Rosebower’s back yards were less well-kept than the front lawns. Maybe they always had been, or maybe people had let that part of their yardwork go as they got older. Avery had said that she wanted to be able to prowl through those bushes, gun drawn. She wanted to make it hard for someone to slip into the undergrowth and hide. He understood her rationale for taking that job, and he agreed.
They both had cell phones, obviously, but they were also in direct audio contact, because there was no place on Myrna Armistead’s small property where one of them could call out for the other without being heard. This plan was all Avery’s and it was a good one.
Behind him, Dara was leading Faye, Amande, and Myrna into the tiny little room where she talked to spirits. He turned his head to watch. Through the séance room’s open door, Tilda Armistead’s crystal ball reflected light from her sister’s parlor chandelier. It shone dimly on the faces of the four participants for a moment, then Dara shut the door.
Joe didn’t understand the need to shut oneself away from the world for such things. He couldn’t imagine spirits remembering that walls even existed, once they’d left this Earth. He was even less capable of imagining that spirits cared about spherical lumps of quartz.
Thrusting a hand deep into his leather bag, he came out with a lump of candy that was only slightly dirtied by its time in the bag. He bit into it and the flavor hit him like a jolt. Damn. Joe had never tasted licorice candy so good in his life. This stuff made all other licorice taste like the black jellybeans left in the bottom of a two-year-old’s Easter basket.
While he chewed that first bite, he used Myrna’s torch-strong porch light to take a look at the uneaten portion of his candy. The filling was jet-black and gelatinous, as he would have expected of licorice, and the coating looked like chocolate. He needed to know where she got this stuff. If he hadn’t needed to know this so badly, he would never have noticed that the candy had puncture marks.
Joe had made dipped candy before. He usually made the filling, skewered it on a toothpick, then dipped it in chocolate. This method left a single puncture-like hole, and even that wasn’t an irreparable problem. Artful cooks, and Joe was one of them, knew how to patch over the dipping hole with more chocolate. He could see the patch on this piece, so it was clearly hand-dipped by someone who knew how. Sometime after the careful chef patched this hole, at least one more hole had appeared on the candy’s flat bottom.
He pulled the other two pieces of licorice from his bag and laid them out on one of his big palms, belly-up. On the bottom of each, there were three small holes in the chocolate coating. They were too far apart to be the work of a fork. Besides, they were irregularly spaced, and the holes slanted at widely varying angles.
Joe took another big bite and rolled the candy around on his tongue. It was good. It was too good. Being a very fine cook and a more than passable herbalist, Joe knew of a couple of good reasons why he, like most Americans, had never had licorice candy this fine before. First of all, why should candy makers pay for authentic licorice extract when cheap anise flavoring did the trick? And second of all, what candy maker wanted to be responsible for the pernicious side effects of true licorice?
High blood pressure.
Irregular heartbeat.
Drug interactions.
Congestive heart failure.
These were not the effects people wanted from their candy.
Joe had chewed licorice root a few times, and it had tasted awesome, but the pleasure wasn’t worth the risk. Oh, it wouldn’t hurt a casual, healthy candy-lover. But could constant use tip a habitual user with existing cardiac problems into congestive heart failure? Yes. It certainly could. He’d heard that some manufacturers in other countries still made real licorice candy, but how many American companies would open themselves to lawsuits for giving their customers heart failure?
If Joe had to guess, he’d say that somebody was taking easily obtained anise candy and injecting it with homemade licorice extract, making it simultaneously tastier and deadlier. Faye had described Sister Mama’s garden, so he had a pretty good idea as to where the licorice grew. He didn’t know the citizens of Rosebower well enough to guess who was dosing Myrna with an herb that could kill an elderly heart patient, but Faye did. He slid the deadly candy back into his bag and sat still, doing nothing but looking for danger.
Watching the stars pop out of a quiet sky usually brought Joe’s world into complete equilibrium. Tonight, all he could do was count the stars and wait for a private talk with Faye.
