Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  Toni was waiting for them outside the auditorium where tourists stood in line to see Dara and Willow do their thing. The moonlight sparkled on her steel-rimmed glasses and the scattering of silver strands in her black hair, and Faye was struck by the lack of wrinkles and age spots on her pale face.

  It was not that the woman did not look her age. Rather, she seemed to be little damaged by it. Faye supposed that a lifetime in the classroom was the ultimate sunscreen. Toni had the complexion of a bookworm.

  “Are you two ready for the psychic reading? Or maybe I should call it a show? Actually, I should probably call it what it is—the gullible public’s daily fleecing.” Toni spoke quietly, glancing around to make sure she wasn’t heard.

  “You really know how they do their tricks?”

  Toni quieted Amande by putting a finger to her own lips. “Most of them. I keep going to their shows, trying to figure out the rest, but I have to space out my visits. I shouldn’t be going again tonight, when I was just here on Monday, but I can’t resist watching their shenanigans with you two. You’re so…rational. In Rosebower, rational people are refreshing.”

  “Why do you have to space out your visits?” Amande asked. “You’re paying good money for your tickets. What’s the harm?”

  “I don’t want anybody to notice me. For professional reasons. But don’t worry, I’ll manage, eventually. Dara is no more supernaturally gifted than any of the rest of us. She’s slick. That’s all.”

  “What about Willow?” Amande asked.

  “He’s not even slick. He’s just slimy.”

  Amande said nothing, but Faye could tell she didn’t like Toni’s criticism of her handsome new friend.

  Leaning in even closer, Toni whispered, “I’m going to help you two look past their misdirection. I’ll sit between you, so I can give you both an unobtrusive tap on the arm. When I tap once, I want you to look to the left of whatever it is Dara or Willow is doing, no matter what’s happening on stage. I’m talking about your left. Don’t try to remember which way is stage left. When I tap you twice, look right.”

  Faye supposed that figuring out magicians’ tricks wasn’t the weirdest hobby a physics teacher could have.

  ***

  Willow trained the hidden camera on the audience. There she was, just to the right of center and near the rear of the house. Toni the Astonisher. How anyone thought it was possible to hide from the Internet in this day and age was beyond him. And this was a person who had actively sought publicity for decades. He supposed that people of her generation had a blind spot when it came to privacy, or the lack thereof. He still had friends in the world of illusionists, and he’d been asking some questions. Toni the Astonisher could be trouble.

  This was at least the sixth time she’d come to the show. He and Dara were good at what they did, but they weren’t that good. There was a reason she kept coming back, and Willow couldn’t think of a good reason. This camera fulfilled its function very well. It gave him a way to study the audience before a show, so that he could choose the most rewarding dupes. It was amazing what could be discerned by the body language of someone distressed enough to make life decisions based on the pictures on the faces of tarot cards.

  Maybe everyone had a blind spot when it came to privacy, or the lack thereof, since every single human walked the Earth in a body that told watchers everything. A slump of the shoulders. A melancholy tilt of the head. A devil-may-care gleam in the eye. Willow knew how to work all these things to his advantage. He’d already chosen tonight’s mark, so now he could train his camera on Toni the Astonisher and leave it there for the rest of the evening.

  He’d already done this once, and an after-show viewing of the video had revealed much. She had stood out visually, among a crowd of other watchers, because she was never looking at the same thing they were. All the other eyes in the auditorium stayed focused on Willow and Dara, where they should be. Toni’s eyes wandered up and down. They focused in directions Willow did not want them focusing. Toni could not be misdirected. This was dangerous.

  Tonight, she sat with Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her remarkable daughter. These, too, were not people who could be readily fooled. Willow wasn’t sure what to do about these three women and their refusal to be distracted. He trained the camera on the rear of the auditorium, just right of center, and set it to record. Maybe after he’d watched them watch him he would know how to proceed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Faye did not need a retired physics teacher to tell her that Dara and Willow employed a defined strategy. They liked to baffle their audience with bullshit. The auditorium was small, and the décor was inexpensive but flashy, with lots of glittery upholstery and wall hangings that distracted the eye from the serviceable industrial-grade carpeting. The stage was decorated with a dome-shaped brass-and-glass cage.

  No, that wasn’t right. The scientist in Faye couldn’t honestly use the word “dome” to describe the structure. It was constructed of flat panes of glass, some of them mirrored, and it encompassed a volume that was actually more like half of a dodecahedron, with its faces made of glass and some of them left free of glass so that Dara could walk through them to enter the space.

  A table and chair sat at its center, and the table was laid with ceremonial items. They were too small to make out from a distance, but a video screen overhead revealed them clearly. There was apparently a camera hidden somewhere, because Faye could see that Dara would be working with a deck of tarot cards and a large glass bowl full of something clear.

  The stage set was the closest thing to a crystal ball that could be constructed of flat glass. Half a crystal ball, insisted Faye-the-geometry-freak. If it had been a full ball, there could have been no floor for Dara to walk on.

