Lavender Lies (2 page)

The Texas Hill Country setting of the China Bayles books is a fictional one. (This doesn’t make it any less real, of course, for imagination and memory are closely allied and our recollections of fictional places we love are often as vivid and delightful as those of places we have actually visited.) The people aren’t real, either, except for Bertha Reppert and Betsy Williams, who have graciously consented to allow their fictional counterparts to appear in these pages. However, the herbs definitely
are
real, and their uses may have both favorable and adverse consequences. The medicinal and therapeutic uses of plants I mention in this book are documented by scientific research or by long practice, but please don’t take my word for their appropriateness in your particular situation. You should do your own research or seek advice from a qualified practitioner before treating yourself with any plant medicine.

“You’re not practicing that hocus pocus on me,” I said. “If you have to tell fortunes, Ruby, start with Justine.”

Across the table, Justine Wyzinski looked up from the lavender stems she was attempting to braid. “Palm reading is only a parlor game, China. Just superstition. Play along—it won’t hurt you.” She tossed the braid onto the table with an impatient gesture and leaned back in her white wicker chair. “Isn’t there something else I can do besides making these ridiculous lavender hearts? Ruby’s are perfect. Mine are hideously deformed.”

“Justine,” I said, “you only admit to being incompetent when you don’t want to do something.”

Ruby put the heart she had fashioned into the box in the middle of the table and swatted away a bee. My front porch isn’t screened, and the fragrant honeysuckle draws bees from three counties. “For your information, Justine, palm reading is not a game, it’s one of the great mystical arts. And as for superstition—”

I picked up one of the four dozen cookies Ruby and I had turned out earlier in the afternoon and began to taste-test it, while Ruby launched into a lecture on palmistry, her latest occult passion. As the owner and manager of the Crystal Cave, the only New Age shop in Pecan Springs, she has to know about such psychic oddities as astrology, tarot, and numerology. But weirdness is right up Ruby’s alley, which is clear from the moment you meet her. She is a wild and wonderful six-foot-tall redhead with her own wacky brand of outrageous exuberance. Today, she was wearing a long, slim, yellow knit dress, yellow sandals, and a yellow upper arm bracelet. She looked like a luscious lemon popsicle topped by a frizz of carroty hair. Her eyelids were shadowed to match the green of her contacts and she had applied mascara and eyeliner with a dramatic hand. If I went out in public looking like that, people would double over in hysterical giggles. But when Ruby wafts past, there are murmurs of awed admiration.

“Well,” Justine said reflectively, when Ruby had finished her lecture, “all I’ve got to say is—
yee ha
!” And with that, she leaped from her chair, yanked both my hands onto the table, and pinned them there, palms up. “I’ll hold her, Ruby. You read.”

“This is assault,” I said, and closed my hands into fists. “And you’ve made me drop my cookie.”

My third taste-test had fallen onto the porch floor, right under Howard Cosell’s nose. Howard is a crochety old bassett hound whose favorite exercise is lurking under chairs in anticipation of falling cookies, bits of bread and jelly, and other delectable doggie treats. Unfortunately, these goodies have done a number on his liver. He’s been under the weather, and the tests show that his liver enzymes are out of alignment. Every day now, Howard gets his dog food with a topping of milk thistle seeds and a sprinkling of turmeric. We’ll see what the retest shows.

“Don’t be a sore loser.” Justine straightened my fingers. She is a large person with a strong will. I yielded the point.

“Okay,” I said. “Ruby, you can read my palm—first. Then it’s the Whiz’s turn. Her palms have lots of lines. But I’m on record as saying that this is all a bunch of hooey.”

Justine relaxed her hold. “Of course it’s hooey.” She let go of my hands and pulled her chair next to mine. “But if Ruby’s going to engage in this mystical claptrap for hire, she needs to practice. How else is she going to be able to fleece her unwitting victims?” She leaned over and said, in a stage whisper, “When they threaten to sue, refer them to me. Consumer fraud is such fun.” She reached for another cookie. “What’s the flavoring in these? Is it legal? They’re pretty tasty.”

“Mace,” I said.

Justine sputtered and Ruby laughed.

“Not that kind of mace,” I said. “This one is a spice. The dried covering of the nutmeg fruit, which looks like a pear. Cut the fruit open, and you’ll find a seed. That’s the nutmeg itself, which is covered with a sort of fibrous stuff. That’s the mace. It—”

“Spare me the botanical details.” Justine yawned. “I get the picture.”

When Justine and I were in law school together a million years ago, she earned the nickname the Whiz because she was so damned smart. Her brown hair might not have been combed for a day or two, she might have spinach on her teeth, and she had the social savoir-faire of a three-toed sloth, but nobody doubted that, intellectually, this woman was light-years ahead of the rest of the class. After graduation, the Whiz hung out her shingle in San Antonio, where she is now one of the city’s most respected renegades, still fast, still tough, and still very, very smart. I joined the law firm in Houston where my father had once been a partner and began a career as a criminal defense attorney. Unlike Justine, though, I didn’t stay with it. A few years ago, having concluded that the herbs growing in the greenhouse window of my condo were far more interesting and less stressful than the career I was cultivating, I turned in my boardroom key, cashed in my retirement plan, and opened an herb shop called Thyme and Seasons in Pecan Springs, a small Texas town halfway between Austin and San Antonio. It hasn’t been the uneventful life I anticipated and I’m certainly not reaping bushels of money. But my earnings don’t grow out of somebody else’s grief, and I’m doing what I want to do. What’s more, I can enjoy the luxury of closing the shop on Mondays and sitting on my porch with friends, making lavender hearts and getting my palm read. It isn’t a bad life.

