Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  “But is she done with everything? What about the donations? And the support group?”

  Posey sniffled. “She won’t want me in it anymore. She hates me.”

  Jamie rubbed her shoulder, making reassuring sounds, still looking at Mae.

  “The best way to stop her is healing,” Mae said. “Real healing. I was just getting her to talk, before you started that song.”

  He lifted his chin, his goatee snagging a strand of Posey’s brittle hair. “Couldn’t know that, could I?”

  “You had to have seen me go into her room.”

  Jamie held Mae’s gaze. His Posey-free shoulder twitched. “It was my fight, not yours. I won it my way.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Appalled that Sierra had struck Posey, Jamie had honestly wanted to comfort her, but even as he held the weeping little woman, he kept wishing she would go away. How had Rex endured her clinging? When Posey excused herself to go wash her tear-smeared face, Jamie was relieved and more than ready to part with her. Her makeup had stained the shoulder of his lemon-yellow long-sleeved T-shirt, his favorite of the new shirts he’d bought in Maine, and her perfume clung to him. Revolted by the smell, he hadn’t given enough of himself, and he felt guilty about it. Any shoulder to cry on was better than none, but still, he hadn’t been present.

  Mae had joined the group around the big rock. Don was talking to them, and even the children were listening. Jamie was about to walk over and tell her he was going to his room to clean up, but what was the point? She wouldn’t even notice his leaving. His sadness that Mae wasn’t looking at him was as fucked-up as Posey’s self-pity, but knowing that didn’t change it. Mae had moved him out of the center of her life—if he’d ever really been there—but he hadn’t moved her from the center of his, and it hurt.

  Hands in his pockets, he headed toward the back gate. Leon, still slumped on his bench, gestured with his head, an invitation to stop and sit.

  “Can’t stay long.” Jamie remained standing. “Need to go ...” Wash Posey off? True, but unkind to say aloud. What was urgent and believable? Need to go lie in bed and feel bad about stuff? He’d left his phone beeping after his nap and never found out who’d called. “Check my messages.”

  Leon slid over, although Jamie had plenty of room to sit and had made no move to do so. “Sierra’s reputation will be ruined.”

  “Um ... Yeah. That was the point. Piss her off, y’know? Didn’t think she’d hit Posey—Jeezus, that was bad—just knew she had no sense of humor.”

  “You wanted to bring out the worst in her?”

  “Yeah. Prophylaxis.” Where had that word come from? “People at this retreat who didn’t know her might have looked up to her, thought she was a real healer or something.”

  “So you were preventing them from turning into fools like me?”

  “Like both of us.”

  When he reached his room, Jamie pulled off his shirt, collapsed in the red chair, and listened to his message. It was from Refugio.

  “We’re at the hospital. We were bringing Magda Stein some flowers, and we ran into that crazy lady, Sierra. She was trying to get in to see her. Her daughter wouldn’t let her, though. And then—Ezra wants to tell you.”

  Ezra took over, “We told Ms. Stein’s daughter how much we liked the Afterworld books and I said how she’d written me a letter, and I had it with me, and her daughter read it and said, ‘Oh, you’re that boy.’ And she took us in to see Ms. Stein.”

  Refugio came back on. “We’ll drop the letter at Mae’s place after we run.”

  They shouldn’t go to the trouble. Mae didn’t need the letter anymore. Magda was safe. Sierra was gone. But Mae would still like to see Ezra.

  Jamie picked up his shirt, irrationally distressed by the blue and purple eye makeup on it, and hoped Mae would let him do laundry at her house. No, too much like being a couple. He crossed the parking lot to the violet-colored building and the laundry room he’d seen the housekeeper using, found a bottle of spot remover and some detergent, and rinsed his shirt in the sink, obsessively washing it over and over while using as little water as possible. Then he hung it on the line. The New Mexico sun would dry it in an hour.

