THE WITCH AND THE TEA PARTY (A Rachael Penzra Mystery) (5 page)

I was dying to know how much they were actually hauling in, but it seemed impolite to come right out and ask. I’d leave that to Patsy. She tends to bluntness sometimes, on the theory that if you want to know something, you ask. It makes sense, but it wasn’t the way I was brought up and embarrasses me to try.
I asked instead, “What about Ralph? Is he working out? What does he do?”

“He sometimes taps on the table or wall, but that isn’t as impressive as when he touches them and they get chills. He’s gotten quite good at stroking hair and arms. Then if the client says something about it, he’ll tap.”

“Well, I can see where this is much more fun than hanging out in my store,” I sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t blame him for deserting me.”

“We’re telling people about him when they’re startled. We don’t blurt it out, we let them feel or hear him first. And he doesn’t show up for everybody. He seems to take breaks whenever he wants, not when Moondance does.”

“Maybe he needs them,” I reminded her. “We don’t know how his system works.”

She showed me the peephole and I admittedly took a quick look. I was startled to see a regular customer of mine seated there, leaning forward avidly to hear what golden nuggets might drop from
Moondance’s lips. I refused the offer of the earphones. Somebody had to have standards. But I speculated about it all the way back to the shop.

The trio wisely kept their hours for the fortune telling to three hour stretches, from one to four. That gave them an hour to sit in the back room and go over the day’s excitements, one of them working the front shop until they closed. They were obviously having the time of their lives
, and Patsy and I were regaled every evening with stories as we ate. We let my aunt talk, operating on the theory that if she could chatter to us, she’d be less apt to need any other outside outlet. It fascinated me that she still needed someone to talk to. The three of them seemed never to be silent when they were together. However, it seemed that they were being extremely discreet other than with each other and us. I imagine Moondance’s husband, Jimbo, heard his share of confidences, but he rarely actually seemed to listen to what she said, so he wasn’t a problem.

Besides, I kept reassuring myself, they weren’t doing anything illegal. Any confidences were freely given with no promise of secrecy. Their clientele was mostly women, which I’m not sure says anything good about my gender, and women, true or not, are supposed to need to gossip more than men. (I have my own opinion about that.)

Still, there were a surprising number of men who showed up for readings. Somehow one didn’t associate males with that sort of gullibility. It was, rather to my chagrin, becoming clear that more and more of the clients were showing up as believers, rather than as people looking for a good chuckle and some unusual entertainment. I didn’t like what I was hearing, all second-hand from Aunt Myrtle, whom it never occurred to that what she was saying might be worrisome.

“A woman wants to hire Moondance for a party,” she told
us, about a month after the tourist season was in full swing. “She’ll pay us really good money. That’s legal, isn’t it,” she asked Patsy. “To be paid as entertainers? That’s what we’re going to put on the contract, that the whole thing is entertainment.”

“That should be okay,” Patsy admitted. “But where will this be held? And how are you going to bring Ralph along? It might fall a little flat without him.”

“We’re doing it in the shop. Dora wasn’t sure about it at first because she likes to use the shop as an extension of her house when she’s closed. She says she considers all the stuff to be a part of her personal life. But we persuaded her to think of being open for the party is really just like having a sale of something, not interfering with her life except for a few hours.”

“How many people are going to be there?” I asked, curious. “The shop’s big
with that back addition, but it’s pretty crowded. Are the guests going to need seating, or food?”

“Oh no, nothing lik
e that. Mrs. Brown-Hendricks—with a dash between the names like some sort of royalty or something—is going to have the meal at her home and bring them over for tea and the readings. There’ll only be ten people, including herself, so we’ll push a few things around and get them all seated. She’s figuring on five minutes for each person, so it’s only an hour. Moondance says she can’t read the tarot that quickly so it’ll have to be the crystal ball.”

I shuddered a little inwardly at the mention of the Tarot. I am not a fan of cards of any sort. The Tarot frightens me. I think of it much as I think of the Ouija, though they don’t seem to bother other people. The minute the deck is touched by another person I get strong vibes from it, usually bad ones. I don’t even play Go Fish. “An hour’s rather a long time for people to sit around Dora’s shop, isn’t it? And what do you mean by ‘drinks’?”

“I guess she’ll bring along some liquor, or maybe some of those bright-colored after dinner drinks, the ones you sip out of tiny glasses. And it shouldn’t seem long to them. They can look around Dora’s shop, and when the first few people are finished, they can talk about the readings. People love to do that. And Rachael, she’s paying us two thousand dollars!”

“Wow!” I was impressed.
It sounded okay, safe enough. And the worst that could happen was for their client to be displeased with the readings and stop her check. Then, I supposed, we could go through the drama and excitement of planning to sue. Whether or not they’d actually go through with that was doubtful, but they’d get their money’s worth of entertainment out of their plotting and bursts of righteous indignation.

“I knew you wouldn’t
make a fuss about it,” she said proudly. “I told them you’d think it was a good idea.”

“Wh
at do you mean, ‘fuss about it’?” I asked, wondering as the words left my lips if I really wanted to hear the answer.

“You know the way you always find something wrong with our ideas,” she told me, not seeming to notice my indignation.

“Aunt Myrtle! I do not!” I was really insulted. “The only time I try to discourage you from doing something is when I think it might lead to trouble or injury or something.” I stopped and thought about it. She did have a point, just as I did. The problem was that most of their hair-brained ideas made me worried, and yes, I always did voice my opinion. Somebody had to act as a leavening agent to their madness. Most of the ideas they came up with were enough to turn a person’s hair gray. Not that mine is gray, mind you, I only use coloring to bring out the highlights in my natural color, and I’ve only started doing that recently—about as recently as when Aunt Myrtle had come to visit (and stayed).

