Hangman's root : a China Bayles mystery

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  ^ ckn o ivledgm en ts

  My grateful thanks go to Claudia Cabiness for her contributions to this book, and to all the wonderful herbalists who have supported this series: most especially Gwen Barclay, Marge Clark, Rosemary Gladstar, Portia Meares, Paulette Oliver, Jeanne Rose, Dixie Stephen, and Susun Weed. I also want to thank the Anderson Mill Animal Clinic and the Texas Veterinary Medical Center of Texas A&M University for help with the research for this book; and to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, many thanks. Above all, of course, to my husband. Bill Albert, for many patient hours of invaluable help.

  JLutJior s Isote

  This novel is set in the imaginary Texas town of Pecan Springs, which includes such fictitious elements as the campus of Central Texas State University. Readers familiar with the central Texas hill country should not confuse Pecan Springs and its inhabitants with such real towns as San Marcos, New Braunfels, Wimberley, or Fredericksburg, or CTSU with any local university. The author has created the fictional characters and events of this book for the reader's pleasure, and intends no connection to real people or happenings.

  Jrlangman s Xvoot

  "Why do I let myself get roped into these things?" I was almost shouting over the carnival din. "It must be a personality defect."

  McQuaid grinned. "The snakes are probably thinking the same thing." He turned to a burly Texan whose vest, suspenders, and boots were all made of rattlesnake skins. "That'll be three bucks."

  "Snakes can't think," the Texan said. "They got no brain."

  His companion sported a red gimme cap turned backward. "Got no feet, neither," Red Hat said, forking over three ratty ones. "I don't trust nothin with no feet."

  The two men broke into raucous laughter as they left the ticket booth and headed for the bleachers in the arena. A couple of hundred people were already there, drinking beer and eating hot dogs while they gawked at the buzzing, writhing tangle of rattlers in the twelve-by-twelve glass-walled enclosure in the center. It was the annual Heart of Texas Booster Club Rattlesnake Sacking Championship, a day of fun and frolic for everybody—except the rattlers.

  Rattlesnake sacking, a sport indigenous to Texas, is played by a sacker, a catcher, and a dozen live rattlesnakes, all confined in a glass-sided pen. The snakes are dumped out of a burlap bag onto the floor. The sacker snares a snake with a metal hook, pins its

  head, grabs it barehanded, and pitches it back into the burlap bag, which is held by the catcher. After three rounds of this circular exercise, the team that has sacked its rattlesnakes fastest is declared the winner. Five-second penalties are assessed for failure to pin properly and for scooping. Getting bitten tacks on ten seconds. A deposit of seventy-five dollars is required for ambulance service.

  "Three-seven point three-nine seconds!" the announcer bellowed into the mike. "Hey, folks, doncha know that's real dangerous work out there? Let's show these guys how much we 'preciate 'em!" Earsplitting whistles, rebel yells, and foot stamping showed that the crowd in the bleachers appreciated the guys a whole bunch. It wasn't an opinion I shared.

  "Tell me again why we're giving up a perfectly good weekend morning to do this," I growled to McQuaid. "I forget."

  McQuaid peeled another ticket off the roll and handed it to a short, plump woman wearing a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a rattler coiled over a red outline of Texas and the words "Hill Country Snake Handlers." I wondered whether she was a snake handler herself or whether she was married to one. Either way, did her life insurance company know about the hobby?

  "I don't know how zovcvt youre doing it, China," McQuaid replied, "but I'm doing it to raise money for a dialysis machine." He gave me a superior look. "You don't have to hang out here on my account."

  I definitely did not want to hang out here. It is true that snakes are not my favorite creatures. I go out of my way to avoid them, and I fervently hope they will return the favor. But feelings aside, it seems to me that there's something barbaric about a pair of men slinging snakes into a burlap bag while spectators whoop themselves into a frenzy, rooting for somebody's luck to run out so the loser will have to forfeit the ambulance deposit.

