Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  The ruins of the old house reminded Faye of Tilda’s body. The northern summer sky hanging over it was a bright clear blue, without the brassy gleam of the morning sky over her Florida home. Traveling down the rural highway to Rosebower would have been a pleasant morning’s drive if Faye hadn’t known she’d find this at the other end.

  The building looked almost as it had looked the night before, weathered siding freshly painted in period-appropriate shades of ochre, but the scalding smoke that had ruined Tilda’s lungs showed itself in dark smudges over the house’s broken windows. A house was a much smaller loss than a human being, but Faye grieved for it anyway. She’d come to believe that old homes grew souls over time, soaking up the happiness and sorrow of their human occupants. Her own home, Joyeuse, had stood as long as this one, plus a little more, and it had its own spiritual presence. Tilda’s house was dead now.

  Faye saw Samuel standing on the sidewalk nearby, so she parked and joined him there, with Amande at her side. He was watching a woman move around within the yellow crime-scene tape bounding Tilda’s property. She carried a camera in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

  “The fire inspector,” Samuel said, nodding in the woman’s direction. “She’s already said that she wants to talk to you. You two—and Myrna and poor Tilda, of course—were the last people in the house before it burned.”

  “How’s Myrna?”

  Samuel spoke like a man who was choosing his words carefully. “About as well as you could expect. She was up all night, pacing and crying. There were a few of us with her, including her niece Dara. I thought we should call a doctor, but the others vetoed that idea. They called Sister Mama and she sent something over that knocked Myrna right out. She’s still sleeping.”

  Faye looked at Amande. “Have we met Sister Mama?” The girl shook her head.

  Samuel smiled for the first time that day, maybe for the first time since Faye had laid eyes on him. He was a very serious soul. Fortunately for Faye, he was serious about local history, and he had enough spare cash to front the money for the historical society to hire her. For this reason, Faye was inclined to overlook his funereal air.

  Samuel’s skin was unlined and his dark hair was only lightly streaked with gray. Now that she’d seen him smile, she realized that he might actually be in his early forties, about her age. One would think that independent wealth would have made him a bit more lighthearted.

  The fire investigator approached, slipping her phone in a pocket to free her right hand. Extending it first to Amande, then to Faye, she said, “I’m Avery Stein. You must be the Longchamp-Mantooth women. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  Faye nodded, and Avery beckoned for them to step over the crime-scene tape. As they walked toward the house, she asked, “Do you remember anything unusual about your time in Ms. Armistead’s house last night?”

  “You mean, other than the séance and the crystal ball and the fact that Tilda was pretty sure she could talk to dead people?” Amande asked.

  Avery nodded, giving a quick, shy smile. Faye thought she might be almost as close to Amande’s age as her own. She was also almost as sturdily built as Faye’s strapping daughter.

  The open flame under Tilda’s crystal ball had haunted Faye all night, so she described it to the investigator.

  “Do either of you remember where she stored the lamp oil? Was it in the room with you?”

  Faye and Amande both shook their heads.

  Faye said, “I don’t know about the fuel. The lamp under the crystal ball was full when Myrna lit it, but there must have been a good-sized jug of fuel somewhere nearby. Tilda seemed to like oil lamps better than electricity. I remember that she had a collection of glass lamps on the dining room sideboard and on a secretary in the living room. She lit them all as the sun went down.”

  A crease appeared between the eyebrows of Avery’s freckled forehead. “I…didn’t know about the other lamps.”

  From this Faye inferred that Avery had found the séance room and the oil lamp inside it. She also inferred that Avery was trying not to let them know what she’d already discovered about the fire, and that she was probably a very poor poker player.

  A stepladder stood beside the house’s dining room window. Avery indicated that she’d like Faye to climb up and look in the house. “I’ve been inside, and all indications are that it’s structurally stable, but I won’t put you at risk till I know more. Just tell me if you can see anything through the window that might be important. Does anything look different than it did when you left last night?”

  Faye climbed the ladder. Unbidden, Amande clambered up behind her. Even standing a step below Faye, Amande could easily see over her mother’s shoulder. Faye saw Avery consider stopping the girl. Instead, the arson investigator grabbed the ladder’s legs to steady it under the weight of two people.

  Faye could see through the dining room and into the parlor, so the entire space where she and Amande had visited with the Armistead sisters the night before was visible—except, obviously, for the interior of the séance room. She was surprised to see how much of the area was still recognizable. The firefighters had quenched the fire before the roof caved in, so the rooms were littered with bits of fallen ceiling material, but they weren’t filled with debris. The wood floor was scorched, but still in place. Faye could see footprints in the ashes where Avery, and probably some technicians, had already done a full inspection. She could also see scars on the floors and walls that she knew from experience were sites where samples for the arson lab were collected.

  “Lucretia Mott’s chair.” Amande sighed. Its horsehair upholstery had surely burned like an acetylene torch.

