Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (29 page)

"So?" Anna Mae asked, her hands raised.

"So move real slow and set down that
knapsack. We'll have to ask you to come with us."

"That's stupid," she said, realizing that
this was not the best way to handle law-enforcement officers of any
kind. "I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't got any booze or
narcotics, and even if I did, what's with the guns? Are you afraid
I'd try to brain you with a beer bottle, or what?"

Something metallic clicked on one of the
guns, and despite her disparaging tone, she felt her unemptied
morning bladder give way a little, a trickle of urine run down her
leg. Oh, shit, she had thought the bracelet was a sort of
initiation gift, but maybe it was just bad luck.

The words to a Hoyt Axton song full of funny
curses for overly officious policemen ran through her head
suddenly. It gave her a little courage. "Look, I'll take a
breathalyzer and we can call my lawyer when the store opens, but I
need to see some ID. I was just minding my own business. . . ."

"You were trespassing on federal reservation
lands," the cop on the left said. "When you people do that, it
usually means you've been drinking, and there's a stiff penalty for
that."

Her eyes were trained very firmly on the
little metal holes, and her ears were trained on the voice of the
cop. She didn't know how these men had known she was here, but
their orders were probably coming from higher up—or lower down—than
even they suspected. She knew if she went with them, no one would
ever hear from her again.

* * *

Tom George parked in the back as he always
did, but a little farther down the road. He'd seen the fresh tire
tracks headed for the store, and he didn't know who would be coming
out here so early. He had a feeling it had to do with that woman,
the woman he half suspected had sent the porcupine after him this
morning. He had a college education, he had two tours in Vietnam;
he had a younger sister dead from injuries in Desert Storm, his
sister he'd stayed with last night was a doctor, and another sister
practiced law in Oklahoma City—but he still didn't discount the
possibility of magic. Or evidence, he thought, touching the quill
in his pocket. In fact, the longer he lived, the more he believed
the ancestors had been right about a lot of things.

He entered quietly through the back of his
store and unbolted the front door. There were two of the firewater
fuzz, Harl Ingersoll and Cal Perry. Cal had served in Nam at the
same time as George and they had been state cops for years before
switching over to the new federal substances division. He and Harl
had their guns trained on the porcupine woman, she looking bristly,
wary, and desperate, as if she would spring back over the fence or
make herself disappear, which somehow wouldn't have greatly
surprised George.

Harl was saying something to her about
trespassing, which she was, of course, but George felt pretty sure
he could have discussed that with her without resort to firearms. "
'Scuse me, boys," he said, taking his cue from Harl, "but what are
you doin' harassin' my new security officer?"

"You harborin' drunks, Tom?" Cal asked him,
but George knew that, despite his challenging tone, Cal was thrown
a little off balance.

"You drunk?" George asked the porcupine
woman, trying to remember her name. She shook her head. "She says
she's not drunk, Cal. Told me she never touches the stuff. You can
test her if you like, but I don't think the guns are
necessary."

"We'll be the judge of that," Harl said, but
Cal was already disgustedly holstering his weapon, and Harl
followed suit. The woman walked slowly to stand beside George.

"You should inform us if there are other
authorized people on the premises, George," Cal said.

"I'm informing you. I hired her
yesterday."

Cal gave him a disgusted look, but they got
back into the car and left without further question.

Porcupine Woman looked George in the eye.
"Thanks," she said. "Where's the ladies' room?"

* * *

There had been quite a few health clubs
before Willie and the others went to Britain, but nothing quite on
this scale. This Temple thing had taken over an old building
formerly devoted to the Department of Social Services. It had been
redecorated and re-plumbed, and now a procession of people in
bright-colored, formfitting suits that covered their whole bodies
pumped weights, moved stuff around with their thighs, and soaked in
Jacuzzi-like swimming pools that smelled like rotten eggs.

