Doh! “Speaking of doctors. Why can’t we ask Nat to check?”
“Natalie.” Beka breathed her name, and threw the car into gear. “A very good idea. I will consult my grandfather at once.”
While we were gone, most of the upper level streets had been cleared. A short time later we parked behind Sobieski Square. Beka shut off the engine. “It should only take a moment.” Her smile was slightly mocking. “That’s all the time he ever has to spare for interruptions.”
She slammed the door shut and walked briskly into the Council building. I looked over my shoulder at Tania in the back seat. “I didn’t know that this job was going to involve vampires and politics,” I said. “Any time you want to quit and return to what you were doing, I will completely understand.”
Tania’s wide gaze shifted to me. “The vampires I learned about when I first joined the Salfmattas. It is not as secret as the Devil’s Mountain people think.”
“Well, it was a big surprise to me.”
The corners of her mouth lifted briefly, a flicker of a smile. “I think that you bring surprises to Dobrenica, but it has surprises for you.”
“Got that right.” The words came out oddly in Dobreni. “Very true.”
“For the rest,” she added in a low voice, “when I think that otherwise today I would have had to sweep the store, then polish all the brilliants, and then tend those customers Madam Petrov did not want to talk to. . . .” She shrugged. “I only miss grinding lenses.”
“You can go back to working with lenses, but we’ll talk about that plan later.” I studied the Council building. Beka was nowhere in sight. “Sure is a long moment, if the Prime Minister is even there.”
I fought the urge to get out of the car and go poke around inside. My head had that achy, on-the-verge-of-dizzy sense, and I was still getting after-images of Alec lying unconscious on the back seat of his own car and a totally unwanted imaginary image of Tony cutting open a vein with an ancient knife.
I glanced back at Tania. “Do you see any ghosts hanging around me?”
“No,” she replied.
Time to experiment, since Beka was still not out yet. I took the prism from my pocket and balanced it on my hand so the weak light coming in the windshield shone through it. Rainbow colors spilled and glittered with the intensity of sun-splashes on water, but I couldn’t make out anything in them.
My eyes teared up. I put the thing away and blinked after-image spots from my vision for several minutes.
They were still dappling my sight when Beka came marching out, her face tense. She got in the car, started the engine, then locked the doors.
“Thank you for waiting,” she began. Her voice trembled. She pressed her fingertips together, like someone bracing up inwardly. “I did not see my grandfather yesterday evening. You know that I was with Honoré, then searching for you and Alec. Because of the storm, Grandfather spent the night with my uncle and aunt.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering why she was giving us all this backfill.
“So he was not able to tell me what was in those witness testimonies until now,” she said. “In one, Dr. Kandras testifies that Magda Stos confessed to him that, during October, she overheard Alec on the phone, with you, planning your family’s visit to Milo as the first stage of a conspiracy.”
“What?”
“And once Ruli was dead, you would all come to Dobrenica together, with Milo, to heal the grieving nation.”
I gritted my teeth on an explosion of wrath. “That’s a freaking lie.” Beka’s eyes were angry. “I know. First of all, if Alec was stupid enough to form a conspiracy while talking on the palace line, with half a dozen assistants in earshot, he would deserve to be discovered. But he would do such a thing. No, there is definitely a conspiracy, and Magda must be deeply in it, or why would she lie?”
“So what do we do now?”
“My grandfather said to wait. He will recommend that the investigative committee compel Magda’s actual presence here, so that she can be questioned by the Council. He also said that he would talk to the bishop.”
I sagged back in the seat. Then burst out, “What is the point of all those lies? Surely they’ll be proved wrong. They can’t believe Milo would assent to any plan to off Ruli. Not with his record.”
She made a quick gesture, as if pushing something aside. “To drag Milo’s name in is to taint everyone. Everyone.” She shut her eyes.
“What I’d like to do,” I muttered, “is find Tony, tie him to a chair, and pour boiling oil onto his head until he tells the truth.”