  But it's the snakes who are out of luck. There they are, peace-

  fully sunning themselves on a warm rock after a cold winter, when a rattlesnake hunter shows up. Next thing they know, they've got a starring role in the sacking Olympics. But fame is fleeting, and they take their curtain calls at the snake factory in Waco. For four bucks a pound, live weight, the skins are turned into belts, boots, hatbands, and billfolds; the rattles and heads and skeletons into keyrings and jewelry; and the meat into gourmet goodies. Even the insides are good for something. Powdered, the gall bladder brings three thousand dollars an ounce in the Orient, where it's prized as an aphrodisiac. After only a couple of rounds of snake sacking, I was already on the side of the animal rights protesters who were marching up and down in the parking lot, carrying signs that said things like "No Fun for the Snakes," "It's Not Cool to Be Cruel," and "A Voice for the Voiceless." I agreed. It was time to speak up for the snakes or leave.

  On the other hand, my reason for being here was still here— tall, dark, and not quite handsome in jeans and a blue denim workshirt with the sleeves rolled up. His name is Mike McQuaid.

  I met McQuaid five or six years back, when he was with Houston Homicide and I was a defense attorney in a firm that defended big-time clients who were not always pure as the driven snow. Four years ago, I got fed up. I cashed out my retirement, stepped out of the fast lane, and found myself in Pecan Springs, a small, quiet town located halfway between Austin and San Antonio, on the rim of the Texas hill country. I bought an herb shop in a century-old stone building with living quarters in the back, met my neighbors and made some friends, and settled down to discover whether there's any truth to the rumor that a high-powered career isn't the only ticket to a life of success and happiness.

  A year or so later, McQuaid showed up. He'd traded his badge for a Ph.D. and his Homicide assignment for a teaching job in the criminal justice department at Central Texas State Uni-

  versity, on the north side of Pecan Springs. It didn't take long to figure out that our relationship was something larger than simple friendship. But weVe kept it casual—or I have. Until McQuaid, Yd never had a commitment longer than three months, and a wedding ring was the farthest thing from my mind. While other women were watching the biological clock, I was ticking off the career advancements.

  McQuaid leaned one hip against the counter and popped the top on a cold Lone Star. "If you want to go to Dottie's, for pete's sake, go," he said. Dottie Riddle had asked me to come over that afternoon to see her new cattery. Some people rescue old cars. Others rescue beached dolphins and whales. Dottie rescues stray cats. Her new cat hotel houses over a hundred animals, and there's a waiting list. I don't share Dottie's passion for cat collecting, but that doesn't keep me from liking her.

  I looked at McQuaid. "You won't mind if I leave.^"

  "Hell, no." McQuaid pulled at his beer. "What I mind is your standing around like the SPCA taking names."

  "It's that obvious, huh?"

  "You've been glaring at every person who buys a ticket."

  "So let her glare," Barry Hibler said, stepping into the ticket booth. "Stick a sign in her hand and put her out in the parking lot. We need all the protesters we can get."

  I stared. In pink-and-yellow-striped shirt and purple golf pants, Barry looked like a cheerleader for the Rainbow Coalition, rather than president of the local Boosters and a prominent real estate broker. "You want those protesters out there?"

  "Wh
en it comes to publicity, those crazies are worth their weight in rattlesnakes." Barry opened the cash drawer and put in a bundle of ones. "You got any idea how hard I work to make sure they're here every year?"

  McQuaid laughed. "So you're the one."

  "Durn tootin'," Barry said. He pulled out a ten and two twen-

  ties and stuck them in his pocket. "Six weeks ahead, I call around and find out who's in charge of the snake lovers this year. I give them the date and tell them that the TV crew will be here." He slammed the cash drawer "Then I call the TV stations and tell them that the snakers and the anti-snakers will be toe-to-toe in the parking lot. Last year some guy put on a black skeleton suit painted with Day-Glo bones and carried a kid's toy pistol. His sign said, 'Save a Rattlesnake—Kill a Booster.'" He grinned broadly. "Boy, don't you know that got attention? We made the six o'clock news in both Austin and San Antonio. Made the Houston Post, too. My cousin sent me the clipping." He sighed regretfully. "Too bad Day-Glo didn't show up this year. We mighta made it to Nightline. "

  McQuaid gave me an arched eyebrow. "How about it, Bayles? We can probably scare up some Day-Glo paint."