  Near the window, Faye could see that Tilda’s china cabinet, though scorched, had withstood the fire, except for its shattered glass doors and the broken glassware inside. The sideboard across the room was in similar condition. But where were the oil lamps that had been scattered across its surface? A house fire wasn’t hot enough to melt and consume glass, was it? She should at least be able to see shards of the lamps’ colorful glass in the ash atop the sideboard.

  And what about the lamps that had been on the secretary in the parlor? Faye squinted in that direction, but her eyes weren’t up to the task.

  “Amande, do you see the lamps that were on Tilda’s secretary desk?”

  The answer was quick and sure. “Nope. Nothing but a little bit of ash.” Amande started to scan the room again, but her seventeen-year-old eyes whipped back to the secretary. “Where’s the chair? Remember? That’s where Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s chair was. In front of the secretary.”

  Faye did remember, and she remembered the chair’s impressive cast-iron construction. The chair’s upholstery was probably history, but there was no way that a house fire would have burned its base beyond recognition. Where was it now?

  They both saw it at the same time, while Avery stood below, fidgeting as if she wished the ladder would hold all three of them.

  Amande pointed so enthusiastically that Avery had trouble keeping the ladder upright. Faye held on as best she could. “The Stanton chair—why is it in the hallway? It wasn’t there last night. It couldn’t have been. It’s sitting smack in front of the entrance to the séance room, blocking the door.”

  Amande was right. Faye could see the ornate cast-iron base of the old swivel chair lying on its side on the hallway floor. The upholstery had burned away, but the metal portions were almost unscathed.

  “That’s one reason why I asked you two to take a look,” Avery says. “I couldn’t think of any reason for that chair to be there. Nor the broken glass.”

  That’s when Faye noticed the colorful bits of glass sprinkled through the ashes on the hallway floor, like ceramic tiles in one of Pompeii’s ancient mosaics. They were all within a few feet of the séance room’s door. Its stout oak had been almost totally consumed, and chunks of its half-burned wood lay on the floor.

  Coal-dark marks as tall as Amande marked the walls around the do
or. Faye was chilled to think of Tilda trapped in the house, struggling to escape, banging fruitlessly on Myrna’s door, driving to Buffalo while choking to death from smoke inhalation. Then she saw something that drove those disturbing images from her brain.

  A stout length of wood dangled from a nail that had been hammered into the jamb of the door to the secret room. A second nail still protruded from the other end of the piece of wood. It had been hammered into something, probably the door, but that portion of the door had been consumed by the fire. Had the wood been nailed there the night before?

  Of course not. It would have held the door closed. They could never have gotten into the room with that board barring the entrance. Faye pointed it out to Avery, whose very poor poker face told her that she’d already seen it.

  Faye did her best to think of a good reason, or even a neutral reason, for that board and its nails to be nailed to a door that was used daily. “Someone might have nailed that board there to try to keep another person out of the room, but it would only work for the amount of time it took the other person to find a crowbar and pry the board off.”

  Avery nodded, but she kept her mouth shut. She was poker player enough to wait and see what Faye did with the exact same data she’d already had time to consider.

  “Here’s another scenario.” Faye was moving inexorably toward a mental picture she didn’t want to conjure. “It’s more disturbing, but it’s also more logical, since it can’t be undone with a simple crowbar. Maybe somebody was in the room, and another person was trying to keep that person in there by using the board as a makeshift lock. The trapped person would be on the wrong side of the door to pry it off. This would be a big problem if the house were on fire.”

  The scorched iron chair lay on the hallway floor in silent support of this scenario.

  It takes time to nail a door closed. A heavy iron chair, jammed under the doorknob, can deliver that time. If someone’s intent had been to trap a person—Tilda, perhaps—behind that door, then the chair, the strip of wood, a hammer, and two nails would have done the trick.

  If the person willing to do such a thing was also an arsonist, then Tilda’s cherished oil lamps would have been the last necessary element. The colorful pattern of broken glass on the hallway floor took a different shape when Faye considered that a burning oil lamp crafted of handblown glass would have been the Victorian equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. Shattering Tilda’s burning lamps against a door crafted of long-seasoned hardwood would have been a particularly artful way to commit murder.

  Amande was just as capable of following the broken glass clues as Faye. “Do you think somebody did that to…to Tilda?”

  Faye had the urge to fling her hands over her daughter’s eyes.

  “Do you think Tilda was murdered?” Faye asked Avery. “Do you?”

  “You’re looking at the same evidence I did. Yes, I think that evidence points to murder. What do you think?”

  Faye didn’t want to say.

  “I can track your whereabouts last night,” Avery said. “Mostly with witnesses, plus there was a lucky shot of you on a convenience store video. I know you didn’t do this to Mrs. Armistead, but it is very important that you don’t tell anybody else about what you see here. I needed you to confirm the condition of the door and the location of the chair when you left last night. You’ve done that. And you’ve also done me a favor by telling me what all that broken glass was about. From this point on, all I need is your silence.”

  Since Faye was too horrified to speak, that might not be a problem.