“I would drive you to his house right now and personally boil the oil,” Beka said. “But Grandfather also told me that Tony flew out directly after the Council meeting yesterday, ahead of the storm. To Paris. He says, to interview cooks.”
“Then he can bring that Magda Stos back along with this hypothetical new cook, if someone calls him.”
“Oh, that is being done. My grandfather himself has been trying to call the von Mecklundburgs’ Paris flat.” Beka flushed angrily.
Nobody spoke again as Beka drove us back to the inn, and Tania and I climbed wearily out of the car. Beka took off with a roar that reminded me of Phaedra, as my new personal assistant and I trooped inside. I longed to eat something, take a long bath—hopefully it was early enough for hot water—and pour my exhausted body into bed.
The prism thumped against my side as I shut the door behind me.
The first thing I heard was Madam Waleska’s bullhorn squawk. “No! Everyone knows that Americans spit upon the floors. She has very clean habits, as she is French!”
As I stepped into the dining room, this is what met my eyes:
Honoré with short platinum hair, jeans, and a leather bomber jacket.
A tall, smiling, red-haired Armandros.
A bunch of punk and Goth guys fooling around with camera stuff, and—
Shurisko’s ghost.
All except the ghost dog stopped what they were doing to turn my way. Shurisko bounded around and through the table where Armandros and the blond Honoré sat, making me dizzy enough to stumble against the counter. I stopped, shut my eyes, and tried to banish the dog.
When I opened my eyes, he was gone. Good. Luckless as I was at seeing ghosts when I wanted them, maybe I could at least un-see them.
“Ah, here is Mademoiselle Dsaret herself,” Madam Waleska announced, emphasizing the “Mademoiselle.” And to me, “I shall fetch your tea at once.”
As she bustled away, she muttered loudly, “No American drinks tea. They threw it into the ocean, everyone knows that!”
The door to the kitchen shut crisply.
I forced myself into the dining area. The locals had given the newcomers a wide berth, I noticed—especially one of the Goths, a huge guy with three-inch spikes dyed black at the roots and orange at the tips. His nose, lip, and ears sported piercings, and he was dressed completely in black. He was arguing with a skinny punk guy dressed in black, red, and green, with short blue hair. They spoke fast, highly idiomatic French as they argued about light filters.
I forced my gaze away from them and back to Honoré, only it couldn’t be Honoré, not only because of that short platinum hair and the long dangling earring, but because of that manic smile.
“Gilles?” I said.
I’d thought it impossible that such a grin could widen, but it did. He leaped from his chair, arms out as if to hug me. “You know me, you! Hear! I speak him, the perfect English. I am a filmmaker. How many you know the stars?”
Out of metro L.A.’s population of nearly twenty million, so far no stars, I was tempted to retort. But I wasn’t going to go there. Yet.
“None,” I said in French, taking in the guy who resembled my grandfather’s ghost. He had to be the mysterious Uncle Jerzy. There was the lopsided smile so many of Armandros’s descendants—and ancestors shared—with Tony’s charm and Tony’s slanted gaze, though his eyes were light brown. His hair was red with silver on the sides, and silver a
lso spangled the front. Like the duchess and my mom, he was very good-looking for his age. His face was broader than Tony’s. Age had deepened the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth.
“I hope you do not mind that I came along with Gilles,” he said in French, hands out in greeting. “To listen to him interview you. It was time we met.”
I remembered being told about the friendly man who’d asked questions about me. “You were here once before, right?” I asked.
“Jerzy von Mecklundburg. Enchanté.” He lifted his shoulders. “I missed you that morning.” He clasped one of my hands in both of his. My fingers were cold. I only realized it when I felt how warm his hands were. “The lady of the house was full of stories about you, Mademoiselle Dsaret.”
“Call me Kim. Kim Murray,” I managed.
“So you do not claim Dsaret?” Gilles asked.
“They insist on calling me that. Probably easier to say than Murray.”
“Mau-r-r-r-ayyy. It is simple!” Gilles back-throated the R sound, French-style.
“We have heard much about you.” Jerzy laughed silently.
Gilled leaned forward. “Tell us your version. It is for a film, you see.
