A Mojo Sheepshanks Novel

Between Bert and Tucker, I was pretty clear that the current look wasn’t working for me. “I’m fine,” I said, a little too quickly.

Tucker pretended to dodge a blow. “Excuse me for asking,” he said.

I finally got my legs working again, and made for the stairs. “Things to do, people to see,” I explained airily over one shoulder, concentrating on 1—putting one foot in front of the other, then repeating the process, 2—not spilling my coffee, and 3—not running back to Tucker and jumping his bones in the parking lot. “Nice seeing you again.”

He didn’t answer, but I felt his gaze on me as I mounted the steps.

LILLIAN WAS NOT having one of her good days, as it turned out.

She sat in her wheelchair, in front of the one window in her fusty little room, a shrunken and fragile figure, arthritic hands knotted in her lap. A worn but colorful afghan covered her bony knees, and a lump rose in my throat as I remembered the woman she used to be. Her stepdaughter, Jolie, had crocheted that afghan for her long ago, as a Christmas present. Lillian had been luminous with delight that day, her laughter rich and vibrant, her brain and body in working order. Those painfully curled fingers had been busy, competent, glistening with shopping-channel rings.

Lillian was my babysitter, before my parents were murdered.

Shortly after the killings, she’d been my kidnapper.

I swallowed the lump, blinked back tears and crossed the room to stand next to her, bending to kiss her lightly on top of the head.

“Hello,” I said gently.

She looked up at me, and for a moment recognition sparked in her sunken eyes. She grasped my hand, squeezed it with a strange urgency and made a soft sound that I chose to interpret as a greeting.

I dragged up a chair to sit knee to knee with her, opened the bag of doughnuts I’d picked up on the way down from Cave Creek and offered her favorite, a double-frosted maple bar.

She shook her wobbly head, like one of those bobble-figures they give away at baseball games, but her watery eyes were full of longing. Lillian had been an off-the-rack size 16 ever since I could remember, but now she looked almost skeletal, with big dents at her temples and under her cheekbones. It was as though her skull were eating its way to the surface.

I broke off a piece of the maple bar and held it to her lips. She took a nibble, like a baby bird being fed in the nest. My heart twisted.

Laboriously, Lillian gummed the morsel and swallowed.

“You look good,” I lied.

“Cods,” Lillian said.

I frowned. “Cods?” She wanted fish?

“Cods,” Lillian insisted.

“She’s talking about these,” a female voice put in, nearly scaring me out of my skin.

I turned to see a pudgy nurse’s aide standing by Lillian’s neatly made bed, holding up a familiar deck of cards. Of course, I thought. The Tarot cards.

I didn’t recognize the aide. The turnover was huge at Sunset Villa.

Lillian began to squirm in her chair, reaching with what seemed a desperate eagerness. “Cods!” she croaked.

“They’re the devil’s work,” the nurse’s aide said, with a self-righteous little sniff. She was overweight and looked like she might attend one of those churches where they drink antifreeze and juggle snakes. “Only thing worse is them Ouija boards, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I pointed out, crisply polite as I dropped the maple bar back into the bakery bag and went to claim Lillian’s deck. They were her most treasured possession, those creased and battered cards. When we were on the run, after my folks were killed, she’d sometimes given readings to pay for a tank of gas or a meal in some diner. They’d warned us, those cards, Lillian claimed, when somebody recognized my picture from the back of a milk carton, and the Tarot had predicted disaster if I married Nick.

I should have listened.

I took the cards and stared at the nurse’s aide, bristling in her flowered scrubs, until, in a minor snit, she turned around and left the room.

“Give,” Lillian demanded.

I handed her the cards, bracing myself to watch the inevitable struggle. Once, Lillian had plied that deck with the skill of a riverboat poker sharp, but that was when her fingers were straight and strong, with a hotline to her brain.

She gripped the cards in both hands, and I saw a tremor pass through her as she closed her eyes to concentrate. I wondered, not for the first time, if large portions of her mind were dark and boarded up, as the doctors said, or if the old Lillian crouched in there someplace, smart as ever.

I didn’t know what to hope for. For a woman as bright and full of life as Lillian had been, it would be hell if the wires were down between her mind and her body. On the other hand, being a vegetable was no fun, either.

