The Lavender Teacup

by Mary Bowers

  I felt a shiver run through me. I’ve had cats do that before – my own cat, Bastet, likes to do that – and an animal expert once told me that when cats do that, it means they feel a strong connection with you. It’s kind of like the Hawaiian word “Aloha,” in that it can mean many things: hello, good-bye, even I love you.

  “What is it, Bella?” I asked in spite of myself.

  She answered by trying to block me from the door. I had a really awkward time getting away from her and around Arielle, who was watching with a kind of fury.

  Once the door was closed, with the humans outside and the cat inside, I turned to Arielle and said, “I run an animal shelter, you know. She must be able to smell that on me – that I associate with lots of animals, and that I love them.”

  She wasn’t mollified. She stared at me with smoldering eyes. “That’s all right,” she said coldly, “it’s not the first time she’s taken a liking to a guest. She always comes back to me.”

  “Kind of like a familiar,” Ed said. I inhaled deeply and tried to stay out of it. In folklore, a familiar is an animal spirit that associates itself with a witch. He started to explain that to Arielle, but she interrupted him, snapping, “I know.”

  “I see,” Ed said.

  “Shall we move along?” I asked. “We’re going to miss the sunset if we don’t hurry.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” Teddy said. He’d become interested in the discussion, and he turned to Arielle and flat-out asked her, “Is Bella your familiar?”

  She hesitated so long I was about to try to get everybody going again when she said, “I like to think so. Like all close partners, she strays every now and then, but she always comes back to me.”

  “So, you are, in fact, a witch,” Ed said, straightening his glasses and trying to act as if it were a normal question.

  “I have my talents,” Arielle said. “Shall we?”

  She gestured in the direction of Mallory Square and we all began to move, two by two, like children lined up at school. I made my way next to Lily and gave her a look, but all the way to Mallory Square, we didn’t speak.

  We didn’t need to.

  Chapter 18

  I don’t think viewing the sunset at Mallory Square was actually conceived and organized by the Chamber of Commerce, but it might as well have been. What probably started as a bunch of sloppily affectionate drunks hanging onto one another for support and saluting God’s sky-painting has evolved into a frankly commercial event, where coins and paper money are separated from the tourists in exchange for a quick laugh, a photo op, or a threadbare melody.

  The affectionate drunks are still there, along with the not-so-lovable ones that are going for the title of biggest idiot, along with a few completely sober older couples who had been told by their grandchildren that this was something they must do while in Key West. Pictures would be duly posted on Facebook, because the grandkids had shown them how.

  On this evening we saw a slim, mute, sad-sack clown in high-water pants, tee shirt and suspenders doing clever things with a little hat. He could bounce it off his elbow and have it land on his head, on your head, or over the end of somebody’s selfie stick right when they were getting ready to click. It was such a simple act, with just the one prop, but he gathered a fairly large crowd and was making good money.

  When the crowd blocked our view, we moved on. At one point, I caught sight of Camille sitting at a cloth-covered table reading tarot cards for a customer. Since she was busy working, we didn’t bother her, but I pointed her out to Teddy and said we’d introduce her later. Before we walked on, I noticed The Professor standing about fifteen feet away from Camille’s table, watching her. Technically we were supposed to be meeting him, but he was too far away from us to call out to in that crowd, and he seemed to be watching Camille . . . well, almost protectively. Since he looked so intent, I didn’t wave or try to distract him. We’d see him later. We walked on.

  The next act was something to do with metal rings, and I don’t think I can even describe it. It all happened so fast and was so much against the laws of physics that you never got the chance to think about how pointless it all was. I mean . . . rings? Who cares? But you were fascinated in a blank sort of way, until you wandered on to the next thing.

  Solo musicians. A guy blowing a conch shell and throwing out a line of patter. A lady dressed as a mermaid getting tips for pictures with little girls. And around and throughout, people with gigantic plastic cups, getting drunk on the drinks and even drunker on the sights.

  We had arrived in a group, but we gradually got separated by the crowd until it was just Michael and me. Lily and Teddy seemed to stay ten steps away from us, and I could always locate them when I wanted to, but Arielle and Ed were gone. I saw her at one point and stopped in my tracks, getting run into by a forgiving college student who only spilled a little of his drink. I pointed and said to Michael, “Isn’t that Darrien Grist with Arielle over there? You know – her cousin?”

  He took a look. “Yeah, I think it is. I thought she was here to look after Uncle Oswald.”

  “I don’t see him, but the cousins seem to have made up. They look friendly enough now, anyway. Not like yesterday morning when they were going at it like cats and dogs.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, and without taking any real interest, he steered me through the crowd again.

  Teddy and Lily were watching a contortionist, and we joined them. Contortionists kind of give me the creeps, but we watched for a while and dropped a tip into the open suitcase before we moved on.

  “Hey, there’s Oswald,” Michael said.

  Teddy hadn’t met him yet, and he swung his head around looking until Michael pointed and said, “Over there. The older man talking to Ed. See – he just wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. It’s a habit of his, when he’s nervous about something. It looks like Helena is with him too, and Maryellen, which is probably why he’s nervous. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

  “Ed’s holding a box,” I said, getting a better look. “I bet Maryellen gave him the cup. The box is just about the right size.”

