Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  Mae dropped the crystals she had used into a bowl of salt water. His lungs had given off a dull, cloudy energy, obscured and lacking vitality. She’d seen the rest of his chest’s interior vividly. A dedicated swimmer despite his COPD, he had a fairly strong heart, though there were spots that she took to be inflammation in some of the arteries. His smoking cessation should help slow the progress of any heart disease. From what he’d said before the session, Rex already knew these things from his doctor. It was what she hadn’t seen that mattered. The white-hot fiery energy of a cancer. She’d only seen it once in her psychic work, but it was unforgettable. “As best I can tell,” she said, “based on everything you told me, nothing bad has happened since your last physical.”

  “Good.” Rex let out a dramatic sigh. “So when Sierra does whatever she does next weekend, I won’t get any surprises.”

  “I don’t think you will. I was in a workshop with her, and she was pretty accurate in seeing health problems.” Sierra had detected Jamie’s femoral acetabular impingement, the hardware attached to his bones, and the pain in his ulnar nerve. And those troubling sparkles, whatever those were. But then she had claimed he was in her soul group and that she’d known him for many lives. “I’m not sure she’s right about some other things, though.”

  Rex frowned. “Posey says she’s amazing.”

  “A friend in Santa Fe, another psychic, went to Sierra’s support group. She said Sierra may be kind of ...” How to put this without condemning Posey as a fool? Rex seemed to think highly of his online sweetheart. “Kind of out in left field when it comes to past lives and the soul group.”

  “Can your friend see past lives? Or can you?”

  “No. She sees the future. And I can find out the past in this life, but nothing from any other lives.” If people even have them.

  “Then how can either of you know if Sierra is right?”

  “We can’t, but Sierra told Kate she was disabled because she’d been a pink river dolphin.”

  Rex appeared to contemplate a corner of the ceiling, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ve often felt I must have been Polynesian.”

  Where to go with this? He didn’t appear concerned about the dolphin life. Did he believe it was possible? Mae checked the time on the small clock at the back of the room. There were still a few minutes before her next appointment. “Kate didn’t feel like she’d ever been a dolphin. How can you tell you were Polynesian?”

  Rex’s face lit up. “When I went to Hawaii,” he leaned in toward her, “I understood the language. It was some tourist event with hula dancers and people greeting you and giving you leis and all that, but before they translated anything, I knew what they meant. It was like I’d heard it before. And the land. I felt like I’d come home. For the first fifteen years of my life, I used to dream about climbing volcanos. It was sacred. The plume of smoke floating up from the crater ...” He closed his eyes, swaying slightly, and then looked at Mae. “Is that why I smoked?” He flung a hand to his heart. “I hope I don’t start worshiping Pele next.”

  It took Mae a second to realize he’d transitioned from a serious contemplation of a Hawaiian past life to joking about its influence. “I don’t think you will,” she said with a smile. “But you sound pretty sure you remember being Hawaiian.”

  “I think I do. But those memories could be just mental clutter. Things I don’t realize I picked up.” Rex got down from the table and stretched. “I cleaned my RV this week to get the tobacco smell out, and I found my Hawaiian trove. You wouldn’t think you could lose anything when your home is that small, but I’m a bachelor. What can I say? I’ve made five trips to Hawaii and brought things back every time. I’d forgotten I had a ukulele, forgot I’d even learned to play it. I could have forgotten I’d seen movies or TV shows about Hawaii when I was a kid, and those are my ‘memories.’ ”

  For such a flaky guy, Rex was a good skeptic. Perhaps Sierra found past life images for other people in what he’d called mental clutter. She could have read a National Geographic article or seen a nature documentary, and then pink dolphins lodged in her mind and popped up when she needed a strange incarnation.

  What if there were past lives, though, and Rex did in fact recall his? What would Sierra tell him? Mae had called Don and asked if he would be willing to check out Sierra’s support group, and he’d said he would do it. Like Rex, Don had childhood dreams that made him think he had past life recall. If Sierra saw what both men had dreamed, it would support the possibility she was right. Mae wanted to dismiss it, but she couldn’t without evidence. If Sierra was right about reincarnation, her other claims could still be false but would carry more weight with her followers. And she could probably raise more money.