It tortured me, wondering how it was for her.

I watched bleakly as the woman who’d saved me from so many things fumbled with a pack of tattered playing cards.

She turned the deck over, thumbed them until she settled on one. The Queen of Pentacles, a colorful card, showing a medieval woman seated on a throne. That one dropped into her lap, followed, after more excruciating selection, by the Page of Cups. A young man in tights, holding up a chalice with a fish, presumably dead, flopping over the rim.

I waited tensely, resisting the urge to help her.

Lillian still had her pride. I had to believe that.

When it came to interpretation, I was useless. The deck was a familiar fixture, since Lillian had carried it in her pocket or purse for as long as I could remember, but I knew next to nothing about the images, even though I’d seen them many times.

It was almost an anticlimax when she settled on the third and apparently final card—Death. It showed a skeleton, wearing black armor and mounted on a fierce-looking horse, bodies littering the ground beneath. I drew in my breath.

Lillian’s hands relaxed suddenly, and she looked up at me, her contorted face imploring me to understand.

“Take,” she ground out.

I plucked the three cards from where they’d fallen onto the pilled afghan covering her thin legs. My palms sweated as I examined the pictures, one by one. I knew there was a message, but the circuits were blocked.

I tried to hand them back.

“Take,” Lillian repeated, and shrank back in her wheelchair, the remaining cards bending in her grasp.

I bit my lower lip, nodded and tucked the Queen, the Page and Death gently into the side-flap of my purse. I’d stop at a bookstore on the way back to Cave Creek, I decided. Pick up a Damn Fool’s Guide to Tarot. I wasn’t ready to leave Lillian, but she was clearly overwrought, and staying too long might plunge her into an even steeper decline.

“Want some more of the maple bar?” I asked, and practically choked on the words. If she’d been in her usual staring mode, I might have told her about last night’s visit from Nick, just to have a sounding board, but she was too agitated to listen to a ghost story. Besides, even if she understood, what could she do?

“No,” she said clearly, and at first I thought she was answering my question about the maple bar. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the doorway.

A tall man stood on the threshold, a finger hooked in the suit jacket hanging behind his right shoulder. He had a full head of gray hair and one of those benignly handsome faces that inspire instant confidence. I felt a spike of recognition and reached out to close my fingers over Lillian’s hands. They were clenched.

My uncle, Clive Larimer, smiled.

“Hello, Mary Josephine,” he greeted me. “Long time no see.”

Lillian began a soft, gurgling murmur.

Larimer stepped into the room, momentarily distracted when the nurse’s aide pushed past him and rushed over to Lillian.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Travers?” she asked anxiously.

I peeped at her name tag. Felicia.

A tear slipped down Lillian’s right cheek.

“You’ll have to leave, both of you,” Felicia decreed.

Larimer backed into the corridor, out of sight. I forgot all about him, in my concern for Lillian.

“It’s those damn devil-cards,” Felicia declared, but she was patting Lillian’s shoulder, and Lillian seemed to be calming down a little. “Time for your medicine anyway, isn’t it, Mrs. Travers? And after that, you can take a nice nap.” Felicia paused to glare at me. “That’s what Mrs. Travers needs. Medicine and a nap. You’d better go now.”

I didn’t protest. I’d already made the decision to split, after all. Lillian had drifted back into herself, and the cards lay forgotten between her palms. I might have been transparent, the way she stared through me.

I nodded, certain I’d break down and cry if I tried to say anything. I picked up my purse, leaving the bakery bag on the window sill, where I’d set it earlier, and dashed for the door.

I ran smack into Uncle Clive in the corridor, and he steadied me by placing avuncular hands on my shoulders.

“Mary Josephine,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it was really me.

I bit my lower lip, speechless. I hadn’t seen the man since I was five, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all if he hadn’t been a state senator, making regular appearances on TV and in every major newspaper in Arizona. He looked harmless, even friendly, but he was one of the people Lillian had wanted to avoid, all those years ago. She’d been scared to death, for herself and me, which was why she’d snatched me from the front yard of my foster home. At least, that was her account of what happened—I didn’t remember any of it.

