Rituals (4 page)

Chapter Five

Faye was a borderline workaholic. She knew how to have fun, and she did so on a regular basis, but few things could prompt her to avoid a job that needed doing. Time at the museum, breathing dust instead of soot, seemed to hard-driving Faye to be exactly what her daughter needed to recover from the shock of Tilda's death.

They passed through the museum's main display area, heading for the inadequate workroom that served as both repository and laboratory but addressed neither function well. Faye was in a hurry, but Amande lingered among the displays, asking, “When are we going to tackle
this
stuff?”

Faye's very intellectual response was, “Um…hmmm…maybe we'll work on it next week.”

This job had come with an unexpected problem. The museum's existing displays weren't remotely interesting to the casual tourists the museum was intended to reach. Well, Faye was making a presumption when she inferred that the historical society was reaching out to tourists. It wasn't like anyone had ever written a mission statement or done any planning whatsoever. It looked to Faye like someone, or a lot of someones, had piled a bunch of old stuff in this old building and called it a museum.

Faye was such a history nerd that it was a marvel she hadn't married a ninety-year-old. If it was old, she was interested. Rosebower was a fascinating little town, with a history full of Spiritualists, religious reformers, and radical feminists. Faye had expected to find a cute little museum, amateurish but fun, needing only her professionalism and organizational flair. Nope.

She looked around the cluttered room, hoping to find a historical jewel that she had somehow missed. Nope again.

Faye had done this kind of work before, helping her friend Douglass bring his Museum of American Slavery up to professional standards. Douglass' generous salary had made a hungry grad student's life easier, and she'd taken extra coursework because she'd wanted to do a good job of curating and archiving his collection. Douglass and his museum had given Faye plenty of experience in sifting through random stuff acquired by an enthusiastic rich person, but his happy morass of uncatalogued minutiae couldn't hold a candle to Samuel Langley's museum—if one could even call it a museum.

Some of the storage cases looked like they'd been purchased and filled when the town was founded in 1830, then ignored. Samuel was apparently not a devotee of Spiritualism, because there wasn't a single crystal ball or photograph of Houdini in sight. There was nothing related to women's rights, either, so he was missing his chance to engage feminists after their pilgrimage to Seneca Falls. In fact, Samuel didn't seem interested in the nineteenth century at all, so he'd also overlooked things like the abolition movement and the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening.

Instead, his displays were full of flint tools and dusty potsherds, poorly labeled and ill-displayed. This focus explained why he'd advertised for an archaeologist rather than an archivist. Faye had spent her first hour on the job perusing the pottery fragments that Samuel had chosen for display, hoping for something that fulfilled the mission she'd like this facility to have—connecting the fascinating history of Rosebower with its community and the world at large. She'd sent photos of the lithics to Joe, hoping for the same thing. Nope, yet again.

Early on, Faye had approached Samuel with the idea of starting a dialogue with the Seneca Indians and other nearby Nations that could be used to enhance the museum's interpretation of their ancestors' culture. No luck. The man wasn't interested.

It had been a long time since museums existed only to display pretty and interesting stuff, transmitting information rather than inviting people to participate. Worse, even if this room had been the King Tut's tomb of amateur museums, Samuel and his predecessors hadn't kept records of who the donors were, or when the donations occurred, or…well…anything. And, just to put a cherry on top of all those problematic displays, they were also boring.

“What about that stuff?” Amande pointed to a huge display in the center of the room. “It
looks
cool.”

This “cool” stuff was the crux of Faye's problem. She already hated the sight of the Rosebower spear, the runestone, and the Langley Object.

According to the museum's exhibit labels, the Rosebower Sspear and the runestone proved that Scandinavian explorers didn't just beat Columbus to the New World by centuries. They'd beaten him by millennia, founding all the great precolumbian American civilizations. The Scandinavian explorers were the real Aztecs, Incas, Mississippians, Clovis people, and Mayans, all rolled into one. This was crazy talk, and incredibly disrespectful to the people who actually did live in precolumbian America, but Samuel believed it.

