Ladies Courting Trouble

by Dolores Stewart Riccio

  “Phil finds it really hard to get decent calves’ feet these days.” Tall, lithe Heather Devlin pushed past Phillipa to give me a hug, her long bronze braid swinging halfway down the back of her khaki jacket, like some modern-day Maid Marian. “Look, I’ve brought you one of my best candles. Light this, my dear, and you’ll breathe in the ocean’s healing power.”

  The candle was greenish and looked like a tide pool, being filled with tiny crustaceans and shells coated with barnacles. If I lit the thing, in a thrice Brenda would be rushing into my room with a fire extinguisher. But it’s the thought that counts. “Thoughts are things,” was my grandma’s favorite saying, and it’s become one of my guiding lights.

  “And I’ve brought you an amulet, a little gargoyle to frighten away the bad vibes.” Deidre Ryan was trying to lean over me and fasten her handiwork to one of my bed’s white enamel posts, but she’s a petite gal and was having to stand on her tiptoes.

  Heather took the ghoulish artifact out of Deidre’s hand and tied it up above the nurse’s buzzer. “Nice eyes,” she commented. “I like that angry red glare.”

  “Now, girls,” Fiona Ritchie took over the room with her new wisewoman glamour. In the slight shift of perception caused by the glamour, her normally plump, rather frumpish self had metamorphosed into a regal, Minerva-like person to whom anyone would want to listen attentively. It was an enviable talent.

  “How does she do that?” Deidre whispered in my ear.

  “I think it’s akin to presence, the kind of aura that some actors are able to project,” I whispered back.

  “If you had dowsed your food, as I taught you to do, you would have detected the poison,” Fiona scolded.

  “Fiona, it was a church social! How would it have looked if I took out a pendulum and let it swing over the cookies?”

  “Exceptional people have to learn to tolerate some puzzlement among the mundanes. Do you know,” Fiona continued, “that there are some religious sects that claim their true believers can handle snakes or drink poison without harm? In ancient times, priestesses of the Great Mother, too, were snake handlers. No, no—don’t look so alarmed. It’s not a test I want us to try. From my studies, I think harmony is the key, and disharmony equals dis-ease. No lectures today, however.” Her deep, warm hug was like medicine itself, and I basked in it. “But on Samhain, we’ll talk of this again. Meanwhile”—out of the pocket of her coat sweater of many colors, Fiona fished a Walkman CD player—“here are some magical tunes to help restore the harmony. Play it later, when you’re alone. I want to see you dancing out of here by tomorrow.”

  Dancing after hemlock poisoning? Sure, why not. Just don’t ask me to make friends with snakes.

  The “magic tunes” turned out to be a tract of medieval music played at my wedding to Joe last Yule. And bringing with it memories of our enchanted honeymoon in New Zealand, it did indeed make me feel like dancing.

  Chapter Two

  “I’m trying to get it out of my head that this calamity was Mrs. Pynchon’s doing, because she herself is such a poisonous individual.” Patty Peacedale confided to me over a cup of my stomach-soothing triple mint-and-chamomile tea. It was several days after the hemlock incident. Thanks to fast action at the hospital, we’d all recovered well enough, except for poor Lydia Craig, of course. Her funeral, just yesterday, had been one of the best attended since the Donahues’ (a double murder two years ago that had packed the church to standing room only). “That miserable woman has been the bane of my existence ever since Wyn took over Gethsemane.”

  “I suspect there’s one like her in every church.” I passed Patty a plate of lemon cookies. Normally, I might have offered cheering chocolate, but I’d lost my taste for that treat, however it might perk up one’s brain chemistry. I suspected that Patty felt the same.

  Lying under the kitchen table, my dog, Scruffy, sighed heavily to remind me that he hadn’t as yet had as much as a crumb of cookie. A bite of sweet stuff hones my superior senses, Toots. Your pal, now, smells lost and sad to my sensitive olfactory system, like she can’t remember where the good bones are buried. Scruffy has his own way of communicating, and somehow I always hear what he’s thinking.

  “This is Wyn’s third church, and believe me, Pynchon’s unique in our experience.” Patty gazed out my kitchen window. “It’s nice here. If I had this view of the ocean to look at every day, I’d never get anything else done. So, what do you think, Cass? I mean, vibe-wise.”

