Rituals (24 page)

Cancel a show? People like Dara and Willow didn't cancel. They performed with pneumonia. They hauled themselves onstage with broken arms hidden under their sleeves. They barely even paused to acknowledge death. The show must go on.

Toni knew of only one likely event that would cause Dara to turn away an audience. Something must have happened to Myrna. And even though logic told her that people in their eighties died of natural causes all the time, intuition told her that now was not Myrna's time. If Tilda's death hadn't been an accident, and Toni had never believed that it was, then nothing that had happened to Myrna this week was an accident. She
could
succumb to natural causes this week but, if she did, Toni could never be made to believe it.

Still wearing a camera on her wrist, Toni left the deserted parking lot at a dead sprint.

***

As Dara closed the door to the séance room, Avery was completing her first circuit of Myrna's property boundaries. All was clear.

Faye's husband Joe had allowed her a brief nod as she passed, then gone back to his previous state of relaxed vigilance. She sensed that he was a good man to have around in a crisis. Not that she expected a crisis, but who could have predicted what happened to Tilda? Her sense was that a sane criminal would be put off by the mere presence of an armed law enforcement official, backed up by Joe's scary-looking impression of a security guard, but this was no reason to take the situation lightly. All criminals are not sane.

***

At some point, Dara had begun talking. Too deep within herself to notice, Faye paid no attention to the literal words Dara was saying.

This was unusual for Faye. For her, words were serious business. They communicated, they clarified, they made sure people understood each other. Tonight, the sounds of Dara's words were striking her eardrums, but her mind wasn't interested. Her brain was busy reading between the lines.

Faye heard grief in Dara's voice, but not guilt. She heard an urgent desire for reconciliation. She heard unresolved questions festering in Dara's mind. The woman knew that her mother's death made no sense. She didn't have to be told that there was no reasonable explanation for the destruction of her girlhood home. Dara needed answers and, for a woman born in Rosebower, the way to get answers was to ask a dead person who knows.

“Mother. I know you can tell me what I need to know. I am sitting with three people who care for you. We will wait for you to come.”

Faye didn't believe Dara killed her mother. She lacked proof for this belief, but so be it. If not Dara, then who?

If the motive had been political, there were too many suspects to count. Half the town had objected to Tilda's actions as town councilor. Faye set those near-strangers aside, and limited her list of potential killers to the people who would benefit directly and immediately from Tilda's death. This made the list of suspects much shorter.

Dara had presumed, wrongly, that she was her mother's sole heir, so there was a place for her on that list, but Faye had mentally drawn a line through her name already. Myrna
was
Tilda's sole heir, but Faye couldn't imagine the tender-hearted woman killing her sister. From a more cold-blooded standpoint, Myrna wasn't physically capable of nailing a door shut, hurling burning lamps at it, spreading more accelerant around to burn, and then escaping unscathed. Faye drew an imaginary line through her name, too.

Willow had possessed every reason to believe that he was married to the sole heir of a woman with property, money, and family jewels. People had murdered for far less. The fact that Tilda had owned property that Gilbert Marlowe needed only gave Willow a bigger motive. Faye knew that developers did not stick with deals that moved too slowly. Time is money, and it always has been. Willow might or might not have been willing to wait for Tilda to die to get her money and jewels, but Marlowe's project had a deadline.

A tract of land big enough—or nearly big enough—for a golf course was worth a small fortune, but only when there was a buyer handy. Tilda would never have sold it to Marlowe. Her death made it possible for her daughter and son-in-law to reap that small fortune before he moved on to a project that would turn a quicker profit. This theory was mostly supported on air, but Faye had one factual piece of evidence. She couldn't forget her glimpse of Willow riding with Marlowe in his limousine.

Marlowe himself must be on the suspect list, for many of the same reasons as Willow. He was heavily invested in developing Rosebower into a major tourist attraction, but those plans were constrained by a lack of land. Who knew what else he might build if he had Tilda's land? And Myrna's? The elder Armistead women were standing between Gilbert Marlowe and money. Faye guessed that Marlowe
already
considered the money and the land to be his. Layer a little sociopathy on top of that narcissism, and the man would absolutely be able to rationalize taking out a little old lady or two who stood in his way. After all, they were going to die soon, anyway.

Dara's voice intruded into her thoughts. “Mother, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Now that you're on the other side, I know you can see my heart so much better. Maybe there is no word for ‘forgiveness' where you are. Maybe there is only understanding. On this side of the veil of death, we lack that understanding, so I ask you to forgive me. We will wait here for your answer.”

