Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  Bowing his head in prayer, he paused a moment, then placed a hand on each of Myrna’s temples. Her breathing slowed. Moving his hands to her shoulders, he watched her closely. After a time, he seemed to see something that Faye didn’t, because he moved his hands to encircle Myrna’s wrists.

  Faye knew that Spiritualists practiced “the laying on of hands” as a healing ceremony, and she knew that it wasn’t unique to Spiritualism. When her mother and grandmother lay dying, the minister of their Holiness church had visited their bedsides often. Faye had never believed he had supernatural healing skills, but he’d given them comfort and she was grateful.

  The relaxation creeping over Myrna’s face made Faye wonder whether she should ask Elder Johnson if he could do something about her own sore neck. Still, the bereaved woman’s color was terrible. Somebody needed to get Myrna to a doctor, even if it meant drugging her first.

  At Faye’s left elbow sat the very outgoing Amande, who had already introduced herself to the white-haired man on her other side.

  “Mom, this is Willow. Dara is his wife, and she is…was…Tilda’s daughter.”

  “Is. The word is ‘is.’ Death is not the barrier you perceive it to be.”

  Faye watched her daughter stare at Willow, goggle-eyed, as he intoned these words of wisdom. The man was working the easiest audience he’d ever have.

  Willow seemed to be finished talking, so Amande turned her eyes on Myrna. She looked as relieved as Faye by the woman’s improved appearance. Leaning toward Faye but still watching Myrna, she murmured, “Maybe she’d feel better if somebody gave her a piece of that awful candy.”

  Myrna didn’t hear her, but Willow’s younger ears did. Amande looked mortified when he proved it by saying, “I think you’re right. Dara and I brought her aunt some of that candy she likes, and this might be just the time to give it to her.” He reached into a bag on the floor by his feet and pulled out a box identical to the one Myrna had passed around on the night of the fire.

  He offered Amande a piece, then grinned at her confusion. “You don’t have to take any. Some people like licorice and some don’t, but Dara’s aunt sure does. And we do.” He offered the candy around the table, but Dara was the only person who accepted. Then he pulled out a piece for himself, took a huge bite, and placed the box on the table where Myrna could see it. Within twenty seconds, she was chewing on a piece and trying to get everyone present to join her. Since they had all tasted the stuff, everyone refused except Willow and Dara, but her duty as a hostess had been fulfilled. Every time Myrna bit into a piece of the candy, the odor of licorice filled the room.

  Now Myrna was relaxed and happy, but her face was still grayer than her hair. Faye could tell that Dara was marshaling another argument in favor of a trip to the doctor, but her maneuvering was interrupted by a knock at the door. Dara leapt to her feet and answered it, preventing Myrna from burning the energy to get up and do so herself. Dara returned with Ennis.

  Faye could see that the young man had not expected to see his lunchtime nemesis and her mother. He refused to look directly at them, but Faye saw him peek twice out of the corner of his eye.

  Good. Let him think that people everywhere were looking out for his aunt.

  He addressed Elder Johnson. “I told Sister Mama what you said about Miss Myrna, and she sent this.” He held out an unlabeled brown glass vial with an eyedropper lid.

  The elder didn’t take it at first, scrutinizing Ennis for a long minute. Maybe he’d heard the gossip about Ennis and his treatment of his aunt. “You told her everything I said? Quick shallow breathing? Racing heart? Cyanosis of her nails?”

  “I did. She wanted to come herself, but she looks almost as bad as Miss Myrna. I told her to stay put, because I could most certainly bring a bottle over here and tell you that the dose is ten drops every three hours. Sister Mama said you should put them in a cup of hot water with a spoon of sugar and make her drink it down fast.” He turned his head toward the ailing woman. “Miss Myrna, she said you can put it in your tea if you want to. She also wanted me to tell you that the sugar don’t do nothing, so you can leave it out, but she knows how you like your sweets.”

  There was a teacup on the table in front of Myrna. In fact, at some point in the proceedings, someone had put full cups in front of Faye and Amande. Either Myrna had summoned the strength, based on eighty years of hospitable urges, or Dara had done it to keep her aunt still.

  Myrna seemed perked up by the very idea that Sister Mama was taking care of things. Without asking Ennis what was in the bottle—and would he have known?—she counted ten drops into her teacup. Then she polished off the contents in a single draft.

  Dara’s eyes were glued to Myrna, but Willow was smiling at the horrified looks on Amande’s and Faye’s faces.

  “What was in that stuff?” Amande asked him, quietly, so Myrna wouldn’t hear.

  “Tinctures of about twelve different roots and herbs, I imagine, probably dissolved in 150-proof home brew,” Willow said. His easy laugh made his white hair swing. Faye could see Amande’s eyes following it as he talked. “I couldn’t begin to tell you which roots she prescribed in this particular situation. Sister Mama has a huge garden and several huger greenhouses and she has the accumulated skills of every gardener since Adam. If, over the past fifty years, Sister Mama decided that she needed to grow a plant that was native to Tasmania or Finland or Ecuador, she figured out how. There could be anything in that bottle, but I’ll lay odds that it does Miss Myrna some good. Sister Mama has a lifetime of miracles to her credit.”