  A woman leaving one of the other rooms in the Pelican Apartment Motel stared at him. He gave her a small Japanese-style bow and hurried back to his suite. People gawked or cringed when he exposed his torso, scarred by accidents and self-inflicted injuries. In the shower, he ached at the memory of Mae’s touch, how she’d loved and caressed his damaged body as if it were perfect like hers. Shampooing his uncombed, partially braided hair, he regretted not untangling it first. Mae had come to accept his freak-outs over hair pain and his attachment to having her groom him. So many things about him didn’t bother her.

  But that wasn’t the same as seeing him as a husband and father. She loved him, but as Jamie-the-sick-person.

  After his shower, his studied his glands in the mirror. Now that he knew the truth, they didn’t frighten him as much as when he’d been avoiding it. He felt more dread than terror. Dread of the process. But maybe that last persistent inch of belly fat would go away while he was getting treatment. How mundane a thought. It hardly mattered. All he wanted was for his body to stay alive, and for Mae to love and touch him again.

  It was a depressive act as much as a surrender to his fatigue and he knew it, but he went back to bed with Gasser. And William. The ghost cat settled against him, punching and prodding at Jamie’s thigh. His presence was both touching and disturbing. Jamie hovered a hand above the place where he sensed his late cat, as close to petting the ghost as he could get. You can relax, mate. Head back to the other side. I’ve got my diagnosis. I’m going to get well.

  Jamie slept.

  When he woke, roused by Gasser’s thudding departure from the bed to go to his food bowl, William was gone and Ezra hadn’t returned. Jamie had just enough time to grab his shirt from the line and arrive a minute early for his appointment with Yeshi.

  The Tibetan doctor had a massage table set up in the conference room. It was a simple space, its décor quiet except for a collection of gleaming glass grapes on the high ledges. On a side table lay Yeshi’s little rattan sticks. One pair had tiny sacks on the end, another pair had small wooden eggs, and one stick looked like a roller. Two chairs faced each other, and soft music played, a male chorus chanting. Another table held a hot beverage carafe, a few mugs, and a box of teabags. Yeshi, in black linen pants and a long white shirt with white leaves embroidered on it, reached out and shook Jamie’s hand. “Would you like tea before your consultation?”

  “Thanks.”

  Yeshi filled a mug and set it on a small table next to one of the chairs. Green tea, no sugar. Mae wouldn’t like that. They sat, and Yeshi folded his hands in his lap. Jamie crossed an ankle on his thigh. There was enough fur on his pants to make a small kitten. He began picking it off and imagined shedding strands of his own hair onto Gasser in the future. “Not sure I need the consultation. Rather just get the massage, y’know? I know what I’ve got.”

  “Yes? What does your doctor call it?”

  “It’s not just one thing. Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, ADHD, cat scratch disease.” Jamie took a breath. He’d just said it to Leon, but it still felt alien. “And Hodgkin lymphoma.”

  “That is quite a list.” Yeshi nodded, frowning slightly. “I’m not sure you know the essence of what is wrong, though. You know the Western diagnostic labels. But not the pattern. The underlying cause.”

  “Don’t start with my bloody karma.”

  “Why not?” Yeshi inclined his head. “Something must explain why so much happens to one man and not another.”

  Jamie put his foot down and sat forward. “If you tell me you think Sierra is right—”

  “Calm down. Please. She did not invent the concept of karma. And you know she is sometimes right. She sees illness.”

  “But she has everything else wrong. I didn’t make myself sick.�
�

  “Not with intention, no. There are subtleties she cannot grasp.”

  “Ya think? I could rant for an hour about the subtleties Sierra doesn’t grasp. And some of ’em aren’t so fucking subtle. Like kindness? Compassion?”

  “I have been trying to teach her. I started letting her work with me so she could see how I talked with patients. I wanted to show her how to use less force. Less judgment.”

  “Really? You heard the crap she told me the other night when I was ready to kill myself and you didn’t correct her.”

  “Kill yourself?” Yeshi took in a sharp breath. “I didn’t know.” His brow furrowed. “How could I have known?”

  “I’d been crying. I’d dumped out a whole bottle of aspirin. You don’t take the whole bottle for a fever.”

