Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  “But the bowl….” Amande’s voice drifted away as softly as Willow’s rosewater perfume.

  “I bet you didn’t notice the wet spot beside Dara’s chair, did you? It was hard to see from where you all were sitting.” Joe’s smile was sly. Faye hadn’t seen it often enough lately. She reminded herself that she was angry with him. “What was in that bowl when the lights went out?” he asked.

  “Water. Oil. A few drops of Willow’s blood.” Avery was trying to deliver that last phrase with the professional tone of someone whose work had shown her a lot of death, but Faye heard a faint note of discomfort escape her. Seeing the body of someone who died in a fire was truly horrible. Watching a small cut bleed slightly was not, but watching a man purposely harm himself was discomfiting in a different way. Faye understood how Avery felt.

  “I bet they dumped in a whole bunch of herbs, too.”

  Faye wondered if maybe Joe was the real psychic, until he said, “The herbs are still in there, if you want to check. There was a lot of wet, slimy, green stuff stuck to that wet spot on the floor. She must have dumped the bowl after the lights went out, but before she made you hold hands. She did make you hold hands?”

  They all nodded, but Amande asked the big question. “Who threw the bowl? Dara couldn’t have done it. Mom had Dara by one hand and Avery had her by the other. She couldn’t have let go of your hands long enough to throw the bowl. Neither of you would have let her.”

  “I sure didn’t,” Avery said. “Did Willow throw it at himself? Or did he maybe stand up next to the wall, holding the bowl in both hands, then bang it on the wall over his head? It was a thick bowl. I think it would be hard to break it that way. And it would be dangerous. He could cut his hands or his head, and the cuts might be a lot worse than the one he made on his palm.”

  Joe contradicted her. “Dara threw the bowl.”

  All three women asked, “How?”

  “After the lights went out, and before she took your hands, she dumped it on the floor behind her. Then she put it on her head upside down. Like a hat. If you went in there and looked at her, I bet you’d see that her hair was a little wet.”

  Amande looked doubtful. “She’s still gotta throw it.”

  “Sure she does. But she don’t need her hands.”

  Joe held out his empty hands and mimed putting an invisible bowl on his head. Then, his upper body made a quick forward-and-back motion from the hips. Simultaneously, he flipped his head forward like a whip. “You wouldn’t believe the power you can get this way, when you put your whole upper body behind it. It’s like using a slingshot the size of yourself. You bet she could throw that bowl hard enough to break it against the wall.”

  “That explains Willow’s reaction,” Faye said. “He looked really surprised and really angry. He’s a good actor, but he didn’t look like a man who felt safe. He looked like a man who didn’t know what had just happened. He also looked like a man who was pissed off at his wife. If he thought Tilda’s ghost threw the bowl, why would he be angry at Dara?”

  Faye remembered the shock in his voice when he said, “She tried to kill me.” In the context of a séance, Faye had assumed he meant Tilda, the spirit being called. She peeked through a window and could see that Dara and Willow were still standing in the same spot, shouting at each other. In the context of a troubled marriage, maybe the “she” who had tried to kill Willow was his wife.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Faye had been keeping an eye on the window, so she saw Willow turn his back on his wife and leave. He headed toward the kitchen and, presumably, out the kitchen door. Dara crossed the room and put a hand on Myrna’s shoulder. A word passed between them and Dara lifted her eyes toward a window that looked out onto the porch. Faye took a step back, but she knew Myrna had told them they were there.

  She was not surprised when Dara opened the door, with Myrna right behind her, so she was ready with innocuous questions. “How are you, Myrna? Should we call Ennis to come get Sister Mama?”

  As she asked the innocuous questions, she noticed a few glittering drops of oil clinging to Dara’s hair. Joe was a genius.

  “What happened in there?” Amande looked hardly able to contain her curiosity, despite the fact that her father had just explained precisely what had happened. The deceitful child was playing Dara for information. “How did that bowl fly into the wall? It looked like it was worth a lot of money.”

