Rituals (8 page)

Chapter Nine

Faye should have guessed that Amande had something up her sleeve when she turned down pie. Looking at the heavy-laden dessert cart, Faye couldn't comprehend Amande's attitude. She tried in vain to find one treat that didn't feature chocolate, coconut, cherries, or caramel. What wasn't to like?

But Amande was only interested in fiddling with her phone, which she checked at least six times during dinner. (Faye had counted.) What was the use of girls-night-out in their bed-and-breakfast's fancy restaurant if the girls in question weren't talking?

Faye made a mental correction. Amande was talking. She was just talking with her thumbs and she wasn't talking to her. But maybe mothers expected too much. If she and Amande were going to be working together all day and sleeping in the same room every night, then maybe Faye needed to build a little alone time into the schedule for both of them.

Oh, great. She should never have admitted to herself that it might be problematic to work together all day with someone and then sleep in the same room every night. Because that was an exact description of her life with Joe. She'd felt guilty about leaving him with Michael, but maybe she'd accidentally done a good thing for their relationship.

Obsessing over her marriage rendered the caramel-coconut-cherry tart absolutely irresistible. She ordered it to-go and called after the waiter, “Can you put a little chocolate syrup on that?”

“Mom.” Amande looked up from her phone. “We have a bottle of Hershey's syrup in the fridge in our room.”

“You're right. I forgot.”

“You
are
stressed. Tell you what. I have something important to do. I'll go up to our room and take care of it while you wait for your coconut-cherry gut bomb. Bring it with you and we can play some gin rummy while you eat it.”

And off she went, worrying her phone's keyboard with both thumbs, while Faye worried over who was on the other end of all those messages.

***

Faye shoved the door open with her hip, so that there was no risk of dropping her luscious pile of coconut, cherries, and goo. She was greeted by three voices yelling, “Surprise!”

One of them was Amande's, obviously, because she was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her computer on her lap. The source of the other two voices was a mystery, until her daughter turned the computer screen to face her. Dead in the center of the screen was Joe's handsome face. In his lap sat a squirming lump of boy, gripping his father's long straight near-black hair with both hands.

Faye looked at the computer, unfettered by any wires whatsoever. She thought of all the miles she had flown on an airplane to get here. Not to mention the boat ride from their home on Joyeuse to shore and the car ride to the airport and the miles in the rental car that had brought her here. Yet there sat Joe and his green eyes. She missed him so much. She missed both of them.

Faye could remember when phones had cords. She remembered when photographs came from film that took time to develop. She hadn't always had a phone in her pocket. And she remembered when long distance calls were luxuries.

Reading her mind, or perhaps reading her frugal facial expression, Amande said, “It's Skype, Mom. It's free! Come over here and talk.”

Faye knew it was free. She was just adjusting herself to the rocketing pace of technology and the rollicking passage of time.

She settled herself on the bed, but Amande grabbed her shoulders before she could say much beyond, “Oh, you two look so good!” She felt herself pulled back sixty degrees from vertical, at least, as the girl yanked her out of range of the computer's camera.

The girl put her mouth next to Faye's ear and hissed. “This is a big deal. Act like you're impressed.”

“I
am
impressed.”

Faye hoped they were out of range of the computer's microphone, as well as its camera. See no evil, hear no evil.

“No, really. You're impressed when he shoots a deer and fills up the freezer with it. For this, you need to make him feel like a rock star. It has taken me all day to get Dad up to speed on a simple little thing like video chatting. Seriously.”

“When I met your Dad, he didn't know how to use an ATM. I
am
impressed.”

Amande removed her hands so that Faye could sit up straight and show her husband how impressed she was.

“Oh, Sweetheart, it's so good to see your face! How did you and Amande manage this? I can hardly believe it. It's almost like a miracle.”

Joe beamed. “It ain't such a big deal, not when you've got a smart girl to help you.”

Out of view of the computer's camera, Amande squeezed Faye's knee in approval. It seemed her daughter thought she was doing a good job of being impressed by a video chat, something routinely accomplished by nine-year-olds the world over.

“Michael, you're so big! Come closer to the camera so Mommy can see you.”

Amande's elbow caught Faye in the ribs. Tiny Faye sometimes had bruises from her big, sturdy daughter's physical expressiveness, especially after she'd said something that sounded dumb to a teenager. “Mom,” she hissed. “It hasn't been two weeks. He cannot possibly be visibly bigger.”

Faye ignored her. “He's
huge
. Michael, tell Amande and me what you and Daddy have been doing every day.”

He stuck his chubby hands two feet apart and said, “Fish!”

