Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Tilda was tougher than me. I don’t know how many years she held that seat on the town council. I couldn’t have done it, myself. I lack her moral fortitude and her ability to speak truth to fools, but I did pay attention when she talked politics.”

  Faye wasn’t sure she agreed with Myrna’s assessment of her own ability to deal with fools.

  “My sister would never have voted in favor of Gilbert’s tawdry scheme, and she kept the other councilors in line. If the wrong person takes her place on the council, Gilbert will be able to do as he pleases.” Myrna set her teacup down because her hand was trembling too much to keep it aloft. The cup trembled and clattered on its saucer, making Myrna’s frailty audible. “Oh, Faye. The truth is that there is no right person. With Tilda gone, there’s no one with enough gumption to take her place. Gilbert has won. So why did he come here? To rub the whole thing in my face?”

  Myrna’s point was well-taken. Based on her description of local politics, Tilda’s death had left a power vacuum in Rosebower, but Faye couldn’t imagine that Myrna would be the one to fill it. If Tilda’s replacement on the town council was to Gilbert Marlowe’s liking, then there was nothing to stop him. Still, if he were really a power-mad scoundrel who destroyed small towns while tying defenseless women to railroad tracks, why had he just scuttled away from a sick lady who was past eighty? Something didn’t add up.

  Faye was, by nature, protective of elderly people. She didn’t like to think of Myrna as a pawn.

  Amande was tapping her on the arm, hard. “The letter. You told her about it this afternoon, right?”

  The letter. It was the reason they had come to Myrna’s house after quitting work for the day. A full hour had passed since Amande had finished transcribing it. If the girl didn’t get a chance to read her transcription to Myrna soon, she was going to burst. And then she was going to have a nervous breakdown.

  “Great-great-great-aunt Virginia Armistead’s letter? You brought it?” Myrna’s face shone in a way that her fellow Spiritualists might have called supernatural.

  “No, I didn’t bring the letter. It’s too fragile to take out of the museum,” Amande said. “But I copied it for you. Do you want to hear?”

  “Indeed, I do. And I hope you two will join me for dinner afterwards. I threw a little something in the oven while the tea was steeping.”

  Faye had thought she’d felt something savory strike her nose. The plan had been to grab a bite at the diner, but this smelled way better. They’d have to eat and run, though, if they were to keep their appointment with Toni for an evening spent watching Dara and Willow strut their stuff. Amande had been cautioned not to mention this to Myrna. Faye didn’t want to get into the middle of any family dynamics she didn’t understand.

  “We didn’t come here just to get some of your cooking, but yes. Thank you. We’d love to stay.” Faye nodded at Amande, saying, “Would you like to read?”

  Amande was already pulling a neatly folded sheet of paper from her purse. She looked up to see if Myrna was ready for her to begin.

  Myrna beamed, resting her arms on the table and letting them take the weight of her slumping torso.

  “My dearest Hosea, I do so wish you were with me. When one is blessed with a partner in life, one does not wish to be without him on days of great import.…”

  Faye always loved the sweetness of Amande’s voice, darker and deeper than most girls her age, but she was struck by the change in tone as she read Virginia Armistead’s words. It was as if the formality of an overeducated Victorian woman had invaded the girl’s speech. Her enunciation was clearer and her delivery was remarkably deliberate for a young person. Like Myrna, Faye rested her elbows on the table and enjoyed the words of a woman who had long ago disappeared into the afterlife in which Spiritualists believed so fervently.

  “We women will soon raise our voices for the things that are our due—the right to own the things that are ours, the right to independent thought and action, and most of all, the right to speak our minds and be heard by our own government. These are not unreasonable requests. You have freely given me such independence as is yours to give, every day of our lives together, but you must understand that the word ‘given’ rankles. Am I entitled to none of the privileges that were yours by right at birth?” Amande’s voice gained the urgency that Virginia Armistead had set to paper so many years before. “You do not treat me as a lesser being, but society does, and it is time for this to stop. It is time for us to be heard.”