  “Vibe-wise, I don’t believe that the poisoner was motivated by hate, meanness, or church politics. More than that, I can’t say. My first instinct, however, is to rule out the ladies of the League. I’m familiar with Conium maculatum. It’s the black sheep of the parsley, parsnip, and carrot family, and anyone who set out to harvest poison hemlock would have to be as knowledgeable as myself and wear protective clothing as well,” I mused. “I must tell Stone to watch out for someone with a case of dermatitis.”

  “Well, I definitely suspect Mrs. Pynchon myself. I don’t suppose you could…” Patty reached in her knitting bag, took out a blue object, either a sleeve or a wind sock, I couldn’t tell which, and began to complete it. She kept her eyes on the work.

  “No fortune-telling, no hexes, no potions,” I interrupted, not wanting my guest to suggest a Pynchon-remedy she’d regret later. Basically, Patty Peacedale was a good soul. With her heart-shaped face and tiny, pointed chin, she would have been cute, although well past the age for it, if her hazel eyes hadn’t been filled with anxiety and her hair limp from general exhaustion. She dressed as one who wanted above all to avoid notice: a powder blue cardigan, a matching blouse with a silver circle pin at the neck, and a navy skirt of the classic just-below-the-knee length. Her shoes were navy blue comfort moccasins, and the matching handbag was slightly scuffed leather. A single brown curl fell in an oily swirl over her broad, fair forehead.

  When Patty had first begun to confide the problems of being a pastor’s wife to me, she’d said it was because I was unconnected in any way to her husband’s parish. Unlikely to judge or to blab, I thought. Rather like a priest, or more aptly, a priestess. Thus I had come to know a great deal about Mrs. Pynchon’s iron grip on her church. At least once a year the woman convened some committee or other to talk about booting out the Peacedales. She fought any innovative idea with tooth and claw, grumbled about every expenditure, ferreted out everyone’s secret vice, and used it as food for gossip. In her spare time, she complained about Patty’s lack of Christian spirit and housekeeping skills. She even blamed Patty for being childless. The congregation had invested substantially in a four-bedroom parsonage, she’d declared in Patty’s hearing, to house a pastor’s growing family. Instead, there were only Wyn and Patty rambling around in all that expensive space. Patty’s hobby room and her own personal office should properly be used as children’s rooms, Mrs. Pynchon had asserted. But was she the poisoner? Somehow, I didn’t think so, much as Patty would have liked to see her persecutor dragged away in handcuffs to the local jail.

  “She told everyone in the church that she drew a cross in the dust on my tier table and three days later it was still there.” The knitting needles clicked angrily.

  “Oh, Patty, a little dust is so unimportant in the larger scheme of things!” At least I hoped so. Looking around, I wondered when the last time was that I’d slicked up the tops of things. “Why is it that women can always be made to feel guilty about housework? A home needs to be a place of comfort, creativity, and a touch of beauty—not operating-room sterile. Especially if you live with animals.”

  We canines prefer dirt floors—cool in summer, warm in winter. Scruffy yawned, stretched, and came out from under the table. Need to pee now, Toots.

  “Hold it a minute, Sport,” I said. Patty looked at me strangely. “Talking to the dog,” I explained, going to the stove to fetch the kettle and refill the teapot with dried mint leaves and boiling water. Making herb tea is something I do on automatic pilot, so I paused to gaze dreamily out the
window where the lowering sun was gilding the little houses along the curving shore, and I noted the way the gulls were lifting and gliding in the golden rays. As sometimes happens when I get rapt by light, I began to get that slightly nauseous feeling that precedes a vision. I sat down quickly in a kitchen chair.

  From what seemed like a long distance away, I could hear Patty saying, “Cass…Cass, are you all right?” Then the kitchen faded from view, and I saw a pair of hands protected by work gloves. A shiny red-handled knife unfolded. A rutted field between two stands of pine, and, growing in that field, a weed that looked like Queen Anne’s Lace, wild carrot. The hands, using tiny steel scissors to snip away at the herb, stashed the fresh green stalks in a canvas bag. An overcast, grisly day, and someone was collecting hemlock. I could see everything except the face and figure of the person harvesting the poison.