Joe, behind him, held his hands up, too, but he was an honest fisherman. His hands were much closer together than Michael's.

Faye caught his eye and he grinned, first down at their not-too-honest son and then at her.

“I swim, too!” Michael's arms flailed in a big windmill, whapping Joe in the chest with every stroke.

“Is that a new bathing suit you're wearing? Show it to Mommy and Amande.”

“Yes. Has fish.” He raised the hem of his oversized T-shirt to show off the rainbow-colored fish covering his new swim trunks, then he kept going. Michael had just learned to take off his shirt, so he did so at every opportunity. Come hell or high water, that shirt was coming off, and it was coming off now. This new trick lacked the severe ramifications of his last one, removing his diaper.

Joe smoothed the shirt back down over Michael's brown belly, as if he could stop this striptease, but Michael was a toddler. Frustration was not to be borne. A struggle over the shirt ensued.

Faye was on the brink of saying, “Oh, let him take it off. What will it hurt?” when Michael won his small battle. Faye's chest tightened at the sight of the long bandage running below her child's right collarbone. The words, “What in the hell happened?” spilled out of her mouth.

She knew Joe hated it when she cursed.

Faye would have ached at the look of helpless misery on her husband's face, if she hadn't been so angry. It had been a long time since she saw that look. When they'd met, his self-esteem had been buried under a lifetime of the kind of failures that come with learning disabilities the size of boulders.

Joe had worked for years to make up for lost time, and Faye had helped him. She'd taught him to drive. She'd tutored him for his GED, then bullied the university into giving him the accommodations his disabilities required. He'd learned to recognize his own undeniable intelligence. Then they'd built a business together and a life and a family.

It seemed so long ago, but the misery on his face brought it all back. Until this moment, she hadn't realized how terrified Joe was that he would someday let her down.

She had already asked, ‘What in the hell happened?” The best thing to do now would be to hold her tongue and wait for his answer.

“He saw me spear-fishing and—“

“Fish!”

“Yes, son, we caught some fish.” He put a hand on Michael's back to quiet him. “I didn't take him out there with me, Faye, and I never let him touch the spear. I gave him some rocks to play with on the beach and I stayed close in, so I could make sure he stayed out of the water. And he did. He stayed on the beach like a good boy.”

“Yes. No water. Daddy said!”

Faye could see how much it hurt Joe to tell this story, so she tried to help. “You were a good boy to do what Daddy said.”

Michael reached for the computer screen, trying to touch her face. The action jostled his wounded shoulder and he winced a little. The child was tougher than beef jerky, so he must really be hurting.

“I told him he could play in the tide pools. You know the ones.”

She did. They were two inches deep, tops. She had let him play there less than a month ago.

“Well, he found a sharp stick, almost as long as he is. He was pretending like he was spear-fishing, too, stabbing make-believe fish in the tide pool. I didn't like the looks of the stick and I thought he was being too rambunctious, so I came up on the beach to take the stick away. Honest, Faye. I was hardly ten feet away when he fell. The stick broke under him, and it jabbed up into his shoulder.”

Faye told the truth when she said, “You didn't do anything I wouldn't have done myself.” Then she listened to Joe describe a sequence of events she'd imagined a thousand times.

Medical crises assume a new level of significance for island dwellers. Miles of water stand between them and help. Joe had done what she'd always known she might someday have to do: he'd stanched the bleeding and bandaged the wound, while assessing whether this was an ambulance-level situation or a trip-to-the-emergency-room situation. Nixing the ambulance, which would have been a helicopter or boat, he had loaded their son into one of their own boats and headed for shore.

Joe told the story calmly, rationally, but Faye got a sense of his level of terror when he said, “On our way in, I called Sheriff Mike. Magda and him met me at the dock and went with us to the hospital.”

Joe only asked for help in matters of life and death. Faye could see that Michael had been in no such danger, so Joe must have been at the end of his emotional rope to have made that call. She said, “Thank God for friends. I'm so glad they were there for you.” Then she casually asked the question that had been festering since she saw the bandage. “When did this happen?”

It could be easy to lose track of time on an island, so maybe Joe really wasn't sure. Or maybe he didn't want to be sure. “Four days? Maybe five?”

The fact that Faye didn't start screaming things like “Don't you know?” was proof that she was deeply in love with this man.

The conversation had grown boring from a two-year-old's perspective, so Michael had scaled his father's ribcage and was now standing on one broad shoulder. Joe had both his strong hands around the boy's trunk, lest he fall.