Perhaps it will not sell, but eh, the family will enjoy it.” He waved at his guys and their film equipment.
Guaranteed your family won’t enjoy it with me in it, I thought. But the idea of annoying the duchess was tempting. Especially if she was plotting to smear Milo and Alec! Anger burned through me, banishing the tiredness.
Jerzy said, “So you are a formidable fighter, eh?”
I smiled. “Is someone planning to challenge me to a duel?”
Jerzy shook with inward laughter. “None that I am aware. However, I would like to ask if you are coming to the gala tomorrow.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, my smile so wide my teeth felt cold.
The film guys were still fiddling around. Madam Waleska appeared, set a tray down before me, and when Spiked Hair said something in extremely idiomatic French to Blue Hair, Madam crossed herself and backed away hastily.
Gilles said, “What I’m told is, up on the mountain, they think you are somewhere between Brunhild and the French heroine Jeanne Hachette.”
“That’s because they didn’t actually see me running from two sets of fighting men, until I got shot.” I rubbed my shoulder. “Haven’t fought a single duel since.” Actually, I have . . . but oh, I was so not mentioning Tony.
Gilles said, “So you came back to Riev to see Alec Ysvorod?”
“No.” I couldn’t help a blush at the mention of Alec’s name, which really annoyed me. “I did not. I came to see Ruli, but I was too late.”
Gilles leaned forward expectantly. “You came to see her about?”
“How she was doing,” I added firmly. “Because I hadn’t spoken to anyone from here or had any news at all, since summer.”
“But your parents did?” Gilles asked.
“I don’t know who spoke to whom,” I stated. “I was in another state, busy with my teaching job.”
“There is no telephone at your teaching job? No e-mail?” Gilles asked.
The camera was rolling now. The second I became aware of it, it was like my skin developed a case of the hives, and I itched all over. Clenching my hands to keep them from scratching my nose, my scalp, my ears, I poured out more tea and busied myself stirring in milk. “Yes, and yes, but I didn’t use them to contact home.”
“And then—though you did not speak to anyone—you decided that you must speak to Ruli? Though the holiday was coming and, as you said, you wished to join your family?” Gilles nodded in a Verrry interesting, but I don’t believe a word of it manner, as his film guys pointed their cameras in my face.
“I wish you could have met her again,” Jerzy said softly. “She needed a friend, poor Ruli.”
Most of my hostility leaked out as I met his sympathetic smile. “I know.”
Gilles leaned forward. “So you knew the marriage was . . . not happy?”
Bang. The hostility was back, full force. “I told you, I did not have any communication whatsoever with anyone here. But I was not impressed by the way her family talked about her last summer. And treated her. Since you were in Paris, did anyone tell you that she spent the entire summer as her brother’s prisoner, and her mother knew it? Alec spent the whole spring trying to find her.”
Jerzy was still smiling sympathetically. I thought, How much do you know about your beloved half-sister’s evil plots?
One of the film guys dropped a piece of equipment with a crash. Another argument broke out, and Jerzy gave a gentle sigh and murmured in Dobreni, “These are the only workers you could find?”
“The only ones willing to come here and on little pay,” Gilles returned in the same language. Then he got up and started yelling at his minions in rapid, idiomatic French.
I decided that this would be the perfect moment to get out of there. I got up. My chair scraped. Gilles turned to me expectantly.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Bathroom break.” I ran upstairs, carefully shut my door instead of kicking it to splinters, and threw myself on my bed.
The familiar ghost chill roughed the skin on my arms and the back of my neck. I sat up, dug the prism out of my pocket, set it down on the nightstand, and reached for the wardrobe door.
There was Grandfather Armandros, cigarette burning, his gaze boring straight through me.
“Esplumoir,” he said, the voice going straight inside my skull without benefit of ears. “Esplumoir. Esplumoir.”
TWENTY-FIVE
MY DAD TOLD ME, when I hit those angsty early teens, that going to bed angry only guarantees a lousy day before you even wake up.
