“Did he steal anything?”
“I’m afraid so. He got your Daddy’s jade.”
“Dad’s gonna die!”
“Let’s hope not. But it seems incredible to me that anybody would come out in a storm like this to rob a house.”
Jon was silent for an expensive half-minute, then quipped, “And I’ll bet it happened too late for you to make the eleven o’ clock news, huh? There went your ten seconds of fame.”
She was glad she had called. Jon could always make her smile. But the lightness was gone from his voice when he added, “You didn’t get hurt or anything, did you?”
“Not at all. I wouldn’t have told you, but I didn’t want to tell your Dad yet, and I needed to tell somebody. You came to mind because your hideout may have saved my life.”
“Cool. I wonder if it’s too late to get extra credit from my third grade teacher. But why not tell Dad yet?”
“Because he’s got an important meeting Monday morning, and I don’t want to bother him until it’s over.”
“So what’s new?” On that note their signal either got dropped or he hung up.
What’s new? Jon’s question hung in the silent room.
She stared into the darkness beyond the window and silently totted up what was new. This restlessness was new. Anger with Tom and his job was new. That crying jag after his call was certainly new—Katharine never cried, she coped. She prided herself on that. Having her house broken into and her privacy violated was new. Seeing Hasty again was new—and had dredged up emotions she had all but forgotten. And this sense that she was useless and slipping away, and nobody was noticing—that was definitely new.
Perhaps it was a reaction to so much newness, but she felt a need to touch something old. She fetched the bag with the necklace and the copy of the diary, wrapped herself in a soft afghan Posey had draped over a small side chair (the air-conditioning was definitely too cold in their house) and stretched out on the chaise. Perhaps she would translate a few pages of the diary to help her sleep, but first she felt a strong need to hold the necklace. She would turn it over to someone else soon enough, but for tonight, it was hers.
She laid her head back against the soft down cushions and closed her eyes. While the rain drummed on the patio below her window, she stroked the circlet of bronze.
A sound startled her. She opened her eyes and saw that the lights had gone out, but in the dimness, she could make out the shape of a man coming through the door. “Wrens?” she tried to ask, but could not speak. She tried to sit up, but could not move. She watched, terrified, as he closed the door behind him and felt his way through the darkness. Then she heard a voice. A woman’s voice, drowsy and soft. “It is finished, then?”
The words were in a harsh, unfamiliar language, but Katharine understood them. She also understood the man when he growled. “It is complete.” She could tell that he was pleased with his work, whatever it had been. She heard the soft whisper of covers drawn back, although the bed was not where it should have been. She sat paralyzed, wondering what she should do. Slowly she reached for her cell phone, which she had left on a table by the chaise. The table was no longer there.
The man began to snore.
With heroic effort Katharine willed her muscles to move. She slipped silently from the chaise and tiptoed toward the door. The other woman was there before her, opening it without a sound. Katharine crept out behind her and found herself not in Posey’s upstairs hall with a nightlight burning, but in a dim room lit only by a banked fire on a hearth. The light was sufficient to see that the ceiling was low, the room without windows. The air was thick with the smells of hot metal and damp earth, and the floor rustled underfoot. Katharine knew, without knowing how she knew, that she walked on rushes and straw.
She could hear the other woman ahead of her, but when she tried to speak, she still had no voice. The woman bent over the fire and rose with a small taper of light. She held one hand in front of the light as she crossed back to the door and closed it, then she went to the middle of the room and lit a wick. The flame flared in a small pottery lamp and leaped in the darkness to reveal the woman herself. She was tall and dark, her hair black as a crow’s wing and hanging loose to her waist, her face long and thin with eyes as dark as night—a face Katharine felt sure she had seen before. The woman wore a shapeless gown tied at her waist. Its sleeves fell back on her bare wrists as she fumbled in a nest of cloth and lifted something up to her face.
Katharine gasped. It was the necklace! But it was no longer green. It gleamed in the dim light from the lamp. She had not imagined it had ever been so beautiful.
