Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series) Read online

  “I am going to bed. My bed’s over there.” Myrna gestured at another early nineteenth-century house across the street, just as impressive as Tilda’s. In fact, it was utterly identical to Tilda’s. “Our great-great-great-grandfather built hers, and his brother built mine.”

  Amande poked her head out her own window. “Do you have a secret room under the staircase, too?”

  Myrna hobbled over to be close to the girl. “I do. The banisters on my staircase are carved of the same pretty wood, and my brass chandeliers are just as brassy. And I have the other half of the family antiques. You have to see it all. Say you’ll come soon.”

  Amande promised she would, and Faye pulled the car out of Tilda’s driveway. If she’d been dog-tired before, she didn’t know how to describe her status now. Double-dog-tired?

  The rental car gave a polite ding. She might be double-dog-tired, but now she was going to have to find the energy to feed this car another tank of expensive gasoline.

  ***

  Amande hadn’t spoken while Faye pumped the gas. She hadn’t said more than two words since they drove away from Myrna. At first, Faye’s judgment had been that it was better to leave her alone. Right now, she was doubting her judgment.

  Finally, Amande spoke. “I saw her. I saw my mother. In the crystal ball. I wanted to bust it open and let her out, because she looked like she was trapped in there.”

  “I saw some weird things, too. How do you feel about seeing Justine?”

  “I feel like I’ve had some questions answered, except I don’t know what my questions were.”

  Faye pulled out of the gas station parking lot and turned onto the narrow northbound lane of Rosebower’s Main Street. She felt like she needed to maneuver carefully through this conversation.

  “How did you know which one was your mother?”

  Amande cocked her head in Faye’s direction. “She looked like the picture I have of her, the one taken when she was my age. Only she was older. But why do you say ‘which one’?” My mother was the only…um…visitor I saw. Who did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anybody I recognized. I didn’t see anything but lights…pretty lights. It was better than it sounds. My mother was there, and my grandmother. I think my father was there, right next to Douglass.”

  “You’ve told me about Douglass. He came to you tonight? And you were with your father for the first time that you remember? How cool is that?”

  It was cooler than Faye could say, so she didn’t try. Instead, she said, “Look. The diner’s still open. I happen to know that they have banana splits on the menu.”

  Faye could hardly have been less hungry, not after their gargantuan meal. Also, the flavor of licorice might have put her off her food forever. Amande, however, was a growing girl and she’d had no dessert that she was willing to swallow.

  Within minutes, they were giving their order to Julie, the waitress.

  “I’m not very hungry,” Faye said. “Let’s split one.”

  “That’s not why they call it a banana split.”

  “You’re going to make your old mother eat a whole banana split? She’ll get fat.”

  “You’re not old and you have the metabolism of a hummingbird.”

  Faye rewarded Amande for this flattery with an entire banana split, and she couldn’t say she didn’t intend to eat every bite of her own.

  She eyeballed the solemn girl. “You okay?”

  “I’m always okay.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “We’re alike that way.” Amande used her napkin to wipe a stray spot of chocolate syrup off the table. “Other people have had it easy so far, but maybe they’ll fall apart when things get bad. You and me…we already know what bad is, and we already know we can take it.”

  Faye wished she’d been the one offering the sage observations.

  Six scoops of ice cream, two bananas, and four bad jokes later, Faye saw her daughter smile. Her work was done.

  ***

  Joe woke suddenly. It took a moment to come back from the dream and realize where he was.

  Faye wasn’t here, and that felt wrong. He was still wearing his clothes, and he felt like he’d just finished running a marathon.

  Oh, yeah. He’d spent the day chasing a two-year-old. He had just finished running a marathon.

  This revelation also explained why there was a crushing weight on his chest. He’d gone to sleep with Michael on top of him. This beat the other explanation for that crushing weight, a heart attack at the tender age of thirty-three.

  The dream was still reaching for him. Now he remembered what woke him.

  Douglass. Douglass didn’t come to him often. When he did, it meant Faye needed him. He put the boy to bed and picked up the phone.

  Later tonight, he’d build a fire in the fireplace. Just a little one, because it was hot outside. When Joe needed to commune with the dead, he didn’t need much. A little fire and a fistful of sacred herbs would do.

  ***

  A stop for gas. A stop for ice cream. Faye’s bed didn’t feel any closer than it had when she’d left Rosebower.

  She had picked their quaint bed and breakfast at the Vandorn House on the outskirts of Buffalo for several reasons—some of them rational. It was cheaper than Rosebower’s one and only inn, and it was even quainter. Faye had totally gotten into planning this mother-daughter trip, so when it came to choosing their lodgings, she’d decided that girlier was better. Their bedroom dripped with chintz, ruffles, and lace, and the thought of its million-thread-count sheets made Faye long for bed even more.

