Nadia let the crystal shard fall and came upright. The sisters stood, still as statues, staring into each other’s eyes. Cold brushed over Brian as the fine hairs on his arms stood up. A howl of wind made Lana jump closer to her sister.
“What just happened?” Brian asked.
16
Brian
Thursday Night
Lana was fixated on the starburst of crystal on the wooden floor. “When she finds out it’s broken, it’s going to be bad,” she whispered.
“This was special to Sophia?” Brian tried again to get details.
Nadia sent Lana a questioning look, and Lana responded with the smallest of nods. Brian knew they had decided to break a bond and share a confidence. He steeled himself for what was coming.
“Sophia’s great-great-grandmother Adeline brought that goblet with her from Limerick when she immigrated to America. It has been passed down through the generations. It dates back to the early 1800s. Dated back.” Nadia cleared her throat. “When Adeline got married, they gave a wedding toast with that glass, then her grandmother, then her mother, and eventually Sophia did the same. In their family tradition, taking a sip of wine on your wedding day from that goblet connected the new bride to the wisdom of the women who had come before.” Nadia used the hushed tones of a storyteller, as if they were around a campfire deep in the woods.
“Sophia had just moved in to this house, her mother-in-law Jane hadn’t been released from the hospital yet after the car accident. Sophia was out of her mind. She had been crying for days. She had been through so much for so long, and now she had to make decisions for a woman she barely knew. So Lana suggested we ask her grandmothers.” Nadia’s voice faltered, and she looked away, bending her head.
Brian took the candle from her hands and set it at their feet. It left eerie shadows on their faces. He shifted the jar to the side with the toe of his boot. He didn’t need to add to the atmosphere, the women were already shivering, their nerves were pulled so tight.
“I had no idea.” Lana shook her head. “I was half-joking.”
“We fashioned a kind of Ouija board. I filled out slips of paper with the alphabet, the numbers zero to nine, a card for yes, and a card for no. Sophia turned the goblet upside down, and we all sat around the table and rested our fingers on the base.”
Lana’s shivers became trembles. Brian knew that what happened next was the stuff of nightmares and horror stories. A chant had begun in his brain behind the melody of his other thoughts. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name... As the prayer cycled forward, he felt as if each phrase was building the next layer of a wall that would separate and protect him from whatever it was that was frightening these women. “What happened?” he urged.
“As soon as we put our fingers on the goblet, the room started to hum. I expected that we’d be waiting… I thought it would… I had no idea what I was doing. But it happened incredibly fast. The room filled with electricity.”
“Static,” Lana said. “Our hair floated out to the sides like we’d rubbed our heads with a balloon. Our clothes zapped us as we shifted. Nadia asked, ‘who’s here?’ and the goblet immediately spelled out Bambi.”
“Who’s Bambi?” Brian asked.
“We didn’t know,” Nadia said. “I mean, we figured it out in context. Sophia told us later that she called Hunter Bambi as a pet name. Hunter, her husband, had these beautiful golden-brown eyes. All the girls fell in love with him because of his eyes.”
Brian nodded.
“Sophia, she looked like she was in a trance. She asked Hunter if he was okay. The goblet slid to yes.” Nadia hugged herself tightly. “Hunter tried to commit suicide when he found out that Sophia was in premature labor. She was alone in the hospital giving birth to Chance. Christopher John Campbell was the name they had chosen for him. Sophia changed the name to Chance when she filled out the papers. She never talked about why—but it’s easy to guess. They gave her husband and son the same chance of survival that day. Ten percent.” Nadia paused for a long moment. “The second question Sophia asked was if Hunter’s dad was with him and the goblet slid over to yes. Then she asked if he was in Heaven and the goblet went back to the side that had the no.”
“Was there a reason why Sophia asked about his father?”