In an even more outrageous bit of crazy talk, Samuel believed that his Langley Object proved that aliens from other planets had visited thousands of years before the Scandinavians brought civilization to the New World.

Aliens. Faye was still trying to wrap her mind around Samuel's crackpot notions about Europeans and Toltecs. What on earth was she going to do with this so-called alien artifact?

Helpful displays explained this imaginary alien invasion, suggesting that more traditional scholarship was a conspiracy of Biblical proportions. In one last slap at orthodoxy, the exhibit labels claimed that the writers of the Holy Bible itself, not to mention the writers of every holy text on Earth, had started this conspiracy.

Charming.

Faye had already launched two abortive strikes on these theories. Samuel had responded pleasantly, but his mind was made up. Aliens had come to Rosebower. And also ancient Scandinavians. He believed in these things very deeply.

Faye felt that her best hope to salvage this job was to find something in the museum's archives that was much better than its supposed treasures. And by “better,” she meant “real.” This real treasure could take center-stage in the museum, and Samuel's conspiracy artifacts could go into deep storage. She would have had more faith in this plan if one of the conspiracy artifacts had not been named for her client's family.

For the time being, the best Faye could do was to walk past the spear, the runestone, and the object, pretending they weren't there. She flapped a casual hand in their direction, saying, “We'll deal with those later,” and led her daughter into the museum's workroom.

***

Toni the Astonisher had developed a comfortable routine. She worked on her book for a couple of hours in the early morning, then she took a long walk, ending at the diner for a late breakfast. After eating, she asked Julie to make her a to-go cup of coffee that would see her through a few more hours at the keyboard. Those quiet hours of focused concentration couldn't have been more different from teaching school.

Running a physics classroom had been an awful lot like performing a magic act. She'd had to be absolutely prepared, and her lesson plans couldn't just lay out the laws of physics. They had to entertain, too, because she was working with the fragmented attention spans of modern adolescents. Improvisation had been a way of life. Adolescents don't follow scripts and they don't behave as expected.

Toni had been in Rosebower for weeks, much longer than the usual one-day-and-gone tourist, so she knew that people were watching her and wondering. Going against her naturally gregarious nature, she'd kept to herself. She'd mentioned to Samuel that she was writing a book, therefore the whole town knew it, but she didn't want anybody to probe any deeper than that. As far as the citizens of Rosebower were concerned, she was the quiet lady who seemed to have come here to get away from…something.

She'd watched and listened enough to know who was who. She'd even come to like some of the targets of her espionage. Myrna Armistead, for instance. As Toni made her morning trek for breakfast and a coffee to-go cup, she could see Ms. Armistead walking down the sidewalk across the street, leaning heavily on the arm of an elder from her church.

Aging was a funny thing. Ms. Armistead seemed to have good days when she hurried around town, visiting friends and shopping, but there were bad days, too. More of them, recently. This looked like a bad one, and it made Toni sad. It was impossible to breathe the same air as Myrna Armistead without liking her. She moved through the world in a hazy loving glow.

Toni had seen much less of Myrna's sister Tilda, who wasn't the glowing type. Tilda kept to herself, seeing her clients at home and avoiding the social scene at the diner and the town's lakeside park. Toni knew her only by her reputation, which was sterling. Tilda Armistead was a town councilor, and she was reputedly the most gifted spiritual practitioner in living memory. Myrna might have been universally loved, but Tilda was universally admired. Toni harbored a trace of hero worship when it came to Tilda Armistead, which was silly for a woman who didn't believe anybody had the powers Tilda claimed to have. Nevertheless, it was true.

A bright yellow flash of crime-scene tape at the corner of Walnut and Main caught her eye. The tape surrounded Tilda Armistead's grand old house, moving gently in the early summer breeze. Only when she saw the sooty stains rising above all the house's windows did she realize that she'd been smelling smoke for at least a block.

