Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 6

  When Sister Mama had her stroke, Ennis had been the obvious person to come help her. He’d just collected his associate’s degree, with the kind assistance of the Pell Grant people and Sister Mama, and he’d had time to assess just how horrifying the job prospects for a community college graduate truly were. He’d had no possessions that wouldn’t fit into the asthmatic old car that his great-aunt had bought him for graduation.

  Sister Mama’s body might have been wrecked, but that first stroke had left her mind sharper than a green persimmon. She had seen that Ennis needed a job. She had known that he was educated enough and smart enough to take over her empire. She had also known that she would eventually need the kind of hands-on care that was unpleasant but necessary. Ennis was physically strong, in a slender and wiry sort of way. She had presumed he was grateful to her.

  It was entirely possible that she had presumed wrong.

  Chapter Six

  As Faye and Amande parked the wheelchair at a picnic table behind the diner, Julie brought out their meals.

  “Thank you so much for helping her,” she said, gesturing toward the silent woman, sitting contented in the pale northern sunshine. “Ennis has been behaving uglier to his aunt by the day. He never hits her or does anything to call the sheriff about, but the whole town’s upset about how he treats Sister Mama. God knows what’s happening with her business and her money. He’s probably got power of attorney.”

  As she left, she said, “Dwight—that’s my boss—he says there’s no charge for your meals today. He’s been so upset about Ennis that I imagine you’ll be getting free desserts every time you come in here, forever.”

  So this was Sister Mama, the town’s famed root doctor. Faye had called around after she heard that Myrna was taking the woman’s herbal potions, and she couldn’t find a soul who was willing to say anything against Sister Mama. She was reputed to have cured cancer and made barren women into happy mothers. If the stories were all true, this wizened old woman had conquered the common cold. She could probably cure a rainy day.

  Samuel, who had a rich man’s appreciation of business savvy, had told Faye that Sister Mama was quick to see the business potential in Internet sales of hoodoo paraphernalia. Her wares ranged from mojo bags to hex-cleansing floor washes to graveyard dirt. Unfortunately, it seemed that even Sister Mama couldn’t cure old age nor, unless Faye missed her guess, a serious stroke.

  Faye didn’t like the idea of Myrna taking anything prescribed by a woman in this condition. It seemed impossible that Sister Mama was capable of prescribing anything these days. Did that mean Myrna was taking whatever Ennis wanted to sell her? Faye wouldn’t trust the man to give her an aspirin, much less an unknown number and quantity of unnamed herbs. She mentally penciled an end-of-the-day visit to Myrna into her schedule. Faye wanted to check out Myrna’s health with her own eyes, and the bereaved woman would be needing her friends today.

  Faye and Amande took turns helping Sister Mama with her meal, and the disabled root doctor ate very competently when she wasn’t angry with Ennis. She still couldn’t speak, but Faye was struck by the way she studied Amande’s features. The girl was lovely, yes, but Faye thought Sister Mama saw something else. She wondered what it was.

  After they’d all eaten their fill, they took a moment to enjoy the mild air. Faye couldn’t say she blamed Sister Mama for wanting to eat outside.

  Faye looked up and saw Ennis pausing self-consciously outside the diner’s side door. When he saw that she’d noticed him, he walked over.

  “I apologize for my behavior. Thank you for helping my aunt with her lunch. It’s been…hard…lately. I’ll try to do better.” After he’d said his piece, he’d wheeled Sister Mama away.

  Faye remembered her mother’s and grandmother’s last years. Being needed around the clock was hard and lonely. She had a notion of what Ennis’ life was like, but that didn’t mean she could excuse his behavior.

  ***

  The clock crawled toward quitting time. There was a reason Faye was here, doing work so tedious that her competitors hadn’t bothered to bid on it. Her firm couldn’t afford to be picky, and Samuel had approved a budget that would pay her salary for six weeks. Even better, it would cover clerical help that Amande was well-capable of doing. In this economy, a paying summer job for a seventeen-year-old was no small thing.

  Best of all, the project budget included travel expenses for them both, providentially paying for a trip that she had so wanted to give Amande. She didn’t know where the child would go to college but, as long as Faye had breath in her body, she would go. While they were in New York, they would drive around and look at college campuses, just to get an idea of what they were like. Just to feed her daughter’s dreams.

  When Faye and Joe had first met Amande, the girl had been frantically brainstorming ways to fund a longed-for college education. Recently, Faye had stumbled across some of those plans. At the top of the list was “Earn as much free college credit as the school system will give me,” a strategy Faye applauded. At the bottom of the list were “Sell my blood,” and “Sell my plasma,” along with Internet-generated information on how often she could do that and how much income each sale would generate.

  Faye had torn this piece of paper into itty-bitty pieces. Her daughter was going to college, and she would be keeping all her blood while she did it.

