Thigocia flashed her eyebeams on the man’s chest. “Did you see a young woman here in the last few minutes?”
Cliffside staggered back. “The dragon spoke!”
“Uh …” Walter glanced at Ashley. “Yeah. She’s been talking for a long time.”
Thigocia’s beams grew brighter, and her tone deepened to a growl. “I repeat. Did you see a young woman here?”
Cliffside’s voice rattled. “Angel was here earlier. Are you looking for her?”
“No. Her name is Abigail.” Her eyebeams locked on something floating near the man’s head, an ovular crystal about the size of a small hen’s egg. It hovered in front of his eyes, flashing a blue light.
“What’s that?” Walter asked, pointing at the egg.
Cliffside made a shushing sound and pushed the crystal down to his shoulder. “My companion, of course. It suggests that I invite you to sunrise prayers where we will ask everyone about your missing friend.”
“When is sunrise?” Ashley asked.
Cliffside pulled a chain from his trousers pocket and caught a small glass ball dangling at the end. He aimed it at the sky and looked through it. “Maybe two hours.”
“This is a dire emergency,” Thigocia said. “My daughter fell from a great height and likely landed somewhere nearby, but she is nowhere in sight.”
“Your daughter? I’m so sorry!” His brow suddenly wrinkled. “But you were looking for a young woman, not a dragon.”
“It’s hard to explain.” Walter pointed at the garden. “We were thinking she might have fallen in there, but we couldn’t see everything in the dark.”
“I will search with my light.” Holding the lantern in front of him, the man ran along a row, hopping gingerly to avoid the bones. As he turned in a circle, the glow spread across every section. After a minute or so, he ambled back to the field. “Something has disturbed the newly plowed area, but I saw no woman, and no plants are crushed or missing. In fact, there is a new plant. I will have to prepare a growth chart for it and arrange the lottery.”
“The lottery?” Ashley asked.
“Yes, of course. The parent lottery.” He smiled. “There will be another happy couple before the day is over.”
Walter extended his hand. “I’m Walter. She’s Ashley, and the dragon is Thigocia.”
“I am pleased to meet you.” Grasping Walter’s hand, Cliffside shook it clumsily. “The Prophet taught us this custom only recently. It is a pleasant greeting.”
Walter pulled away from Cliffside’s crushing grip. “Well, we’re sorry about landing in the wrong place, but Thigocia’s pretty upset about losing Abigail. In fact, we all are, so if there’s anything you can do to help, we’d sure appreciate it.”
“You have a strange way with words, Walter, but I think I understand. I will ring the bell immediately and call an emergency session.” Cliffside began walking toward the lights in the forest. “Follow me, please, but I fear there will be no room for the dragon.”
Walter turned to Ashley and Thigocia. “I guess we have no choice.”
“I think you’re right.” Ashley crossed her arms and sighed. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
Thigocia spread out her wings. The end of one dangled while the other displayed a rip through part of the membrane. Her voice stayed near a low growl. “If I can fly at all, I will continue the search. When your meeting is complete, look for me here.” Her ears rotated, one independent of the other. “Something is desperately amiss, a strange threat I cannot describe.”
She leaped into the air, beating her damaged wings furiously. As she roared in pain, gusts of wind whipped Ashley’s and Walter’s hair into a frenzy and bit through their clothes. Rising in a slow circle, Thigocia soon faded into the darkness above.
Ashley shivered and edged closer to Walter. “We’d better get going,” she said.
“Yeah.” He laid his arm over her shoulders. “It is getting cold.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She peered into the garden. “I keep thinking I see something moving out there.”
“Probably just the wind.”
“Maybe. But I sense another mind around here somewhere, and it’s not Abigail. I can’t pick up any details, but it feels dark and dangerous. That’s really what’s making me feel cold.”
Marilyn tapped her keyboard while watching the flat-screen monitor on her desk. After adjusting her headset microphone, she spoke into it. “You got all that, Larry?”
“Affirmative. One moment please.”
