Rituals (14 page)

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

by Antonia Caruso

Dara Armistead has done it again. She is enjoying my fifteen dollars and I still don't know how she does her stupid card tricks. Willow is such a good cheater that, once again, I couldn't catch him peeking at the cards he used to fleece that defenseless widow. Still, I do think that's how he does it, and I do think he used body language to tell Dara which cards the widow held. Or maybe their sound system is set up so that Dara could hear when he tapped on his earpiece.

Was she wearing an earpiece, too? I must remember to check next time.

Morse code would be too obvious, but a combination of taps and body signals would do the trick. (Ha. I'm a magician and I just said “trick.”)

Whatever code they're using, it's not overly sophisticated. It wouldn't have to be. It's entirely possible that they did nothing more than memorize a different signal for every card in the deck, because they were afraid that a suspicious retired schoolteacher would one day be sitting in the audience and they wanted to make her life as hard as possible. Even better, they wanted her to buy as many fifteen-dollar tickets as she could afford. They wanted her money.

Money.

I've heard the word all my life. I've earned money all my adult life. I've spent it. I've saved it. I've never been scared of it before.

I have seen people prostitute themselves for money before. This may not be the first time I have seen someone do it mere days after a parent's violent death, but I'll have to say that watching Dara perform as if nothing had happened was a sight that raised the hair on the back of my neck. What would it have cost her to take a week to grieve? Nothing but money.

How much money do Willow and Dara need? Unless I miss my guess, Tilda possessed an inherited fortune, and now it is Dara's. If she is sufficiently in love with money to choose raking it in over grief for her mother, then maybe she was sufficiently in love with money to kill her mother for her fortune.

Do I have evidence for this? Do I even have evidence that Tilda Armistead's death was no accident? No.

All I have is the sick feeling in my stomach that comes from watching two people cheat an audience when those two people should be grieving.

Chapter Seventeen

Faye was still unsettled by Sister Mama's mysterious illness, but she couldn't deny that the discovery of Virginia Armistead's letter had brought a spark to her work life. She could see that Amande felt it, too. At any moment, one of them could find something else equally awesome. This possibility was more stimulating than the caffeine in the double-shot of espresso that had washed down her breakfast.

When Samuel showed up at the museum, mid-morning, she realized that she was a full twenty-four hours late in telling him that they'd found something significant. It wasn't that he expected a minute-by-minute report of their work, but he
was
paying the bills and he
was
passionate about history. He deserved to know about the old letter while it was still news.

To find her in the workroom, he had passed through the museum's displays, still cluttered by the same chaotic mess they had held when Faye arrived. The work room was in the process of getting worse before it could get better. This disarray made Faye feel a little sheepish when he asked, “Can we take a walk and talk about your progress?” She was glad she'd saved yesterday's good news to distract him from the pile of work left to do.

As Faye followed Samuel outside, she pointed Amande in the direction of some documents to be filed. Amande really didn't need the instruction, but showing the client that she was responsible with her employee's time was good business.

Nervous, she led from weakness, making excuses for her cluttered workspace. Samuel brushed her concern aside, saying, “It's been a strange week, Faye. We lost Tilda on Monday. Last night, there was an ambulance on my own street, coming to help Sister Mama. If those things put your project off-pace, I can't blame you. I've seen how you both throw yourselves into your work. You'll get it done.”

Reassured, Faye jumped directly to the good news—fabulous news, actually—about the Armistead letter. “We found something significant yesterday, Samuel. Really significant. It's a letter written from the Seneca Falls convention, and it gives intimate, personal details about the women who attended. I can get a publishable article out of it that will get the attention of every women's studies scholar in the country. More than that, I think it's something that will have widespread appeal. This letter will get you coverage in the popular press. Schools will want to bring their kids to see it. It could put your museum on the map.”

“It should already
be
on the map. We have some amazing things here. What have you found out about the Runestone? And the Rosebower spear? The Langley Object?”

Faye groped for something diplomatic to say that she hadn't already said. Samuel was one of those history buffs who couldn't be satisfied with plain old everyday history. He was convinced that the academic establishment was hiding the truth about medieval Europeans in North America and about Sasquatch and about prehistoric alien landings because…well, because they just were.

Samuel had never met a conspiracy theory that he did not love. History was not history unless it enflamed his imagination, and a simple letter from a woman who knew Elizabeth Cady Stanton wasn't going to do that. A scale from the hump of the Loch Ness Monster would be more to Samuel's liking.

