Shaman's Blood

by Anne C. Petty

  Resolved, he jaywalked across the street and pushed open the glass and brass doors of a well-known piano bar. A hostess approached him, menu in hand, but Ned shook his head.

  “I’m just going to the bar.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Enjoy your stay, sir.”

  Ned sat down at the bar and looked over the crowd. The place was expensive yet laid back, a casual-but-upscale kind of place he’d been in only once before. He looked over the drink menu and saw that he had just enough cash in his pocket for one order.

  “Ginger ale on the rocks,” he said, looking past the bartender at the array of tables and booths reflected in the expanse of mirror behind the man. The place was moderately filled, mostly with couples, but there were enough singles scattered around to get his hopes up.

  He drained his drink, and sat fingering the empty glass. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “Can I get that refilled for you?”

  Ned looked the guy over. Not too old, conservative clothes, understated jewelry, new shoes. Bland Midwestern face. He could have been anything from a college professor to an advertising executive, or a successful dealer.

  “All right.”

  The man picked up Ned’s glass and handed it to the bartender. “Give him a refill of whatever he’s drinking.” He sat down beside Ned. “Name’s Grant. Yours?”

  “Ned.”

  “Do you come here much? I haven’t seen you before.”

  “Now and then,” said Ned, watching as the man took a money clip from his inside jacket pocket and peeled off a twenty from a sizeable wad. The edge of a Rolex peeked out from under his shirt cuff. He paid for the drink and put the money back in his jacket. Ned decided drug dealer was a definite possibility. He needed to be careful.

  “What about you?” asked Ned. “You come here much?”

  “Whenever I’m in town.”

  “You’re not local, then?”

  Grant shook his head. “I do business around the country, but this is my favorite town. I always try to arrange it so that my west coast connection is in San Francisco.”

  The bartender returned with a full glass, and Grant took it from him. He held it, looking at Ned with frank appraisal.

  “And you?”

  “I’ve lived here for about nine years; I guess that makes me sort of local.” He reached for the glass, his fingers barely grazing Grant’s hand.

  “You here by yourself?” Grant asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Want some company?” Then Grant laughed. “Well, of course you do. Why else would you be sitting here talking to me. Am I right?”

  Ned allowed himself a grin. “You’re good. Pegged me right away.”

  “So, Ned … let’s cut to the chase. How much do you want?”

  “I’ll do whatever you want for a thousand dollars,” said Ned without blinking.

  Grant’s barking laugh ricocheted off the leather and brass surfaces of the bar. Heads turned, then looked away.

  “Nobody’s butt is worth that much! I’ll pay you four hundred.”

  Ned hesitated. It wasn’t nearly as much as he needed to get him across the country in a hurry, but he also wanted to get this over with.

  Grant was leaning toward him. “Why do you need so much? Debts to pay?”

  Ned swallowed. “Family emergency. I need to get home.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Florida.”

  Grant leaned back on the stool. “I tell you what, Ned from Florida. You show me the best time I’ve ever had, and you might get more than four hundred out of me.”

  “Done.” Ned stood up. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I imagine my hotel suite is more comfortable than whatever loft you live in. Am I right again?”

  Ned smiled with his teeth. “Lead away.”

  Riding in the cab to Grant’s hotel, Ned was relieved that the man made no overture to touch him or in any way indicate that they were more than two business colleagues out for a drink. The cabbie dropped them off in front of a restored turn-of-the-century luxury hotel near the Financial District. It wasn’t until Grant had unlocked the door to his suite and dropped his suit jacket on a velvet side chair that he made any reference at all to their business in hand.

  “You’re a pretty boy, Ned. Are you part Mexican, or what?” He took two beers from a small icebox and handed one to Ned. Then he sat down on a chaise beside the wide window looking out over the lights of the city. “Make yourself at home. I’m not in a hurry … unless you are.”

  “I’m not,” Ned lied, barely sipping his beer. He sat down in an overstuffed chair opposite the man from out of town.

  “I like you, Ned,” Grant said, taking a long swallow from the bottle sweating around his fingers. “I don’t really have any basis for that, since we barely know each other. But I promise you this—you do me right, and I’ll take good care of you.”

  “Ready whenever you are, but I’d like to see the money, if you don’t mind.”

  Grant laughed. “Before I even find out if you’re worth all that cash or not? You’re pretty demanding.” He sat still, looking at Ned. “I like that.”

  He got up and went to retrieve his jacket, pulling out the money clip. He tossed it onto the glass table between them. “It’s all yours if I like what you’re selling.”

  Ned reached out for the clip and unfolded the wad of bills. He stopped counting when the quick tally in his head went past six hundred. “I think it’s enough.”

  Grant turned out the lights in the sitting room and walked to the bedroom. Ned followed.

  “So, Ned, do you like to give or receive?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Grant unzipped his expensive trousers and let them fall to the carpet. “You do know what to do, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Ned, biting his lip. “I know.”

  Chapter 10

  July 11, 2009—Present Day

  “There he is,” said Margaret, waving.

