Aunt Dimity Goes West

by Nancy Atherton

  “I’ll bet it’s in the library,” I told her. “I’ll look for it this evening. If I can’t find it, you can help me look for it tomorrow, when you come to lunch. Will one-thirty work for you?”

  “I can come earlier, if it’s more convenient,” Rose offered. “Due to lack of funding, the society is closed Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.”

  “How about high noon, then?” I suggested.

  “High noon will work perfectly,” said Rose, and she walked with a bounce in her step all the way back to the parsonage.

  Thirteen

  Toby and I collected our bags and packages from the hall table and thanked Rose Blanding sincerely for sharing her time as well as her incredible wealth of knowledge with us. I had no trouble believing her when she said that it had been her pleasure. She was a born lecturer, and Toby and I had given her a splendid opportunity to hold forth on a subject that was close to her heart.

  We left by the front stairs, but we didn’t take the lake path back to town. Instead, we followed a rough track through the stand of pines that shielded the parsonage and the church from the two-lane highway leading into town. Toby explained that, although the alternate route was slightly longer and marginally less scenic than the lake path, taking it would greatly increase our chances of avoiding a run-in with Maggie Flaxton. I backed his decision wholeheartedly, having employed the same tactics frequently in Finch, to avoid a rampaging Peggy Taxman.

  Before we left the shelter of the trees, I asked Toby to stop.

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t know that your grandparents had died so recently. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been so idiotically chirpy when we reached the cemetery. I’m really sorry if spending time there upset you.”

  “It’s okay,” said Toby. “It turned out to be pretty interesting. I guess Grandma and Granddad are part of the…the repository of history, now.”

  “They are,” I said. “A hundred years from now people will find their headstone as fascinating as we found Cyril Pennyfeather’s.”

  “Only if they have a tour guide like Mrs. Blanding,” said Toby.

  I was ready to move on, but Toby stayed put, gazing down at me with a faintly troubled expression on his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “When we were in the cafe,” he said slowly, “you told Carrie Vyne that James Blackwell was interested in local history. You knew it before Mrs. Blanding told us about his visits to the historical society. How did you find out?”

  “Brett Whitcombe,” I replied. “He told me that James used to pester him with questions about what Bluebird was like in the olden days. He also told me that James was investigating some ‘tomfool stories’—Brett’s words, not mine. I think James went to Brett Whitcombe as well as Rose Blanding, looking for information about the Lord Stuart curse.”

  “Right.” Toby pushed his hat back on his head. “The thing is, James left some stuff behind in his apartment—the apartment I’m using now. I would have shipped it to him, but I don’t know where to send it.”

  “No forwarding address,” I said, nodding. “Is it the material he borrowed from the historical society?”

  “No,” said Toby. “It’s not books or papers, and I’m sure it belongs to him, not to the historical society—he left the receipts behind, too. I thought he was using it for…” His voice trailed off and his gaze wandered to a point somewhere over my right shoulder. “But after hearing Mrs. Blanding, I’m not so sure.”

  “Not so sure about what?” I asked.

  Toby’s eyes came back into focus. “I could be wrong. I’ll show you when we get back. I’d like to know what you think.”

  My cell phone rang, frightening a camp-robber bird that had flown over to see if we had any crumbs to share. It flew off, twittering irritably, and I took the call. It was from Annelise, who wanted to know if she and the twins could have dinner at the ranch.

  “They’re having a cookout,” she explained. “Will and Rob are dying to try buffalo burgers.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Belle Whitcombe took me out to see the buffalo calves today,” said Annelise. “I’m planning to have a salad for dinner.”

  “A farmer’s daughter turned vegetarian?” I said, feigning surprise. “Those calves must be cute.”

  “They’re adorable,” she said. “We’ll be back by seven, half past at the latest.”

  “Have fun,” I told her. I put the cell phone back into my pocket and turned to Toby, announcing, “We’re on our own for dinner. Annelise and the boys are eating theirs at the ranch.”

  “We can pick something up at the cafe,” he suggested.

