“No, you’re not either. Stay here.”
“But I can help,” TB insists.
Wanda chuckles at this. “I’ve got a gun, sweetheart. What are you going to defend me with?”
TB says nothing but I can’t help myself. “Remember that light in the convenience store.”
Wanda looks at me, her eyes narrowing, her gaze stern. I quickly pick up a cast iron pot. “I’m coming too.”
Her shoulders drop in defeat. “Stay behind me,” she says as she heads outside, casting a worried look in TB’s direction. TB manages a small smile but refuses to look at me when he motions for me to follow Wanda, him bringing up the rear. I know I shouldn’t have outed him but at least we’re not sitting in some moldy building while our friend gets murdered and our cat strung up.
The almost full moon’s high in the sky, which means it’s practically daylight outside. It won’t be long before Jack spots us but he and his flashlight are nowhere to be found. There’s a couple of outbuildings back here next to the warehouse and rows and rows of various palm trees. He could be anywhere. I try to remember what I saw in my vision but nothing looks familiar. Wanda, too, seems lost among the plant inventory, not knowing which way to turn.
And then, quietly, in between gusts of breezes coming off the Gulf, I hear Stinky’s cry. Nothing scary, just a cat letting us know where he is.
“That way,” TB says and heads in that direction.
Wanda grabs his sleeve. “Behind me.”
We follow in a line through a row of sago palms, their branches biting our legs as if they’re trying to stop us from hurting their owner. Never liked those things. As we reach the end of the row we notice a cinder block building behind the larger palm trees, next to a small moving van. Two little eyes peer out from the side of the building and I nudge Wanda, point in Stinky’s direction.
Now things feel weird, as if I’m a participant in a vision. I can tell Wanda feels it too. She pulls her gun out of her holster and holds it in front of her. We round the corner and spot Jack behind a tool shed in an area littered with used car pieces and various tools. He’s cussing up a storm while using his booted foot to move dirt on to something.
“Damn cat,” is the nicest thing he mutters.
Like a cat herself, Wanda quietly sneaks up on Jack and cocks her pistol. Jack hears the noise, stops what he’s doing, and straightens.
“It’s not what you think,” he says without turning around.
“What do I think?” Wanda asks.
“It’s not Elena.”
Wanda pulls out her cell phone and dials. After a beat, she instructs the person on the other end to “bring it on” and I suspect her colleagues are standing by.
“Don’t do this, Wanda,” Jack pleads. “For both our sakes.”
Wanda inches closer and grabs Jack’s flashlight from his hand. She moves the beam toward the earth and we can see the dirt has been disturbed as if an animal has dug something up and a man tried to move the dirt back.
“It’s not what you think,” Jack repeats.
Wanda leans over and pulls a piece of blue plaid fabric out of the dirt. When she shines the light on to the cloth, I make out that it’s a woman’s scarf.
“Wanda, listen to me.” Jack’s pleading now. “I can explain.”
Wanda tightens the fabric in her fist and clutches it to her chest. Her eyes brim with tears. “You son-of-a-bitch.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
She stands and points the gun straight at Jack. “How could you? She was your friend.”
I hear sirens in the distance and hope they get here before Wanda does something she will regret.
Jack sinks to his knees and drops his head on his chest. “I couldn’t take it anymore. He came here demanding things, wanting me to start distributing again and I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“He?” I ask.
Jack doesn’t look around or notice that I’m there. He stares at Wanda sadly. “He killed Elena, not me.”
I step forward because something’s not right here. I feel a buzzing in my head like I do before a ghost appears. It’s almost as if Elena stands behind me, listening herself.
“It’s not Elena,” Jack repeats.
It’s then I notice the Nikes, a pair of white Air Force One’s with a red stripe and heart on the back. My father loved those shoes and mom bought him the Valentine’s Day pair as a parting gift when they divorced. Since that day, I never saw my dad without them, even though his colleagues joked about his “silly shoes.”
“They’re girl shoes, Dad,” Sebastian used to tell him. “Buy some manly shoes.”
But John Valentine never took them off just as he never stopped loving Mom.
And I walk closer and the shoes’ trademark heart comes into view, the buzzing intensifies and I feel the ground rising to meet me. The world tilts and within seconds, I’m out cold.
Chapter Ten
I move my hand in front of my face but the darkness has eaten it up. My head pounds and I wonder if I hit something on the way to the ground. I think I’ve fainted but I can’t be sure and when I sit up and gaze around to find TB or Wanda, the darkness envelopes me like a blanket.
“Hello?” I call out but even my voice sounds hollow and dim.
Suddenly, Dad appears, an oasis of light in black. He, too, looks around as if trying to figure out where he is and why there’s so much darkness. When he spots me, a smile erupts.
“Sweetpea.”
“Dad.”
It’s then I remember the shoes and start to cry.
“What is it, honey?”
I try to regain control of my emotions. “What have you done?”
He reaches for me but the darkness acts like a barrier; we’re two beings on different planes of existence, a ghost and the living. “I’m worried about you, Vi. Are you sleeping enough?”
“Dad, were you involved in some kind of drug thing?”
