by Rose, M. J.
“We all need to understand what is going on here. It’s not as simple as going back into the cave and getting the next journal. Yesterday’s incident was serious. Theo, I know how much this matters to you, but your actions could have serious ramifications for Jac, and maybe even for you.”
Before either of them could argue, Eva came out of the kitchen with a platter of eggs and bacon. Just as she placed it on the sideboard, a male voice called out from the front hall.
“Are you all at breakfast?”
“Oh, it’s Ash,” Eva said.
Was the excitement in her voice pleasure or nervousness? Jac couldn’t be sure. She glanced at Theo and noticed that Minerva had done the same.
If it was possible, Theo’s face was now even more ravaged, his eyes filled with even more worry.
Ash kissed first Minerva and then Eva on the cheek, and then looked at Jac. “I’m surprised to find you here. Have you moved in, then?”
“No,” she said, almost embarrassed for a moment. “Things got complicated yesterday and your aunt wanted me to stay over. For observation.” She was caught off guard by her instinct to explain.
“Are you ill?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.” She stopped, not sure how to describe it in a succinct way.
“Why don’t you sit down, Ash,” Minerva said.
“Let me get you a cup of coffee,” Eva added.
“Why are you here?” Theo asked his brother. He looked first at Eva, then Minerva. “Did you ask him to come? Don’t you trust me with the journal?”
“Of course we do, Theo,” Minerva said.
“What are you talking about? They didn’t ask me to come. What journal?” Ash asked.
“They found Victor Hugo’s journal in one of the caves,” Eva blurted out.
“Really.” Ash looked from Theo to Jac. “Are you sure that’s what it is? You must be good at spotting fakes. Is it the real thing?”
“There’s no way to know that yet. It has the look and feel of something that’s the right age and in the right condition. But there are extensive tests, including handwriting analysis, that would have to be—”
“It’s the real thing,” Theo interrupted. His voice was thick with indignation. “What do you want, Ash?”
“I called you a half-dozen times yesterday. We have to resolve the issue with the Renoir pastel now. Today.”
“I told you, the Gaspard receipt indicates a sale, and I’ll get to it.”
“No. You have to get to it now. It just can’t wait.”
“What is this about?” Minerva asked.
Ash filled her in, ending by explaining, “Timmonson claims her client’s grandfather was acting under duress when he sold it in 1937.”
Eva shook her head. “It’s so disturbing to think of these poor people haunted by their memories of lost loved ones and lost family heirlooms.”
“Ash, we’ve been over this. I have the letters to prove there was no duress,” Theo said.
“So what are you waiting for? Get them to Timmonson. We got the preliminary injunction papers at the bank yesterday. This is going to go to court and cost a fortune to defend. I don’t want to waste money on a suit.”
“Davis sold us the Renoir and bought a Dürer,” Theo insisted.
“Just take care of it, Theo. And we must hire someone to attend to the rest of the cache of artwork immediately. We can’t afford to have this drag on and on because you aren’t ready to deal with it.” Instead of looking at his brother, Ash looked at Minerva. “It’s urgent we move on.”
There was a moment of quiet, which Eva interrupted by asking Ash if she could get him some eggs.
He looked at Theo, then at Jac. “Yes, please, Aunt Eva. I love your eggs, and I’d actually like to hear a bit more about Jac’s opinion of the journal.”
Theo got up, threw his napkin on his chair and walked out of the room.
In the long silence that followed, the only sounds were Theo’s thunderous footsteps as he walked across the marble hall.
“You need to be more patient with your brother,” Minerva said. “Less strident. Your tactic isn’t working. It never has.”
“I can’t afford to be more patient. We’re on the verge of calamity here. A lawsuit could ruin us. Can’t you get him into therapy?”
“It isn’t that simple,” Minerva said. “I’m trying to work with him. It takes time.”
“Time? It’s taking forever. He was bad enough before Naomi died,” Ash said. “He’s become impossible now.”
