Free Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica

arrested the Sacramento midwife when one of her patients was admitted to hospital with postnatal complications; they claimed the pain-relief chantment may have caused the bleeding. A mob almost broke her out of jail.
    In early July, a month after Sahara’s first appearance at the lake, pilgrims were headed in the thousands to  the forest outside Indigo Springs, where a grove of trees near a sewer outfall had begun growing to a height of five hundred feet. They’d see Sahara there, it was rumored. So many people showed up looking for their goddess that police barricades couldn’t contain them.
    Savvy marketing: her success has been frightening. But if Sahara had the magic mermaid, she could simply force people to join her, couldn’t she?
    “Sahara doesn’t have Siren anymore,” Astrid confirms.
    “What happened to it?”
    “I’ll get to that.”
    “What was your favorite chantment?”
    “At that point? I’m not sure I had one.”
    “Did you wear the lipstick to the party?”
    She blushes. “I wiped it off. It made Jacks babble.”
    “Did Sahara wear it?”
    “She didn’t know it was a chantment—I’d given her the impression it wasn’t. Neither she nor Jacks knew.”
    “Didn’t you tell them?”
    Once again she chooses not to answer. “When we got to the Mixmeander, a yowl rose from the back. I saw two dozen people jammed in the booths across from the bar.
    “Sahara was in her element. In ten minutes she’d weaseled us an invitation to a camping trip in August. She signed me up for a softball league. She had talk going about book clubs, dinner circles, movie outings. Penny Gonzales needed people to help with a fundraiser for the hospital and we volunteered. I’d said I wanted a social life and she tossed one together like it was salad.”
    “And Jacks?”
    “Surrounded by women, as usual. He was trying to avoid the pack, but gracefully.”
    “Was he avoiding Sahara too?”
    Astrid flushes: the friction between Sahara and Jacks is clearly a sore point. “He’d run into the guy who owns the store next to the Mixmeander.” She points to a photograph on her wall—herself at age seven or eight, standing with her parents beside a bicycle, posing in front of a concrete building. Its paint looks like it might once have been bright blue, but has faded to an uneven gray.
    “And?”
    “Once or twice a year some kid sprays dirty words on that wall. Then the Dispatch crime report carries on like that one act of vandalism means we’re headed for a school shooting. Jacks had been wanting to paint a mural there, and he was making his pitch.”
    “He caught the owner in a receptive mood?”
    “Perfect timing,” she says. “Nathan was nodding and smiling and agreeing to buy him paint. People gathered around, telling them both how brilliant they were.”
    I scan the scattered cards with their painted images, but there is no picture here of the gathering Astrid describes. I wonder: If she lies to me, will the painted images back up her story, or reveal discrepancies?
    Then I see a party scene on the card in her hands.
    “Did your mother come?”
    “Yes. She asked Jacks about those papers of Albert’s—the clippings—but she did it without making a scene. And she talked to our next-door neighbor.”
    “You’d invited your neighbor?”
    “Sort of. She had a job washing dishes in the Mix kitchen. She was this ancient Native woman…this must be in your files. Mrs. Skye?”
    “Oh, of course.”
    “When Mrs. Skye’s shift ended, Ma lured her out of the kitchen. She knew her, a little, because she used to deliver her mail. Ma had a gift for that—gallantly befriending old ladies.”
    “That was thoughtful of her.”
    “Ha! That’s what I thought—and from what I’d seen, Mrs. Skye needed friends. But it was just Everett Burke playing games. Ma interrogated her about how much Albert was around Mascer Lane—whether he’d gardened at all.”
    “Mrs. Skye didn’t find that