“Let’s have some coffee and talk,” Uncle Clive said quietly.

I was twenty-eight years old, a self-supporting adult, not a kid. I’d been married and divorced. I’d read The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women.

There was nothing to be afraid of.

And, besides, I was curious as hell.

Uncle Clive was my mother’s older brother. He’d been around when the killings took place, and he could fill in a lot of gaps in my memory, bring me up to speed on my half brother, Geoff, who’d gone to prison at sixteen for second-degree murder.

“Okay,” I said.

CHAPTER 2

The cafeteria at Sunset Villa wasn’t much, so we walked, my long-lost uncle and I, to a nearby Starbucks, with outside tables and misters to cool the customers. Even in April, it’s warm in Phoenix.

I didn’t think I could choke down anything—the whole scenario was an excuse to talk, after all—but Clive bought us both a cup of classic roast. Except for a few university students bent over textbooks and one doughy guy with piercings and vampire teeth—a poet or a serial killer or both—we had the place to ourselves.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Clive said, as he joined me under the shade of a green-and-white striped umbrella, setting down our cups. His black metal chair, which matched the black metal table, scraped on the patio stones as he drew it back to sit.

I didn’t answer. After twenty-three years, I didn’t know where to start.

It wasn’t that there was too much to say. It was that there wasn’t too much.

Tentatively, my mother’s big brother and only living sibling touched the back of my hand. “It’s okay,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that tears smarted, like acid, behind my eyeballs. “I used to carry you on my shoulders. Help you find Easter eggs. Do you remember?”

I shook my head. Nebulous memories were teasing the far borders of my mind, but I couldn’t seem to corner any of them long enough to take hold.

“We looked everywhere for you.” He spoke quietly, but a muscle bunched in his jaw as he took a sip of his coffee. “My God, it was bad enough, what happened to Evie and Ron, but when you went missing on top of it—”

Evie and Ron Mayhugh. My parents. My work-frazzled, distracted, waitress mother. My moody, chronically unemployed father. For a moment, I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye. It was an image I’d longed for, wracked my brains for, during many a sleepless night, and now, suddenly, there it was, a vivid little tableau branded on the inside of my forehead.

“How did you find Lillian?” I asked. The air seemed to pulse around both of us, as though charged, and there was a slow, dull thudding in my ears.

For a nanosecond, Clive looked confused. Of course, I thought. He’d known Lillian as Doris Blanchard. He made the leap quickly, though, and something eased in his face.

“By accident,” Clive Larimer answered. “Just a fluke, really.” He gave a sigh of benevolent resignation, and his eyes were warm and kind as he looked at me, studying my features, maybe searching for a resemblance to his murdered sister. “It’s ironic, really. The day you disappeared, the police put out an all-points bulletin. After a few weeks, the FBI got involved. The case was featured on 60 Minutes. Beyond an occasional sighting, nothing. And then a friend of mine happens to recognize Doris—Lillian—while visiting her sister at the nursing home. I walk in, thinking I’m crazy to still be hoping after all these years that I’ll find out anything, and there you are.”

“How did you know who I was?”

He smiled. “You look like your mother,” he said.

Well, that answered one question. I found it curiously comforting, even though I had no aspirations to be anything like the woman I barely remembered.

“What happened, Mary Jo?” he asked, after a long pause.

Mary Jo. It was odd, hearing the name. Familiar as it was, like the words of a ditty learned in childhood, it made me feel like an impostor, or maybe an eavesdropper. Anybody but Mary Jo.

“What happened?” I echoed. Was he asking about the murder or the years afterward, when Lillian and I and, later, Greer, lived like the proverbial gypsies?

“You were there, and then you were gone.”

I wondered how much to tell him. On the one hand, he was my uncle. He might have given me away at my wedding to Nick, ill-advised as it was to marry the jerk, if Lillian hadn’t snatched me. I might have had a father figure in my life. On the other hand, Lillian must not have trusted him, back in the day, or she wouldn’t have grabbed me up and hit the road. And she’d seemed startled, even scared, when he appeared in the doorway of her room at Sunset Villa.