  Amande was right about that. Everything in Myrna’s house looked like somebody had spent a lot of money on it, way back when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Breaking a bowl in this house was a bigger deal than it was in Faye’s.

  “It was just a bowl. I’ve used it in my work for a long time, but it can be replaced.” Dara smoothed her hair back from her face and, in the process, smeared away most of the oil droplets.

  “I’ve heard of using a bowl instead of a crystal ball,” Joe said. “But why? Is the ball too obvious? Too hokey?”

  “Hokey? No. A practitioner must use the right tool. When the right tool is in the right hands, magic is not too strong a word. For me, a bowl of water, oil, and my husband’s blood carries more resonance than a simple piece of quartz. There is only one crystal ball that would enhance my abilities, and it belonged to my mother and years of Armisteads before her. There is no other like it. I would trade all my mother’s legacy—the money, the land, and every last jewel in her safety deposit box—for that ball. And, if by some miracle, I did have that ball, I would trade it for a single moment with my mother.”

  Money, land, and jewels. These sounded to Faye like classic motives for murder. Now that Tilda was dead, these things were Dara’s. Willow’s, too, presuming he stayed married to her. And, in Rosebower, maybe a singularly powerful crystal ball belonged on that list of motives for murder.

  Joe directed his next question to Avery. “I just spent most of an hour sitting on the porch, looking at the wreck of poor Miss Tilda’s house, and I’ve got something to ask you. Have you looked under the doorsteps?”

  Avery looked confused by the question. “No, I can’t say that I’ve done much more than shine a flashlight into the crawlspace and under the porches. People were smaller when these houses were built, and maybe the house has settled. I don’t think an adult could get into those crawlspaces now, if anybody ever could.”

  “I’m not talking about the house or the porches. I’m talking about the doorsteps that take you up to the porches. Or any doors, really. I only know what little I’ve read about Spiritualism, but I know a lot about hoodoo. I grew up with people that set a lot of store in it. My wife tells me that you’ve got a root doctor right in there.” He glanced through the open door at the silent Sister Mama. “Seems like the whole town’s serious about hoodoo and root magic.”

  Dara said simply, “Sister Mama is a gifted woman.”

  “Here’s what I know about hoodoo. One way to work on another man’s future with hoodoo is to work your magic on his path. Maybe you sprinkle graveyard dirt someplace where he’ll have to walk. Maybe you don’t do anything but draw a big X in his path when he’s not looking. Lots of hoodoo hexes bury things under doorsteps. In the rest of the world, this would be weird for me to say but, in this town, I think we should look under those doorsteps.”

  Avery shrugged as if to say, “I’ve heard odder suggestions this week,” and they all followed her across the street. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, and the only way she could see under Tilda’s doorstep was to lie on the ground, cheek to the grass.

  When she said, “Somebody hand me my camera. It’s in my purse. And somebody go get Sister Mama,” Faye knew that she’d done a good thing when she sent for Joe.

  ***

  A dried-up lemon. A few nails. Several pennies.

  Avery had photographed them in place. Now she had spread them on the grass and was squatting beside them, taking up-close photos. She squinted up at S
ister Mama.

  “Did you do this?”

  Sister Mama shook her head firmly.

  “Do you know who did?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Do you know what it means?”

  She gave a vigorous nod, as if she were glad to know something useful. She held up one palsied hand, thumb down. Her meaning seemed clear. A person who buried a lemon under another person’s doorstep was not casting a good-luck charm.

  Sister Mama wasn’t finished. She wanted to speak very much. She began with “Ehhhh…,” then frowned. Trying again, she exhaled hard enough to form an “h” sound.

  “Hehhhh…”

  Her arms moved in agitated jerks. She wanted to say more, but couldn’t. Finally, she managed another “Hehhhh…” and ended the sound with a broad gesture of her right hand. It made a swoop downward to the left, then rose high again to make another swoop crossing the first one.

