Blood Spirits (59 page)

I shut my eyes, determined not to see them. When I opened my eyes, they were gone.

“I'm thinking about how delicious the dinner is,” I said, retreating to the safety of food. “I owe it to your chef to savor each bite.”

He gave me an odd smile, leaned toward me—then sat back as Nonni came in with the dessert borne triumphantly in a beautiful soup tureen that didn't quite match the breakfast service but had to be two hundred years old—and carried on a heavy-looking solid silver tray, engraved with falcons and other martial symbols of the baroque period.

With the air of a magician she served out
Poires Belle-Hélène.

The first bite was heavenly. Nonni beamed as I exclaimed, “Delicious!”

Cackling, she bore off the dinner dishes. “Coffee soon,” she said. “Coffee soon.”

I scarcely heard her. I was too engrossed with the pear dish. Flavor rolled across my tongue to the edges as I savored the undertones of lemon zest and vanilla bean, with which the pears had been poached. The chocolate sauce—the thin almond slivers—the crème Chantilly all brought me back to our battered kitchen table in Santa Monica.

I took another bite. Oh yes. I knew every ingredient. In fact, I could name them, and how much, and the order in which they were added.

I laid my spoon down with absorbing care, as if the slightest motion would cause it to explode. Or the plate. Or me.

This was not weird times, or ghost-vision. This was reality, and all my old anger flared up, hot and bright.

Tony watched me over his wine glass.

“A funny thing,” I said. “Though I grew up in a dinky house, and carried my lunch to school in a Disney lunch pail like all the other girls, all my life I've had blue ribbon desserts.”

Tony set down the glass.

“After I turned nine, the food I carried was usually five-star French cuisine. Because my mom was sent to Cordon Bleu training by her hotshot Hollywood catering service so she could work on other things besides desserts. She fed us her homework. Dishes like that dinner. Which I've had once. But chefs have signature dishes. It's why people would travel eighty miles to eat
Crème brûlée
at a hole-in-the-wall that wasn't that great otherwise. My mother, you probably know, is a blue ribbon pastry chef, though she calls herself a cake-decorator. That's because she loves doing wedding cakes, but
Poires Belle-Hélène
is her specialty. Tony, if you kidnapped my mother, I am going to . . .”

“Going to what?”

“Get revenge in the nastiest, most painful, most humiliating way possible.”

There was a long, agonizing pause while he looked out the dark window. I don't know what he saw. “I should have thought of that. Kim, I was going to tell you, but when we returned to Riev. Yes, I see that's making it worse. Before you ruin this superlative food with your righteousness, consider this: what if your mother wanted to come to Dobrenica?”

“Oh, right.”

“Do you really believe I would be able to force my way into Milo's house to pinch your mother without any cooperation from her?”

“I think if you thought it would hurt Milo and Alec enough, you would do exactly that. Or any other sucktastic thing to win the ‘game.' I cannot believe my mother put on a Lucille Ball wig and came along in secret to Dobrenica to cook for your horrible family.”

“No, she dyed her hair before we left Paris. The plan was actually your father's suggestion—you know I've been running my own investigation.”

“Against Alec.”

“To find out the truth,” he retorted. “Alec was the chief suspect, but he was so chief it was too easy.”

That gave me pause.

Tony went on. “Your mother was worried about you after some phone call. Your father suggested she volunteer as a chef, since I was trying unsuccessfully to find an Interpol agent who was Cordon Bleu trained, and who was willing to come to Dobrenica. See it from our perspective.” Tony jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Alec has the resources. And the loyalty to him personally. That's why I called Gilles. I knew he had a friend who worked out of the Interpol offices in Lyon. He refused the first time I asked, but the night Honoré's house burned down, I called Gilles again when the entire family was at the Ridotskis'. I will say this for him, he was here that night—paid for a private plane, brought his mate, cover story in hand—punk filmmakers by day and dressed innocuously when investigating. Nobody pegged 'em, but they've lagged a step behind events ever since.”

