You know what they say, girl: a doctor who treats herself has a fool for a patient.
Going to a shrink meant she would have to talk about It. Anything else would be a waste of time. She'd proven that. The oak was the only one she'd ever told about Buddy, about Jo, about Maureen and pain and fear. But she'd promised . . .
Besides, shrinks cost money. That hundred from Brian would have covered one session, max. It would take her that long just to fill out the forms. Quick Shop didn't have a health plan and if they did it wouldn't cover psychos and if it did, this was definitely a pre-existing condition.
Ben Franklin and the empty speed-loader: those had been the only evidence last night ever happened. David and Jo were gone when Maureen crawled out of bed, groping for the aspirin bottle. Even the breakfast dishes were drying in the rack.
But the car had started and the greasy-fingered mechanic at the corner garage had found a crack in her distributor cap. He’d also replaced the plugs and the air cleaner. She'd had enough left over to buy a new bottle of Scotch and still have lunch.
Have lunch downtown. She grimaced. There were police barricades all around the smoking hulk of the strip club. Radio news said two women had died. Smoke inhalation. Trapped by jammed fire doors. Cause, probably an electrical fault.
She touched Father Oak. "Northern red oak," she recited to herself. "Quercus rubra, specimen tree approximately five foot diameter breast-height and seventy feet tall, struck by lightning about twenty years ago but apparently healthy."
He had already been recovering when Maureen first brought her troubles to him. She sometimes wondered if the lightning bolt had actually struck in the same year as Buddy Johnson. Maybe that was the bond she felt.
Maureen leaned her back against his rough bark and slumped down to squat on her heels. Strength. What Father Oak provided was strength. He could snatch the lightning from the heavens and channel it down his branching arms and give up a strip of bark more than a hand-span wide and still survive. A little matter of non-consensual pre-pubescent sex must seem trivial after that.
She loved this tree. He was everything her own father wasn't: quiet, strong, sheltering, non-judgmental, sober. Father Oak would protect her. Father Oak was her friend. She talked to Father Oak. Sometimes He answered questions.
She had gone into forestry because of Father Oak, to return his love to him. Then she'd found out that Forestry, with the capital "F," was more concerned with killing trees than nurturing them. American forestry was an industrial process. It just asked how to get the most board feet of lumber, the largest yield in cords of pulp, in tons of fiber, per acre per year.
That was half the reason she worked at Quick Shop. The two job offers she'd had were as an overseer on the Paper Plantation, whip dem darkies if they don't meet quota.
Maureen shook her head at the memory. She reached into her other coat pocket and pulled out a hand-carved flute, double tubes of dark wood with a surface polished smooth by generations of fingers. She touch-traced the twining leaf-pattern of its decoration, feeling the warmth that had reached out and caressed her hand when she'd wandered into a Junque Shoppe on Martha's Vineyard. The tree that grew it must have had a dryad.
Smooth puffs of breath brought a gentle non-tune from the flute--a scattering of paired notes floating out into the crystalline stillness like wind chimes in the icy branches. She never tried to play any music, not with this gift from Pan. As best as she could tell, it had come from Romania and wasn't tuned to a Western scale.
The magic of the forest answered her. Jay-notes floated back to her in a squeaky echo, the smooth blue-crested thieves gliding from tree to tree, telling her of the night's changes and any other gossip that touched their sense of mischief. Her trills broke delicate tinkles of ice loose to cascade from upper limbs as the sun touched them with its sudden thaw. Maureen conducted a concerto for forest and solo flute, lost in comfort and safety.
A shadow fell across her hands.
"I didn't know there were any Druids in Maine."
Maureen blinked against the sunlight. A slim, elegant woman stood on the ice in front of her, long dark hair in a straight cascade, dark eyes, skin that came from somewhere on the Mediterranean. Her outfit of gray fur looked like it had just walked out of a Paris salon and molded itself to her body, and she obviously wasn't worried about animal-rights activists splashing ink on it. Her perfume spoke of dollars-per-gram and said the fur wasn't fake.
Hairs rose along the back of Maureen's neck. The woman hadn't made a sound as she approached, no crunch and squeak from the ice. Maureen couldn't see any footprints on the snow.
"I need to talk to you about my brother."
"Brother?" What the hell . . . ? Maureen had never seen this dingbat before. Or maybe . . . . She had a hazy memory, twin shadows in the thick air of the club.
"I think he's calling himself Brian these days, Brian Albion. We saw you together last night."
Maureen's right hand fumbled in her pocket, slipping her finger into the trigger-guard of the .38. Anybody connected with last night wasn't fun.
The woman flipped her hair back with one hand and laughed. "You won't be needing that thing, love. Believe me, I had nothing to do with Liam following you. We were following Brian. I know him better than you do. Don't trust him."
"Who the hell are you?"
"Fiona. Just Fiona. Most of us don't use second names where I live. There aren't that many of us, to need them.