“You are not complete.” The woman’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Your metal has been fired, but it is not inspirited.”
Her fingers moved around the circlet of bronze. “You have been shaped to the neck of the overseer’s bride, but you will give more pleasure to the one who made you and the one who gives you than to she who wears you. Those knobs will lie heavy on her slender chest—as heavy as this marriage will lie on her body and soul.” Her fingers touched each knob in turn. “Poor child, do you know what a brute you will wed? He whips men to death who bring out too little salt. You will need strong protection from him—and from his relations, should he die before you. If they believe, with or without cause, that you had any part in his death, they will consign you to fire.” The woman turned in one sharp movement. “But I must turn my thoughts away from such darkness. My mind must be clear and pure for what I would do.”
She carried the circlet and glided on silent feet toward a door in the far wall.
Katharine knew she ought to try and find the stairs. Posey’s stairs must be there somewhere. Instead, she followed the woman.
The carefully opened door swung without a sound on leather hinges. The woman murmured, “Thank you, blessed spirits,” as she hurried out. Katharine hurried after her.
Stars glittered overhead. Katharine recognized Orion the Hunter and was comforted to meet a friend in that strange place. The Great Salt Mountain—she knew it at once—loomed black against the fainter gray of the sky. She shivered, for the air was cold and damp and she was glad for Posey’s afghan as she followed the woman up a steep track. The woman did not seem to mind the cold, or the breeze that whipped her hair around her shoulders and across her face as they climbed. She held the circlet aloft to the wind, bent to dip it in icy dewdrops that dotted tall grass along the bare path, and touched it gently to the earth. “Bless it, Oh Wind, Water, and Earth, but you alone are not strong enough for what I desire. That requires the Fire.”
Her foot encountered an obstacle in the path and she bent and pried out a large stone. “A sign!” she exclaimed, her voice stronger. “You were not there the last time I ascended the mountain. But it is your nature, Oh Earth, to throw up things that have long lain hidden, the nature of all the blessed spirits to uncover, scour, reveal, and refine. Nothing can stay hid forever. Nothing!” Her voice was fierce, and she turned and looked straight into Katharine’s eyes. But she said nothing more, just turned and began the steepest part of the climb.
Katharine was gasping by the time they reached a broad flat rock. She hung back as the woman climbed onto it, sat down, and waited.
Katharine knew the woman was praying, for she felt her own spirit joined to the prayer, groping wordlessly toward that which is too mighty and holy for words. At last a rim of gold edged distant mountains and began to spread upward. The woman rose and held the circlet up to the faint light. The bronze gleamed with light of its own, as perfectly shaped as the day.
She intoned softly:
I call upon thee, Fire of heaven,
brighter than any forge.
Purge this circlet of any impurity in which it was created.
Shield her to whom it is given
from the evil of him who forged it and of him who bestows it.
Protect her from darts of hatred and vice
and those who would commit violence agains
t her life.
Guide the woman who possesses it through strange and fearful places,
grant her blessing and brightness, wisdom and joy
now and forever.
And through the refining of your mighty flames,
Bring her enemies to judgment.
As she finished, the first cock crowed to herald the dawn. She held the circlet aloft until the sun was full over the shoulder of the mountain, until gleam of metal and gleam of sun mingled into one flash of light. “Now you are complete!” she cried.
Trembling, she turned and began her descent.
Katharine moved aside to let her pass and saw a girl step from behind a boulder down the hill. Little more than a child, perhaps twelve, she had pale gold hair and eyes like a mountain pool. “What were you doing?” she asked in a high childish voice.
The woman stopped, as if uncertain what to say. Finally she held out the necklace. “I was blessing this.”
The girl drew a breath of delight. “Is it for me?” She took the necklace and clasped it around her neck. “It fits perfectly! Your man is so clever with his hands!” She reached up and touched each of the knobs.
