The Magic Circle Page 7

  I got out and yanked the skis from the back of the car, as well as my duffel bag and a few belongings I thought I could carry over my shoulder, and set them out on the flat road. I had slipped in back to rummage for my boots when, through the side window, I saw my mailbox—identified by the little flag rising like a gay beacon from a drift—and suddenly recalled I’d forgotten to stop my mail when I’d left so hastily for the funeral. Slamming the back car door shut and hanging on to its handle for balance, I swept the mound of snow off the box and extracted the mail that must have been building up all week. It was more than I’d imagined. So with my other hand I let go the door handle and reached for the duffel bag, unintentionally stepping slightly away from the car.

  With that first step I sank into snow up to my waist, and I kept on sinking. I felt the fear clutching at me as I struggled to keep from panicking. I knew that thrashing about would only make me sink faster. I’d lived in these parts long enough to hear of many folks who’d been smothered, sinking into bottomless snow where they couldn’t move arms or legs to free themselves. And the second I started to sink, it also occurred to me that I’d departed for the funeral with little fanfare, only telling my boss there’d been a death in the family and leaving a cryptic note for my landlord. It was entirely possible, even though my car would be found, that no one would find me until after the spring melt!

  I tossed the disabling pile of mail up onto the road—under the car so it wouldn’t sink into the drifts and vanish too. I managed to get one elbow propped on the solid surface, clawing with my other hand until I could twist enough to get both arms flat on the road. When I pushed myself up, it felt like vaulting from a swimming pool with fifty-pound weights on my legs: it wrung out every ounce of energy I had. I lay flat on my stomach on the road, shaking and hot with fear and exhaustion. It didn’t last long; soon the chills set in as the clinging ice from my full-body dip in that snowbank saturated my inadequately waterproofed clothes.

  I staggered to my feet and yanked the car door open. Cold, soaked, thoroughly wiped out, I was furious with myself. Wasn’t Jack London’s To Build a Fire required reading for mountain children? About a chap who goes out in the tundra at sixty below, against all advice. He freezes to death. Very slowly. Not what I had on my agenda.

  I pulled the cross-country boots from the car, laced them with stiff fingers in soggy gloves, snapped on my long, featherweight Nordic skis, stuffed the bundle of mail in the duffel, slung it over my shoulder, and slalomed down to the back door. Why hadn’t I tried that as my first idea, and bypassed Mr. Postman until morning?

  The phone was again ringing as I shed my skis, threw open the door, and half tumbled—along with a mess of powder—down the steep stairway to my cozy dungeon fortress. At least, it had been cozy when I’d left it a week ago.

  I flicked on the lights, and saw ice caking the inside of the windows and patterns of crystals formed on the mirrors and picture glass like something out of Dr. Zhivago. Softly cursing my landlord, who turned down my heat to spare expense whenever I left the building, I yanked off the dripping boots before I stepped onto the orientals, raced across the open, book-lined living room, and made a dive into pillows to grab the phone on the floor.

  I kicked myself at once for even picking it up: it was Augustus.

  “Why did you leave?” were the first words out of his mouth. “Grace and I have been nearly at our wits’ end, trying to find you. Where have you been?”

  “Having fun playing in the snow,” I told him, rolling over on my back in the pillows and cradling the phone to my ear. “I thought the party was over; were there other treats in store?” I unbuttoned my wet trousers and tried to wriggle out of them so I wouldn’t get pneumonia down here in this bitterly cold dungeon—or, more likely, develop mold. I could see my breath in the air.

  “Your sense of humor has always seemed to me ill placed, at best,” Augustus informed me coolly. “Or perhaps only your sense of timing. When you vanished just after the reading of the will, we phoned your hotel and were told you had checked out earlier that same morning. But once we’d heard the will, of course, Grace and I had agreed to a press conference—”

  “A press conference?!” I said, sitting bolt upright in astonishment. I tried to keep the phone to my ear as I yanked myself out of my wet parka and pulled off my sweater, but I only caught Augustus’s last words:

  “—must be yours as well.”

