Witches' Bane (2 page)

“How about you, Ruby?” Constance asked.

“I’ve already bought my ticket,” Ruby said. “I’ve got a theory that nobody’ll suspect you of being a witch if you’re a regular at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.”

If it hadn’t been for all that stuff about witches, I might not have let Ruby talk me into going to her tarot class Tuesday night. I’m not your basic New Age type. I’m not big on symbols and I usually forget that my rising sign is Gemini and that my Capricorn sun is in the tenth house until Ruby reminds me that it’s significant. I like digging out the facts, marshaling them in logical order, and putting them to work. I’m right-brained, Ruby says, which in New Age terms means I’m too analytical. Ruby has decided that the Universe has given her the mission of switching on my left brain.

“I’m really not interested in fortune-telling,” I said, when Ruby came into my kitchen that afternoon to invite me to her class. Living behind the herb shop is wonderfully handy and even life-preserving (I no longer have to make a daily kamikaze commute down the Houston freeways), but it does encourage drop-ins.

“Forget fortune-telling,” Ruby said. “The tarot’s really a mind-expanding tool. It will help you break through your linear, rigid, cause-and-effect thought patterns. It will strengthen your Inner Guide.”

I pushed myself away from the computer where I was working and Khat jumped off my lap and onto the floor. Khat is a seventeen-pound narcissistic Siamese who for the past year has permitted me to sleep in his bed and supply him with chicken livers, cooked until they are just slightly pink. When he first came to live with me I called him Cat. Ruby complained that the name was too mundane for such a splendid beast. We compromised with Khat, pronounced Cat.

Displeased at the interruption, Khat flicked his tail, glared at Ruby, and stalked to the bathroom to sit on the sink and admire himself in the mirror. Khat is not anybody’s pet, least of all mine. He only lets you stroke him as long as you do it in just the right way, in just the right place. Otherwise, he nips. He does not answer to “kitty, kitty.”

My computer sits on the desk in my kitchen, so I can work and keep an eye on whatever’s cooking on the old green-and-cream Home Comfort gas stove 1 found in a garage sale in Pipecreek, Texas. This afternoon, several things were cooking. I was boiling down a pot of tomatoes to make catsup, brewing a tea of tansy leaves to water my houseplants, and baking a peach pie. At the moment, I was taking a break from cooking to bring some order to last month’s profit-and-loss sheet. I didn’t like what I saw. Things had been slow lately, with the economy still struggling to stay afloat, but I hadn’t realized they’d been that slow. The bottom line was a definite reality-check. I had to do something to beef up sales—quick. Teach a class, maybe, or develop that mail-order catalog I’ve been thinking about.

“Anyway,” Ruby added, tasting the catsup, “I need you.” She rolled her eyes appreciatively. “What’s in this, China?”

“Cinnamon and mace, among other things.” I got up to check on the pie. When I was working fourteen-hour days, six days a week, I scarcely took time to eat, let alone cook. Now, I’m collecting my favorite recipes and various herbal home brews for a cookbook. “What could you possibly need me for, Ruby? I don’t know the first thing about tarot.”

Ruby sniffed the tansy tea, brewing in a saucepan. “What’s this?”

“Tansy, for my houseplants. The leaves are full of yummy potassium. What do you need me for?”

Ruby sat down at the table. “Well, to tell the truth, my class isn’t quite full. I just said that because Constance was being such a jerk about witches. It would be nice to have another person. To sort of fill out the group.”

“A warm body, you mean.” “So to speak.”

I opened the oven. The crust was beautifully browned. “What’s the magic number? Thirteen?”

“Smart ass. So far, there’s six, not counting you. Pam Neely is coming. You know her, don’t you? She teaches psychology at the college.” Central Texas State University, on the north edge of town, now boasts an enrollment of twelve thousand, but to the natives, it’s still the “college.”

“Sure, I know Pam,” I said, reaching for a potholder. “I didn’t know she was into tarot.”

“I keep telling you, China,” Ruby said patiently. ‘Tarot is not for flakes. It is a complex system of symbols that opens a way deep into our nonrational thought. Serious investigators of the unconscious understand that the cards help expand our intuitive capabilities.”

I had to smile. When Ruby wants to defend her New Age practices, she dresses them up in polysyllabic words. “Who else is coming?”

