Ed Gorman - Voodoo Moon

"Thanks."

"Well," she said, "I'd better get back over there and start acting like a chief of police."

"Nice to see you, Susan."

She touched my elbow affectionately. "We've still got some bowling to do sometime, Mr. Payne."

Istayed another half hour, hoping to snag Tandy and take her back to town.

But by now she was more than a mere celebrity. She was a full-fledged shaman. In addition to the press, everyday people were surrounding her now, too. I heard the word "holy" mentioned by a very old woman. Some would still be convinced that Tandy was a fraud and had used a variation on stage magic to find the bones (or perhaps that she'd even planted the bones herself); others would credit her ESP powers, about which they'd been informed many times on her show; and a few would see her gift as divinely inspired (which it probably could be, this not being mutually exclusive to paranormal powers, as Tandy frequently pointed out).

Her crowd grew wider, deeper. They wanted her autograph. They wanted to know if she'd be doing a segment of her show from town here. One woman wanted Tandy to touch her leg-crippled daughter. Tandy gently declined. She looked embarrassed, even a tad frantic.

I could understand them. They wanted something to believe in. Since you could no longer believe in government, business, movie stars, sports stars, or even many religions. . that left you exploring the fringes for people to believe in. That explains Pat Robertson and all the other pseudo-religious con artists; and that also explains our obsession with things extraterrestrial, even though there's no hard evidence yet that we've ever actually had a close encounter.

So when a fragile young woman through mental powers alone unearths long-buried bones. . that's remarkable.

So why not push your crippled son toward her? Or your blind daughter? Or your cancer-dying husband? If any of these folks were my kin or beloved, I'd probably do the same thing.

Where's the harm?

At least Tandy wouldn't ask you to send her "prayer messages" in the form of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills and "reward" you with little pamphlets of inspirational bilge. And she wouldn't get involved in far-right politics, pushing their message of hate.

So where's the harm?

Maybe on the off-chance Tandy can do something miraculous for you. .

It was all a little frantic and desperate and sad, the yearning way they surrounded her, but there was a human sweetness about it, too.

By now, it was full-fledged football weather, the chill almost tart but fresh and invigorating. Somebody started a small fire. A woman showed up with a small van loaded with coffee and doughnuts and Danish. As the crowd seemed to be increasing steadily, she'd probably turn a nice profit.

I watched the lab people work under their big lights. Extracting the bones was laborious work. We'd taken a course at Quantico in such excavations. Hard, important work.

Somebody tipped the press to who I was, so I had my turn, too. I said very little. Their excitement was based on the fact that I was formerly an FBI profiler, and that Tandy and I had successfully worked together on two murder cases.

I was assaulted in all media-audiotaped for radio, videotaped for TV, and fed live as a special bulletin interrupting whatever network show was on locally at the moment.

No, I had no idea how Tandy had gotten her special power. No, I had no idea whose bones we'd found. No, I had no idea who the private eye Kibbe was, but I doubted that his presence and subsequent death had anything to do with the bones that Tandy had found.

They were disappointed in my responses, of course. They wanted a sound bite that'd be good at the top of the ten o'clock news, which was coming up fast.

They wanted me to link Kibbe and the bones and say that Tandy was having visions of Kibbe's killer and would soon identify him for the police.

They wanted me to say that, in fact, the real killer was already stalking Tandy, fearing that she'd expose him.

The stuff of TV movies-that's what they wanted for the TV news.

And as I said, they didn't get it. Not from me, anyway.

A lot of the time, I thought about Noah Chandler's phone call. Paul Renard still alive? I liked a good urban legend as much as any-body. But the prospect of the tale being true seemed remote.

I was actually more interested in his admission that he'd fired the shots at us at the asylum the other day. What the hell was that all about? Even then, under the anxiety of the moment, I'd felt that the shooter was missing us on purpose.

I wondered if Laura knew about Chandler. Or was maybe even his accomplice.

I tried once more to get close to Tandy. Impossible.

I also tried to say good-bye to Susan Charles. She was busy, too. The press had just discovered her as their next target.

The line at the doughnut van was longer than ever. The coffee was steaming hot and the pastry glistened with sugary coating. If the line hadn't been so long, I'd have indulged myself.

Lonesome prairie night. That was the feeling I had when I saw the plastic lights of Brenner, the reds and blues and yellows of all the chain fast-food places and the video stores and convenience stores with the six-deep gas pumps and all the Harleys parked slantwise along the front of the walks.

Kids would be in bed all warm and dream-thrilled and parents would be in front of TVs or in bed early for a quick tumble with their mates and teenagers would be humping in cars or on park benches and cats would be dozing wherever it was warm, and dogs would be doggy-prowling through the night.

Somehow, I didn't feel as if I belonged to any of it, and I desperately wanted to. I wanted to be in the house where I'd lived with my wife and still lived in sometimes; or at the least in my apartment in Cedar Rapids, anywhere where I felt a sense of community, not a fucking motel room and a fucking motel room bed and Tandy all gone from me now with her power back and celebrity dazzling her eyes sure as jewels.

I would have settled for an animal to ride with, dog, cat, raccoon; hell, night crawler if I had to.

I was pulling into Brenner with a full load of dislocation and self-pity. I was not ready for prime time.

"Evening."

"Evening," I said.

"Help you?"

I hadn't seen him before. He looked like a retired gent, earning a little spare cash working the motel desk at night. He wore a ratty cardigan, thin flannel-style cotton shirt, and had some kind of serious-looking wart on the bottom of his lower lip. His HMO had probably convinced him it was nothing to worry about. His dentures clicked when he spoke. He was reading a Collector's magazine. BIG MONEY FOR "JUNK"!cried one headline.

"I went to Noah Chandler's room," I said, "but he didn't seem to be around. Just wondered if he'd told you where he was going?"

"They don't usually do that. Tell me anything, I mean. Hotels, they tell you where they went sometimes. But not motels. Not usually, anyway."

"Well, thanks."

The trucks on the highway, the trains on the prairie, provided the usual amount of roaring rumbling background noise. The night smelled of cigarettes and cold and exhaust fumes from a truck that had just pulled in. Half the lights above the various motel doors had burned out, lending the place a seedy quality it had plenty of already.

I decided to try Laura and Tandy's room. Maybe Noah was there. I hadn't checked because I didn't know if Laura knew what Noah wanted to tell me. Maybe, given her feelings about me, she wouldn't want him dealing with me.

I knocked and the door creaked open. Nice crisp horror-movie sound effect, that creaking.

Dark room. Tart smells.