Rituals
Authors: Mary Anna Evans
Copyright © 2013 by Mary Anna Evans
First E-book Edition 2013
ISBN: 9781615954476 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
Poisoned Pen Press
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Contents
For little Adam
I'd like to thank all the people who helped make
Rituals
happen. Michael Garmon, Erin Garmon, Rachel Broughten, Amanda Evans, Robert Connolly, and Matt Hinnant read it in manuscript and provided their customary astute observations. Suzanne Quin, Nadia Lombardero, and Kelly Bergdoll were my analytical chemistry and pharmacology consultants. They are responsible for the passages in which I got things right, and they are innocent of wrongdoing on any occasions when I did not.
As always, I am grateful for the team of people who help me get my work out into the world where readers can find it. My agent, Anne Hawkins, has been looking out for my interests for a very long time now. Because I can trust that my editor, Barbara Peters, and the rest of the hardworking Poisoned Pen Press staff will ensure that my work is at its best when it reaches the public, I am free to focus on creating an interesting world for Faye. Special thanks go out to Suzan Baroni at Poisoned Pen Press. She was doubly efficient in getting
Plunder
to the Florida Book Awards judges, making me doubly fortunate in winning two bronze medals for Faye's seventh adventure. Much gratitude goes out to my publicist, Maryglenn McCombs, for letting people know that Faye and her stories are out there, ready for the reading.
And, of course, I am grateful for you, my readers.
by Antonia Caruso
They call me Toni the Astonisher.
I never hit the big-time but, for a while, I was the most successful small-time magician in America. I played Vegas, but never The Strip. I played the biggest halls in the most mid-sized Midwestern towns. I opened for aging rock bands whose careers had descended to the point where headlining a state fair was a good gig.
I have an abiding passion for overblown, overwrought 1970s progressive rock, and my agent knew that I would take as much as twenty percent off my minimum fee if one of my idols was on the playbill. It was always my position that since one does not get rich as America's biggest small-time magician, one might as well have some fun. There is not much money to be made on the state fair circuit, but the rock gods and I sometimes amused ourselves by demanding that our M&Ms all be green. Or, later, blue.
I am a pragmatic person, and I have a pragmatic person's need for security. Therefore, I never tried to earn my living solely as a magician. I taught high school physics, which means that my booking agent was adept at maximizing all those school holidays. During the school year, I was only available to be a magician between three p.m. on Friday and eight a.m. on Monday, so he knew every venue within a semi-reasonable drive of my Syracuse, New York, home. The man made a nice living taking care of people like me, and he earned it.
In the summers and over the Christmas break? I would go anywhere he sent me. One fine New Year's Eve in the early 1990s, I played a third-rate casino so close to the Las Vegas strip that I could see its neon glow from my hotel room window. This was the apex of my showbiz career.
Now? After thirty-five years of faithful service, I recently snatched a generous retirement from the hot little hands of the New York state pension system. Let's do the math, folks. (You can see that I will always be a teacher at my core.) I finished college at twenty-one, thanks to the December birthday that graced me with many years spent as the youngest, smallest, and smartest kid in the class. (Social ostracism is such a special way to spend one's childhood.) That makes me fifty-six now.
I may eventually go back to doing magic at two-bit venues, but for now I think I've earned some time to enjoy my pension and the booking fees that I squirreled away for decades. I'm probably out of my mind, but I'm spending my first months of decadent leisure here in Rosebower, writing this book about the weirdest little town in New York.
Why Rosebower, the touristy epicenter of the faux-metaphysical world? Because there is something about a physics education that makes a person a crusader for truth. There are people in this world who take the money of lonely people, desperate for an answer to the riddle of life. These lost souls flock to fakersâpsychics, faith healers, astral projectionists, mediums, palm readers, and all their cheating kinâand they come away with no answer to life's riddle and without a chunk of their hard-earned money.
This is the kind of thievery that will make a mild-mannered physicist mad. More to the point, it will make a flamboyant and strong-minded physicist/magician ready to go to war. Hence, this book.
Here in Rosebower, where psychics have fleeced the faithful since the days of Houdini and before, I am on a mission. I am writing a history of this little town and its roots in the early days of table-floating, Ouija-board-loving, nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Between the covers of this book, I will reveal all the ways that Rosebower's fakers have convinced their victims to believe in magic. I doubt it will stop the tourists from coming here looking for ghosts but, if I don't speak up, vulnerable people will keep paying to see expensive wonders that can be explained away by simple physics and sleight-of-hand. The fakers will have won.
