Rituals: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  Willow was waiting by the door as Dara shut it behind her. They did the same damn show nine times a week, but she could see that he was taut with nervous energy. In a moment, she would be, too. No performer could engage an audience without that energy. Dara’s mother had exuded the same energy, even when she had an audience of one.

  There is a knack to being fascinating. Performers have it. Regular people just don’t.

  Dara was torn between her grieving aunt and the audience that was already gathering. She and Willow made a good living, entertaining Rosebower’s tourists with their daily dose of magical shock-and-awe. Willow did a masterful job of working the audience, day in and day out, but Dara was the one who owned the stage. She knew it. He knew it.

  She was tired of the daily shows, but she needed them like a drug. She wanted to stay here with Myrna, but she wanted an audience more. Theoretically, she had a partner who could have carried on without her on days when she was sick. She should have been able to take a day or two off after her mother died so horribly, but she couldn’t.

  She could carry the show without Willow, if need be, but he couldn’t carry it without her. And they both knew it.

  Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:

  An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism in Rosebower, New York

  by Antonia Caruso

  Dara Armistead is not her mother. She resembles her mother in no way, beyond the fact that they are both tall, strong-willed women. I know for a fact that she lacks her mother’s integrity.

  Any reader of my eventual book will know that I do not believe Tilda Armistead had psychic powers, because I do not believe that anyone has them. Still, intellectual honesty requires me to repeat this mantra daily: “I could be wrong.”

  It is possible that I am wrong in my belief that the physical world is all there is. It is possible, though I think it’s highly unlikely, that some people can communicate with our dearly beloved ones who have passed to the other side. If so, then I admit the possibility that Tilda Armistead was the real thing. I do not give Dara Armistead that much credit, because there is no question that she is a fraud.

  It is no wonder that the two women didn’t speak for the last fifteen years of Tilda’s life. It’s more surprising that their relationship lasted as long as it did, but distance can be a precious buffer between incompatible relatives. When Dara went away to college, she married Willow and they lived somewhere down south for a while. My contacts in the illusionists’ world remember them faintly. They seem to have made quite a splash in a few of the old Confederate states. I’ve heard Myrna say that it nearly killed Tilda when her daughter would go for months without even letting her know she was alive.

  Eventually, though, the young couple saw the potential for making a killing in the family business. They moved home to Rosebower and, from the moment they hit town, Tilda’s relationship with her daughter was doomed.

  I have uncovered this much hard evidence in the public record: Dara and Willow applied for a business license to practice as psychics within the city limits of Rosebower, and the town’s governing council denied their request. Nothing in the public record tells us why.

  Dara Armistead is Rosebower royalty. She is not some upstart Rust Belt retiree who wants to move here and supplement her Social Security check by reading palms and tea leaves. There is a story behind Dara Armistead’s rejection by the town her ancestors founded. There has to be. And I think I know what it is.

  These people believe in what they are doing. When they deliver a message from dead Cousin Fred and departed Aunt Martha, they believe they are helping their tearful clients. Dara’s exhibitionist antics horrify them, and there can be no question that they horrified her mother. After Rosebower rejected Dara, she threw their disapproval right back in their faces, building her business barely outside the town limits on property she inherited from her father. In other words, she and Willow work just out of reach of the town council and its annoying ethics requirements.

  I have attended the circus that Dara and her husband call a “Spiritualist event” on several occasions. Once every day, and twice on Saturday and Sunday, they pack the tourists into their small custom-built auditorium. I have to admit that they put on a good show, but it is unadulterated old-fashioned hucksterism.

  Willow appears to be very good at cold readings, particularly when his victims are lonely middle-aged women. He takes their faces between his manly hands and stares deeply into their eyes, making bold statements and asking searching questions:

  “There is someone special in your past, someone who hurt you.”

  For how many middle-aged women is this statement not true? I can say honestly that it’s true for me.

  The poor vulnerable victim sheds tears over her faithless lover, and then Willow is off to the races. When he guesses wrong, he is excused, because he has already been right about the doomed love affair. And when he nails something obvious, like, “Your children have never appreciated the sacrifices you made for them,” everyone in the room is on his side.

  He doesn’t fool around with parlor tricks like stealing the poor sucker’s watch and having an accomplice hide it someplace amazing. He does not plant fake suckers in the audience who will agree that his most far-fetched statements are miracles of mindreading skill. He merely chooses the most vulnerable person in the room—and it’s usually a woman—then he manipulates her emotions for the entertainment of a crowd.

  It’s sad to watch, really.

  Dara doesn’t bother going out among her guests. She remains on the stage at all times, which is a good use of her theatrical flair. She’s really a very talented magician. In particular, she is adept at sleight-of-hand. My, how she can make tarot cards spin and fly and disappear!

