Ancient Illusions

by Joanne Pence

  “Can I?”

  “Yes! Definitely. Now, lie down.” He smoothed the covers over her. “We should try to get to sleep.”

  “Don't leave me.”

  “Never.” He shut the light, then kicked off his shoes and lay beside her, atop the covers, his arm over her, protecting her, until she fell into a restless sleep.

  Chapter 56

  Ceinwen slept until nearly ten o’clock, and woke to a sweet note from Michael, saying she seemed to be exhausted and should rest in her room that day, that he would be back to check on her soon.

  She clutched the note as a talisman as visions of last night’s demonic dream played over and over in her brain.

  A knock on the door startled her. "Who is it?"

  Stedman came in with a breakfast tray, saying he understood from Master Michael that she was feeling under the weather. He told her to leave the tray in the hall so he needn’t disturb her again.

  She ate a little of the breakfast, and was feeling better, but still didn’t care to leave the room. The thought of seeing Claude again made her stomach churn.

  As she dressed in casual slacks and a top, her gaze lingered on the lacy nightgown she had worn. Where had she found it?

  A highboy chest of drawers was in the room. Most of the drawers were empty, but one was filled with stoles and scarves, and another had several beautiful négligées.

  Last night, she must have opened that drawer to find the one she had worn. But why? And most disturbing, she didn’t remember doing it at all.

  The drawer held a number of exquisite lingerie pieces. As she looked through it, in the back of the drawer she found a book. It had a green leather cover, the same as Jane Rempart’s diary. She opened it to find it was written in a fine, familiar hand, but the writing was smaller, terser, more adult, than the diary she had previously read.

  The first page showed “Property of Jane Rempart.”

  Ceinwen felt no hesitancy this time. She needed to know all she could about this family, this house—and how dangerous William Claude might be.

  Chapter 57

  Jake Sullivan joined the investigators out near the Selway River. He had been flown there by bush plane to meet the daughter of a rancher who had rented four horses and two double horse-trailers for a good sum of money.

  The daughter didn’t live on the ranch, but near Hells Canyon. She told him that her father had contacted her because he felt nervous about a business transaction.

  The week before, he had called her to say that four strangers had come to him saying they wanted to rent horses for five days to ride and hike deep into the backcountry. They claimed to be from Salmon, and that they knew how to handle themselves and horses out in the wilderness.

  The rancher swore they didn’t look like “dude ranch types,” but were tough and leathery skinned—as if they had spent plenty of time in the wilds. Still, it struck him as odd that they showed up the way they did. People usually rented his horses for day trips only. But, along with IDs and credit cards, the men gave the rancher the phone number of their business in Salmon. He had checked into it. The business appeared to be legitimate.

  Finally, when the men offered to pay double the rental rates, and in cash, the rancher gave his okay.

  Still, he had been worried, and for that reason called and gave his daughter all the information he had collected.

  His daughter was convinced he’d been right to have been nervous. After she couldn’t reach him for a couple of days, she drove out to the ranch and found him dead, shot to death.

  She was sure the four strangers had something to do with it.

  The woman showed Jake the numbers her father had given her from the men’s Idaho driver’s licenses and credit card. Jake would check to see if they were real or fake. But when she gave him the name, address, and phone number of the Salmon business her father had contacted, Jake knew it was legitimate. It was the coffee shop next door to the sheriff’s station. The daughter said that when her father phoned there, the woman who answered claimed to be the wife of one of the hikers: Emily Donahue.

  Jake could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

  When he returned to Salmon, he found that Emily was gone. That very morning, Jake had told her he was heading out to the Selway River because he had a lead on someone who may have rented horses to Deputy Grayson’s murderers. Apparently, that news caused her to close the shop and leave town.

  Jake couldn’t help but wonder what else he might have inadvertently revealed to her about his investigation.

  He checked phone records to and from the coffee shop, as well as the personal phone of Emily Parker, or Emily Donohue, or whatever her name really was. More than one call had originated from somewhere in Massachusetts.

  “You’re right, Jake,” Jianjun said. He and Kira had joined Jake and Charlotte for dinner that night at Bertram’s on Main Street to fill each other in on how the investigation was going. “I did some tracking of Emily Parker or Donahue. Neither are her real name. It’s Emily LeGrand. She’s not married and has a record. Felony burglary. It was the key to tracking her.”

  “Great,” Jake muttered, still steamed by the way he’d been taken in by the woman.

  Jianjun continued. “She received ten grand to report what was happening in Salmon. She was a go-between for the people in New England and those in Central Idaho. Various unlisted phones were used, but satellite phones have much stronger footprints than regular cell phones, so I was able to dig up at least this much information.”

  “Ten thousand dollars doesn’t seem like enough for something this big,” Charlotte said. “Not when murder charges are now on the table.”

  “Maybe it sounded like a fortune to her,” Kira suggested, “when she thought all she had to do was to listen and make some phone calls.”

  “And me and my big mouth gave her all the help she needed,” Jake said. “Damn me!”

  Charlotte squeezed his hand. “How could you know? And why would you suspect her? Look at how badly my wires crossed about that woman.”

