by Gwen Hunter
“So call Aunt Matilda.”
“Yeah. That’s the best option.” I tried to keep silent my thought that Aunt Matilda might demand Jane come to the Low Country for training, but Jane was already powerful. She picked it up.
“No freaking way. I’m not going anywhere until my daddy can take me. Himself. Period. And that made you glad. Why don’t you like Aunt Matilda?”
I couldn’t keep my reaction walled off.
Jane’s face grew incredulous. “You’re scared of her?”
“Stop it,” I said, taking away my hand with an uncomfortable laugh. “A girl is entitled to a few secrets. Read my thoughts now.” I deliberately thought of a bright pink, lop-eared rabbit with a blue studded collar around his neck and a safety pin in one ear. Jane shook her head. I put my hand back to her face. “Now.”
“Rabbit. Punk rabbit. Almost Goth, but the collar needs to be black.”
“Good.” I removed my hand and tucked the covers closer to my neck. The room was cold. I needed to turn on the fireplace and blower. “Yours is like mine, then, at least today, though that may change. Like you, I pretty much need touch to make it work.” I shook myself more fully awake and realized that wasn’t exactly true. I pursed my lips. “Except for last night when you knew about the guys in the alley. Tell me what you felt, what you saw.”
Jane blew out a puff of air and pulled the silky down comforter over her chin. “I was sitting at the table waiting for hot cocoa. Isaac was in the kitchen with his back to me. I heard a sound, like a scuff, like a shoe on the mat at the door. Then I heard a guy say, ‘Okay, okay. They’re coming. Hit him hard and I’ll take her. Blank it all. Trees and bushes. Go.’ And I saw some trees. And then I saw blood, and somebody liked it. I screamed it all at Isaac and he hollered for me to lock up, set the alarm and not let anyone in until he got back. And he was gone.” Her face crumpled.
“And,” I prompted.
“And then I was seeing the men but they looked like stick people.” Her voice roughened, her hand slid into mine beneath the covers. “Like haunted tree people moving around. And they were hitting you and Jubal,” she said as tears gathered. “And Isaac was flying like a bird and clawing and I was in everybody’s mind at once. And I got so scared.” A tear rolled sideways across her right cheek, another pooled against the left side of her nose. “And then it stopped. And I thought you were dead.”
“A really great big ostrich egg,” I agreed.
She smiled wanly.
What had Davie told her about the gift? He had known it would come to her when she came of age, but had never told me she was a St. Claire. How far had he prepared her? How did I tell her that the St. Claire gift was always like that? Really helpful. And totally useless. Never there when you needed it and then giving only fuzzy images or impressions. “Tell me what your daddy told you about the St. Claires. And about the gift. Tell me about how he prepared you for it.” When she looked at me blankly, I added, “Did he teach you meditation or yoga or anything? Anything that seemed weird?”
“My dad is a psychic. He’s weird with everything,” she said, her tone working at being teenage-girl-world-weary, with a dash of parents-are-such-a-pain thrown in. But the sadness and fear for her father were almost tangible beneath. “Real new-age weird, always testing himself with rocks and metal, and talking to plants. But yeah, he taught me meditation.”
“Isaac and Jubal are fixing breakfast this morning. It’s early, but they’ll be up. Shall we go over?”
“Sure. But you get the first shower.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because that way you get to heat up this refrigerator you call an apartment some. It’s cold as ’lasses in here.”
I knew she was quoting Davie and touched the tip of her nose, sending her thoughts of love and tenderness. “Done.” Her smile brightened. I rolled out of bed, hit the cold floor and started my morning routine. Which wouldn’t be routine at all, not until Davie was found. While in the shower, I pondered the things my niece had plucked from the attackers’ minds. Trees and bushes. They had been shielding their minds from someone. Ergo, they knew about my gift. Now, that really sucked a big ostrich egg. A car-sized ostrich egg. That changed everything.
