Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  Amande was eyeing him, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I want you to tell me something,” he said.

  Faye couldn’t tell whether he was talking to her or Amande, but Amande didn’t seem to be answering him. Wondering what Ennis was going to ask, she said, “Okay.”

  “Did Sister Mama have something Willow wanted? Do you think he might have wanted her dead, too? Like Tilda and Myrna?”

  “Does she own any property?”

  “Yeah, a big plot near the road coming in from Buffalo. Across the highway from Tilda’s land.”

  Faye heard Amande take in a little gasp. Ennis gave her a sharp look.

  Faye could see he already had his answer, but she told him anyway. “Marlowe wanted that land. I’d bet on it. Marlowe doesn’t seem to have done anything illegal himself, but we think he told Willow to do whatever it took to make his development happen. Willow decided that the easiest tactic was to kill everybody in the way. Tilda and Myrna, for sure. Probably Sister Mama, too, because Willow had to be the one who made the soporific sponge. Avery’s chemist friend found opiates on it, and she says he may kill himself with overwork because he won’t rest until he figures out what else Willow put on it. In the end, he went after his own wife, along with Myrna and the two of us. Joe and Avery, too, because they got in his way. There’s no way he’d have gotten away with killing us all. He must have just cracked.”

  “I threw away the medicines he told me to give Sister Mama a week ago, when he got arrested. Look at her now.” He nodded at Sister Mama, laughing with Myrna. “She can walk a little. She’s talking again. She’s talking a lot, actually. I don’t think there ever was a second stroke. Goddamn that man for using me to hurt her. And other people.”

  This time Faye was sure he was talking to her daughter.

  “I threw the rock at Toni’s window. It was stupid. Willow had filled my ears full of how evil Toni was. He’d looked her up on the internet and she scared him. He knew she was getting ready to expose him and Dara as fakes. I thought he was my friend, so it wasn’t hard to get me all riled up against her. The only thing that makes me better than him is that he set fires to kill people he didn’t like, and I threw a stupid rock. And I buried some lemons under the porches of nice ladies that never did me any harm, because I wanted to hex them into selling their property to Gilbert Marlowe. I didn’t think about hurting anybody. I just didn’t think.”

  “Are you going to stay here?” The tone in Amande’s voice said she actually cared about the answer to her question. Her face gave away nothing.

  “I got to. I can’t leave Sister Mama to be taken care of by somebody who won’t even do the piss-poor job I’ve done. And I got to get her to teach me about roots and herbs, while she still can. While I’m at it, I have really got to figure out what part of her business is legal. Opium poppy juice? It’s a miracle the Feds haven’t already come to get us. And I don’t even want to think about what would happen if they found out about the home brew. Mostly, I’ve got to learn what Sister Mama knows, while she’s still here. How’m I going to keep her work going when she’s gone, if I don’t understand it?”

  “You’ll have to start by figuring out how to keep people out of her garden,” Faye said. “Willow stole licorice from you, for sure, plus all the stuff he put on that soporific sponge. God only knows what he put in the tinctures your aunt and Myrna were drinking.”

  “I’m looking into electric fences.”

  Amande laughed out loud.

  “No, seriously. I am. I don’t think anybody but my great-aunt understands what some of that stuff can do. She told me one thing that’s gonna make both of you laugh. I know how Miss Tilda made her séances…special. All these years, Sister Mama’s been a big help to her. More than either of them knew, actually.”

  Faye tried to picture Sister Mama slipping through the secret staircase entrance to help Tilda fake metaphysical magic. She couldn’t, so she asked, “How was she a big help?”

  “Sister Mama said that she steeped calming herbs in oil, and that Miss Tilda would rub them on her crystal ball and let the warm lamp underneath spread the essences around for people to breathe.”

  “I remember that!” Amande said.

  “Sister Mama was quick to say that using her oil wasn’t cheating. Tilda never cheated. She’d grown up helping her father fool people, and she hated it. Hated it. She believed she had real talent. I believe she did. But my aunt’s herbs helped her put people in the mood, and Tilda didn’t consider that cheating.”

  “What about the incense?” Amande asked. “Did she make that, too?”

  “She did, and that’s the part that’ll make you laugh. Sister Mama made it out of wild lettuce sap. We were about to run out of it when Tilda died. Sister Mama was too sick to tell me how to make more, so I looked it up on the internet. And you know what? Wild lettuce sap’s perfectly legal, and it’s got an awful lot in common with opium juice. I really got to put up an electric fence.”

  He’d been right when he said they would laugh.

  “So those things we saw during Tilda’s séance weren’t real?” Amande asked.

  “Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but you were flying high when you saw them. No doubt about it.”

  When Ennis laughed, his whole face came into focus.

  “I’m not sure there’s any reason Miss Myrna needs to know that,” he said.

  Nodding at them both, a quick agreement for Faye and something slower for Amande, he said, “I need to go now. I need to see if either of those two ladies need anything. I’m all Sister Mama’s got, and Dara can use some help keeping up with Miss Myrna. Dara’s got a show to run, and she’ll be doing it by herself from here on out.”