  “Actually,” Jake said with a cocky grin, “I kind of like it that you were so jealous.”

  She swatted him with her napkin.

  Chapter 58

  Ceinwen would have loved to have dinner brought to her room just as lunch had been. The last thing she wanted to do was to face Michael’s father. As the dinner hour approached, however, and she heard nothing more from Michael or anyone, she stiffened her spine and headed downstairs. She refused to spend the rest of the visit hiding in her room, and decided to get the encounter over with.

  On the sideboard she found enough food to feed at least six people, but no one else was present.

  She was wondering what to do when she heard Stedman’s voice behind her. He had approached as quietly as ever. “Mr. Rempart may be a bit delayed. He said not to wait for him.”

  Relief filled her. “Thank you. Have you seen Michael?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She filled her plate and had begun eating when William Claude entered the room. She froze as memories of her dream came back to her.

  But Claude greeted her with ease, looking directly at her with no sign of anything untoward having occurred between them. He sat across from her as Stedman prepared his plate.

  “Don’t tell me that son of mine has abandoned you already?” Claude said. “What’s wrong with that boy?”

  Her mouth felt dry and her throat had all but closed. Somehow she forced out, “He does seem to lose track of time.”

  Claude nodded. “It comes from living alone, I’m afraid. I suffer from it as well. We are much alike, although the boy hates to admit it.”

  No, you aren’t at all alike, she wanted to shout. They ate in silence. Ceinwen kept hoping Michael would show up, but he didn’t. When Stedman cleared their plates and brought them some after-dinner coffee, Claude said, “So, has Michael told you much about the amazing Chinese pearl he found last year?”

  She drew in her breath,
remembering Michael’s warnings not to even think about what was happening with the pearl. “Very little,” she said. “Does it interest you?”

  “Of course! I’m sure Michael told you I’m an alchemist, and that the pearl is a powerful philosopher’s stone. How could I not be interested?”

  She frowned. “Perhaps because alchemy is a hoax.”

  He snorted. “Men and women of today are amazingly close-minded. All of you think you know ‘truth,’ which you define as whatever you happen to believe.”

  “Narcissists, are we?”

  He grinned. “Absolutely. The civilized world knew alchemy worked from the time it was discovered around three thousand years before Christ up to the twentieth century when scientists convinced people it didn’t. Keep in mind, these are the same scientists who can’t tell you how Tylenol works. At least they haven’t decided that everyone who takes a Tylenol and says it helped relieve their pain is a charlatan or a huckster. But that’s what they’ve done with alchemy, even though many of the most brilliant minds of the past were alchemists, including Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics and the inventor of calculus. He had a closely guarded blueprint, or recipe if you will, for creating a philosopher’s stone.”

  “I thought philosopher’s stones simply existed.”

  “Not at all. Man creates them, and man perfects them. And once man creates a valuable philosopher's stone, he can perform untold miracles with it."

  "But have they? Has any man?"

  "Oh, yes," William Claude said, clearly relishing this conversation. "Newton’s contemporary, a giant in the world of chemistry, Robert Boyle, also was one such believer. Based on work of men like him, the world has learned to create new alloys, invent apparatuses for distillation in making perfumes and whiskeys, developed the concept of the atoms centuries before modern atomic theory, and provided a template for the scientific method by running controlled experiments.”

  “Uh huh,” Ceinwen murmured, her tone dripping with skepticism.

  “You can mock it, but the list of famous men who at least dabbled in alchemy goes on and on,” William Claude continued. “Of course, there’s our family’s famous ancestor, Edward Kelley, associate of the famous Elizabethan occultist, John Dee, and the Frenchman, Nicolas Flamel, who succeeded in creating enough gold to build a children’s hospital—and he had been a poor bookseller before that. The Bishop of Cologne known as Albert the Great or Albertus Magnus, was also said by many to have created gold. His work laid the foundation for St. Thomas Aquinas’ work on alchemy which discusses the manipulation of matter in a laboratory. You also have Roger Bacon, George Ripley, Villanova—”

  “You can stop now,” Ceinwen said.

  “The list goes on, and as you can see, those men aren’t lightweights. I believe many of them were far more brilliant than our so-called scientists today. How many of today’s scientists can compare with, say, Sir Isaac Newton?”

  “All that is true, but the achievements you cite are because alchemy was the foundation for chemistry,” Ceinwen said. “Much of what is said to have ‘arisen’ from alchemy has nothing to do with creating gold, and especially not with immortality. It developed through what we now call chemistry. You are mixing the two to make a point that, scientifically, you cannot make.”

  “I completely disagree!” he bellowed. “It’s you whose mind is closed to what really happened. Alchemy is the expansion of chemistry, not its genesis.”

  “You expect me to believe that?” she scoffed.

  “Of course! I can prove it in my laboratory.”

  “Sure. You’ll rig something up to impress me. I know how that works. I might have been born at night, but not last night.”

  He chuckled. “Why don’t we go up to my laboratory? I can show you now. No time for ‘rigging.’”

  She stood. “I think it’s time for me to say good-night. I’ll visit your lab some other time.”

