by Glenn Cooper
Three door thuds snapped him to attention.
‘FBI!’
He only had time to grab the obsidian mirror and two pieces of paper.
As the door was being unlocked, he was on the balcony.
And when the first agent entered the room, Hamid was falling through the night air.
He hit the steep cliff face and careened down a hundred feet, bashing against rocks and stumps, and landing in a twisted mass of bloody flesh on the hotel access road.
As he fell, the wind caught the papyrus and Eve’s Enochian transcription and sent the sheets fluttering out to sea.
The showstone slipped from Hamid’s hand on his first impact and fell to the asphalt drive, shattering into a thousand sharp pieces.
THIRTY
The call had come out of the blue and it was enough to get him onto a plane.
When the flight was within an hour of landing in San Francisco, he took out the papers Eve Riley’s lawyer had mailed from Tucson.
Cal had not known it at the time, but on Eve’s last morning of life she had used his computer to write her lawyer a set of instructions, and had made a single change to her last will and testament. The attorney explained to Cal that although the revision hadn’t been notarized, the probate court had seen fit to ratify it.
Cal Donovan was therefore duly appointed the executor of Eve Riley’s estate.
The job of her executor was not particularly challenging. It turned out she was renting her house and her only significant asset was a checking account with a few thousand dollars on hand. This trip to Redding, California would fulfill Cal’s only significant duty.
He waited at baggage claim for a suitcase and picked up his rental car.
The three-hour drive from the airport gave him time to think about the genealogy report that Eve had made an exhibit to her will.
The names of the men and women of each generation played through his mind. Husbands and wives, daughters and sons.
In the nineteenth century, John Riley and his wife, Mary, fled the Great Hunger in Ireland and came to America to start new lives. They first settled in New York City, then Chicago. Six generations later, Phillip and Meg Riley, residents of Denver, Colorado, had a daughter, Eve, who, in turn, had a son out of wedlock whom she put up for adoption.
But it was the European section of the family tree that Cal thought about the hardest.
Because Eve Riley’s roots traced back to 1588 when a boy, Theodorus Trebonianus, was born in Poland to Jane Dee and John Dee. Yet, by all accounts, contemporary and historical, the father of the child was not the esteemed academic, but his angel-scryer, Edward Kelley.
Theodorus Dee married Eliza Church in London in 1606 and they had a daughter, Mary, who would marry William Riley of Belfast, and the Rileys, whom Cal imagined had passed their gift of scrying from generation to generation, remained in Belfast and thereabouts until the Irish diaspora.
Cal found the address on a tree-lined street. He got the suitcase out of the trunk. Inside were Eve’s Enochian tools – her inscribed wooden table and wax seals, her scrying bowls and crystals, her reference books and a few copies of her own.
The woman who answered the door was Isabelle Heath. Cal had talked to her in advance and had smoothed over all the details.
On the phone she had said, ‘He knows about things in general. We were always going to tell him the details of his birth-mother when it was time. I suppose it’s time.’
Now she said, ‘Come on in. He’s in the backyard.’
‘He knows I’m coming, right?’
The woman bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to say it.’
‘It’s okay,’ Cal said, smiling. ‘I’ve got a little speech planned.’
Cal waited in the living room.
There were photos of the boy everywhere. Smiling pictures of a mother and father, and a boy who was now fourteen. It looked like a fine family.
Cal hoped that the kid would take to the contents of the suitcase.
He hoped that something good would come out of it.
There was so much evil in the world. Maybe a good young man with the right disposition and abilities could make a difference.
Ryan Heath came in, his long black hair wild from the wind.
Cal said, ‘Hey, Ryan, my name is Cal Donovan.’
Ryan looked at him then looked at the suitcase and said, ‘I kind of knew that someone was going to be coming to see me.’