  Barry looked eager. "Hey, yeah, China. We could make you a Tree the Snakes' sign. That always gets a laugh."

  I declined hastily, said my goodbyes, and left McQuaid trading snake jokes with Barry. Out in the parking lot, a dozen animal rights people were marching in a tight circle, carrying signs and chanting. I recognized Janine Nolan and Dan Matthews from the Pecan Springs Humane Society, but the other demonstrators looked like college students. One of them, a tall redhead, came toward me. Her hair was cut short on the sides with a little braided tail in back, and she had large hazel eyes. She looked vaguely familiar.

  "We represent PETA," she said. "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." She didn't have to tell me. She was wearing a button the size of a saucer. "We hope you'll ask the Boosters to stop sponsoring the mistreatment of rattlesnakes." She held out a leaflet. "And please call the TV stations in Austin and San Antonio and tell them they should be here, covering our protest."

  She looked like a nice girl. I didn't have the heart to tell her

  that PETA's presence in the parking lot was adding coins to the Boosters' coffers. I stuck the leaflet in my shoulder bag, climbed into my old blue Datsun, and drove off, reflecting that our ability to persecute other species is exceeded only by our ability to victimize our own.

  If I had anything to do with it, I had just attended my last rattlesnake sacking championship.

  On the way out to Dottie's, I swung by Thyme and Seasons. My friend Laurel Wiley comes in to take care of things every now and then so I can take a break. She was there today. So were a half dozen customers, browsing the shelves and meandering through the herb beds out front.

  "How's it going?" I asked. I suspect that I have the same guilty feeling when I leave my shop to somebody else that a mom has when she drops her toddler off at day care.

  "Great," Laurel said. Her full name is Laurel Walkingwater Wiley. She's half Navajo and has a deep interest in southwestern herbs and ethnobotany. "Too great, actually," she added, flipping her loose dark hair over her shoulder. "Things are pretty calm right now. But a few minutes ago the place was so crowded that people could hardly move. Oh, yes," she added, "I sold out of that new cookbook about four minutes before Constance Letter-man came in asking for it. Got any more?"

  Thyme and Seasons is small, and there's no room to store stock. The cookbook was stashed in my living quarters behind the shop, with the boxes of books, bags of bulk herbs and seasoning mixtures, and too many other things I couldn't make room for up front. "I'll get a couple of copies for you," I said. "What else are we out of?"

  Laurel gave me the list. "Have you thought of building on?" she asked, then laughed. "Cancel that." She knew as well as I did that the lot was too narrow for an addition.

  I guess there are cycles to everything. When I was practicing law, my biggest problem was not having enough time. For a couple of years after I opened the shop, I didn't have enough money—not nearly enough. Now I have the money to buy a little time, but it's space Fm short on.

  My building has two retail shops in the front. Thyme and Seasons is one. Ruby Wilcox's Crystal Cave—Pecan Springs' only New Age shop—is the other. At Thyme and Seasons, every square inch is functional. Bundles of dried herbs hang from the ceiling, along with ropes of garlic and peppers, onion braids, and wreaths. Bulk herbs and herb products—handmade soaps, natural cosmetics, bags of potpourri, vials of oils, gleaming bottles of herbal vinegars, fragrant teas—pack the wooden shelves. Dried tansy and yarrow, celosia and goldenrod, sweet annie and salvia and love-in-a-mist fill baskets and corners. A book rack occupies one wall. The front yard is an herbal patchwork of fragrant beds and paths, and wooden racks of potted herbs line the front of the building. There's not another nook or cranny for anything else, although there are lots of things Fd like to add to my inventory.

  Fd been aware for the past several months that Thyme and Seasons has a space problem. As far as I could see, there was only one possible solution: Evict Ruby Wilcox and expand Thyme and Seasons into her space. But that's out. Ruby is my best friend, and the Cave is what she does for a living. Fm not about to throw her out. But what could I do for space? I asked myself as I filled Laurel's list out of the boxes behind the sofa. What can I do?

  But today was Sunday, not a day for beating my head against the current intractable problem. I had squandered the morning at the rattlesnake rodeo, but the afternoon was free to spend with Dottie—most of it, anyway.

