Dead Sleeping Shaman (6 page)

He mumbled a few words under his breath and toed the beach sand with his shoe until he remembered he’d just polished it and bent to wipe the shoe tip clean.

“Courtin’, ” he said.

“Courting? You mean as in calling on a lady friend?”

He nodded. “Delia Swanson.”

I hesitated, trying to sort out the neighbors along Willow Lake Road. I only knew of one Delia. She lived about a mile from me, past where the Survivalists had their fenced-in camp with big “For Sale” signs and no takers. Delia Swanson had to be at least seventy-five but I guessed that was a good age for a man like Harry, in his late sixties. Still, Delia had been single all her life and lived with her mother, Bertha Swanson, who was now close to one hundred. I’d only met the mother once, when Delia brought her into EATS for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Kind of a nasty soul, not a smile or a good word for anyone in EATS, was what I remembered. One of those old people who seemed to melt inward until they had a face as wizened as an apple doll’s, or a shrunken head. I remember everyone in the restaurant trying to make Bertha and Delia feel at home, but you could hear Bertha complaining about the stuffing having no oysters and the cranberry sauce straight out of one of those cans until I thought that if I were Eugenia Fuller, the restaurant owner, or Delia, I’d pick the old lady up by the scruff of her neck and toss her out the door.

“I’m inviting Delia into town to see that preacher what’s come for the end of the world. Might as well hear the man out, is what Delia says, and I agree with her. She’s one smart woman, I’ll tell ya. Said that if the world didn’t end the way the preacher said, we’d be no worse or better off than right now. But in case it does end, we’ll be ready, souls prepared. Don’t hurt to play the odds.”

I nodded and led Harry up the path through the bronzed and fallen bracken to the house, where I sewed his button on with black thread while he sat formally upright on a stool at the kitchen island. When he was ready to go I offered him my Jeep to take his lady friend to town. His old half-car/half-truck wasn’t the kind of vehicle to go a courtin’ in and I didn’t think it had a valid license. Harry shook his head but thanked me for my kindness. He walked stiffly out the door and back up my drive to where he’d parked his vehicle at the road.

In the house, I searched the cupboards and fridge for wine. Jackson would bring food but he’d forget the wine. And the bread. And dessert. I sighed.

There was a bottle of Valpolicella near the back of the refrigerator. That would do. In fact, I decided it would do so well I opened the bottle, poured myself a glass and went to sit on my sofa, wrapping a Christmas throw around my legs, and wondering if I should find something better than damp jeans and an old tee shirt to wear for my supper of scrambled eggs and two-day-old biscuits.

Sorrow, needing company, joined me, dropping a hard rubber ball in my lap that bounced against my wine glass, tipping it over onto me and the floor as the phone rang. I struggled to my feet, unwrapping the dripping afghan from my legs and pushing Sorrow, who stood barking at me to throw the ball, out of the way.

It was Dolly.

“I’ll be there to get you tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Bringing someone with me. The lady who reported a missing person. We’ve got to get her over to Gaylord. She can identify the body …”

“Can’t,” I said firmly. “I’ve got plans.”

“Yeah, well, cancel them. This is about the woman you found. You’ve got to be there. Even Brent said to bring you.”

“Well, I’ve … I don’t think …”

“Geez! You’re a reporter, ain’t you? I’d think you’d want to be there.”

“As I said …”

“Yeah, sure. She’s getting to town about two o’clock. Should be at your place about two-thirty.”

I was left holding the phone in one hand and in the other a coverlet dripping wine. Of all the nerve. That grumpy little person could take herself and whoever she was bringing on over to Gaylord without me. I had better things …

Then came my “AHA” moment. Of course I had to go to Gaylord with Dolly and her friend tomorrow. Probably take all afternoon and evening. Business, after all. Very, very important business. I couldn’t let Lieutenant Brent down …

I dropped the winy afghan, did a graceful little twirl in place, picked up the phone, and punched in Jackson’s number.

Tuesday, October 13

14 days to go

I worked on Dead
Dancing Women
all the next morning, getting it in shape to send to Madeleine Clark. In some places I took out words; in others I added words. I moved paragraphs around, then put them back. I cleaned up bad punctuation and misspellings even my spell-check missed. It was a daunting job, to get the novel in such good shape it would look perfect to professional eyes. Soon I got tired of the whole thing, went back to the house, and was happy to see Dolly when she drove down my drive at precisely two-thirty.

“Got her in the car.” She yanked my screen door open and snapped her head back toward the patrol car. A woman was seated in the front.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Friend of the dead woman.”

“What’s Brent saying?”

