Fantastical Ramblings (18 page)

Whythes never passed up a dare. Or so Grumpy, her
great-grandfather had informed her many times.

“What about my life line?” Gabby asked in reply to the old
woman’s question.

“It is broken. Three times. Then it cuts short here.” She
drew a cracked fingernail the color of nicotine across the center of Gabby’s
palm.

“So?”

“Your life will present you with many hard choices.” The
Gypsy clamped her mouth shut and swallowed. Sweat broke out on her brow. Her
throat apple bobbed several times. It protruded like a man’s.

Gabby suppressed a giggle. Maybe the fake Gypsy was also a
fake woman.

“You will meet an interesting man who will change your life,”
the old woman said hurriedly. She dropped her grip on Gabby’s hand and wiped
her own palm on her multi-colored and threadbare skirt. She looked away
furtively.

“And I’ve studied enough psychology to know you’re hiding
something.” Gabby narrowed her focus to the pulse throbbing in the woman’s
neck. Too rapid. Pale skin. Sweat. Definitely the telltales of a lie.

A whopping big lie.

“You... um... you are descended from one who helped my
people many times.” She lowered her eyes and murmured something that might have
been a prayer.

“Yeah, so what. My family traces their genealogy back to God
or someone just as important, like King Arthur. Bound to be someone in there
with a bleeding heart for the downtrodden.”

Gabby had documents taking the family back to 1774 and the
Boston Tea Party. Before that the documents dried up, dissolved into family
legend. Without cross-references and records, Gabby refused to believe her
Grumpy’s
stories
. She’d accept DNA
evidence, especially if there were records suggesting an ancestor had the deep
blue eyes that permeated every generation of her family.

Blue eyes were supposed to be recessive. Not in her family.
They tended to dominate.

Ancient history was just that, ancient. Gabby liked the
rough and tumble frontier politics and survival society of western America.
Give her fur traders and wagon trains and Native Americans any day over tired
and shopworn myths of the old world.

The Gypsy’s eyes flew open. She glared at Gabby
malevolently.

Gabby didn’t back down. She’d learned early how to out-stare
her great-grandfather, who claimed all kinds of psychic powers. Including the
ability to curse an enemy with boils and sores and other such nonsense.

“Your fate is written in the stars and reflected in your
hand,” the Gypsy snarled. The tent grew quiet. All sound outside reduced to a
background hum. The candles and incense seemed to stop flickering.

Gabby held her breath in expectation. She didn’t think she
could breathe if she wanted to. Her pulse sounded loud in her ears, the only
evidence of life and the passage of time.

“I don’t believe in fate. I make my own destiny,” Gabby said
on a long exhale. She drew in another breath by sheer force of will.

“The life line in your palm does not lie,” the old woman
continued in a sing song voice, almost a chant. “The interruptions reveal a
broken path full of obstacles that you will stumble over. Sometimes even fall.
And then you will die young. An ignoble death not worthy of your family’s fine
heritage.”

“That’s a ball of crap!” Gabby exclaimed with glee. Her
family might believe in this hoodoo voodoo stuff, but that didn’t mean she had
to. “The broken parts are where I splattered acid during a chemistry
experiment. And the life line stops because of scar tissue from a deep cut when
I fell out of a tree when I was ten.” Another dare.

“Believe what you will. You cannot change your fate.”

The scene became blurry in Gabriel Griffin Whythe’s memory
as a harsh bell jangled her out of a deep sleep. She had put that incident out
of her mind at the end of her senior year of college. Right after it happened.

“Nonsense and crap,” Gabby muttered.

The scent of incense lingered in her mind and her nose.

The bell kept ringing. Loudly. She jerked her head to look
at the alarm clock. A string of obscenities erupted from her mouth.

“Nine-fifteen in the fricking AM! Shit. I need to get to
work.” Oversleeping was a natural consequence after too many hours of research
and working on her dissertation.

A donor wanted to deposit a trunkload of family journals and
memorabilia at Gabby’s museum. The family had records linking them to Josiah
Ezekiel Marshall, a frontier Methodist missionary who had serviced remote
communities throughout the Oregon Country in the 1840s and ’50s before building
a permanent church and settling down on the high desert plateau of central
Oregon for the final ten years of his life.

