Healing Sands (9 page)

Sully heard another voice in the background, as if someone were being paged on an intercom.

“I apologize. What were you saying, Sully?”

“Porphyria, where are you?”

“I am in a hospital room with people who will not stop fussing over me. I am just before running every one of them out of here.” Sully felt the smile in her voice, but he couldn't come up with one of his own.

“Hospital room?” he said. “Since when do they admit you for a physical?”

“Since they decided my heart isn't tapping out the rhythm they want to hear.”

Sully set his cup in the console. “What's wrong with your heart?”

“I think that's what we're about to find out. It's probably just a malfunction in the pacemaker.” She gave a deep-throated chuckle. “I never have liked the idea of being fitted with spare parts. Now, how are you doing with your motivation question?”

Sully shook his head. “That can wait if this is serious. I can get a flight tomorrow.”

“It's going to get serious if I see your face in this hospital. Do what you have to do—one God-thing at a time. Now, I mean it.”

You didn't argue with Porphyria Ghent, not when she took that tenor. So Sully hung up dutifully and put the car in gear and headed for the Pichaco Hills Community Church as if Porphyria were in the seat next to him, floating a hand toward the windshield, making him go where the answers were. The fact that she wasn't . . . that she was in a hospital room with doctors frowning over her EKG . . . He couldn't go there, in body or in mind.

According to MapQuest, he had about a fifteen-minute ride ahead of him across the Rio Grande to the western skirts of Las Cruces, which gave him a chance to experience the same sensation that had come over him anytime he'd ventured out since his arrival in New Mexico.

It was as if he were drifting in a space where the sky took up more room than the tireless desert, which itself ended in distant purplish mountains without ever seeming to reach them. Even as he drove, the light changed and the shadows shifted across the land, and it became a different place than it had been moments before.

It was good to be noticing those things. Large as they were, he would have missed them a year and a half ago when this journey first began. In the process of working with Porphyria for three months and working with his own client in Nashville for a number of weeks before he started a year-long speaking tour, he had become myopic. That, he hoped, was about to change.

He tried to settle back in the seat, not an easy task in the Mini Cooper with his long legs and tall torso. The guy at the used-car lot had all but told him he was going to look like a clown climbing out of a circus car, but it was cheap and temporary, and its frog-green paint job wasn't hard to find in a parking lot the way his eighteen months' worth of rental cars had been.

Unless Kyle Neering was at the same location. Sully had been amused when he pulled up to the clinic that morning to find that Kyle's car was almost identical to his. Gourmet lunch and cufflinks notwithstanding.

Sully made a turn off of Route 70. With five minutes to go, he needed to focus. If he had been preparing a client for an errand like this, he would have suggested rehearsing what he might say when he got there. So far that exercise hadn't been productive.

I'm looking for Belinda Cox. She's the quack who called herself a counselor, the one who fourteen years ago told my postpartumly depressed wife she needed to renounce her demons instead of taking medication and getting real therapy, even though she knew she was suicidal. Yeah, as a result, my wife drove off a bridge and took our infant daughter with her, and now, after a near-breakdown, I'm just getting around to locating Ms. Cox and finding out if she's still using those same methods. I don't want to throw her in front of a train. I can't even see that her license is revoked, because she doesn't need one for her kind of “counseling.” I just want to expose her so she can never allow another woman to go so far into her nonexistent guilt that she can't find any way out except to kill herself. At least, I think that's why I'm doing it. So—have you seen her?

Sully almost missed his turn and squealed the Cooper's tires into a freshly resurfaced parking lot. His hands ached from clutching the wheel. As he licked tiny points of sweat from his upper lip, he decided on a simple
I'm looking for a woman named Belinda Cox. I believe she has an office here?

Although he suspected she had moved on. When he called the number listed for Belinda Cox, he got a message saying it had been disconnected.

Sully smoothed the front of the Hawaiian shirt with his palms and strode toward the door marked
Office
. His Google trail had ended here. Maybe someone could help him pick it up again. Someone like a church secretary. They knew everything.

A bell tinkled cheerfully as Sully entered a sunshiny office that smelled like breath mints and furniture polish. The woman at the desk smiled before she even looked up at him, as if everyone who walked in blessed her and Sully was going to be no different, no matter who he was. When she did raise her head, the smile reached her eyes.

“How can I help you, my friend?” she said in a voice as dimply as her chins.

“I'm looking for someone,” Sully said. “Someone who I believe has an office here, or did have.”

“And that would be—?”

“Belinda Cox.”

Sully had never seen a smile evaporate that way, chilled out of existence by the steely gaze that took its place.

“She no longer rents office space from us,” she said. “She left here four months ago.”

“I suspected as much,” Sully said. “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“No, sir.”

Sully waited. Ten years of working with clients hadn't been wasted on him. There was more she wanted to say.

“Are you a family member?” she asked.

“No.”

“A friend of hers?”

“Not by a long shot.”

The woman melted a few degrees and nodded toward a rocking chair situated catty-corner to her desk. If experience served him well, she was working up to a good vent.

“I'm Sarah Quinn, by the way,” she said.

“Sullivan Crisp,” Sully said. “Sully.”

“Well, Sully, I don't know why you want to find that woman, but I hope it has something to do with the IRS or unpaid parking tickets or some such thing.”

“I take it you weren't fond of her.”

Sarah sniffed. “I just want to make it clear, first off, that she was never affiliated with this church. She only rented office space from us, until the pastor asked her to leave.”

Sully's raised eyebrow seemed to be sufficient encouragement for her to elaborate.

“She never paid the rent on time,” she said, ticking that off on a plump finger. “She said she was running a counseling business, which I never saw the need for in the first place, since Pastor does such a good job of that himself. The first time I saw her, I knew I'd never go to her with a problem.”

