Kiss of the Sun (3 page)

Clarence and Gladys looked at each other. “The detective assigned to the case, Detective Grimes, he says the case won't ever be closed, but after those first two months…”

“One day we were looking through Peavy's things,” Clarence said, “his notebooks from school and such, and we found this.”

He pulled a ruled sheet of notebook paper from the box. Pieces of torn perforation dangled from where it had been ripped from a spiral binder. On the front was a swath of lead pencil marks. In the gaps of the scribbling, Martha could make out a symbol or glyph of some type—a circle enclosing two triangles that were joined at the tips. The outside of the circle was surrounded by points of differing sizes that radiated outward. Martha felt a chill—something about the symbol seemed vaguely familiar. She swallowed and brushed the thought away, at least for the moment. “What do you think it is?”

Clarence pulled at the knees of his pleated slacks. “We don't rightly know. But we do think the investigation took a funny turn after we found this.”

“Funny?”

“The detective's reaction was odd,” Clarence said. “Things were just different after that.”

“It seemed like they weren't trying as hard,” Gladys added.

“It's a nice drawing. Did Peavy study art?”

Gladys nodded. “If he ever drew anything, it was monsters, cars, or stick figures. Never anything like this.”

“Anyway, it's not really a drawing,” Clarence said. “It's what they call a frottage. We looked it up.” Martha herself had learned the term for the practice during an art history class at Ponce de Leon College.

“Every child tries it at some point,” he continued. “It's like when you place a penny under a piece of paper and run the pencil lead over it until you pick up the image of Lincoln.”

Martha tilted the drawing back and forth in the sunlight that streamed from the window behind her. The shaded impression had an elusive, spectral quality. “So you think Peavy found this symbol engraved somewhere and rubbed his pencil over the paper to capture it?”

Clarence nodded. “We just don't know where. We've never seen it before or since.”

“What do you think of it?” Gladys asked.

Martha shook her head. “I'm sorry, it doesn't mean anything to me.”

“Just let us show you the other things that we brought,” Clarence said. He took the objects out of the box and laid them on the glass top of the coffee table in front of Martha: A small, jointed Spider-Man figure. Some marbles in a baggie. A stack of baseball cards bound by a rubber band. A translucent hair comb. “These are items that were special to Peavy, things that meant something to him.”

They watched her expectantly. After a moment Clarence added, “We come a long way, Miss Covington. We just hoped you might look at his things, touch them, and let us know if anything comes to you. Any impression or idea about what may have happened to Peavy.”

“You're pretty much our last hope,” Gladys said. She started to sob, and fished a tissue out of her purse. Clarence put a hand on hers. “I'm so sorry. I tried hard not to do this.”

“We know there isn't much hope that Peavy is still with us,” Clarence said. “But we've
got
to know. We've just got to know, or we aren't ever going to have any peace.”

“There's been a misunderstanding. This isn't something I can do. I don't help find missing people.”

“But we read what you wrote about in your book,” Gladys said. “You see shadows of the past.”

“I brought some money, right here.” Clarence started to open the envelope, revealing a stack of bills.

“No,” Martha said, holding her hand up. “I don't take payment for my work. Even if I could help you—”

Gladys nodded at the box. “Aren't you going to touch his things?”

They sat there looking at her, Clarence with his hat in his lap, Gladys gripping her handbag.

Martha looked at the sad collection of items on the table—the comb, the baseball cards, the figure, the ball, the drawing. Was it familiar, or had she just imagined that? Clarence nodded his encouragement.
Should you tell them that you've been diagnosed with schizophrenia?

The only way to convince them she couldn't help would be to demonstrate, to just get it over with.

“All right,” she said.

She picked up the cards first, pulled off the rubber band. She went through the stack, sliding each card from top to bottom, one by one. Atlanta Braves.

“I don't know much about sports, but even I've heard of this one,” Martha said, smiling ruefully as she turned one of the cards around: Greg Maddux.

“Mad Dog Maddux,” Clarence said, smiling back at her. Gladys was squeezing her handbag, causing the silver lamé fabric to flex and gleam.

She reached the end of the cards, looked up at the couple, gave her head a tiny shake. She felt ridiculous.

She picked up the baggie with its eight marbles.

“Go on…take them out,” Gladys said.

Martha poured the marbles, eight of them, and they soft-clicked into her palm. There was a cat's eye and a sunburst. Another was translucent green with smoky clouds inside. Beautiful, marvelous spheres. Every kid owned some at one point or another, and every adult forgot how wondrous they were.
Glass.
Something flashed in the corner of her mind, like a half-glimpsed firework. She glanced up at the couple, saw that they were leaning forward.