  Opening another unlabeled box, Faye found dozens of stone tools that looked an awful lot like the ones already on display. Amande was staring out the window, but Faye merely cleared her throat without comment. If her daughter could tolerate this level of boredom for weeks, while weathering a seventeen-year-old’s mood swings, then the two of them just might enjoy this trip.

  Without bringing her eyes back from the window, Amande held up another photo. “Display or defer?”

  Amazing. The child could work while she daydreamed.

  The photo was an unremarkable shot of somebody’s brand-new Chevy. “Defer,” Faye said victoriously. She handed Amande the box of stone tools. “Now, put the freakin’ photos away. I want you to take pictures of these things and zap ’em to your father.”

  Amande fondled the chipped stone tools. “Oooooooh…Dad’s gonna love this part of the job.”

  “Yup. He’s gonna be able to tell me who made all this stuff and how long ago. Then he’s gonna tell me whether they rate a big shiny display case or whether they should be properly stored someplace where they will never again see the light of day.”

  “Dad comes in handy sometimes.”

  Yes, he did. The only reason Faye and Amande could be in New York, breathing museum dust, was because Joe was watching little Michael. In theory, Joe would be catching up on the company’s accounting while Michael napped. In actuality, Faye expected to go home to a mud-covered child who had learned to track deer, and a grown man sheepishly admitting that he had no idea of the state of their accounts receivable.

  Faye figured there were worse things than being married to a man who could hear a quail breathe, then put an arrow in its eye. Even if their accounts receivable always fell short of proper recordkeeping standards, Joe’s family would never starve.

  Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:

  An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism

  in Rosebower, New York

  by Antonia Caruso

  I’m having some trouble getting motivated today. Someone unique lost her life last night.

  Most of the charlatans of Rosebower trigger every last one of my crusader impulses, but I genuinely admired Tilda Armistead. Did I think she could work magic? Did I believe she could deliver messages from the dead?

  Of course not.

  If I believed that, I’d have been camped on her front lawn, begging her to put me in touch with the parents I loved so well. I did believe, however, in Tilda’s honor. In all my efforts to dig up dirt on these people, I found no evidence that she ever cheated anybody. No one remembers a lie crossing her lips, not once.

  Until lat
ely, I had the time and opportunity to dig up all the dirt I pleased on Tilda Armistead and on everybody else in town. Until Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her daughter arrived to straighten up Samuel’s museum, I had free run of the place. Samuel Langley is putty in the hands of anybody who shows a little interest in the history of his goofy hometown.

  Until the Longchamp-Mantooth ladies talked Samuel into closing the museum while they worked, I pored over decades of Rosebower’s weekly newspaper. I never found a single advertisement touting Tilda Armistead’s services. Nor her father’s nor her grandparents’ nor their parents’. The Armisteads never needed to debase themselves with tawdry ads in commercial publications. Everybody with an interest in Spiritualism knew who the Armisteads were, and they came here to see them.

  It took me a while to notice one of the most telling things about Tilda. The woman was born in the early 1930s. She married in 1960, late for that day and age. She stayed married until her husband died twelve years later. To all accounts, the marriage was solid. Yet her name was always Armistead.

  Tilda kept her maiden name. In 1960. How often do you think that happened?

  I wish I’d known Tilda better. All I can do is guess, but I’m thinking that a woman who kept her own name in 1960 had a strong personality and an unshakeable family pride. The Armisteads founded Rosebower and, along with the folks in nearby Lily Dale, they had a hand in founding Spiritualism itself, back in the nineteenth century when it was so much easier to believe in ghosts.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the father of the ever-logical Sherlock Holmes himself, believed in the original fakers, the Fox sisters, who lived quite near here. Something about western New York makes people go irrational over ghosts or religious reform or seemingly unattainable things like woman’s suffrage. Sometimes they talk to angels and dig up golden tablets. Maybe when people are snowed in for most of the winter, something inside them ferments.

  Sir Arthur believed that the Fox sisters were genuine mediums who could communicate with spirits through unearthly knockings and rappings. He continued to believe, even after one of the girls confessed to fakery and proved that she could duplicate the ghostly noises by cracking her toes. (Cracking her toes! How would you like to be famous for a century or two because you could crack your toes really loudly?) The good sir refused to believe her confession. He also publicly believed in fairies.

  Tilda Armistead was born into a family of people who had actually met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as his doubting adversary, Harry Houdini. Her mother was born to a woman whose grandmother knew the feminist leaders who caused so much trouble at Seneca Falls. No wonder an heiress to such a heritage wished to keep her own name. Tilda was an Armistead through and through.

  If Tilda had lived to see my book published, she would have never spoken to me afterward. In it, I will expose her family as dupes, used by the fakers in their midst who were only out for a quick buck. But until that day, I would have liked to have been her friend.

  I don’t feel much like writing today.

