by Mary Bowers
“Ferdie inherited everything and had the good taste to get rid of most of it. It took a couple of months to settle the estate, and then Ferdie negotiated with Ozzie to have him take the lot, but for some reason he held onto that teacup. He had it in his house for, oh, about a week when somebody made a joke about him having such a girly little cup in his collection. At least that’s what he said.”
“If he wanted a memento, it was either that or bunnies, right?” I commented.
“Exactly. Still, something made Ferdie nervous about that cup, because he dropped in on Ozzie the next week and asked what he’d give him for it. He told that cover story about a friend making a joke, but Ozzie thought he seemed really squeamish when he was talking about it. He didn’t even have it with him; he’d taken a picture with his cellphone to show Ozzie, and he asked that he come and pick it up. Ozzie thought that was odd, but he agreed. But he never had the chance to go get it, because it was only a day later that . . . .” She stopped suddenly and looked at Camille. “Are you all right with this, Cam? If you’d rather I’d wait to tell her the next part until after you’ve left, just say so.”
“I’m all right,” Camille said in a throaty voice.
Maryellen looked back to me. “She’s the one who found him dead. Ferdie was a client of Camille’s. He came to her regularly for advice on the last day of every month. Always, right, Camille? Been coming to her for years, to prepare himself for the coming month. And then suddenly the last day of September – ”
“It was August,” Camille interrupted. “Before the hurricane. I remember thinking, when we were hit by Irma, that at least Ferdie had been spared that. He hated hurricanes.” Her eyes were glazed at this point, and staring past me.
“August. The last day of August, Ferdie didn’t come for his regular appointment, and Camille got worried. She went to his house to check on him and found him dead at the bottom of a ladder. He’d been trying to change the battery in his smoke alarm and he fell off the ladder and broke his neck. It must have just happened when she got there, because he was still . . . warm.”
“I warned him to get rid of that teacup,” Camille said tonelessly.
“You did?” Maryellen said, obviously startled.
Camille blinked herself back to us and took a breath. “I warned him that he had acquired something dangerous. I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, but I knew it the moment something dark began to cast a shadow over his life. I felt it. And I know the difference between the mere shadow of death and the shadow of a darker power. The spirit of something evil had entered his house – something angry and deadly. I asked him if he had a new lady in his life. Ferdie was 87, but in remarkable health. A wealthy bachelor can fall prey to the wrong kind of woman at any age. And I warned him to avoid heights,” she added, her voice getting louder. “Yet there he was, lying beside a five-foot ladder, and I stood there staring at him and hearing the siren of death making its horrible cry, and within it I could hear laughter. And I knew.”
The reference to the laughing siren of death made my eyebrows rise, and I looked at Maryellen.
“The smoke alarm,” she told me. “It needed a new battery. They peep, you know. A peep is not a siren, but after a while it can begin to seem like one. Who knows how long Camille stood there looking down at Ferdie and hearing that thing go peep-peep-peep. Those things will drive you out of your mind – over and over and over until you can’t stand it anymore and no matter what time of day or night it is, you get up there and change the damn battery. More dangerous than a fire, some of those things. At least it was to Ferdie.”
“He should have gotten rid of the teacup,” Camille said doggedly.
“He should have gotten rid of the damn smoke alarm,” Maryellen said, just as doggedly. “Or at least had it moved. It was up at the top of a double tray ceiling, where only a homicidal maniac would install one, knowing it would need batteries replaced. It wasn’t one of those stick-on ones you get at the hardware store; it had been built into the house, according to code, and it had a battery back-up.” She tapped the table angrily. “More people die from household falls than household fires.”
“It was the teacup,” Camille said. “As soon as he took possession of it, I knew he was in danger.”
Maryellen was digging in, ready to fight for her smoke alarm and I interjected, “Maybe it was just his time.”
They both stared at me as if I were an idiot.
“So what comes next?” I asked, hoping they’d move the story along. “Are any other deaths connected with the teacup?”