Faye couldn't think of much to say that wouldn't leave her bawling. She went with a question that could be answered with a concrete and unemotional number. “How many stitches?”

“Twelve.”

This huge number did not remove the distinct danger that she might start bawling. It was time to get off the phone. Skype. Whatever.

She smiled brightly and said, “Michael, it's your bedtime. Will you try not to be taller than me when we get home? And do you promise to do everything your daddy tells you to do? He's a smart man and you can learn a lot from him.” To Joe, she just said, “I love you so much. We'll be home as soon as we can.”

After the men in her life vanished from the screen and after she was dead-sure that the audio link was broken, too, Faye looked at her daughter. “Did he think I'd never notice the scar?”

“Sometimes Dad lives in a dream world. You know that.”

“When was he going to tell me?”

Neither of them knew the answer to her question, so they went to bed. Since she hadn't been able to say it to Joe and she probably never would, the words circled through her brain through a sleepless night.

When was he going to tell me?

***

Amande knew her mother wasn't sleeping. If she herself were sleeping, she would not know this.

She understood how much Faye hated to think of Michael hurting and far away. She loved her new baby brother, and she wasn't looking forward to seeing the scar on his tiny chest. She did not, however, think that Faye fully understood the flip side of this situation: Michael was so lucky to have a long list of people who cared when he hurt.

In Amande's foggy memories of her toddler years, her Grandmother Miranda hovered…her grandmother and no one else. Miranda wept over little Amande's wounds and tended them, but she was the only one. No mother had stood between Amande and loneliness. No father. No other grandparents, no cousins, no friends.

In Amande's mind, even a two-year-old could grasp the concept of tenuous safety: “This person takes care of me. If she goes away, I have no one.”

She still prayed at bedtime, the way Miranda had taught her. Tonight, she told God how thankful she was that Michael would never be just one person away from being alone. Then she prayed for Tilda and for Myrna, the sister who had been left alone.

Chapter Ten

Work isn't always fun. Focus on the money you're earning and the bills you're going to pay with it.

This was the scolding that Faye would have expected to give a teenager. It embarrassed her to admit that she was the one who needed scolding. Amande shifted in her chair now and then, and she sometimes gazed out the window, but her to-be-sorted pile was shrinking just as fast as Faye's. They were giving their client good work. Nobody ever promised that it would be interesting.

As Faye opened yet another storage box, Amande gave a little squeak. Faye hurried to the girl's work table, because something about the squeak was distinctly not bored.

“Look at the date on this letter! It says July 17, 1848.”

There were many artifacts in this museum that dated from the 1840s and before, but Faye knew very well what had happened near Rosebower on July 18 and 19, 1848—the Seneca Falls convention for women's rights.

Amande's hand was shaking. “It's signed by a woman named Virginia Armistead. And the return address is from Seneca Falls.”

She held the letter out to her mother, but Faye didn't take it. This was Amande's moment. Faye just asked, “Can you read it?”

She watched the girl lay the sheets of the letter over her work surface, smoothing them individually with hands sheathed in white cotton gloves. Despite her desire to see Amande do this herself, Faye couldn't resist doing her own hands-off assessment. The paper looked supple and it wasn't terribly yellowed. The use of wood pulp in paper had already begun at the time this letter was written but, by 1848, the Armisteads were living in grand style in Tilda's and Myrna's beautiful mansions. Virginia Armistead would have had the means to buy high-quality paper. Perhaps she was using stationery bought when she was a bride, possibly many years before. It would be no big trick to find out how long she'd been married in 1848.

Faye could see a monogram on the stationery, centered on an elaborate “A” that might have been a symbol of a bride's pride in her new name. So maybe they would find that they were lucky in Mrs. Armistead's choice of writing paper. But had the ink bled or faded? Was her beautiful but archaic penmanship still legible?

Amande's face gave her that answer. As the girl read, her mouth dropped open.

Still agape, she looked up at Faye with her index finger still pointed at the second paragraph. “She says,
‘I haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing dear Mrs. Stanton. I am given to understand that she has been at work with her pen, using words on paper to speak for us all. Forgive me, dear husband, if I have misspoken, for perhaps she does not speak for you. For myself and our daughter, however, I wish for the security to know that our property will remain ours to control. And, though I know you disagree on this point, I wish to have a voice in all my affairs, including those of my country. I wish to vote. When we gather tomorrow, I shall take the chance to say so.'
”

Amande removed her forefinger from the letter. “Oh, Mom.”

The history geek in Faye wanted to snatch the letter up and read it, immediately, but the mother in her stilled her hand. There was only one way impulsive Faye would be able to give Amande the chance to fully appreciate what she had found. She needed to leave the room.

