Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged Read online

  "So why doesn't Manaba come out and say that in front of me and let's get to it? Too high school for me. If the woman wants help she should speak up or let us alone. Did you ask her for Nizhoni's time of death too?"

  Callie perked up, very happy I was speaking her language.

  "I did. Manaba didn't know to the minute when she was killed. I could only get within a couple of hours." The computer graphics spun, and numbers appeared and adjusted and reappeared. Then the strange astrological wheel that looked like a blueprint of the cosmos settled in, and Callie studied the computer screen. "I don't see anything at all. Something doesn't feel right. I don't know." Callie shook her head as if trying to sort out the confusing bits of information.

  "Maybe you're being blocked from seeing," I said, and Callie looked up at me and gave me a warm smile that seemed like celestial appreciation for my paying attention. "Look up November 21, 1997," I ordered, demonstrating to my lover that all had not been lost on me and surprising myself at how cosmic I could become when a shaman was my competition. Callie began clicking the keys down on the keyboard until the wheel in front of us read 1997 and stared at it silently for a few seconds.

  "She lost her grandmother at a time when the Moon in the Fourth House of home was squaring the Sun in the Seventh House of the grandmother of a woman. Venus was in Capricorn in the Ninth House, trapped between Mars, indicating male, and Neptune, indicating disillusionment or deception. Of course, look, Venus was besieged!" She spoke into the computer screen as if my head was in there instead of over her shoulder.

  "Run that by me again."

  "Besiegement is an old-world astrological aspect that occurs when a planet like Venus is trapped between two heavier planets." Callie pointed to the symbols. "Mars can be many things but certainly, in a negative sense, it means danger or aggression. That's behind her, to the backside of Venus. In front of Venus is Neptune, which negatively could mean disillusionment. With danger at her back, she may have walked forward into deception."

  Callie flopped back in the chair as if the energy of discovery had exhausted her. "A woman will save the day, even though the woman is under threat, because Venus, representing women, is trining the Ascendant, which represents the event—her death."

  "How's a woman going to save the day? Isn't the day pretty much over, since the grandmother is dead?"

  "I'm telling you what I see in the chart. I don't know if it makes sense or not."

  I didn't know what it was about Callie studying astrological charts that always made her look so sexy, but it did. Her intense focus away from me allowed me time to examine every part of her without her looking back, and I had a chance to observe her magnificent mane of white-blond hair, short but feminine and full, barely touching the beautiful white sweater she often wore and framing the thick gold necklace that had to be an inch wide.

  I didn't ask her where she'd gotten the necklace, afraid perhaps her ex-husband, reportedly of ten minutes, had given it to her, in which case I would have to bite it off with my teeth and melt it down into a dagger with which to stab the sonofabitch. I marveled at how I could still have that much hate for Robert Isaacs.

  "What are you thinking? Your energy has gone completely dark." Callie turned to look at me.

  "Sorry, I'll wipe those thoughts away," I said, making a windshield-wiper motion in front of my face as Callie had taught me. "Look up November twenty-first in the present."

  "So you're becoming an astrologer?" she teased, obviously pleased, and I should have basked in her smile and enjoyed the moment. Instead my thoughts flashed from Robert Isaacs in bed with Callie to Manaba having an affair with Callie, and I became so knotted up inside that I choked on all possible playfulness.

  "Right now, Moon, ruler of women, is trapped between Mars and Uranus squaring Venus—so a woman is almost trapping herself. I don't feel the woman is dead," Callie said, shutting down her computer and letting the screen go dark.

  "Too cosmic for me. I've got to write a screenplay. I'm on deadline."

  Even as I said the word, the irony of it struck me—the line at which we are dead. For me, merely an abstract point in time beyond which I would have no studio deal. For an Indian woman, a literal line at the edge of a cliff beyond which she would have no life.

  Chapter Five

  Early the next morning, the phone rang. Checking the caller ID, I picked up to hear Barrett wanting to talk about the e-mail file containing the first seventy-five pages I'd sent her.