As they waited, Faye allowed her mind to rest a moment with the question, “Who else would profit from Tilda's death?” Sister Mama's name flashed into her consciousness, but she was even less physically capable of murder than Myrna, and Faye knew of no motive for her.

Ennis, however…Ennis had no alibi for that night. No one who had attended the council meeting could have any doubt that Ennis and Marlowe were already in negotiations. In exchange for publicly shifting his vote and Sister Mama's, Ennis was being rewarded with a lucrative job that would take him away from his exile in Rosebower. Faye knew nothing about Ennis' character that would argue against his being a killer. This was a rather damning indictment against a human being.

“We wait.” Dara had now repeated this statement several times and in several ways. She sounded firm and open, yet not demanding. This, in itself, was a gift. Even if she had no others, this gift was worth having. She breathed deeply, and the others followed suit. Myrna's breath rattled in her chest. Faye's subconscious took note.

Two women had stood in the way of Marlowe, Willow, and Ennis. One of them was dead. The other one had suffered health reverses that would have been stunning, if they hadn't been obscured by age. Why was Myrna getting sicker by the minute? And why were the people around her so happy to pump her full of mystery drugs? Yes, Sister Mama enjoyed a reputation for fine root doctoring, but she wasn't prescribing Myrna's tinctures any longer. Ennis was.

Myrna lowered her head and used her shoulder to stifle a cough. She was too much a woman of Rosebower to break the circle to raise her hand to cover her mouth. Nothing was worth breaking the circle, not if her sister might be near.

“Speak to us, Mother.”

The lamp beneath Tilda's crystal ball flickered, and its weak light illuminated Dara's glowing curls. Faye knew it was silly, but part of her hoped that the dancing fire heralded the arrival of Tilda Armistead, the only person who had a prayer of telling them how she died.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Avery was approaching the most dangerous moment in a stakeout, the moment when boredom makes a watcher careless. She almost welcomed the barely audible noise in the shrubbery of Myrna Armistead's back yard.

She understood Joe's strategy of making himself plainly visible as a way to forestall trouble, but she preferred being inconspicuous. Crouched by the back doorstep, she had a decent view of most of the yard. She would have been easily visible in daylight, but a shadow cast by a nearly new moon yields all-but-complete darkness. She could only be seen by someone who already knew she was there. To anyone else, she was invisible, so long as she stayed motionless.

Her eyes flicked toward the noise. A few heartbeats later, she saw the branches of a shrub tremble, four feet to the left of the original noise. She might be tracking an intruder or she might be tracking a raccoon, but at least she knew its direction of travel. She waited.

After a breathless moment, another faint sound came. The intruder/raccoon was still moving to her left, and the massive house would soon obscure her line-of-sight. Slowly—and soundlessly, she hoped—she crept from the dark shadow of the stairs and into the slightly less dark openness.

***

Joe heard nothing. Or, rather, he heard only the breath of a noise, so faint that it was hardly more than a vibration of air across his cheek. He forgot that Avery had said his first priority was to open the séance room door. Instinct told him that his first priority should be to keep any intruder from entering the house. He was on his feet and running before the vibration stopped.

***

Faye's intuition had taken her this far. Someone was poisoning Myrna, using Sister Mama's herbs to do it. Someone had tried to kill Sister Mama herself, possibly with her own herbs soaked into the soporific sponge. The obvious conclusion was that Ennis was the culprit. Every day, he brought Myrna an unlabeled concoction to put in her tea. Every day she drank it. And he had total access to Sister Mama. Thus, he was the poisoner. She should feel the satisfaction of solving a riddle, like the solid clink of the last puzzle piece fitting into place, but she didn't.

What was the question left unanswered by this scenario?

The lamp and its fire drew her eye again, and it asked her the critical question. Fire had killed Tilda quickly, while Myrna was fading slowly away. Sister Mama, too. If the same killer was at work, driven by the same motive, why were the murder methods so different?

It seemed to Faye that the difference lay in access. If Ennis had shown up daily on Tilda's doorstep, carrying some weird concoction and claiming that it was a tonic straight from Sister Mama, Tilda would have downed it without question. It would have been the easiest murder in history. It made no sense for Ennis to burn down her house.

Would Tilda have taken the same tonic from Willow? No. She wouldn't have even accepted a piece of his licorice candy.

Faye tested her theory and the pieces fit, in a twisted and Rosebower-like way. Dara was innocent because Faye's intuition said so. Marlowe had no motive to commit murder himself, not when he had sycophants like Willow and Ennis to do it for him. Ennis had no need to risk arson to dispatch an old lady who was in his way, not when he could have poisoned her without attracting attention. Willow was the one who couldn't kill Tilda any other way.

