Soul Loss Read online

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Isn’t that kind of strange? She was his best friend.”

  “Death from alcohol takes longer to heal. Maybe you know, if you’ve lost someone that way.”

  “No. I divorced an alcoholic—my first husband—but he’s still alive.”

  “After my wife died, I used to wonder if I should have divorced her. If it would have made her wake up, or at least saved our girls.” He gazed out into the night. “She drove drunk with my daughters in the car and killed them all. On that road out there. The same year Kandy died.”

  Mae gasped, stunned. “I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

  “It was.” He met her eyes for a fraction of a second, sipped his water, and looked down at the glass. “I didn’t tell you to upset you. It’s to help you understand Jamie. Losing someone to alcohol is different than if they’d died of cancer or old age. You’re not just sad, you’re angry. You blame the dead. You blame yourself for not being able to stop them. Oscar made Kandy leave. I let my wife stay. Would it have made a difference if we’d each done the opposite? When we lost them, we kept telling ourselves a hundred things we should have done differently, as if we could go back and change the past. I’m sure Jamie does that, too.”

  “At least you and Kandy’s daddy are talking about it. I hope it helps some.” Alan nodded, and Mae continued. “Jamie won’t get near it.”

  “Give him time. It may be easier for us to talk. Pueblo people see our dead as nearby, still caring about us, but his mother’s people have a taboo on the names of the dead—like the Apaches do. They don’t say the name for a long time. I think it helped him back off from Kandy while it hurt too much.”

  A small cloud blurred a patch of stars. A motorcycle shot by on 285, speeding. A tribal cop pulled out and followed. How much time would Jamie need? Mae had heard him mention the name of a dead person seven or eight months after the death. Surely he could say Kandy’s name now. He’d had years. Maybe he talked about her in therapy, though he didn’t act like he had. The past year and a half of his life had hit him with enough stress and traumas to occupy his counseling hours. He probably hadn’t told his doctor any more than he’d told Mae.

  Claws tapped and scratched on glass. The cat was hunting moths. Alan opened the door and the moths flew inside as the cat sprang out. Alan slid the door shut. The Yellow Gentleman, Bernadette’s oddly named pet, turned and stared back into the kitchen. Alan petted him and sat back down. “That jewelry you found. Was it the solar system?”

  “Yeah. She was an amazing artist.”

  “She was. I hope Jamie wears it again. There’ll never be any more works by Kandyce Rainbow Kahee, and that was her best. Oscar was so proud of her when she made that.” Alan took a long pause, turning his water glass in his hands. “He used to hope Kandy and Jamie would get married. He didn’t understand why she didn’t want to, when she loved Jamie so much. She never told Oscar what you found out in that vision. About her stepfather. I wonder how long that went on.”

  “I don’t know. I reckon Jamie never told anyone either, if she didn’t want him to.”

  “I wish he had.” Alan’s eyes moistened. “I wish one of them had. She might have lived. Oscar wouldn’t have kicked her out. Or if he had, I would have taken her in. I—I’m sorry. There I go. What if, what if. A death like that. You never quite let go of it.”

  Mae offered her hand, and he squeezed it. It was too late at night to go back to Jamie—if he would speak to her—but her heart went out to him as well.

  Bernadette woke Mae with a hug on her way out the door, assuring her she could stay as long she needed, and gave her a key. Alan was still sleeping. Mae felt oddly lonely in her awareness of his presence. The Yellow Gentleman chirped as he raised a paw and asked permission to come up on the couch. Mae shook hand and paw with him, he jumped up, and she petted him, comforted by his affection. The contrast with Gasser was sadly funny. Even Jamie’s cat was moody.

  She took her phone off the charger and listened to her voicemail. Jamie’s voice was ragged and sad. He’d forgiven her less than an hour after she’d left, and started to blame himself. His urgent apologies faded to weary surrender. The last of his messages had come in at four in the morning. If she’d gone back at night, it wouldn’t have been too late after all, or unwelcome. Now he wouldn’t be up for hours, and if she called she would wake him. She’d have to stop by after her appointments, when he’d had time to sleep. Much as she wanted to drive straight to his place and hold him and kiss him, it would be selfish to disturb him this early—and unwise. They needed to talk about that fight before they did anything else, and see if they could have the talk without fighting again.