  "I'll be back about a half hour before closing time," I told Laurel, stacking the replacement stock behind the counter She turned away from the register to flash me a quick grin. I left, feeling good about having plenty of customers and bad about not having enough space for them.

  Driving north from town, out the narrow Falls Creek blacktop toward Dottie's, I relaxed, forgot about the shop, and congratulated myself on having the good sense to abandon the asphalt deserts of Houston for the hill country. The woods were splashed with masses of purple redbuds and laced with creamy branches of Mexican plum and rough-leaf dogwood. The afternoon sky was watercolor blue, and the still-bare branches of pecans and elms were penciled in sharp lines against it. But the early March rains had turned the roadside grass spring green and edged it with frills of wild carrot and the flat, silvery rosettes that would blossom into bluebonnets in another week. Spring would be here in a matter of days, accompanied by Monarch butterflies from Mexico, skimming through the trees on the south wind, and sandhill cranes from the coast, flying high, riding one thermal to the next, heading north.

  The land from which all this beauty arises was once the warm shallows of a rich Cretaceous sea, brimming with fish and mollusks, with families of dinosaurs wandering its muddy shoreline. So much life, so many species, some transformed in the relentless, rhythmic march of evolution, others swept away in the natural innocence of a random cosmic catastrophy. I couldn't help thinking as I drove past the huge cement plant on the far side of town that the catastrophes created by our species are not so innocent.

  The houses in the Falls Creek subdivision, where Dottie lives, are built far back and far apart. When I turned off onto San Gabriel, all I could see were mailboxes on either side of the road. The houses themselves were screened by trees. And when I

  finally parked on Sycamore in front of Dottie's mailbox, I could barely see the outline of the house behind clumps of yaupon holly and cedar—a long, low brown-shingled ranch, part of which Dottie had built herself. When I stepped onto the porch, I woke a clutch of dozing cats. Samantha, Dottie's favorite black cat, got up to greet me with an amiable sniff. With Dottie, favorite is relative. She has hundreds of favorites.

  Dottie Riddle teaches at CTSU, where she's the only woman in the biology department. But when Dottie's name is mentioned, people don t think of her profession, they think of her passion: cats. Black cats, white cats, cats without tails,
cats with fleas, mama cats with baby cats, any cats who need a home. For the past five or six years, Dottie has rescued as many cats as she could entice, trap, or trick into the cage she always carries in her Blazer, along with bags of cat food, feeding dishes, a net, and leather gloves. Until recently, she kept the animals in the house and in a small wire pen behind the garage until she could find homes for them. But there's a limit to the number of people in Pecan Springs who are willing to adopt a cat, and the extras keep adding up. When Dottie's mother died and left her some money, she built a spiffy new cattery, doing most of the work herself.

  I've known Dottie for a couple of years now, and I like her, but her obsession is a great enigma to me, a mysterious center I've never quite been able to plumb. Here she is—an intelligent, educated, liberated, and otherwise reasonable woman who lets stray animals dictate the terms of her life. I don't get it.

  But Ruby does. She told me the other day that Dottie's passion is just another version of the heart-to-heart connection that brings people alive. "Dottie's animals make her human," she said. "So stop trying to figure it out. Just appreciate it."

  So today, I was here to appreciate Dottie's all-new, world-class Cat Holiday Hilton, with all the amenities of a luxury feline resort. In honor of the occasion, I had brought pink champagne

  and lemon basil teacakes for the humans and a dozen catnip mice for the cats.

  Dottie answered my knock in a gray sweatshirt and paint-stained jeans, with tendrils of graying hair escaping under a red bandana. Dottie is big boned and muscular, with the look of a woman who isn't afraid to put her muscle to work. When she shifted the orange tabby she was holding from her right arm to her left and took my hand, the strength of her grip was impressive.

  "Glad you could come, China." Her voice was raspy from the cigarettes she smokes too much of the time. Her colleagues in the biology department, to a man, consider her strident and abrasive. But her students admire and respect her, even though she believes in calling an F an E They've voted her Best Science Teacher of the Year for so many years running that it's gotten to be an embarrassment to the rest of the faculty.