  “Good idea,” I said. “I wanted to go back into town anyway. I need to hit the grocery to pick up a few things for lunch tomorrow, and I’d also like to find a gift for Bill.” I held up the bag from Dandy Don’s. “Strange as it may seem, my husband isn’t into stuffed animals, flower seeds, or earrings.”

  Toby laughed and we turned our steps once more toward Stafford Avenue. Fortunately, Maggie Flaxton was too busy browbeating a hapless neighbor into participating in Gold Rush Days to notice our presence in her store, so our shopping there went off without a hitch. I then spent twenty minutes meandering in and out of shops, rejecting one tacky souvenir after another, before Toby came up with his brilliant idea.

  “How about a geode?” he proposed.

  “Fantastic,” I gushed. “What’s a geode?”

  “It’s a round, hollow rock,” Toby explained. “It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but the inside’s lined with crystals. When you break a geode in half, it looks like a twinkly cave inside. They’re really pretty, but not in a girlish way. Granddad used one in his office as a paperweight.”

  “A man can never have too many paperweights,” I said. “Where do we find geodes?”

  “Mystic Crystals,” Toby said promptly. “Also known as the rock shop.” He began to walk rapidly toward the top of Stafford Avenue. “I hope it’s still open. Amanda keeps her own hours.”

  “Amanda?” I said interestedly, scrambling to keep up with him. “The local loony-tune?”

  Toby snorted disparagingly. “Amanda Barrow is Bluebird’s resident hippie. She runs a commune in the geodesic dome with her cat, Angelique, and an everchanging cast of crazies who think the dome sits on a vortex.”

  “Wouldn’t it twirl around?” I said. “Like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz?”

  “It’s not that kind of vortex,” said Toby. “According to Amanda, it’s a focal point for the mystical energies of the universe. According to me, it’s a focal point for people who smoke too much wacky-weed—organically grown wacky-weed, of course.”

  “Do I detect a faint note of skepticism in your voice?” I asked, suppressing a smile.

  “You detect a deafening roar of skepticism in my voice,” Toby returned. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Amanda well enough, but you never know what belief system she’ll subscribe to next. Granddad used to say that she belonged to the goddess-of-the-month club. Grandma called her the queen of hocus-pocus.”

  “I’ll bet she has some interesting theories about the Lord Stuart curse,” I said, grinning.

  “I’m sure we’ll hear all about them,” said Toby, “so brace yourself.”

  “I’m braced,” I told him.

  I probably could have found Mystic Crystals without Toby’s assistance, but I wouldn’t have known it was a rock shop. Amanda Barrow ran her business from a small Victorian house that stood between Eric’s Mountain Bikes and the Mile High Pies pizza parlor. The house had been painted an eye-catching shade of hot pink that clashed resoundingly with the fluorescent orange and lime-green sandwich board sitting next to the front door.

  The sandwich board advertised a well-rounded menu of metaphysical services—palm reading, tarot-card reading, aura reading, rune casting, crystal-ball gazing, psychic healing, dream analysis, and past-life retrieval—along with aromatherapy, medicinal herbs, meditation aids, and
yoga classes. A long-haired white cat lounged in the shop’s prominent bay window beneath a dangling display of spinning prisms, wind chimes, dream catchers, and multifaceted crystals.

  “Angelique,” said Toby, nodding at the white cat.

  “I didn’t think it was Amanda,” I said dryly.

  “Couldn’t be,” Toby joked. “Amanda’s a redhead.”

  I felt as though I’d stepped into the vortex.

  “Whoa, hold on, stop…” I seized Toby’s arm to keep him from entering the shop. “Are you telling me that Amanda Barrow has red hair?”

  “Yeah,” said Toby. “She’s got freckles, too. So?”

  I put a hand to my head in an attempt to stop the whirling, but the pressure only seemed to magnify the image spinning in my mind of Miranda Morrow, Finch’s red-haired, freckle-faced witch, who lived with a black cat named Seraphina.

  “Are you okay, Lori?” Toby asked.

  “Yes,” I managed. “Just a little dizzy.”

  “I shouldn’t have walked so fast,” he said contritely. “I always forget that Stafford Avenue goes uphill.”

