Rituals (3 page)

Chapter Three

Faye didn't know Myrna's number or address, but she was able to give the emergency personnel enough information to find her. Then she told the story of Tilda's final moments several times to various people in uniform. Finally, they left her alone while they examined the Monte Carlo and its owner, trying to figure out what had really happened to Tilda.

Faye had long since sent Amande to their room, over the girl's protests that she wanted to be where the action was. One of the prerogatives of parenthood was the occasional ability to separate a child from “the action.”

Now, she was alone in the parking lot, still too upset to let her daughter see her in this condition. She wanted…needed…more information, and she had a bad feeling about the sooty stench of Tilda's dying breaths. There was only one Rosebower number stored in Faye's phone, so she called her client, Samuel Langley. He'd lived his entire life in Rosebower, so he surely knew the Armistead sisters. And, though she'd told the emergency personnel how important it was to find Myrna, maybe somebody local could find her quicker than an outsider wearing a uniform.

When Samuel answered his phone, Faye could tell by the background noise that he wasn't sitting alone at home. She heard voices and a siren and the engines of more vehicles than had any right to be on the streets of nighttime Rosebower. “What's happening down there?”

His response was overpowered by the sound of another siren.

Faye tried again. “Samuel, something's happened to Tilda Armistead. I need to find Myrna.”

“We've got Myrna. Nobody could get her to answer the phone—the woman's half-deaf—so several of us who live nearby took matters in hand. We got a ladder, broke a window, and went looking for her. She's fine. But did you say you knew where Tilda was?”

Faye could hear shouting and the quiet wailing of a woman's voice. She thought of her call to 911. It would have triggered a call to Tilda's next of kin, but Samuel was telling her that Myrna wasn't home. Faye doubted she had a cell phone, so she couldn't know of Tilda's death. The noise of sirens said that
something
was going on in Rosebower, in terms of emergency personnel, but Faye could feel a disconnect between what she knew and what Samuel knew. Even twenty-first-century technology can't be instantaneous. Tonight, that time lag had a deadly feel.

All Faye could do was tell Samuel what she knew and ask him to do the same. “Tilda was here at my hotel with me until…Samuel, she's dead. Some kind of respiratory failure, I think. It sounds like something just as awful may be happening where you are.”

Now Samuel was yelling outright. “I'll call you back, Faye. I can see firefighters suiting up to look for Tilda right now. I can't let them go into a burning house for no reason.”

The line went dead.

***

Faye watched the last marked car pull out of the parking lot. Tilda's body had long since been taken away, but Faye could already guess the result of the autopsy. The cause of death would be smoke inhalation.

Samuel had called back, telling her that he'd been enjoying a nightcap on his back porch swing when he smelled smoke. The ground floor of Tilda's house had been fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, but they'd been able to quench the fire quickly. The exterior walls were still standing and the roof was mostly intact, but the flames had been impressive while they raged. Samuel was the youngest resident on Walnut Street. His neighbors had reached the time in life when they sometimes had trouble waiting for sundown to make it socially acceptable to go to bed. If he'd gone to bed even minutes sooner, the whole house would have been gone.

And if Tilda had escaped even minutes sooner, she might not be dead.
No matter how hard she tried, Faye couldn't shake the image of a woman in her eighties, alone, fighting her way out of a burning house.

Faye thanked Samuel for the information, saying, “It's late and neither Amande nor I have had any sleep. We may not be at work on time tomorrow.”

“Take your time. Tell me, Faye. Were you and Tilda close? I don't mean to be rude, but she wasn't big on leaving town. What on earth possessed her to drive to your hotel?”

“I knew her well enough to know that she was agoraphobic, but I don't have any idea why she came to me for help tonight. It sounds like she lived on a street full of people she knew much better, and they would have wanted to help.”

“Of course, we would've wanted to help, but I wouldn't say any of us knew her any better than you did. Tilda has always kept to herself. I'm sorry you're mixed up in this terrible thing. Take your time getting to work tomorrow.”

Faye thanked him and broke the connection. Then she dialed home. Joe answered so quickly that she imagined he'd been sleeping with the phone on his pillow.

Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:
An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism
in Rosebower, New York

by Antonia Caruso

There are people who think I'm a killjoy. Those people enjoy the antics of fakers. They say that séances and communing with the dead are, at worst, harmless entertainment. We pay our entertainers. Why shouldn't we pay our fortune-tellers, even if they are fake?

I think my idol, The Amazing Randi, explains it best when he says there is a real danger in believing people who claim that they can solve real problems—like, for instance, the energy crisis and environmental decline—by magic. For example, there are common illusions that give the impression of matter or energy springing into being from nothingness. One of them looks like a large faucet, suspended in mid-air, from which water flows unceasingly. To the eye, water is being made out of nothing and the illusionist responsible deserves a citation from the Reality Police for violating the Law of Conservation of Matter.

If the illusionist is enterprising, a small water wheel is part of the apparatus, merrily turning in the flow of water being created from nothing. Thus, the illusionist is creating energy from nothing, and the Reality Police exact very high fines from people who build perpetual motion machines violating the Law of Conservation of Energy. Even worse, the size of the punishment dealt to those who defy entropy, the relentless killjoy that will eventually make motionless atomic particles of us all, is incalculable.

So is it true? Can anyone build a faucet that creates water and energy? Of course not.

In reality, there is a pipe running upward, hidden by the gushing flow of water that supports the faucet. Attached to this pipe is a submersible pump that recirculates the water so that it can flow out again. This pump requires electricity to do its magical work.

Voila!
Energy has
not
been created out of nothing, and neither has matter. Entropy continues uninterrupted in its quest to destroy us. The Reality Police can rest easy.

There is no harm in an illusion that makes the audience laugh and say, “Wow! How did he do that?” But if that audience is in the thrall of someone unethical enough to suggest that such violations of the laws of physics are possible for people with magical powers, then a very real harm has been done. People who believe in impossible things may lack an understanding of the need to conserve water and energy, and they may feel no pressing need to vote for people who are willing to deal with reality.

A society consisting of people who believe in the irrational could find itself in a condition where only magic can save them. I don't know about you, but that's not a society I ever want to see. Consider this book my contribution to the rationality of the world.

You can thank me any time.

Chapter Four

The ruins of the old house reminded Faye of Tilda's body. The northern summer sky hanging over it was a bright clear blue, without the brassy gleam of the morning sky over her Florida home. Traveling down the rural highway to Rosebower would have been a pleasant morning's drive if Faye hadn't known she'd find this at the other end.

The building looked almost as it had looked the night before, weathered siding freshly painted in period-appropriate shades of ochre, but the scalding smoke that had ruined Tilda's lungs showed itself in dark smudges over the house's broken windows. A house was a much smaller loss than a human being, but Faye grieved for it anyway. She'd come to believe that old homes grew souls over time, soaking up the happiness and sorrow of their human occupants. Her own home, Joyeuse, had stood as long as this one, plus a little more, and it had its own spiritual presence. Tilda's house was dead now.

Faye saw Samuel standing on the sidewalk nearby, so she parked and joined him there, with Amande at her side. He was watching a woman move around within the yellow crime-scene tape bounding Tilda's property. She carried a camera in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

“The fire inspector,” Samuel said, nodding in the woman's direction. “She's already said that she wants to talk to you. You two—and Myrna and poor Tilda, of course—were the last people in the house before it burned.”

“How's Myrna?”

Samuel spoke like a man who was choosing his words carefully. “About as well as you could expect. She was up all night, pacing and crying. There were a few of us with her, including her niece Dara. I thought we should call a doctor, but the others vetoed that idea. They called Sister Mama and she sent something over that knocked Myrna right out. She's still sleeping.”

Faye looked at Amande. “Have we met Sister Mama?” The girl shook her head.

Samuel smiled for the first time that day, maybe for the first time since Faye had laid eyes on him. He was a very serious soul. Fortunately for Faye, he was serious about local history, and he had enough spare cash to front the money for the historical society to hire her. For this reason, Faye was inclined to overlook his funereal air.