  Chapter Seven

  Ennis LeBecque didn’t take well to public humiliation. Nobody likes humiliation, and the free-pumping testosterone of a twenty-year-old man made Ennis like it even less. Testosterone whispered things in his ear, violent things. It made him want to wipe the smug victory off the face of the girl who had embarrassed him in the diner. It made him want to hurt somebody. It made him want to see the victorious girl’s pretty face again.

  A brain that takes a daily bath in hormones is easily confused. Ennis wanted to punch Amande. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to show her who was boss. He wanted to buy her flowers. He wanted her bitchy-looking mother to be far, far away. Maybe it was the bitchy-looking mother that he wanted to punch. He liked girls, but he didn’t like women.

  Women were selfish, like his mother. They were controlling, like his Great-aunt Sister Mama. Girls were probably just as cruel, at their core, but they could still be pushed around. Powerless people made Ennis feel better about himself. Of course, the girl in the diner hadn’t seemed powerless, but maybe that was because her mother was there. Ennis had a notion that he could show her who was boss, if he could just get her alone.

  In the meantime, he would hoe Sister Mama’s garden and pick the day’s harvest of herbs. He would wash and chop and simmer the roots and leaves, following Sister Mama’s recipes to the letter, then Sister Mama would tell him he’d done it all wrong. The woman couldn’t even talk, but she could still push him around with grunts and gestures and judicious use of the stink-eye.

  Ennis had ambitions, and being the unpaid servant of a hoodoo practitioner was not one of them. He had doubled Sister Mama’s online business, and she was still paying him with room, board, and a tiny allowance. He was nearly done here. His exit strategy was in full swing. Sister Mama could find somebody else to feed her strained peaches for the short time that remained to her.

  He should be focusing on his plans to get the hell out of Rosebower, but he couldn’t keep his mind off the girl. What would she look like when he’d wiped the smug smile off her face?

  ***

  Faye’s heart sank when Myrna opened her front door. Her friend looked terrible. Myrna’s breathing was ragged and the fact that she was weeping uncontrollably didn’t help. Sociable to the end, she didn’t let these physical constraints keep her from answering her own door, despite the fact that there were several people in the house who could have done it for her.

  She led Faye and Amande into the dining room, where the long table, so like Tilda’s, was set for tea. A white-haired man hovered at Myrna’s elbow, and she introduced him as Elder Johnson, saying that he had been sent by the church to sit with her, though not in grief. According to Spiritualist beliefs, Tilda was not gone. Elder Johnson was here to support Myrna until she established contact with her late sister.

  Faye wondered what would happen if Tilda’s spirit showed up and told somebody she’d been murdered. If this happened, Faye would be forced to believe in ghosts. Unless, of course, the person contacted by Tilda was also the murderer, the only resident of Rosebower who could know that detail.

  Two people in their mid-forties sat across the table from Myrna. They were striking, in a calculated way. The woman had waist-length hair in a very attractive shade of red that was almost natural. She was tall and fair, with long arms, long fingers, and a long neck. Faye thought she looked like medieval royalty.

  Amande must have agreed, because she leaned toward her mother and whispered, “It’s the Queen of Hearts.” A glance at the woman’s elaborate dress, low-necked and cinched at the waist to accentuate her full hips, confirmed that Amande’s observation was dead-on. It also made Faye want to laugh, which would have been inopportune in a house of mourning.

  The man beside the Queen of Hearts was as eye-catching, though not nearly so tall. His shoulder-length white-blond hair matched his blond brows and lashes, so Faye supposed that his dramatic coloring was more God-given than the Queen’s.

  “He looks like Dad, only not,” Amande breathed into her ear, barely audible.

  She was right again. Like Joe, he had green eyes, and his strong features were made even more masculine when framed by long hair. Also like Joe, his coloring would turn heads from twenty paces, but while Joe’s skin was bronze and his hair was almost black, this man was arrestingly pale. His torso was also notably narrow in comparison to Joe’s broad shoulders and barrel chest. Faye gave him a few seconds of study and decided that his androgynous good looks did nothing for her, but she could tell that Amande thought otherwise.

  The Queen of Hearts was speaking. “A doctor, Auntie. Let me take you to a doctor.”

  “Oh, no, no. There hasn’t been a doctor in Rosebower for years, not since Samuel’s cousin Oscar passed to the other side. I just need some rest and,” she paused for breath, “perhaps a time of prayer with Elder Johnson.”

  The Queen seemed accustomed to steamrolling right over Myrna. “There’s a twenty-four-hour clinic twenty
miles down the road.” She reached across the table and took Myrna’s hand between both of hers. She rubbed it reassuringly for a moment, then resumed steamrolling. “We can be back by dark. Come.” She stood, presuming that Myrna would rise with her.

  But Myrna kept shaking her head and saying, “No, no, no, no, I can’t. Dara, I just can’t. I need to be here. I need…I just can’t.”

  Apparently, Myrna had her own case of agoraphobia, and it was almost as bad as Tilda’s had been. Dara sat back down. Even the Queen could see that her aunt wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Allow me,” said Elder Johnson.