***
Myrna had produced a quaintly ornate lamp from one of her china cabinets. It fit neatly within the stand that supported the old crystal ball, just like Tilda’s lamp, so Faye assumed it was another family heirloom. Because Willow was not there to fake a spiritual visitation with rappings and odorous breezes, Dara didn’t need utter darkness. The faces of Amande, Myrna, and Dara glowed in the lamp’s light, but the rest of the room remained in near-utter darkness.
Dara lit no incense, nor did she smear scented oils over the ball. Away from Willow’s influence, she revealed a style even more spare than her mother’s. After the four of them had spent a few breaths studying the uplit ball, she instructed them to join hands. They did so, but not in the awkward hands-flat-and-pinkies-touching style that she’d required before. This time, they held hands like friends, palms together and fingers interlaced.
Then she did nothing but breathe. Faye found that it was impossible to ignore the breaths of the people around her. As she listened, the four of them slid into synchronized rhythm. Amande’s soft and easy rhythm meshed with Dara’s tense and shallow breaths, then Myrna labored to join them. Faye’s chest hurt as she tried to breathe along with the frail woman. It was as if the two of them were dying at the same time.
Freed of everything in the world outside the dim lamplight in front of her, freed even of the need to choose the rhythm of her own breath, Faye’s mind had nothing left to fight. Intuition surfaced. Faye felt that she had seen enough this week to solve the riddle of Tilda’s last hour. Now, at last, she could stop fighting her subconscious and let it surface.
The first thing it told her was to listen to Myrna. She had been fine last week, almost perky. Now she sounded sick. Not old. Sick. There had to be a reason.
***
Toni walked across the empty auditorium parking lot. She wasn’t surprised to see the sign on the door saying that the evening’s show was canceled—the absence of cars had told her that—but the silence around her was disconcerting.
Cancel a show? People like Dara and Willow didn’t cancel. They performed with pneumonia. They hauled themselves onstage with broken arms hidden under their sleeves. They barely even paused to acknowledge death. The show must go on.
Toni knew of only one likely event that would cause Dara to turn away an audience. Something must have happened to Myrna. And even though logic told her that people in their eighties died of natural causes all the time, intuition told her that now was not Myrna’s time. If Tilda’s death hadn’t been an accident, and Toni had never believed that it was, then nothing that had happened to Myrna this week was an accident. She could succumb to natural causes this week but, if she did, Toni could never be made to believe it.
Still wearing a camera on her wrist, Toni left the deserted parking lot at a dead sprint.
***
As Dara closed the door to the séance room, Avery was completing her first circuit of Myrna’s property boundaries. All was clear.
Faye’s husband Joe had allowed her a brief nod as she passed, then gone back to his previous state of relaxed vigilance. She sensed that he was a good man to have around in a crisis. Not that she expected a crisis, but who could have predicted what happened to Tilda? Her sense was that a sane criminal would be put off by the mere presence of an armed law enforcement official, backed up by Joe’s scary-looking impression of a security guard, but this
was no reason to take the situation lightly. All criminals are not sane.
***
At some point, Dara had begun talking. Too deep within herself to notice, Faye paid no attention to the literal words Dara was saying.
This was unusual for Faye. For her, words were serious business. They communicated, they clarified, they made sure people understood each other. Tonight, the sounds of Dara’s words were striking her eardrums, but her mind wasn’t interested. Her brain was busy reading between the lines.
Faye heard grief in Dara’s voice, but not guilt. She heard an urgent desire for reconciliation. She heard unresolved questions festering in Dara’s mind. The woman knew that her mother’s death made no sense. She didn’t have to be told that there was no reasonable explanation for the destruction of her girlhood home. Dara needed answers and, for a woman born in Rosebower, the way to get answers was to ask a dead person who knows.
“Mother. I know you can tell me what I need to know. I am sitting with three people who care for you. We will wait for you to come.”
Faye didn’t believe Dara killed her mother. She lacked proof for this belief, but so be it. If not Dara, then who?
