Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  Hell. For all I know, somebody in town is advertising a preternatural ability to read chicken guts.

  How can these people’s gullible devotees fail to see the obvious? Why would a person with true supernatural powers need props? Wouldn’t a real psychic be able to look a person in the face and just know?

  From Faye’s description of the séance she attended, I know that Tilda Armistead used props, but simple ones, just a crystal ball and some incense. Then she closed her eyes and didn’t even look at the crystal ball. I see a lot more honor in her style than I do in the antics of someone sloshing wet tea leaves around in a cup. Right or wrong, Tilda’s readings came from inside her, not from a randomly flipped assortment of cards. Or from a steaming pile of chicken entrails.

  Rosebower is going to miss Tilda and her unshakeable good sense. Specifically, she’s going to be missed in her lifelong role as a local politician. The town council has ruled this place with an iron fist since God was a girl, and Tilda’s death will not diminish its political power. Her loss will, however, obliterate its ability to govern credibly.

  Imagine, if you will, the most head-in-the-clouds and daydream-believin’ hippie you’ve ever met. Feel free to imagine three of the original hippies, grayed and wrinkled but still waving a fist at the establishment that provides their Medicare. Or perhaps you’d rather imagine a thirty-something neo-hippie who has never worked for anyone but his father. Or maybe you’re pondering the image of a middle-aged woman who embraced the New Age and its mystic crystals instead of dealing with the emotional fallout of her empty nest. Even better, imagine all these people and two more like them, then try to imagine that they are able to run a small town.

  You can’t do it, can you? Well, neither can I. Without Tilda Armistead on its council, I think the town of Rosebower is in deep, deep trouble.

  I have no idea who will be elected to Tilda’s seat, but I do know what the first order of business will be for the new town council. They will begin to bicker over licensure requirements. If they make it more difficult to become a Rosebower-licensed spiritual practitioner, then people with established practices win, because they won’t have to deal with new competition. If they relax the town’s standards, new residents hoping to start a practice will be happy. And so will the wannabes who would move here tomorrow, if they thought they could get a business permit. The wannabes don’t vote here, not yet, but the owners of the inn and the diner and the grocery store and those new teahouses do.

  Any council without Tilda will eat itself alive from the inside, arguing over licensure and creating enmities that will last a lifetime. Tilda won’t be there to make them do boring things like negotiate a contract for garbage disposal. She won’t be able to make sure that there’s enough money in the budget to keep up the parks. Institutional gangrene will set in, and there will be no one to stop the decay of a place that is unique, if a little loopy.

  Bystanders like me will be treated to the spectacle of Spiritualists at war. The newcomers will press for their right to do business, and the old guard will entrench itself further, horrified that anyone would equate the practice of their religion with “doing business”…despite the fact that they all charge a hefty hourly rate for that practice. And the schism can only continue to grow wider.

  This is when Gilbert Marlowe will stop looking like Rosebower’s money-loving destroyer. Tilda Armistead was the only human alive who was capable of standing between Marlowe and a dollar. Give him a chance to clean up the parks and re-institute garbage pickup, and he will start looking like a savior. When that happens, the council will gratefully approve the plans for his tawdry resort and the fascinating history of this weirdo little town will come to an end.

  His plans for developing a New Age Disneyland in Rosebower have brought the old guard to the edge of apoplexy. And he may be able to push them over that edge, because the staunchest upholders of Rosebower’s storied past are uniformly elderly. It may be that he needs to do nothing more than wait for a few more funerals. If he stirs the hornets’ nest a little more, his opponents may start dropping dead on their own. Only I don’t think Gilbert Marlowe has any patience whatsoever.

  I may think these people are wacky, but I do like the place. I will be sad when Marlowe destroys it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Faye was a finder by nature. She could hardly count the times in her childhood when she’d stumbled onto money someone had dropped on a department store floor. Her mother had always marched her straight to the service desk to turn it in. Her grandmother had been less consistent in her approach to good citizenship. If Faye found big money then, yes. Her grandmother had made her do the right thing. When it was pocket change—a quarter, or maybe even a dollar—her grandmother was capable of looking the other way.

  This, Faye had decided, was the advantage of being a grandmother. Grandmothers could totally shuck moral responsibility on occasion, but mothers were saddled with it forever.

  Faye’s status as a finder held true outside the retail world, as well. She was not the best housekeeper in the world, but she never lost a critical piece of paper. If a bureaucrat asked her to produce one of her children’s birth certificates, she could reach right into the heap of paperwork on her desk and pull out the folder labeled “Important Documents,” while Joe and Amande watched in neatnik horror. And when they lost their keys or their phones in their own pristine private spaces, Faye could find those for them, too.

  When tropical storms blew down trees on Joyeuse Island, Faye was the one who found arrowheads snared in their rootballs. She was the child who had explored the island’s woods while her grandmother fished, and found the foundations of a slave cabin, obscured by weeds. What is an archaeologist but a finder? She’d been born with a talent for her profession, and her grandmother’s windswept island had been the perfect place to develop it.

