by China, Max
The gates were already open. She was already in. As he strolled up the driveway, he noticed she was playing music. She must be in a good mood. He was looking forward to seeing her. Unable to suppress a grin, he pressed the buzzer. The alloy speaker panel crackled, and the bolt mechanism disengaged. Pulling the door open, he entered.
Her face lit with a smile. "Hi, stranger," she said, switching the radio off. She got to her feet and came around to the front of the desk, encircling him with her arms.
He squeezed her tight and said, "Good to see you back at last. How's Kathy?"
Pulling away, she looked almost disappointed.
"And you - how are you?" He shrugged, embarrassed. "I'm sorry; I've had so much on my mind . . . I've forgotten my etiquette."
"We're both okay," she said, "Kathy goes to a day centre now. I'm a bit worried because she's talking about becoming a nun, which is hardly surprising after everything she's been through. Doctor Marshall said that her recovery was nothing short of a miracle, but he was inclined to believe that she'd faked at least some of her earlier symptoms. Do you think he's right?" she said, cocking her head to one side inquisitively.
"It isn't important. She's so much better, and that's all that counts."
"True, but what he said is a cop-out. Why not just admit that whatever The Sister did, it worked?" She dipped her head and looked up at him from below her fringe. "Now that I've got you face to face, you've got a lot of explaining to do."
"Can I have a coffee first?"
"Of course, I'll join you." She plucked her cup from the top of her desk and said, "I'll put the kettle on."
He followed her to the kitchen. "How's the website going?" he said.
"It's all done, just needs you to look it over and give it your stamp of approval." She held up a teaspoon. "Still taking sugar? You chop and change so much I never know." She bit her bottom lip and looked at him, tears welling. "I'm sorry. I still haven't quite got over everything . . ."
"Hey, if you need some more time?"
"No, really, I've had more than enough, I - it's time I got back into normality." She took a tissue from under her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes before throwing it into the waste bin.
The kettle rumbled steam spewing from its spout. The button popped out, and the vibration slowly subsided. She poured the water and stirred. "I'm having mine black, you?"
"Same." He picked his coffee up from the worktop and wandered out into the main office area, with no one else present to worry about, he said, "What did you want me to explain?"
"All of it. I want to know why The Sister had to flee like that, and what this church you spoke about wants her for. Did she get away?"
She sat behind her desk. He perched on the corner.
"She did what she set out to do. I helped her. Beyond that, I don't know anything else." He stared into a distance that she couldn't see. Kale had betrayed the trust he'd put in him. Isolated from the abilities that had grown within him all his life, the other acquisitions, sharpness of mind and intuition hadn't left him. Conclusions, once based on probabilities, chances and possibilities: he'd have to learn to put faith in those deductions again. Although cut off and cast adrift from all previous perceptions, he was acutely aware he was missing something. More and more, he'd thought about what Rosetta had told him. I see three women. Only one is good for you. With Stella sitting adjacent to him, the thought drifted into his mind.
She waved her hand in front of his face.
He shook his head and then clapping his hands together, said, "Right, let's see what you've done with this website."
"I didn't realise you could do all that," he said after she'd run through the pages. "The last site we had running was just static, do you remember?"
"Do I," she groaned. "Okay, so you're happy with the layout, what about contact details, you said you were going to think about those—" Interrupted by the sound of his mobile ringing, she paused as he answered the call.
"Good morning," he said, deliberately withholding her name. "Is everything okay?"
"Miller, I need your help."
"Can we talk about it later?"
Stella, detecting a level of tension in his voice, stared at him, and listened for clues that would give the caller's identity away.
"It's to do with Boyle," Carla said.
"He's long gone," he said, calmly, but without conviction. He didn't want to spook Stella.
"Is he? Are you sure about that? I know you got Tanner to meet the two sisters when they came back from Scotland."
"That was weeks ago, he's either skipped the country, or he's dead. Eilise hit him so hard she swears she left a dent in his head."
"Still, you can't be sure, can you?"
Stella got to her feet and moved closer to him. Looking at her, he half smiled and grimaced at the same time. He moved from the corner of the desk, and ambled towards his office, mouthing to her; I won't be a minute.
"I can't, you're right, I can't." He mourned the passing of the powers that Sister kept cloaked from him. He sat on the corner of his desk.
"It's a nice little job, Miller. A jaunt down country . . . an overnight stay with me . . .?"
"What does any of that have to do with Boyle? I'm right in the middle of setting up a new website in the office," he sighed. "I'm trying to get away from all that . . . I want to take a new direction, a less dangerous one."
Carla's voice cooled and became distant. "A few months ago, you'd have jumped at the chance to stay overnight somewhere with me . . . It's that new secretary of yours, isn't it? You can't bear to leave her, can you?"
He considered what she said. There was some truth in it. He definitely felt more of an affinity with Stella since he'd taken her to Scotland.
Carla goaded him, "Not denying it then?"
He laughed, "So silence is agreement is it?"
"Never mind," she said her tone matter-of-fact. "I've got a prediction for you. Can you guess what it is?"
A small measure of irritation crept into his voice. "Sadly, no. Just tell me, will you?"