The odor was spreading over Rosebower, announcing the wreck of Tilda's house, but Toni had paid no attention. She looked over her shoulder and saw Myrna's back as she walked away. The woman held the church elder's elbow with one hand and used the other to dab her eyes with a handkerchief. Oh, this didn't look good.

Someone at the diner would be able to tell her what had happened. The smell of smoke and the sight of Myrna's delicate hankie warned Toni to brace herself.

***

The museum's workroom was full of sagging cardboard boxes holding things that bereaved adult children couldn't part with, but didn't want to store. Everyone thinks their family heirlooms belong in a museum. In very few cases is this true.

Smart museum curators find a way to politely refuse family keepsakes. Rosebower didn't appear to have ever had a smart museum curator.

Still, archaeologists are treasure-hunters at heart, so every time Faye opened a box, she hoped for a miracle. Instead, she usually got early-twentieth-century family photographs that someone had donated because it seemed a shame to throw them away. She liked looking at the black-and-white images of serious people in hand-sewn clothes and quaint hats, but the photos were unlabeled. There wasn't much Faye could do with these mystery pictures.

Faye had given a big box of photos to Amande, asking her to sort out the ones with an identifiable background. She'd thought it might be interesting to compile an exhibit showing how Rosebower landmarks—Main Street or the lakeside picnic area, for instance—had changed over time. Most of the other photos were probably worthless for her purpose, which was telling the story of Rosebower in four rooms or less.

Maybe Samuel would enjoy having a museum open house where residents could have a chance to identify Great-great-aunt Maud among all those trapped-in-time faces. In most cases, Faye would be perfectly happy for Great-great-aunt Maud to go home with her descendants, thus decreasing the load of paper in this room by one piece.

With no donation records, she wasn't sure she could ethically go even that far. Depending on New York's abandoned property laws, ridding the museum of this stuff might be more trouble than it was worth. She didn't have the budget to jump through the legal hoops. She didn't even have the budget to find out exactly what those hoops were in New York.

Her work plan, which Samuel had approved, was to identify and catalog materials that should definitely be retained. Everything else would be stored properly—and by “properly,” Faye meant “for God's sake, not in cardboard boxes”—then deferred for later re-evaluation. In a world-class museum, some of the deferred items would have been destroyed. In Rosebower, the new archival boxes would probably just sit, forever. Part of her job would be to train Samuel to say no the next time someone offered him the contents of his parents' attic.

Amande stuck a photo in front of Faye's nose. “Retain or defer?”

The cars and their sherbet-colored paint jobs dated from the 1950s. Faye thought the faded shades of old color photos were pretty, so she was going to have trouble weeding them out, but some things had to go. She was pretty sure this photo was one of them, until she noticed the town's one-and-only diner in the background. A spherical sign, adorned with neon tubes and metal spikes, rose from the parking lot. It was just so…so…tacky and Sputnik-fearing and atomic, and this might be its only surviving photo.

She sighed. “Keep it for the Main Street exhibit. But don't stop asking me. We've gotta do something about those overstuffed displays or the floor's gonna cave in. Samuel won't like paying for a new one.”

“Let's get him to pay us instead,” Amande said.

“I like the way you think.”

***

Faye's cell phone beeped. She had told it to let her know when noon rolled around, because checking the time every five minutes wouldn't bring lunch any faster.

“Let's go see if we can find the hole in the diner's parking lot, the one where that futuristic neon sign used to be,” she said, grabbing her purse and rising in a single motion.

Amande quickly darkened the screen on her tablet. Faye felt her brows lower into her own mother's what-have-you-been-doing? face.

“Don't worry. I've been off the clock for ten minutes. I'm keeping track of my hours. My timesheet will be accurate.”

Faye wished she didn't look so much like her mother, because she knew what a charming face she was showing her daughter.

“I was talking to Dad. Really.”

Faye didn't think her eyebrows could go any lower.