Samuel's skin was unlined and his dark hair was only lightly streaked with gray. Now that she'd seen him smile, she realized that he might actually be in his early forties, about her age. One would think that independent wealth would have made him a bit more lighthearted.

The fire investigator approached, slipping her phone in a pocket to free her right hand. Extending it first to Amande, then to Faye, she said, “I'm Avery Stein. You must be the Longchamp-Mantooth women. Can I ask you a few questions?”

Faye nodded, and Avery beckoned for them to step over the crime-scene tape. As they walked toward the house, she asked, “Do you remember anything unusual about your time in Ms. Armistead's house last night?”

“You mean, other than the séance
and the crystal ball and the fact that Tilda was pretty sure she could talk to dead people?” Amande asked.

Avery nodded, giving a quick, shy smile. Faye thought she might be almost as close to Amande's age as her own. She was also almost as sturdily built as Faye's strapping daughter.

The open flame under Tilda's crystal ball had haunted Faye all night, so she described it to the investigator.

“Do either of you remember where she stored the lamp oil? Was it in the room with you?”

Faye and Amande both shook their heads.

Faye said, “I don't know about the fuel. The lamp under the crystal ball was full when Myrna lit it, but there must have been a good-sized jug of fuel somewhere nearby. Tilda seemed to like oil lamps better than electricity. I remember that she had a collection of glass lamps on the dining room sideboard and on a secretary in the living room. She lit them all as the sun went down.”

A crease appeared between the eyebrows of Avery's freckled forehead. “I…didn't know about the other lamps.”

From this Faye inferred that Avery had found the séance room and the oil lamp inside it. She also inferred that Avery was trying not to let them know what she'd already discovered about the fire, and that she was probably a very poor poker player.

A stepladder stood beside the house's dining room window. Avery indicated that she'd like Faye to climb up and look in the house. “I've been inside, and all indications are that it's structurally stable, but I won't put you at risk till I know more. Just tell me if you can see anything through the window that might be important. Does anything look different than it did when you left last night?”

Faye climbed the ladder. Unbidden, Amande clambered up behind her. Even standing a step below Faye, Amande could easily see over her mother's shoulder. Faye saw Avery consider stopping the girl. Instead, the arson investigator grabbed the ladder's legs to steady it under the weight of two people.

Faye could see through the dining room and into the parlor, so the entire space where she and Amande had visited with the Armistead sisters the night before was visible—except, obviously, for the interior of the séance room. She was surprised to see how much of the area was still recognizable. The firefighters had quenched the fire before the roof caved in, so the rooms were littered with bits of fallen ceiling material, but they weren't filled with debris. The wood floor was scorched, but still in place. Faye could see footprints in the ashes where Avery, and probably some technicians, had already done a full inspection. She could also see scars on the floors and walls that she knew from experience were sites where samples for the arson lab were collected.

“Lucretia Mott's chair.” Amande sighed. Its horsehair upholstery had surely burned like an acetylene torch.

Near the window, Faye could see that Tilda's china cabinet, though scorched, had withstood the fire, except for its shattered glass doors and the broken glassware inside. The sideboard across the room was in similar condition. But where were the oil lamps that had been scattered across its surface? A house fire wasn't hot enough to melt and consume glass, was it? She should at least be able to see shards of the lamps' colorful glass in the ash atop the sideboard.

And what about the lamps that had been on the secretary in the parlor? Faye squinted in that direction, but her eyes weren't up to the task.

“Amande, do you see the lamps that were on Tilda's secretary desk?”

The answer was quick and sure. “Nope. Nothing but a little bit of ash.” Amande started to scan the room again, but her seventeen-year-old eyes whipped back to the secretary. “Where's the chair? Remember? That's where Elizabeth Cady Stanton's chair was. In front of the secretary.”

Faye did remember, and she remembered the chair's impressive cast-iron construction. The chair's upholstery was probably history, but there was no way that a house fire would have burned its base beyond recognition. Where was it now?

They both saw it at the same time, while Avery stood below, fidgeting as if she wished the ladder would hold all three of them.