  Myrna burst into spontaneous applause.

  “Wait! There’s more,” Amande flapped the paper in the air.

  “I know. But it just seemed like a good time to cheer for Great-great-great-aunt Virginia. Never mind me. Carry on.”

  The low, sweet voice resumed. “I haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing dear Mrs. Stanton. I am given to understand that she has been at work with her pen.…”

  As Amande read, Faye let herself relax into the sound of her daughter’s voice and the feel of Myrna’s warm home and the smell of the coming meatloaf. Some moments were so simple and perfect that Faye’s nattering brain was able to be quiet and enjoy them. This was one of those moments.

  ***

  “Thank you for finding my great-great-great-aunt’s letter. And thank you for coming to tell me about it.”

  Myrna patted Amande on the arm, and the pleasure on her face made Faye realize how rare the company of young people had been in the woman’s life. “When Tilda was your age, she used to help Father in his work. People came—my, how they came—and Father would put them in touch with their loved ones. He and Tilda would take them in the séance room while I waited upstairs with Mother, out of the way. After their time with Father and with their ancestors, our guests simply beamed with happiness. Imagine! Communing with a loved one who had passed over, someone you missed very much.” She put a hand to her own ample breast. “I miss Tilda so.”

  They paused in Myrna’s front door. Faye knew they needed to go. Toni was waiting for them, but it felt wrong to walk away from Myrna’s grief.

  “Sometimes, when Father didn’t need her, Tilda came over here and helped our uncle with his readings. I wanted to be part of helping those people; truly, I did, but Tilda was the one with the gift. She was only a year older, but even when we were little girls, I could see that she had something I didn’t. But enough of that. I had Tilda, and she was a wonderful sister. And my parents and my dear niece Dara. And now, you! I have so many friends. Why else do we live, except to love other people? Love like that can’t possibly be stopped by something as meaningless as death.”

  Amande hugged Myrna impulsively and thanked her for the fabulous meal, then Faye did the same. As they hurried, anxious to be on time for Dara’s show, Faye was left to wonder how women of Myrna’s generation had acquired the knack of plunking a fabulous meal on the table half an hour after extending an invitation to unexpected guests. Maybe Myrna’s freezer was full of the homemade version of TV dinners, ready at a moment’s notice.

  Amande must have been thinking the same thing, “I thought she said Tilda was the good cook in their family. Did you notice a difference?”

  Remembering the tomato sauce dripping over the sides of Myrna’s meat loaf, Faye shook her head. “If Tilda’s cooking was better, my taste buds aren’t good enough to tell.”

  Toni was waiting for them outside the auditorium where tourists stood in line to see Dara and Willow do their thing. The moonlight sparkled on her steel-rimmed glasses and the scattering of silver strands in her black hair, and Faye was struck by the lack of wrinkles and age spots on her pale face.

  It was not that the woman did not look her age. Rather, she seemed to be little damaged by it. Faye supposed that a lifetime in the classroom was the ultimate sunscreen. Toni had the complexion of a bookworm.

  “Are you two ready for the psychic reading? Or maybe I should call it a show? Actua
lly, I should probably call it what it is—the gullible public’s daily fleecing.” Toni spoke quietly, glancing around to make sure she wasn’t heard.

  “You really know how they do their tricks?”

  Toni quieted Amande by putting a finger to her own lips. “Most of them. I keep going to their shows, trying to figure out the rest, but I have to space out my visits. I shouldn’t be going again tonight, when I was just here on Monday, but I can’t resist watching their shenanigans with you two. You’re so…rational. In Rosebower, rational people are refreshing.”

  “Why do you have to space out your visits?” Amande asked. “You’re paying good money for your tickets. What’s the harm?”

  “I don’t want anybody to notice me. For professional reasons. But don’t worry, I’ll manage, eventually. Dara is no more supernaturally gifted than any of the rest of us. She’s slick. That’s all.”