Nadia shifted her weight. “Hunter was in a coma, braindead after his overdose, but his parents couldn’t bring themselves to remove him from life support. Sophia was dealing with life and death decisions for her new baby, and she felt very strongly that Hunter’s parents should have whatever control she could give them over their son’s life. At first, they decided to keep Hunter on life support while they looked for alternative treatments. But there’s nothing that brings someone back from being braindead. In late spring of that same year, Hunter’s dad was diagnosed with advanced heart disease. His only chance at survival was a heart transplant.”
A low note slipped between Lana’s lips.
Nadia reached out and pulled Lana to her side. “Jane begged her husband to take their son’s heart. If he didn’t, she was sure to lose both of them. If he did, then she could keep them both alive in some way. So that was the plan. They’d try to save both the father and some part of the son with the operation. They had started the surgery to remove Hunter’s heart, and were prepping his father—Matthew was his name—for surgery. But Matthew had a massive heart attack and died. Sophia had already said goodbye to Hunter, but now she was mourning her father-in-law. And Jane, to be perfectly honest, went crazy. She had to be institutionalized for a time. Sophia had to make the funeral arrangements for her husband and father-in-law all by herself.”
Nadia released a jagged breath. “There we were, using the goblet to talk with the dead. Sophia asked, ‘Where are you?’ The goblet spelled out, ‘Waiting for mom. Let her come.’ Now, all of us were barely touching the goblet. Sophia couldn’t possibly move the glass on her own. Lana and I didn’t know that the doctor was talking to Sophia about palliative care versus aggressive choices in treating Jane. We had no idea that Jane might die.”
“Holy crap,” he said under his breath. Brian tried to imagine the women, sitting around the table having this otherworldly experience.
Nadia pursed her lips, waiting for the thunder to finish rolling across the sky. “It gets worse. The next thing it spelled out was, ‘I love you. I’m so sorry.’ I thought that now that we had answers we’d stop. Sophia needed to know what to do and now she knew. But Sophia—I have never seen a human look like that. She was white to the point of being…gone. Her lips were colorless.”
“She was translucent,” Lana said. “It was as if I could see right through her, like she had become vapor. I wanted to magnetize her particles back into a solid whole, but I couldn’t pick my fingers up off the glass. I was stuck. Powerless. It felt like Hunter had gone and something evil had slipped through a door he had left open.”
“It was as if I was on a spinning ride where you’re held in place by centrifugal force and the bottom drops out,” Nadia explained. “Lana’s right, I couldn’t get my fingers off that goblet. I knew that I’d only be allowed to let go when whatever it was that came in the room was satisfied.”
Brian began to wonder if this was a performance. If the sisters’ story was something they heard or saw or came up with. If that were true, they were damned good actors. “What happened next?”
Nadia bit at her lips. It seemed to Brian that she was having trouble forming the next words. “It spelled out ‘Your fault.’ Sophia’s body vibrated, her whole body shook. But her hands were steady on the goblet. I was getting angry at Hunter, I didn’t realize that he’d switched. I was thinking, how dare he blame Sophia when his depression and suicide were caused by a head injury? I yelled at the goblet to stop.”
“The goblet spelled, ‘My grave,’” Lana whispered then whipped her head around to look across the ceiling and into the corners. “Sophia was shaking so hard the rim of the glass bounced on the table, then it spelled, �
��You desecrated my grave.’”
Brian shook his head. This was so farfetched that they had to be pulling his leg.
“Sophia screamed the highest pitched scream—held it inhumanly long. The dishes were rattling in the cupboards. I’m going to be disgustingly honest here.” Nadia turned to look him in the eye. “I peed myself. I was so terrified.”
Brian thought she’d burst out laughing and let him in on the joke, but she didn’t.
“When the scream ended, Sophia collapsed. The static electricity left.”
The quiet that followed was one Brian experienced after a bomb blast when everyone in the area was in shock. Unsure, unclear, unable. He stood quietly until one and then the other sister seemed to come back to themselves. In his mind, Brian heard the prayer that had continued this whole time, say one last time, Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, followed by an amen. The weird feeling of being watched or eavesdropped on vanished.
