The Magic Circle Read online

  “Likewise, hotshot,” said Sam. “I hope we’re both going to be around for a very, very long time. And again, sweetheart—please forgive me. I had to do things this way.”

  “Time will tell,” I told him.

  I just prayed there’d be enough of it left for both of us. At least enough to get our hands on Pandora’s deadly files.

  Olivier had to work late to catch up enough to take off for a weekend of skiing, so I dropped by the grocery store to pick up a steak and fixings for Jason’s and my dinner. It was dark by the time I got home, but the moon was out amid drifting clouds, and enough snow had blown off that I could almost make out the drive. I got out and threw some salt and gravel on the rest. Then I pulled my car in and let Jason out into the dappled darkness to check out the snow.

  After putting away the groceries I hiked up the drive as casually as possible to check my mailbox. I could hear Sam’s voice in my mind telling me to behave normally, though my heart was thudding. I mindlessly watched Jason jumping around on the crusted snow still covering the sloping lawn. I was praying to find it waiting up there—no matter what dire consequences might result—just to put an end to the clammy terror I felt whenever I thought of it.

  As I pulled the mail from the box, scudding clouds suddenly effaced the moonlight, drowning the road in darkness. But just by feel, I knew there was no large package. My heart sank. This meant another suspense-riddled day ahead, and perhaps another and another after that, with my life and Sam’s both in danger until we could get our hands on that package. But now it would be a thousand times worse since I was no longer in ignorant bliss.

  It was at that precise instant the flashbulb exploded in my brain: I knew what was wrong with this picture.

  No one had taken that mysterious package of Sam’s. It had never been in my mailbox and never could be! My mailbox was smaller than even one ream of paper. And since the snows had prevented anyone reaching my door to leave a parcel, as I’d discovered myself only last night, it meant my postman had been unable to deliver it at all. When that happened, he’d have left a little yellow postal slip notifying me to call at the main branch during office hours to pick up the parcel myself.

  Whoever Sam’s “professionals” happened to be, I knew that even a criminal or a spy wouldn’t be fool enough to stand out here in the open road, in a rural area like this where everybody knows his neighbor, just waiting to rifle through my mail looking for a yellow slip of paper. Especially if he had no inkling that the “valuable” item would come by uninsured parcel post.

  Even if someone had found this postal slip, would he try to claim the parcel at the post office? It would be taking a huge risk in a town this size, where a stranger trying to call for somebody else’s mail would be not only remembered but probably questioned right on the spot. We Idahoans are naturally suspicious of strangers. If the package had indeed arrived, the yellow slip of paper could still be in the damp pile of mail inside my house, where it could have been found if they searched this afternoon. Even if I didn’t find the paper tonight, I could go to the post office when it opened first thing tomorrow morning and collect the parcel myself—paper or none.

  I headed back to the house, today’s mail in hand, intent on sorting through my entire week of soggy mail on the floor. But halfway down the drive the clouds parted briefly, showering the snow-laden lawn with milky moonlight. I saw Jason sitting on the mounded whippedcream waves of snow out there, batting at a leaf with his paw. I started to call for him to follow me back into the house for dinner. Then I froze. It wasn’t a leaf he was batting at, it was the corner of a yellow piece of paper half buried in the snow—blown perhaps from my tossed pile last night.

  It was right there in plain sight, yet hopelessly out of reach. The crust of that snow might be strong enough to support one small cat, but there was no way it could support one hundred ten pounds of healthy girl nuke. If I tried to cross to where Jason was playing with the paper, I’d crash through the crust and repeat last night’s sinking experience. Nor could I clamp into my Nordic skis, as I had last night. If I was being watched, that would be even more obvious than leaping into phone booths. Sam would not approve.

  There was only one choice: I had to hope that Jason’s obsession and talent for retrieving would work on something more than his little red rubber ball.

  “Jason, fetch,” I whispered, as I crouched in the drive and reached my hand out.