  “I’ll be fine in a minute,” I said.

  “Take your time,” he urged me. “There’s no hurry. The shop’s still open.”

  I closed my eyes, breathed slowly and steadily, and forced myself to concentrate on the myriad of differences between Finch’s Miranda Morrow and Bluebird’s Amanda Barrow. Miranda conducted her business over the telephone and via the Internet, not in person. She lived in a modest stone cottage, not a geodesic dome, and she didn’t have a garish sign on her front gate advertising her profession. The only time I’d seen her read palms was at the Harvest Festival, when she’d played the role of a gypsy fortune-teller in order to raise money for the St. George’s Church roof repair fund. No one in Finch—not even Peggy Taxman—had ever referred to Miranda Morrow as a loony-tune.

  “Okay,” I said, when I’d regained a modicum of mental stability. “All better. Take me to the geodes.”

  “This way,” said Toby.

  He opened the front door and we stepped into a high-ceilinged, rectangular room filled with the cloying, sickly sweet fragrance of sandalwood. A handful of joss sticks burned in a brass holder next to the cash register on the rear counter. The smoke trailing up from the joss sticks was the only sign of life in the shop, apart from Angelique, who took one look at us, gave an unearthly yowl, and streaked through a bead curtain behind the counter.

  “I’ll be right with you!” a woman’s voice called from beyond the bead curtain.

  “Amanda,” Toby murmured. “She really shouldn’t leave incense burning unattended. If Angelique knocked it over, the place would go up like a tinderbox.”

  “She shouldn’t be burning incense at all,” I murmured back. “It’s an insult to the pure mountain air.”

  The room was divided into two distinct spaces. To our right, bathed in the sunlight pouring though the bay window, freestanding glass shelves held candles, stone pyramids, bottles of aromatic oils, packets of incense, brass incense holders, onyx Buddhas, chunks of quartz crystal, strings of stone beads, and baskets of polished rocks. Necklaces, earrings, and bracelets hung from a Peg-Board behind the counter, and a wooden bookcase against the far wall was filled with books on a wide range of metaphysical topics. CDs featuring New Age music complemented the book display.

  To our left, shielded from direct daylight by a gauze curtain, sat four wooden chairs, a round wooden table covered with a circle of star-spangled black velvet, and a tall dark-purple cupboard in which, I imagined, Amanda Barrow stored the tools of her trade: crystal ball, tarot cards, rune stones, possibly a Ouija board and some dousing wands as well. The walls on either side of the purple cupboard were decorated with posters illustrating acupuncture points, meridian lines, and the constellations.

  Toby ignored the left side of the shop and went directly to a glass shelf displaying a selection of geodes that had already been split in half. They were exactly as he’d described them: dull and boring on the outside, but alive with twinkly amethyst crystalline formations on the inside. I picked one up and carried it to the bay window to look at it in the sunlight.

  “It’s like the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” I said, smiling delightedly. “Bill will love it. He’s one of those guys who has everything, but he doesn’t have anything like this. Thanks, Toby. It was a great idea. I think I’ll get one for my father-in-law as well. It’ll add a certain something to his law office in Boston.”

  The bead curtain rattled and I looked over my shoulder as a short, stout, middle-aged woman emerged from the back room. She had to be in her late fifties, but she dressed as if she were still in her teens, wearing a low-cut, embroidered peasant blouse; a flouncy, ankle-length muslin skirt; clunky leather work boots; an apple-seed necklace; and a pair of huge hoop earrings accented with feathers. Her face, chest, and arms were plastered with freckles, and her henna-enhanced red hair fell almost to her waist.

  “Hi, Amanda,” said Toby.

  “Hello, Toby,” said Amanda, coming out from behind the counter. “You’ll have to forgive Angelique. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She’s in the back room, hiding under the sink. I tried to get her to come out, but—” Amanda broke off abruptly as she caught sight of me. She gasped, her green eyes opened wide, the color drained from her face, and she raised a trembling finger to point at me.

  “Death!” she cried. “You bring death with you!”