  As he walked away, Faye gave Amande the same silent eye contact that her mother had given her long ago, when she’d been sneaking around with boys at seventeen. “Is there anything about that man you want to tell me?”

  “He wanted to ask me out. I didn’t encourage him, so he didn’t.”

  Faye’s continued silence asked for more of a response, so her daughter said, “He’s just a boy. I’m waiting for a man to come along.”

  ***

  Joe began closing the open books scattered over Samuel’s desk. “Are you convinced?”

  “Yes. It’s hard to accept that my treasures aren’t what I thought they were, but you laid out the facts. You walked me through those books. You showed me pictures on your computer. You showed me lab reports from rock taken from American and European quarries. I’m not stupid. You’ve convinced me. It’s not that I thought the people in America couldn’t have built all those pyramids and mounds on their own. It’s just that I thought that they didn’t.”

  Joe let that statement rest as he placed the books, one by one, in an orderly stack. “Now I want to explain something else and I want to ask you a question.”

  “Of course.”

  “I just spent two hours walking you through a bunch of research. I enjoyed myself. I think you enjoyed it, too, but my time don’t come cheap. Faye’s time costs even more. It should. She’s the one with a Ph.D.”

  “Well, yes,” Samuel said. “She—“

  “Hang on a minute. I’m going somewhere with this. Faye already told you everything I told you this morning, but she didn’t spend two hours doing it, because that wouldn’t be a responsible way to spend your money. If you want her to walk you through this project, she can do that, but it will cost you a lot. It might be cheaper to let her get her work done, hands-off. You could use that time to take some archaeology classes, since you do seem awful interested. Yeah, you can pay her to explain every last thing to you, but it would be like paying a private tutor to make a doctor out of you. Only you wouldn’t get the piece of paper that says ‘Ph.D.’”

  This made Samuel laugh. “I don’t need the piece of paper, but I just might take some classes.”

  Joe closed his computer, stood, and shook his client’s hand. “Good. If you want me to, I’ll le
t you know next time we’re doing a dig. We can always use volunteers. But here’s the question I wanted to ask you. Is it maybe possible that you listened to me today, after you ignored Faye when she told you the same thing, because she’s a little tiny woman and I’m not? Because if it is, you owe my wife an apology.”

  Samuel had risen when Joe did, but he was still holding the Langley Object. He turned it over in his hands, studied it a bit, then spoke. “She’ll get one.”

  “I presume that means that there will be no trouble with her bill. It will show some hours for things we’ve done that are beyond the original scope of work.” He nodded at the pile of books cradled in the crook of his elbow. “Like, for instance, this conversation you and I just had.”

  “Tell her to send me a bill. There will be no trouble at all.”

  Joe said goodbye to his client. He thought Faye would be happy with the way he handled their accounts receivable.

  ***

  “Mom?”

  Faye took off her reading glasses and looked up at her daughter.

  “I’ve been reading about Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Amande said.

  “It’ll take you a while. She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments and read it at Seneca Falls. She was friends with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott and Amelia Bloomer. She raised hell for decades in favor of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. I forget how many children she raised while she was doing that. About a billion, or so it seemed when I read her biography. She was a complicated person, and I don’t agree with everything she did, but she made history. Nobody can argue with that.”

  “I think there’s something about her that you didn’t notice, or you’d have said so.”

  Faye, being the competitive soul that she was, said, “Oh, yeah? Bet me.”

  “I bet you a banana split.”

  “You’re on. What did you notice about Elizabeth Cady Stanton that I didn’t?”

  “She has the same last name as your great-great-grandmother, Cally Stanton. And Cally’s husband, Courtney Stanton, obviously, because she took his name. What do you know about Courtney Stanton’s family?”

  Faye realized that she owed her daughter a banana split. “Um…nothing. When Cally was interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project for their slave narratives, she just said that Courtney and his mother were Yankees. To Cally, a Yankee might be anybody born north of Florida.”

  “New York is north of Florida. We should try to find out whether you’re distant kin to one of your heroes.”

  Faye blurted out, “I don’t want to know.”

  Why had she said that? Probably because she liked the idea of being kin to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and she didn’t want mere facts to get in the way of that feeling.

  “Too late. I’ve already emailed your cousin Bobby, the family genealogist. He’s on the case.”

  Faye hoped Bobby found the link Amande believed was there. If not, she hoped he hit a dead end that left the question of kinship forever unanswered. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have fit right in with the stalwart women on Faye’s family tree, and Faye wanted to always be able to imagine her among them.

  Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:

  An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism in Rosebower, New York

  by Antonia Caruso

  My work in Rosebower is done. I have everything I need to write the book I came here to write. I have photos of Virginia Armistead’s letters, in her own handwriting, confessing to fakery. I know that Tilda Armistead was as honest as she looked, but that she was unknowingly drugging her clients with Sister Mama’s psychotropic-but-legal wild lettuce sap. And I have the nasty little story of the charlatan Willow, husband of the last in the long line of Rosebower Armisteads.

