The Hawley Book of the Dead (30 page)

“Reve,” Jolon cut in, his voice gentle. “I need you to talk this through with me. That’s how you can help them now.”

I nodded. I tried to drive the sick, lurching feeling back where it came from.

“First of all, do you have any reason to believe the twins would take off without telling anyone?”

“No. That’s not something they’d do.”

“Did they want to move here? Didn’t they miss their school, their friends?” He hesitated, just for a beat. “Could they have run away?”

“That just isn’t like them. They’d think of their horses first. They have nothing with them but some water. They didn’t take their packs. No grain for the horses, nothing even to tether them for the night. And they’re too smart to think they could ride back to Nevada. If they meant to leave, they would have taken one of my credit cards, booked a flight, got on a train or bus. But they didn’t. Every credit card, my cash, my bank card, are all accounted for. I checked my wallet, believe me.”

Jolon wrote something, clicked his pen some more. “Okay. Let’s table the running-away possibility. I know your husband died earlier this year. Are you single now?”

I must have looked at him like he had two heads.

“I’m sorry.” His eyes turned down to his forms again before he asked, “Was your husband the girls’ father?”

“God, yes!”

“Reve, I’m just trying to ascertain if there’s anyone who might have reason to kidnap them. I have to be frank. For the girls’ sake.”

I had to sit down. I slumped into the chair farthest from Jolon. “I know that. No, I don’t have a fiancé, a boyfriend, a lover. I work at home now, have no friends here, don’t know anyone but you. The girls are tutored at home. Nathan tutors them. He’s also their cousin, and lived with us for years. They have no boyfriends here, either, that I know of. I don’t know anyone who’d want to … to do anything to harm them. Except Rigel Voss.”

“Reve,” he said my name again in a patient, calming voice that if anything, ratcheted up my terror. “I think we need to keep operating on the information that Rigel Voss is dead.”

I glared at him. “All right, have it your way. The Fetch, then. Call him whatever you want, Jolon. Whoever he is, I know he’s here. I know he’s found us!”

I suddenly remembered that Caleigh was still up, playing board games now with Nathan, plying her string as she did so. She didn’t need to know any of this, and she was probably listening in with her acute hearing. She would have to be questioned, as well. But that would be for the morning, when a child advocate would come out, Jolon had told me. A child advocate.

I got up and shut the kitchen door. I poured myself some coffee, gulped it. The black coffee was too hot; it scalded my mouth.

“As soon as I heard from you, I called the Las Vegas PD again,” Jolon told me. “Just to see if they could tell me anything more. But they couldn’t.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

Jolon had also contacted the few bed-and-breakfasts and private campgrounds in the area. He even found the ranger who patrolled the state forest campground, playing darts at Pizza by Earl. The B and Bs had only families staying. It was late in the season for the state campground to have many takers, even with the warm weather. One single male, a bow hunter, had taken a cabin at Candy Cane Park two days before. Jolon sent two officers to the park, but they came up with nothing. They ran the guy’s New York plates, the car registered to an Abel Carmichael, a retired roofer from Syracuse, married, two grown sons. Nothing out of the ordinary, but they slunk up to the window for a closer look. The curtain was cracked, the guy watching TV, alone. They knocked on the door, showed their badges, asked him a few questions. Carmichael was just a guy from New York State hoping to bag a deer.

“Why didn’t they search his cabin?”

“No probable cause,” Jolon said. “We can’t haul in every stranger.”

“Jolon, I know the Fetch is in Hawley. Let’s cut the crap.”

“Okay. Whoever he is, he might be in Hawley. Let’s go with that. Have you received any more threats since that e-mail you forwarded to me?”

“No. Only that one e-mail, saying he would find me. Us.”

“You know the stalker’s a male?”

“Speculating.” I sucked in more coffee. It smelled the way I imagined brimstone might. “Look, I know the detectives assigned to the case didn’t believe me. Did they tell you they think I planned Jeremy’s murder?”

“Not in so many words. Anyway, I like to form my own opinions.” He looked at me in the deep way I knew so well, solemn, seeking, as if he might be reading my soul. “I know a lot has changed, but I know you, Reve. You didn’t plan your husband’s death, or the twins’ disappearance. Magician or not. Just so you know where I stand, and we can move on. I believe in your stalker. I believe he could have found you. I may not believe he’s who you think he is, but what I do need is some concrete evidence, something I can get a handle on, so we can find your girls. Until we know, let’s hope they’re just a little lost. Okay?”