“Something?” Clarence asked.

Martha shook her head. “I'm sorry, just thinking.”

She continued the ritual with the comb, the Spider-Man figure, then the baseball.

She hefted the ball, felt its weight, closed her fingers around it, shut her eyes, then—

A hum filled her ears, and she felt herself drop into a twilight world. A vision opened up: a half-lit landscape. Hills. Trees. Leaves. A house. White columns. A ravine. Leaves, rocks. A towering column of smoke—

Martha heard a hollow thump and snapped out of it, rocketing back into the day-lit room, gasping.

Clarence stood, leaned over, and grabbed the ball, which was rolling across the living room floorboards. He turned back toward her.

“Are you all right, Miss Covington?”

Martha's vision was muted by brown spots and sparkles that were presently clearing. She stood up, felt dizzy, sat back down. She took a sip of tea.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm sorry, I just—I felt like I was going to black out. Maybe I was sitting for too long.”
Oh, no, no. Why me? Oh God, I don't want this.

“You saw something?” Gladys asked, leaning forward, gripping her purse.

Martha took another sip of tea. “I'm not sure.”

Mojo rubbed against Clarence's pant leg, and he reached down and stroked the cat.

“It was just a feeling, a glimpse of something. I don't know how to describe it.”

“But it was something,” the woman said, curling her lip into her teeth.

But I'm not well, you see. I'm as batty as a bell tower.

“Do you think he's alive?” Gladys blurted out.

Clarence put his hand on her leg again. “Let's don't get ahead of ourselves here, Gladys. We've got to give the girl some time.”

“I don't know. It was just a feeling, that's all.”

Clarence put the ball back in the box. “We'd like to leave his things here with you. Keep them as long as you like. I've put our address and postage in the box so you can send it back when you're ready.”

Martha nodded. The couple rose.

“No matter what happens, you can't disappoint us,” Gladys said. “Nothing else can disappoint us.”

“God bless you,” Clarence said. He put his hat back on his head and placed a piece of notepaper on the coffee table. “Here's our phone number.”

Martha shifted her five-speed Schwinn into low gear and pedaled along the sandy, oak-shaded road, rolling past the low-slung cottages and cinder-block houses that made up the community of Turkey Point, her adopted village. She waved at Garland Rusk, who lived in an abandoned school bus with a screen porch attached. He was noodling in his vegetable garden, staking his tomato vines with twine. A rooster pecked beside the road in front of the home of Eunice Beady. The sun winked in and out of the elderly oak limbs, kissing Martha's bare arms and shoulders, and the clean, briny air filled her nostrils. Her home for more than a year, and she was in love with this place. It had accepted her, healed her.

As she turned off the road onto a path that threaded through the coastal oaks and poplars, she thought of Jarrell, the smoldering volcano of a young man who had come into her life so briefly and intensely just over a year ago. She thought of him often—how could she not? Jarrell wasn't just from this island; he was
of
the island. Yet, apart from the one visit to his mother's grave last spring, he had not returned. She had sent him a letter in June, the old-fashioned, handwritten kind, and had received a typed response—polite, but impersonal and lacking details. She had written another letter, this time hinting that they should get together again. It had been met with no response at all. Then she'd written a third, also unanswered. A couple of attempts to find him using Google at the Amberleen Public Library had been to little avail.

Pine straw gave way to white sand as she followed the path down into a shallow depression. Her tires crackled over oyster fragments and she arrived at the midden, a low hill of shells, bones, and dirt. It was a kind of prehistoric trash pit, the residue of some ancient populace whose provenance and destiny were lost to time. She dismounted the bike and leaned it against a tree.

It was a quiet place, one of her favorite spots on the island. A place to meditate and seek inspiration for her book project. Billy Goat Beach, a wild, undeveloped stretch of windswept sand that seemed to go on forever, was a few hundred yards away, past low dunes carpeted with ice plants and pennywort. She could hear the waves from here sighing and collapsing against the near-white sand. Somewhere in that soundscape of the breeze and waves, a thousand other voices whispered, vying for her attention. But now she knew how to tune them out, how to dial them down and ignore them. She was in charge now, thanks to rigorous cognitive therapy and the single clozapine tablet she took nightly.

At times she wondered if she still needed the drug, but her new doctor, Gayle Goodwin, was quick to quell such thoughts. Lenny, the hallucinatory punk rocker who had once plagued her with self-destructive exhortations, was now banished to the nether regions of her consciousness, like a faint radio transmission. She knew she could tune in to Lenny again if she wanted to. It was like picking up a conch shell found along the beach and holding it to her ear. She could listen for a moment, then put the shell down and continue on her way.