I shrugged, picked up my coffee, set it down again, untasted. Some of it sloshed over the rim of the cup and burned my fingers. I almost welcomed the pain, because it jarred me out of the muddle of surprise that had fogged my thinking and limited my vocabulary from the moment the thought formed in my mind: This is my uncle.

“It wasn’t a bad life,” I said. “Lillian took good care of me. We…traveled a lot, but I thought it was fun.” Except, of course, for the times when I’d just settled into a new school, made some friends, gotten myself another library card and then had to go on the run again, usually in the middle of the night.

“Catch me up,” Clive urged, after another extended silence. “What do you do for a living? Are you married? Do you have kids?”

I bit my lower lip. Clive Larimer was a state senator, with a socially connected wife named Barbara and four big-toothed, impossibly blond, Harvard-educated children. I’d Googled him whenever I got into one of my Norman Rockwellian moods and turned nostalgic. I figured when I answered his questions, he’d think the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, that I was as shiftless as my dad and as co-dependent as my mom, and I wished I could whip out pictures of two-point-two munchkins, a dog and a successful husband, and refer circumspectly to my part-time job as a rocket scientist.

“I work at home,” I said instead. “Medical billing and coding. Doctors like to outsource that stuff these days.” Feeling stupid, I blushed, but then plunged on. Telling the truth is good for you, Tucker had taunted me, not so long ago, during one of our screaming fights. You ought to give it a try sometime. “No kids. I was married for a couple of years, then divorced.”

The truth, I told Tucker silently, is overrated.

My uncle’s face reflected a calm, intense interest as he listened.

I left out the part about seeing Nick’s ghost, of course, and I didn’t get around to mentioning that I lived in a rented apartment over a biker bar in Cave Creek, either. I’d save that for when I really wanted to make a major impression. Show him my stack of dog-eared, highlighted Damn Fool’s Guides, too, and tell him how I’d educated myself on every subject from psychic pet communication to private investigation. Who needed Harvard?

“So that’s about it,” I said, letting the words dwindle to a sigh.

Uncle Clive settled back in his chair, tented his fingers together over his chest. “You must have a few questions yourself,” he remarked.

Hell, yes, I had questions.

The first one, which I didn’t voice, was: What ever happened to that no-good, scum-sucking, parent-murdering brother of mine? Correction, Geoff was a half brother—but the whole topic congealed in my throat, like some gelatinous mass, and the words my brain framed were slithering along, flattened against the side walls, trying to squeeze past it.

I’d run a hundred Googles on Geoff if I’d run one, after finding his last name in the newspaper archives. I didn’t remember it, for reasons already stated, and Lillian had always clammed up whenever I raised the subject. Geoff Waters, born to my mother by her first husband, had gone to a juvenile detention facility in California after confessing to shooting Dad in the back of the head and Mom through the throat. At twenty-one, he’d been released and his record expunged. It galled me a little—and scared me a lot—to know that he was out there somewhere, lily-white as far as the law was concerned. Going on just as if nothing had happened.

“Geoff,” I finally managed. “Where do you suppose he is now?”

I hadn’t realized Clive was tense until he visibly relaxed. “Who knows?” he replied, followed by an unspoken, Who cares?

“He killed my cat,” I said. The words just came out, without my consciously forming them.

What cat?

Clive leaned forward slightly in his metal chair. His bushy brows lowered a little, and his eyes narrowed.

I blushed again, rubbed my right temple with my fingertips. “I don’t know why I said that,” I admitted, flustered. “I don’t remember owning a cat.”

My uncle bent a little farther at the waist and laid a hand on my shoulder. “This is too much, too fast,” he said. “I’m sorry for springing myself on you out of the blue, Mary Jo. It’s just that I’ve wondered for so long, what was happening to you—if you were all right. When I saw you, I…”

I wasn’t used to that kind of concern, and I’ve got to admit, it felt damn good. After I married Nick, Lillian and I weren’t exactly estranged, but we weren’t as close, either. She flat-out didn’t like him, and she didn’t mince words about it. Around the same time, Ham, Lillian’s husband and Jolie’s father, had been diagnosed with liver cancer, with all the attendant sorrows for all of them. And Greer had been too involved in stealing her rich doctor husband away from his former wife to care much what was going on in my life, so I’d coped as best I could.