“I’ll try not to commit any fraud,” Ruby said, with a glance at Justine. She studied my right hand as if it contained the secrets of the universe. “Palmists say that the shape of a person’s hand tells a lot about her character,” she remarked. She looked at my hand for a few seconds longer. “Yours is square.”

“So far so good,” I said. “I am an extremely square person. In bed every night at ten, nose to the grindstone from dawn to dark. No hanky-panky.”

Lately, at least, this was true. Back in June, following the annual Cedar Choppers Chili Cookoff, I’d had the misfortune of breaking my femur, cracking an ankle socket, and getting generally scraped when I got stuck—and nearly incinerated—in an abandoned barn. I spent June and July and part of August in a traction rig and then in a cast. When I finally limped back to the shop, I was so far behind that I’ve had to work double time to catch up. And for the past three weeks, I’ve been getting ready for a wedding—mine. I haven’t had a spare second for hanky-panky, even if I were inclined in that direction.

“People with square hands are successful in business,” Ruby went on. “They enjoy making money. They’re good partners because they are scrupulously honest, although their independence sometimes gets in the way.” Her fingers traced a line on my palm. “See this? This is the money line. It ends under your index finger—which means that you will make a lot of money in business.”

“Good deal,” the Whiz said approvingly. “I’m all in favor of making money. The more the merrier.”

“She isn’t reading my palm,” I said, “she’s speculating.” Ruby and I are partners in a soon-to-open tearoom called Thyme for Tea, which is located behind my herb shop, which is next door to the Crystal Cave. All very convenient for a partnership, although I confess that I haven’t quite gotten used to the arrangement. Ruby won the lottery, you see—not the Big Sweet One, but big and sweet enough to yield a very substantial annual income. She might have retired to Jamaica for the rest of her life, but for some weird reason she had set her heart on having a tearoom. I was opposed to the idea at first, because ... well, because I
am
independent, damn it. I’ve lived forty-five years without a partner, and I don’t function well when I have to ask permission. But one of the lessons I learned this summer is that even fiercely independent people sometimes have to ask somebody else to help them get into their pantyhose. We can’t fly solo all our lives. So I signed the partnership agreement and Thyme for Tea is about to open. Ruby is providing the capital, I’m furnishing the space, and both of us are contributing ideas and labor. We may argue violently over the details—the menus, the decor, the kitchen layout—but we haven’t gotten a divorce yet. I’m not one to make optimistic predictions, but it just might work out.

“The fingernails tell a lot about you, too,” Ruby said, turning my hand over. I tried to jerk free, but it was too late. Ruby gave a disapproving tch-tch. “I hope you have a pair of decent gloves for the ceremony.”

“I am a gardener,” I said with dignity. “I garden in alkaline soil that eats fingers to the bone. If McQuaid doesn’t like my hands, he can find himself another wife.”

The Whiz gave me a curious look. “Are you going to call him McQuaid even after you’re married to him?”

“Yep,” I said. I was a criminal attorney and he was a cop when we met, and our friendship began on a last-name basis. He could call me China if he wanted to, but to me, he’d always be McQuaid. “I intend to keep my own name too,” I added. “I may be getting married, but I’m not losing my
self.”

Ruby turned my hand over. “Now, about the heart line.”

“Does she have one?” the Whiz asked. She propped her feet up on the porch railing, leaned back in her chair, and clasped her hands behind her head. “I’ve always thought of China in terms of head, not heart.”

“Of course she has a heart. It’s right there.” Ruby pointed with a gorgeous, gold-painted nail. “See that line? It ends between the middle and index fingers, which indicates a realistic approach to relationships. She’s not exactly a romantic.”

“Tell us something we don’t already know,” the Whiz said. “China does not have one ounce of romance in her soul. How McQuaid ever persuaded her to marry him, I don’t know.”

“It was the other way round,” Ruby replied, before I could open my mouth. “China was the one who decided it was time to get married, after all those years of saying no every time he asked her. And McQuaid was the one who—” She stopped, biting her lip. “Who said yes,” she went on. “See? Right there? That’s the marriage line.”

Ruby’s general outline was okay as far as it went, but it left out eight months of painful detail. McQuaid had gotten involved with a young, pretty law enforcement officer just about the time he accepted a temporary assignment with the Texas Rangers. He ended their brief relationship before I discovered it, but the job with the Rangers nearly ended him. In February he was badly wounded in a gunfight with a carload of dope dealers on a deserted South Texas highway. At first, the doctors were afraid that he might not make it—and then that the injury to his spine would leave him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But an indomitable will and a therapist who is as stubborn as a Texas mule enabled him, at last, to stand and walk. He wears a brace on his left leg and uses a pair of lightweight aluminum canes, but he came home from the convalescent center in August. He has even accepted an interim appointment as Acting Police Chief of Pecan Springs—Bubba Harris had been the chief until he got mad and quit in June. McQuaid gets around slowly and he tires easily, but being back in law enforcement (he’s a former homicide detective) has been good for his morale, and things are definitely looking up. When you total up all the pain we’ve been through, add the months McQuaid was out of commission, and factor in my six miserable weeks in an uncomfortable cast, it hasn’t exactly been the Best Year of Our Lives. But it has taught us that we want to spend the rest of it together, and that’s got to be worth something.