  Jason looked at me and flicked his tail. The clouds closed in again, plunging us into darkness. I could still make out the outline of Jason’s small black body against the stark white snow, but in this light—or lack of it—I could no longer see the paper. I prayed to God he wouldn’t decide playfully to bury it so I’d have to excavate the whole garden tomorrow to find it. That would be hard to do “casually,” as Sam had enjoined me—and worse yet than the Nordic ski idea.

  “Come on, Jason,” I whispered a little louder, wondering whether my invisible snoopers were just across the road in the woods.

  I stood up, trying to act like an ordinary woman calling her ordinary cat in to dinner. I continued down the drive, not wanting to be overly obvious. Besides, Jason himself would grow suspicious if I started acting too normal. He was accustomed to life in a highly eccentric milieu. Nevertheless, he got the message. Before I reached the back door I felt him rubbing against my boots as he did when he wanted to be picked up. I crouched again in the inky darkness, yanked off my gloves, and took Jason’s face in my hands so I could feel what I couldn’t see: in his mouth was a bit of paper.

  Thank God, I thought—choosing not to dwell on what might follow immediately on the heels of this discovery. My heart was thudding again as I carefully removed the paper, holding it gingerly between my trembling fingertips.

  “Good cat!” I whispered. Jason purred back, and I patted his sleek head.

  At that instant the driveway was flooded with blinding light; I was drowning in light, frozen like a jackrabbit in the brilliant glare as the scream of a giant engine bore down from above, barreling toward me. I panicked, unable to see where to dive for shelter. Jason had ducked behind me as if for protection from a ravening monster. But somehow, in that split second, I found the presence of mind to tuck the piece of yellow paper in the sleeve of my sheepskin coat.

  The high beams and growling engine bore down on me, penetrating the drive and shutting off any exit. I stood there riveted by the noise, trying in blindness to feel for my car as a buffer. Then all at once the lights and motor were shut off—though I still couldn’t see—and we were plunged back into darkness. A car door opened and slammed shut, and I heard Olivier’s voice with its québecois-soaked accent calling:

  “Jiminy Crickets, do they never grow weary of playing in the snow?”

  “What is that monster?” I called back up into the void. “The headlight beams alone look ten feet high! You frightened me out of my wits.”

  “You mean I frightened your wits out of you,” Olivier said as his voice moved toward me in the darkness. “My crankcase oil froze before I left work. I guess the temperature had dropped more than I knew. Larry the programmer loaned me his truck till tomorrow. I dropped him at his apartment in town before coming home.”

  I was curious how Olivier could have approached down our dark, deserted road without my having seen or heard the truck, but I was so relieved it was Olivier, not the gang of spy-thug-murderers I’d been expecting, that I hugged him when he came within range, and we three went into the house together.

  “I only got one steak,” I told Olivier at the landing where our two stairways diverged. “I thought you were planning to grab fast food at the office.”

  “Tish, tish.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “I’ve been exhausted since our breakfast this morning; I couldn’t eat a bite. I’ll turn in for the night, if you and the argonaut don’t mind dining without me. Maybe a healthy sleep will work a miracle.”

  From below we heard my phone ringing. Olivier raised an eyebrow. It was rare
for me to get so many calls.

  “I hope my phone isn’t forming bad habits,” I said. “I may have to join the twentieth century and get one of those evil answering machines.”

  Olivier and I parted ways; I raced downstairs and grabbed it on the sixth ring.

  “Ariel Behn?” said a woman with a strident voice and an affected mid-Atlantic accent. “This is Helena Voorheer-LeBlanc, of the Washington Post.” Holy cow, that was some moniker. But I’d never liked newspaper dames: too pushy by far.

  “Ms. Behn,” she went on without awaiting a reply, “I do hope you don’t mind my intrusion during this time of grief, but I’ve tried to reach you on several occasions at work, and your family did give me this private number. They assured me you wouldn’t mind speaking with me for a few moments. Is now a good time?”

  “As good as any,” I agreed with a sigh.

  I was getting a headache, no doubt fueled by the number of times I’d had to jump-start my heart this afternoon. My steak was getting warm, my house was getting cold, and I had a piece of yellow paper stuffed up my sleeve that was hotter than nobelium, with a half-life a good deal longer than my own if I didn’t do something about it, and soon. Interview with the Washington Post? What the hey, why not?