  “What must be mine?” I asked. I rubbed my hands hard over my goosebumpy body, stood up, and dragged the phone over to the fireplace. I was tucking pinecones and paper under the pile of logs already stacked as Augustus replied.

  “The manuscripts, naturally. Everyone knew Sam had inherited them, how very valuable they must be. But after Earnest’s death no one could locate Sam. He seemed to have been swallowed up. When I tried to discuss it during dinner after the funeral, you seemed to want to avoid the issue. But now that it’s known you’re not only Sam’s principal heir but his sole heir, naturally matters have changed—”

  “Naturally?” I said with impatience as I lit a match under the kindling and watched with relief as the flames leapt up at once. “I have no idea what manuscripts you’re talking about!”

  And stranger still, I thought, regardless of what they might be worth, why on earth would someone with my father’s predilection for privacy ever dream of agreeing to a press conference? It was more than suspicious.

  “You mean you don’t know of them?” Augustus was saying in an odd voice. “How can that be, when the Washington Post and the London Times and the International Herald Tribune were all here? Of course, there was nothing we could say, since the manuscripts were not in the hands of the executor, and you had vanished as well.”

  “Maybe you could clue me in, before I freeze to death,” I said between chattering teeth. “What are these manuscripts Sam left me—no, let me guess: Francis Bacon’s letters to Ben Jonson, admitting that Bacon really did, as we’ve always suspected, write all Shakespeare’s plays.”

  To my surprise, Augustus didn’t miss a beat. “They’re worth a good deal more than that,” he informed me. And my father was a man who understood the meanings of words like “worth” and “value.” “The very moment you learn anything about them, as I’ve no doubt you will,” he went on, “you must notify me or our attorneys at once. I don’t think you quite appreciate the position you are in.”

  Okay, I thought, I’ll give this one more try. I took a deep breath.

  “No, I suppose not,” I agreed. “Could you see your way to share with me, Father, what the whole world already seems to know? What are these manuscripts?”

  “Pandora’s,” Augustus said curtly, the name sounding bitter as acid in his mouth—as well it might.

  Pandora was my grandmother—my father’s loving mother, who’d abandoned him at birth. Though I’d never met her, by all accounts she’d been the most colorful, flamboyant, and outrageous of all the Behn women. And with our family tree, that was going some.

  “Pandora had manuscripts?” I asked my father. “What kind?”

  “Oh, diaries, letters, correspondence with the great and near great, that sort of thing,” he said in a dismissive tone. Then, casually, he added, “It’s possible she might even have written a memoir of sorts.”

  I might not see eye to eye with my father on most things, but I knew him well enough to know when he was pulling my chain. He must have been calling here every fifteen minutes for the past two days; that’s why I’d heard the phone ring twice during my brief time outside. If he was in so much of a panic to reach me, and this stuff was so hot that he had to give in to a press conference, why was he playing footsie with me now?

  “Why all the belated interest?” I asked. “I mean, Granny dearest has been dead for years, right?”

  “It’s generally believed that Pandora left these manuscripts in trust to the … other side of the family,” my father said stiffly. I started thinking just how complex my family relations actua
lly were. “Earnest must have had them under lock and key for decades, for he had many offers,” Augustus went on. “But he couldn’t evaluate their true worth because apparently they were all written in some sort of code. Then your cousin Sam …”

  Holy cow!

  I stood there before the fire in my skivvies, phone in hand, as my father’s voice flapped on like meaningless noise in the background. Good lord—they were in code!

  Sam had vanished just when his father Earnest died. He was out of touch for seven years, and now he was dead. And what coincided with that hiatus? Sam’s inheritance—including, perhaps, that of these manuscripts. What was Sam’s profession and calling? What had he lavished his time upon teaching me even since childhood, that got me my very well-paying job?

  Sam was a codebreaker, one of the best in the world. If Sam knew about these manuscripts of Granny’s, it would have been far too hard for him to resist having a look, especially if his father wanted to determine their value. He must have seen them—perhaps broken them—long before Earnest died. Of that I was certain. So where were they now?