“Oh, you’re talking about the teacup?” said a woman’s voice behind me. “Hello, Camille. I didn’t expect to see you here,” she added.
“Come on in, Helena,” Maryellen said without getting up. “I’m outnumbered. Psychics to the left of me, mediums to the right of me, come on in and join the muggle squad, but give the dining room a wide berth as you do; the teacup of death is lurking by the window.”
I looked over and saw a neat, slim woman who looked about eighty, but had a much younger air about her. She was the type I always (silently) call a “cool old lady,” the kind who will tell you wise and amusing things about life and never mention her sciatica. Her hair was thin, white and boy-cut, and even from across the room, I could see how vivid her blue eyes were. Even in old age she was beautiful; in youth, she must have been ravishing.
Helena gave the painting set-up an amused glance, then came forward and got herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, just as if she lived there. Then she took the empty chair between me and Camille. Without waiting for introductions, she gave me a friendly look and said, “I’m Helena Brady, Maryellen’s next-door neighbor. So you’re the new psychic everybody’s been talking about. Taylor, is it?”
“Taylor Verone,” I told her. “I run an animal shelter. I don’t know what you’ve been hearing about me, but I’d rather play for the muggle squad.”
I didn’t catch Camille’s reaction, but Maryellen and Helena both laughed.
Helena transferred her attention to Maryellen, “So,” she said chummily, “how’s the new book coming along?”
“It’s writing itself,” she said. Then she got a funny look on her face. “They always do. It’s as if somebody else is telling me the story as I write. Sometimes I can hardly keep up with it, and I never dry up. I don’t know why.” She looked at Camille with what I suspected was feigned seriousness. “Could it be the spirit of some mystery-romance writer who’s passed on but still had more stories to tell?”
“You’re mocking me,” Camille said quietly, shaking her head. “You supply the answer yourself, and at the same time you laugh, as if you really can’t see the truth. It’s called automatic writing, Maryellen, and it’s a well-established phenomenon. Your mentioning that you sometimes can’t keep up with it is a dead giveaway that the story is being told to you. If you feel as if you’re not in control, you’re probably not.”
“Darn,” Maryellen said, dead-pan. “And I’ve been taking all the credit for myself. Royalties, too, not that money does them any good in the great beyond. I’m so ashamed.”
Camille refused to be baited. “Can you think of an author whose work yours closely resembles? One who is dead?”
Maryellen switched gears; suddenly, it was fun. “Patricia Wentworth? John Dickson Carr? No; he adored young lovers as much as I do, but I don’t do locked rooms, and besides, we’re looking for lady writers, aren’t we? I wouldn’t dare say Christie; she sits upon the throne, high above us all, and besides, you couldn’t trust her with the young lovers. No matter how appealing she made them, she sometimes sent them to the hangman in the end. Perhaps Margery Allingham, but that might be flattering myself.” She waited half a beat, but nobody dissented. “Could it be both Wentworth and Allingham, one whispering into each ear? For choice, I’d have to say Wentworth.”
Ha. I didn’t argue with her, and I’d never read any of her books, but I’d read some Wentworth, and she’d been prudish about “p
rolonged action scenes” for the young lovers.
“How do you feel when you first begin to write every day?” Camille persisted. “You’ve said something to me in the past about waking up with ideas bubbling over. You are most vulnerable, most open to possession, when you sleep. Does Ms. Wentworth ever come to you in dreams, telling you stories, sending you images? And when you do begin to write, is it as if you’re slipping away? Being pulled into a quiet place and giving yourself up somehow?”
I shifted uncomfortably, and Camille homed in on me with sharp eyes. She murmured, “You too?”
“Of course not,” I said as if I’d been insulted.
I had lied, and Camille knew instantly. What she was describing was exactly how I’d felt during some of the stranger moments in my own life.
Now Maryellen was looking back and forth between me and Camille with a calculating look. Settling on me, she asked, “You’re a spirit medium, aren’t you? Ed says you’ve produced remarkable results at séances. Perhaps writing is somewhat like giving yourself up to another reality, just as a spirit medium does. It sometimes feels as if I’m channeling ideas from someplace outside myself. Is it like that for you when you channel a spirit?”