  “Well, hallelujah for that,” Teddy said. “Now he can stop obsessing about it and get to work on it.”

  “You need to get to work on it too,” Lily said sweetly, “remember?”

  Teddy shrugged, grumpy. “Rinsing ghosts out of teacups is Ed’s job, not mine.”

  I wondered if Lily was going to have trouble with him, and I could see that she was wondering the same thing. The show’s ratings had begun to sag, and there had been talk about moving the spotlight away from Teddy and onto Ed. He had a lot of fans, too, and his approach was more scientific than Teddy’s straight-ahead-and-grab-that-ghost act. Social network analysis was beginning to show that people wanted more Ed and less Teddy, unless you were only looking at women of a particular age demographic. And the show’s format was getting stale; everybody knew it but Teddy.

  They noticed us when we were about ten steps away, and we did quick introductions, only having to repeat names once or twice. You can imagine the noise.

  Oswald looked Teddy up and down, looking more disconcerted than interested, and Helen politely shook his hand then warmly turned to Lily. I could just see her thinking how wonderful the girls were today, working in jobs she couldn’t even understand and being so cool about it. Lily told her she was a reality show producer, and Helen didn’t even say “What’s that?” Whatever it was, it was new and obscure, and gamine little gypsies like Lily just stepped up and did it, like it was nothing at all. Among all the ways the world was going to hell in a handbasket, this was one way it was actually getting better.

  Helena happened to glance at me and saw me reading her mind. We smiled.

  Maryellen addressed Teddy as if they were the summit leaders at this gathering. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ve turned over the object of all our fears to your colleague, here, so you can all get on with defragging it, or whatever it is you do.”

  “We
appreciate your cooperation,” Teddy said.

  “Metaphysics,” Ed added, “should not be held to a schedule, but we do have time constraints. One defrags a computer’s hard drive, Maryellen, not a teacup. Otherwise, you’re quite right, it’s high time to get on with this. Well, have a pleasant evening, everyone.”

  He turned and left.

  Those of us left standing were literally open-mouthed at his abruptness, and we watched him walk away without saying a word. The sun hadn’t even set yet, but once we got over being ditched like that, nobody was really surprised he hadn’t waited for it. In a manner of speaking, Ed’s sun was just rising.

  We were a big enough group now that we were an obstruction within the ever-flowing crowd, and it was hard to talk and be heard. When the man with the conch shell mounted a light standard and called the masses to order, I was relieved.

  He bade us be silent, waited for the precise moment, then threw his head back and blew into his shell, long and loud.

  Now that we were seeing what we’d come for, I quickly concentrated on taking it in. The last of the light had expanded into layers of misty color, powdering the miniature islands in the Gulf with a dusting of rose gold. The eye of the sun gently closed. Colors drained away and a streak of green flashed along the horizon.

  Following protocol, the crowd clapped, because they knew they were supposed to. The show was over. The entertainers began to pack up and the crowd began to move, gradually thinning.

  “You do this every night?” I asked Helen.

  “Oh, heavens no,” she said. “It’s for the tourists, mainly. I only came down tonight because Oswald wanted to.”

  “Maryellen said she was turning the teacup over to the investigators,” Oswald said. “Frankly, I intended to stop her and take the thing back myself, but she saw Ed before I did, and before I could try to reason with them, he had it in his hands and I could see it was going to take somebody stronger than me to get it away from him again.”

  “It would have taken somebody stronger than you to get it away from me, too,” Maryellen said. “I want to see what these people are going to do with it. Aren’t you interested in their investigation? After all, you started it.”

  “And I now regret it,” Oswald said.

  “Was it Arielle who suggested you call Ed?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “I never heard of these people,” he added, gesturing vaguely toward Teddy and Lily.

  “Don’t you want the teacup cleansed?” Teddy asked. “You can’t in good conscience sell it in its present state, and do you really want to keep it in your shop?”

  Oswald regarded Teddy, who towered over him, for a moment, then grudgingly said, “I suppose so. At this point, I don’t think you can do any actual harm, and maybe you can do some good.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody just find a nice, hard surface somewhere and drop it?” Michael asked.

  It was cold water on hot coals, and it sizzled in the air a moment. I had to struggle to keep a smile off my face.

  “That could just release the evil,” Teddy said in his talking-to-an-idiot-child voice. “It could actually make things worse.”

  I glanced off to the side and noticed The Professor helping Camille packing up her things. They took opposite sides of her spangly tablecloth as if they’d done this a million times, and quickly folded it up. Then she stuffed it into a backpack, stood up and stretched. She had worn a long, loose black dress and heavy gold jewelry, and I wasn’t surprised when she began taking the earrings and bracelets off, but I was definitely taken aback when she unbuttoned the dress and dropped it, revealing a dark shirt and denim capris underneath.