  “What about Willow?” Amande asked.

  “He’s not even slick. He’s just slimy.”

  Amande said nothing, but Faye could tell she didn’t like Toni’s criticism of her handsome new friend.

  Leaning in even closer, Toni whispered, “I’m going to help you two look past their misdirection. I’ll sit between you, so I can give you both an unobtrusive tap on the arm. When I tap once, I want you to look to the left of whatever it is Dara or Willow is doing, no matter what’s happening on stage. I’m talking about your left. Don’t try to remember which way is stage left. When I tap you twice, look right.”

  Faye supposed that figuring out magicians’ tricks wasn’t the weirdest hobby a physics teacher could have.

  ***

  Willow trained the hidden camera on the audience. There she was, just to the right of center and near the rear of the house. Toni the Astonisher. How anyone thought it was possible to hide from the Internet in this day and age was beyond him. And this was a person who had actively sought publicity for decades. He supposed that people of her generation had a blind spot when it came to privacy, or the lack thereof. He still had friends in the world of illusionists, and he’d been asking some questions. Toni the Astonisher could be trouble.

  This was at least the sixth time she’d come to the show. He and Dara were good at what they did, but they weren’t that good. There was a reason she kept coming back, and Willow couldn’t think of a good reason. This camera fulfilled its function very well. It gave him a way to study the audience before a show, so that he could choose the most rewarding dupes. It was amazing what could be discerned by the body language of someone distressed enough to make life decisions based on the pictures on the faces of tarot cards.

  Maybe everyone had a blind spot when it came to privacy, or the lack thereof, since every single human walked the Earth in a body that told watchers everything. A slump of the shoulders. A melancholy tilt of the head. A devil-may-care gleam in the eye. Willow knew how to work all these things to his advantage. He’d already chosen tonight’s mark, so now he could train his camera on Toni the Astonisher and leave it there for the rest of the evening.

  He’d already done this once, and an after-show viewing of the video had revealed much. She had stood out visually, among a crowd of other watchers, because she was never looking at the same thing they were. All the other eyes in the auditorium stayed focused on Willow and Dara, where they should be. Toni’s eyes wandered up and down. They focused in directions Willow did not want them focusing. Toni could not be misdirected. This was dangerous.

  Tonight, she sat with Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her remarkable daughter. These, too, were not people who could be readily fooled. Willow wasn’t sure what to do about these three women and their refusal to be distracted. He trained the camera on the rear of the auditorium, just right of center, and set it to record. Maybe after he’d watched them watch him he would know how to proceed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Faye did not need a retired physics teacher to tell her that Dara and Willow employed a defined strategy. They liked to baffle their audience with bullshit. The auditorium was small, and the décor was inexpensive but flashy, with lots of glittery upholstery and wall hangings that distracted the eye from the serviceable industrial-grade carpeting. The stage was decorated with a dome-shaped brass-and-glass cage.

  No, that wasn’t right. The scientist in Faye couldn’t honestly use the word “dome” to describe the structure. It was constructed of flat panes of glass, some of them mirrored, and it encompassed a volume that was actually more like half of a dodecahedron, with its faces made of glass and some of them left free of glass so that Dara could walk through them to enter the space.

  A table and chair sat at its center, and the table was laid with ceremonial items. They were too small to make out from a distance, but a video screen overhead revealed them clearly. There was apparently a camera hidden somewhere, because Faye could see that Dara would be working with a deck of tarot cards and a large glass bowl full of something clear.

  The stage set was the closest thing to a crystal ball that could be constructed of flat glass. Half a crystal ball, insisted Faye-the-geometry-freak. If it had been a full ball, there could have been no floor for Dara to walk on.

