by Gayle Wilson
“Mr. Gardner’s treatment of Ms. McAllister isn’t in question here,” Ethan said. “Someone tried to kill him, and we believe that attempt is connected to Cassandra.”
“Then it’s really tragic my husband is no longer here to help you. If that project were his responsibility, as you claim, then he’d be the only one who could possibly know what that connection is.”
Chapter Seventeen
“I just realized who she reminds me of,” Ethan said, glancing at Raine before he inserted the key into the ignition.
She knew he was concerned about how quiet she’d been as they made their way out of the house. There was too much to think about, however. Things had been said that she knew were important, yet she couldn’t understand why they should be.
There were also things that had been tantalizingly familiar. When she tried to place them into some kind of context, the connections slid out of her head like quicksilver.
“I’ll bite,” she said, trying to shake off her sense of disquiet. “Who does she remind you of?”
“Natasha.”
He turned to look at her as the engine came to life. Her face must have revealed that she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“Boris and Natasha. Rocky and Bullwinkle. Didn’t you watch cartoons when you were a kid?”
“I worked for the CIA when I was a kid.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Look, maybe—”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “That wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just something that happened. I wasn’t harmed by it. I don’t know why I even said that.”
It seemed disloyal to her father. As if she were blaming him for letting her participate in those experiments. In actuality, she had always considered his agreement to be no different than any father letting his child serve in the military and being proud of their service to their country.
“She was lying through her teeth,” Ethan said.
“I know. She knows everything that happened. And she wanted to make it clear to me that she did.”
“Did you recognize the language she spoke to her niece?”
Raine shook her head. She didn’t tell him that it had sounded familiar, so much so that she knew she should be able to understand the words. Like those elusive memories, they had seemed just beyond her grasp.
“Neither did I, but I can tell you it wasn’t Russian,” Ethan said, as he began to back the car into the turn-around in front of the house.
“Are you sure?”
“The agency runs a very good language school. Not only was it not Russian, it wasn’t any of the old Soviet satellite languages they teach there. I know just enough to be able to recognize most of those. That was something I’ve never heard before.”
Raine knew that she had. Just as she knew she had heard the idioms sprinkled through the old woman’s English. She had encountered both at some time in the past, but since she couldn’t remember when or where, that certainty was no help at all in solving the mystery Sabina Marguery represented.
Ethan had turned the car so that it was pointing back down the drive. He didn’t seem inclined to leave, however. Maybe, as she was, he was still caught up in the web of lies and deceit the old woman had woven.
“Someone who knew a lot about how things operate in Washington told us that The Covenant was the reincarnation, or maybe the continuation, of an older society,” he said. “One that’s been around since the founding of this country.”
“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with what she said?”
“If Marguery’s family really was what Ellington claimed, maybe there’s a link.”
The psychologist had said the Marguerys were one of the founding families of Virginia. The mansion, even in its state of decay, gave testimony to their wealth and power during the period during which it had been constructed.
“A link to that other society?” she asked.
“Your father compared The Covenant to the Hell Fire Club, but I doubt that would be the prototype for an organization bent on politicizing morality.”
“What would be? The Illuminati? The Masons? The Knights Templar?” She laughed, mocking the ridiculousness of her suggestions, especially the last. When she glanced at Ethan’s face, she realized that his lips hadn’t moved in response. “Strike that one,” she said, her inclination to laugh disappearing as she remembered that group’s history. “I think they were all burned at the stake for heresy.”
“And for treason against the crown,” Ethan added softly.
Traitors. After all, that was what this was about. People in positions of authority working against the well-being of their country.
Ethan had turned to look at her, his eyes silver in the late-afternoon light. He had told her last night that while the investigation was ongoing, their being lovers could be distracting.
It was certainly proving to be for her. Everything about him. The shape of his mouth. How it felt moving against her body. A jolt of pure sexual reaction ran through her veins, reminding her of how much she had loved the feel of his arms around her.
She had also cherished what they’d shared today. Working together. Brainstorming possibilities.
The perfect emotional complement to the physical unity they had discovered last night. An intimacy so in tune, it had sometimes seemed as if he could read her thoughts.
“It doesn’t matter about the origins of The Covenant,” he said. “It only matters that we figure out why they’re so afraid of what we might discover about Cassandra.”
“She was right, you know. It was the fact that no one believed what she said that was Cassandra’s curse. She knew what would happen, but no one would listen to her. And she was forced to watch all of them die.”
His attention had refocused on the driveway, but something about her tone caused him to turn back to her, his eyes questioning. “Forced to watch who die?”
“Everyone she ever loved.” As she whispered the words, she shivered.