  The conversation circled around meaningless chit-chat, but the chit-chatters’ hearts weren’t in it. Their eyes flicked toward Myrna, time and again, but the weary woman didn’t seem to notice. To pass the time, Dara told a funny story about how her foot once fell asleep while she was onstage. “I was flinging the tarot cards around, jiggling my leg the whole time.”

  “I couldn’t figure out why you were stalling,” Willow said. “I started making up stuff to say while I waited for you to stand up.”

  “Be glad I stalled. Otherwise, I’d have fallen on my face, and you’d have had to scrape me off the stage.”

  Faye nursed her zero-proof tea for a quarter-hour, watching Dara sparkle for her very small audience. During that time, Myrna’s color did improve and Ennis disappeared. She guessed that Sister Mama had told him to come home promptly and report on her patient’s condition, though how she was communicating so well with her nephew was anybody’s guess. Maybe they’d developed a sign language system, or maybe her speech got better when she wasn’t angry.

  Faye had spent that quarter-hour honing her own observation skills. She could see Tilda in her daughter’s lean form, although Dara must have gotten those hips and that flamboyant personality somewhere else. Her faultless posture, so like her mother’s, was a form of physical dignity. Faye could also hear a crisp intelligence in Dara’s words that harked back to Tilda.

  Faye suspected that Myrna too had inherited the family smarts but, for whatever reason, she chose to hide them. She more than made up for those hidden brains with social acuity. It would be a mistake to underestimate either woman.

  Different as they were, Myrna and Dara were blood relatives. Though their approaches to life were different, Faye could see that kinship. After Elder Johnson left, Dara got up and sat in his chair, pulling it close to her aunt. The two women shared an emotional effervescence that bore no resemblance to Tilda’s reserve. It was touching to watch them together.

  They hugged. They forced tea on everyone present. They gossiped. My, how they gossiped.

  “Do you think Ennis could’ve gotten out of here any faster, Auntie? He knows the whole town has heard about this little girl taking him down a notch or two.”

  The Armistead women—Faye had already ascertained that Dara clung to the family name as tightly as her mother—had grinned at Amande over her lunchtime victory, and Faye had watched the girl relax into friendship with them both. Willow had s
at quietly through the Armistead women’s goofy jokes, sipping his tea and watching his wife’s every move. Faye had rarely seen a man so smitten after years of marriage.

  Other than her own Joe, of course.

  When it came to Dara, Willow had plenty to watch. She possessed the gift of quiet drama. Her voice was soft and her gestures were slight, but she had the power to make you watch every movement of those expressive hands. Her tasteful bracelets, one on each wrist, slid gently back and forth as she moved. Her riotous red curls swung softly. Her dress was embroidered with beads and splashed with all the jewel tones there were. She would surely make a memorable picture sitting behind her mother’s crystal ball, caressing it with hands so like Tilda’s.

  Faye felt a pang when she realized that the crystal ball had probably not survived the fire. Dara had lost many things in the fire that were far less important than her mother. Still, for the rest of her life, she would have moments when she woke up and thought, “It’s gone. The portrait of my great-grandfather. It’s gone.”

  While Faye was thinking, Dara’s conversation with Myrna had taken a turn in the same regretful direction. Tears were rolling down Myrna’s cheeks as she said, “If only she hadn’t been so stubborn. And you, Dara. You’re as stubborn as she was, and now it’s too late. The two of you lost years that you’ll never get back. Why didn’t you go sit on her doorstep and stay there until she forgave you? I told you to do that.”

  Dara’s eyes were glittering, too. “Mama passed her gifts to me. Is it so surprising that I got her bullheadedness, too? You’re right. I should have lived on her doorstep, if that’s what it took to get her to speak to me. You told me to do that, and I should have. I do have one consolation. She will come to me now. From the other side, she’ll see my heart and she’ll come.”

  Now Myrna was weeping openly. “But not to me. Why don’t I have the family gifts? I’m just a worn-out old lady who’s never talked to anybody that wasn’t standing right in front of me, in the flesh.”

  It was Willow’s turn to reach a hand across the table and take hers. “And on the telephone. You’ve talked to me many times when I wasn’t right in front of you, and I was always glad to hear your voice. We all have our gifts, Miss Myrna.”

  Faye gave Myrna a good hard look. She was weeping, but the tremors were gone and her cheeks were pink. Sister Mama’s 150-proof miracle had done its work. Dara no longer needed Faye as an ally in forcing Myrna to see a doctor. It was time for her and Amande to go.

  She rose, gave hugs and handshakes where they were appropriate, and took her daughter out the door with her, leaving this family to make its own peace.

  Chapter Eight

  Ennis closed the door to his bedroom and dropped onto the bed. He was glad to see Miss Myrna respond so well to his great-aunt’s root medicine. Sister Mama had tried to teach him her secrets, back when she could talk better, but Ennis hadn’t had a lot of patience for lessons that looked a lot like the chemistry homework he’d hated so much.

  “Just tell me what root to use for what sickness,” he’d said.