  Mae asked, “Would you mind letting me know what Sierra says about your past lives?”

  “Not at all. I’m going to schedule another healing session with you on my way out. A booster shot, you might say. I liked coming in later in the day like this. Does that work for you?”

  “Yes, afternoons are fine.”

  “Great. I’ll see you—oh, not next week, that’s the retreat—the week after.” Rex headed for the door, and then paused. “Do you think Posey will like my being an RV-er? I haven’t told her yet.”

  “Isn’t it kinda soon to worry about that? You haven’t met her.”

  “Ahh.” Rex tapped a finger to his nose. “That’s something else I could use from you as a psychic.”

  “Sorry. It’s Kate that sees the future, not me.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I was thinking, could you do something like a background check? I Googled Posey, of course. I’m told everyone Googles prospective partners now. But not everything ends up online.”

  Mae’s gut reaction was to refuse. This was exactly what she had hoped to avoid by becoming a professional again. Earlier that summer, her friend Misty Chino had asked her to find out her boyfriend’s secrets, and it had ended up putting a strain on their friendship. Of course, the same type of requests had come up when Mae was a professional before, in Virginia Beach. People wanted psychics to tell them things they had no other way to know, things that could affect their lives deeply. Things honest people would tell each other.

  “I don’t like to do that kind of work if I can avoid it. Checking out someone you’re going to date feels, well ...”

  “Nosy? Being nosy about Posey?” Rex gave her a wry smile. “It is. I thought of it as the same thing as Googling her, only you’d be using a bigger database, but I suppose you’re right. If I’d been able to have a psychic check out my ex-wife, I never would have married her, and we did get a couple of good years out of the mistake.” He paused in the doorway, giving her a Groucho-like wiggle of his eyebrows. “And twenty bad ones.”

  After he left, she reflected on his jest. That’s my new business card: Mae Martin’s psychic marriage-prevention service. It wouldn’t work, of course. She’d married her first husband fully aware that he drank too much and couldn’t be trusted. At eighteen, she’d been a romantic optimist and thought she could change him. And nothing anyone could have told her about Hubert’s character would have made her think she shouldn’t marry him. He’d turned out to be exactly the man she thought he was. A lot had come between them, from his objections to her using her psychic gift to her unhappiness in Tylerton, North Carolina, but at some level their painful differences hadn’t altered how they felt about each other. Maybe it was easier to split the way Rex had, burned out and more than ready.

  She dried the crystals that had been in the salt water bath and then sat on the edge of the table to clear her mind and energy of any residue of Rex, brushing her aura with snow quartz and focusing on her breath.

  Someone knocked on the half-open door. Mae expected her next client, but the young man who was working at the front desk stuck his head in. “Your father called. He says he can’t get you on your cell and it’s an emergency.”

  Had Niall had an accident in his sculpture studio? Or a heart attack? Mae managed t
o sound calm through her alarm. “Thank you. I’ll turn on my phone. Tell my next client I may need to reschedule.”

  “She’s already here, but she said she’d wait.”

  The man left. Mae called Marty. “Daddy? What happened?”

  “Don’t panic, baby. Just listen. Hubert couldn’t reach you, so he called us. He doesn’t want you to take time to call him back right now. Just do what he asks. Brook and Stream are missing. He wants you to find them.”

  Her legs trembling and her heart pounding, Mae shut the door and leaned against it. “I will. Tell him I will.”

  As close as she was to the girls, the deep connection with them woven into her, she wouldn’t need to hold anything of theirs for their energy. Her mind was shaken, though, and she struggled to calm herself enough to enter a psychic journey. As she took a clear quartz point from the table, it fell from her hand. She sat on the floor, pressed the crystal into her palm, and closed her eyes, then tuned in to the feeling of her girls in her heart and the thread that tied her to them.

