Snake Face

by Amber Foxx

  “You’re not paranoid. Paranoid people see patterns that aren’t there.”

  “Nah, come on, it’s a coincidence,” Jamie said, his skin crawling at Wendy’s confirmation of his unease. He’d wanted her to assure him it was preposterous, not that it was reasonable. “I fuck up a lot, I forget stuff. It’s bloody stupid but it’s normal. I mean, here I am resting the fucking van again. I forgot to take it in, twice. That’s a pattern. The telltale sign of an imbecile.”

  “I’m talking about the thefts. Hotel room keys don’t have numbers on them, but they can let you in the building from outside late at night. Someone could have followed you, like maybe they did in Austin. That thief knew where your van was, right? And the thief in Austin hid what he’d done, so you wouldn’t notice right away. He made it look like your instruments were still there. This thief that took your clothes didn’t take what you’d notice, like your phone or the book next to the bed. He took the stuff in your suitcase and made the suitcase heavy. And he knew which room you were in. So he had to have followed you. It’s the same pattern.”

  “Fuck.” The single word dropped like a stone down a well. Jamie walked back to the van, looked inside at the emptiness. No cat, no drums, no didg.

  “Talk to me,” Wendy prompted.

  “Jesus.” Jamie pounded the van, closing his eyes against the fear that flew out from that emptiness. “Bloody hell. Do I have three lunatics after me?”

  “Three?”

  “Sylvie’s one.” He took a breath, turned his back to the van and leaned on the door. He could feel his heart pounding in his back as well as his ribs. “Then there’s the poisoner.”

  “Who?”

  “Gives me gifts—food. ’Nother nutcase that likes me. And then this thief.”

  “Could any of them be the same person?”

  “Nah. If Sylvie was in Asheville she’d have given me my flutes. If the thief was in Asheville he’d have taken stuff there. And the poisoner was in Asheville. At least the gift was. And they don’t do the same stuff. Why would the same person steal from me and give me things? Doesn’t make any sense. That’s three weird people around me.”

  “But the gift bag person and the thief are both invisible. And they were both in Raleigh. Maybe they are the same person.”

  “Jesus. Stop. You’re scaring the crap out of me. That makes them like—a stalker.” He shuddered. “Why can’t it be all different people? I’m a trauma magnet. Crap lands where I am.”

  “Jamie,” Wendy said, “why don’t you get back in your van? I know this is upsetting you. I don’t want you to have a panic attack in front of a truck.”

  “No worries. Some lunatic with a yellow gift bag will come swooping in and grab me in it like a net and save me, and then steal my keys and my flutes and leave me naked on the side of the road with a bar of chocolate.” Climbing back into the van, he felt his muscles and bones resisting that simple movement, and sank into the seat with a groan. “Bloody hell. My entire body hurts. Have I complained enough yet? Would you like to know what I think about the bloody fucking weather? Does the fucking sun ever come out here?”

  “It’s a tropical depression. This isn’t normal.”

  “You’re kidding. This weather is called depression?” A blast of laughter rattled him. “Jeeezus.”

  “I want to hear the van start again. And I want you to promise me you’ll keep an eye on your keys, and—”

  “Right.” The engine started when he turned the key. Good excuse to cut this appalling conversation short. “Crawling off up the road then. Catcha.”

  He ended the call, dropped the phone into a cup holder. Couldn’t take any more of that talk. Wendy had to be wrong.

  Jamie looked at his Durham directions. Bloody hell. He’d been driving to the bar where he’d be playing that night, not a hotel—he wasn’t even supposed to check out of the one in Raleigh. Durham was so close he was supposed to stay another night. He couldn’t go back, not after the theft. If he needed to sleep somewhere and couldn’t get a room, there was always the van. If he had it back from repairs.

  Not sure what else to do, he got back on his erroneous path, parked in the section of Durham where his show would be, and got out. The enormous white shirt lost its comic novelty as cold air blew through it. Now what? Sweaters? Ford place? Simple decisions seemed out of reach behind a fog. Must be that weird pad coffee. It hadn’t worked.

