Rituals (13 page)

Chapter Fifteen

“Mom.
Mom.
”

Faye realized that her daughter was trying to get her attention, and that she'd been doing so for some time now. Amande couldn't be blamed for being bored by the current topic of conversation—health insurance options for retired and self-employed people. Neither could Faye and Toni be blamed for finding them fascinating.

“Mom. The diner's still open. I think I'll walk down there for a cappuccino.” Anticipating Faye's response, she said, “It's only a block and there are lots of streetlights.”

Toni, who had offered them a very hospitable variety of beverages, jumped up to make a pot of coffee, but Faye held out a hand to stop her. Amande didn't want coffee. She wanted to escape the tedious company of grown-ups.

“Go. Have a banana split. Text me when you get there.”

“It's not even ten and I'm walking one block.”

“A text is a small price for freedom. And a banana split. Go.”

***

As soon as Amande knew she could no longer be seen through the bay window of Toni's living room, she pulled her phone from her pocket. Its bright screen displayed the two-sentence text message that had arrived while her mother and Toni were deep in boring money talk.

Meet me in my aunt's garden. I have something to show you.

How did Ennis get her cell number? Maybe from Samuel but Amande would say Myrna if she had to guess. Myrna would probably adore the chance to be a matchmaker.

As Amande walked past the diner, she made good on her promise to text her mother when she got there. Then she kept walking.

***

Amande lingered at the garden gate. It was covered with vining plants, and the thicket of leaves on the other side was so dense that she wasn't sure it would swing open when she pushed. The sense that these vines were reaching out for her kept her from taking the last step toward the gate.

Amande was not crazy about overgrown gardens and weedy lawns. She had the feeling that anything could be lurking in the unkempt greenery. This was stupid, because she had spent her childhood mucking about the swamps in Louisiana. These days, she could kill an entire Saturday afternoon with her dad in the pristine woodlands of Joyeuse Island, braving ticks and chiggers for the thrill of seeing the year's first blooming dogwood.

Nevertheless, she liked the area around a house to be tidy. Not necessarily manicured, but tidy. Perhaps this vulnerable feeling went back to the days when nomadic people needed to be able to see whether a predator was creeping up to their tents. And perhaps this meditation on nomadic people might only occur to the daughter of two anthropology-types.

The phone in her hand vibrated and its screen lit up.

Where are you? I'm in the middle greenhouse. Hurry!

She could have called out an answer to him, but she was still in a cautious mood, fit for lingering. Texting felt safer.

I'm almost there.

The vines resisted, but she forced the old gate open. Using her phone as a flashlight, she crept through the lush garden on the other side. A shadowy figure stood in the second of the three greenhouses on her right. That must be where Ennis was waiting. Led by the glow of his phone, she picked her way to where he stood. He waited in a narrow walkway between the shelves where Sister Mama grew medicinal herbs that weren't happy with New York's weather.

“Hurry!” She wondered why he was whispering. Maybe because it felt like there was nobody else awake in Rosebower. Except, of course, for her mother and Toni, who were a good bit more than one block away.

Then she saw it. In the phosphorescent glow of his phone's screen was a flower, large and white. It was opening before her eyes.

“I told you to hurry. You're just in time. It's a night-blooming cereus,” he whispered.

It seemed unnatural to watch a plant move. Without the help of a breeze or a human or some other animal, a plant is supposed to sit still. Yet here this one was, stretching its luminous white petals into the air. Minute by minute, the flower formed itself, large and lovely. It loosed a penetrating perfume as it took shape.

“Beautiful, right?” he said.

Amande could hardly breathe, but she nodded.

“If you like that, you need to see the night garden.”

Amande wondered why he thought she'd she want to leave the cereus before it finished opening, but she followed him outside into a dimly lit fairyland. The flowers in this corner of the garden, mostly white, had been chosen because they were beautiful in the dark. Ennis moved here and there, illuminating various blooms with his phone.