  From the comfort of home, she’d figured that this place’s quaintness-to-cheapness ratio made the thirty-minute drive to Rosebower worthwhile. It was also situated near several major highways, and Faye had big plans for this trip that didn’t all involve work. The time they lost on their daily drives to Rosebower would be made up on the weekends, when she planned to take Amande on road trips in all directions to look at potential colleges. And, of course, there would be the very girly pilgrimage to Seneca Falls.

  When it came to travel-planning, Faye was uncommonly astute at figuring out how to get the most experiences per dollar spent, but she sometimes neglected the limits of human endurance. She was exhausted, and Amande looked like she could hardly hold her head up. A more convenient hotel might have been better, but they were locked into their current lodgings because she had negotiated a sweet monthly rate with the proprietor.

  Her phone rang and she saw that it was Joe. Damn her self-imposed rule against talking on the phone while driving. She believed in the good example mode of parenting, and she didn’t ever want Amande careening down a highway with her phone in her hand and her mind a million miles away. Faye needed to talk to Joe even more than usual, and that was saying a lot, but rules were rules. She let the call go to voice mail.

  Amande rested her head against the passenger window. Faye hoped she was sleeping instead of seeing her dead mother trapped in a crystal ball.

  ***

  The parking situation at the B&B was almost as quaint as its pocket-sized bathroom. Faye took care navigating the narrow lane to the parking lot around back. This was good, because as she rounded the sharp curve, she found her way blocked by a lemon-colored car. It had missed the final curve, then skidded sideways into three parked cars. The echoes of those three impacts, one after the other, must have been still reverberating when Faye and Amande arrived, because a crowd was only beginning to gather.

  Faye stopped her car and got out. Various versions of “What in the hell just happened?” were sounding as she pushed her way through the onlookers. She didn’t know what in the hell had just happened, but she certainly knew who owned that car. How many mint-condition yellow 1972 Monte Carlos could there be in western New York? Amande was at her side, helping her get through the crowd. Faye wished she’d had the presence of mind to tell the girl to wait in the car.

  Faye recognized the B&B’s owner, who was leaning in the window of the old Monte Ca
rlo, and she recognized the woman at the wheel. It was Tilda, who looked uninjured but terribly upset.

  “Faye!” Tilda called out. Her voice was weak and harsh.

  The hotel manager stepped aside. Faye had to lean in close to hear Tilda. A strong odor of smoke from her clothes and hair and breath signaled that all was not as it seemed. Tilda’s wheezing breaths scared Faye enough to make her ask if someone had called 911.

  Three people pointed to the cell phones at their ears. Help was on its way. Faye sensed that this was a good thing.

  Tilda had a lot to say, most of it unintelligible. Exhausted from trying to speak, she sank back, her head lolling against the driver’s seat. Faye hadn’t understood much, but she’d caught a few troubling phrases. “Needed to be safe,” and “No place to go,” and “Nobody to trust.” Still more troubling was this: “Myrna…she wouldn’t wake up. I couldn’t…Faye, can you help?”

  By the time the paramedics arrived, Tilda was dead, and Faye was left to wonder why a dying agoraphobic who had traveled only a couple thousand miles since 1972 had driven thirty miles to ask a relative stranger for help.

  Chapter Three

  Faye didn’t know Myrna’s number or address, but she was able to give the emergency personnel enough information to find her. Then she told the story of Tilda’s final moments several times to various people in uniform. Finally, they left her alone while they examined the Monte Carlo and its owner, trying to figure out what had really happened to Tilda.

  Faye had long since sent Amande to their room, over the girl’s protests that she wanted to be where the action was. One of the prerogatives of parenthood was the occasional ability to separate a child from “the action.”

  Now, she was alone in the parking lot, still too upset to let her daughter see her in this condition. She wanted…needed…more information, and she had a bad feeling about the sooty stench of Tilda’s dying breaths. There was only one Rosebower number stored in Faye’s phone, so she called her client, Samuel Langley. He’d lived his entire life in Rosebower, so he surely knew the Armistead sisters. And, though she’d told the emergency personnel how important it was to find Myrna, maybe somebody local could find her quicker than an outsider wearing a uniform.

  When Samuel answered his phone, Faye could tell by the background noise that he wasn’t sitting alone at home. She heard voices and a siren and the engines of more vehicles than had any right to be on the streets of nighttime Rosebower. “What’s happening down there?”

  His response was overpowered by the sound of another siren.

  Faye tried again. “Samuel, something’s happened to Tilda Armistead. I need to find Myrna.”

  “We’ve got Myrna. Nobody could get her to answer the phone—the woman’s half-deaf—so several of us who live nearby took matters in hand. We got a ladder, broke a window, and went looking for her. She’s fine. But did you say you knew where Tilda was?”

