Witches' Bane (10 page)

I leaned forward for a closer look. Bloody footprints led from the body to a telephone on a table, then to the sofa where Judith was sitting with the cop. A knife—bone-handled, the word “Ruby” etched on its blood-stained blade—lay on the carpet behind the body and slightly to the left. In front of the body, there was a black dish filled with coins, a wooden wand tipped with a crystal, and a wine goblet. The goblet lay on its side. The wine, redder than Sybil’s blood, had soaked into the rug. Under the body, I could see a circle of tarot cards.

“God,” Ruby whispered, “how
awful\
She was stabbed while she was doing a spread.” She looked at me. “The Death card,” she said.
“My
card. Where is it?”

“A spread?” Blackie asked. “The Death card?” A strobe flashed, and the photographer repositioned herself to take another shot.

“A spread is a layout,” Ruby said. “With the tarot cards. She was in the middle of a ritual.”

Blackie’s eyes narrowed, wary, suspicious. “Fortune-telling cards?”

“Some people tell fortunes with them, but that’s not what Sybil was doing. I teach my students to use them to ask for guidance.”

“Guidance? Guidance for what?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby replied testily. “I don’t pry into what they’re seeking. That’s up to them.” She pointed with the toe of her sneaker. “These other things—the coins, the wand—they’re part of the ritual, too. They’re symbols of the elemental energies that the cards represent. The coins are earth, the goblet water, and the wand fire. The knife represents air.”

I felt sorry for Blackie. This was probably his first encounter with the New Age. “She was your student, huh? Is that how your knife got here? And what’s this about a Death card?”

“The knife was stolen from my store on Friday night. So was the thirteenth trump—the Death card. It’s got a picture of a skeleton on it. Somebody broke in and trashed out the place. I reported the break-in and Bubba, Chief Harris, I mean, came and investigated. I didn’t get around to reporting the knife, though. I didn’t miss it until late yesterday afternoon. I didn’t find out that the card was missing until last night.”

Blackie bent and lifted Sybil’s hip slightly. “This the card?” Under her body was the thirteenth trump. The grim reaper with its malevolent scythe, harvesting Sybil’s blood.

Ruby pulled in her breath sharply. “That’s it.”

“Could Mrs. Rand have stolen the knife and the card?”

“Of course not.” Ruby gestured at the luxurious room. “Why would she break into my store and trash it when she’s got all this? Anyway, somebody sent her the card. With a voodoo doll.”

“This thing?” Blackie pointed with his boot to something half hidden under Sybil’s hand.

I bent over. The black-haired thing stared up malevolently, the copper wire tight around its neck. “That’s it. It came with the tarot card, according to Sybil. The last time Ruby and I saw either one was when she put them on the kitchen counter, just before we left for the party. She was showing them to us.”

Blackie looked at me. “So whoever sent her the doll sent the card, too? How’d she seem about it?”

“She seemed...” Ruby paused. “She acted as if she didn’t want us to know how much it frightened her. The Rands’ maid was here, Angela Sanchez. Angela insisted that the doll was sent by someone who had a grudge. Sybil tried to treat it as a joke, but I thought she seemed scared.”

While Ruby and the sheriff were talking I had stepped to the bookshelves. Sybil had collected as odd and interesting an assortment of books as she had plants.
A Witch’s Guide to Gardening
was there, along with all eight volumes of Thomdike’s
A History of Magic and Experimental Science
and a book called
Cauldron Cookery.
She also had the I985 AMA
Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants
and reprints of several old English herbals I itched to get my fingers on. On the shelf below I saw several books on tarot, including an intriguing one called
The Qabalistic Tarot,
as well as half a dozen astrological texts. There was more, but I needed to get back to the conversation.

The sheriff was zeroing in on the weapon. “This knife— is there some special significance to it? That why it’s got your name on it?”

Ruby lifted her chin. “It’s my personal ritual knife. I use it in my own tarot ceremonies and when I teach the cards. In tarot, the knife—it’s called the
athame
—symbolizes the power to discriminate intelligently, to draw lines, to make choices. It represents the cutting edge of moral courage, knowing the difference between right and wrong. It’s not meant to actually cut anything. That’s why it’s so dull.”

Blackie gave a gritty laugh. He picked up the knife carefully and held it out on the flat of his hand. “Oh, yeah? If it was so dull, why did it slit Mrs. Rand’s diroat easy as bleeding a deer?”