“Here are the moonflowers.” He pointed to a vine loaded with luminous palm-sized blossoms. “They bloom when the sun goes down. You can see them open, just like the night-blooming cereus. You should come back tomorrow at sunset and watch.”

His attention span for flowers was shorter than hers, because he quickly moved on to a bed of large-leaved plants topped with clusters of starry flowers. “See how white the nicotiana petals are? That's the scientific name for flowering tobacco. Sister Mama designed her night garden so all the flowers show up in starlight. And the leaves, too.”

Surrounding the flowering plants were mounds of ornamental foliage, variegated in white and all shades of green. Their leaves glowed in the dark night, and they were as lovely as the flowers.

Ennis was still giving his flashlight tour. “And she picks the plants that smell the best, too, because it's important in the dark. A blind person could enjoy this spot.”

This was true.

“Look. These four o'clocks glow like fire. Sister Mama says they got their name because they don't open till four o'clock in the afternoon.”

The tiny trumpet-shaped flowers were magenta and yellow and white. Some of the flowers were splashed with all three colors. They looked like fireworks, and they did absolutely belong in a night garden. Bending down close, she could smell something sweet that was neither nicotiana nor cereus.

“Sister Mama loves the way her plants look and smell, but those things are just bonuses. She's not big on wasting garden space. The nicotiana is good in poultices and you can make bugkiller out of it.”

“It kills bugs, but you'll put it on somebody's open wound?”

“It's all in the dose and in how you give it. That's true of store-bought medicine, too. Foxglove'll kill you. Digitalis will save your life.”

“And the dose is different for different people. What would cure you, might kill me?”

“Exactly.”

“What about these other things?”

“Leaves from four o'clocks help people who are holding water. Sister Mama might make a tea or give them a poultice. Either way, they take the swelling right down. The seeds are poison, though.” He was still whispering, so Amande had to lean close to get her answer.

“The cereus? How does she use it?”

“It's not like she's taught me everything she knows. Not yet. But it may be that she grows the cereus just because it's too pretty to be called a waste of garden space. Sister Mama does what makes her happy. Want to go look at it again?”

Amande did want to see it again. Very much. As they turned to go, a muffled grunt startled her. It came from an open window on the back of the house.

“Was that your aunt? We should check on her.”

“She talks in her sleep. A lot. We should stay out here and let her do that.”

The sound came again, and Amande headed for the house's back door. Another noise came, and this one didn't sound like a human voice. It was more like one solid thing striking another solid thing. “Don't you hear that?”

“Hear what? No, Baby, I don't hear a thing.”

The back door was unlocked and Amande was in the house before Ennis could take another shot at keeping her outside with him. It wasn't hard to figure out which room belonged to the open window. Once Ennis saw that she wasn't going to linger romantically in the greenhouse with him, he was right behind her.

Sister Mama's bedroom held little more than a bed and a chest-of-drawers. A handful of fragrant flowers sat on top of the chest, spilling gently over the edge of a wide-mouthed glass bottle. Her wheelchair sat in the corner and she herself lay under a worn patchwork quilt. One hand picked absently at loose threads hanging from the quilt. The other pawed at her face, as if someone were trying to suffocate her. Nobody was there.

Ennis hurried to her bedside. “Sister Mama. Sister Mama, are you okay?”

The woman didn't respond. Eyes closed, she continued plucking at her face and at the quilt. Amande tried to put a calming hand on her arm and she could feel the muscles spasming.

“Call 911,” she said. “Hurry.”

Sister Mama's breath caught in her throat and Amande wasn't sure she was getting any air. Maybe her throat muscles were spasming, too. She tried to lift the woman to a sitting position, thinking it would help her breathe. Sister Mama wouldn't bend. All her muscles seemed locked up tight, except for the ceaseless motion of her hands and forearms.

Amande couldn't check Sister Mama's airway, because her mouth wouldn't come open. She noticed that Ennis had begun massaging his aunt's abdomen, maybe to help her breathe and maybe to loosen up the muscles so that she could sit.