If the motive had been political, there were too many suspects to count. Half the town had objected to Tilda’s actions as town councilor. Faye set those near-strangers aside, and limited her list of potential killers to the people who would benefit directly and immediately from Tilda’s death. This made the list of suspects much shorter.
Dara had presumed, wrongly, that she was her mother’s sole heir, so there was a place for her on that list, but Faye had mentally drawn a line through her name already. Myrna was Tilda’s sole heir, but Faye couldn’t imagine the tender-hearted woman killing her sister. From a more cold-blooded standpoint, Myrna wasn’t physically capable of nailing a door shut, hurling burning lamps at it, spreading more accelerant around to burn, and then escaping unscathed. Faye drew an imaginary line through her name, too.
Willow had possessed every reason to believe that he was married to the sole heir of a woman with property, money, and family jewels. People had murdered for far less. The fact that Tilda had owned property that Gilbert Marlowe needed only gave Willow a bigger motive. Faye knew that developers did not stick with deals that moved too slowly. Time is money, and it always has been. Willow might or might not have been willing to wait for Tilda to die to get her money and jewels, but Marlowe’s project had a deadline.
A tract of land big enough—or nearly big enough—for a golf course was worth a small fortune, but only when there was a buyer handy. Tilda would never have sold it to Marlowe. Her death made it possible for her daughter and son-in-law to reap that small fortune before he moved on to a project that would turn a quicker profit. This theory was mostly supported on air, but Faye had one factual piece of evidence. She couldn’t forget her glimpse of Willow riding with Marlowe in his limousine.
Marlowe himself must be on the suspect list, for many of the same reasons as Willow. He was heavily invested in developing Rosebower into a major tourist attraction, but those plans were constrained by a lack of land. Who knew what else he might build if he had Tilda’s land? And Myrna’s? The elder Armistead women were standing between Gilbert Marlowe and money. Faye guessed that Marlowe already considered the money and the land to be his. Layer a little sociopathy on top of that narcissism, and the man would absolutely be able to rationalize taking out a little old lady or two who stood in his way. After all, they were going to die soon, anyway.
Dara’s voice intruded into her thoughts. “Mother, I’m sorry. I was wrong. Now that you’re on the other side, I know you can see my heart so much better. Maybe there is no word for ‘forgiveness’ where you are. Maybe there is only understanding. On this side of the veil of death, we lack that understanding, so I ask you to forgive me. We will wait here for your answer.”
As they waited, Faye allowed her mind to rest a moment with the question, “Who else would profit from Tilda’s death?” Sister Mama’s name flashed into her consciousness, but she was even less physically capable of murder than Myrna, and Faye knew of no motive for her.
Ennis, however…Ennis had no alibi for that night. No one who had attended the council meeting could have any doubt that Ennis and Marlowe were already in negotiations. In exchange for publicly shifting his vote and Sister Mama’s, Ennis was being rewarded with a lucrative job that would take him away from his exile in Rosebower. Faye knew nothing about Ennis’ character that would argue against his being a killer. This was a rather damning indictment against a human being.
“We wait.” Dara had now repeated this statement several times and in several ways. She sounded firm and open, yet not demanding. This, in itself, was a gift. Even if she had no others, this gift was worth having. She breathed deeply, and the others followed suit. Myrna’s breath rattled in her chest. Faye’s subconscious took note.
Two women had stood in the way of Marlowe, Willow, and Ennis. One of them was dead. The other one had suffered health reverses that would have been stunning, if they hadn’t been obscured by age. Why was Myrna getting sicker by the minute? And why were the people around her so happy to pump her full of mystery drugs? Yes, Sister Mama enjoyed a reputation for fine root doctoring, but she wasn’t prescribing Myrna’s tinctures any longer. Ennis was.
Myrna lowered her head and used her shoulder to stifle a cough. She was too much a woman of Rosebower to break the circle to raise her hand to cover her mouth. Nothing was worth breaking the circle, not if her sister might be near.
“Speak to us, Mother.”