Willow burned down his mother-in-law's house, with her locked inside. Faye was sure of it. There was no other way to get his hands on his wife's inheritance before Marlowe bolted, because Tilda didn't trust him enough to let him poison her.

But there was something else, some other message in the timing of Tilda's quick death and Myrna's slow failing. What was it?

A cold fact clicked into place. As of this morning, Myrna was much more of an obstacle than she had been. The resort could possibly be built without the property she had always owned, but not without the larger property that had been Tilda's and was now hers. Now that the knowledge was out that she was Tilda's heir, rather than Dara, Myrna was a direct impediment. Until today, the resort deal could proceed while Myrna died slowly, with Dara and Willow eventually selling Marlowe the less-important piece of property she'd always owned. Now, there was no deal until he held the land she'd inherited from Tilda. As of today, Myrna was vulnerable to a murder attempt that was not slow and stealthy.

***

Misdirection and camouflage are the only real weapons in a stage magician's arsenal. Being in possession of impeccable timing doesn't hurt, either.

Willow sat motionless, shielded by the same viburnum bush that had sheltered him for hours, since just after his wife walked out on him. He wore the matte-black elasticized jumpsuit that he had often used when working as a magician's assistant in stage shows where he didn't want to be seen. He'd worn it two nights before, when he'd slipped in and out of Sister Mama's bedroom. Their current auditorium was too small for him to do invisible onstage magic, but on a properly lit flat-black stage in a large hall, this suit rendered him invisible. It made him capable of things that looked impossible from the cheap seats. Outdoors, in the shadows on a dark night, he was almost as impossible to see.

He had known Dara would come here again, looking for her mother. She was hardly out their door before he was out of the house, dressed to be unseen. Thus camouflaged, he had waited for the chance to torch another house. Anonymous hands-off murder gave the same kind of rush as a successful illusion, magnified a million times.

His wife and her aunt Myrna were the only things that stood between him and the money Marlowe was dangling for the Armistead sisters' land. Sister Mama, too, needed to go, not because she was an immediate and direct impediment but because Marlowe wanted a little more land for his golf course's clubhouse, and she had some. Ennis would sell it to Marlowe, and they would both enjoy the financial benefits of his pleasure, but Willow would be the only one holding the secret of why the three old ladies had died with such convenient timing.

Willow liked having this kind of private knowledge. There was power in secrecy. Secrets were magic.

Willow would have liked to continue dispatching Myrna and Sister Mama slowly and unobtrusively with medicinal potions and toxic candy, and he wouldn't have minded staying married to Dara, as long as she shared the proceeds of selling her inheritance. She was entertaining, she kept their home and business running, and the sex was amazing. But she'd said she was divorcing him, and Dara never failed to live up to her word. Now he had to kill her, and he had to do it quickly, before a divorce court severed his claim on her inheritance.

It would have been better to find another way to kill Dara and her aunt. A second house fire was too obvious, but he was short on time and he'd gotten away with the first one. It didn't matter if the arson inspector hiding in the shadows of Myrna's house suspected foul play, as long as she couldn't pin it on him. Next to him, hidden under an opaque black shroud, sat a stout board, a hammer, a jar of nails, a can of gasoline, and a large box of matches, all of them stolen from Myrna's own storage shed. In the darkness, the shroud would serve as his cloak of invisibility while he transported these tools into the house. Dara and Myrna would be dead in an hour, and he would be the sole heir to both their estates. Whoever else sat with them around the crystal ball would be collateral damage.

But first, he needed to dispatch the arson inspector who thought she was hiding behind the porch steps. A moment ago, he had struck the ground lightly with his hand, making a sound like an errant footfall. That must have gotten her attention. He wasn't even slightly concerned that it also gave away his position.

After giving her a moment to echo-locate him, he had reached out a long leg and shook a bush just enough for her to see it. Without moving from his original position, he had diverted her attention to a new spot. Then, to finish the illusion, he had thrown a small rock in the direction his leg was pointing. It dropped to the ground. Its impact was softened by fallen leaves, but it was still audible.

Misdirection. Human senses were so very vulnerable to its lies. Avery was now watching someone whom she believed to be moving toward the front of the house, while he remained in his original position, perfectly camouflaged. When she gave chase, he would be just behind her, waiting with a rag soaked in the tincture of many things he'd stolen from Sister Mama's garden. They would have killed Sister Mama effectively, if the Longchamp-Mantooth women had left the soporific sponge in place long enough. All he would have had to do was sneak back into her room after she was dead and pluck out the sponge.