“Of course,” the woman agreed with a haughty lift of her chin. “His rings, bracelets, and circlets are prized by princes. Fortunate is the mere man of wealth for whom he consents to make a circlet such as that.”
“His works are also considered amulets against ill fortune. Some are credited with saving lives.” The girl’s face had grown anxious. “Is that true?” She clutched the necklace as if aware for the first time how dear life is.
“Some have that power,” the woman acknowledged. Her gaze wandered to the top of the mountain and the rock now bathed with sunlight. “Not all.”
“I pray this may be one of them.” The girl took it off reluctantly and handed it back.
“Pretend to be surprised when you receive it,” the woman cautioned. “My man would beat me if he knew I had taken it from his forge.”
“I will. Good morrow!” The girl skipped down the hill as lightly as a gazelle.
The woman watched her go, then turned and looked back up the hill. “Protect her and all to whom it belongs,” she said softly. Then she turned, looked again at Katharine, and dissolved like mist.
Katharine lay on Posey’s chaise wrapped in the afghan. Rain tapped the pane, and the sky was dark. She felt disoriented and muzzy-headed. Had she dreamed? Or had she slipped through a crack in time? Whichever, she was holding on to the necklace as if for her own dear life.
It tingled in her hands as if a current ran through it. Her fingers were stiff as she unclenched them and laid it on her lap. She closed her eyes and saw again the wide blue eyes of the child for whom it had been made, and the dark eyes of the woman who had blessed it. “I will be faithful,” she vowed in the empty room. “I will take care of it while it is mine.”
By now she was wideawake. She stroked the circlet once more, then wrapped it in the cloth and returned it to the bag. Now she would tackle that diary. Reports from an archaeological dig ought to put her to sleep fast enough.
She started by looking up the German words for “archaeology” and “archaeologist,” to be sure she would recognize them. As in English, they were taken straight from the Greek: Archäologie and Archäologe.
The sheets of the copy had gotten mixed up when she thrust the first ones back into the envelope, and it took her a while to reorder them by date. The second entry was written over a week after the first, and as she thumbed her dictionary for unfamiliar vocabulary words, she discovered that it did not deal with picks and shovels.
When will we finally come together? Can you care for me as I care for you? Will you ever come to me of your own free will? I do not deserve that you even look my way, but I shall die if I do not possess you—no, never possess, but rather discover together what love can be. I nearly despair when I think that may never be. But L2assures me it will, that I must only be patient until you are ready. And because L2knows you so much better than I, I will be patient.
Surrounded by the music of rain on the roof and hitting the patio below, Katharine let the sheet fall to her lap and sat staring into the darkness beyond her window. This was such a letdown. Either Georg Ramsauer had fooled his fellow archaeologists into thinking he was keeping a detailed account of their work while he was actually conducting an affair, or the diary belonged to someone else—probably Carter. Georg Ramsauer had twenty-four children and a full-time job. When would he have had time for a passionate affair?
Still, a man with twenty-four children must have an enormous sex drive.
And why should Carter keep his diary in German? To practice the language while he was in Vienna? Why would Lucy have kept it all these years?
One thing made it likely that this was Carter’s diary: the name L2 scattered throughout. Katharine thumbed through several more pages and saw it on almost every one. That was probably his code name for Lucy, something they had dreamed up when they were children. Was Sara Claire his intended love? Was he far more involved with her than Dutch had known or been willing to accept?
Katharine had a hard time picturing her aunt ever inspiring that kind of passion. Sara Claire had about as much warmth and sex appeal as a Canadian lake in February, and her nose was so permanently tilted up in scorn that Susan and Jon used to giggle when it rained and say, “Call Aunt Sara Claire and warn her not to go out. She could drown.” Yet she must have had something in her college days, if Dutch had been, in his own words, “sweet on her.”
Katharine rested her head against the chaise and watched drops slide down the window. Their journey was erratic and unpredictable, without pattern. She had grown up believing that human lives have a pattern, that there is purpose in everything. Now she was losing the pattern of her life—and realized she had never known that of her parents and their friends. Had Dutch looked at Sara Claire over the years and regretted he had lost her to Walter? Had she, in fact, become the person she did because she married Walter? It was all so long ago.
