“Did it work?”
“Supposedly. Maybe not as well as modern anesthetics, but that is a list of some very powerful natural sedatives and painkillers. A sponge up the nose would administer them as inhalants, just like our modern general anesthetics, but they could also be absorbed through the mucous membrane. If I knew somebody was planning to cut me open, I’d figure it was worth a try. Let’s go talk to the paramedics about this. And no. We’re not finished talking about the honesty issue. It can wait, because this is more urgent. Slightly.”
***
The paramedic looked tired. He was probably coming up on the end of a very long shift. “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think you understand how many weird things I’ve seen in people’s noses. And other parts. Usually, it’s kids that do this kind of thing, but you’d be surprised.”
“So you’re not going to take her to the hospital?” Faye asked.
“For what? Look at her. Does she look worse than she usually does?”
Faye had to say no.
“I don’t know what to say about the sponge. You lost me when you started talking about ‘herbal alkaloids.’ I’m here to treat the patient. I did that. There is no longer an emergency. If you weren’t here, I’d have already gone. Since I’ve got another call, I’m going to do that now.”
Faye didn’t want to discuss this issue, or anything else, in front of Ennis, so she followed the paramedic out of the house and she kept walking.
“Where are we going?” Amande asked.
“To the inn down the street. I want to talk to Avery. Someone has already killed a woman in this town, using a bizarre method. People don’t get locked up and set on fire by antique kerosene lamps every day of the week. In that paramedic’s world, people may get kitchen sponges stuck up their nose all the time, but not in mine. I’m not comfortable with bizarre events, not when it comes to a person’s safety. Avery needs to know about this.”
“What are you going to do? Get her to run a tox scan on a snot-covered sponge?”
“Maybe. If it was soaked in an opium derivative, a toxicology lab analysis aimed at heroin or codeine would probably pick it up. Hensbane, mandrake, and hemlock? I’m not so sure about that. But even a screening test could probably tell us whether there are unexpected chemicals soaked into that sponge, even if it can’t identify them.” She picked up her pace, as if all the mysteries of the week would be solved if she could just get an orange chunk of sponge to Avery. “I’m betting they do find something. Why else would she have started getting better as soon as you took it out? My guess is that it hadn’t been in there long, or she would have been unconscious when you found her. And, no, I don’t think she stuck it up her own nose.”
“Who’d want to drug Sister Mama?”
At last, Faye made eye contact with her daughter. “Maybe the man who gets fed up with taking care of her? She’s less trouble to him when she’s asleep.”
“Mom. That’s just…awful. Ennis wouldn’t do that.”
“And you know this how?”
“You weren’t there. He was so upset to see her that way.”
“Then let’s get back to your question. Who else would want Sister Mama drugged? Or dead.”
“Dead? Why do you say that? Dead?”
“Sister Mama is very frail. A real doctor probably wouldn’t consider putting her under modern anesthesia in her condition. You don’t think exposing her to a random mix of primitive anesthetics—any one of which could kill her with a big enough dose—might be a murder attempt? Haven’t you ever heard of Socrates being poisoned with hemlock?”
Amande started to say, “Where would anybody get—” then she gave up. They both knew that any plant-based pharmaceutical in the world had at least some possibility of being in Sister Mama’s garden and greenhouses.
“Why would Ennis invite me over while he was in the process of killing his great-aunt?”
This was a point that Faye would have to concede, though with a caveat. “He probably wouldn’t, but murderers are crazy. Maybe he wanted some company while the poisons did his dirty work for him. Maybe he wanted an alibi. Or maybe he wasn’t trying to kill her. Maybe he just wanted her to be quiet while he tried to romance you. If you think somebody else did it, you need to tell me how they got past you and Ennis.”
“The windows were open. One of them was on the side of the house that we couldn’t see. Somebody could have gone in and out of there before we got there, and Ennis might have been watching TV. He’d have never heard. Or…Mom! I heard a noise right before we went in the house. It was like a thump. I bet it was somebody going out that window.”
“You say you heard the noise. Where was Ennis?”
“He was right there. It was after I heard Sister Mama groan the first time.”
“He didn’t hear either noise?”
“No.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to hear. Maybe he knew his great-aunt was in there dying.”
Amande gave a frustrated teenager screech. “You just want him to be guilty. You’re trying too hard to make him be a killer. I think he’s not.”
“Who found the sponge?”
“I did, but it was easy for him to miss. Only a little bit of it hung out where I could see it.”
“Maybe he was hoping you wouldn’t notice it.”
Amande’s glare spoke for her. They had reached the front door of the inn. Faye said, “I guess we should call Avery and let her know we’re coming. And we’re bringing a snotty sponge with us.”
