Rituals (27 page)
Authors: Mary Anna Evans
by Antonia Caruso
My work in Rosebower is done. I have everything I need to write the book I came here to write. I have photos of Virginia Armistead's letters, in her own handwriting, confessing to fakery. I know that Tilda Armistead was as honest as she looked, but that she was unknowingly drugging her clients with Sister Mama's psychotropic-but-legal wild lettuce sap. And I have the nasty little story of the charlatan Willow, husband of the last in the long line of Rosebower Armisteads.
Dara is so anxious to distance herself from his crimes that she has shared every detail of how they fooled their audiences. I was gratified to learn that I'd unraveled most of their tricks, but Dara is an artist of the stage. She taught me a few things I didn't know, and I was doing sleight-of-hand before she was born. I know what they say about old dogs, but this one loves learning new tricks.
I also know that, not so long ago on a summer night in Rosebower, Myrna Armistead convinced a hard-headed archaeologist and her daughter that she was channeling her sister's spirit. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her daughter Amande are certain that Myrna knew they were in danger before the danger presented itself. They are even more certain that she warned them in her sister's voice, not her own. In that voice, she ordered them out of the house and she begged them to save her sister and her daughter. When Myrna Armistead said those words, she had no daughter and no living sister. But Tilda Armistead did.
The physicist in me knows that Myrna was being systematically drugged. She was grief-stricken. And prolonged congestive heart failure may have starved her brain of oxygen. There is a real possibility that she was hallucinating. But the physicist in me also knows that science learns new things every day.
In other words, things that are perfectly explainable today were utter mysteries yesterday.
For this reason, although I have everything I need to write my Rosebower exposé, I'm not going to do it. I have other books to write, other trips to take, other ways to wring every last ounce of fun out of my retirement. I don't need to do it at the expense of people who don't deserve my scorn.
It is likely that I will come back to Rosebower, now and again. Dara's tired of working seven days a week, year-round, but an empty auditorium is a wasted money-making opportunity. She would never share a stage with me, because she still believes she's the real thing and I make no such claim, but she'll gladly rent me the hall. I may spend some years gadding about, returning here to perform for occasional extended runs.
I may even retire here. I'm learning that the aging process doesn't change us. It just makes us more like the people we've always been. I want to be the best old lady possible. If I went looking for role models, I could never find better ones than Myrna Armistead and Sister Mama. They're loving. Strong. Contrary, when the situation requires it. Maybe it's not too late for me to learn to be more like them.
My first step toward being a loving and generous person in old age will be to kill this book. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth only told me what she knew about the letters and the wild lettuce because I promised not to publish it while Myrna Armistead was alive. The world has waited this long for the truth. It can wait a few years longer. I made the same promise to Dara Armistead and, in exchange, she taught me something about magic.
Magic is what you believe it to be. So is life.
Guide for the Incurably Curious
This is the place where I usually give a little background for readers who are interested in which parts of the history Faye is investigating are really true. Teachers, homeschoolers, and book group leaders tell me that this kind of information spurs discussion, and I find that my readers tend to be like me. We are incurably curious, so we are always happy to have a few questions answered.
For this book, however, I find myself wanting to leave the magic alone. Instead of sharing with you every last historical detail about the roots of Spiritualism and the activities of the brave ladies at Seneca Falls, I think I will do things differently this time. I will point you in the direction of a couple of books I used while writing
Rituals
, then I will tell you a story about my own one-and-only brush with the metaphysical.
I have owned a copy of James Randi's
Flim-Flam! Psychics, Unicorns, and Other Delusions
for quite some time. I knew that I would someday want to draw from his exposé of metaphysical fraud, but I was waiting for the right story to come to me. Randi, also known as the magician “The Amazing Randi,” has been a crusader for truth, and my “Toni the Astonisher” was in part inspired by him. If you read
Flim-Flam!
, you will learn about real-life fakers far more brazen than my fictional Dara and Willow.
In constructing my imaginary Rosebower, I visited a Florida town built by 19th-century Spiritualists called Cassadaga, where I attended a church service, experienced the laying on of hands, and received a psychic reading. I also did my usual writerly exploration of the town itself, just walking around and stopping into local businesses and checking out the public buildings. Even my imaginary places need to be rooted in the real world. This is why I like to travel to the sites of my books or, when those sites are imaginary, I like to travel to someplace nearby. If you're curious about Spiritualist towns in general, or about Cassadaga in particular, I recommend
Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community
by John J. Guthrie Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe.
I did not, however, go to western New York, and I did not go to the real-life town known as the home of Spiritualism, Lily Dale. Rosebower is only modeled on Lily Dale in the sense that they both have lovely floral names. I made the decision not to go to Lily Dale rather late in the process of preparing to write
Rituals
, and here's why. Although some of the residents of my Rosebower are wonderful people, honest and devoted to their faith, some of them are not. I felt that it would be disrespectful to the faith of real-life Spiritualists to taint their town with fakery and murder, so I wanted there to be no suggestion that I was accusing real people of such things. Instead, I created Rosebower, where I could let my fictional crooks come out to play. Now that the book is finished, I want very much to visit Lily Dale and Seneca Falls, and I expect I will do so soon.
And now I'll share my personal story of mysterious metaphysics. Like Faye, I was educated in the sciences, so it would take unassailable evidence for me to believe in anything that cannot be rationally explained. I know that there are things in this universe that we don't understand, so I leave the door open for miracles, but I set a very high bar when it comes to proof. Nevertheless, I have visited psychics from time to time, out of sheer curiosity.
In 2002, I attended a wonderful party. As part of the entertainment, the hostess had hired a psychic, and all attendees could sign up for a brief session with her. I found her to be pleasant, but her advice was fairly generic. She said nothing that would have required her to have arcane powersâ¦until the very end of the session. Out of the blue, she said, “I hear three names. Barbara, Robert, and Sam. They will be important people for you.”
Those of you who are familiar with my publishing house know that Robert Rosenwald is the publisher and Barbara Peters is the editor-in-chief. When this woman pulled their names out of the air, my first novel,
Artifacts
, had been submitted to them for possible publication. No one else at that party (or probably in the world, except for my agent and the people at Poisoned Pen Press) knew this. Shortly after that psychic reading, Poisoned Pen Press bought
Artifacts
. Or, in other words, when that woman pulled those two names out the air, two people named Robert and Barbara were poised to change my life.
Is this proof? Not really. Barbara and Robert are not the two rarest names in the world. Still, I do think that the odds are heavily stacked against that psychic being lucky enough to guess two names that were, right that minute, much on my mind.
I know what you're thinking. You're asking me: “So what about Sam?” Well, the third name she called out wasn't really Sam. I'm keeping his name to myself, and I'm watchfully waiting. If somebody named “Sam” comes along and changes my life again, then this engineer might be forced to believe in magic.
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