Dressed in long johns, denim and flannel, Jane and I tramped through deep snow on the roof to the boys’ apartment where they were outdoing themselves. In the loft across from mine, the table was set with Jubal’s good crystal and china on starched linen. Candles were burning in cut-crystal holders, flickering off the apricot-painted dining-room walls. There were fresh flowers on the table. It must be a gay thing, to be able to find fresh flowers on a weekday morning before anything opened. If I’d been a froufrou kinda gal, I’d have been jealous of the talent.
While Jubal loaded the table with elegant pitchers, platters and bowls filled with blueberry syrup, strawberry syrup, maple syrup, cane syrup, whipped cream, fruit, bacon, coffee, tea, milk and juice, and while the waffles cooked under Isaac’s watchful eye, we discussed whether Jane was going to school. There were safety issues and then there were issues of a St. Claire sort. How would Jane react when surrounded by hundreds of classmates and teachers? How open to sensation, emotions and mental pressure was she?
Before Evan Bartlock arrived and while the last waffles were browning, we decided to test her. I didn’t have a clue how Aunt Matilda tested her clan, but I knew what worked on me, and so devised a method.
I sat Jane on a stool in the kitchen, her eyes closed. “Now, I want you to practice that meditation ritual Davie gave you to clear your mind.”
“The candle burning, the quiet place, I know, I know.” The words were bored, but it was obvious Jane was excited. For the moment, she was the center of her world.
Without her knowing what they were, I gave the men very specific thoughts, dissimilar to the Goth bunny but just as odd, then positioned each man ten feet from her. I stood at the far corner of the room, a cup of strong black tea in my hand.
“Okay, fix the images firmly in your minds and walk slowly toward her. Jane, the moment you sense anything or get an image, let us know.” Jubal glanced at me and I nodded. The men started forward. As they approached, step by slow step, I watched Jane’s face. And was secretly glad when she didn’t react. My niece was unable to pick up a single image from the men until they actually touched her.
“That was good, right?” Jane asked. “It means I have a wall like you?”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried. “It sounds good to me. Part two.”
The men moved back to the far side of the room and this time I told them to remember events that caused them strong emotion. Emotion that they could feel to this day. “Emotion that is appropriate to a little girl,” I mock-warned. Again Jane had no clue what to expect as they crossed the room to her. Step by step, my friends moved closer, their faces intent. Jane sat with eyes closed, expression serene. And so far, nothing.
I had once wondered if autism in children was a sign that the entire human race was becoming psychic. What if an unsuspecting child were suddenly bombarded with thousands of impressions, emotions, images from every side, from every person, with no hidden truths or protection from fleeting thoughts, hopes, fears, petty angers. What if the only way to survive was to shut down totally?
“Okay. I got something. Two somethings.”
The men stopped. They were eight feet from her. Which was not good.
“I got a little puppy, squashed by a car. Oh….” Her voice changed, developed a soft Texan accent. “That was so sad. I loved that pup. He used to follow me around all the time.” Jane’s face scrunched up tightly. “And my daddy hit me.” It was Jubal’s speech pattern. “He thought I stole some gum from the store. But I didn’t. Sissy did. And Daddy doesn’t believe me. He always loved her best.”
Fear zinged through me, a whip-crack of horror. Jane’s eyes snapped open, her face mirroring mine.
“Stop it, guys,” I said, quickly envisioning a lit candle. I held the
image as I crossed the room to my niece and touched her shoulder, pulling her attention to me alone. I thought happy thoughts as I analyzed her reaction, concentrating on visions of angels and fairies and roller-coaster rides. Each image held a reflection of a lit candle behind it. Jane slumped as my meditative thoughts stimulated her own. She relaxed and watched my face. I schooled myself to calm. Jane had personalized the impressions. Become one with the moment. And that scared the pee out of me. A thought I kept way back in the deeps of my mind.
When I received an impression, it was almost always at a distance, an event that I was seeing, not feeling, except with strong emotion or violence, like when Davie was being beaten. Unlike me, Jane had lost herself instantly, falling into the mind-thoughts-feelings of her friends. If her own personality was not strong enough to filter out the people around her, would she lose herself in the personalities of the others?