  Mae’s first appointment was with Azure Skye. The medium welcomed her into a house that smelled of coffee and fresh-baked peanut butter cookies. Sky-blue walls and white furniture with puffy pillows gave the impression that the house and its soft, pastel-clad owner were one continuous cloud. A white rabbit bounced across the room and lowered its head at Mae’s feet. Azure said, “That’s Mr. Perkins. He’s very sweet but he loves to chew shoes.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, announcing her intention to serve coffee and cookies. After disengaging the rabbit’s teeth from the sole of her shoe, Mae stroked Mr. Perkins and he followed her to the couch.

  Once Azure had served food and drink and settled in an overstuffed chair, Mae explained her supposed research project, ending with a request she hoped would set up a chance to do the healing. “I’d like to be able to describe your work the way your clients experience it. Could you show me?”

  Azure sipped her coffee, added a little more cream, and tasted it again. Her voice became subdued. “I’d love to but ... I’m not working right now.”

  “Of course not.” Mae pretended to misunderstand. “I can’t pay you for a real session anyway. But what would it be like? Could we go through the motions?”

  Azure looked down as Mr. Perkins hopped to her. She baby-talked to him, and he scooted under her chair. “Maybe. Obviously we wouldn’t be contacting anyone since it’s not a real session.”

  “Of course not. But if you could demonstrate, even just the beginning of a—you don’t call it a séance, do you?”

  Azure laughed softly. “Like Blithe Spirit.”

  “I didn’t mean to make fun, if that’s how it sounded.”

  “It didn’t. I found it charming.” Azure drank coffee and looked out the window. “We can put on our play.” More animated, she faced Mae again. “Let’s imagine that my back yard is a place associated with someone’s lost loved one.”

  “You have to go to a special place to find the spirit?”

  “It helps. Very few souls stay around as ghosts. Most of them move on, and for them to reassemble themselves in a way that’s meaningful to their loved ones there needs to be a strong call. So, if possible, I go with my clients to places where the departed person’s energy might be attracted to us.”

  When Mae had started working as a healer, she had sensed guidance from her maternal grandmother, a folk healer, who had died when Mae was ten. Had using Granma’s crystals that way called her? “Does it have to be a place that calls them, or can it be something else?”

  “I can use places, objects, music, favorite poems—but depending how long they’ve been on the other side, how close they are to another life, or how far into a higher plane they’ve moved, it can take a lot of effort at attraction to bring them back to communicate. There’s so much evolution after death, it’s very hard for some to return. Or, so they tell me.”

  “Dead people told you all that?”

  “Of course. How else would I know?”

  Azure led Mae to the shady back yard. Its collection of chimes was soothing, except for an annoying bamboo clacker that sounded like a recycling truck collecting plastic bottles.

  “In a real session,” Azure said, “the client would go with the medium to the place where they hope the soul will find them. If someone had
loved this yard, for example, the chimes would call them.”

  “What if the place is too far off?”

  “I’d try to call the soul here. The dead visit my home often. And then—yes, this will seem a little like an old-school séance—we’d hold hands.” She offered Mae her hands. The moment Mae had hoped for as a healer had arrived. “We’d concentrate on the feeling of love. The client sending love to the departed and the medium opening to the universal essence of love.”

  Mae tuned into the energy of the crystals she carried in her pocket as well as to the feeling of love, and sought the place in Azure that needed healing.

  At first it felt like a weak, broken spot. Internal bleeding of the soul. As Mae explored further, she found the source of the weakness, a tube-like structure in the back of Azure’s energy body, like a tiny throat. It seemed alien, a secret surgery done to her without her knowledge. This had to lead back to whatever was taking power.

