From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  Sally helped me in, the cats hissing from the bathroom as we entered the bedroom. I set the alarm for eight—to give myself enough time to gather whatever papers I needed, not that I had very many—then left Thom a message on the deli voice mail saying that I wouldn’t be in until after the hearing.

  The next thing I knew, I was dreaming about anchovies trying to claw their way from the deep fryer as my father slammed the wire mesh basket down on them . . .

  I was up like a hen at cockcrow, alert and not sure what to expect. I’d either be laying eggs or getting what my chicken-raising great-great-grandmother called tashmesh and I just called a screwing.

  I grabbed my papers, did some quick online research as I had coffee and a raisin bagel, and made it to the court with thirty seconds to spare, traffic at this hour being very different from the traffic I was accustomed to ninety minutes earlier in the day. The hearing was held in a small room at One Public Square and it was pretty much what I had expected, a complete waste of my time. It was a pair of attorneys arguing through me—or rather with me as a shuttlecock. Andrew A. Dickson III was at one table, Joseph M. Bushyhead, a Cherokee, was at another, and I was on the stand reading from various documents and answering an occasional question from Judge Charlene Gold. Her Honor was an unsympathetic woman with a long, gaunt face topped by a tangle of gray hair. She looked like a scrubbing brush. I didn’t hold that against her. I probably looked like hell, too.

  There were no reporters, as far as I could tell. Everyone who was there seemed to have an attorney on his or her arm. I guess this kind of hearing wasn’t sexy enough.

  Yet.

  The whole thing was all over in less than a half-hour. None of the ostensibly wounded parties—Reynold Sterne or my Wiccan sisters—was present. Just the two sparring attorneys, both of whom spoke with passion about the rights to something that belonged to neither. It was surreal.

  Before accepting the judge’s offer to step down, I asked if I could say something for the record.

  “You may,” the judge said matter-of-factly, apparently expecting a plea for mutual love and understanding. I imagine she’d heard it all during her tenure on the bench.

  But probably not this.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Your Honor?”

  She and the attorneys all turned to me as one. No one in the gallery was talking or fidgeting.

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “I am, Your Honor.”

  “This is relevant how, Ms. Katz?” she asked.

  I smiled thinly. “I don’t believe in them, you see.

  But I believe that someone is trying to make me think my house is haunted.”

  “Why would someone do that?” she asked.

  “It could be to scare me into leaving.” I looked directly at the open-mouthed Dickson. “Or it could be to convince me that I need constant spiritual protection.” I glanced at the unflappable Bushyhead.

  “I have a full calendar and the other pleaders will kindly forgive this discursion,” Judge Gold sighed. “Will you explain and make it brief, Ms. Katz?”

  “I will, Your Honor,” I said. “I was awakened at two a.m. by noises in the den. I went downstairs and I saw someone in the shadows. When I went to call nine-one-one, the electricity was suddenly shut off. I hurried outside where I was rendered unconscious by an airborne toxin blown into my face by someone I didn’t see.”

  “You were assaulted?” the judge asked.

  “Ambushed and poisoned,” I said. “The police and paramedics have a full report, and the doctor took a sample from my nasal passages. When I thought about it this morning, I realized that the tableau I saw downstairs was meant to resemble a Civil War encampment, I think—complete with a soldier in gray and sandbags.”

  “Your Honor!” Dickson protested.

  “How do you know it wasn’t a real manifestation?” the leather-faced Joseph Bushyhead asked, turning from Dickson to the judge.

  Which was exactly what I had hoped he would do. I didn’t answer. Andrew A. Dickson did, however—which was exactly what I’d hoped he would do.

  “Your Honor, lack of evidentiary support aside, this is irrelevant testimony,” the attorney said. “If Ms. Katz experienced anything at all, it may have been a home invasion which she interrupted—”

  “Or it may be a result of the opening of a door to the spirit world,” Attorney Bushyhead countered.

  “—neither of which should or can have any impact on a contract dispute,” Attorney Dickson barreled on. “I would like to remind the court—I am obligated to remind the court that there are also at stake here the futures of many promising young scholars, who are devoting their theses to the work at hand.”