I remembered the only visit I had made to the St. Claire stronghold in the Low Country before my gift came upon me. Everything had been so strange, including the whispers that stopped instantly when I entered a room. I learned later that the secrets had been about cousin Imogene, who had lost herself, lost her mind, within a year after she found her gift. Was that a possibility for Jane?
I put a smile on my face and patted her shoulder. “Waffles are ready. You did good, Jane. Hungry?”
“Way hungry!” She hopped down from the stool and raced to her seat at the big dining-room table. Jubal and Isaac watched me for a moment, but I didn’t meet their eyes. With a swift glance at each other, they turned to host duties and served the meal. My thoughts carefully kept to myself, I ate, the food like dust and ashes in my mouth.
Jane insisted she could go to school, contending that being surrounded by her friends would be a great place to practice building a wall against their thoughts. I didn’t agree, but also had no firm defense against her attending except a sense of foreboding. She might take months to come fully into her gift. How long could I keep her isolated? Was I even supposed to? How in blue blazes was a St. Claire trained?
I was going to have to call Aunt Matilda.
Sick at the thought, I caved in and allowed Isaac to drive Jane to school.
In the storeroom an hour later, I realized that Evan Bartlock hadn’t shown up for breakfast. I wondered what incident might have affected his plans. Surely something about Davie. I recalled my dream, impressions of Davie, his pain, his location. But there was so little to go on. A window that faced east and showed only sky, not a nearby mountain that could give me a landmark. A bloody wall. Broken bones. An office. Somewhere.
I couldn’t help my brother. All my life I had hated the times when I was helpless, out of control, useless. It was probably why I became a lapidary. Working stone gave me control over the most fundamental of all things, the earth. If I could reshape a stone, cut it away from the mother rough, give it a shape that combined its inner self, which is trapped in the rock, and an image of my choosing, if I could polish it and make it a thing of beauty, then nothing was beyond me. There was nothing I couldn’t do. And I was no longer helpless, at the mercy of the world.
Aunt Matilda, if she were here and saw my current indecision, would read the cards, probably laying out a Shadow Path spread. And then she would tell me all about my inner uncertainties, the fears I refused to face. Like I didn’t know them already.
Outside, another storm was blowing in, this one sleet and freezing rain, which would, at first, melt yesterday’s snow, then create a hard shell of ice on top. Town was deserted. No one would move around much and I didn’t expect customers, yet someone had to stay in the front just in case. Noe wasn’t coming in, preferring to work at home updating the Web site offerings, preparing invoices for shipping the sold items, and coming up with advertising blurbs for the spring line. Isaac had a class to teach at his do jang and Jubal had work to do in back. I had the display area of Bloodstone Inc. to myself.
Needing to do something, I pulled the wooden crate full of Davie’s papers to me and carried it to the front of the shop. Settling into a wing chair, I slid an afghan over my feet and began going through the files.
The morning passed slowly as I dug through financial papers, property deeds, county and state property-tax notices, letters and printouts of e-mails. I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was looking for. I could only hope I’d know it when I saw it.
And maybe I did. I was on my third cup of black tea, the Christmas mug resting on an electric warming plate, when I found correspondence between Davie and some guy in the governor’s office. Charlie Stunhold, assistant to the governor herself. The letters were photocopies in a folder marked WLS. The letter on top was a proposal from Davie to the state of North Carolina, that they work together in a joint venture to create a new kind of wildlife sanctuary, a place that allowed wildlife of all kinds to roam safely within the existing framework of the town of Connersville and its surrounding county land.
It was to be a test project, an experiment to show that modern man, who spent less time farming and living off the land and more time indoors, could cohabit the earth in relative safety with unfenced wild animals who could roam freely. He wanted wolves, black bears, elk, bison and even cougars to be reintroduced to the mountainous regions of the state. And he wanted to donate most of the land to the state for the experimental wildlife sanctuary. It was pure Davie, a vision only he could see, impractical and nigh impossible. A dream world.