“I know you can’t help being a worry wart, dear,” she attempted to comfort me, pouring oil on the coals. “People with your conservative nature have a difficult time adjusting to change and innovative thinking. It’s not your fault. It’s genetic.
Look at my sisters. You were no doubt born that way.”

Is there anybody who wants to be called stodgy and set in her ways, especially by someone a generation above her?
I tried to comfort myself with the idea that my aunt was entering her second childhood. Ergo, she was less conservative than I am. Still, I don’t think of myself as a stick-in-the-mud bore. The really upsetting thing was that I’d only started behaving like the mother of an out of control teenager after my own children were grown. They hadn’t represented the problems my aunt did. It had, if nothing else, been much easier to guess what they were up to.

Deciding I was on shaky ground and it was only going to get shakier, I did the wise thing. I wished her the best of luck and offered the loan of one of my big coffee urns
if they wanted to serve coffee to anybody who wanted it during the readings. I thought that was gracious of me until she said that they might want to borrow it just to provide hot water for the home-made tea they’d be serving. Foolishly I asked what kind of tea they had in mind.

“We’ve been working at combining some of the more common teas, those you can make from local plants
and such, and we think we’ve got a winner,” she told me. “It should work for heart, liver, pancreas and bladder problems, as well as help alleviate excessive gas. We won’t actually make those claims, of course. We’ll just hint that they might be helped.”

“
Er, do I dare ask what’s in the tea?” Even I heard the magistrate’s tone in my voice.

“Oh nothing that could hurt anybody,” she defended. “We’ve combined dandelion, the inner bark of willow, some St. John’s
Wort, Valerian and a few other natural things. We added a lot of mint to kind of cover some of the odd tastes. Mint’s really good for you, you know. We chose peppermint for the stomach.”

I thought people might need the peppermint. I’d inquire later into the exact “few other natural things”. Maybe I’d have Patsy do it. Let her be the one
to be called unadventurous. She, however, had no intention of falling into my trap. The next morning, at breakfast, she choked a little, but she didn’t say a word to back me up, the coward.

“I’d like to have the recipe if you think it really works,” I said
to my aunt, rather sneakily.

“We can sell you some,” she countered.
“But you can’t steal the recipe.”

Patsy definitely choked that time.

“No, I wouldn’t sell it when it’s clearly your invention, but I never take anything when I’m not sure what I’m ingesting.”

She thought that over, and while she no doubt found it yet another example of my
old-fashioned attitude toward life, she came to the decision that what I said was reasonable to some degree—especially for someone with my wimpy nature. “I can make up a list for you if you really want.”

“I’d like to buy some from you,” I assured her. “You know how much I love the natural teas. I like to try anything new. Do I have all the right herbs and things growing in my garden?”

“Most of them,” she thought about it. “There might be one or two others.”

“Well, if I’m not allergic to them, I’d like to try the tea.” I turned back to my
food, behaving with great casualness. My less than helpful niece went to the refrigerator, behind Aunt Myrtle, and applauded me silently. I ignored her.

Hopefully I could actually pin
my elderly relative down in the next few days.

Old-fashioned, conservative, unadventurous or not, I intended to find out
exactly what they intended selling to the general public.

Fortune telling has been going on since virtually the beginning of Mankind. As quickly as man’s mind developed, he began to wonder what was going to happen to him after he died—very much the way man does today. Since we’re worldly creatures for the most part, he soon began to question his near future as well, that being easier to handle. Telling fortunes can be done by tossing sticks in the air to land where they may—or by throwing down the entrails of a sacrificed animal—and then having the patterns they create studied by experts. The western world seems to rely more on crystal balls, Tarot readings, and astrology forecasts. Scrying from simple to complex form is popular. Some people feel life is pre-ordained, and to them the future is something unavoidable. Most fortune tellers believe that what is foretold is merely the future that the person’s path is leading him at the moment. It’s something that can be changed to some degree. There might be danger ahead, but it can often be avoided by alertness, or even by attitude changes. 

Chapter Three

The tea, surprisingly, was okay. By that I mean there was nothing poisonous or potentially dangerous to anybody who didn’t suffer from any unusual allergies. It tasted absolutely awful, although Aunt Myrtle insisted it was really quite palatable with a little lemon juice and honey added. I tried that, but even using more than a little of the extras, it was horrible. The overlying taste of peppermint couldn’t change the basic formula. It tasted so bad that I wondered if people wouldn’t decide it had to be healthy on the theory that anything that disgusting must be good for you.

Binky continued to improve, ever so slightly. I didn’t have to bring her back to the vet’s to realize that she was definitely slow
, not just traumatized. ‘Training’ her was going to be mostly a matter of setting up a firm schedule for her routines. Fortunately, she took most of her leads from George. If he peed, she peed. If he pooped, she at least tried.

We had to protect poor little Fleur so he wasn’t too hassled by her when she spotted him.
Being a skunk, even though I think he thought he was a dog like his new daddy, George, he would hop up and down stamping his feet and making odd noises. When that only delighted his attacker, he’d turn his little posterior toward her, huge fluffy tail straight up and menacing. That, of course, did nothing to discourage her, particularly since he had no scent glands.

We finally had to step in and stop
the pup every time they met. It was something we hadn’t worked out, and maybe never would. Fortunately Fleur preferred evening hours to wander around the yard. We just had to be watchful.

Like Binky, I do best on a set routine. For the most part, I don’t like surprises. Very rarely in my life have they been a good thing. So I was quite
content for the next week. The store did well, I spent a lot of spare time with David and the dogs, and I’d lost a pound—probably from drinking that horrible tea. It might, I pondered, be worth gagging my way through a cup or two every week if it continued to make me lose weight.