The atmosphere was both hushed and noisy at
the same time. Thick carpets covered the floors but did not absorb
the noise from the six TV sets featuring other dancing, pumping,
body-suited people. About twenty young folks, pretty and healthy
enough to suit the sacrificial taste of even the pickiest Aztec
god, bounced around the room bossing other people he assumed were
the customers. Some of them looked bewildered, some of them looked
grimly determined, and a few just looked as if they were in pain. A
bunch of people were busily scaling all the walls, which were
designed to look like something out of an ancient ruin from an old
Harrison Ford movie.

"Hi, I'm Mindy," said a blond cheerleader
type with a physique straight out of one of them old-fashioned
macho exploitative men's magazines, or maybe, Willie thought when
he looked a little closer at her and saw that she was not quite as
young as she looked, a plastic surgeon's office. She gave him a
smile with enough sparkling white teeth to pave Congress Avenue in
downtown Austin.

"Well, hi there, Mindy darlin'. I'm Willie
MacKai." He hefted his guitar and said, by way of explanation, "I'm
the band."

"Nice to meet you," she said, and ran her
eye down his body. "But, oh dear, Willie, I'm afraid you're
overdressed. Wouldn't want to make the clients feel uncomfortable.
Aubergine, I think, is just the perfect color for you." She plucked
a reddish-brown-purple package from a shelf behind her and handed
it to him, then pointed out the locker room.

He undressed and tugged the suit on.
It was surprisingly comfortable, but he felt a little ridiculous.
He sprinkled a dab of fairy dust over his head to go with the
aubergine Peter Pan outfit. He'd need all the help he could get.
He'd played stranger gigs than this, but not
much
stranger.

"Where do you want me to play, darlin'?" he
asked Mindy.

"Well, I think for the therapeutic dance
workshop. I was told you do heart-strengthening songs, and that
sounds like just what we need."

Willie stood in front of the class behind
the instructor, a hulking young fella with biceps as big as
Willie's thighs and a lot of curly blond hair.

"This is experimental, people," the
instructor said. "We're going to have live music here, and we'll
improvise our moves to go with it." The class looked at Willie with
a mixture of expectation and profound doubt.

Trying to pretend he thought he was starting
a trend, but feeling as if he were making a fool of himself, he
asked, "Well, what would you like to hear first?" But they all
looked at him blankly because, of course, they still didn't know
any songs at all.

The instructor said, "We got to warm
up."

"Then you want somethin' kind of slow,"
Willie said. He knew slow songslots of long, slow, gruesome ones
he'd learned in Scotland, but ballads with a hundred verses would
take up all the time these folks had paid for and then some. The
kind of songs he liked best, the ones he had mentioned, were maybe
a little complicated for people who were huffing and puffing so
hard they might have trouble hearing him. But work songs, hell,
they were designed for singing through noise and exertion. So he
said, "Okay, how about a sea chantey? I'll play you a halyard
chantey called 'Lowlands Low.' Unless I miss my guess, it'll be
extra aerobic if you sing on the chorus while you do your moves,
okay?"

To his amazement, it actually worked.
This kind of music went even better than he hoped with the
exercises. Pumping chanteys like "Strike the Bell" were good for
knee bends and push-ups, capstan chanteys like "General Taylor"
with its steady, "
walk
him
along, John,
carry
him along"
were good for repetitive, smoother moves.

Willie was getting into it. His old buddy
Jim Hawkins, the sailing chanteyman he'd met at Anna Mae's
festival, might worry about tradition getting a little stretched
out of shape—Hawkins was one of those guys who cared a lot about
tradition—but what the hell, there was a pool here, that ought to
make it wet enough for sea chanteys.

People were singing along too. Willie felt
his excitement growing. It was beginning to feel as if this totally
ridiculous gig was going to work—some woman was even coming up with
a pretty good harmony. Willie found himself doing little dance
steps with them as he played and sang and sweated along.

He started something a little livelier, a
Caribbean chantey conducive to more rhythmic movement—"Packing
Sugar in the Hold Below." The leader had the group doing sets of
leg raises followed by trunk circles, followed by hand
clapping.

"Now we need something with a steady, even
beat," the instructor told him at last. "Like
chukachukachukachuka."

"Then what?"

"Then nothing. Just that."

