Snake Face Page 27

  He froze, eyes wide, then burst out laughing. “Fuck.” The word got past his filters at full volume. “Yeah. Why not, if it helps? He’s got me learning to cook, not scared of food like it could attack me. I even make vegan brownies and stuff I used to think could jump up and make me eat it, y’know? And I’m all right. It’s the head. Not the food. And exercise that makes you happy. Y’know? I hate bloody gym crap, so I climb, and bike, and dance—have fun. Find what you love.” He looked at Sylvia, hesitated, and said softly, “I think it’s better than surgery, seeing a shrink.”

  “I’m sure it is.” She spoke with the forced patience of an adult humoring a child. “I’ll remember that. But if you didn’t have surgery, what happened to your stomach?”

  “My stomach? Fuck, it’s still there.” He rubbed a hand across his belly. “The last ten pounds live there.”

  Sylvia started to speak, and then stopped. She smiled. “Thanks for your time. Have a good date.”

  Mae’s imagery shifted suddenly, breaking up and reforming. Sylvia stepped into the doorway of another office. Lisa Savage, in the middle of grading exams, looked up coolly, her red pen poised.

  “Excuse me,” Sylvia said. “Sorry to bother you. It’s not about physics. It’s about Mr. Ellerbee.”

  Lisa had a voice like a 1940s film star. “Close the door, Sylvia. Have a seat.” She folded her manicured hands on her desk. Her careful response revealed no emotion. “Why do you think you should talk to me about him?”

  “I know this will seem like it’s none of my business, but I like you, and I think you should know.” Sylvia fidgeted. “Okay, so—ever since that day Mr. Ellerbee put those flowers on your desk, it’s been obvious he’s really into you.”

  “He does—” Lisa Savage paused and smiled, “wear his heart on his sleeve.”

  “Anyway, I have to explain the background. I read some articles for a paper for my AP psychology class by this psychologist here in Santa Fe, Dr. Carl Gorman. He does some kind of experimental therapies for people who have problems with medications. Depression, anxiety, OCD, that kind of patients. Helping them go all natural, I guess you’d call it. Off their meds. And when I was in Mr. Ellerbee’s office to look for the rehearsal schedule, I saw Dr. Gorman’s name on his calendar.”

  “There could be more than one Dr. Gorman.”

  “I know. I thought of that, but you don’t see other kinds of doctors twice every week, do you?”

  “I see. You’re concerned that I might be getting involved with a man who is ... unstable?”

  “Maybe. I mean, he’s all over the place. Moody, you know. Excited, and then mad at us, then so sorry he was mad at us, then so happy if things go well—you know.”

  “Colorful.” Lisa studied Sylvia. “But you’re telling me you think he’s something more than colorful.”

  “I do. And, well, dating someone who’s still seeing a shrink—I’d hate to see it get messy for you. I think you’re such a cool teacher, Ms. Savage. I want you to be okay.”

  “Thank you, Sylvia. By the way, you got a ninety-eight on your test. You are an incredibly bright girl. Even if you don’t mind your own business.” Lisa nodded toward the door and picked up the red pen. “I need to get back to your classmates who have no future in physics.”

  “Yes, of course. Please don’t tell him I mentioned this.”

  The Savage laughed softly. “I’m smarter than that. And I trust you are.”

  Mae drew back from the vision, her emotions interfering with her concentration. Sylvie had been a stalker before she was angry with Jamie. Had she even had a paper to write, or had she looked up the articles by Jamie’s psychologist to feed her obsession?

  Mae flipped through the diary to the stubs of the torn-out pages. They were followed by a possibly related entry: Backfire. He broke up with the wrong person. No more G on his calendar. As Mr. E would say, FUCK!

  On the rest of that page Sylvia reacted with anger, relief, and shame to Dylan Roybal protecting her from a mean-girl incident. Nothing more about Jamie. Mae set the diary down. What did this tell her about Sylvie’s goals?

  The girl had never been a normal kid with a crush after all. She had tried to destroy Jamie’s new relationship by bringing up Dr. Gorman’s specialty area, trying to control her love object’s life even when she stood no chance of having him herself.

