connect with the ball. She hadn’t used the sight since she’d found Belle the night she and her mother had moved to Cauwetska. There’d been no call for it, and she’d promised not to use it to be wicked and pry into people’s business. But now Mack might be lost, and the night would get cold.

  In the back of the pick-up, she sat holding one of Mack’s once-treasured possessions, an empty beer can, and kept her mind quiet. There'd be some trace, some kind of scent-like thing about Mack on the beer can or even in the truck itself, like there had been with Belle’s ribbon.

  “Mae?”

  “Give me a minute.” This had to look crazy to Hubert, and she had no idea if she could make it make sense to him. “I’ll explain this later.”

  Forcing herself to stop caring what Hubert thought, she concentrated on the feeling of Mack. Slowly, something came through her hand as if a line of energy linked her with her ex-husband, a heavy feeling as if indeed he were drunk. She knew Mack, regrettably, as well as she’d known the late Belle, so if she was going to be able to do this at all, it should be as quick as that search had been. But since she’d kept the sight shut off for almost thirteen years, nothing might come of this at all.

  She closed her eyes, and her vision narrowed in her mind to that same tunnel she’d seen when she looked for Belle this way. The tunnel moved her and opened up to show what she was looking for. In a nest of beer cans and dry leaves behind a fallen tree covered with a few years’ moss, Mack lay apparently passed out or sleeping, his rifle tipped up against the enormous dead trunk. Mae recognized the place. The trails through the woods were as familiar to her as the streets of Tylerton. In her four years married to Hubert, step-mama to his twin girls from his own early mistake of a marriage, she’d spent as much time at his parents’ place as at their own home, and in the summer she ran those shady trails. This place was a long way in, but it was on one of them.

  “He’s near that big oak that got knocked over by Isabelle.” Eastern North Carolinians were on a first-name basis with a lot of storms and dated events by them. “He’s drunk. ’Course I reckon that’s like saying he’s breathing.”

  “Mae, how in hell did you come up with that?”

  Mae jumped out of the truck, and she and Hubert crossed the side yard to the late-eighteenth-century farm house, dogs a few feet ahead, the old one limping, the young one chasing something no one else could see, the middle one sedate. “Come on, I used to be married to him. I know he’s drunk.”

  “You know what I mean. The rest. How’d you figure he’s near that tree?”

  She doubted Hubert would accept her vision. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing. “It’s far enough in he’d think he won’t get caught. Hiding place.”

  As they came to the front porch, a few sturdy December mosquitoes approached the screen door with them. Hubert smacked one against the door frame, saying they needed a frost to kill them off, then opened the door, letting the dogs in first. They scrambled with the irrational claw-slipping excitement of canines on coming home.

  “So you were guessing?”

  Mae hesitated. She didn’t like lying to Hubert about anything. But what if she was wrong? She was sure she wasn’t, but still ... if she said she saw it and was wrong, she’d never live it down.

  “Good run?” Sallie Ridley looked up over her reading glasses. She and her husband Jim, both sporting their graying hair long, wore old jeans and T-shirts, incongruous with the family antiques and the historic house. The dogs, after seeking petting, sprawled on the Oriental rug. Books and magazines lay on all surfaces not occupied by cups of tea. The couple was the picture of their typical evening at home, reading in contented chaos, while the twins lay on the rug with the dogs, drawing with crayons on the backs of pages of computer printout not quite used enough to recycle yet.

  “Mack Tyler’s truck is still out there. Mae says she thinks he’s passed out drunk and that she knows exactly where.” Hubert walked to the landline phone in the hallway between the living room and kitchen. “I’m calling the cops to go get him.”

  “You can’t know exactly where,” Jim said, frowning, and set his book down.

  “I reckon not.” Mae sat on the couch and looked at what the children had drawn so far. Brook’s picture showed a tractor with pink tires, and Stream’s, a dancing dinosaur. Mae praised the art. She could feel her in-laws’ eyes on her and heard Hubert talking on the phone. “But I feel like I do. It’s like I could see him.”

  “Uh-oh, she’s turning occult on us,” Sallie teased. “We’ve got a psychic in the family.”

  Jim and Sallie, more educated than most people in the area, had come back to Tylerton after college to make something of Jim’s family place as an organic farm. Belief in anything mystical or spiritual, anything that couldn’t be proven, was out of their range, and Mae hoped she wouldn’t end up having to explain her vision to them.

  “Mae,” Hubert called, “you want to tell Yolanda exactly where?”

