Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 5

  Charming.

  Faye had already launched two abortive strikes on these theories. Samuel had responded pleasantly, but his mind was made up. Aliens had come to Rosebower. And also ancient Scandinavians. He believed in these things very deeply.

  Faye felt that her best hope to salvage this job was to find something in the museum’s archives that was much better than its supposed treasures. And by “better,” she meant “real.” This real treasure could take center-stage in the museum, and Samuel’s conspiracy artifacts could go into deep storage. She would have had more faith in this plan if one of the conspiracy artifacts had not been named for her client’s family.

  For the time being, the best Faye could do was to walk past the spear, the runestone, and the object, pretending they weren’t there. She flapped a casual hand in their direction, saying, “We’ll deal with those later,” and led her daughter into the museum’s workroom.

  ***

  Toni the Astonisher had developed a comfortable routine. She worked on her book for a couple of hours in the early morning, then she took a long walk, ending at the diner for a late breakfast. After eating, she asked Julie to make her a to-go cup of coffee that would see her through a few more hours at the keyboard. Those quiet hours of focused concentration couldn’t have been more different from teaching school.

  Running a physics classroom had been an awful lot like performing a magic act. She’d had to be absolutely prepared, and her lesson plans couldn’t just lay out the laws of physics. They had to entertain, too, because she was working with the fragmented attention spans of modern adolescents. Improvisation had been a way of life. Adolescents don’t follow scripts and they don’t behave as expected.

  Toni had been in Rosebower for weeks, much longer than the usual one-day-and-gone tourist, so she knew that people were watching her and wondering. Going against her naturally gregarious nature, she’d kept to herself. She’d mentioned to Samuel that she was writing a book, therefore the whole town knew it, but she didn’t want anybody to probe any deeper than that. As far as the citizens of Rosebower were concerned, she was the quiet lady who seemed to have come here to get away from…something.

  She’d watched and listened enough to know who was who. She’d even come to like some of the targets of her espionage. Myrna Armistead, for instance. As Toni made her morning trek for breakfast and a coffee to-go cup, she could see Ms. Armistead walking down the sidewalk across the street, leaning heavily on the arm of an elder from her church.

  Aging was a funny thing. Ms. Armistead seemed to have good days when she hurried around town, visiting friends and shopping, but there were bad days, too. More of them, recently. This looked like a bad one, and it made Toni sad. It was impossible to breathe the same air as Myrna Armistead without liking her. She moved through the world in a hazy loving glow.

  Toni had seen much less of Myrna’s sister Tilda, who wasn’t the glowing type. Tilda kept to herself, seeing her clients at home and avoiding the social scene at the diner and the town’s lakeside park. Toni knew her only by her reputation, which was sterling. Tilda Armistead was a town councilor, and she was reputedly the most gifted spiritual practitioner in living memory. Myrna might have been universally loved, but Tilda was universally admired. Toni harbored a trace of hero worship when it came to Tilda Armistead, which was silly for a woman who didn’t believe anybody had the powers Tilda claimed to have. Nevertheless, it was true.

  A bright yellow flash of crime-scene tape at the corner of Walnut and Main caught her eye. The tape surrounded Tilda Armistead’s grand old house, moving gently in the early summer breeze. Only when she saw the sooty stains rising above all the house’s windows did she realize that she’d been smelling smoke for at least a block.

  The odor was spreading over Rosebower, announcing the wreck of Tilda’s house, but Toni had paid no attention. She looked over her shoulder and saw Myrna’s back as she walked away. The woman held the church elder’s elbow with one hand and used the other to dab her eyes with a handkerchief. Oh, this didn’t look good.

  Someone at the diner would be able to tell her what had happened. The smell of smoke and the sight of Myrna’s delicate hankie warned Toni to brace herself.

  ***

  The museum’s workroom was full of sagging cardboard boxes holding things that bereaved adult children couldn’t part with, but didn’t want to store. Everyone thinks their family heirlooms belong in a museum. In very few cases is this true.

  Smart museum curators find a way to politely refuse family keepsakes. Rosebower didn’t appear to have ever had a smart museum curator.

  Still, archaeologists are treasure-hunters at heart, so every time Faye opened a box, she hoped for a miracle. Instead, she usually got early-twentieth-century family photographs that someone had donated because it seemed a shame to throw them away. She liked looking at the black-and-white images of serious people in hand-sewn clothes and quaint hats, but the photos were unlabeled. There wasn’t much Faye could do with these mystery pictures.

  Faye had given a big box of photos to Amande, asking her to sort out the ones with an identifiable background. She’d thought it might be interesting to compile an exhibit showing how Rosebower landmarks—Main Street or the lakeside picnic area, for instance—had changed over time. Most of the other photos were probably worthless for her purpose, which was telling the story of Rosebower in four rooms or less.

  Maybe Samuel would enjoy having a museum open house where residents could have a chance to identify Great-great-aunt Maud among all those trapped-in-time faces. In most cases, Faye would be perfectly happy for Great-great-aunt Maud to go home with her descendants, thus decreasing the load of paper in this room by one piece.