  "Teague, you ought to spend more time out of the sack and at the computer. Good stuff."

  "I'm very glad you like the script, Barrett," I said, intentionally completing full sentences to let Callie know who was on the phone and what we were talking about, and thinking that married people's lives must simply border on hell.

  "I like everything about your work..." Barrett's words dangled like a lure at the end of a fishing line—letting "work" encompass the screenplay I'd written for her or the sex I'd once had with her, her tone trying to snag me like a hook passing a hungry fish. I didn't take the bait.

  "So I'll continue writing brilliant work and—"

  My upbeat tone annoyed her because she abruptly interrupted. "I sent it on to Jacowitz, to let him know you're on it, and he had a couple of comments that I don't think are too off base. Is this a good time?"

  That was the Hollywood version of I'm-letting-you-know-I-have-manners-but-I-hold-your-career-in-my-hands.

  "Great time, shoot," I said, the last word obviously Freudian.

  "You've done wonders with what you've got. I love the interplay between the housewife and the husband, dead-on in its honesty. Makes me believe you're straight." And Barrett laughed so I laughed. "First dialogue between the women, nice. Jacowitz loved it.. .but he thinks it needs to be a little grittier. Maybe develop a kind of sexy grunge, make it a little more hip, and of course that's going to be hard unless we make a few character tweaks. He was thinking, we make the nun a therapist—"

  "A therapist nun..." I repeated, trying to be open-minded. After all, the novice is studying psychology.

  "Therapist, period. Drop the nun. And the therapist is trying to help this psychologically abused hooker."

  "Hooker?" My mind was scrunching into a psychotic ball.

  "Don't you love it?" Her voice was gleeful.

  "But the abused wife is—"

  "Gone. She's the hooker. Who better to know about psychological abuse, to have experienced abuse, than a hooker? So the therapist and the hooker give you that kind of grunge right from the start, and you don't have to deal with the whole church thing and having the movie picketed and all that BS. Now we can get some language in there that's sexier because the hooker can say things like pussy and cunt, where the housewife wouldn't—"

  "Why does she have to say pussy and cunt?"

  "She's a hooker!" Barrett shouted as if she'd written the entire screenplay and I was too dense to get it. I was silently clouding up, the spectrum of my internal energy waffling between corpse gray and hearse black as Barrett rushed her closing remarks. "Think about it. It would make Jacowitz happy to know you're at least listening."

  "Look, I'm listening but—"

  "I know you're listening." She verbally stroked me. "You listen better than any writer I know, you're the best. It's a small change. You okay with it?"

  I sighed. "I wouldn't call it okay—"

  "Look, this is your first motion picture with a big-time director. The important thing here is the relationship, right?" Pause. "Right?"

  "Right," I repeated at her prodding and then hated myself for it. Why is the relationship the most important thing? The work is the most important thing.

  "He works with people who get it. You've got to show him you get it."

  "Got it," I said, dejected beyond description.

  "Got to go to a meeting at the Bev," she said, apparently forgetting I would know why she had a meeting at the Bev—it was her casting couch. "Call me if you have questions and hi to the blo
nde." She hung up before I could comment further.

  Putting my face in my hands, I moaned. "I'm a whore writing about a hooker."

  "Don't say that!"

  "I'm a fucking Hollywood hamster who jumped back on the wheel of ‘love your story, let's do your story, let's change your story, was this your story, I thought it was my story.'"

  "Was she yelling at you?" Callie frowned, having heard Barrett's voice through the phone and seen my dejected expression.

  "Yeah, redeveloping my story and then shouting at me because I don't get the plot. By the time this project is over, I won't recognize this as my story, which is good because it will probably be about a psychologically abused aardvark that has sex with a chicken, and there will be enough writers on the credit roll to start a ball team. The entire shape of the story is shifting...subtle at first, a tweak here, a tweak there.. .and soon it's unrecognizable, like a screenplay suffering from Alzheimer's, the original idea still buried inside there somewhere, struggling to communicate something...but it's forgotten what."

