Rituals (15 page)

Amande wished she had a best friend like Faye's. The one thing that Amande's new life with Faye and Joe hadn't given her was friends. She'd never had real friends while growing up. It hadn't been her poverty that had set her apart, because there had been plenty of poverty to go around in south Louisiana.

Part of her isolation had been her doing, because she'd never known what to say to the other kids. They'd wasted their time on playground bickering, as if they didn't know what real trouble was like. And they'd kept their distance from Amande, because they knew that she did.

She'd imagined that they were afraid to talk to her, for fear her bad luck would rub off. The combination of a runaway mother, deadbeat father, and weirdo grandmother was enough to render her socially untouchable. Worse, the almost-homeless existence of living on a houseboat was deeply scary to children who knew, at some level, that their own families might be one assistance check from an existence that was as tenuous.

Being adopted by Faye and Joe had been like having a fairy godmother drop down out of the sky with a pumpkin full of all Amande's dreams. She was a little lonely. This was true. So what? She'd be going away to college in a year, and that would be way different from living on an island with a couple of adults and a toddler.

She looked out the window. Faye had her phone to her ear and she was hunched over with laughter, so Amande knew exactly who was on the other end of the call. That was a best-friend kind of laugh, so her mother had called Magda.

Distracted by Magda's jokes, there was no way that Faye would have noticed the foot traffic on the sidewalk across the street behind her. If Amande hadn't been watching, no one would have seen Ennis walk by and then, five minutes later, walk past again. Amande guessed that he was hoping her mother would leave so he could come inside and pay Amande another visit.

If she took her mother's suggestion and walked to the diner for a cappuccino, she had no doubt that he'd follow her there. She thought maybe she'd skip the coffee. Or maybe she'd go for a walk and let him chase her.

Sometimes Ennis weirded her out. But sometimes…Well, sometimes, she thought he might be nothing worse than lonely and bored. Just like her.

Faye was still talking ninety-miles-a-minute to her cell phone, gesturing with her free hand as if Magda could see her. Amande wondered how long they'd been friends. She should ask Faye.

Her mother knew she was lonely. She kept talking about getting Amande a job in Sopchoppy or Panacea when they got home, so that she could spend time with people her age. Amande was very good at real-world math, and she knew that the fuel costs to get her ashore to that job would eat up every last dime of a minimum wage paycheck. Faye seemed to think she should do it anyway.

Amande knew she could have friendships like the one Faye shared with Magda, once she ventured off the island and put some effort into meeting people. Right now, however, she was a little scared of the big bad world. She thought she might hide out on Joyeuse Island for an extra year or so.

Chapter Eighteen

Faye could laugh and joke all she liked. Even on the other end of a cell phone connection, Magda Stockard-McKenzie could tell when her friend was stressed past her limits. The laughs came a little too quick, and the jokes fell a little too flat. Faye had not placed this call just to hear Magda's harsh and crow-like voice, but that was okay. Best friends didn't have to say what they were thinking, not until they were ready to say it.

The best friend code required Magda to pretend that Faye had really called to talk about work. No-nonsense Magda could play make-believe, when necessary, so she asked a work-related question. “So your client believes he's got a picture of an alien
and
he believes he's got a medieval Scandinavian shopping list proving that Columbus wasn't here first?”

“Yes, he does believe those things. I've held that stupid ‘Runestone' in my own two hands. Oh, and by the way, Columbus
wasn't
here first. Keep talking like that, Madame Archaeologist, and I'm going to see about getting your Ph.D. revoked.”

Magda liked to hear that familiar cocky attitude. If Faye could still make her laugh by insulting her, then things couldn't be all that bad. “I know Columbus wasn't first. Not two hours ago, I got an eye full of your gorgeous husband, and I am completely aware that his ancestors were waiting on the beach to tell the Europeans hello. Just think. If Columbus hadn't come over here and messed things up, this country would still be full of men who look like Joe.”

“Yeah, but then your people would've stayed in England, so you wouldn't be here to goggle at Joe's.”

“I'm sure we would have had an embassy with the Creeks. I could've gotten a job there, where I'd be surrounded by Joe clones. Trust me. I'd have found a way to get to this side of the Atlantic.”