“And Milo? What did you tell him?”

“That I was after the truth. He said he would help me any way he could.”

“So he sent my mother? Your Interpol guys can't find out who's behind the poisoning? It's got to be my
mom?
”

“Anyone I put in my home had to be someone I could trust, after what happened to Honoré and his dog. Milo agreed with your father's suggestion—”

“If Gilles's punk guys really are Interpol, what have they been doing, besides asking the wrong people nosy questions?”

“I told you, they've been a step behind, between watching Alec and investigating and keeping up with the various murder attempts.”

“Various? Other than that crossbow the other night—oh, yes, and the iced driveway at Ridotski House—isn't that pretty much confined to Honoré?”

Tony held up a hand and counted fingers. “Honoré three times. The Ridotski family once, on the same night as yours and Robert's crossbow incident at the opera gala. Alec once. And me twice.”

THIRTY-FIVE

“W
HAT? SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL ALEC?”

“Gilles told me right before I picked you up at the inn.”

“What happened?”

“Someone tried to poison him.” Tony finished off his wine. “Luckily, Alec wasn't around.”

“Madam Emilio was out on errands and returned to find things subtly shifted about in the kitchen. She summoned Kilber, and he recognized the bitter almond smell of cyanide. On his orders they threw everything out.” Tony grinned. “You should enjoy this. They found your scarf in the garden. The one everyone had been seeing you wearing for a week.”

“It was a setup!”

“Of course it was. Gilles thinks the scarf was supposed to caused rumors, but whoever did it counted without Kilber's way of shutting down rumor.”

“And someone tried to kill you, too?” I asked.

“Twice. But as Uncle Robert was once heard to lament, I am very hard to kill. And the attempts seem to be getting steadily more wild. We don't know if those attempts are part of the same conspiracy or a separate one. There are also stray facts, like the test results that came yesterday about my mother's anti-depressants, which were given her by her doctor after the news about Ruli. She acts doped until she crashes. So one of my errands in Paris was to have them analyzed. Someone substituted her pills for morphine.”

“So back to my mom.”

“She put together her disguise herself. You are the first one to find out who she is, aside from Gilles.”

“Who's protecting her while you're here with me?”

“Percy is staying there with my mother and uncle. He hasn't much training, but he's as strong as a horse, and he can be persistent. Between Percy and Uncle Jerzy, your mother and everyone else at the house should survive until my return.”

“Has Mom discovered anything?”

“She's only been here five or six days, but I can tell you this, she terrorized the entire household into obedience. It helps that the food is superb. And no food comes in or goes out without ‘Madame Tullée' personally overseeing it. When Luc serves it, she goes along with him.”

“‘Tullée!' I bet she picked that name for the nasty tule fog that appears on Highway 5. Just her kind of joke.”

“Nothing foggy about her. When I left, she was standing over my mother, supervising every bite. I have to say, watching those two is better than television.”

“It might be horrible if they figure out who she is.”

Tony lifted a shrug. “I'm beginning to think your mother will carry it off. She loves Paris—they'll have that in common. Talked about it most of the flight to Riev. She'd picked up a lot during her October visit. I filled her in on other details my mother would know about current life there. No one has questioned her credibility.”

I couldn't get over the idea that Mom was actually in Riev playing sleuth, but I'd just finished the last bite of her signature dessert, and my palate knew that her hands had created it.

“What about my dad, Gran, and Milo? What's up with them?”

“No clue. Finished? Misha promised to give a concert this evening.”

“A concert?” In the middle of a war, I was going to say, but I bit it back. We were locked safely inside the lit building, where vampires could not enter. And apparently this was Yet Another Day at the secret military field outpost.