  To what end was she manipulating his life now? Mae turned the black Stetson over. There was a third person in this story. Was Joe Wayne the new Dylan—Sylvie’s bad boy protector, or the new Jamie—her romantic obsession? Sylvie wanted to make Joe Wayne jealous of Jamie. Why?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Even though every answer only brought up more questions, Mae wanted to send Jamie off knowing as much as possible. She still had to check on Gasser’s safety.

  It was past midnight. She’d planned to get up early when Pamela did, and drive to Cauwetska now that the town had power again, but Arnie would be at work and the twins still in school. Jamie had a short drive tomorrow, too. They could both sleep in and have time to talk about what Mae had learned. Since Pamela had her husband home now, she probably wouldn’t mind not having her guests at breakfast. Mae sent a text she knew Pamela would check first thing in the morning. Jamie and I need to sleep. I’ll lock up and bring you your key at whichever office you say to. Thanks a million from both of us.

  Hoping her mind would cooperate with yet more psychic work, she got Gasser’s furry nest shirt out of its box. Using the same crystals, Mae sought the cat. He was in the garage, alone. In the dim light that came under the door, all she could make out was the white of his front paws. A light came on, and Roxana, dressed for her run with the basenjis, came in from the house with his water dispenser. She set it on the floor in the back of the garage near his food dispenser, some gardening equipment, and two motorcycles. Behind the cat’s feeding station, metal shelves with blue tarps bore shapes that suggested Jamie’s instruments. The bottoms of the drums were just visible.

  Roxana took her pink cell phone from the pocket of her shorts and made a call. The only Spanish phrase Mae understood was “el Gordo.” Fatso. Gasser. The pet sitter sounded exasperated, mentioning Sylvie. Mae got the impression that Roxana might be talking to Joe Wayne about Sylvie and the cat.

  Gasser ate and drank, and then made an effort to climb, putting his front legs on the lowest shelf and contracting mightily. On his third attempt, he got a hind leg up, flopped, and scrabbled the fourth leg up. Roxana’s expression suggested he’d farted in the process. Still on the phone, she went back into the house without petting him or talking to him, and Gasser collapsed against the side of one of Jamie’s drums. The light cut off.

  Leaving the vision, Mae felt both reassured and worried. Gasser was alive and well, but relegated to the garage. The event had to be earlier in the day, or even the day before. Roxana wouldn’t be doing her pet-care duties in the middle of the night. Had she complained to Joe Wayne about the cat? If so, Joe Wayne and Roxana could agree to give Gasser away. If this was yesterday, perhaps they already had.

  It took more mental effort than Mae thought she had left in her, but she shifted her attention to Joe Wayne’s hat, seeking contact with him that would tell her about the fate of the cat.

  Joe Wayne Brazos was in a hotel room again, sitting at a table across from a king-size bed and gazing at the screen of his laptop. He was alone, and had a cigarette, but no beer. “I think I see it, yeah, why you think there’s a song in it. Keep going.” He had Sylvie on Skype. On the table lay a sheet of paper onto which he had scratched a few words. Shipwreck, beauty, goddess of love.

  The setting behind Sylvie on the screen also looked like a motel room, a white wall with a generic landscape print. She drawled impatiently, “Da Vinci goes on about pleasant hills and flowery verdure and wandering mariners. I think we don’t use that shit except maybe the wandering sailors. Then he’s back to the wrecks and this place being the shrine of Venus.”

  Sylvie sipped bottled i
ced tea, set it down, and held up a battered old book to read aloud. “ ‘Alas! How many ships have foundered here! How many vessels have been broken upon these rocks?’ ”

  “Yeah, people love a shipwreck.” Joe Wayne wrote: Fascination with watching someone wreck—ship or person. “But it’s not gonna be a song actually about shipwrecks. You’re into the metaphor as the meat of the song, right, babe?”

  “Of course. No one but you would actually care about some ancient history shit.” Sylvie closed the book. “How did you do with my other Da Vinci notebook stuff?”

  “I’m almost finished with ‘Hope Dies,’ and it is so damned good, babe. You’ll love it. I’ve got this much on the other. Don’t know what to call it yet.” He sang a melody heavy with longing and sadness.

  “If you value your liberty, if freedom to you is so dear,

  Please don’t ask me what I want, I want the thing that you fear.

  May you never discover, my face is love’s prison. My face is love’s prison ...”