“I'm going to tell your husband.”

“Mike knows that I love every hair on his…arms. Despite the fact that there aren't many left on his head and they're all gray.”

These things were true, but the retired sheriff still walked and talked like the forty-year-old man he had been when he took responsibility for the safety of the citizens of Micco County, Florida. If the words “peace officer” had ever been true of anyone, they were true of Sheriff Mike. Magda loved the old coot for just those things.

She listened to Faye mentally backpedal through the conversation. “Wait. You said you'd just seen my husband. Did he come ashore for no reason other than to visit? Don't tell me he got lonely enough to admit it.”

It had taken Faye long enough to ask that question. Magda decided that she really
must
be stressed. Everyone in Joe's world knew that he generally only left Joyeuse Island for work and for unavoidable errands, like grocery shopping. His hunting, fishing, and gardening kept their grocery bill to a minimum, but the Longchamp-Mantooth family liked milk. And ice cream. They were all big on ice cream. Short of learning to milk a deer, the island-dwellers' only choice was to come ashore from time to time.

“I happen to know that my husband bought groceries not two days ago. What was he doing in town today?”

“He got lonely,” she said. “Imagine being alone on an island with a two-year-old for days and days.”

The phone was silent while Faye took a moment to do that. Finally, she said, “Poor Joe.”

“Yes. And he's never going to get over that emergency room trip with Michael.”

“Did you get a look at his stitches? Do you think he's in pain? Does he even still have stitches?”

Magda interrupted Faye before she could embarrass herself with another question. “Hush. The child is fine. The stitches are still in. The cut looks good. Joe is a meticulous man, you know that. He cleans the wound and uses antibiotic ointment three times a day, like clockwork, just like the doctor told him. I watched him do it yesterday, after school.”

“School? Yesterday? Joe was in town three days in a row?”

“When I saw him at the grocery store on Tuesday, I could see that the man was at the end of his rope. He was the sweet, calm, loving, and perfect dad that he always is, but he was at the end of his rope, nevertheless. Two-year-olds are…”

“Two.”

“Yes, they are. I told him to come in early yesterday morning and I'd talk to the people at Rachel's preschool about letting Michael visit a few days a week. Just for the summer.”

“So Michael started school and Joe was going to tell me this…never?”

“Settle down. Michael didn't start school without you. He just got some glorified babysitting and he had a good time on the playground. Mostly.”

Magda mentally kicked her honest self. She should probably have kept Michael's playground adventures to herself.

“Mostly?”

“Um…Michael's homework is to remember that it's not okay to throw rocks.”

As a mother of a five-year-old, Magda knew that it was possible to be absolutely humiliated by something she herself did not do. That sick feeling was in Faye's voice as she said “Rocks? He went to school with a bunch of little kids and threw rocks on the first day? Did he hurt anybody?”

“Nobody's hurt. He wasn't aiming at the kids, or somebody might've been. The teacher said he damn near took a squirrel off a tree branch. The rock whiffled right through the fur on its fluffy little tail.”

It could have been worse. One inch in the right direction, and the playground could have been full of traumatized children watching a squirrel expire.

“I can't believe my child was throwing rocks at school.”

“Faye. What does your husband do with rocks? There is a reason Michael likes to throw rocks, and the reason is not that his mother is a failure.”

Her phone emitted the sound of Faye saying, “Ohhhh.” Understanding had dawned.

“Joe spends days chipping rocks till they're razor sharp. Then he makes arrows, kills something tasty, and we have a great meal. Sometimes he skips the chipping and the bow, and he just uses his sling to throw any old random rock.”

“Exactly. If Michael's rock had been an inch to the left, there would have been a squirrel waiting in your freezer when you got home. Faye. He'll figure out when it's okay to throw things and when it's not. Baseball players' children figure it out. A hunter's son can, too.”

Faye was silent for a moment, but Magda waited for her.

“None of this makes it any easier to say what I called to say.”

“I was wondering when you'd get around to that. Does it have something to do with your crackpot client?”