“911?”

He pointed at the phone clutched to his ear. He had been massaging his aunt with one hand while he thumb-dialed. He was already talking to an emergency responder, but Amande was too frantic to listen to what he was saying. What was she going to do if she couldn't help Sister Mama breathe?

Since she couldn't get the suffering woman's mouth open, Amande went for her nose, trying to see whether air was coming in and going out. Something felt wrong.

One nostril was stiff and distended. The other, thankfully, seemed to be clear, but Sister Mama was still flapping her hand around her face. Amande eased her own hip onto the bed and forced the hand under it. If she needed to sit on it long enough to see what was happening to Sister Mama, then so be it.

“I think she's getting air,” Ennis said. “Stand back and give her some room to breathe.”

Amande stayed put, palpating both nostrils. “Turn on the lights.” When he hesitated, she said, “Do it.” He did.

There was something in Sister Mama's right nostril. Amande had heard of little children putting beans and rocks up their nose, but could a woman in Sister Mama's condition have done that? And had she regressed to toddlerhood? Amande had spent only a single lunch with her, but she didn't think so.

Now that the lights were on, she could see something barely protruding from the nostril. It was such an unnatural shade of orange that Amande knew it couldn't be part of Sister Mama. She grasped it between her finger and thumb and yanked hard.

As the squishy orange thing came out, every muscle in Sister Mama's body relaxed. Her eyes found Amande's and said thank you.

Amande looked at the thing in her hand. It was fairly large to have come out of a nostril, but sponges can be squeezed into remarkably small places. Why had Sister Mama had a chunk of kitchen sponge up her nose? And how long was it going to take the paramedics to show up?

She turned her head to look at Ennis. He gestured to the phone that was still stuck to his ear and said, “They're coming.”

Amande took Sister Mama's hand in hers, hoping the gesture was comforting. Then she thumbed her own phone, one-handed, until the first person on her speed-dial list answered.

“Mom?”

***

Faye didn't remember saying much more to Toni than, “Amande…
Sister Mama,” as she lunged out the door and ran for the car. Even in Rosebower, there were times when a car was the way to go. Driving five blocks was a lot quicker than walking five blocks. But why was her daughter four blocks further away than she was supposed to be? How did she find herself in the bedroom of a sick woman who was struggling for life?

***

Faye rushed past Ennis to Amande. The girl stood silently, watching a paramedic examine Sister Mama.

“Mom. You wouldn't believe how much better she looks. She's pinking up by the second. She's breathing well. She's relaxed. She's sitting up. I don't even think they're going to take her to the hospital. Why do you think she shoved a sponge up her nose?”

Sister Mama couldn't talk to the paramedics, but Ennis assured them that this was normal for her. Other than being unable to answer their questions, she obediently responded to every instruction. She raised both hands, individually and together. She looked to her left, she looked to her right. She correctly answered questions intended to assess her mental function, by using gestures. Faye could see that the paramedics already had one foot out the door.

“Where's the sponge?”

“Right here on the floor.”

Faye handed Amande a tissue. “Pick it up and bring it with you. I need you to step outside and explain some things to me.”

Chapter Sixteen

Faye stood outside Sister Mama's front door, fiddling with her phone and delaying the moment when she'd have to ask Amande to explain herself. Amande opened the discussion herself.

“We were just looking at flowers.”

“Then why did you lie?”

“Because you wouldn't have let me go.”

“Not good enough.”

Faye went back to fiddling with her phone. In a way, she was the one acting like a teenager. She was ignoring her daughter because she couldn't think of the right thing to say and because she was pretty sure there was something on the internet that she needed to find. Something about the sponge up Sister Mama's nose triggered Faye's memories of a favorite class in the history of science. The Romans had impressed her as ingenious people, particularly in their approach to the medical arts.

She asked the Internet to remind her of what she once knew about soporific sponges.