She shrugged. “No car out there. Helluva walk in without one.”

“Think she was carried? Sure looked arranged, there at the bottom of the tree, skirt all neat.”

“No deep footprints. No drag marks.” Dolly thought a while then shook her head.

“Clothes weren’t dirty. No rips that I could see,” I said.

“You never know. Brent’s assigning an officer from the post to help us, kind of watch over things, make sure nothing’s being missed.” Dolly’s face went a little dark. She wasn’t happy with the thought of an overseer. “Hell, as if I need some guy from Gaylord keeping track of me.” She shook her head, setting her cop hat to bouncing. “Come on, come on,” she complained. “Lady’s waiting out there.”

True to Dolly’s usual state of oblivion, she didn’t warn me about the woman in the front seat of her patrol car. You couldn’t help but be dazzled—and puzzled. She had to be in her early fifties; dressed in a caftan ranging in color from bright orange to vivid brown, with bronze fringe running down the sleeves and sides. The woman’s hair was stop-light red and done up in the messiest top knot I’d ever seen, a fountain of bottle-red hair cascading to her shoulders and hanging in bangs over her wide, green eyes, more red than green at the moment as the woman’s long, lush face shone with rivers of flowing tears. Her narrow hand with bright-painted fingernails came out to give me a limp handshake as I leaned in at the open window.

“Glad to meet you,” I said, pumping her hand a time or two more.

She was a study in earth tones and misery.

She frowned, tucking her chin into her chest so that a couple of double-chins formed. “Crystalline. From Toledo, Ohio.”

“Emily Kincaid.”

“You’re the reporter who found …” She took a deep breath and let it out, then looked away, toward the lake. She threw her head back, red hair tangling over her shoulders, and let out a deep and mournful sigh.

“Is that your real name?” I couldn’t help myself.

She looked up, not understanding at first. “Oh … no. It’s the name I was given. I was going to do my Shamanic training with Marjory.” She seemed about to burst into sobs again but stopped herself. “Now all I’ve got is the name. She said I needed that first—to get my head into better places than where I’d been. Crystalline means clear as day. A kind of purity. But of the earth, too. You know, like a gem, a crystal. Marjory said it suited me. Which is kind of funny if you’d known me before. I guess there’s a little fire in the crystal. That’s what she said. A lot different than who I used to be. She changed my life, I’ll tell ya. Marjory. Just changed everything.”

“And Marjory is …?”

“Oh crap …” Crystalline was gone, both of her red-knuckled hands at her lips, lacy handkerchief pressed against her mouth.

Dolly leaned over from her seat behind the wheel. “Marjory’s the one Crystalline thinks you found out there in Deward. Marjory Otis.”

I made a face and nodded. Probably one subject to stay away from for the time being.

Crystalline settled into the seat. I got in back, and slammed the door behind me. The wire screen was between us. I told myself there wasn’t much doubt that Crystalline had known the dead woman. If ever there was an identifiable uniform, these two belonged to the same club, sect, group—whatever it was.

Dolly took off up my drive, through a shower of pebbles and leaves. No siren this time. With un-Dolly-like decorum, or maybe it was respect for the woman’s feelings, she contained herself and drove at a normal speed across Sandy Lake Road toward Gaylord, faster than going around through Mancelona but sometimes almost impassable, with deep sink holes and soft, sandy ruts.

We lurched from hole to hole along the dirt road maintained by the oil company with pumps back in the woods. Dolly cursed under her breath, probably at the thought of losing her muffler again.

Crystalline blew her nose into her wilting handkerchief, then half turned to look at me through the wire back of her seat.

“I’m sure it’s Marjory,” she said. “Oh dear … oh crap.”

We let her cry. There was time ahead, after she identified the body, to find out who Marjory was and what she was doing at Deward. Crystalline struggled for control and kept talking, not so much to Dolly and me, as to herself. “Dear, sweet Marjory. I reported her missing early yesterday morning ’cause I didn’t hear from her. None of us in our group heard and that’s not like Marjory. I kept calling and calling.”

Her voice broke. She sniffed hard, blew, and went on talking. “It was like I could feel something immediately. You know, one of those universal warnings—coming at me so fast. I called your chief of police. I told him something had happened to her. There was no need for her to come here alone, the way she did. Any one of us would have been glad …”

She sighed, and turned to look out the window.

“Pretty country …” Her strong voice grew weak. “I can see why she was drawn back … well … not mine to say, I suppose.”

We grew quiet as the woods sped past us.

