Witches' Bane (13 page)

But I
was
tired, I realized, as I helped Leatha carry her bags from her powder-blue Chrysler into the guest cottage. She had stayed there several times before, for a day or two, but judging from her stack of luggage, this time she planned to stay longer.

She put her purse on the coffee table and looked around. “I thought I’d just settle in for a week or maybe two. I have some serious thinkin’ to do. I find lately that it’s easier to think away from that big, empty house.” The tinkling laugh again, up the scale and down. It was already grating on my nerves, which was a bad sign. There was at least a week to go, maybe more. “And I
do
want us to have that talk, dear. We haven’t had a really good conversation in years.”

Let’s just leave it that way, I wanted to say. But I simply showed her where the extra towels were, said I’d see her in the morning, and wished her a good night. When I left, she was carrying a brown paper bag from the Chrysler to the cottage. It didn’t take a detective to know what was in it.

CHAPTER
9

As it turned out, however, the bag held breakfast fixings. At seven, while I was still in bed, Leatha came into my kitchen and began to stir pancake batter, cook eggs, and broil bacon.

“What are you
doing
?”I asked groggily from the doorway. I always sleep a little later on Mondays. I was still wearing my favorite ragged nightshirt, and my hair was tousled. Leatha was wearing a lavender running suit and my green-checked apron and her hair and makeup were perfect.

“I’m cookin’ breakfast for you, dear,” she said, breaking an egg into the pancake batter. “You look like you could use a good meal.”

I gave a helpless laugh. “I
had
a good meal, just last night. I eat very well. Better than you, actually,” I added tackily. Leatha doesn’t eat. She just picks at her food. And she’s never cooked breakfast for me. Well, maybe not never. But almost. We’d had a string of cooks—Aunt Hettie of the generous bosom was only the first I could remember. My father insisted on the arrangement, partly because he liked to entertain, partly because Leatha didn’t cook.

“I’ve turned over a new leaf,” she said, testing the griddle. “I’m eatin’ a lot better.” She poured out a pancake, then two more. “Can’t you tell?”

“Well, I did notice an extra pound or two.” I put on the kettle for tea and struck a match.

“That’s probably because I’m not drinkin’,” she said casually, ladling a fourth pancake onto the griddle. “Bein’ sober does tend to put on the weight.”

I stared at her. The match burned my fingers and I shook it out.

“Your father’d be surprised,” she said, watching the pancakes begin to bubble at the edges. “He swore I
couldn’t
stop, it was in the blood, ‘cause Daddy was a drinker. He probably wouldn’t like it that I’ve been goin’ to a group. He always said he didn’t want me barin’ my soul to a bunch of drunks.”

The second match broke.
“You ‘re
going to AA?”

She picked up the pancake turner. “What a
horrible-soun-
din’ name. AA. Like it was an automobile company or something. But yes, I go to a meetin’ every day, and once a week I go to see this sweet lady named Marietta, who grew up in Gulfport and lets me talk about anything that comes into my head, no matter how silly it is. And Marietta’s got a lathes’ circle that meets once a week, and we read books and talk about... oh, women things.” She did a credible job of flipping the pancake. “It was
very
hard in the beginnin’, I’m here to tell you, an’ it’s not much better now. I have to say I miss the liquor, guess I’ll
always
miss it. At least that’s what ever’body in AA says, you never get over missin’ it. But Marietta says I’m gettin’ better, an’ it’s true I’m eatin’ better, an’ feelin’ better. Even lookin’ better, which of course wasn’t hard, I did look so pitiful an’ thin. A good Gulf breeze could’ve blown me away. I’ve stopped smokin’ too,” she added as an afterthought.

I tried again with a third match, and this time got the burner lit. I sat down at the table. “What prompted all these remarkable changes?” I asked, and immediately regretted the sarcasm. But I couldn’t take it back, and I was glad when Leatha pretended she didn’t hear it. Selective deafness was another thing Aunt Tullie had taught her, which I both hated and used—and hated myself for using.

“Decided it was time I had a life of my own. My daddy an’ your daddy have both been dead a while now, and all that old stuff ought to be over and done with, wouldn’t you think?” She flipped another pancake. “It was hard enough livin’ with those two old roosters when they were alive. There’s no point in me carryin’ ‘em to my grave, the way Aunt Tullie did.”