“Theo is haunted,” Eva said.
Both Minerva and Ash looked at her with surprise. Jac guessed she’d never said anything like that before.
“Yes, he’s having a hard time getting over Naomi’s death, but—” Minerva began.
“No, it’s more than that. He’s haunted,” Eva repeated.
“Whatever do you mean?” Minerva asked.
“I’ve watched these boys grow up. Seen the troubles between them their whole lives. I’ve listened to you explain it psychologically but it’s never made sense to me. There’s no solid psychological basis for their problems with each other. You keep trying to spin one out of thin air. Because I was neither a mother nor a therapist, I kept my own counsel. But since we took out the Ouija board the other night, things have seemed different to me. Falling into place in a way they didn’t before—” Eva broke off.
Jac watched the older woman’s face. Eva was weighing her words carefully. Where there had been confusion in her expression was deliberation and then finally resolve.
“The air here is poisoned,” Eva said. “It is for us and was for our grandfather. And it’s time for us to attend to it.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Ash asked.
Eva turned to face her sister. “What do you know about how our grandfather died?”
“It was late and not all the lights were on. You and Grandfather were coming down the steps and didn’t see the cat. Grandfather tripped and in trying to regain his balance pushed you or pulled you, and you tripped too. Both of you fell. You broke your hip, he broke his neck.”
Eva stared at her plate of eggs and toast as if for clues. “He had started to pursue you, Minerva. In the same way he’d been going after me. I recognized all of it. He’d get you all worked up and frightened with the Ouija board, and then he’d soothe you. Whisper and comfort you with soft touches, sweet words. Nothing too overt, nothing too traumatizing. Not at first. But he was leading up to more. Much more.” She was still looking down. “It was wrong. Very wrong.”
Jac was watching Eva’s hand on her lap, clenching and unclenching. Then Eva opened it and kept it open. She lifted her face and looked at her sister.
“There was no cat on the steps.”
“Why did I think there was?”
“That’s what I told everyone.”
“Then what caused the accident?”
“It wasn’t an accident. I tripped him on purpose. Before he could do to you what he was doing to me.” Eva pushed her plate aside with too much vigor. It jostled the juice glass, which tipped over. Bright orange liquid spread out over the linen tablecloth in a large irregular pattern. Eva put her napkin on top of the stain. She righted the glass and looked back at her sister.
“The more séances there were, the hungrier he became. I don’t know what the psychological explanation for it is, or what his condition was called, but he believed this Shadow existed. Our grandfather was listening to this spirit. What do you call it? An associative disorder? A psychotic break? I’m not sure, but he created a monster so he could take orders from him and become a monster himself. He had become a sexual predator, and I couldn’t stand by and watch him hurt you too. I didn’t think he was going to die. I don’t know what I thought. I was just so angry and so scared. First I set up the Ouija board in the library, then I went to Grandfather’s room and woke him up. I told him the spirit was in the library and using the board without us. I said it was spelling out a message. T
hat the spirit wanted to rest, and that we had to stop forcing him out, and if we didn’t he was going to punish us. I told Grandfather I was scared and wanted him to see it. When he started down the stairs . . . I tripped him . . .”
She stopped talking. A lone tear escaped and made its path down Eva’s cheek.
“To protect me?” Minerva asked, stunned. “And all this time you never said anything?”
“It went so wrong.” Eva’s voice cracked.
Minerva stood and walked around to her sister. She pulled Theo’s chair over and sat down. Minerva wrapped her arms around the weeping woman.
“What a terrible burden to carry for so long. I wish you had told me. I wish you had.”
The two sisters sat like that for a few moments, then Eva pulled away, straightened up and collected herself.
“What’s important now is Theo. All this talk about the Shadow and Theo thinking it’s possible to communicate with him. Was what happened to us when we were children actually real? I always was sure Grandfather made the Shadow up, but I’m not so sure anymore. Is our house being revisited? Something’s wrong here. With us. With all of us. We have to address it.”
