THE WITCH AND THE TEA PARTY (A Rachael Penzra Mystery)

The Witch and the Tea Party

 

Crystal balls are a favorite way of foreseeing the future, one we most often see in movies, although they’re nothing more than a fancy version of scrying. If you have a crystal ball, it should be used by you and you only. It needs cleansing and proper care. It is a tool, and used properly, a very powerful one. The best manner of using the ball takes three steps. The first night the ball will be cleansed. The second night a protection ritual is performed on the room and on the user. The third night the reading is done. If the ball is in more or less continuous usage, steps one and two can be bypassed, although the ball needs periodic cleaning by a smudge prepared with your personal cleansing herbs and/or grasses. A gemstone sphere is often placed beside the ball to strengthen the power. Candles seem to add in strengthening images. Incense and soft music add in setting the mood. (When not in use, cover the ball with a dark cloth that is used only for that purpose.) Place your hands on the ball when you’re ready to start. Create a mental image of the question or person you’re interested in. Remove hands and remain in a relaxed state. Allow your eyes to stare into the crystal, allowing them to lose a little of the sharp focus. Slowly a mist will form and images will appear. Don’t be surprised or discouraged if the images have nothing to do with what you are asking. It takes practice and patience, and often the answer is there, only in a different form than you expected.

Chapter One

It was one thing for Ralph to desert me, but it stuck in my gall that he’d left me for another woman. Make that
three
women. And they were old women, too—one of them married. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy enough to get rid of him. In many ways I was. He was critical of my singing, my dancing, and my store arrangements. Nevertheless, I’d taken him in when he had fled from danger, whether real or imagined. It might be said, if you consider mingling with humans to be a good thing, that I changed his life for the better.

He d
oes come back to visit occasionally when he thinks I might be baking bread. Even as a ghost, it seems his sense of smell is highly developed, like a werewolf’s or something. He can’t taste anything, but he enjoys the
idea
of eating. Mac, my Aunt Myrtle’s frequent escort and man about town, described Ralph as a scrawny little guy, sporting a thin mustache, along with an incipient pot belly. In life, he’d apparently been a dancing instructor. He claimed to be twenty-nine, and the victim of murder most foul. At least that was
his
opinion, although he didn’t seem anxious to have us delve too deeply into the background of the case. His anger seemed to be centered on the fact he’s dead rather than from any desire for vengeance.

Since he’d been hanging around all winter, I’d thought to put him to good use in the store
when we opened in the spring. (Let him earn his room and board, so to speak.) He could, I figured, do a little gentle haunting, just enough to excite my costumers without compelling them to run screaming out the door.

Then, about the time for him to pop out and perform, I found he’d left the premises. “What happened to Ralph?” I asked my aunt and niece. “I haven’t heard him around for a few days. I was going to go over a few points about his behavior in the store with him.”

Patsy looked up. “You know, I haven’t seen him either now that you mention it. What could have happened to him?”

My aunt, usually the first to join in any conversation, remained mute. If she’d
said something, even something mundane, I probably wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. As it was, both Patsy and I turned toward her suspiciously. “Do you happen to know anything about his disappearance?” I demanded rather than asked.

“Oh, well…uh, you know men,” she stammered. “You never know what they’ll do next.”

“Where is he?” Patsy asked.

“Uh, I suppose he’s flitting around, you know, from place to place, enjoying the
nice weather. Isn’t it a lovely day?”

“Where is he?” Patsy repeated. Normally she’s a nice young woman, but we’ve both learned (the hard way)
never to trust our senior relative when there’s something amiss. Chances are she and her two cohorts, Moondance and Dora, are involved. When she starts tiptoeing around a subject, you have to pin her down.

“At this moment?”

“Where has he been lately?” I added in my tone of impending doom.

“Uh, he might be hanging around at Dora’s a little,” she stammered. Fortunately, while she’s been known to lie until she’s blue in the face, she doesn’t really enjoy it. She lies like a child, to get out of
any trouble she knows she’s to blame for.

“What is he doing over there?” Patsy asked, her voice stern. We’ve found it’s easier to play bad cop/bad cop rather than give her a chance to relax between attacks.

“You know, don’t you?” I accused her.

“We thought… He wandered over… He thinks it’ll be fun to help us tell fortunes.”

There!
Her attitude declared.
It’s out. I’ve told you everything I know.

Fat chance of that.

“That’s what you three were talking about last winter, isn’t it?” I vaguely recalled them mentioning purloining our resident ghost and setting up séances or something in Dora’s store. The sneaky trio had managed to keep their mouths shut since then, no doubt busily scheming and planning secretly behind my back. “Do you think it’s fair to steal my ghost?”

“He isn’t
yours
,” she declared. Nuts. She’d caught her second wind. “Dora’s right when she says he’s a grown man and he can do what he wants. He
wants
to help us.”

“In other words, you seduced him,” Patsy said, sounding disgusted.

“I never did any such thing!” my aunt was genuinely shocked at the idea.

“Not that way,” I explained, already feeling the high ground slipping out from under our feet. “She means you seduced him with words.”

“I’ve never seduced anybody in my life,” she remained adamant. “I’ve never even said I liked him particularly, much less that I
loved
him.”

Patsy burst out laughing. “I give up. I can’t fight that kind of reasoning. You’re on your own, Aunt Rachael.”

“Okay, okay,” I pacified Aunt Myrtle. She really was distressed. “We know you didn’t seduce him. But you did tempt him, didn’t you? What did you offer him?”

“You can’t bribe a ghost,” she said, clearly having rehearsed her words ahead of time. “He has made his choice.”

“We concede that,” I told her. “Now tell us what you three…four…are planning to do.”