“It does. I need Joe to come up here and explain to my client that the Iroquois were perfectly capable of making his idiotic ‘Runestone' and that the Mayans did not need prehistoric astronauts to help them build their pyramids. I'm on the brink of quitting this job, but it's just possible that Joe can help me save it. I need him. I was going to see if you and Mike could watch Michael, just for a week, but now I don't know. He's such a handful lately. I think it's too much to ask.”

“Don't act stupid, Faye. Of course, we'll take our godson for a week. We were a little insulted you didn't ask in the first place. Mike needs an excuse to drag his model trains out of the attic, and I need an excuse to play games that Rachel thinks she's outgrown. And I solemnly swear not to let Mike teach him to shoot his service revolver. The child doesn't need access to any more deadly weapons.”

Faye said what best friends say when they see that it's pointless to continue arguing. She said, “Thank you.”

“Don't thank me until you see whether I give him back.”

Chapter Nineteen

Why hadn't she thought to lock the door?

Amande did a mental face-palm. She had denied herself cappuccino so she could sit here and worry over whether Ennis was going to walk past her window again, but she'd left the service entrance unlocked. Stupid.

There he stood in the closet door, with his hands jammed in his pockets like he didn't know what else to do with them. Well, she couldn't exactly make fun of him for that. She was sitting at her desk, fumbling with a pen, because she didn't know what to do with
her
hands. Worse than that, she'd just smeared ink on her wrist. She dropped that hand to her lap.

Ennis looked scared. That made two of them. She'd be scared of making a fool of herself, even if Ennis were nothing more than a decent-looking twenty-year-old who had told her she was pretty. Since he might also be a man who couldn't be trusted with an old lady's safety, she was also scared that she was being a fool. She should open the window and call for her mother.

But maybe he wasn't so bad. Maybe she'd met him on the worst day of his life and maybe he was as torn-up about his aunt's near-death experience as she was. Maybe he was a nice-enough guy who loved his aunt, and he just wanted to talk to somebody his own age as badly as she did. Maybe.

If she was going to let him stay, she needed to say something, because he seemed to have run out of ideas. Since she didn't even know whether she liked him, she decided to treat these encounters as practice sessions for the time when she'd need to think of something to say to a man she
did
like.

“Did you always live in Rosebower? Before boarding school, I mean.”

“No.
No.
Small towns aren't for me. I'm meant for the city. I come from Atlanta and I'm aiming to get back there when…when I can.”

Amande gave him the tiniest bit of credit for realizing how poorly she would respond to something like, “I'm heading back to Atlanta as soon as my great-aunt kicks the bucket.”

She said, “I'm not sure if I'd be happy in a city. I want to go to a good college next year, but I hope it's not too far away from my family.”

“I don't want to waste my time in school, not when I've got a business to run. Sister Mama, she counts on me.”

This did not make Amande feel good about Sister Mama's situation, but Ennis kept talking. He had perked up, like a young man who thought he was impressing a pretty girl. He had also walked across the room as he spoke, stopping just on the far side of her desk.

“She taught me how to run the greenhouse and take care of the garden before she got so sick. Now I'm taking care of all that and her website, too. And her patients, mostly. They come to me for their herbs.”

“You're prescribing their herbs? Their medicine? I bet Sister Mama spent a lot of time learning to do root medicine. My grandmother knew all about it. She gave people weird stuff all the time, but I wouldn't. You can hurt somebody with that stuff.”

“Relax, Baby.” He reached a hand toward her hair, and she drew back. The hand hung in mid-air, still reaching. “I told you Sister Mama taught me a lot, back when she was able, and she's still pretty good at bossing me around. I only understand about half of what she says, but it's enough. I'm not hurting anybody.”

His hand moved forward. Her head moved back some more. Then she saw his eyes flick toward the window.

“I've got some orders to deliver. I'll talk to you later, Baby.” Ennis slipped out the delivery door about forty-five seconds before Faye walked in the front.

Amande could see that her mother's conversation with Magda had gone well, and she expected to hear about it, eventually. She wasn't sure whether Faye needed to know that Ennis had started calling her “Baby,” or even whether she needed to know that Amande had been in the same room with him.

Probably not.

***

Toni headed for her usual seat at the diner for a late breakfast, as she had done every day since arriving in Rosebower. Toni had the habits of a scientist, so she'd done the math on breakfast economy. She knew there was no way to justify the cost of a restaurant breakfast.