  “There’s more to it than that. That’s why you need to listen to me. No. That ain’t right. You need to listen to your patients…what they’re sayin’…what they ain’t. You gotta listen to their chests and you gotta hold your hand on their pulses a long time. Not just till you’ve counted the beats, no. A body’s heart will speak for it. You got to learn to listen.”

  It was no use. Ennis didn’t have her healing gifts, and he didn’t really want them. When it came to website-building and search engine-optimization, however, he was hell on wheels. Sister Mama had built quite a respectable online presence before Ennis came to live with her, but he had taken her business to a whole new level. It was an understandable error of youth that he hadn’t thought ahead to the day when Sister Mama wouldn’t be there.

  She’d needed him to help out around the house when he’d first come to live with her, but she could still walk and talk and boss him around. He’d counted on having her on his hands for a long time, fiddling with the roots and herbs while he focused on making money.

  How could a twenty-year-old, full of life, have imagined the second stroke that wiped away almost everything his aunt had once been?

  She still had her moments. Sometimes she could spit out a few sentences, then finish making her opinion known through sign language. She had a letter board she used, pointing to letters that spelled the words she couldn’t say any more. When he’d told her that Myrna Armistead needed her, she’d rallied enough to mix the tinctures herself.

  And then there were those other times. He didn’t like the town talking about the way he’d treated Sister Mama at the diner, but they didn’t have to live his life, now, did they? They didn’t have to wipe up after an old lady who drooled about half the time. He didn’t want to spend his time with the shell of his aunt. He wanted to be with the pretty young girl who had shamed him in public.

  He also wanted to know what he was going to do when Sister Mama could no longer tell him how to do root medicine. He figured he could just shut the local practice down. All the real money came from the Internet, anyway. But how was he going to handle the mail-order business?

  He knew the recipes for her various hexing powders and love potions. He also knew that she was adamant that there was more to her work than just mixing a few powders and putting them in a bag. He believed her when she said that Goofer Dust packaged by a nonbeliever wouldn’t work. Worse, it might even hurt somebody.

  Ennis, who was a nonbeliever most of the time, was seriously considering converting all of Sister Mama’s product lines to pure talcum powder and sugar water. Nobody knew what she was selling, anyway. Goofer Dust made out of talcum powder couldn’t hurt anybody, and neither could a tincture made of sugar water, flavored with a dash of moonshine.

  He had no answer to the question of how he was going to hold on to his biggest income stream, the online private clients. They emailed, they texted, they Skyped, and Sister Mama told them what to do to feel better. Was he going to prescribe talcum powder to all of them? Or maybe these special clients would be happy to buy tiny vials of her very potent homebrew with no herbal tinctures in it, whatsoever. He had a theory that Sister Mama’s moonshine alone could cure things that modern medicine wouldn’t touch. This probably meant that he needed to hurry up and learn to make homebrew.

  Ennis was tired of trying to figure out how to keep the Sister Mama gravy train rolling after she passed, but maybe he wouldn’t have to do it much longer. He prided himself on his ability to make deals, and he had the mother of all deals on the hook right now. If he landed it—and he did intend to land it—he could show Sister Mama and everybody in Rosebower his back as he moved on to something bigger. Lots bigger.

  Failing to land it might trap him in Rosebower forever, hoeing magical herbs until he himself needed somebody to push his wheelchair around.

  All of these problems circled around the one central question that drove Ennis these days. It grated on his peace of mind so much that he did stupid things, like losing his temper with his aunt in public. It disturbed his sleep. This one central question never left his forebrain.

  What was he going to do when Sister Mama was gone?

  ***

  “I don’t like to leave you, Auntie.”

  Dara brought Myrna’s footstool and arranged some magazines, a cup of tea, and a box of candy on the table next to her aunt’s favorite chair.

  “I’m fine. Those magazines will keep me occupied till bedtime. There’s no need for you to stay here with me when you’ve got work to do.”

  Dara watched Myrna’s eyes droop. Her aunt would be reading no magazines tonight.

  “I’ll come back after the show and help you get upstairs to bed.”

  The lids jerked open. “I can climb my own stairs. I did it for thirty-five years before you were born.”

  Dara thought, Nothing lasts forever, Auntie. And nobody lasts forever, either. But she only said, “You
’ll call me if you change your mind about needing help?”

  There was a faint nod. The eyelids were settling again, but Myrna was a talker. She could talk until the instant that sleep took her. “I talked to Elder Johnson about your mother’s memorial service.”

  “We should plan for a crowd. The whole town will want to pay their respects, and we’ll need to feed them something afterward.”

  “Your mother didn’t want that. Think, Dara. How did Tilda feel about crowds? She wanted a cremation, then a brief time of remembrance with only family in attendance.”

  “But Auntie. You, me, and Willow are all the family she has. We might as well have had the service while we sat in your dining room this afternoon.”

  Myrna was dozing off with her tea, candy, and magazines still untouched. “It’s what your mother wanted. She told me when I witnessed her will. Tilda was a private woman of great faith. You couldn’t make her into something else when she was alive, and you can’t do it now. Go do your show. I’ll be fine.”