He acts like he doesn’t hear me. “I’ve been thinking a lot and I hope you and your husband are able to move on. The death of a child is life-altering. When my brother died, I thought my world had ended.”
Not what I was expecting. “My world did end.”
He inches closer. “No, sweetie. Don’t let it. One thing I’ve learned here….”
“Where?”
“…is that you cannot hold on to pain. It will eat you up inside.”
“But Dad, we need to know….”
“I should have gotten counseling about Sean. I shouldn’t have let it turn into problems that affected all of you.”
“You weren’t to blame for your brother’s death.”
“I know that now. But it didn’t just ruin my life.”
“We’re all fine, Dad. We need to know why you were in….”
“Portia.” He doesn’t say more, pauses and turns sullen.
“What about Portia?”
John looks away, lost in thought.
“Dad?”
“There’s no manual to parenthood. You think you know what you’re doing, that you’ve got this. Then you realize you screwed up but it’s not a lesson plan or a thesis that’s riddled with errors. It’s a human being.”
Is he talking about leaving us?
“Why didn’t you come home, Dad? What made you stay in Texas?”
“I failed her. I failed you all,” he says quietly and then disappears into the darkness.
It’s then I smell something truly awful and open my eyes to find Spiderman hovering over me with smelling salts.
“Peter Parker?” I scream at the ENT and he laughs. Behind him I spot TB looking at me as if something shifted in my brain on my trip to the ground and now I’m completely insane.
I sit up on the tailgate of the ambulance — this is becoming a habit, I’m thinking — and rub my neck which feels sore. “We know each other,” I quickly tell my husband.
I met Peter when I fainted inside a cave outside Eureka Springs, my first press trip and my initiation with g
hosts of water. You’d have fainted too if you had found a bloody girl screaming at you in the cavern depths — and she wasn’t alive!
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Strange how in all the places in all the world I meet the one ENT I’ve met before. We share our personal stories, how I’m searching for information about my father and he had followed a love interest to the Texas Coast, one that didn’t pan out.
“The woman is crazy,” I whisper with a seductive grin and realize I’m flirting. Did I mention he’s cute as hell?
TB clears his throat behind us and it’s then I remember why I’m here. The vision of my father and that awful darkness come back in a rush. Peter notices my discomfort and begins asking a dozen questions that I faithfully answer but truth be told, I have no idea why I fainted.
While I’m being interrogated, I hear shouting. I look over and spot Wanda sitting on a wooden box next to the warehouse, her elbows resting on her knees while an enormous man towers over her. As Peter Parker — and yes, that’s his real name; the universe loves to throw me people with name alliterations and double meanings — takes my blood pressure, TB sits by my side on the tailgate.
“Apparently, Wanda took it upon herself to meet with Jack,” he tells me. “She planned backup with the local PD but didn’t clear it with the McAllen office. In fact, the McAllen police were pretty upset about it and her boss was on his way over here while we were sneaking in the back.”
That tall man is still yelling at Wanda, whose head is now hidden beneath her hands.
“Is she in trouble?”
“Think so.”
“Poor Wanda.”
“Yeah.”
I look at TB and notice tears in his eyes. “What?”
He swipes his eyes and looks away. “You fainting and her losing the love of her life.”
“What?”
TB sniffs and Peter slips him a tissue so I send Peter a grateful smile. He shrugs like it’s no big deal. What insane woman let this great guy go, but then I’m married to a man who has no problem showing emotions. Sometimes there are good men in the world.
“While you passed out, Wanda lost it,” TB continues after blowing his nose. “She fell on her knees at the grave and started crying, talking about how much she loved Elena.”
I knew there was something more between them.
“But it’s not Elena.”
The words come out of my mouth before I have time to think. I could easily blame my ADHD for this statement but I fear there’s more at work here. Maybe Mimi’s right, when we relax and let down our guard — I’m in an ethereal state right now — messages arrive from the other side. Both Peter and TB frown as they look my way.
“How would you know that?” Peter asks.
How indeed? I’ve no clue. Elena had to have died by water but could have been buried here after the fact. Dad’s shoes were at the gravesite but Elena could have taken them at some point.
“But, wait,” I say, as if talking to myself. And I really am. “Dad’s shoes were a size ten. I doubt Elena would have been wearing shoes that big. She was a small woman.”
Dad’s shoes. It all comes back to me, spotting those rare Nikes that he loved so much, talking to him in the intense darkness, Dad mentioning Portia.
“What does Portia have to do with all this?”
Peter and TB exchange looks as if maybe taking me to the hospital might be a good idea. That or the mental ward.
“I’m fine,” I tell them. “Just processing some information.”
TB exhales and relaxes. “She tends to do that.”
Before Peter can put in his two cents, that enormous man saunters over.
“Is she okay?” he asks Peter, who looks at me with the unspoken question.
“I’m fine.”
Peter packs up his bag and heads off, while Officer Weston — it’s on his nametag —towers over us like he did Wanda. It’s unnerving as hell. He’s about to start our interrogation but I beat him to it.
“It’s not Elena, is it?”
He pauses, mouth open, staring at me as if he’s five and I said there’s no Santa Claus. “What makes you say that?”
