Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  Amande looked at the thing in her hand. It was fairly large to have come out of a nostril, but sponges can be squeezed into remarkably small places. Why had Sister Mama had a chunk of kitchen sponge up her nose? And how long was it going to take the paramedics to show up?

  She turned her head to look at Ennis. He gestured to the phone that was still stuck to his ear and said, “They’re coming.”

  Amande took Sister Mama’s hand in hers, hoping the gesture was comforting. Then she thumbed her own phone, one-handed, until the first person on her speed-dial list answered.

  “Mom?”

  ***

  Faye didn’t remember saying much more to Toni than, “Amande…Sister Mama,” as she lunged out the door and ran for the car. Even in Rosebower, there were times when a car was the way to go. Driving five blocks was a lot quicker than walking five blocks. But why was her daughter four blocks further away than she was supposed to be? How did she find herself in the bedroom of a sick woman who was struggling for life?

  ***

  Faye rushed past Ennis to Amande. The girl stood silently, watching a paramedic examine Sister Mama.

  “Mom. You wouldn’t believe how much better she looks. She’s pinking up by the second. She’s breathing well. She’s relaxed. She’s sitting up. I don’t even think they’re going to take her to the hospital. Why do you think she shoved a sponge up her nose?”

  Sister Mama couldn’t talk to the paramedics, but Ennis assured them that this was normal for her. Other than being unable to answer their questions, she obediently responded to every instruction. She raised both hands, individually and together. She looked to her left, she looked to her right. She correctly answered questions intended to assess her mental function, by using gestures. Faye could see that the paramedics already had one foot out the door.

  “Where’s the sponge?”

  “Right here on the floor.”

  Faye handed Amande a tissue. “Pick it up and bring it with you. I need you to step outside and explain some things to me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Faye stood outside Sister Mama’s front door, fiddling with her phone and delaying the moment when she’d have to ask Amande to explain herself. Amande opened the discussion herself.

  “We were just looking at flowers.”

  “Then why did you lie?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have let me go.”

  “Not good enough.”

  Faye went back to fiddling with her phone. In a way, she was the one acting like a teenager. She was ignoring her daughter because she couldn’t think of the right thing to say and because she was pretty sure there was something on the internet that she needed to find. Something about the sponge up Sister Mama’s nose triggered Faye’s memories of a favorite class in the history of science. The Romans had impressed her as ingenious people, particularly in their approach to the medical arts.

  She asked the Internet to remind her of what she once knew about soporific sponges.

  ***

  Amande expected her mother to keep talking about the fact that she’d lied. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to acknowledge the lie or do an end run around it, by railing about the silliness of tracking her whereabouts by text. She was seventeen years old, and she’d been wandering around Barataria Bay alone in a boat when she was twelve.

  But hey. She’d lied. There was no denying it.

  Since she was inarguably guilty, why hadn’t her mother gone in for the kill? Why was she standing there studying her phone like its screen displayed the answer to all life’s questions?

  “A soporific sponge. Just what I thought.”

  Amande was accustomed to weird polysyllabic utterances from her mother, but “soporific sponge” might be the weirdest of all.

  Faye handed her phone to Amande for perusal. “I took two semesters of ‘History of Science’ in grad school. The second one focused on medicine. In the old days, people spent a lot of time worrying about pain relief. It’s not like you could run to the drugstore for an aspirin in the Middle Ages. And surgery…the ancient Romans knew a lot about the human body, and they knew how to fix some parts of the body when they broke, but can you imagine having a tumor removed while you were awake?”

  Amande shook her head.

  Faye brandished the phone. “Look at this web page. It says that medieval writers described something that sounds almost like a magic potion—poppies, mandrake, henbane, hemlock, and probably a lot of other stuff. The potion was brewed, then left in the sun to evaporate off most of the water. When someone needed to be unconscious, a sponge soaked full of that stuff was stuck up their nose. The Romans are thought to have used something similar.”

  “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 wan
t 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 fr
om 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.