Martha took the shoebox from the wire basket on the front of her bike and sat down on a wind-polished piece of driftwood. She closed her eyes, and in the purple gloom she took a long, slow breath, then released it gradually. If there was any place where she felt safe enough to find out if the vision would return, it was here. She took the lid from the box and removed the baseball. She cupped the ball in her hands, then closed her eyes, touched it to her forehead.

Nothing. She rolled the ball from hand to hand. What was she doing? She was out of her depth, playing with people's lives and hopes.

She closed her eyes again, listening to the distant sound of the waves. Faint glimmers began to swirl behind her eyelids; transparent, ghostly shapes. The shapes coalesced into forms of aggression and menace, frozen like glass statues. She saw teeth, fangs, legs. Animal shapes, predatory.

Martha took a deep breath.
Stay in control. You are safe here. You are in control.
Then the glass beasts began to dissipate, were replaced by another scene—a dusky landscape. It was the same vision she had glimpsed the day before in her living room with the elderly couple, unfolding like a silent movie in the cinema of her mind. Was she simply remembering the scene from the day before, or seeing it anew?
Relax. Pay attention this time.

The house. White columns. Perhaps a mansion. The light was dim, ruddy. Maybe it was dawn, or dusk. Hills, trees. Then a shallow ravine, rocks and leaves, and—

A shape among the leaves, a figure lying prone. A male.

The image unsettled Martha, and she felt herself floating back to the surface, back to the present. As she rose, the last thing she glimpsed was that column of smoke, rising against an ochre sky—

Martha's eyes opened and she saw the sunlight and the tranquil surroundings. Trees and shell fragments. Heard the twitter of sparrows. Her heart was racing. She controlled her breathing and put the baseball back into the shoebox. She went to her bike and took out her notebook and pen—the basic tools of the profession she had trained for, journalism.

She sat on the log and wrote down every detail she could remember.

A house, or mansion. White columns; perhaps Greek Revival style?

Animals made of glass, or crystal. Bared teeth.

The prone figure in the ravine, in twilight—perhaps dusk or dawn. Lying there among the leaves, leaning against a rock. Alive or dead?
Martha squeezed her eyelids together and asked herself again:
Alive or dead?

Martha clicked her pen. What else had she noticed? The figure was unmistakably male, African American, and older than the Little Leaguer in the photograph. Wearing long pants and what appeared to be a gray shirt. His face was partially turned away, and the light too dim to make out specific facial details. How old? Peavy had been fourteen when he disappeared. The boy in the vision—eighteen, twenty, twenty-five?

Where was he? Perhaps near the house? She had a sense that all of the elements in the vision were connected, all contained within a limited geographic region.

And then the last thing in her vision, some distance away, that tower of black smoke. Maybe she could tell the police to look for a fire. But when, and where? And a white-columned mansion—there were surely hundreds in the state of Georgia alone. Thousands throughout the Southeast. It wasn't much to go on. But the glass animals—maybe something there. For that topic, she could deploy one of the best resources in her journalism tool kit: the Internet.

“All right, suppose you go to Atlanta. What then?” Gayle Goodwin sat in her leather chair, clipboard on her knees. She was staring at Martha evenly through her round glasses.

Martha rubbed her knee. “I don't know. I'll go to the place where the boy was last seen. I just want to look at it.”

“And if you believe you get some special insight into the case?”

“I'm not going to even tell them I'm going. Not until it's all over. Any impressions I get, they can report to the police, or, if nothing comes…”

Martha looked away, stared at one of the framed pictures on the wall—a color photograph of verdant crops, perhaps spinach or alfalfa, orderly rows that converged toward the horizon. The down-to-earth, agrarian theme of Goodwin's office was in distinct contrast to the whimsical, folk-art decor of her previous therapist's office.

“And this couple”—Goodwin looked at her clipboard—“the Turners. Do they know about your illness?”

That word again. It was one Goodwin insisted on using, and required that Martha use, whenever they talked about her schizophrenia. Goodwin was all about reality, the bluntness of it. Each weekly session with her began the same way, with a ritualistic call and response:

Did you take your clozapine?

Yes.

Did you take it last night?

Yes.

When will you take it again?

Tomorrow, at seven p.m.

Her first psychotherapist, Vince Trauger, had been gentler, more permissive. But Martha knew it was Goodwin's hardheaded style that had helped her gradually make her way back from the storm of darkness and chaos that had nearly consumed her over a year ago.

Martha crossed her legs. “I didn't promise them anything, Gayle. They just insisted on leaving that stuff with me.”