For the last six months, Gabby had spent every spare moment
working on her dissertation, exploring the legality and social implications of
the unregistered marriages between fur traders and their Indian wives.

At three this morning she’d come to the sorry conclusion
some vital piece to the giant puzzle was missing. She had thoroughly explored
the legal precedent set by the heirs of Peter Skene Ogden. His east coast
relatives had tried to seize his estate in 1854, claiming that both his
marriages to Indian women had been Indian ceremonies and invalid. Therefore his
children by both women were illegitimate and ineligible to inherit the sizeable
estate.

Ogden’s children had taken their case to the Supreme Court.
The ruling found that since the marriages had been recorded in the Hudson’s Bay
Company books, they were legal under common law—the prevailing legal system of
the time.

In Gabby’s own town of Carter’s Ford, the opposite had
occurred. Emile Carter’s only surviving daughter, Hannah, could not find a
reference to his marriage in any of the Company books and had lost her
inheritance to greedy cousins. No one believed Mary Carter, the widow, when she
claimed a Christian marriage. She had no papers to prove it.

Lots of examples. Lots of research. Still something was
missing. And Gabby was running out of time to finish the dissertation.

She’d interviewed for a job curating the local university’s
collection of historical artifacts going back nearly ten thousand years.
Getting hired depended upon her finishing her dissertation by the end of the
year. November had come a week ago. She was running out of time.

With any kind of luck Josiah Marshall’s journals would
contain a few nuggets of insight into the situation. From what she’d read of
his exploits, mostly second-hand information, he’d spent a good deal of his
missionary time persuading fur traders and mountain men to marry their Indian
wives in Christian—and therefore legal—ceremonies.

Old Josiah Marshall didn’t approve of Indian ceremonies or
of the Hudson’s Bay Company practice of recording the marriage in their books
as if they were business transactions. Company clerks recorded marriages right
alongside inventories of supplies sold to the fur trader.

She rolled out of bed and slapped the alarm off in one
awkward movement.

She tripped and almost fell trying to cram her legs into
panty hose and her one and only power suit of sapphire wool, the same color as
her eyes. Then she stubbed her toe on her discarded boots as she ran to the
bathroom to brush her teeth.

Damn. She was never this clumsy.

Crawling and cursing, she fished her good black shoes with
the sensible one and one half inch heels out from under the bed.

If she broke every speed limit in town and hit all the
lights right she should be able to greet the Marshall descendant on time with a
mask of professional calm and a courteous handshake.

Another bell startled her. She banged her head on the bed
frame trying to get up from her awkward stretch to retrieve the elusive shoe.

The doorbell sounded again. This time, the obnoxiously early
person leaned on it as if they had a mission.

“Go away,” she shouted, rubbing the back of her head with
one hand and brushing dust panthers off her suit with the other.

The bell rang again, longer, louder.

“Then let yourself in if you’re in such an all-fired hurry!”
She had a vague recollection of slamming the door closed without locking it
about midnight when she’d stumbled home from the small house museum she ran.

The latch lifted and the door swung inward, propelled by
unseen hands.

Gabby shivered. Memories of her dream and the eerie feeling
surrounding the Gypsy woman lingered. She still smelled burning incense, an
exotic blend of patchouli and jasmine. Funny, now that she thought about it,
friends at the University said that the Renaissance Fair folded and never
returned to campus after Gabby graduated with a double major in History and
Anthropology, concentrating on the Pacific Northwest. The Fair organizers had
shown up for the first time five years earlier, at the end of her freshman
year.

“Ms. Whythe?” an imperious voice asked.

Gabby looked up to see a tall male silhouetted in the
morning light.

“Wh... who needs to know?” She had a sudden fear of a family
summons back to Boston. She didn’t have the time to fly off to one of Grumpy’s
deathbed scenes. He performed them about every five years, conning family
members into conforming to his expectations so they could inherit his fortune.
Then he’d miraculously recover, only to succumb again when the family drifted
away from his strictures.