  He walked a few blocks, asked directions from a girl who looked like a college student, and found there was a thrift shop next to a coffee shop. Perfect. In the coffee shop, he ordered the largest size, black, and borrowed a pen from the barista. Perched on a tall stool at a counter along a brick wall, he breathed in the blissful scent of real coffee, and started a list on a napkin. Lists were reassuring—if he put the right things on them.

  Shirts, jeans. Sweaters. Socks. Underwear. He couldn’t buy socks and grundies used, though, that would be disgusting. That meant finding another store. What was the matter with this thief? Who would want someone else’s socks and grundies? He wrote on the list: locate big box store. More directions. That meant driving again. The van went on the list. He was not going to get distracted out of that again. Why was this all so difficult? Jamie drank his coffee like a prayer to the god of caffeine, hoping for a miracle in his state of mind.

  A woman sat beside him and immersed herself in a book. She had a foamy coffee drink in hand. Out the corner of his eye, while still trying to attend to his list, he noticed she had very small hands. Sylvie? Couldn’t be. She hadn’t seemed to look at him.

  Her book was old and worn like a library book, and she bowed over it, her dark straight hair hiding her face except for her nose, sharp in profile. Was he going to start thinking everyone was Sylvie? Were all small brunettes going to make him nervous? Stupid. She was only eccentric anyway, it wasn’t as if she was dangerous.

  He resumed expanding his list with minor things that he could feel good about checking off, like getting the Ford place’s number and finding a big old paper phone book. He was tired of calling information for numbers and writing them down, scrambling them, asking again, and calling again if he forgot to double-triple-check that he had them right.

  The small woman still ignored him, so she couldn’t be Sylvie. It was a coincidence that she was so petite and had that hairstyle. Finishing the list, he drained his coffee to the last drop and spun on the stool, ready to leave. Time to get new clothes. He could do his other errands with a better head if he felt he looked better.

  The woman set her book down and pointed at a paragraph. “Da Vinci says”—she had a Texas accent—“that fame should be drawn as a bird, covered with tongues instead of feathers.”

  Even while pinned by Sylvie’s bright little brown eyes, he had to acknowledge it was a brilliant observation. A perfect image. She closed the battered red cloth cover. A translation of Da Vinci’s notebooks.

  “This is fucking weird. I’m getting coffee and you’re next to me reading Da Vinci’s notebooks.” Jamie was embarrassed that his voice sounded so shaky. “What in bloody hell are you doing?”

  “I’m fascinated by genius.” She smiled. “Fascinated.”

  “I mean being here, not reading that.”

  She broadened her smile. “It covers both.” She pulled out her cell phone, held it to the side, and took a picture, before he could react to what she was doing. “You could have smiled, Jamie.”

  “Did I tell you my name?”

  She leaned into him with a bad attempt at thrusting out her virtually non-existent breasts. “I’m a fan.”

  “But—that’s not on my albums, or my web site. It’s all Jangarrai.”

  “You don’t remember? What’s the matter, cowboy? You getting confused? Stressed out?”

  “I don’t want women following me around.”

  “Oh my god, that is just so sweet. A musician who doesn’t want women following him around.”

  “I really don’t. Especially not married women. Can we jus
t arrange how I get my instruments back? I don’t want to play any games.”

  She sucked the cream off the straw from her frothy coffee and dropped her chin, gazing into his eyes in what looked like an inept attempt at sultry sensuality. “Now what fun would that be?”

  “So—what—you’re going to show up on the rest of my tour?”

  “I might.” She winked. “Fame is a bird, covered with tongues instead of feathers. You could write a song from that, don’t you think?”

  “Nah. Don’t need lyrics. I do my own.” Jamie picked up his coffee cup, realized it was empty, and put it down. “Call me when you’re back in Austin and I’ll get my stuff.” He started for the door.

  “Hold your horses, cowboy.” Sylvie waved his list at him. “You forgot something.” She frowned at it, then eyed him up and down as he came back and took the list from her. “How come you gotta buy all those new clothes?”

  “I got robbed.”

  He couldn’t tell from her cartoon of an expression if she was surprised or amused. “Again?”

  “Yeah. Again.”

  Pouting her lower lip, she put on a childish sorry look. “I hope they didn’t take you poor li’l kangaroo.”