***
Ennis sat at his sleeping aunt’s bedside. She looked better and her breathing was regular. She was as healthy as she’d been the day before, but that wasn’t saying much. She still couldn’t walk and talk. She couldn’t tend her garden and mix her potions. He couldn’t tell when she was happy or sad. He didn’t know if she was ever happy these days.
This might have been the evening that Sister Mama took her leave of this earth. Maybe it would have been better that way.
***
Faye’s daughter looked at her and said, “Avery said she’d get some labs run on the sponge. Are you happy now?”
Not particularly, no. Faye wasn’t happy at all. Avery had listened to her, which was more than she could say for the paramedic. She hadn’t called Faye’s soporific sponge idea stupid, so Faye had to give her credit for being open-minded. She’d just said, “I’d have done the same thing in the paramedic’s shoes, but he hasn’t spent most of the past week in Weirdbower, New York. Neither has the sheriff. He lives on the other side of the county, which might as well be another continent. If I call him, he’s going to want to know whether I think he should investigate every time somebody has a fainting spell. However.”
Faye had liked the sound of that “however.”
“The forensics lab manager owes me a favor. I actually don’t know whether he’s got a handy-dandy test for hensbane, but you said ‘opium.’ If there’s opium on this sponge, I’m sure there’s a tox screen that will find it. Let me see what he’s willing to do for me.”
So now Faye and Amande were in the car, making yet another drive back to the bed-and-breakfast. Returning to Amande’s “Are you happy now?” question, she said, “Of course I’m not happy. I’m worried about Sister Mama and I’m worried about you. We are only here for a few weeks and there’s no need for you to start something up with a questionable man like Ennis LeBecque. You are not to see him again.”
Great. Now she’d wandered into the most treacherous part of parenting a teenager. She’d issued a dictum that she might not be able to enforce.
Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:
An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism
in Rosebower, New York
by Antonia Caruso
Dara Armistead has done it again. She is enjoying my fifteen dollars and I still don’t know how she does her stupid card tricks. Willow is such a good cheater that, once again, I couldn’t catch him peeking at the cards he used to
fleece that defenseless widow. Still, I do think that’s how he does it, and I do think he used body language to tell Dara which cards the widow held. Or maybe their sound system is set up so that Dara could hear when he tapped on his earpiece.
Was she wearing an earpiece, too? I must remember to check next time.
Morse code would be too obvious, but a combination of taps and body signals would do the trick. (Ha. I’m a magician and I just said “trick.”)
Whatever code they’re using, it’s not overly sophisticated. It wouldn’t have to be. It’s entirely possible that they did nothing more than memorize a different signal for every card in the deck, because they were afraid that a suspicious retired schoolteacher would one day be sitting in the audience and they wanted to make her life as hard as possible. Even better, they wanted her to buy as many fifteen-dollar tickets as she could afford. They wanted her money.
Money.
I’ve heard the word all my life. I’ve earned money all my adult life. I’ve spent it. I’ve saved it. I’ve never been scared of it before.
I have seen people prostitute themselves for money before. This may not be the first time I have seen someone do it mere days after a parent’s violent death, but I’ll have to say that watching Dara perform as if nothing had happened was a sight that raised the hair on the back of my neck. What would it have cost her to take a week to grieve? Nothing but money.
How much money do Willow and Dara need? Unless I miss my guess, Tilda possessed an inherited fortune, and now it is Dara’s. If she is sufficiently in love with money to choose raking it in over grief for her mother, then maybe she was sufficiently in love with money to kill her mother for her fortune.
Do I have evidence for this? Do I even have evidence that Tilda Armistead’s death was no accident? No.
All I have is the sick feeling in my stomach that comes from watching two people cheat an audience when those two people should be grieving.
Chapter Seventeen
Faye was still unsettled by Sister Mama’s mysterious illness, but she couldn’t deny that the discovery of Virginia Armistead’s letter had brought a spark to her work life. She could see that Amande felt it, too. At any moment, one of them could find something else equally awesome. This possibility was more stimulating than the caffeine in the double-shot of espresso that had washed down her breakfast.
When Samuel showed up at the museum, mid-morning, she realized that she was a full twenty-four hours late in telling him that they’d found something significant. It wasn’t that he expected a minute-by-minute report of their work, but he was paying the bills and he was passionate about history. He deserved to know about the old letter while it was still news.
To find her in the workroom, he had passed through the museum’s displays, still cluttered by the same chaotic mess they had held when Faye arrived. The work room was in the process of getting worse before it could get better. This disarray made Faye feel a little sheepish when he asked, “Can we take a walk and talk about your progress?” She was glad she’d saved yesterday’s good news to distract him from the pile of work left to do.
As Faye followed Samuel outside, she pointed Amande in the direction of some documents to be filed. Amande really didn’t need the instruction, but showing the client that she was responsible with her employee’s time was good business.
