Shaman's Moon Read online

  Shaman’s Moon

  By

  Sarah Dreher

  A Stoner McTavish Mystery

  New Victoria Publishers

  ©Copyright 1998 by Sarah Dreher

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by New Victoria Publishers Inc., Hereford, AZ 85615

  eBook Edition 2015

  Dreher, Sarah.

  Shaman’s moon : a Stoner McTavish mystery / by Sarah Dreher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-934678-91-9

  1. McTavish, Stoner (Fictitious character) - - Fiction. 2. Women

  detectives- -United States--Fiction. 3. Lesbians- -United States-

  Fiction. I.Title.

  PS3554.R36S48 1998 98-12883

  813’ .54--dc21 CIP

  To Donna and Jody

  my friends and teachers

  Chapter 1

  Aunt Hermione insisted she was fine, but Stoner knew there was something wrong. She knew it by the slight, split-second hesitation in Aunt Hermione’s speech, as if she had to search for the words to use before she spoke. She knew it by the light, waxed-papery, nearly-translucent quality of the flesh that covered her aunt’s cheeks. Knew it by the tiny uncharacteristic sigh that rose from her as she got up from her chair. Knew it by the chill in her own bones and the tingling under her skin when she caught an unexpected glimpse of her.

  Even Gwen, Stoner’s lover and life partner, who had won three consecutive Olympic Gold Medals in Worry-freeness, was concerned. She didn’t say much, but Stoner caught her glancing Aunt Hermione’s way when she thought no one was watching.

  Marylou Kesselbaum, their fourth housemate and Stoner’s partner in the travel agency of Kesselbaum and McTavish, was the least concerned. “If there’s anything wrong, she’ll tell us,” Marylou had said when Stoner had brought it up, and offered her an Easter green Snowball.

  Stoner sat uneasily on the front porch step and watched the Deerfield River, a mile away but visible from their hillside home. Mortgaged to the eyeballs and struggling to keep the travel agency open through the winter, they’d lived in Shelburne Falls for seven months now. She loved the small-town western Massachusetts atmosphere, but she still hadn’t gotten used to the quiet. Years of downtown Boston had, she thought, created the permanent hallucination of background traffic, which made silence seem noisy, and noise like silence.

  It was a nearly perfect late spring day. A high crisp blue sky with a few wisps of cloud lay reflected in the sparkling water. The maples and oaks were in full leaf. The scent of apple blossoms drifted on the air. Bumble-bees hung over the iris blooms, and a faint breeze made moving silver shadows in the tall grasses.

  Another season. They’d all settled in well, actually. Aunt Hermione had found kindred souls and psychic counseling clients through the Psychical Awareness and Research Association and the Spiritualist Church, down in Springfield. In fact, after a lifetime of using only public transportation, she had made up her mind to learn to drive so she could visit her new friends more often. Last Candlemas a local coven had invited her to join after one of their members died and another moved to Oregon. She found it stimulating, being in a mixed-age group. But sometimes it exhausted her. “Young people,” she told Stoner, “are so very exuberant.”

  Marylou, who was always looking for love in all the wrong places, had found it again. Her current flame was a Vietnam War veteran named Cutter. He lived somewhere deep in the woods, and spent his days in a Buddhist encampment out in the woods around Ashfield, where he did odd jobs and construction to atone for his sins. She’d met him one morning at McCusker’s Market as she was checking out the day’s whole grain muffin selections. Cutter talked very little, shaved his head, and most of the time wore Buddhist robes. Marylou found that attractive. He’d been to dinner once, but was so uncomfortable in their dining room he and Marylou had ended up eating on the back porch.

  Stoner had the feeling Marylou was beyond rehabilitation.

  Gwen had found work at Mohawk Regional School. Substitute teaching at first, then part-time, and by April had taken over a full-time position in History and Social Studies. She found it a little unnerving, being pink-slipped like a beginner after twelve years of teaching. But even though she’d be fired every May for the first three years, her superintendent assured her she’d be rehired if she submitted her application. The head of the school board’s son had been her student, had developed a crush-at-first-sight on Gwen, and had raised his “D” in History to a “B” in one semester. Another school board member’s daughter would be in her class this year. Information passed freely over the back fences and coffee cups among the members of the Mohawk Trail Regional School Board, good news as well as bad. They had already decided that Gwen Owens was good news.