Sensing that she’d won, she relaxed and told us their plans
. “We thought we’d use the little room near the back of Dora’s shop as a séance room. We’ll tell fortunes. Moondance can use the Tarot cards and Ralph can kind of waver around making the customers feel shivery. He’ll touch their hair and arms. He can rap on the wall, too, when it fits the situation. You know how good he is at wall tapping. We’re going to fix up the room to look like a fortune teller’s tent.”

A picture of a harem room from an old silent movie flashed through my head. Sometimes I enjoy being psychic. A smile formed on my lips before I caught myself and bounced back to reality. “Aunt Myrtle,” I told her. “
I’m sure there are all kinds of rules and regulations about fortune telling. You can’t just set up a business without looking into those things. You might need a license or something. Nowadays you need a license for almost everything.”

“I can ask Joe about it,” Patsy said. Joe is her boyfriend, and when he isn’t with her, he’s a
sheriff’s deputy. “He can at least find out where we should ask about things.”

“It’s none of their business,”
my aunt declared, speaking of THEM. We all despise THEM, but usually we have to give way to their proclamations. THEM is a synonym for authority in all its manifestations. THEM is who we mean when we state, ‘
They
say…’

There was no sense arguing with her.
I knew she’d dutifully repeat our conversation to her cronies, and surprisingly, they’d listen. They might not do anything about it, but they’d discuss it in their own inimitable way, no doubt deciding that since I’d brought the legal situation up, it was my duty to take care of any difficulties that might arise.

“We did have one question,” she said hesitatingly. “We don’t know how to approach her, but we thought Elena might want to come in with us. Could you ask her, Rachael? Or maybe you should have David do it.”

“I can guess the answer to that right now,” I scolded her. “And so can you. Elena would set up her own fortune telling business if she wanted to do that sort of thing. No, I won’t ask her, nor will I ask David to ask her. You can talk to her yourselves if you want. She might be able to give you some advice.”

Elena was the local mystery woman. She’d moved to our town some years earlier and set up an accounting business, servicing small local businesses. With the internet so handy, she
might do a lot of work on that too for all I knew. She occasionally mixes with the local coven and she certainly has exceptional abilities. I’d seen her locate missing people (my aunt, as it happens) with a pendulum, and David has told me that she’d made her living for years as a fortune teller. She’d made the mistake of volunteering one time for a local fund raiser. She’d told fortunes, and she’d done it a little too well for comfort. Several people in town still wonder nervously where she’d gotten such intimate knowledge about them.

David i
s my boyfriend, significant other, main man…what
do
you call them nowadays when you’re
ever-so-slightly
past your youth, and while your friend is a male, he’s hardly a boy anymore? We’re not talking boy toys here. I couldn’t handle one of those, anyway. I’d be too busy bossing him around to enjoy his charms. Old habits of motherhood die hard.

We a
re a couple. A couple of what? Lovers? Friends? Soul mates? All of the above. We’d grown into our romance slowly, but steadily, and it wasn’t based solely on either lust or the need for simple companionship. The core was more complex than that. I could go on forever about our wonderful relationship—and put everybody around me to sleep. Suffice it to say that he’s my boyfriend, and he too has psychic talents.

I think psychics and people with similar skills either hide
from the world or seek each other out. I hid my abilities for most of my life. It made me awkward and nervous around people, so it was nice to find company who understood me.

After far too many years of doing my best to suppress my
gift, I had finally listened to my Aunt Josie and started developing it. I also became a witch at the same time. There are a lot of names, such as white witch, or good witch, New Age practitioner, etc. I guess I’d describe myself as the old-fashioned ‘wise woman’, someone who studies Nature rather than worshiping a god. For the most part, I’m like the women of old who believed in herbs and the powers of the natural world. Whatever the source, we were given life in this wonderful world and I don’t want to waste my time worrying about potential future punishments. I believe in right and wrong, and I don’t think a healthy soul has many questions about what they are. The Wiccan rule,
Harm none
is a lot more complicated than it seems at first glance. I admittedly don’t always manage to follow it.

“I think it’s terrible that she’s afraid to use her powers,” Aunt
Myrtle doggedly continued about Elena. The trio must
really
be confused about what exactly they were doing. It wasn’t like them to let a little thing like ignorance stop them, or to cause them to look around for help.

“I doubt fear is the reason,” I said. “She simply doesn’t choose to do it.”

“She was so good at that fund-raiser,” she sighed. “She scared a lot of people, only most of them won’t tell anybody what she said to them.”

“That could be dangerous,” Patsy told her.

“She could just tell the okay things, kind of skip over the bad stuff.”

“She might go into a trance,” I said. “That happens sometimes with fortune tellers. She wouldn’t be able to control what she saw or said.”

“Maybe we could just have her read people who look nice…”

“They’d be the worst kind,” Patsy laughed. “We all have our little secrets and think of how horrified some social pillars would be to k
now that someone else knew theirs.”

“And it wouldn’t always be small things they’re keeping from the world,” I shook my head. “Some of them might have some really ugly secrets they’re covering up.”

Rather than looking thoughtful at our tales of caution, her face lit up and her eyes glowed. “We could catch some bad people that way,” she said, delighted at the idea. “We could have Elena in another room, reading their minds. They wouldn’t know she was listening and we could tape record anything she said in a trance. So they wouldn’t even suspect we knew, and we could follow up the leads and turn bad people over to the law.”

“No, you couldn’t,” I
ordered
her. Sometimes that works. From the shifty look she gave me, I had a feeling this wasn’t one of those times. “It would be terribly dangerous and could lead some a horrific lawsuit if you couldn’t prove—in a court of law—what you alleged.”

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