  Mae started to follow the tube, but it began pulling on her. Alarmed, she let go. That pulling was familiar. She’d run into it before—in a witch. This time, it was coming at her through the witch’s victim. How could Mae attack the intruder without damaging the host?

  She called on the feeling of love again and filled the shared inner space with blue and white light, Azure’s colors. It didn’t work. The tube sucked up the healing. Mae couldn’t follow it without feeding it more. Frustrated and unwilling, she withdrew her efforts.

  Now what? This was her job. Azure had to be healed.

  A voice spoke so clearly that Mae almost thought someone else was in the garden. An old woman with an Appalachian accent. “I’m gonna do this, honey. You watch.”

  Granma?

  Rhoda-Sue Jackson’s blue-veined, knotty-knuckled hand reached into Azure, pulled the little tube out, and then patted the energy space inside her back together, like putting soil in place around a plant after weeding. “There. No worse than getting a splinter out of your young’un’s finger.”

  The vision fractured and vanished, replaced by a split second of lightning and black thunder in the inner world. Mae felt a chill, and quickly focused back on the love, the light, the warmth of Granma’s voice, and the energies of the crystals.

  “The departed loved one,” Azure said, “has come and gone.” She held Mae’s hands a little longer, and then let go to sink onto a bench under the bamboo clacker.

  Mae struggled to force herself back into her role. Her grandmother’s guiding presence had never been more than a feeling before. She wanted to take time to process what had happened—but she needed to close her boundaries again. Had that flash of lightning been a warning, the witch’s anger at being cut off? “Is it usually short like that?”

  “No, but it’s not unusual, either.”

  “Does the dead person speak through you, or to the client?”

  “Sometimes I hear them. Sometimes I only feel their presence, and my client hears them. Other times, the dead will move things, make signs in the physical world. If they’re still very close to this world, they can do that, or even make themselves seen. The further along their path they’ve gone, though, the more likely it is that only I hear them, and not the client. I spend more time among them.”

  Mae sat on the bench with Azure. “You must be really good at this. I actually felt like somebody showed up. And you weren’t even trying to do it for real. Do I just have a vivid imagination?”

  Azure closed her eyes. “No. Someone showed up.” Her pink mouth parted, perfect teeth shone in a radiant smile, and her eyes opened again, shining. “I could only feel her hands. I couldn’t see her face, and her voice wasn’t clear, but she felt like an old, country grandmother.”

  “So, an actual, real dead person showed up?”

  “Yes.” The medium clapped her hands together, beaming. “A healer from the other side.” She popped to her feet and headed for the door. “Would you like some more coffee? Another cookie?”

  Mae hesitated. Two dead people had come through her in two days. First Kandy, apparently directing Mae’s journey, and now Granma, not just guiding the healing but talking and visible. This wasn’t normal. Mae wanted to stay, to drop her role and talk with Azure psychic to psychic, but if she broke her cover to get advice or explanations, it would violate her contract and possibly jeopardize the rest of her work. “Thanks, but I need to get going.”

  Relieved by Azure’s healing, Mae got in her car and placed her crystals on the dashboard to cleanse them with sunlight. The interior was an oven. She left the door half open and rolled the windows down. Before her next appointment, she wanted to look at Azure’s past to see if Dahlia really was the attacker. Mae had considered asking the medium about any contact with Dahlia, but such questions might get back to the presumed witch.

  Mae took a quartz point from the dashboard and held it, her other hand resting on the zip-lock bag of cookies Azure had given her, and prepared for the journey. Where did that tube come from? Who or what does it feed?

  The tunnel swept her back into the blue-and-white living room.

  Dahlia stood just inside the door. Azure, her face pink and distressed, put Mr. Perkins into his cage, murmuring to him and smoothing his fur. Mae sensed a disturbed energy in the room. She suspected Dahlia might have kicked the bunny if he’d gnawed on her strappy suede sandals. Azure closed Mr. Perkins in his cage and took a seat on the couch.

  “My parents are dead,” said Dahlia, with no more feeling than if she had said they lived in Illinois. “Can you really contact them?”