Ruby put her hand to her mouth. “Slit ... her throat? I thought she was stabbed.”

I felt a chill, and the room suddenly felt like a great whitefloored cave, empty and echoing. Somehow, the idea of Sybil’s diroat being cut was much harder to handle than the idea of Sybil being stabbed. I pulled in my breath, remembering why I was there. “Juditii Cohen phoned Ruby after she found the body this morning. According to her, Sybil was stabbed.”

“You can bag Uiis, Malory,” Blackie said, handing the knife to one of the print team. “Ms. Cohen didn’t want to look too close,” he said to Ruby. “No question about it. The lady’s throat was slit. Very neat, very clean, very fatal. Kind of makes me wonder.”

It made me wonder, too. It looked as if the killer had come upon Sybil from behind so stealdiily that she didn’t know he was there. He? In this case, likely. Throat-slitting isn’t a means of murder often chosen by women. I knew about it in only two contexts, professional murders and ritual killings. If I had to make a snap judgment, I’d go with the ritual killing. What’s more, I’d bet that most of the elements of this crime appeared on the cult indicator list the Department of Public Safety had sent to Bubba.

“If it was my knife that did this,” Ruby said, “the blade had to have been sharpened.”

“You’re saying you didn’t sharpen it?”

“No. I don’t know how.”

I could see where Blackie was going. Premeditation. You usually don’t go to the trouble of sharpening a knife unless you intend to use it.

“If you ask me, this thing is connected with Sybil’s poison garden,” Ruby said. “First somebody steals her wolfsbane, then somebody makes a voodoo doll, then . .. this. It might even be connected with Bob Godwin’s goat. There was that business about the human sacrifice, too.” She snapped her fingers. “And the picketing.”

I frowned at her. The Reverend couldn’t have anything to do with this, unless she thought ... I didn’t want to think about what she thought.

“I know about Godwin’s goat,” Blackie said, “but what’s this about a poison garden? And a human sacrifice?”

It took a minute to fill Blackie in on the things that had been going on in Pecan Springs, including Sybil’s award for Most Unique Garden, her stolen wolfsbane, Mrs. Bragg’s chickens, and the tip Bubba had gotten about a human sacrifice.

Blackie went for the garden first. “Why would Mrs. Rand cultivate a bunch of poisonous plants? Do you think she was planning to use them?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She seems to have had quite a wide-ranging intellectual interest in the occult.” I gestured at the bookshelves. “Magical herbalism, astrology, the tarot.”

The sheriff glanced at the books, stepped closer, took down a volume of Thorndike and thumbed it. “You know of any cult she belonged to?” He put it back again and turned around.

“She was a loner,” Ruby said, “a solitary. She was too independent to belong to a ritual group.”

“What about the sacrifice?”

“That was some sort of anonymous tip,” I said. “You’ll have to ask Chief Harris about it.”

“And the picketing?”

Sharp, I thought. He didn’t miss a thing. “The picketing has nothing to do with this.” I avoided looking at Ruby. “We’ve had a little trouble at the stores, but the mayor got them to move on. It’s all settled.”

“They thought we were witches,” Ruby added helpfully.

“I wonder why,” Blackie said.

Judith got up from the sofa, gave us a small, tight-lipped nod, and left. Blackie turned to the cop who had been questioning her. “If you’re all through, Knight, get on the horn to the hospital and see what’s keeping the transport. You can use the phone in the kitchen if the print team’s finished in there.”

“Do you have a time of death?” I asked, as the cop headed for the phone.

Blackie countered with another question. “You say you left her here at eleven?”

“Yes.” I remembered something. “She was expecting company.” Was it her killer she had expected?

“That’s right,” Ruby said excitedly. “She got a call from a friend who wanted to come over, so she had to get home.”

“Kind of late for a visitor,” Blackie said. “Did she say whether this friend was a man or a woman?”

Ruby and I traded looks. We shook our heads. She hadn’t said.

“Who were her friends?”

“Judith, for one,” Ruby said. She paused, considering the question. “You know, I can’t think of any others. China and I, I suppose. But we really didn’t know her.” She looked down at the body. “She wasn’t an easy woman to know. There was something ... private about her. Something remote. I don’t think she liked most people.”

“She and her husband on good terms?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know him.”

The cop came back from using the phone. “The ambulance is on the way.”