I would never expose the illusions of an honest magician running an honest show. But “psychics” who fleece people by faking the ghosts of their loved ones? They are profiting from real pain. There is no code of honor to protect con artists.
When the spiritual mediums of Rosebower see my book, they will wonder why, with all their extrasensory powers, they failed to foresee the coming apocalypse.
The dark liquid rose in the syringe. Experience had proven that injecting more than its full volume of three cubic centimeters was impractical under these circumstances. This was unfortunate. A higher dose would have served the purpose better.
Caution for patient safety would ordinarily require certain safeguards. Injecting an air bubble into someone's bloodstream could haveâ¦consequencesâ¦but only if the person wielding the hypodermic needle cared whether the patient lived or died.
The hollow needle encountered only slight resistance before emptying itself into the softness beneath. That was its job, puncturing. The job of the syringe was to deliver its secret cargo.
Soon, it would do so again.
***
“Hey, Mom?”
Ignoring her impulse to do a victory dance every time Amande called her “Mom,” Faye Longchamp-Mantooth turned to her adopted daughter and said, “Hmm?”
“I'm
exhausted
. How come I'm so tired when all I did was sit at a desk all day? And it's only Monday.”
“Well, we did work six days straight last week.”
Faye stopped walking. She grabbed her hips with both hands to stabilize them while she twisted her torso hard to the left, then to the right. It was the only way she knew to stretch out the little twinge in her lower back that had lingered since she was pregnant with Michael. He was two now, so she guessed the little twinge would be with her for life.
Amande grabbed Faye's shoulder and rubbed her fist hard over those sore back muscles. It helped.
“You're good at that. I'm glad I keep you around.” Faye didn't tell her that her neck hurt, too. Otherwise, she'd soon be enjoying a full body massage on a public sidewalk in downtown Rosebower, New York. “My grandmother was a secretary, so all her workdays were like the one we just spent. Every night, she walked in the house and announced, âI feel like I've been beat with a stick.'”
“That's exactly what it feels like!” Amande gave Faye's lower back a final punch. It felt good, but it almost sent Faye face down onto the concrete. Her new daughter was a big, beautiful six-footer and Faye was a flyweight. “It feels like I've been beat with a stick.”
Since Faye and Amande had a contract to do cultural resources management for a tiny historical museum that had been run by amateurs for a century, they'd spent the past week hunched over piles of unfiled papers and undocumented artifacts. There was no end in sight.
“Welcome to the world of the small-time consulting archaeologist, Sweetheart. Sometimes you get to work outside, digging up cool stuff. And sometimes you spend your time indoors with old, dusty junk. It all pays the bills.”
“Then we'll sit inside and try not to sniff too much dust. It could be a lot worse,” said Amande, who had lived most of her life in a world where the bills didn't always get paid.
Faye wasn't sure there was another teenager alive who brought such a sunny disposition to a summer spent working for her mom. Her own disposition swung daily from sunny to dark. She loved having this chance to be alone with her daughter, but she missed her husband Joe and their son Michael so fiercely that it kept her awake some nights. Knowing her as he did, there had been nights when she'd picked up the phone and it had rung in her hand before she'd even poked in Joe's number.
“Oh, my dears, I am so glad I caught you before you went back to that dingy hotel room.”
Myrna Armistead's voice approached from behind, but slowly. She didn't look as perky as usual but, at Myrna's age, she was lucky to be traipsing the sidewalks at any speed. Faye had enjoyed watching this aging spinster's awkward overtures for Amande's friendship. Even past eighty, the mothering instinct is powerful, and Myrna wasn't choosy. She'd barely known forty-two-year-old Faye a week, but she had already tried to mother her a few times. Faye had let her.
“Tilda and I would be honored if you'd both join us for dinner. And a spiritual reading afterward, if you like. My sister tells me the spirits are thick around the two of you. Good spirits,” she added quickly, when she saw the alarm on Amande's face. “They are the essences of all the people who have loved you. Tilda has the sense that you both have many loved ones who have passed over, maybe more than you have left on this side of The Great Divide. Let her help them talk to you.”