  With no donation records, she wasn’t sure she could ethically go even that far. Depending on New York’s abandoned property laws, ridding the museum of this stuff might be more trouble than it was worth. She didn’t have the budget to jump through the legal hoops. She didn’t even have the budget to find out exactly what those hoops were in New York.

  Her work plan, which Samuel had approved, was to identify and catalog materials that should definitely be retained. Everything else would be stored properly—and by “properly,” Faye meant “for God’s sake, not in cardboard boxes”—then deferred for later re-evaluation. In a world-class museum, some of the deferred items would have been destroyed. In Rosebower, the new archival boxes would probably just sit, forever. Part of her job would be to train Samuel to say no the next time someone offered him the contents of his parents’ attic.

  Amande stuck a photo in front of Faye’s nose. “Retain or defer?”

  The cars and their sherbet-colored paint jobs dated from the 1950s. Faye thought the faded shades of old color photos were pretty, so she was going to have trouble weeding them out, but some things had to go. She was pretty sure this photo was one of them, until she noticed the town’s one-and-only diner in the background. A spherical sign, adorned with neon tubes and metal spikes, rose from the parking lot. It was just so…so…tacky and Sputnik-fearing and atomic, and this might be its only surviving photo.

  She sighed. “Keep it for the Main Street exhibit. But don’t stop asking me. We’ve gotta do something about those overstuffed displays or the floor’s gonna cave in. Samuel won’t like paying for a new one.”

  “Let’s get him to pay us instead,” Amande said.

  “I like the way you think.”

  ***

  Faye’s cell phone beeped. She had told it to let her know when noon rolled around, because checking the time every five minutes wouldn’t bring lunch any faster.

  “Let’s go see if we can find the hole in the diner’s parking lot, the one where that futuristic neon sign used to be,” she said, grabbing her purse and rising in a single motion.

  Amande quickly darkened the screen on her tablet. Faye felt her brows lower into her own mother’s what-have-you-been-doing? face.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been off the clock for ten minutes
. I’m keeping track of my hours. My timesheet will be accurate.”

  Faye wished she didn’t look so much like her mother, because she knew what a charming face she was showing her daughter.

  “I was talking to Dad. Really.”

  Faye didn’t think her eyebrows could go any lower.

  “It’s a surprise. Let’s go eat. You look like your blood sugar’s hanging down around your knees.”

  Faye hated it when her daughter was right. No, that wasn’t quite true. Faye hated it when she, herself, was wrong.

  ***

  It was only a few blocks to the diner, past the blackened hulk that had been Tilda’s house and the house of mourning that was Myrna’s. The sooty smell in the air made Faye walk faster. If Tilda Armistead had been killed by a resident of Rosebower, then the murderer was likely within a half-mile radius of Faye. The stench of smoke probably reached that far.

  The sidewalk took them past two quaint tea rooms, both opened within the past year. They served lunch to the increasing numbers of tourists who came to Rosebower for spiritual readings and, on Sundays and selected evenings, to spend an hour in a real live Spiritualist church service. Faye hoped the tourists put some money in the collection plate, because it didn’t seem right to use a church as a tourist attraction.

  Samuel wasn’t paying Faye and Amande enough to eat at the tea rooms. Besides, when Faye traveled, she liked to eat where the locals ate. The Rosebower Diner, which she now knew had once been called The Jetstar, was more her style.

  The diner was still furnished in 1950s chrome, vinyl, and linoleum. The air was savory with roast chicken. Faye doubted that this place was going to offer her a side of okra or turnip greens—she was in New York, after all—but it did what it did very well.

  An elderly African-American woman sat in a wheelchair pulled up to the table next to theirs. A slight young man with ebony skin and close-cropped hair sat with her, methodically shoveling her meal into her mouth. Rather, he was trying to do it methodically, but she kept shaking her head from side to side. Faye could see that he didn’t like it when she messed up his rhythm.

  Trying not to watch their battle of wills, she listened to Amande order fried chicken without warning her that it probably wouldn’t taste like it did at home. Neither would the gravy on her mashed potatoes.

  One of the benefits of travel was learning that people in different places did things differently. Making gravy without a roux was different, but it wasn’t wrong. Well, okay, maybe Faye’s grandmother wouldn’t have considered it actual gravy, and maybe Faye didn’t intend to eat any of it, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

  The waitress left their table, paused at the next one and asked, “Would you like some more Pepsi, Ennis?” Now that Faye knew the man’s name, she had a focus for her rising discomfort. Ennis wasn’t raising his voice at his companion. He wasn’t speaking to her at all, but Faye could see his frustration in every motion of the spoon.

  Her own frustration crept up another notch when the old woman began trying to speak. “Ous. I…”

  Ennis took the opportunity to slip in a bite of potatoes when she opened her mouth to speak. Faye watched closely, worried that he was going to choke her with such antics, but the woman seemed fine.

  Again, “Ous…I!”

  Was she saying “ouch”? The words didn’t seem to match his actions, not in a way that would suggest he was hurting her. As for the word, “I,” maybe she was just asserting herself. Or maybe she was asserting her dignity.