  “Your Honor, as we have been debating for the past thirty minutes, this is also a question of religious freedom,” the Cherokee disagreed.

  “Religious manipulation,” Dickson countered. “The earlier agreement, prior to the hasty conversion of the site, should have priority.”

  Judge Gold asked for both men to be silent and looked at me. She seemed openly annoyed. “Ms. Katz, I have eaten at your deli. You make a good grilled cheese with turkey bacon and tomato.”

  “Thank you, Judge Gold.”

  “And you seem to be a thoughtful, hardworking, down-to-earth woman. However, in the matter before the court, we have not been impressed by your behavior to date. We are here because as Mr. Dickson has stated, the evidence suggests you were trying to overturn an already adjudicated matter by inviting the Wiccans into your home. I understand the shock of discovering what your uncle had agreed to, but your remedy makes me question your commitment to the legal process. You could have petitioned this court for a temporary restraining order. The road not taken is lined with billboards that advocate rational, proven tradition.”

  “I didn’t drive a lot until I moved here, Your Honor,” I said. “I’m still learning.”

  “At whose expense? Religion? Archaeological research? Your own health and well-being?”

  There are times to defend one’s self and there are times to shut up. I could hear my great-grandmother yelling in my ear, “Sha! Sha!” I did not speak.

  “That said, I cannot tolerate the prehearing manipulation of a witness. Therefore, I’m going to order a recess until I can read the relevant reports of the police and medical personnel. This matter is adjourned until Monday morning at ten.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” I said to a pair of dubious, deep-set eyes.

  Dickson looked as if he wanted to protest but thought better of it. I had been watching their expressions carefully; both men seemed to have had no knowledge of what I had dropped on the courtroom. If one of their clients was responsible—and I was betting they were—these two were out of the loop.

  The question, then, was who did it and why? And one thing more. There were now three poison victims: two fatal, one not, but all relatively back to back to back. That, plus my innate Jewish paranoia, would not let me shake the idea that in some way these events were all related.

  Chapter 19

  It was Saturday.

  That was always a day for the tourist trade, and they dribbled in over the course of the day without anything approaching a “rush.”

  A visit from a police officer—not one of the two who had come to my home, but a Detective Olive Egan—confirmed that it was belladonna that was puffed in my punim. She said she would be going back to the house to search the grounds for evidence the other officers may have missed.

  “May have?” I snorted. “They spent about five minutes looking around inside and out, and shared a flashlight.”

  “The focus of their investigation was not clear,” she said evasively.

  “You mean they thought the victim was the perp,” I said.

  “They made quick field judgments.”

  God, I hated cover-your-ass language. I gave up. Anyway, I shouldn’t have bashed her for their incompetence. For all I knew, she was perfectly fine at her job. She showed me a satellit
e view of my home on an iPad, asked me to point out the spot where I was dusted, then asked me to try to describe my assailant. I told her I could not, it having been dark, me having been in a panic, and poison having clouded my vision. She thanked me, then cautioned me not to expect much since it had rained the night of the assault and whatever footprints or traces of powder might have been there were probably gone.

  “Check for dead moles and chipmunks,” I suggested.

  This being Saturday, it meant that after brunch I was free to try and find out where the poison came from and who might’ve purchased it. While I knew that exotic herbs could be grown or mail-ordered, I also had a suspicion that this was not.

  The health inspector’s question about bamboo prompted me to look it up online. Easy to grow, innocuous . . . and chock-full of naturally occurring cyanide sugar. It would take a whole lot of garden space to grow that much bamboo.

  Or a tiny bit of shelf space to keep it in powdered form. As at the local natural vitamin and herbalist emporium.

  I was sure that Daniels and his crack little team had thought of this, too, but I also knew that the owner, Bill “Spud” Carla, was an unrepentant hippy who had lobbied hard at the state legislature for the struggling Safe Access to Medical Cannabis Act. I didn’t know him, but I was willing to bet that he knew me.