Looking at his normally taciturn face, now bright with anticipation, she finally admitted to herself why none of her colleagues had outbid her for this job. She'd thought it was because they could find better paying work elsewhere. Now, she knew deep-down that the real reason she'd won this bid was because nobody else wanted to work for Samuel.

He was still talking, and he still wasn't making sense. “And the Langley Object? It's a bas-relief carving of an actual
flying saucer
. Please tell me you're getting it documented.
That
is the article you should be publishing.”

Faye opted to backpedal and tell the truth at the same time. “I've looked at all the items you mentioned under magnification and I'm still working on a literature review. I also sent photos of the Rosebower spear to an expert on ancient American weapons.”

She neglected to mention that this expert was her husband and that his opinion had been the same as Faye's. The spear point didn't deserve to be a focal point of this museum.

It wasn't junk, no. It was an utterly beautiful work of art. But it was not rare and it was not nearly as old as Samuel wished it to be. In Faye's professional opinion, it was a not particularly uncommon example of work done by Native Americans in the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era in the place that would be known as New York. Unfortunately, the huckster who sold it to Samuel told him that it was far older and that it was carved from stone only found in Europe, thus “proving” contact between the Old and New Worlds a thousand years before Columbus.

If Faye couldn't get Samuel to listen to reason, she would have to waste his money on laboratory results that said what she already knew to be true. Faye hated to waste money, even if it wasn't hers. Also, Samuel was not going to believe lab results he didn't like, so why pay for testing?

As for Samuel's fabulous “runestone,” Faye didn't need Joe or a lab to tell her that it was a palm-sized sherd incised with decorations common to Iroquois pottery. It wasn't rare, and it was exactly what she would have expected to find in the countryside surrounding Rosebower. Samuel, however, believed with all his heart that it was something more. To him, those incised figures were Nordic runes proving that northern Europeans were living in America long before Columbus got lost on his way to the Spice Islands.

Most ridiculous of all was the “spaceship” carving on the “Langley Object.” In this case, Samuel had been right to believe that he owned something that she wouldn't have expected to find in western New York. It was a piece of stone about half the size of a sheet of notebook paper, but only an imagination the size of Samuel's could see a spaceship in its stylized carving. It looked Mesoamerican to Faye, and she couldn't argue that it had traveled a long way to New York from the Yucatan Peninsula, but she didn't think it came to Rosebower by way of a flying saucer.

If she had to guess, she'd say one of Samuel's nineteenth-century ancestors had bought it while traveling in Central America, brought it north, and stashed it in the museum. Whatever its origin, Faye was really skeptical that the round thing on the central figure's head was anything more than a ceremonial headdress, but her client wanted it to be a spaceman's helmet. He wanted it bad.

Samuel wanted Faye to drape the credibility of her Ph.D. over work that would be called pseudoarchaeology in polite circles. In impolite circles, it was known as “bullshit archaeology.”

Still dumping on the Armistead letter, one of the most significant finds of her career, Samuel asked, “Why are you wasting time on letters that passed between housewives? The Rosebower spear, the runestone, the Langley Object—these things could change the way we understand the world. And ourselves!”

Until this instant, when she finally understood the intensity of his misbegotten passions, Faye had not realized that she could give this client good service, yet still lose the job.

If she told Samuel what she thought about his “Runestone” now, she would soon be scurrying to read the fine print on her contract, because if it left Samuel the wiggle room to fire her, then he most certainly would. Since contracts generally favor the person who has the money, Faye was pretty sure that Samuel had retained some wiggle room.

Faye tried to examine her quandary dispassionately. She'd known Samuel had odd notions, but she hadn't expected the situation to spiral so far out of control. It wouldn't wreck her career if he forced her to leave this tiny, unimportant museum in a shambles. It would, however, hurt her professional pride.

Besides, the Virginia Armistead letter proved she could be walking away from truly significant things that ought to be preserved. American culture hadn't always done a good job of recognizing women's contributions. Here was her chance to help right that imbalance. Faye really wanted to salvage this situation.

Then Samuel put a toe over a line in the sand that Faye didn't even know she'd drawn.

He said, “Don't you see? My artifacts explain everything! There's no way that the Indians were advanced enough to build huge mound complexes like Cahokia in Illinois, much less the pyramids in the Yucatan. First the aliens came. Then the Europeans came years earlier than we thought. They built the cultures that Columbus and the explorers after him discovered. It's the only reasonable explanation.”