  Sylvie sat up straighter, excited. “You leave it hanging?”

  “I’m kinda thinking that, yeah. No rhyme. Fill out the phrase on the piano. Makes it feel like the guy in the song feels, you know? Unfinished, suspenseful, kind of empty.”

  “I like it. Not a radio hit, though.”

  “No, but the other one will be, I guarantee. I’ll play it for my next show in Austin—after you hear it first, of course. When are you heading home?”

  “Tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Thank god. Get my damned dogs out more. They hate doing time in the pen. And get rid of that goddamned cat. Don’t know what got into you. Roxana says he stinks.”

  Sylvie put the book down and swung her feet up on the table so the bottoms of her tiny toes showed in the screen. She sounded relaxed and indifferent. “Fine. No cat.”

  “Keep it away from my basenjis. You remember what the breeder said. ‘Not good with non-canine pets.’ I don’t want my babies going bad on me.”

  “I said it’ll be gone, all right?”

  “Okay. You’ve got the rest of the week, but ... well, hell, you know that.” He wrote Shipwreck at the Shrine of Venus, and smiled. “You always know my schedule better than I do.” He added another line, seeming to disengage from Sylvie as he sang it softly. My friend’s another shipwreck at the shrine of Venus.

  She chugged her tea and then toyed with the empty bottle. “You haven’t asked me how my sister is.”

  “’Cause it’s a fucking lie.” He snapped back to attention, away from his song in progress. “Christ, Syl, you send me a picture of this dude instead of her, and then say you ran into an old friend. Really? What the hell are you up to? He sure as hell doesn’t look like he wants you in the picture. It’s like a damn paparazzi shot.”

  Sylvie banged the bottle down and swung her feet to the floor. “He is an old friend. From way before you, in fact. In Santa Fe. And my sister really was in the hospital.”

  “See if Dabney buys it. Not that you need the job. Jeez, you know I’ve got you covered.”

  “No I don’t. I trust you about as far as I can throw you.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to try.” Joe Wayne burst out with a long, loud laugh at his own joke. Mae picked up again the odd resemblance to Jamie, a similar energy in that passing moment. “Stay out of trouble, woman.” Then he softened. “Feels like something ain’t right. I can’t place it.” He sighed. “Get on home. I know damn well you’re not in Santa Fe.”

  Sylvie bristled, challenging but teasing. “You know where I am?”

  He frowned, sucked smoke, and blew it out with a kind of cough. “General vicinity, yeah. You’re less than fifty miles away from me and haven’t even stopped by.”

  She tossed her hair. “Thought you might have company.”

  “I’d send ’em home,” Joe Wayne practically whispered, velvety and sweet. “Kick ’em out on their bare nekkid be-hinds. Always will, for you.”

  Silence fell between them. It was the most peculiar fight, if it had been one, that Mae had ever seen. It might even have been foreplay.

  Joe Wayne scribbled on his song notes, He’s let go the rudder, surrendered control, blinded by beauty that’s stolen his soul??? My friend’s another shipwreck at the shrine of Venus. “You know, this new album is gonna re-brand us. A lot of it’s heavy and dark. No jokes, no mischief. I wonder if my audience is ready for that. It’s like the music I should put out when I’m forty or something.”

  “Get some other singers on it. We can bring in some people who have that kind of ... I can’t think of the word for it.”

  He spoke in a low, solemn voice. “Gravitas.”

  “You pompous ass. Where’d you come up with that?”

  “Don’t mess with an English major, math girl. I got words coming out my ass.”

  “Out your gravit-ass.” She paused, smirked, and Joe Wayne chuckled. Sylvie said, “We can ask some of the older folks around Austin, maybe Sherry Conley and Gerry Baker.”

  “No. I was thinking about some new people, not even country. Artsy types, alternative music. People you won’t listen to.”

  “Why? I hate that shit.”

  “It’d bend better conceptually, you know? And we’d get that audience, too.”

  “All right. I might buy that, Mr. Snob. Test me. Who’d you have in mind?”

  Joe Wayne took a beat, and barely cracked a smile. “Jangarrai.”

  Sylvie’s face vanished. She had quit Skype.

  Joe Wayne shook his head and turned to pick up a guitar, singing to himself.