He was right, of course he was. “Okay.”

“Now I’d like to take a look at the barn, and get a brush or saddle pad that has the horses’ scent, just in case we need to bring in tracking dogs in the morning.”

I nodded, took a ragged breath.

“I’ll go out first at dawn,” Jolon said. “I have some experience tracking. The tracks will be all muddied up if we send dogs out first.” He saw my look. “I trained in Maine with a Native American Jesuit priest who’s one of the best trackers in the country. I went to police academy, and then worked in Worcester County. I still kept my hand in as a consultant to the state police as a tracker. Eventually, they hired me on full-time, to lead search and rescue in eastern Mass. A few months ago, the police chief job came up in Hawley. So here I am. The state cops would ordinarily be in charge, but I was asked to head up this search, since I have the experience and know the forest so well.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Reve, is it a problem that I’m the one in charge of the investigation?”

I looked into his clear eyes and lied outright. “Not at all.” Although I knew it would be. A problem for me, but more so for him. I knew he would never rest until my girls were found. That’s how it had always been with us. Jolon would do anything for me. That was the way he loved me. He still did. That was in his eyes, too. I wanted to warn him, I wanted to tell him how dangerous I was to anyone who loved me, how anyone without a death wish should just stay away from me. But my girls needed him and I was silent.

The hall clock tolled midnight. We waited in silence for the twelve
deep tones to sound, like the extinguishing of hope. Grace and Fai had been gone nine hours.

Caleigh was curled up on the sofa, fast asleep. Nathan dozed near her.

I went up to my office. I went for the Book. I walked right by the mirror across from my desk. I didn’t look directly in it. I knew I looked like hell. The mirror had been downstairs when Jolon and I were children. We had peered through the windows into its silver plane, speckled with age. The mirror made us look like ghost children. Now, my eye caught the edge of it, and I had to look again. I didn’t see myself at all, just the reflection of black sky, and the portrait of my great-great-grandmother.

Then I saw a flash of light that seemed to come from the mirror. The sky reflection wavered and broke, giving way to a woman with chestnut hair, holding a sword before her. She had the face of the woman in the portrait, only younger, more implacable. It didn’t seem like a reflection. The mirror looked like a doorway to another world altogether.

I leapt up, and my chair flew across the room on its casters. The mirror quivered, then reflected only blackness again. I felt my scalp contract, all the hair standing up on it. My legs collapsed like someone had cut my strings, and I fell against the desk, then to the floor. “Shit, shit!” I’d turned my ankle during my fall. “Stupid mirror! Great. This place
is
haunted.” I sat rubbing my ankle, swearing under my breath, then propped myself in my desk chair. My ancestor gazed at me calmly from the boundaries of her frame. “What are
you
looking at?” Her placid eyes were not at all like those of the warrior woman who’d shone in the mirror.

Seriously shaken, I picked up
The Hawley Book of the Dead
, held it. I thought of Jeremy. My own dead. I wanted him with a physical ache. I felt guilty when I didn’t think of him. It had been only two months, and I was beginning to forget things, little things. I wanted to remember everything,
not lose one memory. How he tied the rope for the trick called Magic Knot. How he shaved, which cheek he began with. How he’d coat his food with pepper and make us all sneeze. How he held me hard. Not as if I was some fairy princess, but as if he trusted that I was solid in the world, would never break. I desperately wanted him with me now, to help me out of this horror story.

My hands slipped the Book open. I smelled not lilacs this time, but Jeremy. The nutmeg smell of his skin. I began to feel light-headed, then dizzy, as if I were falling down a tunnel of light. I fell and fell, but kept hold of the Book. When I landed, it wasn’t the past I saw. I saw Kilcoole Beach, that strand ringing the flat and shining Irish Sea. I was standing on the gorse-lined path from our house on the Sea Road, the old stone house built by Jeremy’s grandfather for his Irish wife. She could look out at the changing skies over the sea, and walk to it when she liked. It was a walk we took nearly every day we were there, Jeremy and I, leaving the damp-walled house, the peat fire banked for our return, the walk to the seawall and beyond.