  She seemed thankful to get out of that dress. She stretched a moment, then took off her thick headband, and half her hair came off with it. The dress got rolled up with the hairpiece and stuffed into the backpack along with the tablecloth, then she stood there a moment taking deep breaths and looking relieved, shaking out her own natural hair and looking around. I had to smile, remembering the relief I’d felt after getting out of my own fortunetelling costume after doing my act at fundraisers.

  I pointed. “That’s the fortuneteller,” I told Teddy. “Want to meet her?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Let’s go make ourselves useful,” I added. “Looks like they’re packing up.”

  So we walked off towards Camille and The Professor. The magic moments after sunset were over now, and darkness was falling fast. The landward side of the wharf was lined with hotels and tiki bars, and there was enough ambient light so you could keep yourself from walking into things, but it was murky by then, and a coldness began to creep over me. It was several minutes before I realized we’d lost track of Oswald, Helena and Maryellen.

  They hadn’t yet broken down the folding table when we got to Camille and The Professor, and they stopped packing while we introduced Lily and Teddy.

  “A pleasure, sir,” The Professor said, giving Teddy’s hand a manly shake.

  “I have seen your show,” Camille said, without commenting one way or the other on it.

  “It’s always a pleasure to meet a colleague,” Teddy told her.

  “Can we help?” Michael asked, looking at her table. Next to the oversized backpack that was already stuffed with material was a clear plastic storage box with her tools of the trade already partially packed away in it.

  “How nice,” Camille said. She seemed very tired, and I felt good about saving her some of the heavy lifting. “If you’ll carry the crystal ball, Michael, it would be a big help. That ball is surprisingly heavy – it really is a solid crystal – and there’s no way to pack it so it isn’t awkward to carry.” She nested it into a Styrofoam form, probably the original packing it had come in, and settled it into the plastic box, closing it up securely.

  “I’ll take the backpack,” I said, hoisting it.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said.

  I gave Michael a happy glance. Somehow, I always feel virtuous when I’m working. My mother must have been frightened by a Puritan when she was carrying me.

  The Professor, interested in the technical side of creating a reality show, was monopolizing Lily, and I noticed that he was either accidentally or deliberately walking her away from us. That was fine with me; I didn’t think The Professor should be hauling tables around, and Lily was a big girl. If she got separated from us, she could find her way home.

  Teddy offered to break down the table while Michael and I walked away with Camille to put the things her car, but by the time we got back, Teddy was nowhere to be seen and the table was standing there alone.

  “He probably couldn’t figure out how it works,” Camille said. “I wanted something heavier than a card table, and this one was just what I wanted, but the hinges are tricky.”

  “Still,” I said, “he shouldn’t have just wandered off like that. Somebody could have stolen it.”

  “Oh, nobody here would do that. There he is,” Camille said, pointing, though I couldn’t see where he was. The crowd was still pretty thick.

  “I’ve seen this kind of table before,” Michael said. “A buddy I used to play cards with had one just like it. I know how to break it down.”

  “You have to be careful,” she warned. “It’s easy to pinch your fingers in the hinges.”

  Thinking I’d help turn the table over, I reached for its edge at the same time Camille did. Suddenly I felt as if I’d been hit by lightning. I pulled back the hand that had touched hers and held it close to my chest.

  “Did I scratch you?” she asked. “I’m sorry, it was an accident.” She was gazing steadily at me. I had already realized that Camille had a strange way about her, but the look she was giving me was really off, somehow.

  “I’m okay,” I said, spreading the hand and looking it over. “I guess you just gave me a shock.”

  She nodded wisely. “Yes. We carry opposing charges, you and I.”

  “Uh huh,” I agreed, watching her.

  “Tha
t was it,” Michael said. “I saw a little spark and heard a snap. I’ll handle this, ladies. Camille, why don’t you go talk to Teddy. You must have a lot of questions for him.”

  “Thank you so much,” she said, and still looking blank somehow, she walked off towards where she said she’d seen Teddy.

  Michael turned the table over and we both got down on the ground and began the process of folding the legs against the tabletop, which was kind of a magic trick in itself. We managed not to pinch any fingers, but Camille was right: you had to be careful. Then Michael picked it up and we walked back to Camille’s SUV.

  “Did she hurt you?” Michael asked as we walked.

  “No.” I said it like a question, and he waited. Finally, gathering it together in my head, I gave it a shot. “You know what it’s like when you get a bad shock – and that was a bad one. The whole world moves, and you see things. Like you’re getting a snapshot of another dimension. And then it’s gone.”

  “That’s weird,” he said. “I mean I’ve gotten static electricity shocks, but I’ve never flown off to another dimension when it happened. What did you see?”

  “Her.” After a few beats and very unwilling, I went on. “Curly hair. You know – the lady in the cup.”

  “Oh. What was she doing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t . . . .” Suddenly I just wanted to shake it off. “It was just a quick thing. I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Uh huh,” Michael said, the same way I’d agreed with Camille’s “opposing charges” theory. I didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t say anything else until we reached Camille’s SUV.

  She’d left it unlocked, and Michael slid the table into the cargo area. We looked around and nobody shady seemed to be hanging around, but I was still uneasy about leaving the car unlocked. I come from Chicago; I lock my car.

  We went back to the wharf to try to find her and tell her to go lock up.