Eggs were running under two dollars a dozen, making them less than twenty cents apiece. Bacon was less than five bucks a pound these days, and there were twenty-ish slices in that pound, so maybe they cost a quarter apiece. The materials in a cup of bad coffee might as well be free, even if she added her customary spoonful of sugar. Any time she paid more than a dollar for bacon, eggs, and coffee instead of cooking them at home, she was hemorrhaging money. Even if the diner threw in a piece of toast and a pat of butter, she was getting no bargain.

Even worse, her favorite breakfast, French toast, contained a fraction of an egg, a splash of milk, a couple of slices of bread, and a dusting of sugar. Paying somebody to make it for her was sheer stupidity. Besides, her own French toast tasted better, because she was prodigal with the vanilla extract. Nevertheless, here she sat, throwing money around, because people are social beings and they don't like to eat alone. She never would have expected to feel nostalgic in retirement about all the meals she ate in the school cafeteria.

As she passed the cluster of retired dudes who always homesteaded the corner of the diner nearest the restrooms, she nodded and said, “Good morning, gentlemen.” For the first time on record, she received utter silence in response.

This was new. These men were twenty years her senior, which meant two things: she looked like a young chick to them, and they were old enough to have lived in an era when sexual come-ons from strangers were considered goodhearted compliments. Sitting down to breakfast without being greeted by “Hey there, Sweet Lips,” was unsettling.

Julie, the ponytailed waitress whom Toni had always envied for her ability to be happy working double-shifts at her dead-end job, left a napkin-wrapped knife and fork on the table with neither a comment nor a smile. This was hard to believe, considering that Toni overtipped her on a daily basis. Dwight, the owner, violated his policy of greeting every customer with a handshake, staying in the kitchen.

Toni sat in silence, wondering when Julie was going to take her order. She might as well have been at home, enjoying a fifty-cent breakfast of homemade French toast.

Time passed, and Toni wasn't even offered a cup of coffee. She found it difficult to face inexplicable social ostracism without the aid of caffeine. When Julie returned, arms loaded with breakfast for the old dudes, Toni tried to flag her down, but the woman disappeared quickly.

An instant later, Dwight appeared, smartphone in hand. “Is this you?”

Nothing in cyberspace ever really goes away. The phone's screen displayed the website Toni had decommissioned when she retired her magic act a year before. It featured a five-year-old publicity photo in which Toni looked far more glamorous than a fifty-ish woman has a right to look, but glamour is good business for a magician.

“Yes,” she said. “That's me. Or it was me. I'm retired.”

“Are you also retired from this?”

He hit a couple of links on the phone's screen, pulling up a series of articles she'd written for a high-profile journal for science educators. Publishing those articles had earned her quite a bit of praise from her graduate advisor, late in the twentieth century and long before the emergence of the Internet. She'd had no idea that they were available online. This was not good.

In those articles, she had spelled out exactly how fake psychics did their tricks, then she had developed in-class activities that let kids see the physics behind mysterious phenomena like floating séance tables. She'd even explained the Pepper's Ghost illusion. And, since she'd been younger and more fiery in those days, she had spared no scorn for the fakers she was exposing.

Worse, she had specifically targeted Spiritualism as a form of organized religion. Having spent face-time with Spiritualists since arriving in Rosebower, she wished she hadn't been quite so snide in debunking the faith of real people with real feelings, but the laws of physics couldn't be bent to spare people's feelings. Toni still stood behind the things she'd written in those articles.

Julie stood beside Dwight. Her order-taking tablet remained in her apron pocket and her hands hung by her sides. She said, “My father is an elder at the church down the street. He's never lied to anybody in his life.” She turned on her heel and walked into the kitchen.

One of the old dudes said, “My wife still gives readings. I guess she'll keep on giving 'em till she passes to the other side herself. She can't retire, because people depend on her, and you know what? Her work put our children through college. Working for the county, it was all I could do to keep us fed. You're an insult to everything my wife stands for.”

The man sitting next to him only looked up from his breakfast long enough to say, “What he said. If you was a man, I'd punch you in the mouth.”