I stared at her. My father and her father had always been her sacred icons. What had this “lathes’ group” done to my mother’s
head?

She went on, chatty and conversational. “It’s a shame you never knew your Great-aunt Tullie, China. She would’ve liked it that you went an’ got your law degree. She’d like it more that you’ve got your own business, instead of workin’ for a bunch of men. That’s the way she would’ve done it, if she could’ve. She was in school when my mama died, you know. My daddy made her come back to Greenville to take care of me because she was his only sister an’ not married. But of course he wasn’t doin’ anything out of the ordin’ry. It’s always been like that, men expectin’ women to do certain things.” She put two pancakes on a plate, added two boiled eggs, and some bacon. “There,” she said, with obvious satisfaction. “That’ll help you face the day. That’s what Aunt Tullie always said. Get yourself a good breakfast, Leatha, an’ start the day right.” She put the plate in front of me.

I usually eat homemade no-fat granola. AH this made me very uncomfortable—my mother dishing out family history with the bacon and eggs and pancakes, not to mention her joining AA, finding a shrink, and attending a “lathes’ circle” that sounded suspiciously like a women’s consciousness-raising group. None of it fit my image of her—the daddy’s deb swathed in white tulle, the adoring bride in white satin, the helpless mother adrift in her own boozy fog. Those were the pictures that had silently fueled my drive to make a place for myself in a man’s world. My anger at my mother and what had created her might not be rational and it might not be healthy, but it was
mine,
the only functional thing inherited from a dysfunctional family. It was what had kept me separate from her, kept me moving toward my own goals while she drifted aimlessly in an amber-colored sea.

Leatha sat down across from me. “One of the things Marietta’s been after me to do is to have a talk with you.” She poured maple syrup over her pancakes.

“Isn’t that what we’re having?”

She leaned forward and poured syrup on my pancakes. “A talk about us.”

I scraped the syrup off. “Why?”

Leatha’s eyes are gray, like mine. They were uncomfortably direct. “You don’t think it’s a good idea for us to get reacquainted?”

I hedged. “I’m glad you’re getting your life straightened out, but I don’t know what that has to do with me.” The kettle boiled, and I got up to measure mint tea into the teapot.

“That almond tea I brought is nice.”

“I’ll try it later,” I said.

Leatha pushed her pancake around on her plate. “You’re a lot like your father.”

“Probably.” Certainly, and not by accident. All the years of my growing up, I’d consciously tried to model myself after him. When he was around, it was clear that the power, me authority, me will to act belonged to him. When he wasn’t around, which was most of the time, I could imagine his power and authority out there in the real world where wrongs were righted and fortunes made at the snap of his finger. If I grew up to be like him, I’d never be like her. If I grew up to be like her, I’d never be anybody at all. It was as simple as that.

She picked up her orange juice glass. “You’re very hard to talk to, dear.”

I sat down and went back to work on my pancakes. “I don’t mean to be,” I said, not truthfully, “I just don’t have a lot to say, especially at breakfast. Look, Leatha—”

She put down her glass without drinking. “Do you think there’s any way you could bring yourself to call me mama?”

I’ve been calling her Leatha since I was eleven and got my first period. “Why?”

She spaced her words, saying them slowly, as if each sentence represented a month’s thought. “Marietta says that one of the things that will help me ... stay away from drinkin’ is for us to have a better relationship. An’ one of the steps in the ... program is to make amends. I’d like to do somethin’, I don’t know what, to ... make up. For what we missed. All the lost years.”

I looked down at my plate. If I said no, it was probably the same thing as saying I didn’t care whether she stayed sober or not. If I said yes, I opened the door once again to her shame, her depressions, her suppressed angers. I took the coward’s way.

“Let’s do it later.” I pushed my plate away and stood up, managing to smile. “‘This morning’s kind of full. I’d better get started.”

She pouted. At least that old trick hadn’t changed. I was almost glad to see it. “But you haven’t had your tea. And I thought you were closed on Monday.”