“Lana, what are we going to do about the goblet?” Nadia whispered. “She’ll lose her mind. She’s already terrified for the boys.”
“I’m not following. Why is she worried for the boys?” Brian asked, wondering if he was going to find yet another stressor that might make Sophia desperate.
Lana caught Nadia’s eye and held it with as close to fierce conviction as he had ever seen on her face. “I think we’ve told too much of Sophia’s story already. That’s really her burden to share if she wants to.” Lana turned pleading eyes on Brian. “Please don’t tell her we told you about the Ouija game,” she whispered. “I don’t know that she’d forgive us.” She grabbed his arm. “It was an intensely private moment. A unique and dreadful experience. There aren’t words to explain the profound horror that we felt. We’ve never talked about it. Sophia refuses to let us. She says she doesn’t want to give it any more power than it already has.”
Nadia explained, “Sophia believes that words, thoughts and deeds all have energetic properties.”
“What does that mean? You said the entity spelled out ‘You desecrated my grave.’ Desecrated seems like a long word for a ghost to spell out.”
“You’re probably joking,” Nadia said. “I can’t imagine that anyone in their right mind would believe a word my sister or I just said. But it’s crazy what’s happened to Sophia. Did she ever tell you we were kidnapped? Held tied up for days with bags over our heads?”
Brian stalled, he couldn’t answer that truthfully. He wasn’t supposed to know that. It was interesting that Nadia’s mind was on being kidnapped. There must be a correlation. “Is that when bad things started to happen? Desecrating a grave—does this have something to do with an archaeological dig?”
“A dig? No. That kidnapping, and every single other horrible thing that’s transpired over the last five years are because of what happened beforehand. And all Sophia wants to do now is turn back time, go back, and fix her mistake.”
Brian reached down to pick up the candle. When he stood, Sophia, dressed in a thin white nightgown, slipped into their circle, skirting around the broken goblet.
“I was having a nightmare.” She crouched down to lift the stem, just like Nadia had, and put it back in the pile. She stood up and looked from Nadia to Lana. “I thought it was the storm.” She shifted her hair out of her face, letting her gaze rest on the picture of her boys. “Bad things are about to happen.”
17
Sophia
Friday a.m.
The phone rang on her desk, pulling Sophia’s attention from the newest images that had uploaded overnight while the storm had raged. She waited until all five beeps sounded then placed the receiver back in its cradle. She opened the case on her keychain flashlight and waited for her cell phone to ring. Normally, the delay was less than a minute. Today though, Sophia finished half the chai tea Brian had brought her this morning when he ran out for coffee. Sophia didn’t have any coffee in the house, and Brian claimed it was his main food group. She had directed him over to the little shop near Willow Tree. Right now, Brian was outside hanging from the eaves, dealing with some storm damage. Sophia was simply too tired to say no to his offer.
She was in her office alone. Nadia had gone home to shower and change, and Lana had gone back to her house to relieve her husband of kid duty. The tumble of boys was five deep when she and Lana mixed their broods. Good thing they piled together like puppies, no one making familial distinction when they were together.
When the buzz came from the cellphone in her hand, it startled her. Sophia brought the phone to her ear and read out the alphanumeric code that told her contact that it was safe to speak.
“You have information?”
“I think I’ve found exactly what we’ve been looking for,” Sophia said. “There’s a tablet that needs a new home that some would consider museum quality.”
“Some? You can give this piece a clean bill of health for shipping?”
Sophia swallowed hard. “I can.”
“Thank you. Forward the pertinent data through the normal channels, we’ll handle it from here.”
“Okay. Moving forward with the other project.” Sophia picked up a book from her desk and turned to put it back on the shelf. “I can’t make an assessment from the picture you sent.”