  But there was a question more crucial to me at this moment, given my own unique situation:

  What was in my grandmother’s diaries, which I had now technically inherited, that was so dangerous it had gotten Sam killed?

  THE KNOT

  Alexander, finding himself unable to untie the [Gordian] knot, the ends of which were secretly twisted round and folded up within it, cut it asunder with his sword.

  —Plutarch

  The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious one, probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot-cipher tied in the rawhide thong.…

  Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot, when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Greater Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mysteries.

  —Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

  It was nearly three A.M. when I turned on the taps of the big claw-footed tub, praying that the pipes hadn’t frozen, and watched with relief as the hot water splashed into the bath. I dumped in some salts and liquid bubbles, stripped, and climbed in. The tub was so deep, the water went up to my nose, and I blew the bubbles away. Lathering up my road-wrecked hair, I knew I had lots of thinking to do. But my brain was engaged in fuzzy logic—not surprising, given the week’s events and the trauma of my trip home.

  As I soaked there, the bathroom door swung open on squeaky hinges and Jason came strolling in unannounced—which probably meant Olivier, my landlord, had also returned. Jason barely gave me a glance with those penetrating green eyes. He sauntered over and regarded with disdain my soggy silk undergarments on the floor. He started to paw at them, as though he thought my long johns would make a nice litter box, but I reached over and yanked them out from under him.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” I said firmly.

  Jason jumped up on the wooden rim of the tub, stuck out his paw, and batted at the bubbles. He looked at me inquisitively. This was my hint to douse him. Jason was the only cat I knew that loved water—any kind of water. It was normal for him to turn on a sink tap to fetch himself a drink; he preferred a toilet to a litter box; and he was known to jump into the Snake River below the falls to retrieve his favorite little red rubber ball. He could swim in current as well as any dog.

  But tonight—this morning, rather—I was too tired to dry him, so I flicked him off the side of the tub, got out, and toweled myself instead. In my big fluffy bathrobe, my hair wrapped in a towel, I padded to the kitchen and heated some water to make myself a hot buttered rum before bed. I picked up a broom and banged on the ceiling to let Olivier know I was back—though my car abandoned on the road should have been his first clue.

  “Dearest one,” Olivier’s voice soon came floating down the stairway, with his recognizable thick québecois accent. “I snowshoed in from my Jeep, but I wasn’t sure it was proper to send the little argonaut down to you yet—you might already be sleeping. And what about me?”

  “Okay, come down and join me in a quick buttered rum before I crash,” I called back up. “And let me know what’s been going on at work.”

  Olivier Maxfield and I had met some five years back, when we were assigned to a project together. He was a strange amalgam: nuclear engineer and gourmet chef, devotee of Yankee slang and cowboy bars, and unrepentant “Jack” Mormon. He’d been born a French Canadian Catholic in a household devoted to la cuisine française, and now as a latter-day culinary genius himself, those no-alcohol-no-caffeine dietary restrictions of the Latter-day Saints hardly mixed with Olivier’s nouvelle persona.

  The first time he met me, Olivier told me he’d already known I would soon enter his life, for I’d just appeared as the Blessed Virgin in a dream involving a pinball competition between myself and the prophet Moroni. By the end of the first week that we’d worked together, Olivier received a sign that I should be offered cheap rent to move into his downstairs apartment. The actual pinball machine upon which I, as the Virgin Mary, had beaten the prophet had miraculously appeared as a new acquisition of the cowboy bar down the road from our very office.

  Perhaps it was the result of my kooky upbringing, but I found Olivier refreshing at a nuclear site stacked with engineers and physicists, all of whom brown-bagged their lunches and went home by five o’clock so they could watch wholesome TV reruns with their children. I went all the time to parties at the homes of “site families.” In summers they barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs in the backyard; in winters it was spaghetti, salad, and prefab garlic bread in the family room. It was as if no one here in this remote high desert had ever heard of any other manner of dining.

