Rituals (23 page)

Joe and Amande both liked this logic. Their satisfied smiles were so alike that Faye would have sworn they were blood-kin.

“But Mom, none of this explains why Tilda came to you. That's been bothering me all week. She hasn't left town in years, but she crawled behind the wheel of her car to come to you for help. Don't take this the wrong way, but she hardly knew you.”

“I didn't understand it then, but five more days in this town has answered that question. Think about it. Who would Tilda have gone to for help?”

“She tried to get to Myrna and couldn't,” Amande said. “I'm not sure if she trusted anybody else.”

“Exactly. She wasn't on speaking terms with Willow and Dara. Samuel told me himself that they weren't close. He said she wasn't close to their neighbors, either. Sister Mama would have been no help, and I wouldn't trust Ennis as far as I could throw him. Most people would call 911, but we've seen how her sister feels about doctors. Tilda probably felt the same way about any emergency responder. Besides, who would that responder be? A call to 911 might bring someone who hated her for the way she voted at council meetings. Tilda must have felt her only choice was to turn to a friendly stranger. Of course I would help her. Why wouldn't I? More importantly, I had no reason to hurt her.”

“I see what you're saying, but Mom. It's horrible. Other than Myrna, there was no one in Rosebower that Tilda could trust.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

There are few things more awkward than gossiping about someone, then finding yourself face-to-face with her. Faye had just spent ten minutes dissecting Dara like a laboratory specimen. Her husband and daughter had listened while Faye dumped on her for feuding with her mother. She'd made catty comments about Dara's faux-red hair, smug in the knowledge that her own hair was still black and her grandmother's hair had stayed black until she was eighty. She'd rolled her eyes at the way the woman failed to turn off her theatrical mannerisms after the curtain had dropped. Then the three of them had walked out the museum door, only to see Dara hurrying toward them.

“I'm so glad I caught you before you went home.”

Faye had done the mocking, but the other two had egged her on. The fact that Dara couldn't read their shame-faced auras spoke against any claim she might make for telepathic powers.

“I can't sleep tonight without trying to contact my mother again. She was with us this morning, but Willow ruined everything. Now I've disturbed her without giving her peace. My mother and I must reconcile, or neither of us will ever rest. Can you find it in yourselves to help me again? Tonight?”

“Now?” Faye asked, trying not to form the thought,
What a drama queen!
And failing. “Do you mean that you want all six of us at the table again, with Joe watching and Willow taking notes? Before bedtime?”

Amande butted in. “Forget before bedtime. You have a show tonight. Are you saying you want to do this tonight before curtain time? It's not possible.”

“We're not doing a show tonight. Maybe not ever again. Willow and I have split. He doesn't believe in what I do. Never has. He wants me to cheat. Nags me into it, every night. He thinks I threw that bowl at his head, but it wasn't me. It was my mother. She was controlling my body.”

She ran the shaking fingers of her hands through her hair. Her rings snagged on the abundant curls and she yanked both hands free, letting single orange strands fall to the ground. “
My mother.
She knew what Willow was. She told me, years ago, and still I let him come between us. If I ask her tonight, without cheating and without Willow, she will come. She will.”

Faye repeated her question. “Do you need all of us? Everybody who was there this morning? I'm not sure Sister Mama is up to it.” Faye wasn't sure she was up to it either. Surely Dara had noticed that none of them had said yes, not yet.

“No. We'll be four at the table. You, your daughter, me, and my aunt. I don't need an assistant. Willow made me include him so that he could knock on the walls and stir up smelly breezes. I can't tell you how glad I am to be rid of him.”

Faye was thinking of a different kind of assistance. If she had been nervous enough that morning to ask Joe to stand guard, she was doubly so tonight. “Avery can help Joe stand watch. She's trained and she's armed.”

It crossed Faye's mind that Dara accepted the need for guards very easily. She wasn't supposed to know that her mother's death was due to arson, but she had already commented on Avery's prolonged investigation.

“Invite Avery? Good idea. If she's still hanging onto my mother's crystal ball as evidence, instead of doing the right thing by giving it to my aunt, I'll bet I can talk her into bringing it. I'm not stupid enough to think that Avery would still be here if my mother died in a simple house fire. If she wants information, she should like the notion of this séance because, basically, we're restaging the night of the fire even more closely than we did this morning. The only difference is that I'll be sitting in my mother's chair.

“And there will be two people standing guard,” Faye said.

Dara nodded. “Even the house is virtually identical. I know that Mother has things to reveal. Tonight, she'll come back to me from the other side. She will.”

***

Toni pulled the wig over her head. Her own hair, coiled on her crown, fit under it snugly. The wig was the same color as her natural hair, making it possible for her to tug out a few short locks. Teased and combed over the wig's edge, they gave a more natural-looking hairline. She held up a hand-mirror to check the result from all angles, and she saw that she'd achieved the desired look. Her head looked like it belonged to an aging man who liked to wait a little too long between haircuts.

She was the first to admit that she owned far too much makeup. Creams to change the skin tone, powders to emphasize brows, pencils to create wrinkles that she didn't have yet—she loved them the way an artist loves charcoals and pastels. Smoothing concealer over her lips, she changed them to a color that was less pink and more mannish. With the sweep of a powder-laden brush, she gave herself a five-o'clock shadow. A bit of stippling with a fine black pencil made that shadow still more believable. Contouring powder made her brow more pronounced and her jaw firmer.

After strategic application of three colors of foundation makeup, her hands now looked less soft and more sun-damaged. When she was satisfied with her manly looks, she slid the camera watch over a newly rugged hand. If Willow, Dara, or anybody at their show, recognized her tonight, then she would know that the magic had left her life for good. It would be her sign that it was time to walk away from illusion. It would be time to really retire.

But not now. Right now, Toni felt the familiar rush of pre-performance adrenaline. She was ready to do some magician's espionage and get video of two fakers in action. She was ready to have some fun.

***

If Joe's over-analytical wife had ever said that she would someday be willing to submit to three séances in a week, he would have called her nuts. Yet here she was, doing it again.

He watched Myrna bustle around her parlor. Dara had refused to allow her enough time to brew tea, saying, “Sunset is approaching and we all know that it is the best time to reach the spirit world, other than dawn and midnight.”

Joe wasn't sure he agreed with her, but he saw no need to argue. It wasn't his business to watch for spirits tonight. He intended to stand watch for three-dimensional people who might want to hurt his wife and his child and these other nice people. If any spirits happened by, he would alert the observant Spiritualist after she finished consulting her mother's crystal ball.

Deprived of her teapot, Myrna was still driven to play hostess, so she circulated through the room, handing out candy. Even before he smelled it, Joe could see by the look on his wife's face that it was licorice. He rather liked licorice, so he held out an unobtrusive hand and Faye slid her piece of candy into it with the stealth of a stage magician. He knew Amande felt the same way, so they performed an identical act of sleight-of-hand. Now he had three big pieces of licorice to keep him company while he watched for evildoers. Score!

Joe and Avery had divided their duties sensibly, based on the fact that she had a gun and he didn't. He was back in his chair in the front doorway. People in Rosebower kept their front yards manicured, so he had a good line-of-sight up and down Main and Walnut Streets. If anybody wanted to come from any of those directions to set this house on fire, they'd see Joe and they'd know he saw them. He doubted any of them would risk it. If they did, Avery and her gun were within earshot, if he should call for her.

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.