  The scene faded, and I found myself back in my own kitchen. Scruffy was nosing my leg in a concerned way. Hey, Toots…you’re dragging your tail. Maybe you’d better lap up some cold water. And Patty was leaning over me, slapping at my wrist. She waved a small, open bottle under my nose. A more than bracing odor hit my brain.

  “Smelling salts?” I murmured.

  “Never leave home without it,” Patty said. “You had yourself a little transient episode of some kind, dear. Should I call your doctor?”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine. The episode was clairvoyant. That’s how it strikes me.”

  Patty clapped her hands, her melancholia having evaporated into a pleased smile. “Oh, Wyn will be so interested that I’ve observed you in action, so to speak. Did you see who did it? The murderer?” she whispered.

  I sighed. It wasn’t easy to explain about the gaping holes in clairvoyance. I described the hands, the knife, the scissors, the field, the harvesting of herbs on a raw day. “I think it must have been September, because the plants had not yet dried on the stalk. Someone planned ahead, I’d say. But I did not see a face, nor even enough to guess if it was a man or a woman. Still, maybe I’ll see that same field somewhere around Plymouth and we’ll at least have a location, a place to start.”

  “The scissors, now. I’ve seen those on a Swiss Army knife.” Patty began to clear the table, motioning me to sit where I was, and, in truth, I did feel a bit weak. “I believe they fold up inside the pocket knife with several other useful tools. Will you tell all this to Detective Stern?”

  “Of course, but it’s not much to go on. If I were Stern, I’d put my money on forensics, maybe some fingerprints on that plastic dish that held the brownies.”

  “Well, that’s that, then,” Patty said, dusting a few cookie crumbs off her hands. “I have to get back to the parish for a committee meeting. The Christmas Bazaar, you know. Wyn always says I don’t have to be part of every committee. ‘My job description doesn’t include an indentured wife,’ he declares to the church governing board from time to time. But you know it’s expected, especially by Mrs. P. I just wish our living room wasn’t considered the parish club, if you know what I mean. And they notice every flaw. If only Mrs. Pynchon…Will you be all right now, Cass, here by yourself?”

  Apparently this dumb dame hasn’t noticed that you’re watched over by a superior companion animal. Scruffy sighed, muttered, and walked to the door to speed the departing visitor.

  “I’ll be fine. Scruffy considers himself an excellent nurse and guard dog, rather like Nana in Peter Pan,” I said. “And Joe will be home soon, laden with do-it-yourself supplies from Home Warehouse.” Joe’s projects around the house were nearly always interrupted by his Greenpeace assignments, so he tended to work at a feverish pitch between expeditions. Any day now, I expected him to fly off to parts unknown, abandoning the latest home improvement, a terrific array of skunk-deterrent floodlights strung from tree to tree, lighting up our backyard like Massasoit Mall.

  As she opened the kitchen door that led to our architecturally incorrect back porch, Patty looked perkier than she had when she arrived. “If you have another vision, please do give us a call. It’s so interesting.”

  Perhaps it was a trick of sun and shadow through the trees, but suddenly I seemed to see her in double exposure, one form erect and smiling, the other bent over in anguish.

  “Patty…when you have these committee meetings, are refreshments served?”

  “Of course, but I only have to manage the tea and coffee. People usually bring baked goods.” She stopped stock-still and put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, my good heavens!”

  “You need to be super careful that you know who brought what from now on. Like the airlines, you need to connect each offering with a person who is present among you. No mystery snacks. Promise?”

  “You don’t think…the poison person will try again?”

  “I do have that notion. I hope I’m wrong.”

  “Well, this certainly has been enlightening. I’ll have such a lot to share with Wyn. Thank you, Cass.”

  Scruffy scooted by Patty and hit the nearest tree with a sigh of relief. Patty turned and waved again as she got into her car, a black Buick Regal.

  “I like Patty,” I said to Scruffy. “She’s rather a dear person.”

  Yeah, but she has the manners of a poodle—hogged all the cookies herself and never dropped a bite. What’s for supper, Toots?