“You're not ready for this. And I'm also concerned about this elderly couple. You're giving false hope, and it's not fair to them.”

“The vision was so vivid, Gayle. It wasn't like a hallucination at all. What if there is something useful in what I saw? I can't live with the knowledge that I might have been able to help them and didn't. I just have to find out.”

Goodwin put her clipboard next to her ceramic desk lamp in the shape of a roosting hen.

“Martha, studying the mystical practices of an ancient, superstitious people is already a risk for you. It's very important that you maintain firm boundaries between what's real and what isn't. To think you are some sort of psychic detective crosses over a line. I realize you are responding out of compassion, but the most compassionate thing you can do is to send the box back with a clear statement that you are unable to help them.”

Martha felt her cheeks growing hot. She looked at another picture on the wall—the silhouette of a farmer perched in the cab of a combine harvester. Noble, heroic.

“Gayle, I feel I have to do this.”

“It is not to be permitted.”

“What if I decide to go anyway?”

“I don't know, Martha. Honestly, I might have to conclude that your behavior poses a risk to yourself and to others.” Goodwin leaned forward, index finger pointed up for emphasis. “Martha. Look at me. This is fraudulent. You are not to accept any more calls from anyone hoping to locate a lost loved one.”

Martha felt her face getting hot. “I'm a free individual.”

“I'm going to be very frank with you. There are many young people in your condition who end up homeless or institutionalized. The island and its residents, the community support you receive there, have enabled you to live a very free and stable life. It's enabled you to do creative work. It's unorthodox, but I support it. My role, as your therapist, is to remind you of your boundaries. And that's what I'm doing now. This is past your boundaries.”

“I just want to go look around—”

“No.”

Martha leaned back on the sofa, stared at the window with its checked curtains.
Now who is stepping over their boundaries?

“You've been through a lot, but you're one of the most resilient clients I've ever had, and I believe you can lead an independent, self-sufficient life. You'll continue to become more independent. You just need to take things slowly, Martha. Don't push your boundaries so fast. There's plenty of time for you to grow in your independence.”

“Then what do you think I should do about this couple, their request?”

“I think you should package up those items at the post office and send them back to the couple, telling them you are very sorry but there is nothing you can do to help them. Because that's the truth, isn't it, Martha?”

She felt her face burning.

“Martha, I want you to acknowledge it. You are not a psychic. There is nothing you can do to help these people.”

Martha nodded quietly.

“When we meet next week, that's what you will have done. I want you to say it to me.”

Martha felt a lump in her throat. “When we meet next week, I will have sent the items back.”

Goodwin nodded and stood. “We've reached the end of our hour for today.” She put her arm around Martha's shoulders, the customary partial hug that marked the conclusion of their sessions. “You're doing great, Martha. Just keep moving forward.”

That night, Martha knew that she was dreaming when the familiar smell came to her—a gumbo of pressed leaves and herbs, the scent of beeswax candles, a whiff of pipe smoke. Then a scene slowly emerged from the shadows: a corridor lined with tall shelves, the glint of flames from a potbelly stove, StarKist tuna cans at regular intervals that glistened with globules of melted wax. Packets of dried botanicals, bound with twine, hung from the rafters.

She knew she was lying in her bed, in her cabin. But she was also in Amberleen, inside the conjure shop.

“Albertha?” she called out into the shadows.

“Yes, I'm here, child. Come deeper,” replied a husky voice. “Come all the way back, into the parlor.”

Martha was barefoot, wearing a flowing, gauzy dress, as she made her way across the worn plank flooring, past the high shelving, past bowls of shells and bones and jars of ground powders. Albertha swayed slightly in her rocker, seated at the edge of the hooked rug, in the glow of the stove. She nodded toward the chair at the edge of the table.

Martha sat, her senses and her mind open to receive. Beyond the shuttered windows of the shop, voices groaned and murmured. Albertha drew on her pipe, and the tobacco in the bowl glowed and whistled faintly.

“Albertha, can you tell me…the boy in the picture…”

“The boy?” The blind woman tilted her head slightly. “Is that really a boy?”

“He
was
a boy, six years ago. But now he's a young man. If he's still alive, that is.”

Albertha nodded.

“So it's true, then? He is still alive, somewhere?”

Albertha held the pipe between her hands. “You must ask the right question. Not where, but who? Who is this boy in your dreams? Who is he really?”

“I don't know much about him, but somehow I feel he needs me.”

Albertha nodded. “So that is true. He needs you, and you need him.”

Martha leaned forward. “Tell me, Albertha. Can I help him? How can I find him?”

“He is closer than you think.”

“But where?”