“You transcribe the letter,” she said as she hugged the girl and then hurried out the door. “I'll go tell Myrna what you found.”

***

As Faye pulled the museum door shut behind her, she reminded herself that Amande was completely capable of transcribing the letter safely. It was already spread across her clean workspace. She hardly needed to touch it. There was no food or drink in the room, and Faye couldn't imagine her daughter sloshing a Coke across an irreplaceable letter, anyway. Everything would be fine.

Since she was concentrating on disasters that weren't going to happen, instead of looking where she was going, she walked straight into a defenseless pedestrian.

Mortified, Faye looked the woman over to make sure she wasn't hurt. She was older than Faye, but still far from being one of the octogenarians who seemed so common in Rosebower. “Oh, I'm so sorry. That was stupid of me. Are you okay?”

“I hardly felt anything. You're not big enough to hurt a fly.”

Faye reflected that she might have inflicted a little damage on both of them, if she'd been traveling at top speed. Fortunately, her momentum had been low.

“Aren't you the archaeologist working for Samuel? My name is Toni. I love history, and I think your work is just fascinating.”

“If you like dusty and dirty old junk.”

“I don't just like dusty and dirty old junk. I like Samuel's dusty and dirty excuse for a museum.”

“You've got to be kidding me. The whole time I've been working in there, I've been wondering if anybody would ever be looking at this stuff when I got finished. If I were completely evil, I would hide a few outrageous captions in the display cases, just to see if anybody reads them.”

“Like this, maybe? ‘This small bone, a human index finger, is the only remaining relic of Adam, the first man.'” Toni laughed out loud at her own joke.

Faye was an introvert by nature, filling her human need for sociability by surrounding herself with a few cherished friends and family members. Yet there were those times when she met someone and immediately felt a potential for friendship. Something about the keen mind behind Toni's bright eyes, augmented by her confident friendliness, appealed to Faye.

“When the museum reopens,” she said to Toni, “make sure to read all the captions. I may leave a few outrageously non-historical Easter eggs for you to find.”

“Well, hurry up with it. Samuel has kicked me out of the museum until you have that grand reopening, and I'd like to finish my book before I'm sixty.”

“You're writing a book? About Rosebower? Why?”

After she said it, Faye realized that the “Why?” was probably rude. There was no writer alive who did not believe that his or her topic was completely fascinating.

“You're not surprised, are you? You know better than anybody else what happened around here. The abolition movement. The fight for women's rights. The founding of the Spiritualist movement, hot on the heels of the Second Great Awakening of the Protestant religions. Joseph Smith and his golden Bible. In the 1800s, this part of New York was as busy and alive as an anthill after somebody stirred it with a stick. Of course, I can get a book out of that.
Anybody
could get a book out of all that.”

Faye nodded to concede her point. She noticed that Toni had fallen in beside her as she walked.

“Are you planning to hit the bestseller lists with the story of Rosebower?”

Toni laughed and said, “I highly doubt that. Maybe it'll sell a few copies and maybe it won't. I'm doing this for fun.”

“I hear that tourist traffic in this town goes up every year. It's been years since New Age stuff got fashionable, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and those people are interested in anything metaphysical. They keep coming here to see the places where Spiritualism got its start. This is like Mecca to them. I think you'll sell a lot of books in the local gift shops.”

Toni laughed again. “Yeah, and maybe that'll cover what I'm paying to rent a house for a year. I figure it'll take about ten years of gift-shop sales to do that.”

“If you don't think it'll be profitable, then why do it?”

“I'm retired so I can do what I want to do. I want to write this book. If I were motivated by a steady paycheck, I would have stuck to teaching.”

“You're writing a book. Does that mean you were an English teacher?”

“Physics.”

“I loved physics! I took a few courses in college, just for fun,” Faye said, surprised to be so comfortable with this woman that she was willing to be unrepentantly nerdy upon first acquaintance.

“Then meet me at Dara's show tonight at seven. I can tell you how she makes cards disappear and tables fly.”

“My daughter will be with me.”

“Bring her.”

***

As Toni the Astonisher watched Faye Longchamp-Mantooth walk toward the front door of Myrna Armistead's house of mourning, she wondered at herself. It was no secret to anyone in Rosebower that she was in town to write a book. Samuel knew she'd burned many hours in his museum. But why had she outed herself as a physicist? And why had she promised to tell Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth the secrets behind Dara Armistead's psychic abilities? It would do her work no good for the inhabitants of Rosebower to be warned about the exposé coming their way. She had acted on instinct, but it was done. There was no sense in second-guessing an action that might prove to be the right one.