Faye felt herself grow unexpectedly calm. She'd been willing to make allowances for Samuel's unorthodox ideas. She didn't share them, but everybody was entitled to an opinion. This last pronouncement, though, had a distinctly racist tone.

So the indigenous Americans, the ancestors of her husband and son and, in small part, herself, were incapable of building complex civilizations? Only aliens from outer space and Europeans were capable of such a thing?

She noticed that he didn't suggest American contact with ancient Egypt, so he probably figured that their civilization was built by aliens, too. Otherwise, he would have been forced to believe that the massive pyramids at Giza were built by Africans—Faye's ancestors, and her son's, and her daughter's. More than likely, Samuel wouldn't have credited Asians with any part in the globe-spanning cultural interchange of the deep dark past, either.

If, in her client's mind, otherworldly aliens and Europeans were the only beings capable of building a civilization, why was he willing to work with not-very-European Faye?

“You understand, don't you? When you find evidence of an advanced civilization, you have to look for early European contact. For so many years, we carried the rest of the world.”

We. He had said “we.” Samuel was standing right in front of Faye, yet he had no idea who she was.

Faye took a glance at the back of her hand. It was a distinctive pale brown. She was proud of her multiracial heritage. People who knew her were aware that her great-great-grandmother was a slave.

This man, who didn't know her at all, was color-blind in a backward kind of way. He had hired a woman, sight unseen, whose résumé had signaled him to expect a contractor who was smart and competent. Based on his world view, the only option when he met dark-beige Faye was to presume that she was a white woman with a really good tan.

Faye was poised to quit the job and walk away…until she saw the glimmer of a possibility that Samuel might be taught a lesson.

Improvising as she spoke, she said, “My expertise is really in historic archaeology. I can hold my own with lithics and ceramics, but I think artifacts as…notable…as yours should be handled by an expert. Fortunately, I know just the person. It'll cost you a plane ticket and a few days of this man's time, but he's really the best there is. I'm lucky that he's willing to consult for me.”

They shook on it, leaving Faye eager to go wash her right hand. Then she returned to her computer to draw up a contract that Samuel would happily sign, because it would promise him a credentialed expert to look at his so-called “runestone.”

She still did not intend to do any bullshit archaeology, so he would not be happy with her final report, but it would be prepared ethically and according to sound scientific principles. More importantly, every word of it would adhere to every last clause in the contract. She still might not get paid, but it would be entertaining to watch him try to wriggle out of her bill for writing it. If she decided to take him to court for breach-of-contract, she would have the pleasure of watching him try to convince a judge that Rosebower's original settlers were intergalactic alien space invaders. And Europeans.

At this point, she no longer cared whether she got paid, anyway. She just wanted to see what would happen if Samuel continued to spout racist crap in the presence of the credentialed expert he was flying to New York—her intimidatingly large Creek husband.

***

Amande noticed that her mother had nothing to say when she returned from her talk with Samuel. Oh, she'd said hello and given Amande's upper arm a playful squeeze. She had peered over her shoulder and pretended to inspect her work, but Faye knew Amande had done nothing all day but sort through old letters. Unlike yesterday's find, today's batch of letters had
not
been written by someone watching history be made.

Most of today's letters had come from spoiled young people writing home to the late-Victorian parents who were paying for their grand tours of Europe. They were invariably some variant on this theme:

Dearest Mother and Father,

Our tour down the Rhine was most inspiring. The castles on the hilltops above us had their romantic aspects, but I am told that even those still inhabited are no longer kept in the grand style, due to the difficulty of finding menials who are willing to do the work needed to maintain such establishments. I also find German wines much inferior to those of France.

Amande always lost attention immediately after each insufferable letter-writer complained about non-French wine. She had tried to joke about these wine whines, but her mother had nodded and said, “Hmmm,” so Amande had gone back to sifting through the stacks of boring papers.

What could Samuel have said to upset Faye so?

After an hour of listening to her mother fidget, Amande wasn't surprised to hear her say, “Time for a coffee break, but I'm not thirsty. Why don't you go to the diner and get yourself some of that cappuccino you like? I'm going to make a phone call.”

Amande didn't get the sense that this was going to be a business call. This was a call prompted by the worries that were making Faye squirm so much that she'd probably worn the varnish off her desk chair. Amande figured that it was a coin-flip as to whom her mother would call to hash out her problems. Either it would be her dad, or it would be Magda.