Haunted Echoes

by Cindy Dees

  I tuned back in. Elizabeth was giving Jane a series of instructions regarding the raising and education of her baby. For wanting this child to just go away, she sure had a lot of opinions as to how the girl should be raised.

  “…and of course, you shall raise this babe a Protestant.”

  “Of course, Your Highness.”

  “When I die, you must see to it that she receives my statue of the Lady. I have written a letter to that effect and placed it with my personal effects, but I charge you or your descendents with seeing it through.”

  “Do you wish for me to take the statue now and keep it with the babe?”

  “No!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I am queen! I have more need of its magical properties than some diapered brat. It is mete that I, as ruler of a nation, should reap the Lady’s gift of long life and not my offcast bastard. When I die, ’twill be soon enough for the babe to receive the statue’s gift.”

  Ah. There it was. The statue was the connection to the Marians—the cult of women in southern France who’d worshipped a goddess older than Christ. A goddess of Earth and Nature, of birth and love, of mothers and daughters and sisters. A goddess older than time. It was a Marian artifact that Elizabeth believed would give her a long life.

  It worked, too. Elizabeth lived seventy robust years in a time when the average life span was more like half that. And now I knew why. And maybe I also knew why she ended up being called the Virgin Queen. She’d had to choose between long life without sex—else risk another statue-induced pregnancy—or a probably much shorter life span, but one where she could indulge in pleasures of the flesh with only normal fear of pregnancy.

  Hmm. Tough choice.

  I also knew now why Elise Villecourt looked a good thirty years younger than her actual age when I met her, and why she’d aged so rapidly after the statue was stolen. Elise was, indeed, correct. The loss of the statue was killing her—or at least aging her back to her correct biological condition.

  Elizabeth was speaking again. “And unlike my grandmother, who bequeathed the statue to the next Tudor Queen of England without warning of its unusual properties, I entreat you to pass this warning along to my daughter. Not only does the Lady grant the gift of long life, she also grants the gift of Life. Literally. She is a fertility talisman. Tell my daughter to have a care for her affairs of the heart lest she find herself in the same kettle of fish that I have landed in.”

  Jane nodded her understanding.

  “Off with you, then. The babe will want her wet nurse soon.” This last was said with just a hint of human tenderness.

  Jane smiled gratefully at her queen and turned to leave the room.

  The door closed behind her, and I was shocked to hear a muffled sob of wrenching grief from the bed….

  “Ana, wake up.”

  I blinked up at Robert, disoriented as I always was after one of those dreams.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart? You started to cry. Was it a nightmare?”

  I frowned. I didn’t know what to call it. A vision? A hallucination, maybe? “I was dreaming about a woman giving away her baby to another person to raise.”

  He made a sympathetic sound.

  I rolled into him, tucking my forehead in the bend of his neck. His arms wrapped around me, and he murmured into my hair, “Never fear. Our children will always be safe and loved.”

  Our—

  “Uh, Robert. There’s something I need to tell you. It may make you want to reconsider your earlier proposal, and I won’t blame you if it does.”

  He rolled me on my back abruptly and loomed over me in alarm. “You’re not a serial killer, are you?”

  “Good heavens, no!” I exclaimed.

  “Good. Because that’s about the only thing I can think of that might change my mind.”

  We’d see about that. Jean-Michel had dumped me in two seconds flat over it. I took a deep breath. “I have a problem with my ovaries. If I’m to have children, it will have to be by in vitro fertilization.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it.”

  His forehead knit in a perplexed frown. “What does that have to do with my wanting to marry you?”

  “I can’t have children naturally.”

  “So? That just means we don’t have to mess around with birth control and can pick when we have kids. Where’s the downside to that?”

  I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  He shrugged. “Even if you can’t have children at all, it’s no big deal. We can always adopt. I want to marry you. Not your ovaries.”

  Okay, that did it. I was officially in love with this man.

  “Have you got any more deep, dark secrets to reveal before we say I do?” he asked laughingly.

  “No, that’s it. How about you?”

  That wiped the grin off his face. “You already know my deep, dark secret. I was an art thief. I went to jail for a year, and now I don’t steal art anymore.” A flustered look crossed his face. “Well, not unless Jane tricks me into it.” He looked up at the ceiling. “And you’d better not do that again, ghostie girl!” he called out.

  I could swear I heard a tinkle of laughter shimmer through the air. Or maybe it was just my heart, singing with joy.

  “It’s still several hours until sunrise. Go back to sleep. I’ll watch over your dreams, too.” He kissed me gently on the forehead.

  And somehow I believed he could. He was just that kind of guy.

  I awoke the next morning to the sight of the red, digital face of the bedside clock blinking. The power was back on. Robert wasn’t in bed beside me, and the water was running in the shower. I stretched lazily, so relaxed after last night I hardly recognized myself. Even when it all came crashing back—St. Germain’s murder, my being framed for it, some extremist element in or near the Catholic Church trying to silence us permanently along with Elise—none of it touched my core happiness. Apparently, mind-blowing sex and a marriage proposal have that effect on a girl. They did on me, at any rate.