I remembered that moment of feigned seriousness she had directed at Camille, and I knew that this was why I always denied the strange things that kept happening to me. In a word, it all made me feel silly. I couldn’t talk to other people about those things and not be aware that they might be laughing at me. Nobody takes these things seriously until they happen to them, and even then it can be hard to accept. I was my own biggest doubter.
And I certainly wasn’t going to bare my soul to this woman, whom I’d just met, and who would probably turn my innermost conflicts into a comic-relief character in her new book.
“I don’t channel spirits,” I told her. “Ed believes I do, and from time to time, I help him out, mostly to earn donations for my shelter. But when I sit down at a séance table, I just let it roll and try not to take things too seriously. The secrets of the cosmos,” I said largely, “are not mine to play with.”
“Oh, bravo, Taylor,” Maryellen murmured. “You are superb.”
I had no idea what she meant by that, but I feared the worst had happened: I had just inspired her to put a ditsy blond with a lot of beads and a turban into her next book.
“What she is,” Camille said tartly, “is in denial.”
“What she is,” Helena said to both of them, “is a guest, and you are both treating her badly. Tell us about the new book, Maryellen, and stop grubbing around for new material.”
“Good old Helena,” Maryellen said. “You can always tell who your best friends are because they’re the ones who don’t hesitate to smack you down when you’re getting out of line. If I’ve offended you Taylor, I do apologize. Call it an occupational hazard. All right, then, the new book. It’s about the teacup of death, of course.” She waved negligently in the direction of her painting set-up.
“Is that what you’re going to call it?” Helena asked. “The Teacup of Death?”
“My working title is A Cup of Death, but I often change the title late in the process, sometimes right before I submit to my publisher. The Teacup of Death? You might have something there. It’s got a ring to it. And Ozzie would hate it, I’m sure, so that means it’s probably good. The hardest part, quite frankly, is going to be disguising the actual events surrounding that dratted teacup, but I think it’s going to be easy to build up a legend around an innocent-looking object like that. I’ll add a whole chain of tragedies, maybe going back to the factory where the cup was made.” Her voice had faded; her eyes had dimmed. Suddenly, she reached for the pencil cup and pad of paper.
She scribbled as she mused aloud, and I marveled at her ability to talk and write on two different tracks at the same time. It really did look as if some invisible entity was guiding her hand while she was talking to us about the general background of her idea. Fascinated, I tried to read what she was writing, and it was coming out as finished text, complete with description and dialog, unlike the disjointed remarks she was making aloud.
Helena smiled at me and said, “Genius at work.”
Camille watched with a kind of lofty satisfaction. There was a tiny quirk of an eyebrow, an occasional slow nod, but she said nothing. In fact, we three observers sat quietly for some eight or ten minutes, listening and watching as the mumbling and scribbling went on.
Maryellen’s energy seemed barely restrained. There was almost a madness about it. “The factory where it was made . . . a shabby backstreet in Victorian England . . . a little girl who paints the cups violently dies . . . explosion – do kilns explode? – I’ll have to research that – wait, she’s nowhere near a kiln. Make it the collapse of a heavy rack beside her, crushing her as she works . . . oh, yes, good, and I won’t have to bother with too much research. Just backstory, one chapter and go. Heavy wooden shelves, like the ones in that pottery shop on the other side of town; I could go back for a look, but they didn’t look stable to me at the time. An earthquake. The rack full of dishware shudders and tips, falls on the poor girl, crushing her.”
“And crushing the teacup, too?” I asked.
She paused. Camille stared at me as if I’d giggled in church.
Oddly, the scribbling continued unabated. “No,” Maryellen said. “It’s an open-backed shelf, rough wood, rotting, open spaces. She’s just finished painting the cup and it’s sitting on the worktable in front of her. She pauses to rub her tired eyes; suddenly an earthquake startles her. She stands. Panic! The shelves collapse. The teacup, safe on the table, survives; poor little Meggie dies.” She moved to the bottom of the pad and scribbled “Meggie,” then went back to what she’d been writing above. “People will cry buckets.”