***

Amande expected her mother to keep talking about the fact that she'd lied. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to acknowledge the lie or do an end run around it, by railing about the silliness of tracking her whereabouts by text. She was seventeen years old, and she'd been wandering around Barataria Bay alone in a boat when she was twelve.

But hey. She'd lied. There was no denying it.

Since she was inarguably guilty, why hadn't her mother gone in for the kill? Why was she standing there studying her phone like its screen displayed the answer to all life's questions?

“A soporific sponge. Just what I thought.”

Amande was accustomed to weird polysyllabic utterances from her mother, but “soporific sponge” might be the weirdest of all.

Faye handed her phone to Amande for perusal. “I took two semesters of ‘History of Science' in grad school. The second one focused on medicine. In the old days, people spent a lot of time worrying about pain relief. It's not like you could run to the drugstore for an aspirin in the Middle Ages. And surgery…the ancient Romans knew a lot about the human body, and they knew how to fix some parts of the body when they broke, but can you imagine having a tumor removed while you were awake?”

Amande shook her head.

Faye brandished the phone. “Look at this web page. It says that medieval writers described something that sounds almost like a magic potion—poppies, mandrake, henbane, hemlock, and probably a lot of other stuff. The potion was brewed, then left in the sun to evaporate off most of the water. When someone needed to be unconscious, a sponge soaked full of that stuff was stuck up their nose. The Romans are thought to have used something similar.”

“Did it work?”

“Supposedly. Maybe not as well as modern anesthetics, but that is a list of some very powerful natural sedatives and painkillers. A sponge up the nose would administer them as inhalants, just like our modern general anesthetics, but they could also be absorbed through the mucous membrane. If I knew somebody was planning to cut me open, I'd figure it was worth a try. Let's go talk to the paramedics about this. And no. We're not finished talking about the honesty issue. It can wait, because this is more urgent. Slightly.”

***

The paramedic looked tired. He was probably coming up on the end of a very long shift. “I hear what you're saying, but I don't think you understand how many weird things I've seen in people's noses. And other parts. Usually, it's kids that do this kind of thing, but you'd be surprised.”

“So you're not going to take her to the hospital?” Faye asked.

“For what? Look at her. Does she look worse than she usually does?”

Faye had to say no.

“I don't know what to say about the sponge. You lost me when you started talking about ‘herbal alkaloids.' I'm here to treat the patient. I did that. There is no longer an emergency. If you weren't here, I'd have already gone. Since I've got another call, I'm going to do that now.”

Faye didn't want to discuss this issue, or anything else, in front of Ennis, so she followed the paramedic out of the house and she kept walking.

“Where are we going?” Amande asked.

“To the inn down the street. I want to talk to Avery. Someone has already killed a woman in this town, using a bizarre method. People don't get locked up and set on fire by antique kerosene lamps every day of the week. In that paramedic's world, people may get kitchen sponges stuck up their nose all the time, but not in mine. I'm not comfortable with bizarre events, not when it comes to a person's safety. Avery needs to know about this.”

“What are you going to do? Get her to run a tox scan on a snot-covered sponge?”

“Maybe. If it was soaked in an opium derivative, a toxicology lab analysis aimed at heroin or codeine would probably pick it up. Hensbane, mandrake, and hemlock? I'm not so sure about that. But even a screening test could probably tell us whether there are unexpected chemicals soaked into that sponge, even if it can't identify them.” She picked up her pace, as if all the mysteries of the week would be solved if she could just get an orange chunk of sponge to Avery. “I'm betting they do find something. Why else would she have started getting better as soon as you took it out? My guess is that it hadn't been in there long, or she would have been unconscious when you found her. And, no, I don't think she stuck it up her own nose.”

“Who'd want to drug Sister Mama?”

At last, Faye made eye contact with her daughter. “Maybe the man who gets fed up with taking care of her? She's less trouble to him when she's asleep.”