I swiped away a tear with the back of one hand.

Clive took out his wallet, produced a card, and laid it beside my coffee cup. It was official, with raised print and the Arizona State Seal in the upper right-hand corner. “When you’re ready, Mary Jo,” he said, “give us a call.” He pushed back his chair, soundlessly this time, and stood. Collected his jacket from the armrest of the seat next to his. Waited.

I finally realized I was supposed to reciprocate with my own information. I took the pen he offered and wrote my cell number on one of the napkins that came with the coffee. I guess I should have added the address in Cave Creek, but I was afraid he’d MapQuest it when he got the chance, and find out I lived over Bad-Ass Bert’s. Maybe before the next mini family reunion, I could swing a decent place.

“Thanks,” my uncle said. He took the napkin, folded it carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his coat, now draped over one arm. “It’s so good to know you’re all right, Mary Jo,” he added gruffly. “I used to worry that Geoff might have found you…”

I swallowed, felt the soft fur of a cat brush against the underside of my chin. A cat I didn’t remember owning.

Chester, whispered one of innumerable wraiths haunting the depths of my subconscious mind.

Clive, who had been about to turn and walk away, paused and frowned. “Are you all right, Mary Jo?”

“Mojo,” I corrected. “Nobody calls me Mary Jo.”

He registered this information with a half nod, his eyes still narrowed with concern. “Just then, you looked—”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. Like I’d wanted to tell Tucker, the truth is not what it’s cracked up to be.

Still, he hesitated. “You’ve had quite a shock. Maybe I should walk you at least as far as your car.”

I shook my head. “I need a few moments to work through all this,” I said.

Score one for the truth.

“The memories must be tough to deal with,” Clive ventured.

I favored him with a thin, wobbly smile. “That’s the problem. There aren’t any memories.”

Uncle Clive looked taken aback, and sympathetic. “No memories?”

“Zip,” I said.

He surprised me then. He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, just lightly, the way I’d kissed Lillian at SunsetVilla. Something in my heart locked onto the feeling, like a heat-seeking missile, and launched itself into unknown territory.

WHEN I GOT HOME an hour later, still shaken, but with a copy of The Damn Fool’s Guide to Tarot under my arm and a spanking-new deck in my purse, the parking lot was full of Harleys and pickup trucks, and Bad-Ass Bert’s was jumping, even though it was still early afternoon. I probably should have rescued Russell from the steady flow of pepperoni and hot dog scraps, but I was already upstairs before I really focused on the idea.

I would take a shower, I decided, fall into bed—Nick or no Nick—and sleep until I could face the world again. After that, a couple of hours at the computer, coding and billing, and I could meet my quota, hold on to my various jobs and reasonably expect to pay next month’s rent when the first rolled around.

I fumbled for my keys, dropped one of the Tarot cards Lillian had pressed on me in the process, and watched as it slipped between the boards of the landing and fluttered to the ground beneath.

With a groan, I unlocked the door, tossed my purse and the book inside, and went back down the steps to retrieve the card.

The skeleton on horseback stared up at me.

Death. Of course it would be that card.

I picked it up, hiked back up the stairs and got a fresh shock.

No, Nick hadn’t come back.

But the cat had. He was fat and white and fluffy, with china-blue eyes, and he sat on the cheap rug just inside the door, switching his lush tail back and forth.

“Chester?”

“Meow,” he replied.

I dropped to my knees, reached for him, drew back my hand. If it went through him, I was going to lose it. I couldn’t deal with another ghost.

“Chester?” Okay, so I was repeating myself. I’d automatically called him by name, so I must have recognized him.

Another meow, this one a little less patient than the last.

Tentatively, I touched his head. Warm. Solid. Soft.

I saw a flash of crimson in my mind. The cat—this cat, lying on his side, dead, shot through with an arrow. I swallowed a rush of bile and sat back on my haunches, still on the landing, still clutching the Death card in my left hand. I had to take four or five deep breaths before I could be sure I wouldn’t either faint or vomit.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

Like he was going to answer.

The way things had been going, he might have. I had definitely tumbled down the rabbit hole at some point. Let’s just say, if I saw a bottle marked Drink Me, I wasn’t planning to take a swig.