  Fourteen

  Amanda’s arm fell and she tottered as though her knees were about to buckle. Toby sighed impatiently, but he thrust the box of Calico Cookies into my hands and hurried over to guide the wobbling woman to a chair at the velvet-covered table. I stood in shocked silence for a moment, then returned the geode to its place on the glass shelves and crept quietly past the gauze curtain to stand a few feet away from Amanda and Toby.

  The red-haired mistress of Mystic Crystals sat hunched over the table with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, massaging her temples and talking to herself.

  “Yes, yes, I understand now,” she muttered. “Angelique saw him, tried to warn me, to prepare me…. I should have listened, but how was I to know? Death comes to us unbidden, when we least expect it. Even those of us who see beyond can be taken unawares….”

  Toby rolled his eyes expressively, as though to reassure me that Amanda’s histrionics were par for the course, then bent over her and asked, “Amanda? Can I get you a drink of water or anything?”

  “Water, yes, water,” Amanda whispered. “Water to cleanse, to clarify, to purify, to—”

  “I’ll get it,” I said quickly.

  I placed the cookies and my bag of souvenirs on an empty chair and headed for the back room. I didn’t relish the prospect of facing a yowling Angelique again, but I didn’t want to be left alone with Amanda Barrow, either. If she passed out, I doubted that I’d be strong enough to keep her from hitting the floor.

  The back room turned out to be a small and remarkably tidy kitchen. After a hasty search, I found a clean glass in a cupboard and approached the sink. I did so with some trepidation, expecting at any moment to feel a set of sharp claws sink into my calf, but Angelique had evidently gotten over whatever had startled her. She leapt onto the draining board and sat there, watching interestedly, while I filled the glass with water. I stroked her fluffy back, then brought the glass to Toby to pass to Amanda. I wasn’t sure she’d take it from my hand.

  Instead of drinking the water, Amanda dipped her fingertips into it, pressed them to her eyelids, her forehead, and her breast, dipped them again, and flicked little splashes into the air, to the north, south, east, and west. Finally, she opened her eyes, threw her hennaed hair back over her shoulders, and turned slowly toward me. Her green eyes searched the empty space around me avidly before coming to rest on my face.

  “He has gone,” she announced. “His energy has traveled to another sphere. He didn’t like being seen by me or by Angelique. He prefers to move undetected through
the physical world.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The male spirit who accompanies you,” she replied. “Couldn’t you sense his presence?”

  I felt a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, as if a chill breeze had blown through the room. I knew of only one male spirit who would frighten cats and freak out psychics, and I didn’t want him hovering within a hundred miles of me.

  “Describe him,” I said warily.

  Amanda closed her eyes, spread her palms on the table, and breathed deeply through her nostrils. “Light hair. A slight build. The glint of spectacles. No.” She frowned in concentration, then corrected herself. “Pince-nez. On a chain.”

  Tension drained from me. Whoever Amanda was describing, it wasn’t Abaddon.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “He has not yet made himself known to you, though I sense…” Amanda peered at me intently, almost hungrily, as if she suspected that I, unlike most people who walked into her shop, had some experience in her chosen field of expertise. “Have you ever been in touch with the other side?”

  “The other side of what?” I asked.

  “Eternity,” she whispered dramatically.

  “I don’t think so.” I pursed my lips and frowned slightly. “No, probably not. I’m sure I would have noticed.”

  Toby sniggered and Amanda waited for me to go on, but I had nothing more to add. I wasn’t about to tell the queen of hocus-pocus that I’d been in touch with “the other side” nearly every day for the past seven years. Aunt Dimity was a dear friend, not a psychic phenomenon. I didn’t want her name bandied about by a bunch of aging hippies holding séances in the geodesic dome.

  Amanda waved a freckled hand toward an empty chair. “Come. Sit with me. Tell me about your dreams.”

  “Sorry,” I said, refusing the invitation. “I never remember my dreams.”

  It was a bald-faced lie, but my nightmare was strictly off limits, and no power on earth would compel me to speak of long, languorous dreams starring heroic, blue-eyed cocker spaniels while Toby Cooper was within earshot. He was a bright boy. He wouldn’t need Amanda’s help to interpret the symbolism.