Witches' Bane (3 page)

Sybil had also acquired several other choice items for her poison gardens—oleander, lantana, mountain laurel, mistletoe, castor plants, water hemlock, jimsonweed, foxglove, death camus, delphinium, and belladonna. Attractive as they are, these are plants to be wary of. Children have died after eating lantana’s pretty purple berries, which are loaded with a virulent alkaloid. Oleander, which concentrates the natural arsenic in the soil, is so toxic that a hot dog roasted on an oleander twig has been fatal. Another name for belladonna is deadly nightshade, and the death camus, a lily like plant that grows wild along Texas roadsides, does just what it says it does—it kills.

Usually, of course, people don’t give a second thought to these perfectly ordinary plants. I’d bet that members of the garden club own oleanders and mountain laurels and delphinium and don’t suspect that they’re toxic. But Sybil intentionally collected these deadly plants because they were poisonous. What’s more, she had the audacity to enter them in the contest. It was the effrontery of the thing, I suspected, that had provoked the six good and true jurors of the Pecan Springs Garden Club and offended Wanda Rathbottom’s respectable soul.

The silence had lengthened. Sybil stared unblinkingly at Pam. “Why poisonous plants?” she repeated.

“Why not?”

“I just meant,” Pam said, unruffled, “that it’s an unusual kind of collection.” Deliberately, she sat down next to Sybil and smiled at her. Sybil didn’t smile back.

“Actually, people have been collecting toxic plants for centuries,” I said. I cut a wedge of Brie and added it to the apple on my plate. I really wanted a slice of my peach pie, but I felt obligated to leave it for the others. “The monastery gardens of the Middle Ages were full of them, mostly used for medicinal purposes. Digitalis comes from foxglove, for instance. It’s a heart stimulant. Wolfsbane is used by Chinese physicians to treat rheuthatism and pneumonia.”

“Don’t tell that to Wanda Rathbottom,” Dottie remarked. “Her husband is a doctor. If people go around growing their own heart medicine, what’ll happen to him?”

Ruby put out another plate of fruit. “I’m sure she thinks Sybil’s about to cast a spell over Wanda’s Wonderful Acres.”

Everybody laughed, me included. But you can’t blame the garden club. They are used to seeing red, white, and blue petunias planted in the shape of the American flag, not a collection of plants with enough poison to dispatch half the population of Pecan Springs.

“Speaking of witches,” Mary said, “I’m having a women’s Halloween party at my place out in Deadwood on Saturday night. Some of my Wiccan friends from Austin are coming. You’re all invited.”

“Wiccans?” Gretel asked apprehensively. “You mean,
real
witches?”

“They get lots of bad press,” Mary said. “Wicca is a goddess religion that claims to go back to prehistoric time. What Wiccans call witchcraft is their religious liturgy. Their Samhain—that’s the Wiccan New Year—coincides with our Halloween, and they celebrate it in a big way. Please wear costumes, the more outrageous the better. Ruby, I was hoping you’d give a few tarot readings for door prizes.”

“Sure,” Ruby said. “And China can bring some of her famous herbal incense.”

Ruby’s always volunteering me. But in this case, it sounded okay. 1 hadn’t been to a party for a while, and I was ready. Anyway, I wanted to see what Wiccans were really like.

“I’ll bring Samantha,” Dottie said. “She loves parties.” Samantha is one of Dottie’s favorite cats, a stunning black creature with green eyes.

“I’ll bring belladonna,” Sybil offered with a cool smile. “It was used as an ingredient in witches’ flying ointment.”

“Hey,” Gretel said, “you’re really into that stuff, aren’t you?”

If Sybil was growing belladonna herself, it would have to be indoors. The plant doesn’t fare well in our hot, dry climate. And if she was going to the trouble of growing it indoors, she must really be into the “baneful” herbs. The leaves and root of
Atropa belladonna
contain tropane alkaloids, as do jimsonweed and henbane, deadly nightshades that grow in vacant city lots and along country roads. Belladonna was once used in magical practice to induce visions (its Old English name was dwale, or delusion)—hence its association with the sixteenth-century “flying ointments.” It’s also the herb Juliet’s nurse gave her to keep her safe for Romeo, obviously in the wrong dose. Belladonna is a narcotic, and some sources suggest that witches condemned in the Inquisition surreptitiously swallowed it to help them doze through the fire. If Sybil was experimenting with the stuff, she’d better be careful. I’d read of dozens of tropane fatalities, including the mass poisoning of solthers sent to Jamestown in 1676 to put down Bacon’s Rebellion. They ate quantities of jimsonweed (a corruption of “Jamestown weed”), went crazy, and died. Tropane is nasty stuff.

