Read Aunt Dimity Goes West Online
Authors: Nancy Atherton
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
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our own for dinner. Annelise and the boys are eating
theirs at the ranch.”
“We can pick something up at the cafe,” he sug-
gested.
“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 par-
ticipating 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 an-
other, 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
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157
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.
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I probably could have found Mystic Crystals with-
out 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,
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159
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 differ-
ences 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 cloy-
ing, sickly sweet fragrance of sandalwood. A handful of
joss sticks burned in a brass holder next to the cash
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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 mur-
mured 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
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161
side of the purple cupboard were decorated with pos-
ters illustrating acupuncture points, meridian lines,
and the constellations.
Toby ignored the left side of the shop and went di-
rectly 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 shoul-
der 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 be-
hind the counter. “You’ll have to forgive Angelique. I
don’t know what’s gotten into her. She’s in the back
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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 trem-
bling finger to point at me.
“Death!”
she cried. “You bring
death
with you!”
Fourteen
A manda’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. “An-
gelique 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 reas-
sure 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—”
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“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 rel-
ish 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 remark-
ably 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 trav-