  And what about you? Stoner asked herself. The move had been easier than she’d expected. Of course, things were always easier than she expected. That was because she always made room in her mind for unanticipated disasters. Aunt Hermione was convinced that the problem was Stoner’s latent and feared psychic ability, which caused her to have negative precognitions. “Undeveloped psychic ability,” her aunt was fond of saying, “is an offense against Nature. The psychic drive is like sex, fine in itself, but you need to get a grip.”

  That was all well and good for Aunt Hermione. Aunt Hermione had been psychic all her life—several lifetimes according to her—and even managed to make a decent living giving psychic readings. She was equally adept at Tarot, clairvoyance and clairaudience, channeling—both trance and waking—and psychometry. Astrology, she declared, was too scientific once you go to transits, and beyond her ken.

  Stoner believed in what her aunt did. She’d seen enough to be a fool not to believe. But when it came to herself, she wanted absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  Her aunt wasn’t surprised at her reluctance. Capricorns, she explained, often had a difficult time with psychic matters, being of a nature that liked things down-to-earth and do-it-yourself.

  In the interest of being down-to-earth, Stoner periodically tried to remind herself that Aunt Hermione wasn’t getting any younger—nearing eighty, in fact. Someday her health was going to fail. That was inevitable, and there was no sense trying to deny it. The healthiest people in the world eventually grew old. And...

  Whenever she thought of her aunt’s inevitable death, her mind turned to white noise. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Future didn’t exist. There was a high wall at the end of Now and the beginning of Then, and nothing beyond that wall.

  She really didn’t know what she’d do when that time came. She’d lived with her aunt most of her life, since she was sixteen and ran away from home because her parents hated her for being a lesbian. Aunt Hermione had welcomed her into her arms and her life. Aunt Hermione had been more than an aunt, she’d been a friend, a parent, her family. Aunt Hermione held her hand through the ups and downs of adolescence and the whims of love. Cared for her when she was sick. Entertained her and loved her and sometimes made her crazy.

  It worked both ways.

  But someday Aunt Hermione wouldn’t be there any more. No matter how vehemently she insisted she’d always be around in spirit, and make Stoner’s life a living hell if she didn’t behave herself... Someday she just wouldn’t be there. Some morning Stoner’d come down to the kitchen and the air wouldn’t smell of bacon and pie and reheats of last night’s dinner.

  Aunt Hermione’s idea of breakfast was to browse the refrigerator and select whatever caught her eye, whether it had anything to do with a normal breakfast or not. “Think of it as brunch,” she’d say when Stoner insiste
d it was much too early for meat loaf and spinach soufflé.

  Stoner never did get in the habit of desserts and leftovers hitting her stomach first thing in the morning. It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t done. It wasn’t moral.

  Aunt Hermione said Stoner had the sense of humor of a Lutheran.

  At which Stoner realized she was being truly rigid and no fun at all.

  Aunt Hermione had been married at one time—for about ten minutes, it seemed—to a “Gentleman of the Lutheran Persuasion.” She insisted it had been one of the most soul-starving, hellish experiences of her life. After that she’d sworn off not only Lutherans, but religion, marriage, and men in general. Though she did have a brief affair with a minor member of the Kennedy family. There was, Aunt Hermione insisted, “nothing remarkable about that. Everyone does it.”

  In fact, her aunt considered the whole romantic love idea rather overrated. That was until she met Grace D’ Addario.

  Grace was a Senior Citizen like Aunt Hermione, though a few golden years older. Grace was tall, kind, and terrifying, and a solitary practitioner of Wicca. Once Grace entered their lives, Stoner found herself flooded with humiliating emotions.

  It was clear that Aunt Hermione had fallen head-over-heels for the woman.

  And Grace returned the feeling.