  Hal came toward them across the baggage claim lobby, impeccable in a well-tailored black suit, oblivious to the midsummer Miami heat.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said, a bit breathless. “Airport traffic is worse than I remembered.”

  “No problem, we just got here.” Alice hugged him; he kissed her cheek and gave Margaret a quick scrunch around the shoulders.

  “I’ve booked rooms for all of us at the Sheraton on the beach, so it’s a bit of a drive.” He helped them find their suitcases and carried them out to a waiting taxi.

  Settled into the back seat with Margaret, Alice watched the cityscape roll by, white and tan and shaded glass set against the impossible blue that was the sky on a clear day over the Miami coastline. She hadn’t been home in years and couldn’t resist pointing out familiar landmarks to Margaret as they cruised along the Dolphin Expressway. Passing over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach, they were soon rolling past Art Deco hotels resplendent and uniquely tacky in their restored facades of pastel aqua and shell pink.

  “As I told you on the phone last night, South Beach is where your mother and father met each other,” said Hal over his shoulder from the front seat. “I believe he was working as a waiter in one of the hotel bars, or something like that.”

  Alice and Margaret craned their necks, taking in the row of hotels along Ocean Drive. To their right lapped the blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Ned Waterston held several different jobs in the year we came to know him,” Hal continued. “Being a waiter was only one of them. Suzanne told us he painted portraits as a street artist. I can’t confirm that, although his artistic talents were genuine. I have a pencil sketch he did of Suzanne that is quite good.” Hal’s voice was level, yet Alice now knew about the strife over Suzanne’s sudden and all-encompassing passion for this mystery man.

  Questions and misgivings swirled in Alice’s mind as they got checked into their hotel room and dressed for the funeral service. Throughout the brief priva
te ceremony in the chapel of the moss-covered Episcopal Church long supported by the Blacksburg family, all Alice could think of was her shifting assessment of Ned Waterston. At the interment, attended by a handful of ageing family friends and Hal’s business associates, an urn containing Suzanne’s ashes was installed in an alcove of the Blacksburg mausoleum beside both her parents. Alice realized Hal was telling her something.

  “—here next to her. I’m showing you this just so there’s no confusion when my time comes, which I hope will not be soon.” He said this last with an off-center smile, as if half of his mouth could not decide whether it was an appropriate reaction.

  “What? Oh, right. In the slot beside her.” Alice nodded, hoping her face didn’t mirror what she was thinking. Where was the line between sibling affection and unhealthy obsession, and how long had it been since Hal crossed over? The thoughts she was trying not to think made her skin crawl. Was her family completely screwed up on both sides? It seemed lately that the people most important to her were not at all what they seemed.

  * * *

  That evening, the three of them sat poolside, watching the lights of cruise ships on the horizon. The night sky lit up far out over the water where a distant storm silhouetted the clouds. A stiff breeze was kicking up the surf, silvery dark in the gloom, in stark contrast to the rippling, lagoon-style swimming pool with its golden artificial lighting.

  “I’ll drive you to the airport in the morning,” Hal said, “so don’t worry about calling a cab.”

  Alice watched the light show behind the growing thunderheads and then finally turned to Hal. “So, I guess now’s the time.”

  Hal glanced at Margaret.

  “No secrets,” said Alice. “Ned was Margaret’s grandfather. She has as much right to know about him as I do.”

  Silence again, and then Hal began. “The family, myself especially, considered him completely unfit for Suzanne. She was bright, educated, had been abroad. That trip to Europe was our gift for graduating from college with high marks. She had ambitions to become an interpreter or teach internationally. Ned Waterston ruined all that.”

  “What did he do,” asked Margaret, “get her pregnant or something?”

  Alice glared. “No! They were already married when I came along.”

  Hal nodded. “That’s true. In fact, you were probably conceived in Australia. We were concerned to learn about the marriage because no one in the family trusted him. Somehow he’d convinced Suzie to move in with him, but we’d hoped it wouldn’t last long. Obviously, those hopes were futile.”

  “Where was Ned from?” Alice tried to keep her expression neutral.

  “That I don’t know.”

  “But you do,” she pressed. “In one of those letters you gave me she said he was from Florida, like her.”

  “Well, then, you know as much as I do on that score. I had a background check done on him, just as a precaution. Not only was there no record, the man did not even have a birth certificate.”

  Alice was stunned. “But you have to have something, don’t you, to get a driver’s license or a passport?”

  Hal shrugged. “Apparently he found a way. I’m just telling you what I know.”

  Alice chewed this over. “But there must have been something worthwhile about him, don’t you think? I don’t know what Suzanne was like before she met him, but I just can’t imagine her falling for somebody who was an outright con artist.” There. She’d said what Hal was implying, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

  Margaret was watching them closely, and Alice wondered how all this was going down. Almost fourteen, Margaret was savvy in many ways, smart, bratty, with Alice’s stubbornness. There was another inheritance, more disturbing and ephemeral, but the dim trail leading back to its origin was slowly coming to light with the discovery of Ned’s artwork. Margaret experienced what their neighbor Raine referred to as “prescient” moments, which was to say images of future events or details of places she had never been washed across her waking mind. These episodes were often accompanied by headaches or a loud ringing in the ears that persisted for up to an hour. Sitting in the safety and comfort of the Sheraton cabana, Alice faced the knowledge that both she and Margaret were carriers of something dark, something lethal, that came from Ned.