Welcome to Rosebower
, Faye thought,
where hearing voices did not result in heavy medication and a quick trip to an in-patient unit
.
The little Victorian-era town was located smack-dab in the western New York cradle of Spiritualism, and it was full of people who were certain they could talk to the dead. To Tilda's credit, she had a reputation for utter honesty. Her psychic readings involved no faked floating tables or Ouija boards or mysterious rappings. Tilda's reputation seemed to be based on the fact that people believed her when she talked.
Why shouldn't they? Faye liked the woman's lined, honest face. If Tilda were to give Faye a message from her great-great-grandmother Cally Stanton, she would be inclined to believe it, despite the fact that Cally had been dead for nearly eighty years. Faye was a scientist, which made it hard for her to believe that Tilda could really talk to the dead, but she had seen some strange things in her life. She didn't want to have dinner with Tilda and Myrna and her long-dead kin tonight, but not because she didn't believe. Faye was just dog-tired.
Amande, too, had been dog-tired thirty seconds before, but there was now a light in her eyes that told Faye it would be hours before she saw her bed. “A spiritual reading? That's like a séance, right?”
***
Because Faye had lacked the energy to say no to a teenager who smelled adventure, she was now using a fresh-baked honey-yeast roll to wipe up the puddled juices of Tilda's succulent pot roast. Scooping up the last bites of home-grown beets and tiny green peas, Faye leaned back in her chair, unable to do anything but sigh. She was way past dog-tired now, but she was happy. Myrna, whose pudgy face was as warm and sweet as the honeyed bread, sat beside Faye, rubbing her own round belly.
“I'm sure that meal was tastier than you would have gotten at the old Vandorn house where you're staying. Remember it, Tilda? Father's friend lived there and we used to visit when we were little. Somebody has made it into a hotel. Imagine! So many people who touched our lives have passed over. But when you cook, Sister,” she said, “I feel like Mama has come back from the dead.”
“She has, Dear. She's here now.”
Tilda's barely perceptible smile lit a face so narrow that it called to mind Faye's mother's old-timey criticism of the looks of a too-thin woman: “That woman's hatchet-faced.”
There was a softness to Tilda's eyes and her short white hair that made up for her straight-edged face and whip-thin body. Faye respected her, for sure, and she thought she'd like her as much as she liked Myrna, once she got to know her better.
Tilda glanced around the room as if there were friendly spirits sitting in each of the eight extra chairs surrounding her awesomely handcarved mahogany table. If Faye hadn't been so contented and full of beef, she might have rolled her eyes at the idea of spirits who had nothing better to do than watch them eat. This would have made her hate herself for disrespecting the cook who made such an incomparable pot roast.
“Would anybody like some candy?” Myrna handed a box of goodies around the table. “I can't cook like Tilda, but I do like sweets. Here, take all you like.”
Faye thanked her and took a big bite of the dark gelatinous thing in her hand. It was licorice. Acrid, medicinal, noxious licorice. Somehow, the fact that the licorice had been dipped in chocolate made the flavor even worse. Could one actually spoil chocolate?
Faye locked eyes with Amande. Her daughter hated licorice, too, but the girl wouldn't want to hurt Myrna's feelings any more than Faye did. Faye responded to her daughter's “Help me!” look by surreptitiously depositing the uneaten portion of her candy into a paper napkin and slipping it into her purse. There was no help for the stomach-turning mess in her mouth, so she swallowed it whole. Amande followed suit.
To distract the ladies from Amande's waste disposal, Faye asked Tilda about the house's antiques. It was stuffed to overflowing with Victorian rosewood settees and hand-crocheted antimacassars, and its walls were hung with portraits of generations of Armistead ancestors.
As Tilda started to answer her, Myrna interrupted. Faye had the feeling that this happened a lot. “There are things in this house that belong in the museum where you're working. Seeâ”
“Not while there's an Armistead alive,” Tilda said flatly, proving that she'd learned long ago the secret to being heard in Myrna's presence: Speak loudly and feel free to interrupt. “Some of these pieces are original to the house, and it was built in 1836. They belong in the family.”
As twilight deepened outside the dining room's many-paned windows, Tilda moved around quietly, lighting a collection of spherical antique oil lamps made of all colors of glass. Faye judged that they were all antique and hand-blown. Their flickering light suited the old house better than the electric bulbs in the converted gasoliers overhead would have.