  They were, Stoner thought at the time in a condescending way, like a couple of kids. Holding hands in public. Even in restaurants. Bringing each other flowers. Talking on the phone endlessly.

  “You’re ridiculous,” Stoner was shocked to hear herself say one evening quite unexpectedly. “You’re too old to be carrying on like this.”

  Her aunt looked at her with utter amazement.

  “Something really bad is going to happen, the way you behave.” She heard her voice rise unpleasantly and couldn’t control it. “You got arrested once, for God’s sake!”

  “Actually,” Aunt Hermione said placidly, “I’ve been arrested several times. You just don’t happen to know about it.”

  “Running around a cemetery NAKED !”

  “Now, Stoner, you know what that was about.”

  She knew, all right. Whenever a person of a sinister nature died, Grace and Aunt Hermione would dance naked on his fresh grave in the dark of the moon, “to make sure he stays put.” They did it to people they knew personally, like Gwen’s husband who tried to kill her but Stoner got him first. They did it to people they read about in the papers—rapists and child molesters, wife beaters and “all-around nasty sorts.” Sometimes they did it when they passed a new grave and “had a funny feeling about that one.”

  They never actually got arrested for naked grave dancing. Once they came very close, but the officer who approached them was young and couldn’t bring himself to run in someone’s grandmother.

  Obviously, Grace was a terrible influence on Aunt Hermione. They were like dogs that run in packs, much more likely to make trouble together than apart.

  And there was nothing Stoner could do about it. It made her feel as useless as the parent of a teenager.

  So she worried and pouted instead.

  Finally, even Gwen got tired of Stoner’s moodiness, and one night sat her down and told her she was being a jackass. Except she was sincere about it, and when Gwen was sincere and annoyed she slipped back into her rural Georgia accent. She managed to make “jackass” a six-syllable word.

  Stoner burst into tears, and as she was crying realized she was jealous and frightened. Frightened that her aunt, with a new and consuming love in her life, wouldn’t need her any more.

  She expected Grace to be angry, or at least to laugh at her when she confessed and apologized. But Grace listened very quietly, nodded, and said she understood.

  “Besides,” she said after a moment, “you’re not losing an aunt, you’re gaining a whole new set of problems.”

  A battered pickup truck rattled past the house. The driver peered nearsightedly at street signs and was obviously swearing to himself. He saw her and rolled down his window. “Hey!” he said.

  It wasn’t one of those, “Hey, there, how’s it going, good to see you,” sorts of “Hey!” It was a, “Hey, stupid, get off your lazy ass and tell me how the hell I get out of this jerkwater town that no one in their right mind would want to live in,” kind of “Hey!”

  Stoner pretended not to understand, and grinned and waved moronically.

  Mr. Truck slammed his foot on the accelerator and burned one of his remaining three-quarter inches of rubber.

  Maybe she should give Grace a call. Maybe she’d noticed something… not quite right… about Aunt Hermione.

  But how could she explain what she meant by that? She couldn’t put her finger on anything specific, nothing was clear. But there was an “off ” feeling about her. Her aunt would call it disharmony between her chakras.

  Stoner found herself watching her too closely, apprehensively. That wasn’t right. Her aunt would say she was “feeding the forces of darkness with negative energy,” or something like that. Stoner wasn’t willing to go quite so far as to say that, but she knew she’d drive herself crazy if she didn’t stop.

  An oriole sang in a tree at the back of the house. She’d met a woman in the book store who called orioles “the avenging birds of Satan” because they built their nests near houses, had voices that could penetrate lead, and started up at dawn and went on all day. “Not only that,” the woman said, “they seek out people with post-traumatic stress disorder and deliberately torture them.” She grimaced as if speaking from personal experience.

  Stoner hoped there weren’t any orioles hanging around Cutter’s campsite.

  Still, she liked the bird. They hadn’t had orioles in Boston. Except for the kind with a capital “O” who usually swept the home series from the Red Sox and weren’t welcome in friendly Fenway Park. But this particular oriole, this flash of orange and black seen from the periphery of her vision, was a fascination. First, there was the color. City birds didn’t have colors which startled. City birds were drab and gray, and if they’d ever been colorful had been drained by generations of city air until the color of concrete became part of their genetic make-up. Even the birds at the Franklin Park Zoo had a dull and defeated look about them.