“Judith Cohen is signed up, and Mary Richards, and Dottie Riddle and Gretel Schumaker.” Ruby frowned and ticked the list off her fingers again, as if she’d lost one. “Oh, yes, and Sybil Rand.”

“Isn’t six enough?”

“Seven would be better. We’re having dessert afterward. You could bring your pie.” She inhaled deeply. “Smells wonderful.”

I put the pie on the table and turned back to the Home Comfort to stir the tomato catsup. To me, tarot was just another of Ruby’s spacey interests, like crystals and rune stones, which I can take or leave. But I like Pam Neely, and Judith Cohen keeps herself so busy that I almost never see her. I didn’t know Mary Richards, but I’d seen the fascinating gold and silver jewelry she made, and I’d been wanting to meet her. I was hesitating when Ruby added the clincher.

“You wouldn’t stay away just because somebody might call you a witch, would you?”

CHAPTER 2

When I moved to Pecan Springs, I was enticed by the sweet, clean air, the limestone ridges of the Edwards Plateau, and the lovely cypress-shaded Pecan River. It seemed like a delightful haven from Houston’s smog and noise and constant rushing. But Pecan Springs is a typical small town. A big night out is barbecue with the neighbors or slow dancing at the Greune (pronounced Green) Dance Hall, which opened for business in 1878 and has never closed since. The people, while they are often warm and friendly, can also be narrow-minded, as you can see for yourself by walking over to the Book Nook and looking at the books Madeline Martin puts on the shelves—and those she doesn’t. As Constance says, people here have a tendency to distrust outsiders’ ways. It’s understandable, when you think about how small towns work. It can also be frustrating, even a little frightening.

But the women who gravitate to Ruby’s shop and classes are different. They have a kind of tangential relationship to the town, both complementing and questioning it. They believe they have something inside that hasn’t yet emerged, something worth discovering. They remind me that there are spaces within me that haven’t yet opened up.

So when I rode my bike over to Ruby’s on Tuesday night, it was more because of the women than the tarot. Still, I have to admit that the class turned out better than I expected. We spent an hour getting acquainted with the cards and arranging them in various patterns. To explain the symbols of the suits—Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentangles—Ruby showed us what she called her “ritual tools”: a crystal chalice, a willow wand with an eagle feather, a bone-handled ritual knife with her name etched on the blade, a pottery bowl filled with coins.

As I watched Ruby’s ritual, it dawned on me that we were practicing what a lot of people would call witchcraft, and that they’d undoubtedly accuse us of being witches. Despite that, I was intrigued by her theory—that playing with symbols taps an unconscious part of us that our everyday minds don’t want to deal with, that our minds are afraid of and want to keep repressed. There are plenty of dark places inside me, and I’d probably be healthier if somebody turned on the lights. I keep Leatha—my mother—in one of those dark places. My childhood memories of her are blurred, as if I were seeing her underwater, but my adult anger and bitterness are sharp and painful. All that stuff you read about dysfunctional families? That’s mine, dysfunctional to the core. Leatha was a lush and my father was on a perennial power trip. He went out of my life when he died ten years ago. She’s still in it. At least, she’d like to be. I’d rather she wasn’t. It’s all very dark.

When the class was over, Pam Neely was the first to speak up. Pam is the first black woman to teach in CTSU’s psych department, which doesn’t give her an easy row to hoe, as we say in Texas. But she handles herself with grace and panache. Her classes are crowded and even the faculty lounge lizards act like humans when she drops in for coffee. She’s also hung out her shingle as a psychologist.

“My unconscious has an urgent question to communicate,” she said. “Is it time for dessert?”

“Rumor has it that somebody brought a peach pie,” Mary Richards said. From Mary’s introduction, I had learned that she teaches part time in the CTSU art department and devotes the rest of her time to jewelry-making. She was wearing a silver pendant in the shape of an ancient goddess symbol— a voluptuous female figure cradling a crescent moon.

“I brought the pie,” I said. “Ruby and I picked the peaches in Fredericksburg last summer.” Fredericksburg is a small town about eighty miles deeper into the Hill Country, famous for its pick-your-own orchards.

“I taught stretching classes at a nursing home there last year,” Judith Cohen told me as we followed Ruby down the hall toward the kitchen. Judith is fifty-something, but you’d never know it from her lithe shape—a great advertisement for the yoga classes she teaches. She wears her graying hair pulled into a tight bun, giving her face an austere, sculptural took. “What I was teaching was really yoga, but no one figured that out.”

