Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged Read online

"She attacked me," I said, using the dialogue I'd rehearsed with Elmo. My mind wanted to spin it, but Callie meant so much to me—I can't keep giving her partial truths if we're going to live together—and before I could stop myself I went venti, in a few tawdry sentences revealing everything from Barrett's touching me to the frightening fish-panty episode and the paramedics' arrival.

  Callie was silent. I was silent, realizing once again my future with her might be in jeopardy. Trying to maintain some bravado and minimize the impact, I said, "You claimed you saw it anyway so why make me tell it. It was horrible."

  "I see images, get feelings, pieces here and there, not everything blow by blow."

  And like that time in Vegas when I told Callie's dad I'd rather sleep with her than eat, I'd said too much. "What about you and the smoke dancer?"

  But Callie wasn't receptive to a redirection of the conversation, and we rode in silence—so much silence that a black hole would have sounded like a rock concert compared to the lack of sound between us.

  As if I could read her mind, I believed she wanted to know why under pressure I delayed the truth, or only partially revealed it, or worse, might think it overrated.

  If I thought about it, my cop training valued one-way truth. If I had to lie to get a perp to confess, the truth was I did a good job. If I had to dodge the truth to protect my cop buddies, the truth was I could be trusted. If I was sleeping with two women and neither of them knew about the other, the truth was I was under a lot of pressure and simply behaving like one of the guys. Truth was subjective.

  Back home, we moved about the cabin as if the cord between us had been severed irreparably. My truth and Callie's truth were not aligned. Mine consisted of shades of gray, it was truth I could spin, it was an artful truth, while Callie's was naively, overtly crystalline, the opposite of black, the prism through which she viewed, perhaps secretly judged, every person, every action, every essence of life.

  Before she could head for the bedroom, I blocked her with my body and grabbed her arm to stop her and force a discussion. "Look, I'm sorry if I—"

  "It's all energy, Teague. Truth is energy. You have to keep it pure."

  "You can't live that purely, Callie, no one can."

  "I have to live the truth and only add things to my life that enhance it."

  "Then I don't know if you want to add me," I said truthfully and walked into the bedroom feeling hollow. I lay down on the box-spring mattress whose creaking coils now sounded forlorn, like a lone clarinet at the end of a New Orleans funeral after all the mourners have been paid; and I looked up at the ceiling and contemplated this strange crossroads in our relationship, brought on by something as seemingly esoteric as the energy of truth.

  Chapter Four

  “Whoever said the truth hurts had it right. Callie slept on the edge of the bed, our bodies never touching, which took real effort since the old cabin mattress was so narrow. She was up at dawn and moved about the cabin as if I were a shadow, paying little attention to me, and I wasn't quite certain why.

  Was she deciding if she could accept me as I was? Was she thinking of ways to tell me good-bye? Or was she simply mad that I'd occasionally been less than truthful with her? I was on the lookout for Callie's discovery that I was short-term fun with no long-term benefit.

  I took Elmo for a walk, dog walking I imagined being what every lover on the planet did when she wanted to avoid a fight, or rehearse what she'd say in the inevitable upcoming fight, or pray that maybe the fight, like a pugilistic Passover, would somehow leave her door unmarked.

  "I didn't get to check in with you last night," I said to Elmo. "My evening didn't go very well. The whole Barrett thing resurfaced like a dead body on the beach, and Callie was as pissed as any non-psychic woman I've ever dated. I think her feelings are hurt. So how did your night go?"

  He walked in total silence, giving me nothing.

  "Aw, come on, don't you start. Remember that talk about the aisle? Well, I'm not really aisled yet. She's toyed with me and told me I'm not ready, and said I had a lot to learn, and on and fucking on. And now suddenly at this moment, on this trip, she's decided somewhere back in time I was already totally hers, and that I've fucked up and been unfaithful, and that furthermore I spin the truth and have bad energy, or something close to that."

  Elmo gave me a look that could only be described as a glower.

  "Fine," I said with sarcasm. "You always take her side. Keep it up and dog biscuits will be a thing of the past."