  And there was the song. Shrill, yes, but with a flute-like tone that could never be copied by human or human-made instrument. Once you knew the song, you would never mistake an oriole for any other bird.

  Orioles had a presence. They were what they were, and nothing else. Stoner admired that quality.

  Well, she’d better admire it from the office. During this slow season, she and Marylou were taking turns working morning or afternoon. Stoner preferred the afternoon shift, as there was no way she could be decent to herself or anyone else before ten a.m. Marylou was up and eager to embrace life at the crack of dawn, afraid something exciting might happen and she’d miss it.

  Stoner was just as happy to miss it. Just leave her a note if there was anything she needed to know. That was as much excitement as she cared to experience these days.

  She went inside the house to wash up. Aunt Hermione was bustling around in her study, getting ready to give a reading. She’d straightened the room, taken her crystals from the glass-fronted cabinet and arranged them on the table, filled a ceramic dish with water, and put a new candle in the holder. She was fussing over incense.

  “What do you think, Stoner? Athena, or Mars? The client’s a Scorpio.”

  Stoner went to look over her aunt’s shoulder. The mingled incense odors tickled the inside of her nose. “I don’t think Mars and Scorpio would mix well,” she said. “Do you have any Kali left?”

  “Of course,” Aunt Hermione said. “The many-armed goddess for the many-armed scorpion.” She looked pointedly at Stoner. “You do have more of a feel for these things than an average person would.”

  “It was logical.”

  “Oh, yes, the average person spends the better part of the day thinking about Sun Signs and incense,” Aunt
Hermione said wryly.

  There were faint gray smudges under her eyes.

  “You look tired,” Stoner said.

  “Oh, don’t start.” The older woman gave her an affectionate and exasperated look. “I’m fine. I’ve been fine since we got here, and I’m still fine.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Are you trying to drive me into an early grave with that kind of talk? Really, dear, it’s very tiresome.”

  “I’m sorry. I just worry.”

  Her aunt patted her cheek soothingly. “I know you do, Stoner,” she said. “Everyone you’ve ever met, and everyone who’s ever heard about you knows you worry.”

  She felt herself blushing with embarrassment. “I’m leaving now.”

  “Have a nice day,” Aunt Hermione said cheerfully. “Remind Marylou not to ‘Yoo-hoo’ when she comes in. It frightens the clients.”

  In Boston, walking to work had been a risky and fairly unpleasant experience. If you weren’t mugged, or run down by one of the infamous Boston drivers, your brain and lungs were assaulted by noxious fumes. Your eyes were violated by ugly, glistening wet spots of suspicious origin on the pavements, and crumpled papers that attached themselves to your ankles like leeches. The weather see-sawed between cold, damp and miserable, and chokingly hot and humid.

  But out here, the way to the agency took her through alleys and past back yards. Spots on the road were easily identifiable as oil, skid marks, dropped ice cream cones, or the remains of suicidal animals. And the worst smells were the lingering odors of decaying fruit and waxed cardboard banana boxes behind the super market.

  The grass had greened up nicely in the past two weeks of cool air and rain. The river was high, swirling and churning over the glacial potholes, Shelburne Falls’ natural tourist attraction. Shelburne Falls’ unnatural tourist attraction was the Bridge of Flowers. This was a walkway between the Falls and Buckland, on the other side of the river. The good ladies of the town had turned an abandoned railroad bridge into a long flower garden that spanned both sides of the path. The flowers were lovingly cared for, healthy, and labeled to educate the young and the ignorant. They were changed with the seasons. At the entrance to the walkway a tiny gift-and-film store offered post cards of the Bridge of Flowers which looked as if they might have been photographed back in the ’50s. Last Christmas, the two towns and the bridge between had been decorated with thousands of tiny bright lights that reflected in the black and sluggish river.