Eva reached out and with a shaking hand picked up her coffee cup. Lifting it to her lips, she took a sip of what was by now lukewarm. “You can live with a painting on your wall your whole life, and then you wake up one morning and the light is shining on it in a different way, and it’s as if you’d never seen it before. Theo is troubled. He always has been. He was born troubled. Therapy hasn’t helped. Nothing has. And now he’s getting worse. I can see it in his eyes. I see it now in a different way than I have before. He’s haunted, and he needs more powerful help than we’ve given him so far.” Eva looked at Ash. Then at Minerva. And then finally at Jac. “He needs some kind of magic.”
Thirty-five
Ash left for the bank. Minerva went to her office. Eva stayed, sitting at the table, alone, nursing a second cup of coffee.
Jac found Theo in the library studying the tide tables.
He said that because of the tides they couldn’t try to visit the cave for another hour or so. But there was one other monument he wanted to show her, and he led her out to the car.
The ten-minute drive that took them through picturesque countryside ended when Theo parked the car by the side of an inauspicious road. There was nothing around to indicate they’d arrived at a destination.
“We have to go the rest of the way on foot,” Theo explained. “This place is called La Pouquelaye de Faldouet.”
“Faldouet means fast-running stream, doesn’t it, but what’s pouquelaye?”
“Some think the first part of the name comes from Shakespeare’s Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, who was one of the ‘little people’ or dare I say ‘fairies,’ and laye can be deciphered as ‘place.’ So we get ‘fairy place of the fast-running stream.’ ”
Turning a corner, they came upon a group of towering stones.
“This is astonishing!” Jac said. More than a dozen monoliths formed a pathway that led to a large circular chamber, beyond which was a second chamber with a gigantic capstone.
“That stone is over twenty-four tons,” Theo said. “It comes from an area half a kilometer away from here. How did they move it? And why did they move it?”
“Like Stonehenge, there are only guesses about what these sites were. So many of them are burial grounds,” she said.
Jac’s work continually exposed her to reminders of loss, secrets gone, history covered over and forgotten. People who would never speak again. Their souls like fragrances that linger in the air for a few moments and then disappear forever.
And all these gravesites . . . this site . . . brought Jac’s own losses to the forefront. Always they had made her think of her mother, and now in addition there was the loss of her lover, and the pregnancy . . .
For a moment the idea of a baby—of her and Griffin’s baby—was so real that she lost a step. She put her hand out and touched the wall. Stood still. Trying to get her bearings. The grief was like fog.
“This area has been excavated several times,” Theo was saying. “Starting in the mid-eighteen hundreds. They’ve found the bones of two children and three or more adults here.”
Jac shivered. She had seen so many excavations, she could picture the scene they had come upon.
“One skeleton was in a seated position in one of the side chambers,” Theo continued. “They also found utensils and household items. Some bowls, stone axes, greenstone pendants, tools made of flint. I’ve read that the household goods weren’t buried ceremoniously but instead seemed to be positioned as if they were in use. No one is quite sure if the site was a graveyard, a temple or a dwelling.”
“This place is aligned with the solar equinox, isn’t it?” Jac asked as she tried to focus. Be present, as Robbie would say.
Theo nodded. “Yes. Most of the sites on the island are. Is that common?”
“Yes, Neolithic-period temples and burial sites often are aligned on ley lines. Have you heard anything else out of the ordinary about this one?”
“About thirty years ago, some strange occurrences were noticed in many houses west of here. Objects seemed to be moving around. A chair was no longer next to the fireplace but halfway across a room. A plate from a coffee table was found on a shelf. A painting no longer hung on the wall but leaned against a door. Because the local black-magic circle used this place as a sacred site to hold meetings, the rector of the Anglican church was called in to help. He worked here for three days, exorcising the spirits from the dolmens. After that none of the residents reported any more poltergeists, but I’ve heard from some of the guides that they still find remnants of witch covens here. Stubs of burnt-out candles left on standing stones. Grass wreaths studded with flowers on the floor. There’s even gossip that, around the time of the equinoxes, there’s been evidence of blood sacrifices being carried out. According to people who study paranormal activity, through ceremonies and chanting, the area’s ley lines might have been reenergized or overenergized.”