“Right,” Dottie Riddle chimed in. Dottie is the cat lady of Pecan Springs. Dozens of cats live with her, and she feeds countless strays around the university. She’s one of Judith’s students. “Some people think yoga is the devil’s work, but if you call it stretching, they go for it.”

In the kitchen, Ruby took out a stack of plates. “You can get away with murder as long as you don’t say exactly what you’re doing.”

Sybil Rand gave a deep-throated laugh. “There are some things you can never get away with, around here at least.”

Sybil had been a regular customer at the herb shop for the past year, but she’d never invited friendship. She was remote and disdainful, as if she wanted to be sure that people around her understood that she was different, special. She was in her late forties, with unruly dark hair and dramatic makeup that accentuated her hooded, deep-set eyes. Of all the members of the group, she looked most like the kind of person who might be interested in the occult. She was wearing black slacks, a black cowl necked tunic, and a striking African necklace of carved wooden beads, animal teeth, and polished fragments of bone. I didn’t know much about her, only that she lived at Lake Winds Resort Village—an exclusive, upscale development about five miles outside of town—and that she was married to C. W. Rand, the managing partner of the resort. I knew that she and Judith were friends, and that she collected unusual plants. I wondered if there was any connection between her interest in plants and her interest in the tarot.

Pam took a plate and headed for the kitchen table, which displayed the desserts. Pam is a petite woman with skin the color of a rich chocolate mousse. She speaks with a soft Georgia drawl that conceals an inner resourcefulness. “What couldn’t you get away with, Sybil?”

For a moment, Sybil didn’t answer. Then she lifted her chin and spoke in a throaty voice, cool, amused. “Poison,” she said. The word dropped like a pebble into a quiet pool, and the silence widened in rings around it. Pam’s eyebrows went up.

“I heard about that,” I said after a moment. Sybil had entered her garden in the annual Pecan Springs Garden Club contest. When the jurors showed up to see it, they were horrified to learn that all those lovely plants were poisonous. I had the sneaking suspicion that they wouldn’t have known if Sybil hadn’t told them.

“I read in the paper that they gave you a prize anyway,” Gretel Schumaker said. Gretel and her mother own the candle shop in the Craft Emporium, where they demonstrate the traditional art of dipping and carving folk-art candles. “But I forget what it was for.”

Ruby poured mugs of coffee. “Most unique garden, wasn’t it?” She grinned. “I guess they couldn’t, think of anything else. They probably don’t have a category for the best poison plants or the most deadly design.”

Judith took a coffee mug. “One of the judges told the newspaper that they should give Sybil the garden club’s first Hemlock Award. It was probably meant to be a joke.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Sybil said. She was sitting on a stool, separate from the rest of us around the table. It was a voluntary separation, I thought. The others would have been glad to include her, but she held them back with an energy that was almost visible. “They were insulted, I think. Especially Wanda Rathbottom.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t buy any of those poison plants from Wanda,” Gretel said. “That’s probably what ticked her off.” Wanda owns Wanda’s Wonderful Acres, Pecan Springs’ premier nursery. She only stocks sure sellers, summer and fall annuals, basic perennials, a few standby shrubs and trees— ho-hum plants. Most of the gardens in the contest were planted with Wanda’s old reliables. “What do you plant in a poison garden?” Dottie asked.

“More to the point,” Pam asked curiously, “why?”

I knew what Sybil had planted, because I’d helped find some of the plants. I met her a year ago when she came into the shop looking for wolfsbane, a highly toxic member of the aconite family. In earlier times, wolfsbane was stuffed into chunks of meat to poison wolves. Humans sometimes ate the plant by accident—or by somebody else’s evil design. The sixteenth-century English herbalist John Gerard suggested an antidote: victims of aconite poisoning might survive if they drank a mixture of olive oil, the juice of laurel berries, and the corpses of several dozen flies that had fed on aconite leaves. Because the flies usually weren’t around when the emergency arose, there weren’t many survivors who could vouch for Gerard’s antidote. Aconite was a poison of choice for centuries, until 1882, when Dr. George Lamson was found guilty of slipping a hefty dose to his eighteen-year-old brother-in-law, Percy John. The trial record makes interesting reading, because the case was the first to rest on toxicological evidence. After Lamson’s conviction, the use of aconite became somewhat more risky—from a would-be poisoner’s point of view.