Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  Faye thanked her and took a big bite of the dark gelatinous thing in her hand. It was licorice. Acrid, medicinal, noxious licorice. Somehow, the fact that the licorice had been dipped in chocolate made the flavor even worse. Could one actually spoil chocolate?

  Faye locked eyes with Amande. Her daughter hated licorice, too, but the girl wouldn’t want to hurt Myrna’s feelings any more than Faye did. Faye responded to her daughter’s “Help me!” look by surreptitiously depositing the uneaten portion of her candy into a paper napkin and slipping it into her purse. There was no help for the stomach-turning mess in her mouth, so she swallowed it whole. Amande followed suit.

  To distract the ladies from Amande’s waste disposal, Faye asked Tilda about the house’s antiques. It was stuffed to overflowing with Victorian rosewood settees and hand-crocheted antimacassars, and its walls were hung with portraits of generations of Armistead ancestors.

  As Tilda started to answer her, Myrna interrupted. Faye had the feeling that this happened a lot. “There are things in this house that belong in the museum where you’re working. See—”

  “Not while there’s an Armistead alive,” Tilda said flatly, proving that she’d learned long ago the secret to being heard in Myrna’s presence: Speak loudly and feel free to interrupt. “Some of these pieces are original to the house, and it was built in 1836. They belong in the family.”

  As twilight deepened outside the dining room’s many-paned windows, Tilda moved around quietly, lighting a collection of spherical antique oil lamps made of all colors of glass. Faye judged that they were all antique and handblown. Their flickering light suited the old house better than the electric bulbs in the converted gasoliers overhead would have.

  “See those chairs? There have been more than family butts in them.” Myrna was whispering in Amande’s ear, but the whispers of a woman with failing ears don’t conceal much. “See that swivel-seat chair made out of cast iron? The one in front of the secretary desk?”

  Amande did, and so did everybody else in the room.

  “Elizabeth Cady Stanton sat there, not long after she delivered the keynote address at the convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, not far from here. Lucretia Mott visited on another occasion. She sat there.” Myrna pointed at a slender chair with original horsehair upholstery.

  Myrna had a rapt audience. Amande scampered across the room and fondled the horsehair. “Mom’s taking me to Seneca Falls while we’re here. She says we have to make a pilgrimage to the place where women put their demands in writing, just like men. After that, I’m supposed to vote every chance I get, as soon as I turn eighteen. Next year.” The last two words were delivered with an emphasis that said, “And I can’t wait.”

  “I like your mom,” Tilda declared. “It’s good to exercise our rights. And to remember the people who got them for us. Shall we spend some time with their spirits? Would you still like a reading?”

  Faye had to admit she was curious. Also, Myrna was muttering, “Where’s that candy? The little girl and her mother may want some more,” and Faye was in all-out licorice-avoidance mode. She would have endured the most cringe-inducing fake séance if doing so would have spared her a second dose of that candy.

  “Yes,” Faye said. “We’d be honored if you would do a reading for us, Tilda.”

  Myrna led them into a room tucked under the stairs while Tilda took a private moment to prepare. Since the builders of grand old homes like this one took their stately staircases seriously, there was room for a large square area under the second floor landing, with a narrow, sloping extension beneath the steps. The underside of each stair could be seen, rising stepwise one-by-one. For an odd moment, Faye felt trapped inside the surrealist art of M.C. Escher with its impossible staircases to nowhere.

  A chair, old and threadbare, was tucked under the stairs. Behind it was a dark area where an adult would have to stoop and then crawl. The square portion of the room was almost completely occupied by a round table. In its center sat a crystal ball, not large but utterly clear, glinting atop an ornate stand of tarnished goldtone metal.

  Myrna busied herself with a pile of folding chairs stacked in the depths of the slant-roofed space. She could barely carry a single chair, so Faye and Amande rushed to help. Once they were in place, Myrna beckoned them to sit, chatting like someone who hadn’t met anybody new in years.

  “We do this every night, just the two of us. It’s important to tend our bonds with family members who have passed over. Mother. Father. Tilda’s dear husband Edwin. Not to mention all the family we never met on this plane at all. There are so few of us Armisteads left. Just the two of us, really, and Tilda’s daughter Dara. We have some distant cousins-by-marriage in Texas—not Armisteads, but kin on Mother’s side—but we could never ever go there.”

  “Why not?” Faye asked. “Airplanes fly back and forth to Texas every day.” Tilda and Myrna seemed to have financial means to make the trip, if they really wanted to go.

  “I could go, but I don’t like to leave Tilda. She doesn’t travel.”

  Myrna leaned so close that Faye could see her reflection curving across the surface of the crystal ball. For some reason, the distorted image made Faye look up at the uncomfortably low ceiling. It seemed to be sinking even lower.

  “Tilda really doesn’t travel,” Myrna went on. “She hasn’t left Rosebower since Edwin died. I think there are even parts of Rosebower that are too far from home for Tilda.”

  Rosebower was a postage stamp-sized town built long before cars came along. It was physically impossible for two places in Rosebower to be far apart. Tilda must have a fearsome case of agoraphobia.