"You're so boring lately, Miller. There was a time you'd have had a guess, and it would have been right."
"Carla, stop messing around and just tell me."
A low whistle came down the line. "Okay. You will come with me to devils pond."
"You're wrong about that," he said.
"For my book, I have to solve the mystery of those clooties that appear every year. I have a theory and only one chance to prove or disprove it for another year. August the 27th, ghost day."
"You've got the date wrong, it's the 15th July."
"No, that's St Swithun's day. The anniversary of the mine disaster, the day the locals believe the pond releases those ghosts to walk again. I'm talking about the Chinese; they celebrate ghost day more or less a month later."
"All very interesting Carla, but I've laid my ghosts to rest. I won't be coming with you. Find someone else."
Stella appeared in his doorway, watching him, cool eyes gauging his reactions. He shrugged his shoulders at her and mouthed, I'm not going.
"Miller, I've dug up a lot of stuff for the book we didn't know about Boyle before," Carla allowed a stream of air to escape her lips. "The night Josie disappeared . . ." she trailed into silence.
He stood upright, curiosity lining his face. "What about it?"
"Boyle was on the same ferry." Her voice softened. "If we can find out who puts those silken rags up every year, we will have another piece of the jigsaw. We might get closer to finding out—"
"When are we going?"
"Today . . ."
He listened as she told him the plan.
Stella shook her head in dismay. "Tell me you haven't agreed to do something with that woman. She's bad news."
"Look, Stella, it's just one night—"
"I don't care, I'm coming with you. When is it?"
"Tonight, I have to go. She's doing a book about Boyle. Do you remember me telling you about Josie, my first love,
how she vanished at sea, and they never recovered her body?"
"I do, but aren't we all supposed to be moving on?"
"If what she just said is true, it will help me to do that. She told me Boyle was on the boat when Josie disappeared that night." A faraway look was in his eyes.
"And you're going after him?"
He stared into the depths of her crystal blue eyes and registered the concern there. "Stella, if I knew where he was, I'd go in a heartbeat," he said, through clenched teeth. "For what he did to her and what he did to Kennedy . . . I'd kill him."
Stella's hand sought his, to reassure, provide comfort. Her touch electrified him. A solar wind blew through his senses, and he saw something he hadn't realised before. When The Sister had given Stella the stone, part of him was contained within it. She'd known it would pass into Stella. Now he had it back. Not as strong as it had been, just like an echo. Closing his eyes for a moment, he rested his other hand on top of hers. Something else came through. She felt it too.
He pulled away.
"I don't want you to go," she said.
An awkward silence followed.
"Miller, what happened just now? I know you felt it. The same thing happened when I held the stone at the Sister's house; something was taken from me." Her voice seemed disoriented. "And now I feel strange, as if I've known you for years."
"I'd love to be able to explain it, but I wouldn't know where to begin."
The Sister. All this was meant to be, according to her vision. She'd stripped him of his extra-sensory abilities so he wouldn't see through her plans for infiltrating the Resurrectionists and through Stella, she'd given a part of that back and in doing so had created a bond between them.
I see three women. Only one is good for you.
"I've got to go," he said.
She stepped into the doorway and barred his exit.
Getting closer to her, he said, "Okay, I'll squeeze past." She did not attempt to move. A look passed between them as he crossed the invisible line into her personal space. Clear, crystal blue eyes, larger than he'd ever seen them before locked with his. Her arms found their way around his neck. Hesitant at first, they kissed with a passion that threatened to engulf them with its flames. She felt for him, and gasped as he nibbled her neck.
"Stella," he whispered. "What are we doing?"
"I want to be sure you'll come back to me."
Miller knew that to get safely close to the pond in the dark; he'd need a four-wheeled drive vehicle. He hired a Land Rover and picked Carla up just before four in the afternoon. A fresh and lovely fragrance preceded her as she got into the car with an overnight bag.
"Ready?" he said.
"I'm always ready," she breathed.
His right eyebrow rose, out of her line of sight. "You were going to tell me how you found out about Josie."
"It was quite a simple exercise to trawl the records. To be honest, the connection came out of the blue. I knew Boyle had joined the Foreign Legion, and I knew he had French connections, among others dating back to those times. To cut a long one short, I went to France to see if I could track any of them down and I did. Tanner came with me."
A pang of jealousy soured the taste in his mouth. "How did you get him involved?"
"Oh, he owed me a favour. We'd done some research on the best travelling fighters in an effort to track Boyle down earlier, and we interviewed a number of past Kings of the Gipsies . . . The whole story is in my book, but we ended up talking to this guy in Marseilles, and it turned out he'd seen Boyle for the last time, quite by chance in Boulogne, waiting for the ferry on the night that Josie vanished. We checked the passenger records. Boule - the name he adopted in the Legion - was among them, and so was she. Coincidence? I think not."
In his mind, he replayed the snapshot the Sister had shared with him. His jaw tightened, grinding his teeth together. It was him. I know it was him.
"Are you okay?" she asked, breaking the silence.