A performer, particularly one whose act is based on illusion, must be gifted with intuition. A rapport between a magician and her audience is essential. If the people watching do not follow her into a world where magic might be real, then they cannot willingly be fooled.

In Toni's opinion, the ability to sense an audience's belief or disbelief was not a matter of psychic talent. It was an ability to sense the subtle stirrings that said her audience was bored, so she'd better by God say something funny or she would lose them. The sound of the shifting of human butts on upholstery fabric told her when she should quicken the pace of the next illusion, or maybe even skip it.

Toni did not believe that this special sense was magical. She believed it was a part of human nature. Her sense of Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was that she would be deeply interested in Toni's work. That sense also told her that Faye could be trusted.

***

Amande knew her mother had no idea that Ennis LeBecque was stalking them.

Oh, okay, maybe he was just stalking her. This was the first time she'd been out of her mother's sight in the twenty-four hours since Ennis first laid eyes on her, yet here he was, not five minutes after Faye walked out the door. And here he still stood, lingering in the doorway from the museum's display area into the work room and thereby blocking her primary exit. Her logical mother would agree that the timing suggested that he had been lurking outside, waiting for Faye to leave.

Amande didn't look at the closet behind her, but she was glad to know that there was an exterior door in there, intended for deliveries. Maybe Ennis knew about it and maybe he didn't, but the rising hairs on the back of Amande's neck were saying, “Make sure you've always got a safe way out.”

Ennis stood there, lean and gawky, wearing a goofy smile. All he said was, “Hey.”

God, this man was smooth. She fastened her eyes on him, but gave him no answer.

“Are you gonna be in town long?” he asked, looking so pointedly at her chest that she wanted to say, “The girls and I will
be here for another month or so.”

But she didn't really want to say that. She was pretty sure she wanted him to go away, almost sure, so she decided to remind him that she didn't like him.

“How's your aunt? Did you leave her strapped in her chair and staring out a window?”

He didn't rise to the bait. “She's taking a nap. And she's got me on speed dial.” He held up a cell phone. “There's no place in Rosebower that's more than five minutes from our house. Some people live in houses so big that it'd take that long to find an old lady if she got hurt.”

This was true enough. Amande laid her gloved hand flat on the Armistead letter, not because she thought it wasn't safe when Ennis was around, but because she felt the need to touch something old and comforting.

He took a step toward her. “Anybody ever tell you that you're pretty?” Another step. “Real pretty?”

“Yes. My dad. He's twice your size and he makes these for fun.” She reached into the box of stone tools on her desk and groped for the wickedest spear-point she could feel. It was longer than her hand, and its finely wrought flint retained an edge that would meet the exacting sharpness standards of an eye surgeon.

She held it up for him to see. Both of its honed edges extended from end to end. Her thin cotton glove would be only the barest protection from those edges, if she tried to use it while gripped in her hand. Still, Ennis was no bigger than she was. Amande was pretty sure she could hurt him bad enough to make up for the lacerations her hands would suffer while she was doing it. If she had to. If he quit taking steps in her direction, then this spear point could remain what it now was. A rock.

“I only want to talk to you.”

Maybe this was true. Having spent the first sixteen years of her life as a social outcast, and having spent the past year alone with her family on an island, she didn't know how to talk to men any more than Ennis knew how to talk to women. Maybe those stupid hairs on the back of her neck were standing up because she was attracted to him but, more likely, it was because he creeped her out. She had no idea how to tell the difference.

Since she saw no immediate need to defend herself, she palmed the point and rested her hand in her lap. Then she sat and listened. It seemed that Ennis didn't care much what she had to say, as long as he could stand there and look at her while he talked.

“Don't you ever just want to do something crazy?” He gestured vaguely at the window behind her. “Don't you ever want to run down the road…no car, no suitcase, no nothing…and get away from jobs and grown-ups and laws that say we're too young for a goddamn can of beer? Well, don't you?”

He was standing still, so the hand holding the stone point held still, too.

“From what I've seen of the things goddamned cans of beer do to my worthless relatives, I wish the law would keep them away from everybody. How old are you, Ennis?”

“Twenty. Old enough to fill out a draft card, but not much else.”

“I think twenty is too old to be talking about ‘grown-ups' like they're somebody else. From where I sit, you
are
a grown-up. I'm seventeen and I'm damn sure not a kid. Twenty is old enough to be grateful to the woman who puts a roof over your head. And it's old enough to get a job that earns you a roof of your own. Speaking of jobs—”