“Mom. That's just…awful. Ennis wouldn't do that.”

“And you know this how?”

“You weren't there. He was so upset to see her that way.”

“Then let's get back to your question. Who else would want Sister Mama drugged? Or dead.”

“Dead? Why do you say that? Dead?”

“Sister Mama is very frail. A real doctor probably wouldn't consider putting her under modern anesthesia in her condition. You don't think exposing her to a random mix of primitive anesthetics—any one of which could kill her with a big enough dose—might be a murder attempt? Haven't you ever heard of Socrates being poisoned with hemlock?”

Amande started to say, “Where would anybody get—” then she gave up. They both knew that any plant-based pharmaceutical in the world had at least some possibility of being in Sister Mama's garden and greenhouses.

“Why would Ennis invite me over while he was in the process of killing his great-aunt?”

This was a point that Faye would have to concede, though with a caveat. “He probably wouldn't, but murderers are crazy. Maybe he wanted some company while the poisons did his dirty work for him. Maybe he wanted an alibi. Or maybe he wasn't trying to kill her. Maybe he just wanted her to be quiet while he tried to romance you. If you think somebody else did it, you need to tell me how they got past you and Ennis.”

“The windows were open. One of them was on the side of the house that we couldn't see. Somebody could have gone in and out of there before we got there, and Ennis might have been watching TV. He'd have never heard. Or…Mom! I heard a noise right before we went in the house. It was like a thump. I bet it was somebody going out that window.”

“You say
you
heard the noise. Where was Ennis?”

“He was right there. It was after I heard Sister Mama groan the first time.”

“He didn't hear either noise?”

“No.”

“Maybe he didn't want to hear. Maybe he knew his great-aunt was in there dying.”

Amande gave a frustrated teenager screech. “You just want him to be guilty. You're trying too hard to make him be a killer. I think he's not.”

“Who found the sponge?”

“I did, but it was easy for him to miss. Only a little bit of it hung out where I could see it.”

“Maybe he was hoping you wouldn't notice it.”

Amande's glare spoke for her. They had reached the front door of the inn. Faye said, “I guess we should call Avery and let her know we're coming. And we're bringing a snotty sponge with us.”

***

Ennis sat at his sleeping aunt's bedside. She looked better and her breathing was regular. She was as healthy as she'd been the day before, but that wasn't saying much. She still couldn't walk and talk. She couldn't tend her garden and mix her potions. He couldn't tell when she was happy or sad. He didn't know if she was ever happy these days.

This might have been the evening that Sister Mama took her leave of this earth. Maybe it would have been better that way.

***

Faye's daughter looked at her and said, “Avery said she'd get some labs run on the sponge. Are you happy now?”

Not particularly, no. Faye wasn't happy at all. Avery had listened to her, which was more than she could say for the paramedic. She hadn't called Faye's soporific sponge idea stupid, so Faye had to give her credit for being open-minded. She'd just said, “I'd have done the same thing in the paramedic's shoes, but he hasn't spent most of the past week in Weirdbower, New York. Neither has the sheriff. He lives on the other side of the county, which might as well be another continent. If I call him, he's going to want to know whether I think he should investigate every time somebody has a fainting spell. However.”

Faye had liked the sound of that “however.”

“The forensics lab manager owes me a favor. I actually don't know whether he's got a handy-dandy test for hensbane, but you said ‘opium.' If there's opium on this sponge, I'm sure there's a tox screen that will find it. Let me see what he's willing to do for me.”

So now Faye and Amande were in the car, making yet another drive back to the bed-and-breakfast. Returning to Amande's “Are you happy now?” question, she said, “Of course I'm not happy. I'm worried about Sister Mama and I'm worried about you. We are only here for a few weeks and there's no need for you to start something up with a questionable man like Ennis LeBecque. You are not to see him again.”

Great. Now she'd wandered into the most treacherous part of parenting a teenager. She'd issued a dictum that she might not be able to enforce.