“You’ll see Jael on Monday. He’ll be travelling with the diplomatic corps through customs. You can figure it out then.”
“Oh good.” Sophia paced over to the window and looked out at her leaf-strewn lawn. The flowers had been pounded into the ground by the relentless fury of the storm, but she could see that they were already pulling their faces up in search of sunlight. “Be aware that the location of our last conversation is no longer secure. I’m picking up unusual activity.”
“I’ll make sure that information gets to the right ear.”
The line went dead.
If all went well, this was the deal they’d been looking for. Then this chapter of her life would be over. Wouldn’t that feel like victory? Sophia’s mind travelled to last night’s fiasco with the crystal goblet. Success was probably too much to hope for. She looked at the boys’ picture hanging on her wall. “I’m trying to do what’s best,” she told their smiling faces.
Brian knocked three times in a tattoo he had created so he could go in and out without startling her. He had a box on his shoulder. Sophia was glad she’d made it through her call before he burst in.
“Special delivery,” he said as the roar of the mail truck moved up the hill.
Sophia clapped her hands as she hustled over to take the box. A smile lit her face.
“You look like a kid on Christmas morning.” Brian grinned. “What’s in here?”
She ran her finger over the tape sealing the box. “It’s pretty awesome. Got a knife? I’ll show you.”
Sophia dug through the protective Styrofoam and pulled out the black object wedged inside. “This,” she announced like a new mother presenting her first child, “is a specialized 3-D digital camera with an integrated computer system to perform measurements, and map planes, developed with the help of archaeologists. Nadia and I are testing it out.” She held it up to her eye and focused on different objects around the room. She stalled on Brian’s face. “Imagine an FBI computer system that has pictures of people all over the United States, all over the world.”
Brian leaned forward in his chair to accept the camera she held out for him.
“Their computers can quickly search through their databanks to find people whose physical attributes match those of their unknown subject, thereby giving them a name and probably a file of information about that person, right?” Sophia’s smile faded when she saw an odd little something in Brian’s eyes.
There and gone again as he held his typically impassive expression.
“This camera is meant to gather data for a similar database. Only this one would be for artifacts. Our goal at AACP, as you well know, is to protect antiquities and keep them in their country of origin. With so many pieces flowing through t
he black markets and into private collections, how do we prove that the piece was taken illegally? We’ve had a hard time with that. From our discussions, and talking with people involved in CSI, we came up with the idea of equipping our teams in hot areas with these cameras. They’re cheap. Thirty-four dollars each. That was a main criterion—or we simply couldn’t get them widely distributed. Our volunteers will collect information and send it back to us.”
Brian was looking over the camera he held, turning it this way and that. “Sophia, did I ever tell you why I was assigned to your team?”
“No, you didn’t.” Sophia curled onto the couch and pulled the throw blanket over her feet.
He leaned forward until his forearms rested on his knees, letting the camera dangle from his hands. He was eye to eye with her. There was a quality to him of earnestness. Solemnity, even. “I was in Bagdad in April 2003.” He stalled for a moment, then nodded his head, as if he’d made up his mind. “We went in fast and hard with our sights set on toppling Saddam Hussein. We were in the center of Bagdad in the blink of an eye. My platoon was in Sadr City and crossed over the Tigris. My squad was sent to the National Museum of Iraq. There were reports of looters, and we were supposed to clear them out. Which we did. The museum workers were there, old men with canes, young men with sticks. They had been trying, without much success, to protect the artifacts. They begged us to leave people in place there. To park some tanks in the yard. But we were on the move. We couldn’t stay put.” He drew his thumb down his jaw line. “To be perfectly honest, we knew all along that the museum was at risk.”
Sophia was staring at her knotted hands. She was trying to absorb the story without jumping to conclusions. She had sat by her television set and screamed at the military to get themselves in there and protect the museum. Brian had been there. She had unknowingly sent waves of hostility toward him at that time. But Brian was a Marine following orders, not a decision maker.
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