  I find it intriguing that she uses a camera and overhead monitor to give the audience a close-up view of her impressive card-handling skills, but there comes a point in the show when the lights go down and the viewer is left with Dara inside the centerpiece of her cheap-but-spectacular stage—a mostly transparent cage built of glass and mirrors that harks back to crystal balls like her mother’s.

  I think her crystal stage is built to hide trickery, but I also think that it is no accident that Dara has made herself the center of her world.

  Chapter Nine

  Faye should have guessed that Amande had something up her sleeve when she turned down pie. Looking at the heavy-laden dessert cart, Faye couldn’t comprehend Amande’s attitude. She tried in vain to find one treat that didn’t feature chocolate, coconut, cherries, or caramel. What wasn’t to like?

  But Amande was only interested in fiddling with her phone, which she checked at least six times during dinner. (Faye had counted.) What was the use of girls-night-out in their bed-and-breakfast’s fancy restaurant if the girls in question weren’t talking?

  Faye made a mental correction. Amande was talking. She was just talking with her thumbs and she wasn’t talking to her. But maybe mothers expected too much. If she and Amande were going to be working together all day and sleeping in the same room every night, then maybe Faye needed to build a little alone time into the schedule for both of them.

  Oh, great. She should never have admitted to herself that it might be problematic to work together all day with someone and then sleep in the same room every night. Because that was an exact description of her life with Joe. She’d felt guilty about leaving him with Michael, but maybe she’d accidentally done a good thing for their relationship.

  Obsessing over her marriage rendered the caramel-coconut-cherry tart absolutely irresistible. She ordered it to-go and called after the waiter, “Can you put a little chocolate syrup on that?”

  “Mom.” Amande looked up from her phone. “We have a bottle of Hershey’s syrup in the fridge in our room.”

  “You’re right. I forgot.”

  “You are stressed. Tell you what. I have something important to do. I’ll go up to our room and take care of it while you wait for your coconut-cherry g
ut bomb. Bring it with you and we can play some gin rummy while you eat it.”

  And off she went, worrying her phone’s keyboard with both thumbs, while Faye worried over who was on the other end of all those messages.

  ***

  Faye shoved the door open with her hip, so that there was no risk of dropping her luscious pile of coconut, cherries, and goo. She was greeted by three voices yelling, “Surprise!”

  One of them was Amande’s, obviously, because she was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her computer on her lap. The source of the other two voices was a mystery, until her daughter turned the computer screen to face her. Dead in the center of the screen was Joe’s handsome face. In his lap sat a squirming lump of boy, gripping his father’s long straight near-black hair with both hands.

  Faye looked at the computer, unfettered by any wires whatsoever. She thought of all the miles she had flown on an airplane to get here. Not to mention the boat ride from their home on Joyeuse to shore and the car ride to the airport and the miles in the rental car that had brought her here. Yet there sat Joe and his green eyes. She missed him so much. She missed both of them.

  Faye could remember when phones had cords. She remembered when photographs came from film that took time to develop. She hadn’t always had a phone in her pocket. And she remembered when long distance calls were luxuries.

  Reading her mind, or perhaps reading her frugal facial expression, Amande said, “It’s Skype, Mom. It’s free! Come over here and talk.”

  Faye knew it was free. She was just adjusting herself to the rocketing pace of technology and the rollicking passage of time.

  She settled herself on the bed, but Amande grabbed her shoulders before she could say much beyond, “Oh, you two look so good!” She felt herself pulled back sixty degrees from vertical, at least, as the girl yanked her out of range of the computer’s camera.

  The girl put her mouth next to Faye’s ear and hissed. “This is a big deal. Act like you’re impressed.”

  “I am impressed.”

  Faye hoped they were out of range of the computer’s microphone, as well as its camera. See no evil, hear no evil.

  “No, really. You’re impressed when he shoots a deer and fills up the freezer with it. For this, you need to make him feel like a rock star. It has taken me all day to get Dad up to speed on a simple little thing like video chatting. Seriously.”

  “When I met your Dad, he didn’t know how to use an ATM. I am impressed.”

  Amande removed her hands so that Faye could sit up straight and show her husband how impressed she was.

  “Oh, Sweetheart, it’s so good to see your face! How did you and Amande manage this? I can hardly believe it. It’s almost like a miracle.”

  Joe beamed. “It ain’t such a big deal, not when you’ve got a smart girl to help you.”

  Out of view of the computer’s camera, Amande squeezed Faye’s knee in approval. It seemed her daughter thought she was doing a good job of being impressed by a video chat, something routinely accomplished by nine-year-olds the world over.

  “Michael, you’re so big! Come closer to the camera so Mommy can see you.”

  Amande’s elbow caught Faye in the ribs. Tiny Faye sometimes had bruises from her big, sturdy daughter’s physical expressiveness, especially after she’d said something that sounded dumb to a teenager. “Mom,” she hissed. “It hasn’t been two weeks. He cannot possibly be visibly bigger.”