  “X?” Amande asked.

  The old woman nodded and repeated the sequence. “Hehhh…” and following it with an “X” in the air.

  “Hex?” Faye asked. “You’re saying someone tried to hex Tilda?”

  Sister Mama swayed and laughed. “Yeh.”

  Faye let her eyes travel over Tilda’s ruined house, thinking that perhaps the person who hexed Tilda Armistead wielded the most potent magic in Rosebower. Then she let her eyes rest on Myrna. The morning sun cast every last crease on her face into sharp relief. Each breath seemed to come harder.

  Without speaking or even thinking, Faye ran back across the street. Being smaller than Avery, she could squeeze most of her torso beneath Myrna’s doorstep. This effort brought her face to face with another desiccated lemon, more rusty nails, and more pennies. Faye would never have thought that a little garbage could make her so blindingly angry.

  She heaved herself back into the sunlight, calling out, “Get that camera over here.” Then she ran for Myrna’s kitchen door, the entrance she used every day. As she expected, she found another lemon, more nails, more pennies. But she didn’t expect to see something else resting just past the lemon, glinting at arm’s-length in the darkness.

  She felt more like an archaeologist under this house than she’d felt since she arrived in Rosebower. There was a story here, and she couldn’t afford to mess it up. Carefully, so carefully, she backed out from under the steps. If there were clues in this dust, she wanted them to stay.

  “Avery. The camera.”

  “Another lemon?”

  “Yes. And a crystal ball.”

  ***

  Faye and Avery worked together to document the site of Tilda’s crystal ball. Technically, Faye supposed, it could have been somebody else’s crystal ball, but Dara and Myrna swore that it was the same size and of the same rare clarity. Maybe some of the fingerprints on it would prove to be Tilda’s.

  Close observation had gleaned some clues to support their opinion. An easily visible trail led through the dry dust under Myrna’s steps. It led from the grass to the ball’s resting spot, as if someone had rolled the crystal like a bowling ball. The stair treads weren’t water-tight. With the next rain, that trail would be gone. This meant that the ball had been placed in this spot since rain fell. A quick check of a weather website said that it had been less than two weeks since Rosebower saw rain. The ball itself had gathered very little dust, which also supported the theory that it hadn’t been outdoors for long.

  Joe had brought a chair outside for Myrna, so that she could watch Faye and Avery work. Sister Mama couldn’t be convinced to go home and rest, and Dara was still hovering over them both. Faye wasn’t sure she’d ever had such an attentive audience while she was trying to work, and she knew she’d never worked in front of someone like Myrna. Every five minutes, she asked, “Faye? Avery? Would you like a cup of tea?”

  At last, she and Avery agreed that they’d collected all the evidence they were going to get. Avery stooped to pick up the ball, but Dara got there first. She cradled it in her arms like a baby and cried.

  “That’s evidence—” Avery began.

  Myrna didn’t let her finish. “And it’s mine.” She took the ball from her niece and clutched it to her own chest.

  Myrna spoke in the sing-song voice of a woman half-tanked. She must still be taking Sister Mama’s alcohol-laced tinctures. Willow’s 150-proof estimate seemed low. “I’ve got more stuff than anybody needs, but the fact remains. Now I’ve got even more. Tilda made me her only heir years ago. You’re my only heir, but this ball and everything else your mother owned is mine for as much time as I have left.”

  Dara looked as if she’d been slapped, but she was born for the stage. She revealed nothing.

  Myrna reached her hand out to pat Dara’s and almost missed. “I’m sorry, dear. So sorry. Why couldn’t the two of you kiss and make up? She was my sister and I know she was…prickly…but she wasn’t that bad. Not that bad. Really.”

  Dara took a few slow steps backward and then ran away, her sandals slapping on the sidewalk’s pavement.

  “I love that child, but sometimes she wears on my nerves.” Myrna handed the ball to Avery. “If you need it for evidence, keep it. My sister left all she had to me, including this useless lump of rock. She must have had her reasons.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The building housing Rosebower’s museum was utterly unpretentious. So why did it scare Faye?