  Robert emerged from the bathroom with a white towel slung low around his hips. Oh, my. Now there was a sight I could wake up to for the rest of my life.

  I did a mental double take on that thought. Whoa. Was I actually considering saying yes?

  I threw back the covers a little self-consciously and, naked, climbed out of the high bed. I turned around, and was immediately wrapped up in a warm, humid, shower-fresh embrace.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he murmured into my hair.

  “Hi, back atcha, handsome,” I laughed.

  “Ahh, lassie, ye fairly glow when ye smile like that.”

  “Scots rogue,” I accused him with a poke in his ribs.

  He flinched, laughing. “You’ve discovered my deepest, darkest secret of all. I’m devilishly ticklish.” He swatted my bottom as I headed for the bathroom and a hot shower of my own. After yesterday’s tepid and then cold bath, it felt heavenly. I turned off the water and heard him talking on the phone in the other room. Eventually I emerged, dried, dressed, and yes, primped—complete with a little makeup and my hair blow dried and round brushed. I was officially done with my man-repelling phase and had dived head first into be-attractive-for-my-hunky-guy mode.

  Robert was off the phone and our meager possessions were all packed in my rucksack. “Ready to go?”

  I nodded. He had it all arranged. A car and driver pulled up in front of the hotel and we climbed in with a word to the doorman about doing some sightseeing and shopping. The car drove southwest out of Rome to the seaside city of Anzio, and its large, industrial waterfront. We found the numbered berth at the docks that Robert gave the driver, and a rusty cargo ship a couple hundred feet long was moored there. I made out the name Al Amar in the faded paint chipping off the prow.

  A truly scary-looking guy came down the gangplank when we walked up to it, a huge black man with shoulders like a bull.

  It turned out the stack of euros in Robert’s pocket was as effective, if not more so, than my In
terpol badge at greasing skids. The two men dickered in French for a few minutes, and then a good chunk of that stack of euros changed hands. The surly sailor gestured us to follow him aboard.

  The ship smelled like a truck stop—must be diesel fueled—overlaid with a smell of something foul and chemical in nature. We walked down a filthy, dark tunnel to a rusted steel door. We stepped over the ankle-high threshold and into some sort of equipment room. Round gauges and big steel, steering wheel–shaped valve handles filled the space. I tripped on a cable lying on the floor and righted myself against the sailor’s broad back. He grunted and threw me an annoyed look as he opened what looked like an electrical access panel. The guy swung back an entire steel panel of circuit breakers and gestured to me to go in. Perplexed, I crouched down in front of the opening and realized a tiny room was tucked back there. A bare single mattress covered most of the floor and a naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling. It had no other openings in its steel walls. I crawled through the door and stood up inside. It smelled like bitter coffee grounds and urine. Robert followed me inside and the metal door clanged shut behind us.

  “So how long are we going to be locked in this lovely suite?” I asked.

  “The trip itself takes about six hours. But we don’t sail until tonight.”

  “In other words, make myself comfortable.”

  He nodded, apologetic. “It’s not pretty, but it’s relatively safe. This crew has bought off the customs officials at both ends of its Italy-Algeria run.”

  We napped on and off through much of the day. At noon, the sailor let us out to make bathroom visits and brought us two big, steaming bowls of a delicious stew he called a terrine. Chunks of meat and squash floated in a creamy base that tasted of coconut milk and curry. Thankfully, the pungent fragrance of the stew masked the other, less pleasant odors of our accommodations.

  The sailor paused in the doorway on his way out. “There’s someone been hangin’ round the dock most of the mornin’. Jus’ one person. L’il guy. Me an’ the boys, we try to see ’im, but he’s sneaky. He’s got a bit of a limp. You’s got enemies, me thinks.”

  I closed my eyes in dismay as the sailor closed us in once more.

  “It’s not the police,” Robert commented, “or they’d have gotten a warrant and searched the ship already.”

  Lovely. It was probably more of those Italian thugs who’d been so bent on catching up with and killing us for the last several days. But there wasn’t a darned thing we could do about it at the moment.

  Around suppertime, the sailor brought us roast beef sandwiches on crusty rolls spread thick with horseradish. And even better, he brought us a couple of newspapers. We dived into them with relish.

  Not surprisingly, the headlines all shouted about the massive, simultaneous power outages in northern France and southern Italy yesterday. And best of all, one of the papers, the English version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, had a map of France in it, pinpointing a whole series of recent power outages in France. Carl Montrose must be having a cow. This was the very story he’d been so frantic to keep out of the press.

  “Pass me the rucksack,” I said suddenly.

  Robert did so, and I pulled out the ley line map that had gotten us in so much hot water. If I was right…holy mackerel!

  “What’s up?” He must have sensed my sudden intensity.

  “Hold those corners down,” I directed as I carefully unrolled the ancient parchment. I laid the German newspaper map and the ley line map side by side so the two images of France were only inches apart.

  “Aha!” I exclaimed. “Look at where the big intersections on the ley line map fall, and then compare them with where the French power outages have occurred.”

  Down to the last outage, they were centered exactly over spots that contained intersections of three or more ley lines.