  Faye couldn’t decide whether she should intervene, nor what she would say if she did. If she intended to make a scene, then “I think you should feed the lady nicer,” seemed inadequate. She was on the point of doing it anyway, when a tall blur blotted out her view of the wordless little drama.

  Amande had shoved her chair back, leapt to her feet, and positioned herself behind the wheelchair before the woman’s companion could scoop up more of the potatoes that he was letting drip off her chin.

  Seizing a wheelchair handle with one hand, Amande said, “Come on, Ma’am. If you want to go outdoors to eat, I’ll take you.”

  Then she looked Ennis in the eye and said, “Do you not understand the word ‘outside’ when someone says it to you? I wish my grandmother were still here. I’d feed her potatoes all day long.”

  With her other hand, she plunked the woman’s plate onto the tray fastened across the arms of her wheelchair. Then she snatched the spoon from Ennis and pushed the chair out of the diner at top speed.

  Feeling like the incompetent assistant of an avenging angel, Faye picked up the old lady’s napkin and her glass with its bendy straw. Giving Ennis a withering look, she followed her daughter’s sweeping exit.

  ***

  Ennis LeBecque was startled to see his gravy train roll out the diner door. His Great-aunt Sylvia Marie, known to all of Rosebower as Sister Mama, had kept him on a short leash ever since his mother went into rehab, then disappeared immediately upon release. He had other relatives, some much closer in blood than Great-aunt Sister Mama, but they were all worthless and she had known it. Sister Mama was only semi-sane, even before the stroke, but she had the financial clout that came with being the first root doctor to recognize the potential income to be made from Internet sales. She also had an unswerving devotion to one high-flying ideal: “Family first.”

  This devotion did not make the old lady a pushover. Sister Mama’s family devotion had precise gradations. Grown adults were expected to fend for themselves. On those occasions when they failed, Sister Mama dependably paid her relatives’ bail or sent their landlords a check for the rent, but she never ever gave them money. Unless it was a full-out emergency, grown-ups were on their own.

  Old people were different. When Ennis’ grandmother broke her hip, Sister Mama had helped her find a nursing home that Medicaid would cover. After she’d plunked her sister-in-law into this government-funded prison, she had dependably sent her presents and letters and nice little checks to cover all the things that Medicaid didn’t, but Ennis’ grandmother had never breathed free air again. Ennis wasn’t sure that Great-aunt Sister Mama should get to decide where people lived, just because she was the only family member with an operational checking account.

  If Sister Mama could be said to consider old people as different from all those other people with their hands out, she considered children to be different still. When Ennis was thirteen, his mother had gotten into so much trouble with her dealer that Sister Mama’s physical presence had been required to keep her from being found shot dead in an alley. Once she arrived in Atlanta, Sister Mama had dug around until she found out that beds in rehab centers were not nearly so non-existent as she had been told on the phone.

  Perhaps they were non-existent for regular people, but not so for root doctors who knew how to sway bureaucrats with the proper midnight conjuring and the proper herbal incenses and incantations. Once the recalcitrant bureaucrats had seen the errors in their thinking, Sister Mama had plunked Ennis’ mother in a magically available rehab-center bed. Then she had left her niece to fend for herself after treatment, because adults are supposed to be able to do that.

  Ennis, however, was no adult. He remembered the way Sister Mama used to talk to herself, back when she could talk. That’s what she had done on the day she put his mama where he couldn’t see her. She had talked to herself.

  “So what am I gonna do ’bout you?” She’d been looking at Ennis, but talking to the air. “I can only spend so much on any one relative that’s flat-broke, because I got so many of ’em. But there’s times when it helps a body to be flat-broke. Let’s see what can be done for a boy without two pennies to rub together.”

  By then, she was already the hoodoo queen of the World Wide Web, so her Internet skills were inarguable. A few hours of web-crawling, a few more hours of phone work, and a few nights of midnight conjuring had resulted in a few days spent hauling Ennis from one boarding school to another. Once more, Sister Mama’s persistence and arc
ane talents had paid off. An elite boys’ school had agreed to take Ennis as a scholarship student.

  Her duty done, Sister Mama had plunked him in an institution full of rich classmates who knew he was a charity case and never let him forget it. For all his years there, she dependably sent him cards and presents and enough money to buy occasional sodas and candy bars, but not enough money to buy drugs.

  Yes, Sister Mama was even smart enough to do the math on addiction. Sometimes he had been able to hoard his money and work out a deal to get just a little taste of the stuff that had ruined his mother’s life, but the options of an impoverished social pariah were limited. Mostly, Ennis had drunk root beer and counted the days until he was a grown adult, able to fend for himself.

  Any reasonable person would have told him to be grateful to Sister Mama for yanking him out of the slums, but Ennis was, and possibly always would be, a self-centered adolescent. He blamed Sister Mama for his mother’s absence, instead of thanking her for keeping his mother alive. He blamed her for his loneliness and, in his mind, he painted her as a woman who stored troublesome people in places where they wouldn’t be troublesome any more.