Jac heard the intensity in Theo’s voice that she’d come to recognize when he talked about the ancient sites. Did his passion border on obsession? Was Ash right? Was Theo preoccupied with the past to the point of distraction? Was there something wrong with how fixated he was on these ancient monuments? Was he, as Eva had suggested, haunted?
Jac walked around the dolmen. “Look at it from this angle. See the way the dirt is mounded?” She pointed. “There’s a theory that these kinds of sites represent the pregnant stomach of Mother Earth.” She felt a butterfly in her own stomach. Why had she brought this up? Keep talking, she thought. Work through this. Get past it. “The main chamber represents the womb, and the entrance and the passageway represent the birth canal. The ancients believed all life came from the Earth Mother, so this formation could be recreating the scene for a birth in reverse. If at your death you were buried in a symbolic womb, it might facilitate your rebirth into the next life.”
“That’s fascinating,” Theo said. “I’ve never heard that before.”
“There’s something else, though.” She was walking the length of the ruin. “I don’t think that’s the key reason this monument was built this way.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “No idea. But I can feel it. Almost as if this place is alive. As if it’s trying to talk to me.”
“I believe that. No matter where we go, there’s a past on the island that is just waiting to come alive again,” Theo said. “I can feel it too. I always have. I think Hugo felt it also. I think that the island rekindled his fascination with reincarnation. Jersey is rich with past-life mythology.”
“If Malachai were here now, he would remind us that it’s no coincidence.”
Theo frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t bring him up so much. You see him as some kind of hero, but he’s manipulative too, Jac. He has his own agenda.”
Theo’s anger at Malachai was pronounced.
“You rely on him too much,” Theo continued.
“I don’t think I do.”
“You need to dissociate yourself from him.”
“Why?”
“I know he didn’t want you to come here. He doesn’t think you should be with me. Isn’t that true?”
Thinking of her recent phone call with Malachai and his concerns, Jac felt a shiver of apprehension.
“Yes, but I didn’t listen to him, did I?”
Theo stepped toward her, and before she realized what he was doing, he leaned forward and kissed her hard and long. This was not a good-night kiss. His lips were cold on hers. His arm went around her back and pulled her with too much force. This didn’t feel right.
She pulled away. Stumbled backward.
“It’s been a long time for me since I’ve kissed anyone,” he said, embarrassed. “I hope I remembered how to do it.”
She laughed but it sounded artificial.
“We belong together, Jac.”
“No, not in that way, Theo. I don’t think so.” A wave of sadness coursed through her. Did she belong with anyone but Griffin?
“Are you sure? Can’t you give it a chance?”
The sun was shining in her eyes. He was backlit and she couldn’t see his face clearly. In the shadows, he became threatening. Something about how he smelled alerted her that there was potential danger here. Then with horror she saw the air around her waver the same way it had so many times in her life—the visual precursor to an episode, or what Malachai liked to call a memory lurch. An intense burst of scent assaulted her. She smelled sage, hazel, juniper, frankincense and that odd amber from Fantine’s workshop.
Jac felt herself starting to stumble. She was seeing the same scene but there were other people there. Ghostlike at first, but then becoming flesh. Having substance. And sound.
A throng of people were lined up and waiting to come into the dolmen. All of them were dressed in natural-colored robes—white, cream or brown linens. Both the men and the women were chanting. Many were holding wooden plates of vegetables, fruits and flat round disks of bread. The air was perfumed with roses and cloves. Sweet and spicy. Fresh and pungent.