  "Your story—subtly shifting like the wolf."

  "What?" I glanced over at Callie, wondering why, when I was baring my soul, all she could talk about was the wolf, which as far as I could see had no relevance to my current trauma.

  "The Navajo clan in which Manaba was reared." The faraway look on Callie's face was making me squirmy.

  "I'm afraid you're about to tell me something that would be very interesting over cocktails in L.A., but in a cabin in the woods might scare the shit out of me."

  "For your own protection I have to tell you."

  "I hate this part." I winced.

  "The wolf could be a shape-shifter or, more aptly put, a shape-shifter has taken the form of a wolf," Callie said, facing me full front and resting her hands on my knees, I presumed, to keep me from running to my car and fleeing into the night. She seemed to weigh my reaction before going further with the explanation.

  "I was studying the aspects in the chart and thinking about my time here with Manaba and realizing she once told me about shape-shifters in the tribe. Not everyone can do it, of course. It's a very special talent."

  Running my hands through my hair, I fretted. I'd had a terrible review on my script and now this. "When I first met you and you told me about astrology and then psychics and then ghosts, I didn't believe you. Now I believe everything you say, so I have to draw the line here. This is way too voodoo for me. I can't go around looking into the eyes of every animal out there to see if it's really...Ethel."

  "I've walked into their energy field, Teague. I've entered their space and gotten involved in someone else's drama. Now he's after me too, as evidenced by the attack on me in the bedroom."

  "He who?" I was breathing rapidly, despising that anyone would threaten Callie. "You haven't done anything to show anyone you're involved in whatever's going on here."

  "People in tune with this know, the energy knows...the wolf knows."

  "The wolf knows? I'm sorry but that's insane."

  Callie didn't chastise me for my negativity, perhaps knowing I'd reached the limit of my willing suspension of disbelief and, instead, went to the kitchen and brewed me some coffee and let me settle down.

  Watching her from behind, the small hips, well-formed shoulders, and the way her gorgeous hair swept back off her features, I sighed. "The one thing I don't want shifting is my relationship with you, unless it's a good shift, however you define shift..."

  She approached, coffee cup in hand, and we stared at each other for a moment. Then I ducked my head and put it against her chest, and she draped her arms around my neck.

  "It's only energy, Teague, don't be afraid. When an athlete stops putting his energy out there and retires, he often gets sick because that outwardly directed energy turns in on him. There's no way to dissipate it. When a woman is repressed and unable to express herself—put her energy out there and say what she feels— that energy goes inside her and she can get diseases of the heart, the mind, the body."

  "Do you really believe that?" I flashed on the myriad of women's illnesses and was incredulous that Callie thought merely speaking out could cure them. "I don't think it's fair to say women cause their own diseases by not speaking up."

  "Energy flows out of you or it goes in on you." Callie was resolute, and the concept she raised seemed so bizarre I really didn't know where to begin the debate.

  "So what does energy have to do with the wolf eyes that were so human?"

  "The human used personal energy to travel out of body, taking on another form, and that form was the wolf."

  "You mean like a werewolf that's not a wolf but a person." I spoke carefully, as if my words might crack the thin ice of reality and drown me in the dark waters of another realm.

  "Many powerful tribal people of both sexes can shape-shift."

  "And why would anyone want to do that—leave a perfectly good body having a nice meat-loaf dinner to stalk around in the woods and gnaw on a raw rabbit?"

  "To see something, or experience something they might not be able to see in human form."

  Elmo suddenly let out a huge sob and crawled under the coffee table, no doubt receiving mental images of people turning into wolves.

  "So how do they.. .shift?" I said, patting Elmo to comfort him.

  "A part of the soul leaves the body and goes elsewhere, sometimes with the help of a rhythmic drumbeat. The partial soul can take many forms."

  "Is this wolf-person.. .is that who attacked you energetically in the bedroom?" I said, thinking I sounded like psychic John Edwards and should be locked up.