  She couldn’t deny that the effect was fairly spectacular for something that could be easily constructed by a building contractor with an on-staff window specialist and welder. Her admiration for the couple’s ingenuity increased when the dome began to spin slowly on a large turntable. Again, the effect was exceedingly dramatic relative to the cost of a motor to run the turntable. The auditorium was equipped with standard overhead theatrical lights that glinted off the spinning frame’s glass facets in several colors.

  Faye had been prejudiced against Dara and Willow by Toni’s insistence that they were frauds, but she was inherently fair. The couple’s performance space gave every indication that they were excellent showpeople. This did not mean that they were dishonest.

  The house lights dimmed, and the rotating glass cage sparkled yet more brightly in the beams of rising footlights. Willow stepped onstage and it slowed to a stop, as if waiting for the real star to take her place at its center. A spotlight picked Willow up as he moved down from the stage and out into the audience. He wore a wireless microphone attached to one ear, and his well-cut black suit contrasted crisply with his pale shoulder-length hair. Faye could hear Amande’s little sigh from two seats away.

  “Welcome, dear friends, to Rosebower, where the boundary between the living and the dead is tissue-thin.” Willow spun to his left, eyes fixed on a fifty-ish woman wearing a flowered sundress. The hidden camera must have swung toward her, because her face suddenly filled the view screen. The damp traces on her cheeks shone in the reflected glow of the floodlights trained on Willow.

  He grasped her hand warmly. “Whom do you seek? I feel that he is near.”

  More tears flowed down the wet tracks on her face. “My husband. Is Kevin here? Do you…feel…him?”

  “Oh, Madame. Don’t you? The aura of love around you is unmistakable. He misses you so.”

  Toni was doing no arm-tapping, so she must think that Faye could figure out this part of the show for herself. The woman was on the front row, so she would have been among the first to arrive. Willow would have had a chance to watch his target ever since the doors opened, maybe for as long as a quarter-hour. He would have had plenty of time to see the tears. Also, even Faye could tell that the woman had come in alon
e, just by the physical positioning of the people sitting on either side of her.

  A weeping woman who has come alone to see psychics, especially psychics who claim to be able to put her in direct contact with the dead? There could be no easier mark.

  Faye had felt the crowd warm to Willow when he guessed that the woman’s loved one was male, but it was easy to see that the odds were in his favor. In any case, gender was a fifty-fifty shot. A woman well into middle age would likely have lost one or both parents, but men marry later than women and they die sooner. At age fifty, the odds that she had a dead father were greater than the odds that her mother was dead, and this would be true for a few more years yet. Fifty-year-olds have also entered the time of life when a dead spouse grows more likely, and heterosexual women far outnumber lesbians. These facts, too, pointed to the probability that this woman’s tears were for a man. The possibility of her having lost a child was real, and the gender in that case would have been a coin-toss, but a dead husband or father was so much more likely.

  Faye couldn’t have calculated Willow’s odds of guessing right when he used the word “he” for the sadly departed Kevin, but she thought they were way more than even. Maybe as much as seventy-five percent. Another sigh coming from the direction of Faye’s own daughter said that the heterosexual women in the audience would have forgiven handsome Willow, even if he’d guessed wrong, and the audience was way more than half female. All of the demographics were in Willow’s favor.

  “It hasn’t been long, has it? Since you lost Kevin? And your name is…”

  “Debbie.”

  Faye wanted to stand up and ask him why he couldn’t read Debbie’s name, if he was such a damn fine psychic.

  The woman’s tears flowed again, and they made Faye angry. Of course it hadn’t been long since Kevin died and left Debbie behind. Any fool could see that the woman was still traumatized. Debbie was not yet of an age when she could be expected to be a long-term widow. And Faye had watched Willow feel up Debbie’s left hand, which still bore the rings that Kevin had put on her finger. Willow was shooting fish in a barrel, and the gullible crowd was letting him.

  Faye cast an eye-rolling glance in Toni’s direction, but Toni responded with only a slight shake of the head that seemed to say, “Just wait.”

  So Faye waited. Willow dried Debbie’s tears by telling her that Kevin was watching over her, and that he was happy where he was. He said they’d be together again on the other side, which drove Debbie to tears of joy. Then he let her sit down as the crowd applauded…something. But what? Willow’s talent? Kevin’s steadfast love? Debbie’s cooperativeness in providing entertainment for them all?

  Faye couldn’t say.

  Willow moved on to a man who had come to Rosebower in hope of relief after years of pain. Willow correctly guessed that the man’s pain was in his hip. Had he seen the man favor his hip as he rose? Who knew? But Willow got a big round of applause for putting his hand on the offending hip, while looking appropriately intense for a minute or two. Maybe the man’s hip felt better when he sat down, but he didn’t say so.

  Then Willow told a teenaged girl that the boy she was dating was wrong for her. The right man would cross her path in five years, he would have red hair, and he would love books. By this time, Faye was getting bored.

  As if sensing that he was losing his audience, Willow announced that he felt called to return to Debbie. As he returned to her front-row seat, he pulled a small box out of his breast pocket, ostentatiously breaking the seal close enough to his face that the microphone hanging from his ear picked up the sound of tearing paper. From the box, he produced a deck of tarot cards, apparently unused.