Amande pointed so enthusiastically that Avery had trouble keeping the ladder upright. Faye held on as best she could. “The Stanton chair—why is it in the hallway? It wasn't there last night. It couldn't have been. It's sitting smack in front of the entrance to the séance room, blocking the door.”

Amande was right. Faye could see the ornate cast-iron base of the old swivel chair lying on its side on the hallway floor. The upholstery had burned away, but the metal portions were almost unscathed.

“That's one reason why I asked you two to take a look,” Avery says. “I couldn't think of any reason for that chair to be there. Nor the broken glass.”

That's when Faye noticed the colorful bits of glass sprinkled through the ashes on the hallway floor, like ceramic tiles in one of Pompeii's ancient mosaics. They were all within a few feet of the séance room's door. Its stout oak had been almost totally consumed, and chunks of its half-burned wood lay on the floor.

Coal-dark marks as tall as Amande marked the walls around the door. Faye was chilled to think of Tilda trapped in the house, struggling to escape, banging fruitlessly on Myrna's door, driving to Buffalo while choking to death from smoke inhalation. Then she saw something that drove those disturbing images from her brain.

A stout length of wood dangled from a nail that had been hammered into the jamb of the door to the secret room. A second nail still protruded from the other end of the piece of wood. It had been hammered into something, probably the door, but that portion of the door had been consumed by the fire. Had the wood been nailed there the night before?

Of course not. It would have held the door closed. They could never have gotten into the room with that board barring the entrance. Faye pointed it out to Avery, whose very poor poker face told her that she'd already seen it.

Faye did her best to think of a good reason, or even a neutral reason, for that board and its nails to be nailed to a door that was used daily. “Someone might have nailed that board there to try to keep another person out of the room, but it would only work for the amount of time it took the other person to find a crowbar and pry the board off.”

Avery nodded, but she kept her mouth shut. She was poker player enough to wait and see what Faye did with the exact same data she'd already had time to consider.

“Here's another scenario.” Faye was moving inexorably toward a mental picture she didn't want to conjure. “It's more disturbing, but it's also more logical, since it can't be undone with a simple crowbar. Maybe somebody was in the room, and another person was trying to keep that person in there by using the board as a makeshift lock. The trapped person would be on the wrong side of the door to pry it off. This would be a big problem if the house were on fire.”

The scorched iron chair lay on the hallway floor in silent support of this scenario.

It takes time to nail a door closed. A heavy iron chair, jammed under the doorknob, can deliver that time. If someone's intent had been to trap a person—Tilda, perhaps—behind that door, then the chair, the strip of wood, a hammer, and two nails would have done the trick.

If the person willing to do such a thing was also an arsonist, then Tilda's cherished oil lamps would have been the last necessary element. The colorful pattern of broken glass on the hallway floor took a different shape when Faye considered that a burning oil lamp crafted of handblown glass would have been the Victorian equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. Shattering Tilda's burning lamps against a door crafted of long-seasoned hardwood would have been a particularly artful way to commit murder.

Amande was just as capable of following the broken glass clues as Faye. “Do you think somebody did that to…to Tilda?”

Faye had the urge to fling her hands over her daughter's eyes.

“Do you think Tilda was murdered?” Faye asked Avery. “Do you?”

“You're looking at the same evidence I did. Yes, I think that evidence points to murder. What do you think?”

Faye didn't want to say.

“I can track your whereabouts last night,” Avery said. “Mostly with witnesses, plus there was a lucky shot of you on a convenience store video. I know you didn't do this to Mrs. Armistead, but it is very important that you don't tell anybody else about what you see here. I needed you to confirm the condition of the door and the location of the chair when you left last night. You've done that. And you've also done me a favor by telling me what all that broken glass was about. From this point on, all I need is your silence.”

Since Faye was too horrified to speak, that might not be a problem.

“You understand why, don't you?”

Faye found her voice. “Of course I do. If anybody other than you, me, or Amande suggests that this was anything other than an ordinary house fire, then that person has been talking to the killer. Or, more likely, that person
is
the killer.”