Willie tried "Wimoweh," and the class liked
it, but the instructor, who Willie began to see was a little put
out that the focus of the class had shifted from himself to Willie,
beckoned to Mindy.

"He won't cooperate with the program," Hulk
said.

Mindy looked superficially disappointed and
deep-down mean as a snake. "Is that true, Willie?"

"Well, hell, ma'am,
chukachukachukachuka ain't no kinda
human
bein'
type song—that's machine noise. You want that,
you'll have to stick with a machine. But we been havin' a pretty
good time here, and I think we should keep it up. This guy here
said he'd change his routine to go along with me."

"I couldn't hear him all the way back here,
Mindy," some guy called out.

"I just don't think this is what we're
looking for, Willie," Mindy said.

"Fine."

"Come and pay me for your leotog and leave,
please."

"Pay you?"

"That's what I said. We can't resell these
once they're used, you know." And she sauntered out.

He changed back into his own clothes and
started to stalk past without paying the hundred and twenty-five
dollars she wanted for the outfit, but the hulk was standing around
the desk, glaring at him. Willie didn't figure he was as fast or as
strong, and he had the money and he needed his hands and arms
unbroken if he was going to play anything, so he paid up and left,
hot all over from anger and exertion.

* * *

The ghost-woman just kind of hovered there,
above Lucien Santos's skylight. Julianne opened her mind and tried
to encourage the ghost to communicate, but all the woman did was
stare down at Juli where she lay soaking in Santos's big whirlpool
tub. The water grew cooler, and Julianne's skin started getting
pruney and puckery from being so waterlogged, and still the ghost
said nothing. Juli opened her eyes and glared up at the spirit. She
had to admit she was feeling a little peeved. She was used to
forthright ghosts who saw right away that she was a receptive sort
of person, tuned into her frequency, and came right out with
whatever it was they had to communicate. She hadn't encountered
such a reticent spook in years.

"Do you maybe have a message from George?"
she asked, but the ghost just hovered. Juli could see the moon
clean through her face now. Not the man in the moon, she thought,
the moon in the woman.

Then she thought, Of course, it's Lucien's
house. She probably is waiting for Lucien. "I gotcha now," she told
the ghost. "You wanted to see Lucien, huh? I'll go get him." But as
soon as she spoke, before she could grab her towel and step from
the tub, the ghost had vanished. Juli thought of calling for
Lucien, but then decided it could wait until morning. She was much
too tired at the moment.

She retired to the pretty room, too
preoccupied to notice the black-and-red calico quilt with the
bear-claw pattern, the painted animal-skull sculptures on her
walls. The crystals lining her windows looked dull and faded. Just
outside her window hung a wind chime made of old forks, but she was
already in bed and on her way to sleep when something bumped the
chimes violently and they tinkled the first few notes of "Banks of
the Ohio" over and over again all through the night.

Lucien was already gone by the time she
emerged from her room the next morning. She put on her clothes,
picked up her new used banjo, grabbed some orange juice from the
refrigerator in the cavernous kitchen, and walked out to the deck.
The day was just pleasant, not cold or windy at all. The morning
sun warmed the wood, and she sat and played "Banks of the Ohio"
until she'd worked out some new progressions. When she got tired,
she decided to go explore down by the little stream that ran near
the house. A few lodgepole pines grew alongside it, but most of the
deciduous trees were already stripped to skeletal bareness, and the
stones shone through water burdened with dead leaves. She liked the
music of the stream, though. It relaxed her, helped her meditate.
She found it hard to truly meditate nearer to the house, though,
which was funny, since Lucien's whole setup was so obviously
designed for that sort of thing.

She really had thought she'd find George
here, and instead all she had found was that one reticent
ghost.

She sat on the edge of the stream and pulled
her banjo into her lap and started playing again. It was chilly,
though, when she'd been quiet for a moment, and she started back
for the house to see if she could find a jacket of Lucien's to
borrow. That was when she saw the shimmeriest, palest outline of
the ghost from the night before, standing there looking at her out
of deep sad eye sockets.