“I am. But I need to finish landscaping the fountain McQuaid put in last week. I have to get the plants in the ground before we get a frost.” It was an evasion, and both of us knew it. I headed for the bedroom to dress. “I’ll have a cup of tea later,” I said over my shoulder. “Oh, and thanks for the breakfast.”

She picked up her fork. “Before you go, do you happen to know somebody named Pam Neely?”

I stopped, my hand on the knob. “Yes. What about her?”

“Marietta gave me her name an’ said I should see her while I’m here, if I felt like talkin’.”

I heard the implicit threat—talk to me or I talk to a psychologist. I decided to call her hand. The social circles she moves in do not include blacks. “She’s good, I hear,” I said.

Leatha bit her lip. “Do you suppose you could at least manage lunch?”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose I could.” I went into the bedroom and shut the door.

The weather was changing. The temperature was dropping from the seventies we’d enjoyed the week before, and the breeze was blowing a gray overcast out of the north. I pulled on a sweater, chose the plants and seeds I wanted, and went to work, trying not to think about Leatha. I was planting a border that would produce edible flowers next spring— borage, chives, anise hyssop, nasturtiums. I planned to teach a class on cooking with flowers.

I’d been working about fifteen minutes, seeding some Double Dwarf Jewel nasturtiums, when the sheriff’s car pulled up out front. Blackie got out and came to where I was working.

“Mornin’, Ms. Bayies,” he said. His short sandy hair was even shorter than it had been the day before, and there was a pale strip over his ears and around the back of his neck. He’d probably just been to the barbershop.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” I said. He didn’t call me China, so I didn’t call him Blackie. “You’re out early.” It wasn’t even nine o’clock.

“Thought maybe you could give me a hand with a few names.”

“Whose names?”

He pulled out a white index card and a stubby pencil. “I understand that Mrs. Rand was taking a fortune-telling class, and that you were in it. I’d like to have the names of the other students.”

I straightened up. “It isn’t a fortune-telling class. We’re studying tarot.”

To Blackie, it was a distinction without a difference. “How about the names?”

I ticked them off on my fingers. Gretel Schumaker, Judith Cohen, Pam Neely, Dot Riddle, Mary Richards, me, Ruby. Only six warm bodies left, now that Sybil was dead. Maybe Ruby would decide to postpone the class for a while, under the circumstances.

“Any of these people friends of Mrs. Rand?”

“Just Judith Cohen, I think. None of the others seemed to know her.”

“This Mary Richards—she the one who had the Halloween party Saturday night?”

‘That’s right.”

“I understand that the people in the white robes were witches, and that there was some kind of ceremony where a witch wearing bones made everybody chant the names of dead women. You know anything about that?”

I grinned. “Somebody must have been looking over the fence.” Probably the same person who reported the KKK meeting.

He repeated his question, deadpan. “You know anything about it?”

“Yes, but it didn’t happen the way you heard it. Nobody made anybody do anything. It was simply a commemoration of people who have died, to celebrate the beginning of a new year. It was very moving.”

Blackie frowned. “Saturday was Halloween, not New Year’s.”

“Halloween is the Wiccan New Year. The people in the white robes were Wiccans, which is a sort of nature religion.” Sort of. I felt as if I were condensing a graduate course in comparative religion into a ten-second sound bite.

“These Wiccans, they witches?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t think they’re the kind of witches you have in mind. Witches are like Baptists—they come in different varieties.”

He didn’t laugh. “So how do
you
know what kind of witches I have in mind?”

“I can hazard a guess. Anyway, if you want to know about the women who were at the party, ask Mary Richards. She can give you their names and explain their religious practices. Really, Sheriff Blackwell, you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think—”

“Ms. Bayles,” he said patiently, “I have to bark up
every
tree. Ninety-nine out of a hundred are the wrong trees. It’s that one tree I have to watch out for.” He turned the card over. “I wonder if you might’ve happened to remember the names of any other friends of Sybil Rand.”

Andrew, I thought. Out loud I said, “I doubt that she had many friends.”

The sheriff jerked his head in the direction of Ruby’s store. “On the subject of friends, this Ruby Wilcox who runs the store there. I hear she’s a friend of Andrew Drake. That so?”

My seed packet started to blow away and I bent over to retrieve it. When I straightened up, I’d gotten control over my face.