  The cop would be a former classmate, Yolanda Cherry. “I’ll show her.”

  “No, she doesn’t want you going out there. She knows Mack. He’s probably loaded and so is the gun.”

  “You know the spot. That huge oak that fell across the trail that runs toward the gully. The one y’all couldn’t even cut up and move.”

  Jim’s lean face crin
kled into a grin of cheerful disbelief. “You really do think you know that, don’t you?”

  Mae wondered if she did know. The vision had felt so clear and right, but no one believed her. “We’ll find out when they find him, I guess.”

  It took an hour and two cops to get Mack out of the woods and into the back of a police car. The Ridley family, including Hubert’s daughters, passed the time in a board game suited to the five-year-olds.

  Yolanda, a heavyset young black woman, came to the door to ask Jim and Sallie if they wanted to file a complaint about Mack’s trespassing. Mae looked out the open door. Her ex slumped behind the grate separating police from trouble-makers, his thin, sharp-boned face slack with alcohol. He’d cheated on her enough in their short marriage that she could only feel a shade sorry for seeing him in that position. More, she felt sad over what he’d become.

  He could have been something. But then, so could she.

  “Yes,” Sallie said, “we’d like to. I don’t want anyone shooting on this land. Where did you find him?”

  “Right where y’all said. Behind that big tree across the trail. Bunch of beer cans all over the ground. We cleaned it up for you. He still had the bag.”

  “Thank you. Above and beyond the call of duty.” Jim looked at Mae. Raising her open hands to imply, Don’t ask me—I can’t explain, she left him with Yolanda, collected the tea cups, milk glasses, and cookie plates from the evening’s gathering and took them into the kitchen. She needed a minute alone. In the farm office and all-purpose junk room, she could hear Hubert getting the girls to put away the game, calming their protests at heading home to bed.

  She wished she’d said she just guessed. The Ridleys didn’t believe in anything, not God, not ghosts, not a thing. They only went to church because it was good for business to look like church people. If they didn’t even believe in what they heard in the Episcopal Church, where according to Rhoda-Rae folks didn’t believe in much anyway, then they sure didn’t believe in psychic visions.

  Mae rinsed the dishes slowly, aware of the roughened surface of the old glasses, the texture of the china pattern’s thin gold trim, smelling the scent of that night’s dinner lingering in the air. Everything felt so down-to-earth and ordinary, that Ridley farm mix of heirloom antiques and the cheap and practical, the compostables tub on the counter waiting to be taken out to the heap, the clean thin china dishes drying in a wooden rack, the old toaster oven where most houses would have a microwave, the lanky young dog wandering in to snuffle around her feet as if she might have spilled crumbs. All of this ordinariness meant a lot to her; she loved the whole family, the way they lived and the easy way they loved each other. The last thing she wanted was to come across as crazy and superstitious.

  But at least Mack was out of the woods. Mae had done the right thing by finding him. She didn’t like doing it to him, but maybe getting arrested would sober him up this time.

  Setting the last dish in the drying rack, Mae joined Hubert and Brook and Stream. The girls looked like their father—strong jaws and wide mouths, thick, dark hair and deep brown eyes, but they were skinny like their absconded mother rather than solid and strong like Hubert.

  “We ready?” Mae asked.

  “I think so.” Hubert zipped Stream's light jacket. Brook wore hers with the hood up and pulled over her eyes, making eyeless faces from underneath it. They were at a delightfully silly stage. Mae yanked Brook’s hood up and made a face back at her, and both laughed. Hubert glanced toward the living room. “Ready as soon as all that business out front is done.”

  Mae heard the front door close. “Sounds like it is.”

  Mae, Hubert and the twins said goodbye to Jim and Sallie in the living room and stepped out the door as the police car pulled out of the driveway, its lights turning onto the road towards Cauwetska.

  “Who was that?” Stream asked, walking with Brook ahead of Mae and Hubert. The twins took turns walking sideways or backwards in some private game.

  “Police arresting a trespasser,” Hubert said

  Brook, turning to walk backwards again, asked, “What does that mean?”

  “Someone where he doesn’t belong. Y’all be careful, there’s a lot of roots underfoot,” Hubert said. “Walk normal.”

  “Walk normal,” Stream said, stretching the word out, and faced front to walk with exaggerated good posture and neat little steps. Brook joined in, walking directly behind her, giggling. “We’re normal.”

  Hubert opened the back door of his car, made sure the still giggling girls got settled in their car seats safely, and he and Mae got in the front.