  Faye could hear shouting and the quiet wailing of a woman’s voice. She thought of her call to 911. It would have triggered a call to Tilda’s next of kin, but Samuel was telling her that Myrna wasn’t home. Faye doubted she had a cell phone, so she couldn’t know of Tilda’s death. The noise of sirens said that something was going on in Rosebower, in terms of emergency personnel, but Faye could feel a disconnect between what she knew and what Samuel knew. Even twenty-first-century technology can’t be instantaneous. Tonight, that time lag had a deadly feel.

  All Faye could do was tell Samuel what she knew and ask him to do the same. “Tilda was here at my hotel with me until…Samuel, she’s dead. Some kind of respiratory failure, I think. It sounds like something just as awful may be happening where you are.”

  Now Samuel was yelling outright. “I’ll call you back, Faye. I can see firefighters suiting up to look for Tilda right now. I can’t let them go into a burning house for no reason.”

  The line went dead.

  ***

  Faye watched the last marked car pull out of the parking lot. Tilda’s body had long since been taken away, but Faye could already guess the result of the autopsy. The cause of death would be smoke inhalation.

  Samuel had called back, telling her that he’d been enjoying a nightcap on his back porch swing when he smelled smoke. The ground floor of Tilda’s house had been fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, but they’d been able to quench the fire quickly. The exterior walls were still standing and the roof was mostly intact, but the flames had been impressive while they raged. Samuel was the youngest resident on Walnut Street. His neighbors had reached the time in life when they sometimes had trouble waiting for sundown to make it socially acceptable to go to bed. If he’d gone to bed even minutes sooner, the whole house would have been gone.

  And if Tilda had escaped even minutes sooner, she might not be dead. No matter how hard she tried, Faye couldn’t shake the image of a woman in her eighties, alone, fighting her way out of a burning house.

  Faye thanked Samuel for the information, saying, “It’s late and neither Amande nor I have had any sleep. We may not be at work on time tomorrow.”

  “Take your time. Tell me, Faye. Were you and Tilda close? I don’t mean to be rude, but she wasn’t big on leaving town. What on earth possessed her to drive to your hotel?”

  “I knew her well enough to know that she was agoraphobic, but I don’t have any idea why she came to me for help tonight. It sounds like she lived on a street full of people she knew much better, and they would have wanted to help.”

  “Of course, we would’ve wanted to help, but I wouldn’t say any of us knew her any better than you did. Tilda has always kept to herself. I’m sorry you’re mixed up in this terrible thing. Take your time getting to work tomorrow.”

  Faye thanked him and broke the connection. Then she dialed home. Joe answered so quickly that she imagined he’d been sleeping with the phone on his pillow.

  Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:

  An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism

  in Rosebower, New York

  by Antonia Caruso

  There are people who think I’m a killjoy. Those people enjoy the antics of fakers. They say that séances and communing with the dead are, at worst, harmless entertainment. We pay our entertainers. Why shouldn’t we pay our fortune-tellers, even if they are fake?

  I think my idol, The Amazing Randi, explains it best when he says there is a real danger in believing people who claim that they can solve real problems—like, for instance, the energy crisis and environmental decline—by magic. For example, there are common illusions that give the impression of matter or energy springing into being from nothingness. One of them looks like a large faucet, suspended in mid-air, from which water flows unceasingly. To the eye, water is being made out of nothing and the illusionist responsible deserves a citation from the Reality Police for violating the Law of Conservation of Matter.

  If the illusionist is enterprising, a small water wheel is part of the apparatus, merrily turning in the flow of water being created from nothing. Thus, the illusionist is creating energy from nothing, and the Reality Police exact very high fines from people who build perpetual motion machines violating the Law of Conservation of Energy. Even worse, the size of the punishment dealt to those who defy entropy, the relentless killjoy that will eventually make motionless atomic particles of us all, is incalculable.

  So is it true? Can anyone build a faucet that creates water and energy? Of course not.

  In reality, there is a pipe running upward, hidden by the gushing flow of water that supports the faucet. Attached to this pipe is a submersible pump that recirculates the water so that it can flow out again. This pump requires electricity to do its magical work.

  Voila! Energy has not been created out of nothing, and neither has matter. Entropy continues uninterrupted in its quest to destroy us. The Reality Police can rest easy.

  There is no harm in an illusion that makes the audience laugh and say, “Wow! How did he do that?” But if t
hat audience is in the thrall of someone unethical enough to suggest that such violations of the laws of physics are possible for people with magical powers, then a very real harm has been done. People who believe in impossible things may lack an understanding of the need to conserve water and energy, and they may feel no pressing need to vote for people who are willing to deal with reality.

  A society consisting of people who believe in the irrational could find itself in a condition where only magic can save them. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a society I ever want to see. Consider this book my contribution to the rationality of the world.

  You can thank me any time.

  Chapter Four