Any ordinary person would have said, “How do you know that?” but not a cop. Keep the questions on their end, keep the perps spilling their beans. They really are infuriating. Maybe I did hit my head on the way down because I feel cocky with this man. Or maybe I don’t like people yelling at my friends. But when I go to speak, give him a piece of my mind, I realize I have no idea why I think like I do.
“It’s the shoes,” TB says. “The person was wearing men’s shoes.”
My father’s shoes. All that bravado leaks out of me.
“What size were they?” I ask.
“What?” Weston is starting to get irritated. He wants to ask the questions.
“The shoes?”
“Why is that of your concern?”
My bravado’s starting to return. I look him straight in the eyes. “Because they were my father’s shoes.”
We spend the next twenty minutes discussing our ghost trip through Texas, from finding my father at my grandmother’s homestead to discovering bodies in McAllen and now a palm nursery on Padre Island. Thinking of Jack, I look around the busy crime scene to locate the former Texas Ranger but he’s nowhere to be found.
Finally, after another officer takes my statement and Weston threatens to charge us with trespassing, Peter Parker, bless his little Spiderman heart, arrives and tells all that I need to rest, that I may have a concussion, and the interviews are over. Weston acquiesces and lets us go.
I give my old ENT friend a big hug and TB and I head toward the van, ready to get back to that Airbnb and hit the sack. I look for Wanda in all the activity but she’s disappeared as well.
I suddenly halt and TB nearly runs into my back.
“Where’s Stinky?”
TB grabs my hand and leads me on but I protest, pull back, and demand that we look for him. “TB,” I exclaim. “We can’t leave him here.” But TB keeps walking.
Finally, when we hit the church parking lot, my heart about to burst from my chest, TB stops to let me reach his side. He nods in the direction of the van and there’s our sweet feline, lounged out by the trash, enjoying the remnants of a pork chop. I scoop up our child and hug him tight.
Once inside the van, I place my cat — who’s beginning to smell like eau de dumpster — back in my lap and lean my pounding head once again on TB’s shoulder. TB kisses my forehead while Lean on Me by Bill Withers plays on the radio. I start to think how apropos that song is when it concludes and Undercover Angel by Alan O’Day comes on. I’ve never liked this song but the timing makes me laugh. At first, it’s a snort that’s becoming way too common these days, then a rash of giggles until I finally break out in full laughter mode.
I sit up and look at my husband but he’s not enjoying this.
“Oh, come on, you have to admit it’s pretty funny.”
“I’ll laugh if Witchy Woman by the Eagles comes on.”
And that makes me laugh even harder.
I’m thankful for the synchronistic music to lighten our emotions and the weird night we’ve had, but walking into our Airbnb takes our strange mood a few notches higher. Aunt Mimi stands on the patio, arms outstretched toward the moon, reciting incantations.
And she’s butt naked.
TB takes one look at her and moves toward our bedroom with lightning speed. I slide the glass doors open and join her.
“You know, Aunt Mimi, the owner lives upstairs.”
Her eyes are closed and her recitations never cease. I stand there watching her for a few seconds until I realize that I’m both interrupting her and that moon spell will not end soon. I move to leave but she opens her eyes and grabs my sleeve.
“Where have you two been?”
“Long st
ory best told over breakfast.” And when said witch has clothes on.
“I want to hear everything.”
“You will. But maybe it’s time to get dressed before the owner sees you.”
Mimi smiles and it’s then I notice the moon reflected in her eyes. Weird. Didn’t the Eagles sing that?
Woo hoo, witchy woman
She got the moon in her eye
I shake my head and grab her elbow. “Let’s get you inside.”
Mimi pulls back. “Do you know what I was doing?”
I shake my head, but her irises still contain that almost full moon image. “Communing with nature?”
She shakes her head, more than likely at my inability to grasp the Craft. “It’s called ‘Drawing down the moon,’ a ritual we practice at the full moon.” She nods to the glowing orb in the sky. “We’re not quite there yet but it’s growing, a waxing gibbous, so the power’s still strong.”
I stare at her wondering what the hell she’s talking about it and she shakes her head again. This time I know it’s due to my cluelessness.
“Don’t you know anything about the phases of the moon?”
I wrap my arms about my chest because it’s getting frickin’ cold out here. But what I’m really thinking is my middle-aged aunt has no clothes on.
She appears to get the message and pulls on her robe.
“I take it you studied something about the moon in your science classes,” she says.
“Yes, Aunt Mimi. The moon goes through phases every twenty-eight days as it revolves around the earth.” And to show that I studied science and not paganism, I add, “And it appears to be growing each month, then fading because of the earth’s position in between the moon and the sun.”
Mimi smiles because she catches what I’m saying. “And the tides are higher when the moon apparently grows larger.”
“Because of the earth’s gravitational pull.”
Mimi tightens her belt around her generous middle and gazes up at the moon. “The full moon has the largest tide, and since we’re made up of mostly water, the moon affects us all.”
I’ve heard this from many people, including ENTs and nurses who swear the hospitals and mental wards surge with patients during full moons. Whether that’s scientifically true or not, I can’t say.
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