Dwight leaned down close and said, “You listen to me. Both my parents, God rest their souls, spent their lives serving people on both sides of death. They weren't fakers. They didn't cheat nobody. They used the talents God gave 'em, and I don't see anything wrong with earning a living by using your talents. It's what you did when you was a schoolteacher and it's what you did when you was ‘Toni the Astonisher.'” His tone grew nasal and mocking as he pronounced her stage name. “How much good were you doing for the world when you charged people to watch you pull rabbits from hats? How much?”

A magician never really lets go of her preference for misdirection, even when she would be better served by going straight to the truth. Toni instinctively answered his question with a non-answer. “I never pulled a rabbit from a hat. Using animals as entertainment is abusive.”

Dwight's voice grew quieter and he leaned even closer to Toni's face, as if he were afraid his restraint would make it harder for her to hear him. “And it's not abusive to insult people's beliefs? It's not abusive to attack the way they make a living? I bet Tilda Armistead is spinning in her grave to know that a person like you is here in the town her family built. You need to go home now.”

He left her alone at a table made of chrome, sitting on a vinyl-upholstered seat. The linoleum floor was sticky under her feet. The diner, which had always seemed so inviting, suddenly went sterile. There was nothing in the room with Toni but hard, reflective surfaces and people who didn't like her.

She picked up her purse and, disoriented by the act of walking out of a restaurant without paying, reached into it for her wallet. Feeling stupid, she slipped her money back into her purse, but reached for the napkin-wrapped cutlery, because her brain had absorbed a certain restaurant routine: Sit down, eat, then deal with the bill left on her table. But there was no bill on the table, only silverware. Having never been kicked out of a restaurant—or a bar or a store or a school or anything else—Toni felt a confusion that made her sympathetic to aging people who behaved strangely because they lived in a world that had changed.

She left the silverware where it was and left with nothing but her purse. When she got home, she found a shattered bay window and a rock in her living room.

Who would do this? Ennis? He was her first thought because his actions merited suspicion, but also because of his youth. Rosebower showed an elderly face to the world for good reason. The town was graying, mostly because there weren't many jobs there, but also because its social structure favored age.

A psychic could practice until late old age and, unlike most jobs, wrinkles and cataracts were an asset. Age signified wisdom and long experience in esoteric matters like contacting the dead. To a person looking for a guide through one of life's tough spots, Sister Mama's frailty made her look like a woman who'd already been around the same block. In Rosebower, age brought political power with it, too, resulting in a town council full of people who would be long-retired anywhere else.

Dara and Willow were by far the youngest successful practitioners around, even though Rosebower itself had denied them the right to practice inside the city limits. Ennis, Dara, and Willow were the most visible members of the younger generations in town, but they weren't alone. Younger people were outshone by the elderly Spiritualists who still ran the place, but they were there, if you knew where to look.

In any tourist town, there are service employees. In this town, they served an unusually old ruling class. These service employees, people like Julie and Dwight, were plenty young enough to hurl a rock through her window or to set Tilda's house afire. Toni was not fooled by Avery's silence on the matter of Tilda Armistead. Something about the woman's death made all Toni's logic circuits misfire. She could think of no rationale that would prompt someone to both kill Tilda and try to intimidate a meddling, non-believing physics teacher, but maybe she needed to think harder.

She wondered whether it was wise to stay in Rosebower, now that her secret was out. Maybe it wasn't just unwise to stay. Maybe it wasn't even safe. That rock could have cracked her skull open, if she'd been at home and sitting in the right place.

But could she write the book she wanted to write if she left? She had told Faye the truth when she said she wanted to write about the foibles of a little town whose residents believed they could talk to the dead, but she hadn't told her the whole truth.

Her intent was to expose hucksterism in all its forms, using Rosebower as a weird little case study. If she was able to parlay her (admittedly minor) show-biz connections into a contract with the right agent, this book could be big. And if she failed to grab the interest of a traditional publisher, no worries. She was pretty sure she would be just as good at building an Internet empire as Ennis LeBecque. She had an interesting hook—fake psychics—and her expertise as a magician gave her a very sturdy platform on which to build an online reputation.