  Plus, there was the shadow-shifter that had defined Margaret’s childhood nightmares. She’d seen the Quinkan rock art images in Alice’s Land of Legends exhibit at the museum and looked it up on the Internet where Queensland rock art websites were a dime a dozen. Margaret claimed to have encountered it, physically manifested in the real world, much as Alice had seen it in that terror-filled afternoon in the old church.

  “Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge,” Hal was saying, draining his drink. “This tired old man needs his sleep, so I’ll see you in the morning.” He bent over and pecked Alice on the cheek. She smiled back at him, but not as openly as she once would have done, and that hurt. They watched him climb the cabana steps back to the hotel lobby.

  Margaret shifted in her chair. “Mom, what do you think?”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Margaret pulled off her shoes, and together they headed down the boardwalk and past the hotel’s low retaining wall to the sand. The half moon was rising, barely dusting the lapping waves with its pale light. As far as they could see in either direction, the beach was a gray-white ribbon. Barefoot, they walked side by side just at the margin of the surf where the sand was damp, but not mushy.

  “What I think,” Alice said, “is that my father was a complicated person. And I think Uncle Hal has … issues that made him not like Ned.”

  “I think he liked his sister a little too much and felt kicked to the curb when she fell for your dad.”

  Alice nearly choked. Once again, she had misjudged Margaret’s grasp of the adult subtext going on around her.

  “For the record, I don’t believe there was anything going on between Uncle Hal and your grandmother. I think he may have been overly devoted to her, especially because of whatever happened in Australia, but I’m sure their life together was platonic.”

  “Know what else I think? I bet my art talent came from him … Ned … my grandfather.”

  “I’ll agree on that much,” Alice said. They linked arms and walked in comfortable silence, the rising sea breeze at their backs.

  Without warning, Margaret dropped to her knees in the sand, doubling over as if in pain.

  Alice was beside her in an instant. “What?”

  “Migraine coming on,” Margaret said between clenched teeth. “I think I’m gonna be sick. Have you got my pills?”

  Alice shook her head. “They’re on the bathroom sink in our hotel room. C’mon, let’s go back. Can you get up?” Gently, she pulled Margaret to her feet.

  “It’s not that far. Can you make it?”

  Margaret nodded, saying nothing, but holding on as if the whipping wind might blow her mother out of her arms.

  * * *

  With Margaret safely settled into bed after a dose of phenobarb, Alice locked the sliding glass door to the small terrace overlooking the cabana, and then stretched out on a deeply cushioned sofa, intending to read for awhile. She propped the fantasy novel she’d picked up in the airport on her knees and read a couple of pages without much comprehension. Alice turned another page and yawned. The cushions were so soft. Nestling down into a comfortable position, she began to doze.

  Her body was shivering. She’d probably set the air conditioning too high, which meant she’d have to get up out of her warm nest and reset it. Forcing her eyes open, she sat up and gaped at a sky streaked with indigo, purple, and gray-blue storm scud flying eastward over the edge of a ragged scarp. Monumental blocks of weathered red and gray sandstone littered the horizon as far as she could see. A chill wind blew up her back.

  The landscape was barren, with a few windblown bloodwood trees stretching out at improbable horizontal angles. Dark red resin oozed from their trunks and glistened
as an occasional shaft of sunlight lanced through the cloudbank. A gang of black cockatoos, crests raised, fought for purchase among the branches, their strident calls ripping the air. They hopped from branch to branch, quarreling, and then suddenly the entire mob lifted into the air and flew screeching over Alice’s head, disappearing down into the gorge behind her. She sat, speechless and terrified.

  A single small bird sailed down the wind and lit on a branch nearest the ground. Glossy black with a white breast and white patches over its eyes, it wagged its tail at her in nervous twitching jerks, spreading its white eyebrow feathers in an insistent display.

  Alice got unsteadily to her feet. She was still in the clothes she’d worn to dinner, but they were torn and soiled, as if she’d trekked miles through the Outback. The willy-wagtail cocked its head at her and chattered its distinctive call.

  Alice framed the thought in her mind and then said it aloud: “This is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up now.” In response, a blast of chilled air tore at her thin blouse and skirt. In its wake, a different sound intruded: something was being dragged, scraping over the rocks behind her. Alice turned and gagged.

  A pencil-thin figure with no neck and no discernable features in its knob-shaped head was pulling an inert human form toward a flat rock not far away. The creature was as tall as the leaning bloodwood, and its shoulders were rounded as it bent to hoist its prey up onto the boulder. Its sticklike limbs were the same color as the tree resin and glistened, slippery wet, in the failing light. Darker drops of red came from an area of its head where a mouth might have been, and then Alice saw that it had been feeding on the body flung across the rock.