  “Of course, if you want to.” Azure’s agitation melted. Her voice was full of compassion. “That must have been hard on you—to lose them so young. When did they die?”

  Dahlia flicked her hair back, glanced at a text message on her phone, and back at Azure. “That doesn’t matter. I just want to see what you get. Can you bring them in?”

  “We need to do a little preparation. Come over and sit with me.”

  Dahlia looked frankly repelled. She joined Azure but sat with her spine stiff and responded to the request to hold hands by flipping her palms up and staring. Azure’s voice, still tender, grew trancelike. “We will think of the family you lost. We will open our hearts to receive the family you lost.”

  While Azure closed her eyes and lifted their joined hands, Dahlia’s face tightened in concentration like someone trying to remember an answer on an exam. After a silence, Azure said, “Dahlia, I don’t see your parents. I see a tiny baby. A little boy. I can’t tell if he’s a well-developed fetus, or a terribly early premie.”

  Dahlia exhaled strongly, an animal sound of effort or warning.

  Azure recoiled a little, as if she’d been hit. “He’s gone. But I think he had something to tell you. Asking you to let him go. To let him move on.”

  Dahlia released Azure’s hands and let out another harsh breath. “What kind of crap is this? I asked to contact my parents and you bring up some dead fetus? So, like, is that yours or something?”

  “No. My boy is alive and well and eighteen years old. This boy was yours.” The medium was gentle but firm. “The family you lost.”

  “Bull.” Dahlia rose, opened her purse, and tossed a few bills on the coffee table. “That was worthless. I’m paying you half what you charge.”

  Leaving the door open behind her, she strode through the front garden, a hint of a smile barely curving her mouth. The vision closed.

  Mae cleansed her energy with the stones that had stayed in the sun.

  That wasn’t a throat or a tube in Azure’s energy field. It was an umbilical cord. Dahlia hadn’t attacked Gaia the way she had because of Gaia’s miscarriages. She did it to everyone, with the image of her own aborted fetus.

  No. Not aborted. Lily Petersen, dancer turned model, whose life revolved around her slim, taut body, wouldn’t let her pregnancy reach the end of a second trimester—a developed, viable fetus—if she planned to end it. She must have wanted the child.

  Chapter Twenty-Three
r />   Mary Kay and Hilda had arranged to meet Mae in the Railyard Park. It was so close to Jamie’s apartment, she was tempted to stop in to see him, but she only had a few minutes and he might still be asleep. Hoping these next healings would be as successful as Azure’s, Mae left her car in public parking and walked behind a row of studios and galleries and across Paseo to the Railyard.

  A red dirt path decorated with old train wheels led her past a bed of spiky agaves to a rose garden ringed with metal benches. In the center, a small bridge spanned a pond of blue glass pebbles and low-growing desert-hardy plants, the place she’d agreed to meet Hilda and Mary Kay.

  As soon as Mae reached the bridge, two women rose from a bench. One was a handsome, well-built brunette. She wore sunglasses and a broad hat, like Mae did. The other woman was thin and harshly tanned, with fair hair pulled back in a ponytail. Sun damage made it hard to tell her age. She dressed in a cross between cowgirl chic and imitation Navajo, with too much silver and turquoise, like Jill’s style but less gracefully executed. Dahlia would disapprove of the failures in both fashion and skin care.

  The brunette introduced herself as Hilda Davis and the tanned woman as Mary Kay Dieffenbacher, and then they led the way to a secluded table in the shade of a cottonwood tree. The breeze carried a scent of sage and dust, and someone’s greasy picnic.

  Mae gave them the same story about her project. Hilda said she would take her to see the angel paintings in a nearby gallery after Mae talked with Mary Kay. Mae started the interview the way she had with Azure. If it had worked once, it could work again. “Would you mind showing me, just make-believe, what a session with you would be like?”

  “Is that the best way for you learn about it?” Mary Kay’s fingers tapped on the table. “I can tell you about some of my case studies. And I can refer you to physicians who work with me for diagnostic confirmation and insights.”