  The trance came suddenly, the tunnel that transitioned her into a psychic journey spinning with shadows. To her distress, the vision stayed dark when the tunnel opened. She could just make out the familiar shapes of her children, lying on their sides face to face. There was a steady humming, thrumming noise all around them. One of them stirred slightly and the other put a finger to her lips. They held still.

  What kind of place was this? They were in Maine for Jen’s cousin’s wedding. They wouldn’t know where to hide or have anywhere to run away to. Had they been kidnapped? Put in a trunk or a cellar? It was too dark to tell if they were tied up. Mae lost the vision to her fear.

  She rubbed the tension from her neck. Stop imagining things. Nothing that bad could have happened. This had to be another episode like their previous escape.

  If they were hiding to make Mae find them, though, and not just to get away from Jen, they wouldn’t be in a place like this. She had told the girls that the only way she could find them was if they were in a place she recognized, or one so distinctive she could describe it to searchers.

  It was hard to do psychic journeys back to back with no break, but she had to try. Mae centered her mind on the crystal’s clarity and on her connection with Brook and Stream, aiming this time for the past. If she couldn’t recognize the place where they were, she might see the steps that led them to it.

  The tunnel took her to a short hallway where signs indicated restrooms and elevators. Brook and Stream, in pastel pink dresses and bright sweaters, peered out of the ladies’ room. Stream ducked back in and Brook closed the door to a crack, watching as an elderly man wobbled down the hall, his gait suggesting he’d had too much to drink.

  “I don’t see them,” Brook whispered.

  “Does anyone see us?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they’re mostly drunk. Let’s go.”

  They exited the restroom, each carrying something wrapped in layers of paper towels. Brook pressed the elevator button with a sharp glance toward the room beyond, where a noisy party was in progress with clapping and singing and Greek dancing.

  The elevator opened and the twins rushed in, wide-eyed and breathless. They were the only passengers. Brook pushed a button with a down arrow on it. After a short silence, Stream said, “It’s weird how you can pee when you don’t have to.”

  “Yeah, but it’s good that we can, so we won’t have to go later,” Brook replied.

  “And it was icky carrying our food in.”

  “You didn’t have to take it into the stall.”

  “Yes, I did. What if someone came in and saw I had packed up all that stuff?”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Only of getting caught. I’m kind of sad for Daddy, though.”

  Brook sucked her lips in over her teeth, blinking. “Me too.”

  The elevator stopped, and the girls put their packages of food under their sweaters.

  A rap on the door broke Mae’s trance. She wanted to stay, wanted to shout at the person to leave her alone, but the door opened. Daphne Brady, her next client, came in. She was scheduled for what she called a tune-up to support her smoking cessation. A skinny woman in her early sixties with graying blonde hair and a lined face, she wore an unsuitably tight short skirt and fitted top. She looked at Mae sitting on the floor and knelt beside her. “They told me you had an emergency, but you hadn’t left. Are you all right?”

  Daphne was a friend of Niall’s, not close with Mae, but her presence was steadying, not an intrusion after all. Mae said, “My stepdaughters ran away. In Maine. They’re somewhere dark now. I can’t tell where.”

  “Do they know anyone in Maine they would run to?”

  “No. They know Niall’s from Maine, but they don’t know his family. And they wouldn’t know how to find them.”

  “Kids aren’t always logical. They may think they can do things they really can’t.”

  “Not Brook and Stream. They’re little scientists. They like to test things and figure things out. They would have a plan, and it’d be as good a plan as any pair of seven-year-olds could make.”

  Daphne rose, got tissues from a shelf, and brought them back to Mae. “Can you think like them?”

  Mae dried tears she’d barely noticed shedding. “I’m afraid the wrong person could have found them.”

  “That’s you thinking like their mother. Worrying. Think like them.”