  Olivier, by contrast, had lived in Montreal and Paris and had passed a summer workshop in the south of France with Cordon Bleu. Though perhaps a tightwad about providing landlordly services such as heat and driveway clearing, he did have assets. While mincing, dicing, mouli-ing, and clarifying butter in his enormous industrial kitchen upstairs to prepare the designer meals he cooked for Jason and me at least once a week, he regaled me with tales of the great chefs of Europe, interspersed with the latest fads on the cowboy bar scene. He was, as the French say, “such a one.”

  “What was this huge emergency that called you away?” Olivier’s handsome, dimpled smile appeared around the half-open door from the steps, as he ran his fingers through his curly mop of brown hair and regarded me with large dark eyes. “Where did you disappear to? The Pod was asking after you every day, but I knew nothing.”

  “The Pod” was the widely used nickname of my boss, the director and general manager of the whole nuclear site. It was used behind his back, for though his actual name was Pastor Owen Dart he was anything but shepherdlike. Indeed, the monogram was recognized also as his description: the Prince of Darkness.

  I’d like to argue that this moniker was inappropriate to my boss. But to be perfectly frank, of the ten thousand employees working at the site—or even among the industry muckety-mucks in Washington he hobnobbed with—I was the only one I knew who hadn’t been scalded by the man. At least not yet. The Pod seemed genuinely to like me, and had handpicked me for my job while I was still in university. As a result of this unexpected affinity, not all my colleagues trusted me—another reason why Olivier, the dashing Québecois Mormon cowboy gourmet, was one of my few close friends.

  “Sorry,” I said to Olivier, pouring hot water over the mush of brown sugar, butter, and rum in the two glass mugs and handing one to him. “I had to leave suddenly. There was an unexpected death in the family.”

  “Oh gosh, no one I know, I hope?” said Olivier with a gallantly supportive smile—though we both knew that he knew no one in my family.

  “It was Sam,” I said, trying to wash down the stick in my throat with the buttery hot liquor.

  “Heavens! Your brother?” said Olivier, sinking onto the sofa near the fire.

  “My cousin,” I corrected. “Actually, my stepbrother. We were raised
as brother and sister. In fact, he’s more of a blood brother. Or I mean, he was.”

  “My goodness, your family relations are somewhat complex,” Olivier said, mocking my own retort whenever anyone inquired about my family. “Are you quite certain you were related to this fellow at all?”

  “I’m sole heir to his estate,” I told him. “That’s enough for me.”

  “Ah—then he was rich, but not really close, is that it?” Olivier said hopefully.

  “A bit of each,” I told him. “I was probably closer to him than anyone in my family.” Which wasn’t saying much, but Olivier didn’t know that.

  “Oh, how dreadful for you! But I don’t understand. Why have I never heard of him, then, except for the name? He’s never been to visit, nor called that I know of, in the many years we’ve worked together and shared this humble abode.”

  “Our family communicates psychically,” I told him. Jason was slaloming around my legs as if he were trying to braid a maypole all by himself, so I picked him up and added, “We have no need of satellites or cell phones—”

  “That reminds me,” interrupted Olivier. “Your father’s been calling here for days. Wouldn’t say what he wanted—just that you must phone him at once.”

  Just then the phone rang, startling Jason, who jumped out of my arms.

  “They must be psychic to pick up our vibes at this hour,” said Olivier. As I reached for the phone, he finished his drink and headed for the door. “I’ll make you some pancakes before work, as a welcome home,” he tossed over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

  “Gavroche, darling” were the first words I heard as I picked up the phone.

  Good lord, maybe my family members had suddenly become psychic. It was my uncle Laf. I hadn’t heard from him in ages. He always called me Gavroche: French for a Parisian street urchin.

  “Laf?” I said. “Where are you? You sound a million miles away.”

  “Just now, Gavroche, I am in Wien,” meaning he was at his big eighteenth-century apartment overlooking the Hofburg in Vienna where Jersey and I used to stay—and where it was now eight hours later than it was here, or eleven A.M. his time. Apparently Uncle Laf had never gotten the hang of differing time zones.