  Robert leaned back on his heels, thinking hard. “This is the national security crisis you used in that phone call to get through to Dupont’s office, isn’t it? They’ve got you investigating the French blackouts and your research took you to the Vatican to read up on ley lines.”

  I didn’t like the way his eyebrows came together. He was bothered that I hadn’t told him about it. Since it was front page news all over Europe now, I probably could admit it to him without breaching any security agreements with the French government. I said quickly, “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier. I do trust you, but I was sworn to secrecy.”

  Robert didn’t say anything for a while. Then he looked up at me. “You seem to have gotten beyond my past. I certainly owe you the courtesy of getting beyond this minor omission on your part.” He smiled and held his arms out to me.

  I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation. Had the mattress not been so completely foul, we might have headed for an encore performance of last night. But as it was, we settled for snuggling close and continuing to study the two maps of the ley lines and the power outages.

  Eventually, Robert commented, “It looks to me like whoever’s causing the blackouts has blasted just about every major ley line nexus—or whatever you call these intersections—in France.”

  “Do you suppose a node can only be used once? Is that why the blackouts have been happening all over?”

  Robert shrugged. “Could just be a clever criminal making sure he’s staying several steps ahead of the law by moving around. Or maybe you’ve hit on something and each node can be used only once. Maybe after power surges through the nexus point the node is—burned up—for lack of a better word.”

  Good point. Except—

  “If the nodes can only be used once, then eventually these folks are going to run out of major nodes to blast. If France just sits tight, maybe it can ride out these attacks.”

  Robert gestured at the stack of newspapers and their flashy headlines. “And maybe France can’t afford to wait that long. Each blast seems to be getting stronger, and the last one nearly wiped out France and Italy.”

  “If we mark the nodes that have already been used on this map in the newspaper, maybe we can narrow down where the attackers are likely to strike next based on what nodes are left to be used.”

  “Then what?” Robert asked somewhat cynically. “We call in the French Foreign Legion and tell them to go have a look?”

  I shrugged. “If it’s a matter of French national security, why not?”

  “There’s the small problem of both of us being fugitives. Hell, the French police are doing everything in their power to frame you for St. Germain’s murder. And you and I both know you went nowhere near that guy on the night of his death. You were with me in the catacombs the whole time.”

  I sighed. We both knew his word wasn’t worth a plug nickel as an alibi, though.

  He added, “Besides, who’d believe us if we said magic earth energy lines were being used to zap the French power grid.”

  “President Dupont would believe us. He’s the one who told me to get the statue back and keep Elise Villecourt alive.”

  “And maybe she’s just his dotty old friend he’s humoring as a favor. I mean, no offense, Ana, but you’re not exactly Interpol’s most experienced or highly trained criminal investigator.”

  That gave me pause. He was right. If Dupont thought Elise was telling the truth about the ley lines, he’d have put real police on the job, wouldn’t he? But instead, he’d assigned me, and only me, to the case. He probably figured Interpol could spare someone as generally useless as me to go play police with a crazy old lady who’d asked for me.

  Like it or not, we were on our own to stop whoever was using the ley lines to destroy the power grids.

  We compared the ancient ley line map and the newspaper map with great care, and finally came to a stunning conclusion. There was only one major ley line intersection left. A massive node with no fewer than twelve ley lines running smack-dab into it. The only mapped node any larger in France was centered in Paris under Notre Dame Cathedral. And my guess was that node had been used somehow to create tho
se totally inexplicable earthquakes in Paris last month.

  “When we get to Algiers, we’ll have to have Elise’s pilots fly us in as close as they can to that spot. Where is it, anyway?” I asked.

  “Looks to be in the Languedoc region in the south. Near a little town called Lys,” Robert replied.

  “Lys? Isn’t that where Catrina Dauvergne has a country house?”

  “I have no idea. I only met her that one time at the Cluny. She struck me as being firmly off the dating market, so I didn’t make much small talk with her beyond asking about the Black Madonnas and the religious cult they stem from. Odd group, those Marians.”

  The word sent a tingle of…power…crashing through me. No doubt about it. Marian magic was tied up in these power failures and in the statue tucked in my backpack. And someone in or near the Catholic Church was out to stop that magic, or at least prevent anyone from finding out about it.

  I wondered if the woman who’d willed the statue to Elizabeth was a Marian. She’d said her grandmother willed it to the next Tudor queen. That would be Henry VIII’s mother, then.

  I thought back through my rusty British history. Henry’s mother was Elizabeth of York. She was the last York, in fact. Her husband, Henry Tudor, was a Lancastrian. And their marriage effectively ended the bloody and vicious War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster. It would have been vital for Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York to have heirs to ensure that the war over control of the English throne didn’t flare up again. I could definitely see a woman like that being given a fertility statue to make sure she had plenty of children to keep the feud from resuming.

  The Marians had been referred to briefly at the Adriano exhibition. They were described as a shadowy cult of women who worshipped a Virgin Mary–like figure. They supposedly died out late in the Medieval period, although the Adriano exhibit hadn’t mentioned they were persecuted to extinction by the Roman Catholic Church. That I’d learned in Paris from Catrina.