“See those chairs? There have been more than family butts in them.” Myrna was whispering in Amande's ear, but the whispers of a woman with failing ears don't conceal much. “See that swivel-seat chair made out of cast iron? The one in front of the secretary desk?”
Amande did, and so did everybody else in the room.
“Elizabeth Cady Stanton sat there, not long after she delivered the keynote address at the convention for women's rights in Seneca Falls, not far from here. Lucretia Mott visited on another occasion. She sat there.” Myrna pointed at a slender chair with original horsehair upholstery.
Myrna had a rapt audience. Amande scampered across the room and fondled the horsehair. “Mom's taking me to Seneca Falls while we're here. She says we have to make a pilgrimage to the place where women put their demands in writing, just like men. After that, I'm supposed to vote every chance I get, as soon as I turn eighteen. Next year.” The last two words were delivered with an emphasis that said, “And I can't wait.”
“I like your mom,” Tilda declared. “It's good to exercise our rights. And to remember the people who got them for us. Shall we spend some time with their spirits? Would you still like a reading?”
Faye had to admit she was curious. Also, Myrna was muttering, “Where's that candy? The little girl and her mother may want some more,” and Faye was in all-out licorice-avoidance mode. She would have endured the most cringe-inducing fake séance if doing so would have spared her a second dose of that candy.
“Yes,” Faye said. “We'd be honored if you would do a reading for us, Tilda.”
Myrna led them into a room tucked under the stairs while Tilda took a private moment to prepare. Since the builders of grand old homes like this one took their stately staircases seriously, there was room for a large square area under the second floor landing, with a narrow, sloping extension beneath the steps. The underside of each stair could be seen, rising stepwise one-by-one. For an odd moment, Faye felt trapped inside the surrealist art of M.C. Escher with its impossible staircases to nowhere.
A chair, old and threadbare, was tucked under the stairs. Behind it was a dark area where an adult would have to stoop and then crawl. The square portion of the room was almost completely occupied by a round table. In its center sat a crystal ball, not large but utterly clear, glinting atop an ornate stand of tarnished goldtone metal.
Myrna busied herself with a pile of folding chairs stacked in the depths of the slant-roofed space. She could barely carry a single chair, so Faye and Amande rushed to help. Once they were in place, Myrna beckoned them to sit, chatting like someone who hadn't met anybody new in years.
“We do this every night, just the two of us. It's important to tend our bonds with family members who have passed over. Mother. Father. Tilda's dear husband Edwin. Not to mention all the family we never met on this plane at all. There are so few of us Armisteads left. Just the two of us, really, and Tilda's daughter Dara. We have some distant cousins-by-marriage in Texasânot Armisteads, but kin on Mother's sideâbut we could never ever go there.”
“Why not?” Faye asked. “Airplanes fly back and forth to Texas every day.” Tilda and Myrna seemed to have financial means to make the trip, if they really wanted to go.
“I could go, but I don't like to leave Tilda. She doesn't travel.”
Myrna leaned so close that Faye could see her reflection curving across the surface of the crystal ball. For some reason, the distorted image made Faye look up at the uncomfortably low ceiling. It seemed to be sinking even lower.
“Tilda
really
doesn't travel,” Myrna went on. “She hasn't left Rosebower since Edwin died. I think there are even parts of Rosebower that are too far from home for Tilda.”
Rosebower was a postage stamp-sized town built long before cars came along. It was physically impossible for two places in Rosebower to be far apart. Tilda must have a fearsome case of agoraphobia.
Myrna was still spilling her sister's secrets. “The only reason we have a car is to make it easier for Tilda to get her groceries home.”
“The grocery store's only three blocks away,” Amande pointed out. “She could walk over there every morning and bring home enough food for the day. Cars are expensive. There's no reason to pay for insurance on a car you don't need.”
Amande knew what she was talking about. She had lived most of her childhood with no motorized transportation but a boat. She was such a reasonable girl, but the human mind is not always reasonable.
“Tilda thought it over and decided that it scared her to think about driving a car to the store once a week, but it scared her more to think about being forced to walk there every single day. Even after all these years, that car wouldn't have two thousand miles on it, except for the fact that Tilda let her daughter Dara drive it a little when she was a teenager. I think maybe the odometer reads about five thousand now.”