  “What would you like to know, Miss—um, LeBlanc,” I asked politely, pulling out the yellow sheet Jason had retrieved and looking at it as I spoke. Yup, this was it: Zip code, San Francisco. The square that was checked read: “parcel too large for box.”

  I sat on the leather sofa and stripped off my coat. Then I stuffed the paper in my back pants pocket and started to make a fire in the fireplace where I usually cooked my dinner. Jason jumped up on the mantel and tried to lick me in the face, so I boxed his ears a little. And I wondered, for just one fleeting moment, whose body was lying in pieces in that coffin under the deep dark earth. Or had they just buried a piece of lead or a rock instead of Sam?

  “Your late cousin must have been a very brave man” was Ms. V-LeBlanc’s segue into our conversation.

  “Look, ma’am, I don’t really feel up to chatting too much about my late cousin just now,” I told her, tossing logs on last night’s cold ashes. “Why this sudden interest in me and my family? I’m afraid no one has made that very clear to me.”

  “Ms. Behn—Ariel—may I call you Ariel? As you must realize, for three generations your family has produced individuals renowned for their talents and …” Greed, I longed to suggest, but she found a more diplomatic term. “… world socioeconomic and cultural influence. And yet, no one has ever accomplished an in-depth study of a family whose contributions—”

  “The Washington Post wants to do an in-depth study of my family?” I cut in. What a joke. “You mean, like a series in the Sunday supplement?”

  “Ha, ha,” she tinkled. Then, recalling my “time of grief,” she settled down. “No, of course not. Ms. Behn, shall I come to the point directly?”

  I wished to Christ she would—we both knew what she was digging for—but I simply said yes.

  “It’s the manuscripts, of course, that we are interested in. An exclusive to publish them is what the paper would like. We’re prepared to pay a large sum, of course. But we don’t want to get into a bidding war.”

  A bidding war?

  “Exactly what manuscripts are you referring to?” I said naively. Let her work for it.

  Touching the inflammatory yellow ticket in my pants with my fingertips, I closed my eyes; then I lit the kindling, thinking all the while how life might be simplified if I accidentally dropped it into the flames. But Ms. Helena Post’s next words snapped me back to reality.

  “Why, the letters and journals of Zoe Behn,” she was saying. “I thought your family had spoken with you—”

  “Zoe Behn?!!” I said, nearly choking on the name. This was worse than my darkest imaginings. “What does Zoe have to do with any of this?”

  “It seems impossible you don’t know exactly what you are heir to, Ms. Behn.” Helena’s formerly forceful voice was nearly mellow with amazement.

  “Why don’t you fill me in?” I suggested.

  She had my complete attention now. There’d been plenty written about my horrid aunt Zoe—my father’s estranged half sister and the true black sheep of the family. Most of it Zoe had written herself. But this was the first I’d heard of any letters or journals. Besides, what could Zoe have to say that was worse than what she’d already told in worldwide print?

  “I was at the press conference in San Francisco, Ms. Behn.” Helena took a deep breath. “We were told that as sole heir to your late cousin Samuel Behn, you are entitled also to the estates to which he had fallen heir—including those of your grandmother, the famous opera singer Pandora Behn, and your uncle, the mining magnate Earnest Behn. When questioned by the press at this recent conference, both your father and Mr. Abrahams, the estate executor, said it was their understanding this estate might have included not only Pandora Behn’s correspondence with world figures and her private writings but also those of her stepdaughter Zoe, the noted …” Tart? The word hovered on my lips, but she finished: “… dancer.”

  As I said, my family relations are rather complex.

  “It seems, Helena,” I told her, “that since you learned so much at this press conference which I unfortunately missed, someone there must have had a clue as to where these important manuscripts actually are?” They certainly weren’t mentioned at the reading of the will, as I could attest.

  “Why, yes, Ms. Behn,” she told me. “That’s the reason I’ve phoned so soon, of course, because time is of the essence. According to the executor, in the event of your cousin’s death all his property was to be placed in your hands no more than one week after the date of the reading of the will.”