I kept telling myself that I wasn’t angry. Yet I was. And frustrated. Not to mention hungry, having stayed in my room to avoid any more encounters. Every day seemed to get longer, wilder, raise more questions, without ever giving me enough answers.
Esplumoir? What was that? The maddening thing was, I knew I’d heard it before. But there was no handy Google Search to plug the word into—assuming I heard it correctly enough to guess at the spelling.
After long series of nightmares full of car crashes, Buffy-style vamp blood fests and a general sensation of being watched, I rolled out of bed at the first hint of dawn, hungry as I was, and did a hundred pushups. Then I put myself through a full workout until my muscles went stringy.
But when I went to take a bath my brain still felt like it was going to explode. I needed one quiet day. Just one. But I knew I wasn’t going to get it. There was that gala ball to go to. I could skip it. On the other hand, I hate missing a chance to dance. On the third hand, who would care if I didn’t show up? Alec would. The memory of that kiss helped banish at least half of the irritation.
But then came the questions. There he was, ready to march up to a firing squad, and I was convinced that he hadn’t even been in the front seat of his car. Except that in my prism vision, Ruli wasn’t in the car at all, yet it was Alec’s Daimler at the bottom of the gulch. How to explain any of that?
I got out of the tub, dressed, and sidled past the row of bags, boxes, and suitcases lined up along the wall. Looked like all the Waleskas’ mountain relatives and patrons were preparing to return home from their holiday.
I peered around the bend in the stair to make sure no Gilles, Goths, or von Mecklundburgs of any make or model lurked among the breakfast guests.
What I saw was a complete breakfast, waiting. Theresa sat nearby, wearing a burgundy velvet dress with lace at collar and sleeves. Next to her sat a thin, familiar teen with long, dark red braids, her coke-bottle glasses flashing as she laughed at something Theresa whispered. She was wearing a pretty dress made of robin’s egg blue wool, edged with ribbon, and embroidered with darker blue amaranth flowers.
“Is that breakfast for me?” I said, summoning up a smile.
“I heard you in the bath,” Theresa said, beaming at me. “It is righ
t above the kitchen.”
“Thank you. Is that Miriam?” I said, recognizing one of Theresa’s two best friends from my summer stay. I offered a heartfelt smile and the girl’s face flooded with delight.
“Mademoiselle Dsaret,” she whispered, and after a nudge from Theresa, she asked faintly, “You said to Theresa you are coming to the concert.”
Theresa said, “Everyone is going. My grandfather says you may ride with us to the temple if you wish. He and Father have gone to get the wagon.”
I had completely forgotten the New Year’s concert including Nat’s sweetie, the tenor. Ordinarily I’d jump at the chance to hear good music, but I really, really wanted a quiet day. Half a quiet day. I glanced at the window, cravenly hoping to be saved by a blizzard, but the low winter sunrays slanting up the street, highlighting the snow piles and the windows of the opposite houses, made it clear that the weather was not going to rescue me.
So I said the only thing possible. “Thank you. Looking forward to it.” And attacked the breakfast Theresa had brought out for me.
While I ate, the girls traded off telling me about the concert program, then Miriam and Theresa exchanged looks.
As I poured tea, Miriam whispered, “Now?”
Theresa breathed, “Wait for Katrin.”
Tall, dark-haired Katrin, Theresa’s other best friend, showed up five minutes later, self-consciously smoothing a dark green dress accented with gold lace. As I greeted her, the girls looked at me expectantly, and I said, “Right. Back in a flash—” And at their uncomprehending looks, translated that into, “I will return shortly.”
I ran upstairs and put on one of the new dresses, made of autumnal rust colored, super-soft wool. Wool! Not a Los Angeles fabric, but it felt good.
When I got downstairs, one of the grandfathers appeared at the door, causing a general exodus.
I grabbed my new coat, which was hanging on its hook, but my scarf wasn’t there. Yet another annoyance. After a useless hunt through the coat racks, I debated running upstairs to get the new one, then decided the heck with it. Didn’t look that cold out, for once, so I slipped into my coat and followed the others out.