“Raine…”
“I need to see him, Ethan. I need to see him this afternoon. Especially after listening to that…God, I don’t even know what to call her.” She shivered again, rubbing her hands over her arms.
“Don’t call her anything,” he said as he reached down to shift into drive. “Don’t even think about her.”
She nodded, relieved they were finally leaving Myrtlewood. As the SUV began to pick up speed, she fastened her seat belt and then stole a glance at his profile.
Through the driver’s side window, she noticed a grove of trees about a hundred yards to the left of the drive. The sense of familiarity she’d felt in the parlor nagged at the edges of her memory.
As far as she could remember, she’d never before been here. And yet she knew that if she walked under the low-hanging branches of those ancient oaks, she would find something she’d seen before. Something important not only to understanding who she was, but what was going on.
“Those trees…” she began, and then realized she didn’t know anything else to tell him.
Ethan turned to look at her, and then, following the direction of her gaze, out his window. “Those oaks? Did you see something?”
She hadn’t. Not in the sense he meant. Nothing real. Nothing tangible.
What she’d felt was a compulsion as strong—and possibly as dangerous—as the one she had followed the night of The Covenant’s fund-raiser. The one that had eventually led her onto that ledge.
“Stop the car.”
“What is it?”
“Just stop the car,” she said again.
She turned her head, looking back at the grove they had passed. The Mercedes began to slow as Ethan directed it onto the shoulder of the drive.
“What’s back there?” he asked. He killed the engine and then looked over his shoulder at the trees.
Without answering him, Raine wrapped her fingers around the handle of the door. After a second’s hesitation, she
lifted, opening it. The sound made him turn back to her, but by then she was already climbing out of the car.
She stood outside in the twilight stillness. Despite the fact that they were far from the noises of civilization, there were none of the normal sounds of insects or birds. The silence that surrounded her was both eerie and complete.
Ethan had gotten out of the car and walked around it to stand beside her. She had been unaware of either movement, too attuned to the sensations that begun bombarding her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something…”
Unable to articulate any further what she was feeling, she began to walk toward the grove of trees. She was aware, on some level at least, that Ethan trailed her, but it was as if she had developed tunnel vision. Only the darkness that gathered under the oaks interested her now.
“Raine?”
She didn’t even consider answering, walking with a single-minded determination across the uneven ground. And he didn’t call to her again.
As she neared the edge of the trees, the unnatural stillness she had noticed before seemed to deepen. Despite the heat that had held steady throughout the day, there was a definite drop in temperature.
That might be explained by the lateness of the hour or by the thickness of the shade, but in her heart she knew it had less to do with the weather conditions than with this location. What she felt as she entered the grove was the kind of spectral cold that chilled to the marrow of the bone.
The canopy formed by the oaks was high, cutting off sunlight that would have encouraged undergrowth. There was nothing to hamper her passage between their thick trunks. No brush. No fern. Nothing but the rich, black loam of the ancient forest floor.
There was no other smell like this. Earthy, almost fetid, it suggested a primordial world untouched by man’s contamination.
She knew instinctively that she was approaching the center of the grove. And she knew—as she realized she had from the first—what she would find there.
She cleared a small rise in the ground, and the pond of her visions lay in front of her, looking exactly as she had seen it. Once in her studio the night Ethan had arrived and once more when she had bent to put her lips against her father’s forehead.
Light from the setting sun slanted across its surface, tinting the water red. Her steps faltered, as if her body were physically reluctant to make the final approach.
Ethan caught up with her, taking her arm. The touch of his hand was comforting in the face of the confrontation with something she had recognized from the first as inherently evil.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shook her head, unsure even now of the pond’s significance. Despite the eerie cold, despite the blood-red surface, it managed to appear serene and tranquil in the late-afternoon stillness.
Ethan’s hand seemed to urge her forward. Fighting an inclination to turn and run, she obeyed. As they neared the edge of the dark water, there was a roaring in her ears. The same sense of disorientation she’d felt in the parlor at Myrtlewood returned, making her light-headed.
“You’ve been here before,” Ethan said.
Given that she’d led him here from the road, a vantage point from which the pond could not be seen, that was obvious. Clearly, she had known it was here, but she had no idea how.
“A long time ago.”
As she said the words, she knew they were true. She had been a child. She had stood behind one of the oaks, looking toward the pond, and she had seen—
She couldn’t remember. Something that had branded this image on her consciousness so that she had never forgotten it.
“Raine?”
“Something happened here. Something…” She hesitated, because she had used the word before in a different context, but it was the only one that was appropriate. “Something unspeakable. Something I wasn’t supposed to see.”
Again, although she hadn’t known all of that when she began the sentence, she knew it now. Something had been done here that no one was supposed to have witnessed. And she had.
“You can’t remember what you saw?”