Gabby didn’t care about the family fortune. She’d built her
own life, determined her own fate.

Her left foot finally plopped into place against the sole of
her shoe. She started working on the right.

“Your Great-grandfather Roderick Griffin Whythe IV, sent me.”
The man stepped through the door of her tiny bungalow on the outskirts of the
University town.

“What does Grumpy want now?” She hadn’t been back to the
family estate in Boston or to any of the family gatherings in ten years. Not
only did she not have the interest, the three thousand mile trek would take too
much time away from her work. The emotional commitment of dealing with probing
questions from the gaggle of her extended family would take too much energy and
creativity away from her work.

The last reason was more compelling to keep her away from
her family than just the time. She had six weeks of vacation saved up. But she
planned to add it to her sabbatical next year to join an archaeological dig of a
Hudson’s Bay Trading Post in Montana.

“Mr. Whythe has requested that I find a home for this female
puppy. The last of the litter his bitch whelped six months ago,” the man
intoned. He looked down his long nose at Gabby.

She had to look up a long way to meet his eyes.

“Well I can’t take a dog. Certainly not now. I’ve got to get
to my museum.” Gabby got to her knees in preparation to standing. What was it
about Grumpy’s dogs? Something important to the lineage. She didn’t really
care.

A long wet tongue slurped across her face. A pair of deep
gray eyes, intelligent eyes, appeared above the tongue. Gabby found herself
staring deeply into those eyes. Deep pools of understanding and wisdom...

Something akin to communication nagged at her perceptions.

Nonsense.

“Oh, dear. I was afraid this would happen,” the man said. He
sounded as distressed as his funereal voice could.

“Hey, aren’t you Grumpy’s butler?” Gabby finally recognized
the man’s voice. She hadn’t seen him in a decade but she’d never forget that
disapproving voice. He uttered every word as if she were the lowliest worm
crawling out from beneath rotting wood.

“Ian McTavis VI, at your service, ma’am.” He executed a
slight bow from the waist. But he didn’t sound happy. Not at all.

Gabby used the tall dog’s shoulder as a prop to get to her
feet. The dog gratefully leaned into her side and looked up at her with adoring
eyes. In another time, another place, under completely different circumstances,
she might have returned the look. She settled for scratching the pup’s ears.

Cymorth
.

The strange word popped into Gabby’s head. Almost as if the
puppy had said something. She had the strange sense that the pup wanted to help
her.

Pup? The brindled wolfhound might be only six months old but
it stood almost as tall as her hip. By the time she reached her full growth,
she’d outweigh Gabby by fifty pounds or more.

“Couldn’t afford to feed you, even if I could take care of
you, pup,” Gabby said, stuffing keys, wallet, ID badge, and a packet of tissues
into her good black purse.

“Lock the door on your way out, Ian. I’ve got to get going.
And good luck finding a home for the pup.”

“Did she tell you her name?” Ian asked skeptically.

“Not hardly. Dogs can’t talk.”

“You might think so now,” Ian muttered.

Gabby dashed for her little electric car. Ecologically sound
it might be, but not a speed demon. Traffic around campus in the morning was
always a mess, increasing her commute time. She didn’t have any time to spare.

The dog bounded after her. Gabby tripped over her trying to
get the car unlocked.

“Sorry. You can’t come with me. Hey, Ian, come get the dog.”
What was it about Grumpy’s dogs? Something important. Something about the dog’s
choosing the heir.

Heir to what? Grumpy’s millions would go a long way toward
restoring her little jewel of a museum and hiring extra help while she finished
her dissertation.

“The dog is no longer my responsibility,” Ian said. He
sounded upset. Maybe he didn’t want to give the dog away at all. “She has
chosen her new owner. Your fates are now sealed together.”

“Not bloody likely,” Gabby snarled at him. That was twice
today she’d been told her fate was fixed. Once in the dream memory. And now
from impassive Ian.

“Grumpy had seven children.” Four of them legitimate. “They
each had at least two children and I don’t know how many grandchildren. Surely
one of them would make a better owner for a wolfhound than me.” Angrily she
pushed the dog aside as it tried to climb into the little car ahead of her.