  He suddenly gave her a look that, if he were a younger man, would have curled her toes. In a voice low and knowing, he all but purred, “I look forward to it.”

  She hurried from the room to look for Michael.

  Michael sat in the tower room, in the chair that had been his mother’s favorite. Just as during his last visit to his strange ancestral house, he had heard the sound of his mother’s music box. And once again, the sound led him to this room.

  He found it odd that his father hadn’t emptied it of all his mother’s things years ago, and especially that he had the housekeeper keep the room vacuumed and dusted. He wondered if it was a sign of guilt over the way his mother had died, or a sign that his father really had loved her. But it was hard for him to believe William Claude ever loved anyone except himself.

  “Michael?”

  He turned to see Ceinwen in the doorway. “Come in. It’s okay. What brought you up here?”

  “I was looking for you and heard soft music. I followed it.”

  “Music?”

  She looked perplexed. “I don’t hear it now. Strange. Maybe … my imagination.”

  “Do you know the piece?”

  “It was familiar, but…”

  He whistled the first few bars of Für Elise.

  She stared at him, clearly upset, and then nodded. “That was it. How did you know?”

  “It brought me up here as well,” he said. “But I don’t know why.”

  “Where is the sound coming from?”

  “It was from a music box my mother once owned. I have no idea where it is now.”

  “Your mother?” she whispered. She sat in the chair facing him. Ironically, it was the chair he used to sit in as a boy. She had a strange expression on her face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I wonder if I know the reason we're both here. But it’s too crazy.” She inhaled sharply. “You aren't going to like this..."

  He waited.

  "When we were in Japan and I was trying to find out about all the strangeness going on, and about you, I came across a diary and read it. It was your mother’s.”

  He gaped at her, then quietly murmured, “I see.”

  “I didn’t realize who it belonged to when I started, but I was immediately brought into her world. She was a fine person, Michael, and she loved you so very much. More than once my eyes were filled with tears by all she said.”

  He didn’t say a word, but simply stared coldly at her.

  Her heart sank. “I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse for what I did. I was curious, and you’re right to be angry. But I’m not sorry I read it. It explains a lot about you, about this house,” Ceinwen said. “About your parents.”

  He wouldn’t even look at her.

  She swallowed a couple of times and then continued. “I’m glad I read it because in the room I’m using, I found the second volume.”

  Michael leaned forward in the chair as he took in her words. “A second volume?"

  “Yes. It was in the back of the drawer under the lingerie.”

  “I wonder if my father even knew it was there.”

  “I somehow doubt it.” She couldn’t know, but if William Claude had read it, she suspected he would have taken delight burning it, page by page.

  “Maybe I should read it.”

  “Or, maybe not,” Ceinwen said. “These pages … they have some information you might not want to know.”

  “I won’t know that until I see what they’re about.”

  “If it were up to me, I’d advise you not to read it. Let those unhappy ghosts rest in peace."

  “But are they in peace? Something drew me into this room, and did the same to you. Maybe the diary is the reason."

  “Yes, I can’t help but suspect that as well,” she said, rubbing her arms as if feeling a ghostly presence. “But trust me when I say, if you were to read it, it will color your opinion of your parents, of both of them.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my room.”

  “Let’s get it.” He stood.

  "N
o." She stood as well. “I’ll bring it up here. There’s no better place than this for you to learn Jane’s story. The complete story.”

  Chapter 59

  “I’ll leave you alone,” Ceinwen said, handing the diary to Michael. Their fingers brushed lightly.

  “Stay,” he asked, but Ceinwen shook her head, her eyes filled with concern.

  “As much as I'd like to be here with you, the diary, the words Jane writes … I think you’ll want to be alone as you read them.” She kissed him softly. “But I hope you’ll join me later.”

  His eyes followed her as she left the turret room. When she closed the door behind her, the warmth she'd brought into the space dissipated. The temperature seemed to drop a good ten degrees.

  He stared at the book in his hands, thinking of the warning in Ceinwen’s words, of her advice that he not read it. But he needed to know.

  He opened the diary, noting the date. The entries began when he was seven, and his mother could no longer put off sending him to boarding school.

  His heart ached as he read of the many tears she had shed over his leaving. After he left home, she was unable to rid herself of her depression. Finally, knowing how much she liked ancient Greek mythology and literature, after the Christmas and New Year holidays ended, Claude sent her away to a Greek island where she could spend the long months until the boys returned again for summer vacation.

  As he read the heartfelt pages, he quickly realized he could get through them only by distancing himself, by thinking of her only as “Jane.”

  * * *

  April 8th -

  Today is Michael’s eighth birthday. I should be with him, but Claude refused to allow him home for such an “unimportant” occasion, so I decided to remain here, thousands of miles away.

  I was sitting on the beach, tears streaming from my eyes at the thought of my boy, when a kind fisherman came by. He asked me if I was hurt. When I said, “Only my heart,” he sat down and talked to me. His name is Constantin, and he is originally from Romania, now living in Greece, on the mainland. He was quite nice and, I’ll admit, very handsome. It did me good to talk to him.