It was not like a dream or a memory; it was not like anything but reality, with the terns keening above me, the wind in my face. I headed toward the beach, walking slowly, expecting something, my heart pounding in my chest, echoing the rush of waves that lapped the sand. At the end of our path, I turned to the south, and the seawall was before me. Only a tumble of rocks really, separating the beach from the grassy hummocks of marshland, and the railroad tracks that ran like a scar by the sea.

There, where he’d come every summer since he was a boy, Jeremy sat looking out toward England. His bright hair shone against the pearly sky. He wore his dreadful old speckled mackintosh, his surety against the Irish rain.

I stood paralyzed, until he turned to me and smiled. As if he’d been expecting me. “You’d might as well have a chat, since you’ve come all this way, love.” He patted the rock next to him. I walked toward him, but I was afraid to speak, afraid to touch him, terrified that at any moment he’d vanish. “Don’t worry.” He took my hand. He wove his fingers through mine, and they felt blessedly real. I threw my arms around him then, felt
his solid presence in that world, at least. My tears, bottled up for so long, let go like the dam had burst. I wept against his shoulder.

“I thought you were dead!” I wailed into his musty rubber coat. That smell convinced me like nothing else that in this dimension at least he was as real as I.

He stroked my hair, said, “But I
am
dead.” I looked up into his eyes then. They were full of love, and something else, a longing. “I am dead, I am real, and this is a place we can meet. While you need me.”

“Jeremy … I’ll always need you.… But you don’t know … oh, Jeremy. The twins are gone, and I don’t know what I’m doing. What will I do, Jeremy? What should I do?”

“Shh, shh.” He pulled me closer, and I thought I could feel his heart beating. I thought if I could stay there forever I’d be happy. Then he said, “But you won’t be, you know. Not without our girls.”

“You can read my mind?”

He laughed. “In a certain way, I suppose I can. You know, if I could go back with you, I’d be the greatest mentalist who ever lived.”

“Then come with me … help me!”

“That’s not the way it works, love. I only wish.”

I pulled away enough to look into his eyes again, trying to take him all in while I could. His arching eyebrows, the planes of his face, so dear to me, almost forgotten in the months since I’d held him in my arms while he died.

“But what
you
can do is look around you, take stock.”

“Do you know where they are? Are they …” I couldn’t say the word.

“Dead, like me? I’ll tell you what I know.”

He took my hand again. His was warm, and comfort seemed to flow from it. “What I know is this. You can bring them back, and only you. Don’t be afraid to use the tools you’ve been given. Don’t be afraid at all, and you’ll be all right. You’re brave, you know. Think of yourself doing Without a Net. How you always had the courage to take that plunge. Trust yourself.”

He paused, then said, “And trust Jolon. Let him help you. He’s a good man.” I didn’t call him on it, didn’t ask how he knew about Jolon at all, or
what he was like, since they’d never met. “He’s smart, too. Smarter than me, obviously.” I opened my mouth to protest, but Jeremy stopped me.

“Sshh. He’s smarter than me, as I’m dead and he’s not. Simple logic, you know. But I’m with you, too.” He put his hand over my heart. “In here.” He raised that hand to touch my brow. “And here. We’re together, Reve. Don’t doubt it. You have the strength of both of us now, love. And the magic. Double magic. The magic you were born with, and the magic that I’ve taught you. Remember …”

Kilcoole Beach started fading, and Jeremy, too. I reached to hold him, stretched to kiss him. Our lips met and I felt that liquid rush of tenderness only the kisses of the well and truly married hold. Then he was gone.

I looked up and it was still dark. The moon had risen over the hill. I was in Hawley again, in my office, alone. It seemed impossible that Jeremy was not still with me. Whatever visions the Book gave, they seemed so real. He seemed so
real
. Even thoughts of the musty mackintosh made me want to weep and never stop.

Then I heard the hall clock chime again, three sepulchral notes. Twelve hours, now. I tried to shake off my misery, take stock, as Jeremy had told me to. So I could bring our girls back, from wherever they might be.

I’d waited to call my parents, but by seven o’clock I couldn’t bear it anymore.