  Holy shit. My life had been put in danger—I’d been completely set up—and all by my own true blood brother, Sam.

  Actually, it was not totally impossible to delineate my familial relationships for others. It was just a damned unpleasant experience.

  My grandfather Hieronymus Behn, a Dutch immigrant to South Africa, married twice, first to Hermione, a wealthy Afrikaner widow who already had one young son, my uncle Lafcadio, whom Grandfather Hieronymus adopted and gave the Behn name. This marriage of Hieronymus and Hermione produced two children: my uncle Earnest, who was born in South Africa, and my aunt Zoe, born in Vienna, where the family moved just after the turn of the century. Therefore these two children were half siblings to my uncle Laf, since all three shared the same mother.

  When Hermione became ill in Vienna and the children were still small—so the story goes—my grandfather, at Hermione’s request, hired an attractive young student from the Wiener Musik Konservatorium to serve as a sort of nanny or au pair to the younger children and to provide their music education. After Hermione’s death this young woman, Pandora, became in swift succession: my grandfather’s second wife; mother to my father, Augustus; and, after deserting them both to run off with my uncle Laf, the most famous opera singer in post-Secession Vienna.

  To further tangle matters came the complex issue of my black-sheep aunt Zoe. Zoe—who’d supposedly been practically raised by Pandora and who had barely known her own sick and dying mother, much less her busy father—elected to run off with Laf and Pandora, thus creating, in a single blow, what later became known as the “family schism.” Zoe’s subsequent life as Queen of the Night, the most successful demimondaine and camp follower of the great and famous since Lola Montez, would take some describing.

  What I now was dying to know, so to speak, was how much Uncle Laf, a key actor in the family drama, knew about these manuscripts I’d inherited; whose they actually were, Pandora’s or Zoe’s; and what role they played in the overall picture—information I hoped I’d glean this weekend. If I lived that long.

  It was clear that Sam, too, knew far more than he was able to communicate. But why some decades-old letters and diaries were still too hot to handle, or why my father had said they were all in c
ode, which no one else had mentioned, or why Sam had faked his own death with the aid of the U.S. government and set me up as the fall girl at a last-will-and-testament-blabbing press conference—all these remained to be seen. This last item still left me speechless with impotent rage. But for now, since I wouldn’t be able to confront Sam even by phone until tomorrow afternoon at the No-Name cowboy bar, I would have to figure out how to hedge my bets and stay alive.

  My first step was to ring off the phone with Helena, star investigative journalist for the Post (who’d told me a good deal more than I’d told her). I said I’d let her know first thing, if I got the manuscripts.

  My next step, critical to events in the days ahead, was to decide whether to let the parcel lie a bit longer in anonymity at the post office, leaving me with only this tiny claim check to conceal, or to pick up the package and try to figure out what to do with it until I could get it to Sam. He certainly deserved to have it returned with equal zeal, like the hot potato it actually was. Whatever the contents—and I was certain by now I didn’t want to know—they’d probably have been better left buried. What a fool I’d been ever to believe I could escape my awful family by burying myself here, potatolike, in Idaho.

  That night before bedtime I lifted my woven, feathered “dream-catcher” down from the place where it always hung, keeping away bad dreams, just above my bed. I put it in a drawer instead. I thought if I planted the idea in my psyche, just before falling asleep, I might catch a dream that would place in my hand the thread I needed to guide me through the labyrinthine nightmare that was swiftly becoming my life.

  I awoke before dawn in a frantic sweat.

  I’d dreamed I was running—not upright, but on all fours—as fast as I possibly could through canelike underbrush so dense I could barely see. Behind me I could feel the hot breath of a large dark animal with ravenous, slathering jaws, its gnashing teeth snapping at me. I saw through the cane that I was coming to an open space of meadow with a wall just beyond. Could I cross it fast enough to leap up and escape the pursuing beast? I gave one extra push of power, though my lungs were already bursting; I crossed the patch of grass and leapt for the wall.