"I have to be," he said, changing the subject. "You didn't tell me how you'd drawn the conclusion that the Clootie Fairy only appears on ghost day, and that being so, how do they avoid detection on each anniversary?"
"Ghost day is never the same day in consecutive years. I pieced everything else together, but something still bothered me about this part of the story. The locals had tried periodically, to catch whoever it was tying the silks up, wrongly assuming whoever it was, was marking the anniversary of the mine disaster. I went there the other day, what a creepy place it is… I counted all the clooties, some of them were old, bleached white, green with mould, rotting; just the knotted part around the branches had survived. Someone had tied up a pair of red socks, so clearly a few of these offerings are just random, but then I counted the silk ones separately, and there were thirty-one of those."
He struggled to recall the numbers of rags Kennedy had quoted him. "Carla, when Kennedy was last there, he accounted for twenty-three mine deaths, the seven murder victims and my three friends. At that time, the number he'd seen tied up was forty-nine. I'm sure of it."
"Maybe, but how many silk ones? Anyway, the penny dropped. There was one of those for every year since the bodies were discovered."
"I see where you're coming from, and Lei Liang was Chinese."
"Exactly, and the extra clooties only started manifesting themselves after her remains were identified."
Driving on auto-pilot, Miller slipped into deeper thought. Ryan had told him about the local legends surrounding Devil's pond, the locals believing it released its spirits on July 15th every year. Thirty-one. Silks. Every year . . . He was on the verge of figuring it out when Carla spoke again.
"Did you know that one of the skeletons pulled out matched Boyle's DNA profile? We reckon it was his father. He disappeared not long after his wife – Boyle's mother – died. It looks like he killed him, too. His own father."
"What else have you found out about him?"
She laughed and stroked the back of his neck. "You'll just have to wait for the book to find out."
They arrived at almost eleven o'clock. He drove slowly down a farm track that led to within a quarter of a mile of the pond and switched off the engine and lights.
"Shouldn't we get nearer?" she said.
"If anyone comes, they'll need a torch to see in this dark, so we'll spot them easily enough. No, we'll wait here."
At just before midnight, Carla caught a glimpse of a low light in the darkness, moving slowly through the trees. Miller had dropped off, snoring gently.
"Come on, Miller," Carla said, shaking him violently. "Quick! There's someone over there!"
He woke, not quite knowing where he was.
Carla was already out of the car. If it really were the Clootie Fairy, she wanted to be the first see who it was. The leaden cloud cover broke, allowing moonlight to illuminate the surrounding land to some degree. Miller got out and ran after her.
Keeping under cover, they followed the shadow as it carried its dim light close to the waters. The dark clad figure put the lamp down and tied a fresh clootie in place, and turning picked up the lantern and moved closer to the water.
From behind, the figure was so small; Carla thought it was a child, but it couldn't be. The clooties had appeared every year for over thirty years.
Carla's torch gave her away. The figure froze on seeing the pool of light, and made no attempt at escape, instead, a thin voice rasped, "Who are you?" It was a woman! She continued talking without waiting for an answer. "Every year on night of Ghost Day, I mark anniversary of death of my child in this place. When I hear of custom to tie rag wiped with hurt, and I see much old rag rot in the wind. I tear sleeve and leave there first time. After, I bring always finest silk. You know pain . . . It never go away."
She turned to face Carla and Miller. In the torchlight, she looked younger than her years. Miller did the maths; she had to be in her late seventies, but could easily pass for a woman in her sixties.
Carla spoke to her softly. "Ar
e you Lei Liang's mother?"
"Yes, I am." The old woman said, proudly raising her chin. "You didn't tell me . . . who are you?"
"My name is Carla Black, and I'm hoping to solve the mystery of what happened to your daughter, and the other people that died here." She indicated Miller, "This man is an investigator, and I am a reporter. We are not far off catching the man who did this."
"You know Lei is not here. I do not know where is she, but not here. I am glad. My gift to her was Five Poison amulet. Here in body, but spirit free, saved by charm from water demon . . ."
Lei Liang's mother moved to the edge of the bank. Taking a telescopic pole with a hook, she extended it, hanging a small paper boat on the end. She lit a taper in the boat before pushing it out, placing it in the water, unhooking it with great care. The three of them stood silent, watching the ritual.
The flame in the tiny vessel flared and shooting upward disappeared into the gloom, leaving only ripples. The moonlight laid a path across the dark waters.
From the corner of his eye, Miller sensed movement. A shadow stepped from behind into his line of sight. Lei Liang shimmered in the moonlight in all her beautiful glory.
Her mother gasped at the sight and clasped her hands in joy. She spoke rapidly in a mixture of Chinese and English.
"Lei, is it really you?" She fell to her knees before the vision.
The projection lasted for several minutes as mother and daughter communed.
The manifestation was so strong that Carla saw it too.
Afterwards, Miller looked drained.
"You didn't tell me you could do that." Carla said.
"I didn't . . ." he replied. "Something used me…"
Miller's doorbell rang as he made himself a coffee. He checked his watch. 9:05 a.m. Wiping his hands on a towel, he walked to the front door. The silhouette in the bulls-eye window revealed it was the postman. "Morning," he said as he opened it.