Blackie nodded. “I understand that Lake Winds has some kind of full-time security. See if you can track down whoever was on duty last night.” He turned back to us. “One more thing. After you left Mrs. Rand here, what did you do?”

“China dropped me off at eleven-fifteen,” Ruby said. “I read for a while—the latest Linda Grant mystery—then I went to sleep.”

“Witnesses?”

Ruby sighed. “I wish.”

Blackie turned to me. “How about you?”

It would have been convenient if McQuaid had come over to give me an alibi, but he hadn’t. “I got home at eleven-thirty, roughly, and went to bed.” I smiled. “With my cat.”

Blackie didn’t smile. “You two can go now. But I may have other questions, so let me know before you leave town.”

Ruby looked uneasy. “You don’t suspect either of us, do you?”

Blackie shrugged. “I’m a suspicious person. I suspect everybody.”

CHAPTER
8

The mayor’s truce held. Of course, there might not have been any pickets anyway, since it was Sunday afternoon and they’d presumably honor the Sabbath. On Sundays, Ruby and I are open from noon to four, just to catch the tourists. Since Maggie’s Magnolia Kitchen opened up across the street, the Sunday tourist traffic has improved. Maggie Garrett, the trim, lively ex-nun who bought the old restaurant last June, also bought the vacant lot next door. She created an open-air dining area under the pecan and live oak trees and I landscaped the rest with perennial herbs such as Russian sage and Mexican oregano
(Poliomintha longiflora,
a shrub that bears lavender flowers on glossy leaves and has the same scent as Greek and Turkish oregano) and Texas wildflowers—coreopsis, eryngo, gayfeather, beebalm, and several asclepias for the butterflies. Maggie, who used to be called Sister Margaret Mary, managed the Benedictine Sisters’ kitchen at St. Theresa’s Convent outside of town for ten years. She left the order last year and brought her culinary talents—speciality omelets, fine pastas, and wonderfully fragrant breads—to the old Magnolia Kitchen, which closed when its owner died. Maggie’s has become a Sunday lunch tradition for people from Austin out for a leisurely drive through the Hill Country, and a lot of people wander across the street to Thyme and Seasons.

I was glad to be busy. The work kept my mind off the corpse on the bloody carpet. But whenever I had a breather, the questions elbowed their way front and center. Who killed Sybil? Why? Was it some sort of ritual killing, as everything seemed to indicate? Or had someone had a reason to hate her—a hate compelling enough to lead to murder?

The questions filled me with a heavy sense of deja vu, as I thought of what lay ahead. Blackie had already started analyzing information and developing a theory. Before long, if he got a few breaks, he’d have a case. There’d be an arrest, an arraignment, an indictment, and, if the D.A. did his work, the grand jury’s true bill. Then discovery motions and a pretrial hearing, while the prosecution and the defense worked their asses off to develop both sides of the story. Finally, jury selection and trial, drawn out as long as possible by the defense until there was, inevitably, a verdict. If the defendant was found innocent, that was the end of the road— as my senior partner used to say, it’s pretty damned tough to try two different people for the same murder. Guilty, and the appeals could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Five years, ten years, twelve years from now, when time and luck and appeals ran out, we the people would exact a life for Sybil’s life: strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville death row, the murderer would the by lethal injection. The road to what we call justice is a hell of a lot longer than the road to murder. The thought was almost as depressing as the violence of Sybil’s death.

News travels fast in law-enforcement circles. McQuaid called at two to tell me he’d heard. “How about having dinner with Brian and me this evening?” he asked. “You can fill me in on the gory details then.”

“Leatha’s coming at eight,” I said without enthusiasm.

“No sweat. We can eat at six. It doesn’t take long to get around a plate of ribs and sausage. The mesquite’s already fired up and the sauce is on the stove, along with the beans.” In addition to his other talents, McQuaid cooks.

“Super,” I said. “Listen, before you put the ribs on, would you do me a favor? Drop by the Rand house out in Lake Winds and see what kind of a line you can get on the case.” I gave him the address.

There was a moment of silence. I suspected that McQuaid was deciding whether Blackie would want his old buddy to trespass on his turf. Fraternity or not, cops don’t like other cops nosing around. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I guess I can do that. I’m kind of curious myself. See you at four thirty for margaritas, huh?” Margaritas don’t exactly go with ribs and sausage, but McQuaid makes good margaritas, too. Anyway, there’s no Emily Post when it comes to barbecue.