  Faye ignored her. “He’s huge. Michael, tell Amande and me what you and Daddy have been doing every day.”

  He stuck his chubby hands two feet apart and said, “Fish!”

  Joe, behind him, held his hands up, too, but he was an honest fisherman. His hands were much closer together than Michael’s.

  Faye caught his eye and he grinned, first down at their not-too-honest son and then at her.

  “I swim, too!” Michael’s arms flailed in a big windmill, whapping Joe in the chest with every stroke.

  “Is that a new bathing suit you’re wearing? Show it to Mommy and Amande.”

  “Yes. Has fish.” He raised the hem of his oversized T-shirt to show off the rainbow-colored fish covering his new swim trunks, then he kept going. Michael had just learned to take off his shirt, so he did so at every opportunity. Come hell or high water, that shirt was coming off, and it was coming off now. This new trick lacked the severe ramifications of his last one, removing his diaper.

  Joe smoothed the shirt back down over Michael’s brown belly, as if he could stop this striptease, but Michael was a toddler. Frustration was not to be borne. A struggle over the shirt ensued.

  Faye was on the brink of saying, “Oh, let him take it off. What will it hurt?” when Michael won his small battle. Faye’s chest tightened at the sight of the long bandage running below her child’s right collarbone. The words, “What in the hell happened?” spilled out of her mouth.

  She knew Joe hated it when she cursed.

  Faye would have ached at the look of helpless misery on her husband’s face, if she hadn’t been so angry. It had been a long time since she saw that look. When they’d met, his self-esteem had been buried under a lifetime of the kind of failures that come with learning disabilities the size of boulders.

  Joe had worked for years to make up for lost time, and Faye had helped him. She’d taught him to drive. She’d tutored him for his GED, then bullied the university into giving him the accommodations his disabilities required. He’d learned to recognize his own undeniable intelligence. Then they’d built a business together and a life and a family.

  It seemed so long ago, but the misery on his face brought it all back. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how terrified Joe was that he would someday let her down.

  She had already asked, ‘What in the hell happened?” The best thing to do now would be to hold her tongue and wait for his answer.

  “He saw me spear-fishing and—“

  “Fish!”

  “Yes, son, we caught some fish.” He put a hand on Michael’s back to quiet him. “I didn’t take him out there with me, Faye, and I never let him touch the spear. I gave him some rocks to play with on the beach and I stayed close in, so I could make sure he stayed out of the water. And he did. He stayed on the beach like a good boy.”

  “Yes. No water. Daddy said!”

  Faye could see how much it hurt Joe to tell this story, so she tried to help. “You were a good boy to do what Daddy said.”

  Michael reached for the computer screen, trying to touch her face. The action jostled his wounded shoulder and he winced a little. The child was tougher than beef jerky, so he must really be hurting.

  “I told him he could play in the tide pools. You know the ones.”

  She did. They were two inches deep, tops. She had let him play there less than a month ago.

  “Well, he found a sharp stick, almost as long as he is. He was pretending like he was spear-fishing, too, stabbing make-believe fish in the tide pool. I didn’t like the looks of the stick and I thought he was being too rambunctious, so I came up on the beach to take the stick away. Honest, Faye. I was hardly ten feet away when he fell. The stick broke under him, and it jabbed up into his shoulder.”

  Faye told the truth when she said, “You didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done myself.” Then she listened to Joe describe a sequence of events she’d imagined a thousand times.

  Medical crises assume a new level of significance for island dwellers. Miles of water stand between them and help. Joe had done what she’d always known she might someday have to do: he’d stanched the bleeding and bandaged the wound, while assessing whether this was an ambulance-level situation or a trip-to-the-emergency-room situation. Nixing the ambulance, which would have been a helicopter or boat, he had loaded their son into one of their own boats and headed for shore.

  Joe told the story calmly, rationally, but Faye got a sense of his level of terror when he said, “On our way in, I called Sheriff Mike. Magda and him met me at the dock and went
with us to the hospital.”

  Joe only asked for help in matters of life and death. Faye could see that Michael had been in no such danger, so Joe must have been at the end of his emotional rope to have made that call. She said, “Thank God for friends. I’m so glad they were there for you.” Then she casually asked the question that had been festering since she saw the bandage. “When did this happen?”

  It could be easy to lose track of time on an island, so maybe Joe really wasn’t sure. Or maybe he didn’t want to be sure. “Four days? Maybe five?”

  The fact that Faye didn’t start screaming things like “Don’t you know?” was proof that she was deeply in love with this man.

  The conversation had grown boring from a two-year-old’s perspective, so Michael had scaled his father’s ribcage and was now standing on one broad shoulder. Joe had both his strong hands around the boy’s trunk, lest he fall.