  He suddenly broke loose, ripping the leash from my hand, and raced up the cabin steps and banged into the screen door, reminding me that I could do a lot of things to him, but he would not tolerate threats. Callie opened the door for him and by the time I entered, they had disappeared into the bedroom, apparently allied in their determination to hide from the energy of threats and lies.

  I went to the computer and started working on the script, trying to focus on something other than this rift in my relationship with Callie. The thing I loved about writing was its ability to take me to another place when the place I was in was uncomfortable or unavoidable or both. Buried in words I could lose all track of time and forfeit the need for food or companionship. Writing, like lovemaking, was all passion and focus, and that's what I needed right now—and maybe it would even be what Jeremy Jacowitz wanted.

  By the time I took a break it was getting dark and I was about seventy-five pages in—not polished pages but first-draft pages— when out of the corner of my eye I noticed Elmo fretting and pacing. Not the kind of pacing that meant he needed a walk, but the kind that said something was wrong. Sounds were emanating from the bedroom, moans and whimpers, and I rushed in to see what was wrong.

  Standing in the doorway, I didn't know what to make of what I was seeing. Callie was stretched out on the bed, her body moving as if aroused, as if I were there on top of her, but her face was wrenched in terror. Her hips undulated but her hands pushed off something in the air above her, the hair on her head pulled straight up, electrified, as if someone had hands on it. The room felt like it was filled with sparks, the air ionized as if in an electrical storm. A wind whipped around the room, its source invisible, and I was frozen, frightened, unable to move until Elmo's squeaks set me in motion, and I literally leapt into bed beside her. Then I really felt it—an electricity, a hair-raising sensation on my neck and arms that could only be described as an energy field, a powerful pulsing tide. Caught in the waves with her, I struggled to remain on the bed.

  "Callie." I pulled her into my arms and now both of us were being rocked. Then, as if someone shut off the breaker, I sagged into her. Having something substantial to grapple with, rather than the mere air above her head, she pushed me away as if I were the cause of whatever was happening to her and began to cry.

  "Stop it. Wake up, Callie. Talk to me!"

  Her eyes snapped open and she seemed disoriented. "How long have you been here?"

  "I heard you moaning and..."

  She sat up in bed and hugged her bent knees in a seated fetal position, looking embarrassed and vulnerable and shook up.

  "I need to take a shower," she said suddenly, jumping up and hurrying into the bathroom. Hearing the water running, I waited on the edge of the bed, not knowing what to do and worried something was wrong with Callie that I was now discovering—something disturbing.

  "Thanks for letting me know," I told Elmo, and he pressed his warm and heavy fur suit against my leg.

  Callie was out of the bathroom and into her flannel nightshirt in minutes.

  "Were you dreaming? What happened? Your body looked like...like you were making love, but your face looked like you were fighting off a killer."

  "It was an attack," she said flatly, sounding almost irritated with me for asking, and I didn't have a clue what to ask next. I must have looked hurt because she put her arms around me. "Someone wanting to steal my energy, suppress and frighten me."

  "Someone like a real person?" My head was reeling. Maybe th
is was why Callie Rivers had parked her sexuality for so many years; maybe this was why she was obsessed with energy.

  "Someone with the ability to travel mentally, energetically, out of body," she explained.

  "Sorry, but you're going to have to go slower. This is freaking me out. Ghosts were one thing but now a ball of energy?"

  "In its simplest form."

  I said nothing, trying to think, but I couldn't grasp a traveling, woman-attacking energy.

  "There are energy thieves in everyday life, Teague. People who drain you physically and emotionally. An extreme example of that is an attempted rape."

  "You were raped?"

  "Someone was trying to sexually assault me energetically, which is nothing more than a person without the physical body present. It's hard for someone to shut down my physical form, because I'm so aware. Attacking me on a different plane was another way of trying to take my power, frighten me, when I was asleep and vulnerable."

  "Who is it?" I was horrified by the idea and furious someone would attempt to harm her in any way, even ways that seemed crazy to me. "Is it Manaba, because I'll yank the feathers right off her raven head!"