  It was a single-story wood frame building dating to the 1940s, originally built as a house. Samuel’s father had established it as a museum in the 1960s. The bathroom looked exactly as one would expect it to look, tiny and utilitarian. Its vintage sink and tub contrasted with a replacement toilet in a groovy shade of avocado green. The rest of the building showed the same historical mishmash. There were gorgeous heart pine floors in the display rooms, but the vinyl flooring in the work room was ugly enough to keep a weary archaeologist awake on the job.

  It was not a beautiful building, but it wasn’t a frightening one. Nevertheless, Faye lingered on the sidewalk outside, her heart fluttering in her chest. It was time for Samuel to meet his new consultant, the one who was going to tell him that the centerpiece artifacts of his museum were worthless.

  Okay, maybe they weren’t worthless, but they weren’t what he thought they were and they weren’t anything special. Faye had set Joe up for a difficult meeting. It didn’t help matters that she and Amande would be working in the next room while it happened.

  Joe put a hand on her waist and started walking, herding her along with him. Amande followed behind, as if she knew Faye was thinking of retreat.

  ***

  Faye sat at her desk, wondering whether Samuel would throw a tantrum and whether she’d be able to hear it through the wall. Maybe her company was destined to lose its only current contract within the next twenty minutes. Even so, she wasn’t the type to go down without a fight. She might as well make those twenty minutes billable.

  She picked up a box filled with carefully packed china, enough to serve a party of twenty. There was no denying that the plates and cups were pretty, festooned with pink roses and blue scrolls, but they were probably mass-produced. Or they could also be as rare and valuable as Myrna’s irreplaceable antiques. Faye bet herself that she and the Internet could ferret out the truth before Joe and Samuel finished talking.

  ***

  As Faye had expected, American antique stores were crammed full of rose-trimmed china plates just like the one in her hand. Twenty minutes of her billable time had been spent proving that Samuel didn’t need to waste shelf space on it. She supposed this was valuable information.

  “Amande, can you catalog these pieces and pack them properly for storage?”

  “Sure. I’m ready to go on the clock now.”

  Her expression said, “You’re supposed to ask me what I’ve been doing and why I wasn’t on the clock,” so Faye obl
iged her.

  “I wasn’t asleep when you and Dad were talking in the car. How’d you like to know who owns the property surrounding Mr. Marlowe’s development? You know…the land he needs if he’s going to build that golf course he wants? Well, it just so happens that there is one name on the deeds of all the tracts that touch the property he owns now.”

  She was still wearing her “Ask me!” face.

  Faye was interested, so she cooperated. “Let me guess. Is it Dara? I remember hearing that she and Willow built their auditorium near there on property she inherited.”

  “Close but no. Tilda owned all that property surrounding Marlowe’s land, so I guess Miss Myrna owns it now. I also found some more nearby land that Mr. Marlowe probably wants. It’s hard for me to tell, because I don’t know exactly how big a golf course needs to be.”

  “Are you going to tell me who owns that land, or are you going to make me guess again?”

  “Guessing would be fun, but I do need to get billable, so I’ll tell you. Myrna owns it outright. She didn’t inherit it from Tilda.”

  Faye had heard Myrna say that Tilda had opposed Gilbert Marlowe’s plans as much as she did. She realized that her next billable museum chore needed to wait. First, she needed to let Avery know that Tilda Armistead, and probably Myrna too, had stood between Gilbert Marlowe and the golf course that his resort probably needed to be profitable. When Faye had seen Marlowe and Myrna arguing, he had obviously been surprised that she opposed him. Before Tilda’s death, he might have presumed she was the only person in his way, not knowing that her sister had more grit than he’d thought. Perhaps he had thought that, with Tilda out of the way, Dara would sell him her inheritance and Myrna would go along meekly with whatever he and her niece wanted.