  She couldn’t deny that the effect was fairly spectacular for something that could be easily constructed by a building contractor with an on-staff window specialist and welder. Her admiration for the couple’s ingenuity increased when the dome began to spin slowly on a large turntable. Again, the effect was exceedingly dramatic relative to the cost of a motor to run the turntable. The auditorium was equipped with standard overhead theatrical lights that glinted off the spinning frame’s glass facets in several colors.

  Faye had been prejudiced against Dara and Willow by Toni’s insistence that they were frauds, but she was inherently fair. The couple’s performance space gave every indication that they were excellent showpeople. This did not mean that they were dishonest.

  The house lights dimmed, and the rotating glass cage sparkled yet more brightly in the beams of rising footlights. Willow stepped onstage and it slowed to a stop, as if waiting for the real star to take her place at its center. A spotlight picked Willow up as he moved down from the stage and out into the audience. He wore a wireless microphone attached to one ear, and his well-cut black suit contrasted crisply with his pale shoulder-length hair. Faye could hear Amande’s little sigh from two seats away.

  “Welcome, dear friends, to Rosebower, where the boundary between the living and the dead is tissue-thin.” Willow spun to his left, eyes fixed on a fifty-ish woman wearing a flowered sundress. The hidden camera must have swung toward her, because her face suddenly filled the view screen. The damp traces on her cheeks shone in the reflected glow of the floodlights trained on Willow.

  He grasped her hand warmly. “Whom do you seek? I feel that he is near.”

  More tears flowed down the wet tracks on her face. “My husband. Is Kevin here? Do you…feel…him?”

  “Oh, Madame. Don’t you? The aura of love around you is unmistakable. He misses you so.”

  Toni was doing no arm-tapping, so she must think that Faye could figure out this part of the show for herself. The woman was on the front row, so she would have been among the first to arrive. Willow would have had a chance to watch his target ever since the doors opened, maybe for as long as a quarter-hour. He would have had plenty of time to see the tears. Also, even Faye could tell that the woman had come in alone, just by the physical positioning of the people sitting on either side of her.

  A weeping woman who has come alone to see psychics, especially psychics who claim to be able to put her in direct contact with the dead? There could be no easier mark.

  Faye had felt the crowd warm to Willow when he guessed that the woman’s loved one was male, but it was easy to see that the odds were in his favor. In any case, gender was a fifty-fifty shot. A woman well into middle age would likely have lost one or both parents, but men mar
ry later than women and they die sooner. At age fifty, the odds that she had a dead father were greater than the odds that her mother was dead, and this would be true for a few more years yet. Fifty-year-olds have also entered the time of life when a dead spouse grows more likely, and heterosexual women far outnumber lesbians. These facts, too, pointed to the probability that this woman’s tears were for a man. The possibility of her having lost a child was real, and the gender in that case would have been a coin-toss, but a dead husband or father was so much more likely.

  Faye couldn’t have calculated Willow’s odds of guessing right when he used the word “he” for the sadly departed Kevin, but she thought they were way more than even. Maybe as much as seventy-five percent. Another sigh coming from the direction of Faye’s own daughter said that the heterosexual women in the audience would have forgiven handsome Willow, even if he’d guessed wrong, and the audience was way more than half female. All of the demographics were in Willow’s favor.

  “It hasn’t been long, has it? Since you lost Kevin? And your name is…”

  “Debbie.”

  Faye wanted to stand up and ask him why he couldn’t read Debbie’s name, if he was such a damn fine psychic.

  The woman’s tears flowed again, and they made Faye angry. Of course it hadn’t been long since Kevin died and left Debbie behind. Any fool could see that the woman was still traumatized. Debbie was not yet of an age when she could be expected to be a long-term widow. And Faye had watched Willow feel up Debbie’s left hand, which still bore the rings that Kevin had put on her finger. Willow was shooting fish in a barrel, and the gullible crowd was letting him.

  Faye cast an eye-rolling glance in Toni’s direction, but Toni responded with only a slight shake of the head that seemed to say, “Just wait.”