  Faye knew the things that finders know. She knew that the eye rarely focused directly on the object being sought. Treasures lurked in the peripheral vision. She knew that trying too hard rarely yielded results, although workaholic Faye had passed forty without fully accepting that success didn’t always rest on trying real hard. Most of all, she knew that major finds rarely came alone.

  Within a week of finding that windfall arrowhead, little-girl Faye had stumbled onto a fifty dollar bill on the grocery store floor. (Her grandmother had absolutely made her give that one up to the lost-and-found.) The slave cabin’s foundation had appeared beneath her feet within a month.

  In Faye’s life, big discoveries came in clumps. For this reason, she was not surprised when Amande opened a sagging cardboard box and erupted in a full-on war whoop. “Mom! I think I’ve got years of Virginia Armistead’s private correspondence here! Not letters written by her, obviously. They would have gone out to the people she was writing. But look at all these letters written to her. And we found them! How lucky is that?”

  So her daughter was a finder, too. Maybe some talents aren’t passed along genetically. Maybe two people can be so well-attuned that their traits just rub off on each other. Faye hoped she was soaking in some of her daughter’s natural capacity for joy.

  Right now, Amande was doing some kind of hip-hop-inspired victory dance that involved a deep squat, followed by hunched shoulders and strange hand gestures, culminating in eight twitches of her left shoulder as she rose to standing. Rinse and repeat.

  Faye was tempted to join her, but opted for a hand jive she remembered from her teens, done to the beat of Amande’s chant.

  “We found ’em! We found ’em! We found ’em, found ’em, found ’em!”

  Shortly before Faye used up all the dance moves she remembered, Amande quit her shoulder twitches and snatched up the box. “Look, Mom! There’s so many of them. We’ll need to split the work between us.”

  Faye held up her hands, sheathed in white cotton, palm out and fingers wiggling. “Bring ’em on. We’re going to get a major con
ference presentation out of these, and you’re coming with me to help deliver it.”

  There was more than one way to get her daughter off their island and out into the wide world.

  ***

  Gilbert Marlowe was impatient. He was always impatient but, at this moment, he was irrationally impatient. He was impatient with the Rosebower elite who refused to succumb to old age and get out of his way, and he was humiliated that he had let Myrna Armistead push the emotional buttons that had made him revert temporarily to childhood.

  Like any entrepreneur, Marlowe dreamed big dreams, and then he chased them like butterflies. Like any successful entrepreneur, he knew that he would catch some of the butterflies, but some of them would get away. Rosebower was an important butterfly and he didn’t like it dangling just out of reach.

  His limousine was large enough to hold a small business meeting. Two men sat on the bench seat facing his. They were not large men, and they looked nervous.

  Marlowe himself was not a large man, but he made it his business never to act small. He pumped iron to accentuate his naturally broad shoulders. He stood straight. He spoke in a deep, firm voice. If he had intended to continue doing business with these men, he would have paid an image consultant to give them some gravitas, but he had no such intention.

  The first thing he’d do would be to change the blond’s name. Willow was no name for a man who hoped to be taken seriously. Then he’d send the image consultant to buy him a new wardrobe. Not that Willow’s current wardrobe was cheap or ill-fitting. This was a man who liked to look at himself in the mirror. No, Willow’s problem was that he looked stealthy and insubstantial, despite the fact that he had the muscles of a man who went to the gym daily because he liked to look at himself in the mirror.

  Ennis, too, was better-built than his thin frame suggested. Maybe his muscles came from lifting his aunt in and out of her wheelchair and pushing it around. The right haircut could do quite a lot with his face, which was pleasantly symmetrical but a little too intense. He was very young, but Marlowe sensed an inherent instability that age wouldn’t fix.

  The bottom line was that Marlowe enjoyed looking at these men and their soft-edged handsome faces more than he wanted to admit, but he would not want to be doing business with them very much longer. Hence his impatience.

  “When can we break ground on the project?”

  Willow and Ennis explained about the town council and they explained about the transfer of titles and they explained about the land permitting and they explained that they needed more time. That’s another thing Marlowe could have taught them, if he’d had plans to keep them around: Never explain.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, interrupting them abruptly, “I am nearly out of patience, but I have plenty of projects I’d like to do. If the Rosebower deal isn’t going to be profitable, and soon, I can take my business elsewhere. I’ll still be making money, but you two will be out in the cold. I can take care of the land permitting, because the county government is much more easily bought than Rosebower’s town council. There are more pressing legal issues that you two need to address. Willow, how long is it going to take to settle your mother-in-law’s estate?”

  “It should be a formality. My wife is an only child.”

  “I have no use for the word ‘should.’”

  Willow pursed his lips but was wise enough not to answer.

  “Your great-aunt, Ennis. Has she given you power of attorney?”

  Into the vacuum of Ennis’ silence, Marlowe inserted a single short sentence. “I’ve asked very little of you two geniuses, relative to the payoff you’ll be getting. So why are you sitting in my car wasting space? I want to hear a detailed plan for how we are going to get from here to a finished project. I want it before the end of the week. By Sunday, the two of you are going to guarantee that there will be no legal impediments or I will walk. Do you understand? Tie up the loose ends or I’m finished with this deal.”