Finally, she stopped writing and put the pen down, looking vaguely at what she had written as if it surprised her. She inhaled deeply, coming awake somehow, oddly refreshed. Then she cracked an evil grin, looked up at me and said, “Nobody reads my books without having a box of tissues nearby.”
It was as if she had split herself in two, and I was left looking at the less appealing part of her while the better part had left its ideas on the pad and dissolved away. I suddenly found her repellant.
Predictably, she noticed and chuckled.
“And you’ve got that thing in the house to inspire you?” Helena asked.
“Partly. As I sometimes do, I’m creating the book cover’s artwork myself. My fans love it when I do that. I have a friend who will come and photograph my painting, once I’m satisfied with it. I can paint, but I’m no photographer, and Andre knows all about pixels and lighting and dots per inch. He has the equipment to do something that’s up to my publisher’s specifications. Then I’ll get the teacup back to Ozzie and in a few days he’ll settle down again. When I’m inspired like this, I can complete a still life much more complicated than that in a day or so, and Andre’s available to photograph it at any time; he runs the art gallery directly across Duval from Ozzie’s shop.”
“You’re a fool for having that thing in your house,” Camille remarked. “A woman your age . . . you’re a fool to tempt fate.”
“Yeah, thanks for the warning,” Maryellen said. Turning to Helena, she said, “We were just about to describe the teacup’s second victim to Taylor when you came in.”
“Second?” Camille intoned. She indicated the notepad Maryellen had been writing on. “Who knows how many victims it’s had. You’ve just had another bout of automatic writing. For all we know, little Meggie was real.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Maryellen said. “Give me some credit for imagination. Still, I’ll grant you that we don’t know the cup’s entire history, and we probably never will. All right, then, Marnie was the second victim that we know of, after Ferdie and if you don’t count Lydia – which I don’t. Helena knows more about Marnie than I do. Didn’t you go to school with her, back in the day?”
Helena nodded, looking tro
ubled. “Never got along with her, but when you’ve known somebody for so long, and the survivors of the Class of ’40 have dwindled to just the two of you, you look out for one another. Nobody really liked Marnie. Marnie Carnahan, her name was. She never married. She used to run one of the key lime pie shops, over by the marina. She still lived in the house she was born in.”
“Helena,” Maryellen said, “we’re interested in her death, not her life.”
“Oh, yes,” Helena said. “Sorry. Well, not to drag the story out, I’d gotten to wondering if she was all right. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in a while, and just casually mentioning it to people, I realized nobody else had either. She was retired from the pie shop by then, of course, and she was having trouble getting around, but she still did get around. I don’t think she had any friends closer than me, so I decided I’d better go check. Well, she didn’t answer the door when I knocked, and the key wasn’t under the pottery frog like it always was. I checked and the front and back doors were both locked, and I have no idea how to break into a house. So I called Big Billy’s mother and asked her to send him over.”
“Is Big Billy a locksmith?” I asked.
“Oh, no, he’s a cop. Nice kid. I’ve known him since he was just a little squirt, but I know his mother better, so I called her and asked if she could have him meet me at Marnie’s house, and she said he was off-duty, but she’d send him over anyway. She’s nice like that, and he’s a good boy. So Billy came and he managed to get in, so he’s the one who found her. He didn’t want me to see, but nothing shocks me. She’d fallen in her bathtub and hadn’t been able to get out again. She’d been gone for a couple of days by then.” Helena took a moment to settle, then went on. “The Medical Examiner said she’d hit her head. It’s terrible to say, but I hoped she’d hit it nice and hard, since she had to die anyway. I hoped she hadn’t been laying there aware and helpless . . . .” This time, she stopped for good. After a moment, she picked up her cup and drank from it resolutely, but she didn’t look at anybody for a few more minutes.