  "I'm almost certain it wasn't. I don't sense real danger from the person who appeared outside our cabin. The other energy had a different vibration."

  "So Manaba...is she a shape-shifter?"

  "Perhaps. Her grandmother whom I visited once while I was with Manaba—"

  "Having an affair." I completed the sentence.

  "A cerebral affair," she quickly corrected.

  "Which Biblically falls under thinking-it-isdoing-it-so-you're-guilty."

  "I don't believe in guilt. I believe in.. .possibilities."

  "It's possible you had a cerebral affair with...a wolf, basically."

  She paused to weigh that thought and finally shrugged. "Perhaps." True to herself, she refused to view her past as anything but the natural course of events her life was supposed to take, and I had to admit I admired her positive attitude.

  "Don't let Jacowitz know or I'll get a call telling me to change the characters to a hooker and a wolf."

  "Is a cerebral affair with a beautiful creature like a wolf more or less strange to you than having sex with a woman who has sushi in her slits?"

  Callie's remark was quick and struck me unexpectedly, like an animal who, viewed as tame, irritated and hiding the feeling, chose one day to take its revenge with one deadly swipe of its paw. I could have retaliated, but a piece of me knew I deserved it. She was so good, so kind, so ethereal, and I was flippant on my best day, sarcastic on my worst.

  But Callie had struck out at me—slapped me as harshly as if she'd physically hit me—and while I could take far worse from anyone else and battle back without missing a beat, I was suddenly devastated by her attack—hurt. My throat grew tight and I teared up. Had I been silly enough to believe that Callie would never say a harsh word to me? Yes, I believed she never would. And why does this ridiculous remark make me so upset?

  My own ritualistic, threadbare jealousy was too ever-present with its dark strands from which I could not extricate myself. Every new thought, every action led back to a memory that triggered my need to attack Callie for perceived unfaithfulness in the past, the present, or the future. But now she was caught up in the jealous energy swirling around us both, the air full of it.

  "We have to stop," I said tearfully.

  "Do you see what combined negative energies can do? We're powerful together but we must stay positive," Callie replied softly and put her arms around
my neck. Over her shoulder through the window, I spotted a woman striding across the lawn on the backside of the cabin.

  I dashed to the door in time to see a heavyset woman with a big flat face in a gray skirt and white blouse, a black sweater too tight to close in front, and wearing clunky black shoes stride up to the cabin. When Callie and I popped out onto the porch, she seemed happy to see us.

  "No idea the cabin was full up—sorry, cutting across to the road. Fern Flanagan." She extended one short, flabby arm and gave me a pump-handle handshake as I introduced Callie and myself. "I maintenance the roadside facilities across the way." She nodded toward the two-lane.

  "So you clean up the camp areas?" Callie asked in friendly conversational fashion.

  "That's me. You can't even think up stuff I've seen. People are dirtier than dirt. Them bathrooms? Looks like cows have been let loose in 'em—pee up every wall!"

  Maybe I needed relief but a strange, Shrek-like woman in my front yard talking about peeing up a wall gave me the giggles, which seemed to spur Fern on.

  "Honey, I've done it so many years I've put these women into categories. There's sitters, hikers, half squatters, and sprayers. Hikers are one leg up, half squatters hang in the air so they don't touch the seat, and sprayers just let 'er rip from any position. What are you two doin' up here—havin' family for Thanksgiving?"

  "A romantic weekend.. .we're here on a vacation," Callie said, toying unnecessarily with Fern's tolerance level.

  What in hell has gotten into Callie? She's outing us to people who haven't even asked, and Fern of the forest is now staring at me.

  "Now that's really nice. I had a girlfriend once in school." For a moment Fern's eyes misted up as she stared off into the woods, then promptly snapped back as if to give herself a slap. "But then I ended up marryin' Frankie. He's a little bitty ole fella 'bout the size of you."

  She poked Callie in the arm and my mind went to a terrible place—little ole Frankie's pistil in Fern's stamen and how they could ever physically...pollinate. I shook my head to knock that thought out.