  He shuffled them so expertly that his hands barely moved. Faye noticed Toni sit up straighter, craning to see his every motion.

  “My wife has a gift for reading tarot. I want to know more about your future, Debbie, now that Kevin has passed over, and I think you do, too. We all do, don’t we?”

  The crowd applauded warmly and a few people expressed their empathy for Debbie vocally. “Yes! We do!”

  Willow held up the newly opened tarot deck, and the rapt crowd settled. “Let us ask the cards for guidance. Dara will tell us what they say.”

  He fanned the cards open and urged Debbie to pick a card, then a second one, and then a third. Holding her three cards in one hand, he snapped the fanned cards shut with the other, before sliding the unused cards back in his pocket. Then he handed the three chosen cards back to her, one at a time, without looking at their faces.

  “You drew them in this order. Don’t show them to anyone. Hold them over your heart while my wife does her work.” On cue, the spangled curtain at the rear of the stage parted.

  Dara took the stage. In so doing, she woke up the room. If Willow’s stage presence was a warm, steady glow, Dara’s was like a laser beam. If pressed, Faye might have been willing to say that Dara’s presence was like a thousand laser beams fanning out in all directions. She owned the stage.

  Her brilliant red curls danced. The scarlet scarf tied around her full hips glittered. The jewel-toned panels of her long flared skirt swirled as if she were dancing, though she was doing nothing more than walk. She stepped through one of the huge glass dome’s open panels and paused beside the table at its center. On cue, the globe began to spin slowly, and Dara went with it.

  She let it make one full revolution before speaking or acting. Standing relaxed and confident, Dara looked less disoriented by the movement than Faye felt. It seemed unnatural to watch a performer onstage, turning her back to the crowd and then reappearing. This was an act that wanted its audience to feel unnatural, off-balance, disoriented.

  Dara slid gracefully into the chair and laid her hands on the table where a tarot deck waited. She scattered them across the table, moving them randomly and occasionally sliding a card to the side. After laying her hand atop that chosen card for a moment, she would go back to sliding the other cards around in circles and spirals.

  Once, she paused and stared deeply into the glass bowl centered on the table. Using a slender brass rod no longer than her thumb, she disturbed the surface of the water in the bowl and studied the ripples. Then she went back to sliding cards around, choosing one and sliding it aside, then changing her mind and sliding it back.

  The room was dead silent. When Willow was performing, the audience had been attentive and interested. Maybe even fascinated. He was very good at what he did, no question about it. But Dara was better. There were no feet shuffling on the floor, no butts shifting in the seats. There was almost no motion at all. The crowd sat as if they’d been hypnotized.

  Except for Faye. Maybe. She wasn’t completely sure whether she’d been hypnotized or not. And except for the physics teacher at her side.

  Faye felt Toni move slightly, placing one hand on her arm. Looking at Amande, she saw that Toni had a hand on the girl’s arm, too.

  One tap means “Look left.”

  She looked to her left and all she saw was Willow. Willow seemed to be doing nothing but working his suit. He spent a few long minutes with a hand on his right hip, which caused the beautifully made jacket to gather behind the hand and drape gracefully. Then he shifted his weight and put the other hand on his left hip. The changes in position came slowly, so he didn’t look fidgety in the least. He looked like a male model doing a photo shoot.

  Faye shot a look at Toni. The woman’s eyes were fastened on Willow, and she seemed to be counting on her fingers.

  Then Dara said in a deep voice completely unlike the one she used when gossiping with her sweet Aunt Myrna, “Now!”

  She raked almost all the cards onto the floor, holding three flat on its surface with her right hand. One by one, she flipped the three remaining cards over.

  Willow extended a hand and Debbie looked at it, as if awakening from a trance. She handed him the cards she’d been clutching to her bosom.

  He showed them to her, one by one. “Death.”

  Debbie put her
hand to her chest.

  “The Ace of Swords.”

  Debbie was shaking now. Willow put a hand on her shoulder to calm her.

  “The High Priestess.”

  Dara sat at her table, staring into space as if she hadn’t heard. She disturbed the water in her glass bowl again, and studied the patterns on its surface. Then she flipped the three cards in front of her. She did this silently, because the camera focused on the cards did her talking for her.

  There was no denying the cards on the table. Faye could see Death, a skeletal rider on a pale horse. The Ace of Swords was unmistakable, with its single blade reaching for the heavens. The High Priestess, shrouded in blue robes, stared implacably at the camera.

  Faye glanced at Toni, whose face did not show the victory of a scientist who has discovered how something mysterious was done. Toni looked frustrated.

  Dara stared at the cards in front of her without acknowledging the audience. She and the stage set continued to spin slowly, sometimes facing the audience and sometimes giving them her back. Still speaking in an odd, husky voice, Dara began to interpret the cards in front of her. “Death is not the cataclysmic card that it seems. It signifies change, rebirth, a total break from the past. For you,” and now she finally looked at Debbie, “whether you like it or not, Death has brought a new beginning.”