  She burst into giggles as Jamie left. Sylvie might not mean any harm, but he hoped he never saw her again. Except, he had to. She had his didg, his drums, and his wheels.

  The list was long but Jamie shopped efficiently, forcing himself to focus. Without stopping to try things on, he grabbed shirts, pants, and sweaters from racks labeled as his size, and checked out. He could change later, maybe at the Ford place. They’d think he was weird, but—well, he was. Carrying the plastic sack of clothes, he looked both ways up the sidewalk outside the thrift shop.

  No sign of Sylvie. He walked to the van. If only he had someone like Naomi here to adopt him for a day and let him use her phone book and take him to a store where he could buy socks and underwear. What a pitiful thought. He should have taken Mae’s GPS thing—not that the thief would have left it.

  No, he would have. The thief left what was out in the open and stole the unseen. No, these weren’t the same thief. Yes, they were, and the thief was the poisoner—no, that look Sylvie gave him, that incompetent flirting—maybe she was the poisoner. No, she wasn’t in all the same places. He really did have three strange followers. Four, if they were different thieves.

  In the van, he sat for a while, unable to move, exhausted as if he had done something strenuous. Finally he turned to drop the bag of clothes in the back. The sight saddened him. The crap the thief had left. Gasser’s clean litter box and his little toy, a plastic ball with a bell in it. The heartbreaking night in Oklahoma came back, and Jamie wondered if Mae would find Gasser’s current address. Had she remembered to look again?

  A new idea struck him. Mae could check out the pipes and buckets and boxes. If the poisoner struck again, he could save the yellow bag. Mae could tell him about these peculiar people plaguing him.

  In the first burst of mental clarity all day, he called. She didn’t answer. In his let-down, that lone surge of hope crashing, Jamie didn’t leave a message. Mae was driving across the country with the Greek.

  When his phone rang a moment later, hope reared its useless little head again. It was Wendy calling, not Mae. “I just talked to Sylvie’s boss.”

  “He called you?”

  “No. I pretended it was a follow-up on your show—”

  “Fuck. Did he hate me for getting rotten after?”

  “Not at all. He said you were great and they’d love to have you back. Then I asked about Sylvie, said she’d been in touch with you a few times, and asked if he thought she’d got a crush on you. He said she’d never even heard of you before he booked you. He’s the fan. She was like ‘Who the hell is Jangarrai?’ until he showed her your web site.”

  Jamie tried to take this in. “She says she’s a fan now. Keeps taking my picture with her. Did he say she’s deranged or anything?”

  “No, totally the opposite. I mean, he wouldn’t tell me much, and I understand. If someone called my workplace and asked for information about one of the employees, I wouldn’t say much, either. But he vouched for her character, and said she had a good reason for her time off. He says she’s a reliable, steady employee, been with him since she was in college. He could trust her with anything. If she said she was returning your stolen things, he’d believe her.”

  “But—she’s—she’s stalking me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.” Sylvie had been nosy, looking in his pack and teasing him about the roo, but aside from that, had she really done anything? She brought him his flutes, she had his other things in storage, she liked his music even though she’d just discovered it, and she took his picture. Of course she’d spent the night in the area after his show. She wouldn’t drive straight back to Austin that night, so she easily could be in a coffee shop in Durham. It was a coincidence, but it wasn’t that bizarre. She was. Or was she? “I don’t trust my own judgment.”

  Wendy’s silence suggested she didn’t, either. When she spoke, she sounded cautious. “Maybe you were right the first time, and I was paranoid. She sounds like she may be all right.”

  “What if she’s at my show tonight?”

  “She could be. It’s right next door to Raleigh, and you got a great review. You should read it. I’ll send you a link. Don’t worry. I’m sorry I freaked you out about her. I should have called Dabney earlier. Relax. Just don’t get robbed again. Did you call the police about what happened in Raleigh?”

  “Nah. No time. Couldn’t see them wasting time on that stuff anyway. It wasn’t worth much. Had to get clothes, get the van in—fuck, I still haven’t done that.”

  “Then take care of that.”