Nervous, she led from weakness, making excuses for her cluttered workspace. Samuel brushed her concern aside, saying, “It’s been a strange week, Faye. We lost Tilda on Monday. Last night, there was an ambulance on my own street, coming to help Sister Mama. If those things put your project off-pace, I can’t blame you. I’ve seen how you both throw yourselves into your work. You’ll get it done.”
Reassured, Faye jumped directly to the good news—fabulous news, actually—about the Armistead letter. “We found something significant yesterday, Samuel. Really significant. It’s a letter written from the Seneca Falls convention, and it gives intimate, personal details about the women who attended. I can get a publishable article out of it that will get the attention of every women’s studies scholar in the country. More than that, I think it’s something that will have widespread appeal. This letter will get you coverage in the popular press. Schools will want to bring their kids to see it. It could put your museum on the map.”
“It should already be on the map. We have some amazing things here. What have you found out about the Runestone? And the Rosebower spear? The Langley Object?”
Faye groped for something diplomatic to say that she hadn’t already said. Samuel was one of those history buffs who couldn’t be satisfied with plain old everyday history. He was convinced that the academic establishment was hiding the truth about medieval Europeans in North America and about Sasquatch and about prehistoric alien landings because…well, because they just were.
Samuel had never met a conspiracy theory that he did not love. History was not history unless it enflamed his imagination, and a simple letter from a woman who knew Elizabeth Cady Stanton wasn’t going to do that. A scale from the hump of the Loch Ness Monster would be more to Samuel’s liking.
Looking at his normally taciturn face, now bright with anticipation, she finally admitted to herself why none of her colleagues had outbid her for this job. She’d thought it was because they could find better paying work elsewhere. Now, she knew deep-down that the real reason she’d won this bid was because nobody else wanted to work for Samuel.
He was still talking, and he still wasn’t making sense. “And the Langley Object? It’s a bas-relief carving of an actual flying saucer. Please tell me you’re getting it documented. That is the article you should be publishing.”
Faye opted to backpedal and tell the truth at the same time. “I’ve looked at all the items you mentioned under magnification and I’m still working on a literature review. I also sent photos of the Rosebower spear to an expert on ancient American weapons.”
She neglected to mention that this expert was her husband and that his opinion had been the same as Faye’s. The spear point didn’t deserve to be a focal point of this museum.
It wasn’t junk, no. It was an utterly beautiful work of art. But it was not rare and it was not nearly as old as Samuel wished it to be. In Faye’s professional opinion, it was a not particularly uncommon example of work done by Native Americans in the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era in the place that would be known as New York. Unfortunately, the huckster who sold it to Samuel told him that it was far older and that it was carved from stone only found in Europe, thus “proving” contact between the Old and New Worlds a thousand years before Columbus.
If Faye couldn’t get Samuel to listen to reason, she would have to waste his money on laboratory results that said what she already knew to be true. Faye hated to waste money, even if it wasn’t hers. Also, Samuel was not going to believe lab results he didn’t like, so why pay for testing?
As for Samuel’s fabulous “runestone,” Faye didn’t need Joe or a lab to tell her that it was a palm-sized sherd incised with decorations common to Iroquois pottery. It wasn’t rare, and it was exactly what she would have expected to find in the countryside surrounding Rosebower. Samuel, however, believed with all his heart that it was something more. To him, those incised figures were Nordic runes proving that northern Europeans were living in America long before Columbus got lost on his way to the Spice Islands.
Most ridiculous of all was the “spaceship” carving on the “Langley Object.” In this case, Samuel had been right to believe that he owned something that she wouldn’t have expected to find in western New York. It was a piece of stone about half the size of a sheet of notebook paper, but only an imagination the size of Samuel’s could see a spaceship in its stylized carving. It looked Mesoamerican to Faye, and she couldn’t argue that it had traveled a long way to New York from the Yucatan Peninsula, but she didn’t think it came to Rosebower by way of a flying saucer.
If she had to guess, she’d say one of Samuel’s nineteen
th-century ancestors had bought it while traveling in Central America, brought it north, and stashed it in the museum. Whatever its origin, Faye was really skeptical that the round thing on the central figure’s head was anything more than a ceremonial headdress, but her client wanted it to be a spaceman’s helmet. He wanted it bad.
Samuel wanted Faye to drape the credibility of her Ph.D. over work that would be called pseudoarchaeology in polite circles. In impolite circles, it was known as “bullshit archaeology.”
Still dumping on the Armistead letter, one of the most significant finds of her career, Samuel asked, “Why are you wasting time on letters that passed between housewives? The Rosebower spear, the runestone, the Langley Object—these things could change the way we understand the world. And ourselves!”
Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 15