  "Never Manaba. She obeys the cosmic laws and would never be part of that kind of imbalance. It's not the Navajo way and it's not in the Navajo heart. She's a spiritual leader."

  Something in her tone and protectiveness of Manaba angered me. "I'm not real clear on spiritual leaders. There's one in Rome wearing a dress and fabulous jewelry, some guy in India wearing diapers and sitting on a mountaintop, a guy in China trying to turn himself into a single drop of rain, and then there's your Indian woman who binds her butt in buffalo briefs and dances in the fire."

  "Is it the dress code that bothers you?" Callie said in a tone that seemed more reprimand than question.

  "No," I replied, defiant and not giving in on this one. "It's a matter of a pure heart and who really has one. I haven't figured that out yet."

  Elmo's ears elevated off his head about two inches, and he launched his loose fur suit at gator-speed into the main room and let out a chest-deep bark that made my heart jump. Grabbing the gun and a flashlight from the bedside table, I went out the door, making sure Elmo stayed inside to avoid his putting his nose to the ground and never being found again or killed and eaten by something with a paw print the size of a butter plate.

  Taking the porch steps in two jumps, I landed on the ground, pointing my gun with my right hand and shining the light with the left. As if the light had been magnetized to its source, the beam landed directly on the largest fur face I'd ever seen outside of the Discovery Channel. A huge wolf—standing so close the vertical slits in its glistening eyeballs looked like coin slots, its teeth bared, poised to lunge and most likely rip me to pieces—glared at me as the door clicked open behind me. Without looking at Callie or taking my eyes off the wolf, I ordered her back into the cabin.

  "Don't kill it!" she warned, running to my side. "Teague, put the gun down." Her hand rested on my forearm and I couldn't believe what she was saying. As if the wolf knew her, it stopped snarling and stood as relaxed as a dog.

  I stared into the calm animal's eyes and a chill traversed my arms and across my shoulders and down my thighs. The eyes were human; I would bet my life on it. In fact, by dropping the gun to my side, I had. The soul behind the eyes of this wolf was more human than people I'd known, and I stared, mesmerized.

  "Go in peace," Callie murmured, and the animal moved its head in a way that could only be described as acknowledgement. Then, as if mission accomplished, it turned and sauntered back into the woods.

  Breath left my body in one relieved and explosive burst. "Holy shit!"

  In the clearing to our left, as if beamed in from outer space, Manaba appeared, or had been there all along and we hadn't noticed her. This time, Callie, seemingly nervous, stood close to me as Manaba took two steps toward her, and Callie put her arm around my waist, perhaps for protection.

  "She's not doing anything to get herself in any more danger," I interjected.

  "Danger exists. We merely walk into its energy field and join it." She addressed me but kept her eyes on Callie.

  "You have the more powerful medicine," Callie whispered.

  "But it has been unbalanced," she said, not waiting for further discussion, and disappeared as the wolf had.

  "You and I need to talk, and that's an understatement," I said, but Callie was already heading up the porch steps. I made one sweep of the area where the wolf had appeared before I followed her inside.

  "Okay, you're telling me somebody's energy tried to rape you, then a wolf appears that I believe is going to eat me for dinner and it turns out he knows you and likes you, and then Manaba, who definitely knows you and likes you, comes out of nowhere and demands help. What the hell's going on?"

  Callie said nothing and went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed as if meditating.

  "Manaba obviously knows about the attempted rape because she showed up right after it happened. How would she know unless she was involved?"

  "Intense energy can be felt by those who are sensitive to it."

  "Mind if I have a glass of wine?"

  I left the bedroom and headed for the kitchen, needing time to think and, frankly, a diversion to allow me to hide my feelings from Callie. Was she totally fucking bonkers? I'd bought into the astrology, and the animal conversations, and even the ghosts, but now she wanted me to believe that... what? A ball of rape energy was loosed on her?

  "I'm sorry you saw it," she said, appearing suddenly behind me and seeming to understand how this was perhaps one of the hardest elements of her life for me to witness.