  His small, boxy shop was located on Oldham Street near Cowan. There was a security camera set up and blackened doors; you had to be video ID’d and buzzed in. I guess I was okay since the door hummed and clicked. I walked into the large, single room. It was lit with long fluorescent lights and looked like a tea shop, but it was musty with pungent odors I did not recognize. Spud was behind the counter. I knew that because he wore a lab coat that had his name embroidered in black. Standing a bony six-foot-five, with his bald head, thick eyeglasses, gray Fu Manchu moustache, and appropriately long fingernails, he looked like the last man on earth to whom you would entrust the passage of a bill or medical procedure. I know, one shouldn’t judge by appearances. But this man had chosen to look weird. The least I could do was honor that.

  When I entered, Spud was using a pair of those fingernails to remove pinches of some kind of leaves—they looked like bay leaves but I was sure they weren’t—from a two-quart jar and place them on a small plastic scoop that sat on a digital scale. There was a brown paper bag beside it. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “Good afternoon,” he said with a low, raspy voice, the result, it sounded, of smoking regular cigarettes which I could smell on his clothes as I neared.

  “Hi.”

  He looked back at his scale. “I’ll be with you in ten blinks of a baby’s eyes.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that except with a strained smile. I looked around the shop. There were shelves of vitamins along one wall, a large, wooden table in the center—it looked like one of those torture racks from which the wheel gizmos had been removed—and more of those big glass jars on the other walls. I recognized the names on seven of the dozens of containers I looked at. A small room beside the counter was labeled LIBRARY. I saw rows of books and DVDs with a female version of Spud at the counter: gray ponytail, no makeup, frumpy wardrobe.

  “Now,” he said apologetically, “what can I help you with today?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “My house was just consecrated as a Wiccan church and I felt I should familiarize myself with herbalism.”

  “You’re Gwen Katz,” he said.

  I turned, still smiling my stiff smile. “That’s right. How did you know? The smell of pastrami?”

  “I would have smelled rotting meat on you as soon as you entered,” he said. “Possibly before.”

  “That’s quite a talent.”

  “Hardly. I am vegan.” He said it with reverence, like a pacifistic extraterrestrial telling me his name. “It is a natural ability that has been buried by toxicity.”

  “I see. I guess I have a lot to learn.”

  “We all do,” he said, “though purifying yourself would be a challenge because of your profession.”

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m a lawyer or politician,” I said.

  His thin lips smiled a little at that. “Well said.”

  “But since you mention it, I was thinking—I’ve only been here a year. People have asked me for vegetarian dishes, and I’ve provided that. But I was thinking it might be fun to add some exotic spices, maybe make the salads a little healthier. Any suggestions? Like this jar,” I said, tapping it lightly with a thumb knuckle. “Bamboo.”

  He walked slowly from behind the counter. “Why did you become a Wiccan?” he asked.

  “What have you heard?” I asked back.

  He grinned. “That you were looking to protect your home. Sally Biglake is a customer of good and long standing.”

  I felt a little uneasy now. Spud may have been skeletal, but he was an imposing figure. Especially trailing smoke and other disorienting smells like he’d just emerged from the Pit of Hell.

  “I think she and I got off to an iffy start,” I said. “She did me a big favor the other night and I was thinking, also, I might buy her a little gift.”

  He looked where my knuckle still rested. “Bamboo?”

  “No, I was thinking about that for a Chinese dish I’ve been considering,” I said.

  “Probably not the best ingredient in that form,” he said. “You may have noticed the label is red, not black.”

  “I did,” I said, looking around. I had noticed but figured he just ran out of one kind of felt-tipped pen.

  “It’s poisonous in more than the smallest of small doses,” he said.

  “Then why sell it?”

  He answered, “As poison. As an ingredient in all-natural pest control.”

  “Forgive me, but why would someone care about killing vermin naturally?”

  “Because the ingredients return to the earth,” he said. “A bird of prey might eat a dead rat. Metabolized bamboo would be less toxic to the predator than, say, lingering traces of indandione anticoagulants or 4-hydroxycoumarin found in over-the-counter rodenticides.”

  “Makes sense,” I agreed.