  “So?” he asked, as he started the car. Mae knew exactly what he wanted to know.

  The car rolled slowly out the end of the circular driveway, taking them towards town.

  “I was right,” she said. It felt strange. Kind of scary. She had been entirely right. Seen exactly what Yolanda found.

  “That is one weird coincidence.”

  “It’s not a coincidence. I knew.”

  “No.” Hubert glanced at her with a quick smile that faded. He sounded as if he were correcting the children’s manners or telling them that a dream wasn’t real when he said, “You think you knew.”

  “Hubert Ridley, that is the most condescending tone you have ever taken with me. You gonna take that back?”

  “No, I’m not. You can't have really seen him. You took a good guess and it was right.”

  Mae felt herself steam inside. Even though she couldn’t explain what she’d done, she didn’t like having him dismiss it.

  “I did not guess. I knew. I saw him.”

  “What’s condescending mean?” Stream asked, tugging lightly on a strand of Mae’s red hair.

  Mae gave Hubert a look, but his eyes stayed on the road. A herd of small, delicate-legged deer grazed fearlessly close to the slow-moving car. “It means your daddy’s acting like he thinks he’s smarter than me.”

  “Is he?”

  “Sometimes. Not this time. And I’m gonna find a way to prove it.” A doe raised her head. “Stop the car.”

  Hubert braked, and the herd, with undulating leaps, crossed the road like a river of deer. “Don’t tell me that’s your proof, hon.”

  “No—I could see the mama getting ready. But you gotta wonder how they all know what to do and when to move.” There had to be some way of natural communication animals and people had that wasn’t spooky or scary, that was actually normal. Not witchy like Mama said. Normal.

  “That was pretty,” Brook sighed.

  Hubert started the car moving again. “You’ve got no idea how you’re gonna prove it, do you?”

  “Not much. But I’ll bet you three backrubs and five Sunday dinners that I can.”

  Hubert grinned. “Honey, my back feels good already.”

  She started the bet the next day. Having failed to get the job she had interviewed for, Mae had time on her hands. It would have been a dull job as a lunch shift restaurant hostess, nothing she cared about, but it would have gotten her out of the house and paid a little something. The twins were in school now and her mind was restless, staying home. This experiment was something to do.

  Now that she had finally used the sight, she didn’t want to use it wrong, to see things she shouldn’t or pry into anyone’s business, so she tested it by finding and seeing people she knew at times she could be sure they were doing something ordinary. But then it was all so predictable that Hubert could explain it away.

  If she held one of Hubert’s ball caps and pictured him when he was at work, she could see him all right, but where else would he be and what else would he be doing? He’d have his long ponytail tucked up under some other ball cap, and he’d be working on a car, either under it, or leaning into the engine.

  “It was Lorrie Smith’s old pink car and you were doing something under it.”

  “And you didn’t see Lorrie drive past? See, you could’ve glanced out the window and seen her drive toward Buddy’s and not really paid it
any mind, and you’d think you’re psychic.”

  Holding an old family picture Jim and Sallie had given them, Mae searched for her in-laws when she knew they’d be home and working on the farm. Without telling them what she was up to, she called Sallie’s cell phone and casually asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Picking the last of the collards. You want some? There’s not enough left to bother to sell.”

  The work matched what she’d seen them doing in her psychic search. Easily a coincidence, according to Hubert. It was December. What else would you do but cut the last of those greens before a big freeze? Mae had to know that. Jim and Sallie had even mentioned it recently in front of Mae.

  The senior Ridleys were just as predictable as Hubert. They had too much to do running a small organic farm with only a little help from their sons and their sons’ wives. The only thing Hubert couldn’t have explained away would have been a vision of them doing something strange, off the property. Of course, she’d seen nothing like that.

  Brook and Stream, creative as they were, could be less predictable, but Mae’s accuracy was not easily proven if they were at home. As soon as she’d try to see what they were doing after she experimented with a vision, they’d be doing something different, or they’d play with her and say, “Nuh-uh” no matter what she said she thought they’d been doing. And of course they didn’t remember what they had done at a particular time in kindergarten that day—that was too much to ask of them. Telling time was still a challenge.

  Sometimes Mae even came up wrong in a search, and saw something the way it wasn’t. If she tried to have a vision without holding something the person she looked for had touched a lot, it felt more like using her imagination then. It didn’t go through the tunnel. Somehow, if a vision was real, it went through a tunnel. Telling Hubert about the tunnel would hardly convince him though. She lost the bet.