Crystalline stirred. She turned her face halfway toward Dolly. “From your description, Deputy, I know it’s Marjory. I know that skirt. She let me wear it. That’s how she was. Best in the world.”

“This is going to be hard on you,” Dolly answered in a, for Dolly, soft voice. “Identification is something nobody wants to face.”

“Well, of course not,” Crystalline snapped then settled back in her seat. “Better me than the others. They … the women in our group—two more besides me and Marjory—well, they’re delicate. You know, they feel things deeper than most people because we’re all tuned in to …” She stopped.

“Into what?” Dolly prodded.

“You know, to the world around us. We can zero right in on what people think and feel. That’s what Marjory teaches: connection. We can’t heal until we can reside inside the body of another. But not power. Oh no. Marjory was so against power—the universal destroyer of civilization, she called it. All that mindless power that kills our babies and …”

It dawned on me what these women were. “You’re healers?”

“More than that. Shamans,” Crystalline nodded, hair bouncing in a waterfall of red. “Marjory was our teacher. She’s done Shamanic studies for years, with some of the best teachers in the country. Oh shit … this world will be such a lonely place without her.”

Dolly turned right at the road leading north, to Gaylord. Soon we were in town and at the state police post. Lieutenant Brent came to the lobby to meet us. He was solicitous toward our cringing Crystalline, asking only a few questions, then sending us on our way over to the low gray building used as a morgue, shared by a few of the northern counties.

Crystalline melted between the police post and the morgue. We helped her out of the car and up the indoor-outdoor carpeted steps into the unprepossessing block building. Inside, Dolly went with her to view the body while I sat in a black plastic chair out front.

That word
shaman
—it brought back memories that didn’t fit the woman I’d just met. It was back when I was newly out of college. I signed on as an intern at
Mother Jones
magazine and was given the opportunity to go to Oaxaca, Mexico, with a group of journalists to study with shamans of the Zapotec Indians. We lived with the shamans, learned a bit of what they did, and marveled at the healing—with a simple touch, a few herbs, and an intense silent communication. I sat through ceremonies and took part in one where I stood before Roberto, the shaman I covered, and was brushed with branches of a tree or bush as he, trancelike, mumbled words, maybe prayers, over me. Roberto took water into his mouth and spit it out above my head. Not a drop touched me. I don’t know what happened to the water, but I felt nothing. I wasn’t wet. No water fell on the ground around me. It was gone and I left that ceremony stunned, feeling otherworldly. I was given soaps and herbs to bring home, and had stories to write. I’d felt things there, in Mexico, I’d never felt before. I saw through new eyes. Coming back to the United States had been difficult at first—it was as if the ground still rose and fell above ruins, as it did in Oaxaca. There were things around me I couldn’t shake, and couldn’t speak about. Those were the stories I didn’t write for the magazine.

I was trying to come up with the first line for my new story when a slow moan came from the back of the building. The moan grew to a choking cry and then the “No! No! No!” began.

In a few minutes, Crystalline, holding on to Dolly’s arm, stumbled from the back viewing room where Marjory lay. The bright caftan was crumpled in on itself; the woman’s head hung. Dolly led her to a chair. After a while, the sobbing stopped, but she kept her head down, hair hanging around her face. Dolly and I looked at each other. We had to get back to the police post. Brent would want a new, signed statement from me—since I was in town—and one from Crystalline. The investigation couldn’t begin until we had as much as Crystalline could give us.

“Chris …” Dolly tapped her shoulder.

The woman looked up and frowned. “Crystalline. Please. Marjory gave me the name for a reason.”

“Sorry,” Dolly said. “It’s just that we’ve got to get back to see Lieutenant Brent before he goes off duty. He’ll need whatever you can give him. I’ll bet anything you want us to get busy finding whoever did this.”

Her head snapped back. “Of course I do. I’m going to tell you stuff … oh, yes … I’ll tell you stuff. Whoever did this terrible thing to Marjory …

“It’s that place,” she went on, sniffing and taking a swipe at her nose with one arm. “That awful ghost town. That’s what did it to her. She was afraid of that place. She’d never have gone there alone.”

When we walked toward the door we’d come in, there was purpose and strength in Crystalline’s step. “Better get moving.” She looked back at us and pushed her bright hair over her shoulder with one determined hand. “I’m feeling forces that might kill again. You got people in town … Marjory came here because of them. That’s what she said. And a letter …” She gave a shiver. “I think it’s Marjory warning us to hurry. She’s all around me. She’s telling me terrible things are going to happen.”

I got the distinct feeling Crystalline, and maybe Marjory, didn’t mean because the world was about to end. There was a much deeper evil at work. Even I could feel it.