The second letter laid out the bones of the entire plan, five pages of proposals Davie had put together with a lawyer, a team of wildlife and environmental experts from across the region, and a team at Clemson University. I paged through the letters, recognizing names and titles of important people in the state. People with ideas and the money to carry them out. A senator, three county commissioners and six big muckety-mucks in the state parks department were among the names. And he had secured promises from three other land-holders in the region to give, set aside, or otherwise make available large tracts of land for the project.
“Holy moly,” I said, paging through e-mails and papers in the file folder. This wasn’t just a dream. Davie was making it a reality.
I discovered that Davie had bought or optioned nearly ten thousand mountain acres over the past ten years. Ten thousand…
I stared at the letters and the amount of acreage. It was staggering. It represented more money than I could have believed. And Davie wanted to donate almost all of it for the project. Where had my brother gotten that kind of money?
I flipped through the rest of the papers for financial records that might explain what was going on, how Davie had secured rights and ownership to that much land. Even if he only optioned most of the land at pennies on the dollar, it was a disturbing sum.
And if the gold was on one of the hills he owned and Davie was refusing to sell, if he was holding the land with the intent that he would never sell, then it made an awful kind of sense that someone would kidnap him and keep him until they got the land and the gold.
I remembered the vision from my scan. Davie’s keeper had forced him to sign some papers. Mineral rights? Land-use rights? How did they think they could use the papers without giving away that they were the ones behind the kidnapping? It was insane.
In the back of the folder I found two heavy beige envelopes, four inches square. Inside one was a beige card with columns of numbers printed in my brother’s neat hand, green ink on the thick paper. I rotated the card over and over. Its edges were raised and shiny with fancy embossing; it looked like the card had originally been intended as a blank thank-you card or invitation card to a formal event. Heavy stock, like that used for weddings. I had no idea what the numbers might mean. Bank account numbers? Phone numbers?
Inside the other small envelope was a long, narrow, baroque, brass key with the number 123 engraved on it. It was shaped like an ornate safe-deposit key, except that it was embellished with curlicues and fleur-de-lis and it was old. Very old. The tarnish was decades’
dark, the metal a rich deep brown. An old safe key? A key to open some religious reliquary? I turned it over and over, my fingers tracing its worn surface, hoping for an image, a vision. Getting nothing, of course, I closed it back in its envelope.
When the phone rang just before lunch, I was startled to realize the phone had not rung since the police had begun to monitor the line. It was really abnormal for Bloodstone to go so long without a call. Had the cops screwed up and rerouted our calls? Or was it just the weather? I heard Jubal pick up the receiver and speak. A moment later, he stepped into the front of the store and handed me the cordless phone. His face was tight with worry.
“Tyler St. Claire,” I said, my eyes on Jubal’s blue ones.
“Your brother won’t last much longer.” Dread pooled within me, seeping into my bones. It sounded the same as before, a computer-generated tone, devoid of clues as to its owner. “You have twenty-four hours before we start removing body parts as an inducement for you to cooperate. Forty-eight hours to get us what we want. Then he’s dead.”
I pointed to the ceiling and mouthed the words, Check the caller ID upstairs. Jubal nodded and raced for the stairs to my loft. Into the phone I said, “If I knew what you wanted, you could have it in a heartbeat. Just tell me what you want and I’ll bring it to you.”
“Coordinates. We’ll call you. Twenty-four hours.” The phone went dead.
I stared at the small cordless phone, clicking off the connection on my end. Distantly I heard Jubal clattering down the stairs from my loft. “No number on the ID. Just a line of x’s. But that black box was humming. Maybe the cops got something.”
I looked from the phone in my hand to my friend. “They want coordinates. For the gold, I’m sure. And I don’t have them. I don’t have anything.” I knew I needed help. St. Claire help. The thought of calling Aunt Matilda made my spine grow weak and sent spikes of alarm through my middle. But I found my finger punching her number, a number I hadn’t called in years.