  “What would you say to a nice beef stew with dumplings?” Already my head was in the refrigerator, taking out beef, carrots, celery. I wished I had the moral courage to be a vegetarian, but having a robust man to feed was a good excuse to ignore the issue. “At least it’s free-range, organic beef,” I justified myself to the dog. “And we won’t tell Joe that I picked these mushrooms myself in Jenkins Park. It makes him so nervous, poor darling.”

  Chapter Three

  Joe keeps his cell phone at the ready day and night, a minor annoyance. The major pain is when it rings, because its chief purpose is to connect with Greenpeace for yet another summons to an environmental challenge. All right, I have to admit, it’s his job, but Greenpeace takes him away from me at short notice and for weeks at a time. As a Libran, I do like to live a well-balanced life. Of course, Joe would complain that I throw my own life out of whack when I embark on a crime-solving spree. Phillipa says we’re both crusaders and will just have to put up with each other’s quests.

  At least it wasn’t the Pategonian toothfish emergency this time. It’s really demoralizing to be abandoned to my fate by someone intent on saving an endangered fish. This newest call had come just as we were relaxing with a favorite old film—Ladyhawk—and a bowl of popcorn.

  “I’ll have to leave tomorrow,” he said with a rueful smile. I didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to see that gleam of anticipation lighting up his blue eyes. “I’m shipping on the Esperanza to Miami. You remember that Greenpeace is being brought up on charges for boarding a ship transporting illegally harvested mahogany from Brazil to the United States?”

  “They arrested the activists instead of checking out the illegal cargo?”

  “Yeah, and all we were going to do was to hang a banner, ‘Mr. President, stop illegal logging.’”

  “Well, sure—you dummies had to bring in the president.”

  “It’s called the right of free speech and peaceful protest. Anyway, we’re making another run at the scene of the crime to see what happens.”

  “Throw your hats in the door, so to speak?”

  “In the port. Probably the worst thing will be a media feeding frenzy.”

  “You hope.”

  “The case against Greenpeace hangs on a hundred-year-old law called ‘sailor-mongering.’”

  “I don’t even want to know what that is.”

  “It’s what you think—a law against boarding a ship that’s entering the harbor with the intention of accosting the crew. Pimps used to row out to arriving ships and proposition the guys, take them to shore, and after some revelry with the girls, relieve them of their money. Not exactly applicable to Greenpeace. And sympathetic public opinion, I admit
, may make a difference, possibly get the charge thrown out of court.”

  “So the feeding frenzy is okay by you?”

  “Right.”

  “You might even, if necessary, stir up the media a little?”

  Joe merely smiled, a male version of Mona Lisa’s inscrutable smirk. “It’s all just part of the job, ma’am.”

  “So, let’s see. It’s almost Samhain now. Think you’ll be out of jail by Thanksgiving?”

  “If this is still a free country.”

  “Or at least by Yule?”

  “Our first anniversary! Would I miss that?”

  That called for a kiss, and the kiss led to a prolonged farewell in the warm, cushioned nest of our bedroom. As always, his compact muscular body and spicy scent were irresistibly sexy. And I was addicted to the gentle strength of his touch. Perhaps the honeymoon is never over for sailor’s wives.

  “Do you think that poison is a woman’s weapon?” I asked Phillipa. We were in her spacious kitchen, where she was putting the finishing touches on the fruit breads for the TV show. These were the perfect creations she would display on a buffet at the end of the show, not the ones haphazardly mixed on camera and baked during the taping.

  “Hmmm,” she replied, realigning a candied fruit decoration.

  “Phil, it’s perfection. Stop messing around, and answer me.”

  “Well, it would be my weapon of choice, that’s for sure. Such a simple thing to do, if you know your herbs—right, dear? My personal favorite would be the Destroying Angel mushroom. But, unfortunately, I don’t know a toadstool from a puffball.”

  “Amanita. I learned all about mushrooms at my grandma’s knee, so I could teach you, if you like. My experience has been that if you’re not trained in foraging as a child, you’ll never be a confident forager later. No wonder poison as a weapon comes to mind for you, since you’re a professional cook. But what about other women, regular women…”