  “I miss my old-time landline phone,

  With the big ol’ click and the dial tone ...”

  He held still, frowning, then strummed and hummed. “Need a rhyme ... hmhm ...” He plucked a few notes and then sang the end of the improvised verse. “She hung up on me.”

  Quiet and inward, he leaned on the instrument, eyes closed. When music emerged again, it was strong and fully formed, a sad song of classic country simplicity.

  “Forsaking all others ’til death do us part

  Comes first in a long line of lies.

  Vows begin...” He struggled for the high note on this line.

  Hope dies.”

  On the last words he dropped into his rough-edged but perfect deep notes. Opening his eyes, he growled and balled up the paper with the seed of a song on it. “Shit. That goddamn Jangarrai could nail it.”

  Mae left the vision with a mix of reluctance and discomfort. She had her answers. Basenjis were not reliable with cats. Gasser might be in danger if Sylvie had a mind to hurt him. She’d be alone with him and had promised to get rid of him.

  And then, after getting this answer, Mae had kept looking. What was the matter with her? Had she turned into some kind of psychic stalker? She’d abandoned any respect for Sylvie’s privacy, but Joe Wayne—even if he’d hurt Stamos—hadn’t done anything to deserve the intrusion. Maybe she’d learned something valuable, something that would protect Jamie, that would explain Sylvie’s motives, but it felt as if she’d simply peered into a hotel room too long. It made her think of her father’s advice for handling mean girls and bullies at school. Don’t let one make you one. She almost had.

  Mae stood and used a snow quartz stone to clear her field, and then carried her crystals down to the kitchen to rebalance their energies in salt water. As she gazed at them in the glass bowl, the single light over the stove catching their facets and colors, she reflected on what she’d just done. Her anger at Sylvie had made her careless.

  Hubert had hated her psychic work because he thought it was like stalking. For exactly that reason, Mae was usually careful about deciding to use her gift. She sometimes saw things she didn’t mean to, but with practice she’d gotten better at controlling and directing her Sight. What she’d just seen had not been an accident. It had sucked her in. It was fascinating.

  The relationship was nothing like she had expected, not the arrogant jerk using his wife as a doormat,
taking advantage of her creative talent and otherwise treating her badly. Joe Wayne was arrogant—but so was Sylvie. No one was boss. They were equals in a strange tango, like nothing she’d ever seen. Mae knew what a bad marriage was like, with her alcoholic unfaithful first husband. And what a good marriage was like, for four of her five years with Hubert. Joe Wayne and Sylvie were something else altogether, off her map.

  Unless she had to do it to help Jamie, she had no business looking any further into whatever went on between them.

  She rinsed and dried the stones and went back upstairs. In the hallway, she paused. Jamie’s light was on. She could tell him what she’d learned, but none of it was reassuring. He would worry so much about Gasser, she decided against knocking. Anyway, Jamie might be sleeping with the light on.

  Suddenly his door flew open. Startled, Mae let out a squeak that turned into a giggle. A sheeted form, arms waving, wailed softly, “Something’s haunting you.”

  They sat on his bed, Jamie tangled in the sheet, laughing.

  “I tried to walk quiet,” Mae said.

  “Ears like a bat.” He pushed his ears forward, made a tiny sound as if echolocating, then lay back, hooking a finger in a belt loop of her jeans. “Can I feel your bum?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s so pretty.” He studied her curves, glanced up at her. “Want to tell me what was bothering you, then? Why you’re up?”

  “Not tonight. I’m tired, and I kinda hoped you’d be asleep.”

  “Can’t. Need Gasser. You could lie here and purr, pass a little wind ... And he does this.” Jamie took Mae’s hand and placed it against his cheek. “Are you lonely? Is that what’s bothering you?”

  She withdrew her hand and looked away. “Not really. I like being alone.”

  “Bloody hell. Get over it. You need company.”

  She suspected he was trying to tell her that he was so lonely he couldn’t sleep, disguising it as flirting and joking. Keeping her tone light, she smiled at him. “That was almost as good as ‘Brace yourself, sheila!’ ” Mae rose to leave before she could get swamped with Jamie’s needs. He confused her too much. Made her smile and feel warm, made her want to take care of him—and made her worry. “I’m gonna say good night now.”