  Myrna was still spilling her sister’s secrets. “The only reason we have a car is to make it easier for Tilda to get her groceries home.”

  “The grocery store’s only three blocks away,” Amande pointed out. “She could walk over there every morning and bring home enough food for the day. Cars are expensive. There’s no reason to pay for insurance on a car you don’t need.”

  Amande knew what she was talking about. She had lived most of her childhood with no motorized transportation but a boat. She was such a reasonable girl, but the human mind is not always reasonable.

  “Tilda thought it over and decided that it scared her to think about driving a car to the store once a week, but it scared her more to think about being forced to walk there every single day. Even after all these years, that car wouldn’t have two thousand miles on it, except for the fact that Tilda let her daughter Dara drive it a little when she was a teenager. I think maybe the odometer reads about five thousand now.”

  “The chrome-yellow ’72 Monte Carlo out front? It’s only got five thousand original miles?” Life without a car had given Amande a motorhead’s heart.

  “I bet Tilda would let you take it for a spin. She leaves the keys in it.”

  Amande looked ready to forget the séance, so she could sprint outside and ogle the classic car before dark. She kept her seat, though, because Tilda had entered the room. An air of stillness entered with her, but Myrna couldn’t let the stillness settle without sneaking in a little more family lore.

  “Tilda was…is…the most gifted medium of her age, just as Father was before her. She still takes the occasional client, but she must really like you girls. She doesn’t do this for everybody.”

  Windowless and claustrophobic, the tiny room made Faye feel disoriented even before Tilda, still silent, lit a low oil lamp and placed its open flame under the crystal ball. Faye grew curious, despite her skeptical nature. The ball, lit from below in a way she’d never seen in the movies, glowed as if from within. At the risk of ruining the spiritual tone of the evening, Faye indulged her own geekiness, leaning in to examine it. When she tried to look through the crystal, images of objects on the other side were inverted.

  Faye understood the optical principle at work, but its effect was hypnotic and unfamiliar. When Tilda daubed her palms with scented oil and rubbed them over the crystal ball,
warmed by flame, Faye thought, This is interesting. None of the fortune-telling gypsies on Scooby-Doo ever did that.

  The fragrance of the heated oil was already rising on warm air when Tilda lit a misshapen lump of incense. She placed it on a ceramic tray that was painted with intricate geometric patterns, holding the burning incense in front of her face with both hands and drawing the aroma in through her nose. Combined with the perfumed oil, it filled the room with a fragrance that was too strong to be pleasant, yet wasn’t oppressive.

  “Join hands, please,” Tilda said in a commanding voice. After three deep breaths, she said, “You were not always mother and daughter.”

  Faye’s mental fraud detector gave Tilda demerits. She was certain that Myrna knew she’d adopted Amande recently, and it was obvious that Tilda immediately heard any gossipy tidbit that Myrna discovered.

  “Amande’s mother sent you to her. She knew that you would care for her child.”

  The curmudgeon inside Faye who bore a grudge against Justine snorted. If Amande’s mother had cared so much, why had she walked away from a toddler and never come home?

  Then Faye’s internal fact checker reminded her that Justine had died only a few days before Faye got the job that took her to Amande. From a Spiritualist’s perspective, death had finally given Justine the chance to manipulate events in her daughter’s favor. She’d never had a shot when she was alive. Justine’s life had been hard from birth to grave.

  Faye’s fraud detector, always fair, removed one demerit from Tilda’s side of the ledger.

  Tilda closed her eyes and took more easy breaths. “The two of you are bound by more than blood. Your ancestors are happy that you found one another. Your mothers have found each other on the other side, and they share your joy.”

  Well, that was an unprovable bit of feel-good psychobabble. Faye was about to issue another skeptic’s demerit when she noticed an uncountable number of orbs of light flickering in her peripheral vision. The orbs were all colors, pure and beautiful, without a tone of gray in any of them. The lights danced. They passed through objects and human bodies. They couldn’t possibly be real, not in a physical sense, but she couldn’t stop looking. Could anyone else see them?

  Myrna and Tilda were looking only at the uplit crystal ball, but Amande’s eyes were darting from the lamplight to the room’s dark corners and back again. The girl wasn’t just confused by what she saw. She was scared.

  Faye gave her daughter’s hand a squeeze. Then Tilda mentioned their mothers again and a shadow fell over Amande’s face. “Your mothers are both here. They have not let go of the pain of living. You should know that your fathers left of their own accord. Your mothers did not send them away.”

  Tilda had nailed that one, almost. Faye wasn’t sure she’d say her father had left of his own accord. More accurately, the draft board had said, “Here’s a one-way ticket to Vietnam,” but Tilda was right that her mother hadn’t sent him away.

  About Amande’s father, she knew exactly nothing, because Justine had never told anyone who he was. Justine had abandoned her daughter after a year of single motherhood and she was dead now, so there was no one to ask. There never would be. If Faye were to ever muster a grain of sympathy for Justine, it would be because she could imagine being a lonely teenaged mother with no help in sight.