  “You understand why, don’t you?”

  Faye found her voice. “Of course I do. If anybody other than you, me, or Amande suggests that this was anything other than an ordinary house fire, then that person has been talking to the killer. Or, more likely, that person is the killer.”

  Chapter Five

  Faye was a borderline workaholic. She knew how to have fun, and she did so on a regular basis, but few things could prompt her to avoid a job that needed doing. Time at the museum, breathing dust instead of soot, seemed to hard-driving Faye to be exactly what her daughter needed to recover from the shock of Tilda’s death.

  They passed through the museum’s main display area, heading for the inadequate workroom that served as both repository and laboratory but addressed neither function well. Faye was in a hurry, but Amande lingered among the displays, asking, “When are we going to tackle this stuff?”

  Faye’s very intellectual response was, “Um…hmmm…maybe we’ll work on it next week.”

  This job had come with an unexpected problem. The museum’s existing displays weren’t remotely interesting to the casual tourists the museum was intended to reach. Well, Faye was making a presumption when she inferred that the historical society was reaching out to tourists. It wasn’t like anyone had ever written a mission statement or done any planning whatsoever. It looked to Faye like someone, or a lot of someones, had piled a bunch of old stuff in this old building and called it a museum.

  Faye was such a history nerd that it was a marvel she hadn’t married a ninety-year-old. If it was old, she was interested. Rosebower was a fascinating little town, with a history full of Spiritualists, religious reformers, and radical feminists. Faye had expected to find a cute little museum, amateurish but fun, needing only her professionalism and organizational flair. Nope.

  She looked around the cluttered room, hoping to find a historical jewel that she had somehow missed. Nope again.

  Faye had done this kind of work before, helping her friend Douglass bring his Museum of American Slavery up to professional standards. Douglass’ generous salary had made a hungry grad student’s life easier, and she’d taken extra coursework because she’d wanted to do a good job of curating and archiving his collection. Douglass and his museum had given Faye plenty of experience in sifting through random stuff acquired by an enthusiastic rich person, but his happy morass of uncatalogued minutiae couldn’t hold a candle to Samuel Langley’s museum—if one could even call it a museum.

  Some of the storage cases looked like they’d been purchased and filled when the town was founded in 1830, then ignored. Samuel was apparently not a devotee of Spiritualism, because there wasn’t a single crystal ball or photograph of Houdini in sight. There was nothing related to women’s rights, either, so he was missing his chance to engage feminists after their pilgrimage to Seneca Falls. In fact, Samuel didn’t seem interested in the nineteenth century at all, so he’d also overlooked things like the abolition movement and the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening.

  Instead, his displays were full of flint tools and dusty potsherds, poorly labeled and ill-displayed. This focus explained why he’d advertised for an archaeologist rather than an archivist. Faye had spent her first hour on the job perusing the pottery fragments that Samuel had chosen for display, hoping for something that fulfilled the mission she’d like this facility to have—connecting the fascinating history of Rosebower with its community and the world at large. She’d sent photos of the lithics to Joe, hoping for the same thing. Nope, yet again.

  Early on, Faye had approached Samuel with the idea of starting a dialogue with the Seneca Indians and other nearby Nations that could be used to enhance the museum’s interpretation of their ancestors’ culture. No luck. The man wasn’t interested.

  It had been a long time since museums existed only to display pretty and interesting stuff, transmitting information rather than inviting people to participate. Worse, even if this room had been the King Tut’s tomb of amateur museums, Samuel and his predecessors hadn’t kept records of who the donors were, or when the donations occurred, or…well…anything. And, just to put a cherry on top of all those problematic displays, they were also boring.

  “What about that stuff?” Amande pointed to a huge display in the center of the room. “It looks cool.”

  This “cool” stuff was the crux of Faye’s problem. She already hated the sight of the Rosebower spear, the runesto
ne, and the Langley Object.

  According to the museum’s exhibit labels, the Rosebower Sspear and the runestone proved that Scandinavian explorers didn’t just beat Columbus to the New World by centuries. They’d beaten him by millennia, founding all the great precolumbian American civilizations. The Scandinavian explorers were the real Aztecs, Incas, Mississippians, Clovis people, and Mayans, all rolled into one. This was crazy talk, and incredibly disrespectful to the people who actually did live in precolumbian America, but Samuel believed it.

  In an even more outrageous bit of crazy talk, Samuel believed that his Langley Object proved that aliens from other planets had visited thousands of years before the Scandinavians brought civilization to the New World.

  Aliens. Faye was still trying to wrap her mind around Samuel’s crackpot notions about Europeans and Toltecs. What on earth was she going to do with this so-called alien artifact?

  Helpful displays explained this imaginary alien invasion, suggesting that more traditional scholarship was a conspiracy of Biblical proportions. In one last slap at orthodoxy, the exhibit labels claimed that the writers of the Holy Bible itself, not to mention the writers of every holy text on Earth, had started this conspiracy.