  ***

  It was coincidence that Faye raised her head at just the right time. It was coincidence again that Amande had chosen the desk that sat catty-corner to the window, putting Faye in the desk that had an unobstructed view of the street. In a way, it was coincidence that Gilbert Marlowe’s limousine was passing at the time she lifted her eyes.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. A vehicle that size, dark and sleek, carried its own gravitational pull. It commanded attention. It drew the eye. Perhaps the limousine itself attracted Faye, tugging on her with enough force to make her look.

  It was glossy, like a dark mirror, and its very blackness gave off an aura of stealth. The window tint was so intense that Faye wondered if its transparent darkness was legal or even safe. Glass couldn’t be both opaque and functional. She got a blurred glimpse of people in the back seat, then she caught sight of something white that swung like a pendulum. It was something she recognized.

  Willow’s hair. The person nearest the rear window on Faye’s side of the car was Willow. Why was Willow talking to Gilbert Marlowe?

  ***

  The limousine had disappeared behind Ennis before he finished opening the garden gate, and he hadn’t even seen it go. Marlowe didn’t seem anxious to be seen with him, nor with Willow. They picked their way through Sister Mama’s garden, unable to avoid treading on the plants that were stretching themselves over the packed-dirt path. If a plant wasn’t packed with healing essences, Sister Mama didn’t grow it, so every step they took released fragrant essential oils from the leaves crushed underfoot.

  Some of the plant smells were minty, some were flowery, and Ennis thought that some of them frankly stank, but Sister Mama still remembered what they all did to the human body. When a favorite client asked, she would even prescribe their oils for an ailing pet, though her imperfect knowledge of non-human reactions to root medicine worried her. On days when she was feeling good, Ennis rolled her chair into the garden and she practiced medicine by pointing to a plant, then pointing to a name on her client list. This method seemed to be working. They hadn’t killed anybody yet, but there was always next week.

  Ennis was thinking of taking Dara and Willow into the business. When Dara was a teenager, she’d worked for Sister Mama after school. She remembered a lot of the herbal lore she’d learned as a kid, and she had his great-aunt’s way with plants. He could almost see them sending out green shoots and leaves as she tended them.

  Willow, too, was taking an active interest in root medicine, and he had more of a head for the accounting side of business than Ennis. If the three of them teamed up—with Willow watching the dollars-and-cents and Ennis handling the web sales and Dara making the products—they would be unstoppable. He thought maybe handling plants might make Dara happier than handling audiences did. He wasn’t sure about Willow. He fed on the love of an audience, but he liked money an awful lot, too.

  Sister Mama might not be crazy about this possible business arrangement, so he hadn’t mentioned it to her. He also hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask Gilbert Marlowe for financial backing. Once the resort project was underway, Marlowe would be a lot more reasonable. In the meantime, Ennis thought maybe Willow would help him put together a business plan. Men like Marlowe liked business plans.

  It was time for Sister Mama’s morning dose of magical good stuff. Ennis pulled a large stoppered bottle off a shelf filled with bottles made of glass in all shades of brown and blue. When her speech had started to fail, he’d gone to Dara, asking if she’d help him tinker with the formula. Dara had twiddled with the recipe until she came up with something that Sister Mama didn’t spit out as soon as it hit her tongue. Now Willow came over regularly to help with the weeding and bring some new recipe his wife had concocted.

  Willow was twice Ennis’ age, but he was the closest thing to a friend he had in this godforsaken little town. Ennis looked forward to his visits, and he did think that Dara’s tinctures were helping Sister Mama. If nothing else, she�
��d been a lot quieter lately.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Amande looked up for the first time since she started work on the transcription of Virginia Armistead’s correspondence. “Mom. There’s something a little weird about these letters.”

  “I saw it, too.”

  They both hesitated. The truth was uncomfortable, but somebody had to say it.

  “Are the letters in your box dated from the 1880s?” Faye asked.

  Amande nodded.

  “By that time, Spiritualism was well-established and Virginia Armistead was a grande dame of the movement, if only because of her illustrious last name. Her husband and children were active practitioners. And she was decades into her marriage.”

  Amande nodded again.

  “Then why is she carrying on an extended correspondence with Piruz Takhat? The man was a notorious fraud and a womanizer.”

  “I’d never heard of him, so I looked him up. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article makes a big deal about proving that Takhat’s names don’t even match.”

  “Yeah, I think Takhat is Farsi and Piruz is used by Sikhs. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” Faye’s knowledge of non-American cultures was embarrassingly spotty. “Even worse, his stage name was ‘Sultan Piruz Takhat,’ but he is known to have been born in Detroit to American citizens named Sullivan. The odds against his being a legitimate sultan are pretty steep.”

  Amande rolled her eyes. “‘Sullivan’ sounds a little like ‘Sultan.’”

  Worse than his phony claim to sultanhood, however, was his habit of misusing his very real talents of hypnotism and masculine charm to seduce a legion of women. His supposed psychic abilities had been thoroughly debunked by Harry Houdini. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t be convinced to believe in him.