  Mae took a breath and tried to get inside the twins’ thoughts. Hubert and Jen and everyone at the party must have already searched before he called and said the girls were missing. That meant they weren’t simply hiding, but gone. Where? Last time, they’d headed to Jim and Sallie’s place. They would go to someone they trusted. Mae reviewed what she’d seen and heard. A dark place. That humming, thrumming sound. Had they stowed away in a vehicle? The one person they liked and trusted who would be driving away from the party was Jamie. But how could they have gotten into his van without his noticing? He was obsessive about locking it.

  Mae told Daphne that she was going to attempt another psychic vision and asked for a few minutes alone.

  This journey opened in the dark place again. The girls seemed to be asleep, hugging each other. Mae listened. Silence except for the thrumming. Then a faint sound that might have been violins playing classical music, but she couldn’t hear it well, her perception being with the twins, down on the floor with the road noise.

  Mae left the vision and called Jamie. He would be heading back to Niall’s cousin’s house for the night and then starting his three-day haul to New Mexico in the morning. He didn’t answer, but that was normal when he was driving. He turned his phone off, knowing he couldn’t handle the distraction. She left a message. “Check in the back of your van. Look under the blankets. I think the young’uns hitched a ride with you. Call me and Hubert as soon as you get this.”

  Mae opened the door and told Daphne what she hoped the girls had done. Daphne hugged her. “You call their father. I’ll call Niall and we can get his cousin’s number.”

  “Good idea. Jamie could forget to turn his phone on, and the girls might be trying to hide until he’s halfway to New Mexico.”

  Hubert answered instantly, eager and desperate. “You find ’em?”

  “Kind of. I think they hid in Jamie’s van, but I can’t be sure. Did they know where he was parked? Have any way to get in?”

  He groaned. “Damn. They sure did. I think they stole his spare key.”

  Stealing? Knowing them, they would give the key back, of course, but if they’d done it, the act virtually screamed how unhappy they were. “I called him. He doesn’t keep his phone on while he drives, but he should get to Niall’s cousin’s house soon. I guess. I don’t know how far it is.”

  Hubert asked her where the cousin lived, hollered to someone, asking how long a drive it was, and got back to Mae. “It only takes an hour to get to Damariscotta, so he should have arrived a couple of hours ago.”

 
“A couple of hours ago?” Had Mae seen the past? Or the children in some other vehicle? The second possibility made her tremble. “I saw the kids in what I think was a moving vehicle, like the back of a van.”

  “Jamie left early. He shouldn’t still be on the road. Hate to tell you this, but he had a panic attack and didn’t finish singing. I made sure he was okay to drive and came back. The party was still going. The girls were in this separate kids’ party, or we figured they were. They had a fight with Jen and I thought we should leave ’em there to play with other kids as long as we could. Give ’em time to cool off. And then they weren’t there, and we’ve spent an hour searching.”

  “Are the police looking?”

  “They will be if you haven’t found them. I hope you have.”

  Daphne ended her call and cut in. “Niall’s calling his cousin.”

  Mae told Hubert she would get back to him shortly and then waited, her mind racing.

  Why hadn’t Jamie turned his phone back on? Had he had another panic attack and pulled over? When he’d been freaked out by the bug museum, Brook and Stream had been so sweet to him. If they thought something was wrong, they would come out of hiding and try to take care of him. They wouldn’t still be under the blanket. What if they weren’t with Jamie?

  Daphne’s phone rang. She listened and then handed it to Mae. Niall’s Maine-accented speech was sharp with frustration. “My cousin says Jamie decided to head west early rather than stay another night in Maine. He packed up before he left for Portland. Should be in New Hampshire by now.”

  “Shoot. I hope he takes a break and turns his phone on soon.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. Apparently he slept good and late and aims to drive all night.”

  Mae thanked Niall, returned Daphne’s phone, and let her know it was all right to leave if she needed to. Daphne gave her a long hug. “I wish I could give you a healing session. You need it more than I do.”

  “I’ll be all right once I’m sure my girls are okay.”

  Daphne left, and Mae sat and held the quartz point, seeking the twins once more. Her psychic vision showed her the same dark space, but something was pressing down on the girls from above in sequential prods, four separate points of pressure. Gasser?