  I poured a glass for myself and she refused one. I plopped down on the couch, propped my feet up on the coffee table made from a tree stump, and said, "Shoot."

  She pulled up an astrological chart on her computer, and my thought process was so overloaded with insane ideas that I welcomed something relatively harmless, like checking out the planets.

  "What are you looking for?" I asked, trying to control my internal sarcasm and becoming more respectful of her, which she appreciated because she suddenly put her arm around me as I stood beside her. I melted into her, grateful for her touch.

  "I told you when you arrived that this was a dangerous time for women—Mars conjunct Uranus in Aquarius squaring Venus in Scorpio—that we would be under attack. It's in the stars right now. Perhaps this person is trying to drive me away from here because he or she knows Manaba is seeking my help. This attacker is someone very powerful in the psychic world, someone who can attack with more force than anyone could muster in the flesh. I'm grateful you came into the room and disrupted the energy."

  "And if I hadn't?"

  "It would have left me as violated as if it had been a physical person."

  "But what if it happens again, how do I protect you from... energy?"

  "Everything is energy, Teague. Accept it, work with it. How you direct energy and redirect it and block it or absorb it is how you move through the world healthy or unhealthy."

  When I was in police work, I was accustomed to attempted rapes and animal attacks, but not by people I couldn't see and wild animals who were really people. Callie would say no more about the energy field, but she did seem uncomfortable, as if holding something back. I wasn't in the mood to let anything ride.

  "So what's the energy between you and Manaba? Even I can feel that."

  "Manaba and I were once very connected spiritually." Pause. "We've had what you might call...a cerebral affair," Callie said, taking my fear and frustration to a higher level.

  "A cerebral affair? Is that like you mentally wanted to sleep with her, but you didn't because you were too busy thinking about it?"

  "It's more like a very elevated version of a romantic friendship."

  "Which is what women had in the 1800s—the hots for each other but fought it for economic reasons."

  "Love is intensely aligned energies, and our mental
energy was intense.. .sort of a melding of our minds."

  I was getting more pissed and hurt by the minute, and tired of what I considered esoteric bullshit.

  "Mind fucking is what I call it. It goes from fucking someone in your mind to, hey, would you mind fucking? So if you're so hot for this, this—" I was searching for the most scathingly negative word I could find because Callie's having a Vulcan mind meld with anyone made me insane, and I started to tear up.

  "It's over," Callie said. "And I didn't have to tell you."

  "Hey, I always appreciate the truth," I said, giving her a small dig for constantly goading me about truth. "Don't you think I could see it? When she first saw you she was salivating all over her muskrat moccasins."

  "I didn't know you then," Callie said, ignoring my fashion barbs.

  "I'm referring to now." And I stormed off, mentally analyzing if I'd had virtual sex, cerebral sex, or any other kind of non-touch sex with anyone in my life and concluded I hadn't. Probably because I tend to have physical sex instead, I reasoned. But if I do decide to have cerebral sex I can guarantee it won't be with anyone whose idea of great threads is sinew socks.

  "Is that what was going on in the fire at the ceremonial site," I shouted over my shoulder, "your energy moving together, because it looked like sex to me." There, I'd said what was on my mind.

  "What happened in the flames was pure imagery, not sex. Manaba doesn't use her powers like that. Could we call a halt to the jabbing?" she asked and suddenly put her arms around me from behind, stopping my verbal stomping.

  Turning to embrace her, I wondered if this is what living together would be like. Right now, I didn't care. Worn out from the energy it took to wage a good sarcastic battle over several hours, I was maxed.

  "When I went over to talk to Manaba at the ceremonial site, I asked her for her grandmother's exact time of death, and she told me it was November 21, 1997 at 4:23 p.m. I remembered reading about her grandmother's unexpected transition—the entire community was in mourning over Eyota, meaning 'the great one.' Her time of death at 4:23 adds up to nine. She died on a spiritual number, and of course the number nine signifies distance, a faraway trip. The online accounts said she died of heart trouble, but Manaba thinks her grandmother's passing wasn't accidental."