We walked upstairs. In the distance, four men's voices rose and fell in a Russian folk melody, then ended in laughter and a scattering of applause. Tony opened the door onto a warm, lit room, painted in pale yellow, with white scrollwork in arabesques around the ceiling and pilasters. On the side walls were enlightenment-era paintings, and opposite the windows enormous oval mirrors framed with golden scrollwork.

“Misha likes an audience when he practices,” Tony said.

The kid had obviously been waiting. He beamed at me, polished his clarinet on his patch-kneed trousers with an absent gesture that seemed more habitual than purposeful, then he raised the clarinet and began to play.

It was like a concert except the listeners sat on the floor, wearing hunting boots and knives at their belts. Niklos lounged in the second window seat as he took apart and cleaned a rifle. The boy began Maurice Ravel's
Pavanne
—and the room began to fill with people.

I was seated on a velvet-covered hassock tucked up against a pilaster. From this vantage it was easier to watch Misha in one of the mirrors. It was amazing that this boy's red, puffed cheeks and stubby fingers were able to produce such heart-rending music. Was there magic in his magic? So intent was my tired focus, I paid no attention to the gathering crowd except to appreciate how quiet they were . . .

Until three barefoot kids stood hand-in-hand in front of the dark window, gazing raptly. Misha faltered. He glanced up, almost eye to eye with a shaggy-haired boy in a ragged, homespun tunic, then he played on.

I could see Misha through all three.

I sat upright and peered around the pilaster. Sure enough, Misha was playing alone. Yet I would swear he'd seen those ghosts.

I turned back to the mirror, and there they were, reflected in the window glass, through Misha.

They were so still that at first I thought the blurring of their outlines no more than the ghostly vapor that Tania had talked about, until I noticed how very shaggy the blond boy was. His hair had thickened to a wild ruff, his hairline arcing down to his nose. His lengthening nose. The backs of his hands ruffled up into fur, and when I glanced back to his face, a jolt ran along my nerves when I saw a wolf's head atop his sloping shoulders.

The boy turned my way, his chatoyant eyes glowing a feral red as he gazed straight at me in the mirror. To his side the smaller boy and the girl had also changed, one into a lynx and the other into a Shepherd dog.

Both looked my way. As the song trilled toward its ending the three gave powerful leaps and bounds directly through the wall to the south, and vanished.

Misha finished, glanced thoughtfully at the wall, then shook his instrument as the listeners clapped and hailed him.

Did
anyone
see that? I took a look, but no one seemed alarmed, surprised, upset. Misha was alone in the center of the room. I did not want to call attention to myself any more than I wanted to interrupt him, so I counseled myself in patience as he performed an arrangement by Debussy that shot me right back to my childhood, dancing as my grandmother played piano. But the memory visit was brief, because my mind was caught in the now. I watched carefully, but the ghosts did not reappear in window, mirror, or in the room.

When the song finished, once again everyone applauded, though there were fewer in the room. Misha began taking his instrument apart to put it away, and as the others got up to go, falling into conversation in a way that suggested that they were accustomed to these practices, I walked up to the boy.

“Did you like it, Mam'zelle?” he asked.

I gave him the compliments he deserved—though it was a struggle to find superlatives powerful enough—then I stepped a little closer and said in a low voice, “Those ghosts. You see them, right?”

“Fyadar?” he asked, and my nerves fired.

“That's Fyadar?” I exclaimed, biting down the
I thought he was just a legend.
My grandmother had told me stories about Fyadar and his child companions when I was small. In fact, it was those half-remembered stories that had prompted my quest to find her relatives, when she sank into the depression that nearly became a coma, the spring before.

And Theresa had shared the forbidden comic books that several generations of Dobreni kids had made during the long decades of occupation.

Fyadar was real?

Misha shrugged. “That's what I call him, when he talks. They don't always talk. But they like my music,” he said, flashing a grin. “They come most often when I am alone and play on the hillside near the arch.” He pointed. “But nobody believed me. You are the first grownup to see them.” He looked enquiringly at me.