  “I am so sorry.” Yeshi looked genuinely aghast. “I assumed you had spilled the pills she was putting back in the bottle. And your eyes were red, but you had driven a long way with little sleep. Was it because of your cancer that you did not want to live?”

  “Nah.” Jamie took a sip of his tea and pitched the teabag into the wastebasket. “Girlfriend problems.”

  Yeshi’s folded hands loosened a little, and his thumbs tapped together. He looked down. “Yes. Those are painful. I have those, too.”

  Jamie tried to wrap his mind around Sierra-as-girlfriend. Yeshi loving Sierra. He wasn’t the warmest person in the world. Did he actually love her? If so, she didn’t seem capable of loving him back. Of loving anyone. “Why are you with her?” Jamie asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “It simply happened. Or so it seemed at the time.” Yeshi paused, touching a finger to his lips, and his eyes shifted focus. “Perhaps she chose me. She was one of the first non-Tibetan people I met in Santa Fe. She was the volunteer who taught me better English. She was fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. When we began dating, I didn’t realize how odd her thinking was. She told me her father had been a spiritual teacher and a healer, and I took it at face value. When she claimed she had taken on her parents as co-souls, I did find that odd, but I told myself perhaps it was a way of being respectful of them. We shared a belief in karma and reincarnation and that made me feel at home. She said she understood the Tibetan idea that healing begins at the spiritual level. And then she told me she wanted to be a healer, too.”

  “Did you think she could be?”

  “Not in the way I am. I couldn’t teach her to be a Tibetan doctor, after all.” A small chuckle, as if he thought this a good joke. “So I encouraged her to study healing styles that were simpler.”

  “I didn’t mean her skills. I meant her character.”

  “She is a very serious young woman. I thought she was looking for a purpose. When she wanted to offer free support to sick people, I thought she was being kind. She had helped me, after all. And when she offered to find investors for my retreat center, it seemed very generous. I did not realize how she was going about any of this.”

  Jamie slurped his tea. “Don’t see how you couldn’t know. What kind of relationship do you have? Don’t you talk to each other?”

  Yeshi bristled. “Of course we talk. But not about clients, about patients. She did not ask me to be at her support group, nor did I think I needed to be there. Until she had a new member who would be coming in a wheelchair. Then I offered to make sure she could get in and out of Sierra’s house, since the men in her group are not well or strong. I listened from the kitchen and ...” He rubbed his forehead, dropped his hand, and shook his head. “It was like seeing another person. A side of Sierra I did not know. I felt guilty that I had referred Posey to her. But I could tell Kate did not believe Sierra, so I wanted her to come back.”

  “You wanted Kate to do your hard work?” Like I did. “You could have just told Sierra to stop. Told Posey it was rubbish.”

  “Have you ever tried to speak to people who live in a world of their own, full of strange things they think are true? Whatever you say, they believe you are the one who is wrong. They claim there’s a conspiracy to suppress the truth about Mu and its way of healing. Doctors want to make money, they say, and religions want to have power.”

  “So what did you think Kate could do, if no one would listen?”

  “Kate has influence, does she not? She is director of that event with all the alternative healers and psychics. She would see that Sierra is not doing a good job and she would tell people.”

  “Why me, then? What was I supposed to do?”

  “Sierra asked me to have you sing. She says I am not a good singer.”

  “Um ... yeah.” Jamie sipped his tea. “You’re not. But she wanted me for more than that. The soul group.”

  “She says you did music together as high priests of Mu, that you led ceremonies together. You had been their chief singer, their healer, in that ancient life. Vibration and mantras are part of healing, so I understood this, though I had never heard of Mu until I met her. When she got onstage with you at Bandstand, that was very embarrassing for you and I am sorry, but she believed she was reuniting with you in music.”

  “So I was a singing priest. How come the others in the soul group all had money? All of them but Posey. Is money a part of healing?”

  “So she says.” Yeshi crossed the room to look out into the courtyard. “She claims that when the priests of Mu became corrupt, they grew wealthy, and to heal their karma, they need to give away their money in this life.”