The lamp beneath Tilda’s crystal ball flickered, and its weak light illuminated Dara’s glowing curls. Faye knew it was silly, but part of her hoped that the dancing fire heralded the arrival of Tilda Armistead, the only person who had a prayer of telling them how she died.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Avery was approaching the most dangerous moment in a stakeout, the moment when boredom makes a watcher careless. She almost welcomed the barely audible noise in the shrubbery of Myrna Armistead’s back yard.
She understood Joe’s strategy of making himself plainly visible as a way to forestall trouble, but she preferred being inconspicuous. Crouched by the back doorstep, she had a decent view of most of the yard. She would have been easily visible in daylight, but a shadow cast by a nearly new moon yields all-but-complete darkness. She could only be seen by someone who already knew she was there. To anyone else, she was invisible, so long as she stayed motionless.
Her eyes flicked toward the noise. A few heartbeats later, she saw the branches of a shrub tremble, four feet to the left of the original noise. She might be tracking an intruder or she might be tracking a raccoon, but at least she knew its direction of travel. She waited.
After a breathless moment, another faint sound came. The intruder/raccoon was still moving to her left, and the massive house would soon obscure her line-of-sight. Slowly—and soundlessly, she hoped—she crept from the dark shadow of the stairs and into the slightly less dark openness.
***
Joe heard nothing. Or, rather, he heard only the breath of a noise, so faint that it was hardly more than a vibration of air across his cheek. He forgot that Avery had said his first priority was to open the séance room door. Instinct told him that his first priority should be to keep any intruder from entering the house. He was on his feet and running before the vibration stopped.
***
Faye’s intuition had taken her this far. Someone was poisoning Myrna, using Sister Mama’s herbs to do it. Someone had tried to kill Sister Mama herself, possibly with her own herbs soaked into the soporific sponge. The obvious conclusion was that Ennis was the culprit. Every day, he brought Myrna an unlabeled concoction to put in her tea. Every day she drank it. And he had total access to Sister Mama. Thus, he was the poisoner. She should feel the satisfaction of solving a riddle, like the solid clink of the last
puzzle piece fitting into place, but she didn’t.
What was the question left unanswered by this scenario?
The lamp and its fire drew her eye again, and it asked her the critical question. Fire had killed Tilda quickly, while Myrna was fading slowly away. Sister Mama, too. If the same killer was at work, driven by the same motive, why were the murder methods so different?
It seemed to Faye that the difference lay in access. If Ennis had shown up daily on Tilda’s doorstep, carrying some weird concoction and claiming that it was a tonic straight from Sister Mama, Tilda would have downed it without question. It would have been the easiest murder in history. It made no sense for Ennis to burn down her house.
Would Tilda have taken the same tonic from Willow? No. She wouldn’t have even accepted a piece of his licorice candy.
Faye tested her theory and the pieces fit, in a twisted and Rosebower-like way. Dara was innocent because Faye’s intuition said so. Marlowe had no motive to commit murder himself, not when he had sycophants like Willow and Ennis to do it for him. Ennis had no need to risk arson to dispatch an old lady who was in his way, not when he could have poisoned her without attracting attention. Willow was the one who couldn’t kill Tilda any other way.
Willow burned down his mother-in-law’s house, with her locked inside. Faye was sure of it. There was no other way to get his hands on his wife’s inheritance before Marlowe bolted, because Tilda didn’t trust him enough to let him poison her.
But there was something else, some other message in the timing of Tilda’s quick death and Myrna’s slow failing. What was it?
A cold fact clicked into place. As of this morning, Myrna was much more of an obstacle than she had been. The resort could possibly be built without the property she had always owned, but not without the larger property that had been Tilda’s and was now hers. Now that the knowledge was out that she was Tilda’s heir, rather than Dara, Myrna was a direct impediment. Until today, the resort deal could proceed while Myrna died slowly, with Dara and Willow eventually selling Marlowe the less-important piece of property she’d always owned. Now, there was no deal until he held the land she’d inherited from Tilda. As of today, Myrna was vulnerable to a murder attempt that was not slow and stealthy.
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