  Dara is so anxious to distance herself from his crimes that she has shared every detail of how they fooled their audiences. I was gratified to learn that I’d unraveled most of their tricks, but Dara is an artist of the stage. She taught me a few things I didn’t know, and I was doing sleight-of-hand before she was born. I know what they say about old dogs, but this one loves learning new tricks.

  I also know that, not so long ago on a summer night in Rosebower, Myrna Armistead convinced a hard-headed archaeologist and her daughter that she was channeling her sister’s spirit. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her daughter Amande are certain that Myrna knew they were in danger before the danger presented itself. They are even more certain that she warned them in her sister’s voice, not her own. In that voice, she ordered them out of the house and she begged them to save her sister and her daughter. When Myrna Armistead said those words, she had no daughter and no living sister. But Tilda Armistead did.

  The physicist in me knows that Myrna was being systematically drugged. She was grief-stricken. And prolonged congestive heart failure may have starved her brain of oxygen. There is a real possibility that she was hallucinating. But the physicist in me also knows that science learns new things every day.

  In other words, things that are perfectly explainable today were utter mysteries yesterday.

  For this reason, although I have everything I need to write my Rosebower exposé, I’m not going to do it. I have other books to write, other trips to take, other ways to wring every last ounce of fun out of my retirement. I don’t need to do it at the expense of people who don’t deserve my scorn.

  It is likely that I will come back to Rosebower, now and again. Dara’s tired of working seven days a week, year-round, but an empty auditorium is a wasted money-making opportunity. She would never share a stage with me, because she still believes she’s the real thing and I make no such claim, but she’ll gladly rent me the hall. I may spend some years gadding about, returning here to perform for occasional extended runs.

  I may even retire here. I’m learning that the aging process doesn’t change us. It just makes us more like the people we’ve always been. I want to be the best old lady possible. If I went looking for role models, I could never find better ones than Myrna Armistead and Sister Mama. They’re loving. Strong. Contrary, when the situation requires it. Maybe it’s not too late for me to learn to be more like them.

  My first step toward being a loving and generous person in old age will be to kill this book. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth only told me what she knew about the letters and the wild lettuce because I promised not to publish it while Myrna Armistead was alive. The world has waited this long for the truth. It can wait a few years longer. I made the same promise to Dara Armistead and, in exchange, she taught me something about magic.

  Magic is what you believe it to be. So is life.

  Guide for the Incurably Curious

  This is the place where I usually give a little background for readers who are interested in which parts of the history Faye is investigating are really true. Teachers, homeschoolers, and book group leaders tell me that this kind of information spurs discussion, and I find that my readers tend to be like me. We are incurably curious, so we are always happy to have a few questions answered.

  For this book, however, I find myself wanting to leave the magic alone. Instead of sharing with you every last historical detail about the roots of Spiritualism and the activities of the brave ladies at Seneca Falls, I think I will do things differently this time. I will point you in the direction of a couple of books I used while writing Rituals, then I will tell you a story about my own one-and-only brush with the metaphysical.

  I have owned a copy of James Randi’s Flim-Flam! Psychics, Unicorns, and Other Delusions for quite some time. I knew that I would someday want to draw from his exposé of metaphysical fraud, but I was waiting for the right story to come to me. Randi, also known as the magician “The Amazing Randi,” has been a crusader for truth, and my “Toni the Astonisher” was in part inspired by him. If you read Flim-Flam!, you will learn about real-life fakers far more brazen than my fictional Dara and Willow.

  In constructing my imaginary Rosebower, I visited a Florida town built by 19th-century Spiritualists called C
assadaga, where I attended a church service, experienced the laying on of hands, and received a psychic reading. I also did my usual writerly exploration of the town itself, just walking around and stopping into local businesses and checking out the public buildings. Even my imaginary places need to be rooted in the real world. This is why I like to travel to the sites of my books or, when those sites are imaginary, I like to travel to someplace nearby. If you’re curious about Spiritualist towns in general, or about Cassadaga in particular, I recommend Cassadaga: The South’s Oldest Spiritualist Community by John J. Guthrie Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe.

  I did not, however, go to western New York, and I did not go to the real-life town known as the home of Spiritualism, Lily Dale. Rosebower is only modeled on Lily Dale in the sense that they both have lovely floral names. I made the decision not to go to Lily Dale rather late in the process of preparing to write Rituals, and here’s why. Although some of the residents of my Rosebower are wonderful people, honest and devoted to their faith, some of them are not. I felt that it would be disrespectful to the faith of real-life Spiritualists to taint their town with fakery and murder, so I wanted there to be no suggestion that I was accusing real people of such things. Instead, I created Rosebower, where I could let my fictional crooks come out to play. Now that the book is finished, I want very much to visit Lily Dale and Seneca Falls, and I expect I will do so soon.