“Why was that?”

“She dressed like she just came off the reservation, beads and shawls and feathers hanging from her ears. But there isn't a drop of Native American blood in that woman's body—blonde hair, freckles all over the place. I mean, honestly . . . right off the bat I knew she was trying to be something she wasn't.” She doubled the chins. “Now, who wants a counselor who doesn't even know who she is?”

“I hear you,” Sully said.

“And the way she talked to me, loud, like she thought I was either deaf or stupid or spoke a foreign language. There's no doubt in my mind she saw me as the hired help.”

Sully stifled a smile.

“And then the goings-on in that office. She was two doors down from here, and I could hear her in there just yelling and raving, telling the devil to get out and screaming at people to renounce him.”

Sully's hands froze to the arms of the rocker.

“And here was Pastor, trying to hold Bible study with all that going on. The people she was seeing would cry, and some of
them
would yell too. They'd come out of that door sobbing—it's a wonder some of them made it out of the parking lot.”

“We are definitely talking about the same woman,” Sully managed to say. “So you have no idea where she relocated?”

Sarah shook her head. She had her hand to her neck, which had turned an angry shade of fuchsia. “She finally made her last rent payment, and all that was printed on the check was
Zahira
.”

“Was that the name of a company or something?”

“I have no idea.” She looked over her shoulder at the door behind her and lowered her voice. “It wouldn't surprise me if it was some kind of cult or something.”

It was another twenty minutes before Sully could extricate himself from Sarah. When he left, she made him promise to call her if he found “that woman.”

The day had drawn out to three thirty by the time Sully turned onto Union Street and pulled into the clinic parking lot between Kyle's matching Mini Cooper and a red Saab he didn't recognize.

He strode through the clinic's turquoise double front doors with every intention of going straight to his office and Googling
Zahira
. But Olivia practically vaulted over her desk in the corner of the reception room and planted herself between Sully and the hallway.

“We have a situation,” she said. The doe eyes had obviously been stricken by headlights.

“What's up?” Sully said.

Olivia curled her fingers around his wrist and tugged him away from the hall.

“Okay, so, this woman comes in and she is, like, about to freak out, you can tell.”

“Define ‘freak out,'” Sully said. “Are we talking mobile unit?”

Olivia shook her head, and the eyes continued to enlarge. “She's just, like, mad, and I thought, uh-oh, another lawsuit, but she said she wanted to see a counselor and I asked her if she had an appointment and she said she didn't know she needed one. The way she said it, it was like it was my fault nobody told her. I mean, you can't just walk in here, right?”

“Liv,” Sully said, “what did you tell her?”

“I didn't know
what
to tell her, 'cause you weren't here. And Kyle and Martha were in the break room having it out—they still are.”

“Olivia,” Sully said. “Did you get a name?”

“Um—it's like a guy's name, only she's a woman.”

“Where is she?”

“I put her in the green counseling room—she didn't seem like the yellow type—and I gave her the papers to fill out. I don't think she's happy about it.”

“How long has she been in there?”

Olivia looked at her wrist full of bangles, among which Sully did not see a watch.

“About five minutes,” she said. “But I don't think she's going to last much longer. I turned up the music and offered her some water, but she still wanted to rip my lips off, I could tell.”

Olivia finally seemed to run out of information. “Did I handle that okay?” she asked.

“I'm sure you were amazing,” Sully said and headed for the counseling room to survey the damages.

Judging from the expression on the face of the woman who turned on him from the window, they were considerable.

“Hi,” Sully said. “I'm sorry you had to wait.”

“So am I,” she said. “You have no idea.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
didn't catch your name,” the man said.

Of course not. I was sure that ditz at the front desk didn't either. She alone made me want to beat a hasty retreat out of there.

He was still waiting, obviously in no hurry to fill up air time.

“Ryan Alexander-Coe,” I said. “And you are?”

“Sullivan Crisp,” he said. “Sully.”

So this was Dr. Crisp himself, the one Poco referred to in hushed tones as if he were the pope. He approached me, holding out a lanky arm and tilting his head like an overgrown kid. Except for the graying hair at the temples, he could have been loping onto a high school basketball court. Somewhere in the South.

“Can I get you anything?” he said. “Water? Juice?”

“No, thank you.”

“Frappuccino?”

“I didn't come for the beverages,” I said.

“Then maybe we should get to why you did come.” He folded more than sat on the green club chair that angled toward the one I was sitting in. I supposed the cozy arrangement was designed to promote the baring of souls.

The rumpled chinos, the worn deck shoes, the shirt straight out of Waikiki all bordered on sloppy, but there was nothing careless about the way he moved. Or the way he waited.

Good. I had no problem taking charge of a conversation. I'd practiced this one all the way over here.

“I have a serious family problem,” I said, “and I want to fix it. I know this is Christian counseling, and I'm good with that. I'm a Christian. But I don't want to be preached at. I don't want Ephesians thrown in my face or any of that—which, I assume, from looking at your Web site last night, isn't going to happen.”

He nodded, face solemn, but I got the distinct impression he was smothering a smile. If he was amused by me, he was going to get un-amused fast, or I was out of there.

“Do you mind if we unpack some of that before we go on?” he said.

“I wasn't clear?” I said.

“Oh, absolutely. You know why you came. A lot of folks have no idea.”

“So what's to unpack?”

He scratched the top of his head as if he were puzzled. I was sure he wasn't.

“You've come to us with a family problem,” he said. “Do you want family counseling, then? We can definitely do that here.”

“You mean bring my sons and my ex-husband in? No.”

I thought I saw his forehead twitch. I hadn't meant to let the ex-husband thing slip just yet.