She tried, struggling against the restraints of a memory long repressed. Deliberately repressed? Because what it contained was too painful to deal with?
Apparently it still was. She shook her head again, pulling her gaze away from the crimsoned surface to look up at his face.
“I wasn’t supposed to see it, and now I’m not supposed to remember.”
“But you do remember something.”
“I kept seeing this. The pond with the rays of the setting sun across it. The night you came to my house. And when I was with my father in the ICU. I saw it, and I knew it was important, but I don’t know why.”
“Obviously something connected to Marguery and Cassandra.”
That was the thread that joined everything. Whatever Cassandra had been, it was still powerful enough to haunt her after all these years. She shivered, conscious once more of the chill that surrounded the grove.
She couldn’t tell Ethan any more than she already had. Something had happened here. She had seen it, and then she had blocked it from her memory. Just as Ellington had suggested.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember. Not even now.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Ethan suggested.
There was no reason not to, she realized. She was no closer to an answer than she had been in her studio that first night.
He took her arm, turning her in the direction of the car. As soon as the pond was out of her sight, she realized that she remembered more about this place than its location. She started forward, walking away from the SUV, drawing Ethan with her.
“What is it?” he asked again.
Despite the fact that she didn’t answer, he followed her through the overgrown grass until they encountered a worn path. At the end of it, atop a gently sloping hill, lay a shaded cemetery surrounded by a low, wrought-iron fence. An ornate M had been fashioned from the same metal and attached to the gate that guarded it.
Thick with rust, it still swung open at the touch of her fingers. She hesitated, but Ethan’s hand around her arm represented enough security that she was able to step through the gate and into the graveyard.
The roughly hewn headstones were covered with lichen, making the inscriptions difficult to read. A few of the dates could be deciphered, in spite of the fading light. Tracking them, she could also track the development of the cemetery itself.
The oldest graves were from the 1700s. Green with age and worn by the elements, their markers bore the names of the earliest members of the Marguery line, whose given names were repeated through the generations.
She hadn’t been aware when she’d entered the gate of what had sent her here. As she wandered among the stones, increasingly agitated, her eyes sought the one name that seemed to be missing.
“Raine?” Ethan again. Still concerned. “What is it? What are you looking for?”
Not what, but who. This was what she’d been seeking when she left the car. This is what had drawn her. The pond and this.
“For Marguery.”
There was a long hesitation before Ethan offered the obvious. “They’re all Marguerys.”
All the Marguerys. Except the one who should be here.
“He isn’t here,” Raine said.
The husband of the woman who still lived at Myrtlewood, the man Sabina and Charles Ellington had both told them died more than twenty-five years ago, the heir to the name and the plantation, was not buried in its cemetery.
Chapter Eighteen
“I’m not sure what it means,” Ethan said into his cell phone, “but I thought you should know.”
Ethan, seated behind the wheel of the SUV, listened to Cabot’s response. As he did, his eyes found Raine’s, and again she could read the depth of his concern for her within them.
“Griff wants to know why you think that’s so important,” he said.
&n
bsp; “Because he should be there. He’s a Marguery. Either he was buried somewhere else, against family tradition…or he isn’t dead.”
She didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t want to even think about the possibility Marguery could be alive. Most of all, she didn’t want to be on the grounds of Myrtlewood another second.
Ethan relayed the information, and then he added, “Marguery’s widow knows far more than she was willing to share. Can you get any information about their relationship? And about her background. She says she was born in a country in the Ural Mountains that’s since disappeared. I couldn’t place the language she spoke to her niece, but it wasn’t Russian. Oh, and the niece might be another avenue of inquiry. Elga Marguery. Late forties, early fifties. She seems to have assumed a caregiver role for the old woman.”
The silence as he listened stretched longer this time. At the end of it, he said, “Let me know what you find.”
He broke the connection and then laid the phone on the center console. “Maybe we should just go back to the house and ask. There could be a simple explanation for Marguery not being buried there.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
It was a legitimate question for which Raine had several answers. None of which she was going to share with him. Because I’ve always been afraid of the dark. Because that fragile old woman scares me to death. Because I need desperately to get away from this place.
“She won’t be any more forthcoming than she was before,” she said instead.
“It would be hard for her to prevaricate about where her husband’s buried. Whatever she says could be checked.”
That wasn’t really the problem. Not as far as Raine was concerned. The problem was her absolute conviction that if James Marguery were dead, he would have been interred in the family plot with all his ancestors. The fact that he wasn’t—
“She’d lie, even if telling the truth would serve her better.”
She knew what she’d just said was true, but she couldn’t tell him how she knew. Any more than she could explain why the thought that James Marguery might be alive was so terrifying to her.