“These witches don’t fly,” Mary said. “They’re white witches—you know, good witches. Black witchcraft is the evil kind.”

“Oh, yeah?” Pam asked dryly. “Well,
I’m
planning to go, so there’ll be at least one black witch there.” She looked at Dottie. “Do you rent black cats for the evening?”

“You can
have
one,” Dottie said. “In fact, you can have two or three, if you’ll give them a good home. I’ve got plenty of extras.”

Ruby served herself a piece of Mary’s chocolate cake. “I don’t think the good
ol
boys who hang out down at the Doughnut Queen can tell the difference between a white witch and a black witch.”

“Want to bet?” Pam asked with a snicker.

“You know what I mean.” Ruby perched on a stool with her cake and a mug of coffee. “And listen to the good ol’ girls at Bobbie Rae’s. As far as they’re concerned, a witch is a witch is a witch, excuse me, Gertrude Stein.”

“That’s the mentality that inspired the Salem witch trials,” Judith said.

“Salem?” Pam asked. “That was only the tip of the iceberg. Remember the Burning Times? In the fifteen hundreds, there were a couple of German towns where only one woman was left alive. The witch hunters burned all the rest.”

“Makes you wonder about the one who was left, doesn’t it?” Dottie said. “I’ll bet all those witches had cats,” she added somberly. “I wonder what they did to—”

“Do you mind if we talk about something else?” Gretel broke in hastily.

“Yeah,” Ruby said. “Those days are gone.”

Sybil’s face was half in shadow. “Are you sure?”

An uncomfortable silence filled the kitchen while we all thought about the grand jury and the Ellis case. Then there was a burst of chatter as everybody started talking about something else. The conversation went on for another fifteen minutes. When the women had said good-bye and left, I helped Ruby wash up the dessert plates and coffee mugs, and we sat down to share the surviving piece of peach pie.

I glanced around the comfortable kitchen, bright with fresh paint and a new sink and countertop. Ruby had even replaced the old fluorescent light that used to make you look like a week-old corpse. The year before—almost exactly a year ago, in fact—she’d bought the house from Meredith Gilbert, whose mother Jo had been our very good friend. Jo had been murdered here, and I often wondered if Ruby was haunted—as I was—by the ghost of Jo’s unfinished life. If so, Jo’s ghost must have been thrilled. Ruby had papered the walls and stained the woodwork, refinished the oak floors, and painted the exterior in shades of gray and soft blue, with coral accents. She’d filled the house with antiques, some of which had been Jo’s. Now, she was in the process of petitioning the Pecan Springs Heritage Society to add it to their register of historic homes. I smiled when I thought of New Age Ruby, with her cards and crystals and Inner Guide, living in this gracious old house, surrounded by antique furniture. There was something marvelously paradoxical about the idea.

Ruby sat back and her face softened. “China,” she said with the air of someone offering a piece of unexpected news, “I’m in love.”

I sighed. By my count, Ruby has been in love at least twice a year since her divorce four years ago from Ward. Her last lover ran the computer at CTSU. They’d been going out for about six months when the guy got involved with a twenty-three-year-old blonde who worked for him. The girl was just two years older than Ruby’s daughter, Shannon, a junior at the University of Texas this year. Ruby’s heart had been shattered, but she was obviously on the mend.

“This time it’s real, China,” Ruby said. “It’s Andrew.”

As if I hadn’t guessed. Andrew Drake, the photographer.

“He’s wonderful,” Ruby said. She wore a soft, pensive smile and her eyes were dreamy. “I think I’ve found my soul mate.”

“Ruby,” I said crisply, “your last soul mate married the girl in User Services. The one before that went back to his ex-wife, and the one before that—”

“I know, I know,” Ruby said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I’ve been working on becoming more aware of my codependency issues. I think I’m finally getting to the point where I can tell whether a relationship is healthy or toxic.” She leaned forward. “This one has a lot of potential, astrologically speaking. My Cancer moon is just a few degrees off his Leo sun, in my eighth house.”

I don’t know enough about the stars to second-guess Ruby’s astro analyzing, but this one didn’t sound quite right. “Since when are Cancer and Leo compatible? I thought water and fire didn’t mix.”

“Sure they do,” Ruby said. “How else would you get steam? And the eighth house is all about sexuality, you know. When we’re together, it’s very volatile.”

“It’s just that I don’t want you to go off the deep end again. I don’t want you to get hurt. I’m running short of Kleenex.”