“Why didn’t I ask more questions when they were all still alive?” Katharine murmured.
Because you cannot ask what you do not know needs asking.
She used to be pleased that none of her elderly relatives ever got to the stage where they lived in the past instead of the present. Now she thought with regret, If they had babbled about their youth and childhood, I might have some answers.
For the third time that day, tears coursed down her cheeks, but this time they were neither tears of anger nor of fear, but gentle tears of sadness, weariness, and release. She relaxed and let them flow.
She must have dozed, because when she next glanced out the window the rain had stopped, the sky had cleared, and her face was reflected against darkness silvered with the light of a bright half-moon. Or was it hers? The face was long and thin, the hair dark, the eyes watchful. But when she bent closer, it was definitely her own face she saw, as transparent and no more substantial than it had appeared in her kitchen two days before.
Chapter 15
Saturday, June 10
Katharine didn’t wake until nearly ten and she had a crick in her neck. Posey’s fat guest pillows were chosen for decorative appeal rather than comfort. Or was it because she had slept with the necklace under her pillow?
After stowing it at the bottom of her Bloomingdale’s bag, she headed down to breakfast.
The Buiton cook prepared most of the family’s meals, but on Saturdays, Wrens fixed country ham, eggs, grits, and his famous cheese biscuits. That morning, however, Katharine went downstairs to find Wrens gloomily reading the paper at the breakfast room table with half a muffin still on his plate.
Posey slid a plate of suspiciously yellow eggs, flat bacon, and muffins in front of Katharine and handed her a glass of juice that was a peculiar shade of orange. “At our age, we need to watch our calories and cholesterol, so today we are having carrot-apple juice, turkey bacon, egg whites, and banana bran fat-free muffins.
They taste almost like the real thing.”
“And make you wish you had a real meal,” Wrens added gloomily. “Would you like some artificial butter for your sawdust muffin?” He passed the spread. “Did you sleep all right?”
“Not entirely,” she admitted. “I kept wishing I had put that diary and necklace in our safe-deposit box yesterday afternoon. My bank’s not open on Saturdays.”
Posey poured coffee that tasted suspiciously like decaf. “If that diary’s been gone a hundred and fifty years, nobody is missing it now.”
“That’s not the point.” Katharine stirred in lots of milk and sugar. “It might shed light on some valuable history. And the thing that makes me most miserable is that whoever’s got it may not know what it is and throw it out.”
“It’s done, Katharine,” Wrens said firmly. “Always look forward, not back.”
Posey leaned over and murmured in his ear, “I’m going to remind you of that when you lose your next golf match.”
Katharine was determined to go home and check out the damage in the daylight, but Posey insisted she come back to spend one more night and take Dane over to keep her company that day. Katharine didn’t object. She also left the necklace in the bottom of her Bloomingdale’s carrier, which she hid under an afghan on the shelf of Posey’s guest room closet.
Her own house looked remarkably normal in the sunlight. The shrubs stood tall and perky after their soaking the night before. The flowers had been beaten down but were beginning to lift their heads. Robins explored the grass for unwary worms washed out of their holes by the storm. Katharine expected to feel a foreboding as she drove into the garage, but all she felt was relief to be home. With Dane padding beside her, she roamed the downstairs looking for signs of the intruder, but except for the bare table in the foyer and Tom’s empty curio cabinet, everything looked fine. Nor did she see any broken windows.
With a curious sense that she must have imagined the whole thing, she left Dane in the kitchen and started upstairs. That’s when she noticed how big and hushed the house was. It took all her willpower to mount the first step and as she lifted her foot for the second, a wave of unease swept down the staircase and pressed her back. “Dane, come!” she called. Tom would have a conniption if he knew the dog had been in the house, but she was unable to go upstairs without him.
Death on the Family Tree Page 16