  How? He still didn’t have a phone book. He didn’t want to call information again, or to struggle with numbers. It all seemed so large, so heavy, a Sisyphean effort. He wanted to drop the boulder and lie down and sleep. The coffee had failed him again, even the good stuff. What in bloody hell is the matter with me?

  “Jamie? Are you there?”

  He’d been staring blankly, absent in some way. “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Fix your van. Keep your guard up. You’ll be fine.”

  No, I won’t. I’m already not.

  Chapter Eleven

  Stamos drove Mae’s Focus, while Brazos played on the stereo. Rowdy, lively, danceable country with virtuosic guitar licks, rocking piano, and backup harmonies that owed a little to Motown.

  “I’m your bad sweetheart. Don’t it just kick your day,

  To see me lovin’ up another girl? Don’t you just have to say,

  ‘That’s bad, sweetheart’ and love me anyway.”

  Exams were over. Their luggage crammed the back seat and the trunk. The East Coast weather looked bad, with a hurricane in the Atlantic, but with any luck it would travel along the seaboard without coming ashore. They couldn’t postpone the trip waiting to see where it would go, and this was just a Category One storm, anyway. Mae wasn’t worried about it. She felt downright exuberant. The trip back East might have haunted her with the losses in her fractured family if she’d been going alone, but with Stamos, and especially with this big date en route, it felt more like an adventure.

  Both felt they’d done well on the morning’s exams and had taken naps to charge up for the long night. Once they’d caught up on the events of their days, Mae got her phone out of her purse to check messages. On her way to pick up Stamos she’d heard it ring a few times.

  A missed call from Jamie. No message. Maybe he was in one of those chatty moods where he had to talk about nothing, or one of those crises where he couldn’t breathe. She hoped it was the former, or that he’d had someone else to turn to if it was the latter.

  Hubert had left a message. She’d told him about her blunder, offering him as mechanic or consultant, and given him Jamie’s number.

  “Hey, hon. I talked to your friend Jamie. Why didn’t you tell
me he’s Jangarrai? Jen loves his music.” Mae was surprised at first, but then, Jen had been a musician once, been both a band geek and an athlete in high school. She’d played softball with Mae, and she’d played flute. Of course she would like Jamie’s music. “We’re gonna catch his show in Durham and check out the van for him.”

  Appreciation of Hubert’s kindness, and discomfort with his sharing his dating life, tugged Mae two ways. Even though she’d moved on, she had loved him like no one else. He shouldn’t still get to her, but he did, though with only a faint echo of the pain he used to cause.

  His message went on, “I worked on an eighty-six Aerostar earlier this year. Those were good little vans. They last forever if you take care of ’em.” Jamie didn’t take care of his and it had still lasted. “Brook and Stream say hey, they’re all excited about you getting here. Oh—and heads up, they figured out there’s no Santa and think they’re the smartest kids in Tylerton—so as you know. You don’t have to pretend their presents are from the North Pole. And Jen says hey, too. She thinks it’s cool I’m gonna work on Jangarrai’s van.”

  This brought Mae back to Jamie and his tour. The missed call might have been about Gasser, Jamie hanging up because he didn’t want to beg or nag. She hadn’t had time to look for the cat again, and she had promised she would.

  She asked Stamos, “You mind if I tune out for a few minutes?”

  “Not at all. I’m in touch with my inner trucker. Getting in the groove for the trip. I like to drive.”

  She smiled, and began to rummage in her purse for her crystals. “Well, trucker, I need you to turn the music down so I can concentrate. I want to look for Jamie’s cat again, see if I can find an address and get the cat back to him.”

  Stamos lowered the volume and whispered in mock awe, “A psychic journey in my presence? Will the inside of the car turn purple? Will I hear angels?”

  Mae teased back, “You’ll hear devils if you give me a hard time about it.”

  She chose crystals that enhanced clairvoyance, hoping to pick up as much detail as she could, and got the shirt with Gasser’s fur on it from its box behind her seat. It was hard to ignore the other energies pressing and pulling on her. Stamos. Her past. Jamie. With effort, she tuned into the monotonous hum of the tires for a kind of trance effect, focusing on her breath and the energy of the crystals and of the missing cat.