I shut up. What gave me the right to give advice, even to my best friend? Where love was concerned, my own record wasn’t anything to brag about. Maybe I was jealous of Ruby’s ability to
feel
so deeply, to allow herself to be so fully involved with a man. I’d had a number of scorching affairs, all of which began with wild enthusiasm but eventually perished from lack of proper care and feeding. I couldn’t be the world’s greatest lawyer and the world’s greatest lover at the same time. Actually, I couldn’t be a lawyer and anything else at the same time. The year before I quit, I billed fifty-eight hours a week on average, no padding—and that didn’t include another twenty hours overhead. I had two sixty-day jury trials, one forty-five-day jury trial, and one bench trial—not to mention innumerable consultations, depositions, and hearings. No wonder I gave up sex. I almost didn’t have the energy to go to the bathroom.

But my relational skills haven’t noticeably improved since I stopped practicing law. When I moved to Pecan Springs, I promised myself I’d be open to a real relationship, commitment and all. Then McQuaid and I got involved in what seems like a healthy relationship, and while I’m a little less wary and a little more open, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to commit. So maybe I don’t
really
love him. Or maybe I do and don’t know it. Maybe, in fact, I haven’t yet figured out what love is. I guess there’s no law that says you learn how to love just by getting a little seniority.

That’s why I stopped offering Ruby advice on how to manage her affairs, pushed back my chair, and stood up. So did she. “Thanks for tonight’s lesson. Ruby. With a little practice, I might even get in touch with my unconscious.”

Ruby bent down and enveloped me in a sisterly hug, companionable and loving. I felt once again, as I often do, that maybe
we
are soul mates.

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet,” she said.

I enjoy riding my bike along Pecan Springs streets after dark. Living room lights are on and people don’t always draw their drapes, maybe because they want the neighbors to see the new piano or the painting they bought at the last Starving Artists show up in Austin. So I glance inside as I ride to see what the residents do with themselves at night. Most, of course, are watching TV or reading the newspaper or talking on the telephone. Once I saw a man building a ship in a bottle. The scenes are tranquil, pleasant, peaceful— boring, McQuaid would say. Ordinary life in an ordinary small town.

It was peaceful tonight, too. Except that Shorty Ennis, who lives by himself in an unpainted frame house at the corner of Vine and Mayberry, was drinking out of his bottle instead of building a ship in it. From the look of him, it wasn’t the first bottle of the day. Three blocks down Mayberry, I surprised two boys smashing a jack-o’-lantern on somebody’s front steps, and when I rode past, one heaved a hunk of it at me. At the corner of Mayberry and Crockett, a trio of teenaged ghosts, trick-or-treaters, were spraying pentagrams on car windows with aerosol shaving soap, inspired by witches, no doubt. I yelled at them and they scattered down the dark alley, but I knew they’d be back the minute I’d gone.

CHAPTER 3

Ah, peace. Ah, tranquility. Ordinary life in an ordinary small town.

Thyme and Seasons Herb Company opens for business at nine, when I put the cash tray in the register, get out the herb snacks and tea, and move racks of potted herbs out to the sidewalk. The building that houses the shop is built of square-cut white limestone, with terra-cotta floors, pine ceilings, and massive hand-hewn beams, cut from cypress trees that grew a hundred years ago along the Pecan River. It was remodeled before I bought it by a bright young architect who saved the best and fixed the worst. I live in four comfortable rooms at the back—a large kitchen, a bedroom, a workroom that used to be an office, and a living room, all with stone walls, wide-planked wood floors, and pine ceilings supported by heavy cypress beams. There’s a large second-floor loft where I hang drying herbs. Out back by the alley, a remodeled stone stable serves as a guest cottage.

Thyme and Seasons is small, so every square inch has to work. The ceiling is hung with bundles of dried herbs, ropes of red peppers, braids of garlic, and handcrafted wreaths. Wooden shelves along the walls hold glass jars full of bulk herbs and a great variety of herb products—vinegars, jellies, seasonings, soaps, herbal cosmetics, potpourri, incense, oils, teas. The corners are full of baskets filled with statice and baby’s breath, multicolored strawflowers, velvety cockscomb, the papery globes of nigella, creamy poppy pods. The front door is always decorated with something seasonal— in honor of Halloween I hung a witch’s broom decorated with Indian corn, wheat, miniature pumpkins, and bright orange-red pyracanthus berries. Outside, clay pots overflow with thyme and basil and rosemary, and the front yard is a patchwork of fragrant herb beds. Autumn is a busy time, and sales pick up in mid-October as people start to think about cooking and decorating for the winter season.