  Jamie felt a prickle of distrust. “How much has she raised for you?”

  “I did not ask her to do it.”

  “But how much?”

  “Not enough to buy the place I need. And I did not know until I listened to her meeting that she asked for donations. I would have made my investors partners.”

  This matched what Chuck and Rex had said. The distrust rerouted in Jamie’s mind. He thought of how he trusted Wendy with his finances and let her make decisions for him. And when he’d lived with his fiancée Lisa, he’d let her do the same thing. “Who controls that money?”

  “Sierra does. It is in an account she started for the retreat center.”

  “Jeezus. That was—” stupid. Jamie managed not to say it. “Land is cheaper down here. She could have just taken the money and done what she wanted.”

  “I believed she wanted to help me with my plans.” Yeshi returned to sit opposite Jamie, his gaze intense. “Not to buy Mu.”

  “Buy what?”

  “Her parents’ farm. Their commune. They called it Sierra Mu. Mu in Sierra County. And yes, they named her that, too. Sierra Mu Carter. Her father was a charismatic man who claimed he knew all the spiritual traditions of the world as one, the old religion of Mu. And that Mu had no illness. That they healed with faith and sound and imagery. When he and his wife became sick, everyone left the commune. They saw it as proof that he had lied to them. Sierra believed her parents had failed, not because her father was wrong, but because they had not resolved issues in their karma.”

  “Jeezus. Can’t believe you let her work with your clients when she thinks crap like that.”

  “She said it made her feel useful, that it helped her learn. And I didn’t know about the commune until this weekend. She was excited that Posey had brought Rex, a wealthy man. To Sierra, it was a sign it was time to buy the land. That was when she told me her plan.”

  “To bring her soul group to her commune and watch them die? So they could leave her more money?”

  “I do not think she wants them to die.”

  “But she doesn’t care if they do, either. As far as I can see, Sierra hates the people she says she’s helping. Especially Posey.”

  “Poor Posey.” Yeshi shook his head. “Sierra saw no place for her in Mu. She is the reincarnation, Sierra says, of a human sacrifice.”

  “What?” Jamie put his mug down so hard tea splashed out of it. “They were going to kill her?”

  “No, no, Sierra would use her to give testimonials and recruit people but not let her live at the co
mmune. Sierra said she had to do this and let Posey go, to work out their shared karma. She believes demons had tempted the priests to turn to human sacrifice to get more power. At the moment they did it, volcanos and earthquakes destroyed Mu and the survivors fled to the other lands of the Pacific. To the Americas, Australia, Asia. To reverse it, the sacrifice had to be made again, but allowed to live.”

  Jamie felt foolish for having asked if Sierra meant to kill Posey. He began pulling cat hair off his pants leg again. “That’s still wrong. Sierra was wrecking people’s lives and you didn’t step in.”

  “I have been doing my best with Sierra, you must know that. I’ve tried to teach her. And to heal her.”

  “You can’t heal her. You’re too close to her.” And not just as her lover. “Too close to the money, too.”

  “No, I was not close to it. I told you. She controls it.”

  “But you thought it was for you. You caught onto how she was raising it back in August when Kate went to that meeting and you didn’t do a bloody thing. You wanted everybody else to expose Sierra and stop her, but if you did it, she might cut you off and keep what she’d raised.”

  “You misunderstand. I did not want to hurt her.”

  “She was going to buy that place instead of what you wanted. Did she think you would join her bloody commune, her cult? For that matter, would you have kept her around when you had a proper retreat center?”

  Their eyes met. Yeshi quickly glanced away. “I don’t know.”

  Bloody hell. Yeshi and Sierra had been using each other. He gave her Tibetan teachings, a kind of status, and contacts with people who wanted alternative healing. She claimed to be raising money for him. And each would have dumped the other when they got what they wanted.

  Jamie stood. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “You do not want your massage?” Yeshi bustled over to the massage table and smoothed out the sheet that covered it. “Please, stay. I know how to work with cancer patients.”

  “Nah. Not in the mood for it. Think I’ll go walk my cat.”