The tincture wasn't chloroform or ether, but it would serve the same purpose equally as well. Applied to a healthy adult, it was a toss-up as to whether this tincture would sedate or kill. Either way, it would help him take Dara's inconvenient guard out of the way.

***

Willow had planned his illusion perfectly. He could see Avery running. The excellent spatial skills that marked the true illusionist plotted her trajectory for him. She was headed for the precise spot he'd chosen. Once she passed his hiding place, she would have her back to him. She would be utterly blind to his attack, and the anesthetic he held would render her unconscious in seconds.

The flaw in his perfect plan was Faye's husband. Even though Joe had placed himself in full view of everyone passing on Walnut and Main Streets, he had done so after Willow took up residence in the bushes. Before this moment, there had been no way for Willow to know that Avery had backup. Now, Willow sank back into darkness and asked himself how to handle two adversaries, one carrying a gun and the other huge, who were both running full-tilt for a spot just a few feet away from him. In a fraction of a second, he would have to decide what to do.

In addition to excellent spatial skills, talented illusionists have remarkable coordination and razor-sharp senses. These things are also true of trained law enforcement officers and natural-born hunters. Three elements of a human explosion were gathering in a single spot at the heart of Rosebower.

***

In the bedroom where she had slept since she was twenty-nine years old, Sister Mama lay quietly. There was no light in the room and no sound. The only sensory stimulus was the downy softness of the quilt covering her twisted limbs. In such comfort, she should have slept straight through until morning, but something troublesome brushed through her dreams. Her eyes opened suddenly, dark and wise. She studied the ceiling and wondered what kind of trouble was afoot.

***

Only one magician's tool was on Willow's side now. It was the element of surprise.

He allowed Avery to run three steps past him, until Joe came within arm's length. With an arcing swing of his hammer, he brought the big man down.

Avery swung her weapon around in a very similar arc and tried to point it at him, but no one can take perfect aim while running and Willow was prepared for her. The hammer knocked the gun far out of her reach and his. It also broke two bones in her hand, and its impact sent her sprawling. She lay curled on the ground, cradling her hand, and her violent collision with the ground left her unable to even look up at her attacker.

A killer who sets fires and delivers poisons to helpless octogenarians is not of the same breed as the killer who beats a human being to death by hand. Arsonists don't like knives. Poisoners don't like guns. Neither breed is likely to strangle. They are as evil as the hands-on murderer, but they prefer the remote exercise of that evil.

Willow needed them both out of his way while he dispatched his wife and her aunt. He could have ensured this by bashing Avery's brains out with his hammer, then doing the same thing to Joe. Instead, he held the dripping cloth over their faces until they slept almost as deeply as the dead. Perhaps they would never wake up. Willow didn't care. He merely didn't want to be involved in the messiness of it all.

He gathered his instruments of death and draped the dark shroud over them. Then he mounted the rear steps of a house where four people sat in a claustrophobic little room. He should have been invisible as he went about this task. He thought he was invisible. He would have been invisible, if there hadn't been someone unexpected coming his way. A magician cannot misdirect a person when he doesn't know that person is watching.

***

The voice wasn't Dara's. It wasn't Amande's. It didn't sound like Myrna's, but it had to be, because Myrna's lips were moving. The words were slurred but Faye heard power in her voice.

“The viper in the bed…broken trust…you are not safe. No one is safe.”

She shook her head back and forth, fighting for words. Faye was not prepared for the words that came.

“Get the hell out of this house.”

Amande stared, wide-eyed. Dara and Faye both instinctively broke the circle and reached a hand out to Myrna. They had lived long enough to know the symptoms of brain injury, and Myrna was showing a lot of them. Her face had lost expression. Her vocal quality had deteriorated. Raving uncontrollably in a spiritual setting was beyond inappropriate for a woman of her religious background. And cursing? Faye wouldn't have thought Myrna knew how.

“Can't you people hear? I want you gone.
Get my sister out
. And my daughter. Keep her safe
.
” Myrna's head lolled onto Dara's shoulder. “Keep her safe.”

The repeated impact of a hammer striking wood reverberated. It told them that it was too late to heed Tilda's warning. An oily scent penetrated the room that was organic but not herbal, and it was unmistakable. Nothing else smells like gasoline.

“Get the door,” Faye barked, and the other three women obeyed in an instant. They lunged together at the door. Even Myrna threw herself at the stout slab of wood, but it was no use. The door was nailed shut.