  He came closer. “Ms. Nash, please do not confuse veganism with being inherently naive or weak. The police asked about my bamboo and my rat poisons. I explained that, yes, an organically based compound would dissipate more rapidly and efficiently into the human body until only a very skilled forensic chemist would be able to correctly identify it. I suspect that quick discovery, not the latter, is the reason they surmised that one Tippi Montgomery died from ingesting the kind of mixture prepared in my shop. I emphasize ‘the kind of.’ Any competent herbalist could have prepared that mixture in their kitchen. And you will find, incidentally, that I do not sell mercury, which—according to the Herbal Defense Fund Association website—was the poison found in the body of the first victim, Ms. Montgomery’s brother.”

  “True, but that was when someone, apparently, was trying to put the finger on my herring.”

  “It is quite right for you to defend your honor and that of your fish,” he agreed. “None of which is my concern or my doing. I don’t mean to sound callous, but I am constantly under suspicion and even assault from the authorities due to my activism. I am not responsible for the actions of my customers, only my own. And, like you, I look after the integrity of my product. Which brings me back to, what can I help you with today?”

  One thing was certain: I’d been told.

  “Sorry to have interrupted,” I said with a nod toward the counter.

  “You didn’t. I finished that step.”

  I’d been told, again. I’d had enough of this. I’d learned that he sold what may have been used to kill Tippi Montgomery—but not definitively. I turned to go and saw, on the shelf, rows of his own remedies. They were packaged in little brown bags, like upscale tea leaves. Among them was one I’d seen before. It was called Karmamine and had a picture of a wave.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.
<
br />   He was still standing where I’d left him. “Seasickness,” he replied.

  Great, I thought. So maybe Yutu shopped here, too. Maybe he had a reason for killing Lippy. Or Barron again—he could have purchased the Karmamine and, by the way, let’s have some all natural rat poison for the boat. Mad had had access to Lippy’s food. I didn’t know who had access to Tippi. And what did any of that have to do with the trumpet case going missing, then turning up—if anything?

  Was everyone in my circle a potential suspect? Was everyone involved? Should I just go home, remove myself from events, and let them take their own course? What was it my great-grandmother used to say about why she never read a newspaper? Let the world knock its own heads together.

  I left knowing little more than I had before, only glad that I was out of that rank tomb with its walking cadaver.

  I headed back across the Cumberland River with almost nothing in my head. Or, rather, nothing particularly motivational. Dammit, I needed a hobby that didn’t involve dead bodies. I was thinking about where to go. I didn’t want to go to the house, where the Wiccan tent was still pitched; I hadn’t seen Sally that morning and I suspected she wasn’t there since her cat was sitting outside the flap, the familiar waiting. I didn’t want to go to the deli which I never seemed to escape. What about a movie? A museum? Something different, like a hot air balloon ride? A hike? There was the Leatherwood Ford Trail that went to the Angel Falls Overlook. That sounded—sweaty.

  “How about you just keep driving and head north, to New York?”

  And then I put something else in my brain. Before going to bed the night before, I had downloaded the song Luke and Mad had been humming—”More Coffee.” I turned on my iPod, gave it a few listens. It was as catchy as everyone had said, with the added benefit that the electric harp was soothing in a kind of full-body-harmonic-New-Age way. It was like “Achy Breaky Heart” and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” except that you didn’t hate yourself for liking it.

  I didn’t go home or to the deli. It was a very clear and warmish day so I went to the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park and walked around a bit. The nineteen-acre park, one of the great urban open spaces in the nation, had been newly restored after disastrous 2010 flooding. I hadn’t been here before but the fountains and columns of the fix-up were stunning. I walked from the capitol building through the Court of Three Stars with its stately ninety-five-bell carillons. I strolled by the Tennessee River Wall and the thirty-one geyserlike fountains representing the state’s rivers and waterways. Then I picked up a pulled-pork wrap and Coke at the farmer’s market—take that, vegan-alien!—and plopped myself on the grass. I had a flashback to Central Park in the early fall, when it was still warm and the trees were only just beginning to turn and there were distant sounds of traffic and kids with balls and Frisbees and dogs, just like now. I thought about what had filled my head then, the short-term worries and ambitions. I actually missed them. They were manageable bites. Finish analyzing this portfolio. Get my hair done for that date. Make sure to pick up Mom’s birthday cake. Pick up a couple of magazines so I won’t go crazy staying home on Yom Kippur.