  The glowing lights flitted around the room, reflecting in Tilda’s glasses and throwing a luminous glow on Amande’s dark curls and her honeyed-brown skin. Faye wanted to ask Tilda whether the orbs were supposed to be the souls of dead people, but she was too relaxed to make the effort.

  Even if they were ghosts, they didn’t scare her. They hovered near the four women at the table, flirting with the idea of touching them, then passing right through their bodies, always at the heart.

  Faye tried to decide what color her mother’s orb would be, or her grandmother’s, or her father’s. What about Douglass? What color was his soul? He had been a rock for her, almost a father, someone she could trust to protect her when needed and to let her go when the time came. Two glowing orbs, cool green and deep blue, flew in tandem past her cheek, and she heard Douglass’ voice rumble in her ear. “He sent me, you know. Your father sent me to take care of you. And now we’re both here.”

  Then she felt herself enfolded by woman-arms, more than two of them. Her mother and her grandmother were there, both of them, but they were silent, because there was nothing about their love for her that she didn’t already know. She wanted to stay there with them, but she looked at her daughter’s face and saw a tear streaking down her cheek. The tear brought Faye back to herself.

  “Stop it.” She half-rose from her chair, breaking her hold on Myrna’s hand. “Stop it now. We’ve had enough.”

  Stupid. How stupid could she be?

  Amande didn’t have Faye’s memories of being a cherished child. There had been only one stable force in Amande’s life before Faye and Joe came along, and that was Miranda, the step-grandmother who had raised her. Hardly a year had passed since Amande learned that her runaway mother had succumbed to cancer. Days after receiving that tragic news, Miranda had been knifed to death.

  It was too soon for Amande to be reminded of the grandmother she’d lost and the birth mother she’d never known. It was simply too soon.

  There were arms around Amande now, real ones, as Myrna reached out for the shaken girl, who was already cradled against Faye’s chest.

  “I’m so sorry, Dear,” Myrna said. “Sometimes this happens. Sometimes, it hurts to touch the ones we miss so terribly. The pain will get better. You’ll be glad later, I promise. These experiences freshen the bonds and bring our loved ones closer. But there’s no need to rush things, now that you know what’s possible. Any time you feel like talking to your mother…or anybody, really…you come back here. Tilda can help you.”

  Tilda hadn’t spoken yet. While they talked, she’d turned her drooping eyes from one face to another, as if hoping someone would tell her what had happened. If Tilda were to ask Faye that question out loud, the only answer she’d get would be, “Hell if I know.”

  Faye wished for Joe. Every last gram of her was a scientist, so she would never stop looking for rational explanations for even the strangest events. Her husband, on the other hand, was sometimes content to let things be. He also possessed a comfort with the power of nature that was rooted in his Creek heritage, and his intuition was so keen that he often seemed psychic when he’d done nothing more than pay attention.

  Faye’s own Creek heritage was so diluted by her African and European blood that she rarely felt a connection like Joe’s to her American roots. Joe was her spiritual touchstone.

  Joe would be able to help her make sense of this experience under Tilda’s staircase. If Faye had thought Tilda possessed psychokinetic powers that could magically snatch Joe out of Florida and bring him to her, Faye would have willingly braved another session around the crystal ball. But not with Amande. Faye knew she was wishing for the impossible, but she didn’t ever want to see another tear on that vulnerable cheek.

  Chapter Two

  Myrna was gathering up the leftover licorice. From the number of pieces left in the box, Faye judged that even Tilda didn’t like it. Faye became very intent on looking for her purse, hoping to avoid eye contact that would prompt Myrna to offer her another piece.

  Tilda stepped between Faye and Myrna’s foul candy. Faye was deeply relieved.

  There was an ache in the psychic’s sharp blue eyes. “I grieve for your daughter’s pain. If I’d known about her mother, I wouldn’t have…well, it’s done now. And to have lost her grandmother as she did. It was brave of her to open up to you and your husband. Very brave.”

  She looked over her shoulder to be sure that Amande was out of earshot in the next room, trying out Lucretia Mott’s chair.

  “One day, when she’s ready—and she will be ready—tell her that her mother came back to her when she died. Everywhere Amande goes, Justine is there. She couldn’t help her
daughter when she was alive, but now she can.”

  Faye wanted to be jealous. She was Amande’s mother now. Justine had forfeited everything when she abandoned her. In her heart, though, she knew it would be better for Amande to feel that her mother cared, even if she had no evidence beyond the word of an octogenarian who believed she could talk to dead people. One day, she would tell her daughter what Tilda had said.

  Myrna walked them to their car, hugged them both and made sure they used their seat belts, then she walked toward the sidewalk, purse in hand. Where in Rosebower could she be going? Everything was closed.

  Faye didn’t like to see Myrna walking alone after dark. Her vision was bad. She was gasping before she even reached the sidewalk. Her short-term memory left a little to be desired. Sometimes old people wandered away and never came home, and moments like this made those tragedies possible.

  Faye rolled down her window. “Do you need a ride somewhere, Myrna? I thought I heard you say you were ready for bed. Let me take you back inside.”