She looked up at the largest flat-panel screen mounted on the side of Larry’s outer wall. A stream of lines scrolled from bottom to top, far too fast to read.
“Your search criteria are now loaded. Would you like the results in print format?”
She tapped a pencil eraser on the page of an open journal. “Yes, and a spreadsheet on my screen, too. I want to make notes on every record you find.”
“Because I must rely on outside data sources, the results may take several minutes. When the search is complete, I will give you an appropriate signal.”
“Thank you.” Marilyn closed the journal and rested her palm on top of its worn leather cover. “Do you have any hits on your local database?”
“I have many popular music titles in my database. Do you want me to play one for you while you wait?”
“No, Larry. By hits I mean data records that match the criteria.”
“New definition of hits recorded for future use.” The word flashed on Larry’s monitor, its font color changing from black to blue to red. An animated book labeled “Dictionary” walked up to the word, opened to a page marked “H,” and sucked it in. “To answer your question, nothing in my local data matches. I found several men by the name of Peters in three of the cities you entered, but when I added the street addresses, each potential match was eliminated.”
“Can you give me two spreadsheets? One with all the men named Peters and another with only the exact matches?”
A file cabinet appeared on the monitor. A drawer sprang open, and two folders fell to the bottom of the display area, spilling papers from within. “The hits from my local data for all men by the name of Peters in the specified cities are now on your screen. While you are perusing these, in keeping with the adventure Ashley recently completed, I will play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on my synthesizer using an accordion and bagpipe blend.”
Marilyn jerked off her headset and laid it on the desk. As tinny music sounded from the earpieces, she leaned over and spoke into the microphone. “Just give me a visual signal when you’re done with the search.”
She spun her chair halfway around and checked on Monique. With her cheek resting on a rag doll, she had fallen asleep in the middle of a circle of stacked building blocks. Marilyn called toward the open door that led to the rest of the house. “Shelly? Can you hear me?”
“Coming!”
A few seconds later, Shelly popped through the doorway, both thumbs busily punching buttons on her cell phone. Dressed in loose red pajama bottoms and a baggy long-sleeved T-shirt, she stopped near the desk, not bothering to pull her gaze away from the phone’s screen. “What’s up?”
“Are you texting your parents?”
“Yep. They made it to D.C., but they’re hitting the sack. Dad’ll start checking on your genealogy in the morning.”
“Did you thank him for changing their flight?”
Shelly nodded. “He said it’s no problem. With Walter flying off to Never Never Land, they didn’t have any reason to go to Montana now.”
“That’s a relief.” Marilyn swiveled her chair toward Monique. “Can you take Pebbles to bed?”
“Sure thing.” Shelly looked up from the phone, her eyebrows rising. “Anything else? You want coffee or something?”
“I think I’ll need it. And please take a cup to Sir Edmund, too.”
Shelly glanced at the only window in the room, a large square one next to Larry’s end wall, but an air handling unit took up most of the opening
, and closed blinds covered the rest. “Is our faithful knight still outside?”
“He insists on patrolling the perimeter.” Marilyn stood and separated two of the slats with her fingers. “I don’t get it,” she said, peering out. “He can’t stay out there all night.”
“A knight out all night,” Shelly grinned at her joke. “Maybe it has something to do with being a knight, you know, the whole gentleman thing. He doesn’t want to be in the house alone with only females around. I’m sure Larry and Gandalf don’t count as males in his book.”
“That might be true.” Marilyn ran her finger over the slats, closing them again. “Any ideas?”
Shelly gave her shoulders a light shrug. “Appeal to his valor? Tell him we will be too scared to sleep if he stays out there?”
“I know I’d sleep better if he came inside. It’s worth a try.”
“I’m on it.” Shelly scooped up Monique and carried her toward the hallway. “Two cups of extra strong java, and my best frightened little girl impression, coming right up.”
As Shelly closed the door behind her, Marilyn turned her attention to the spreadsheet on her desk screen and scanned the rows of data. The third entry showed a Marshall Peters, but his street address didn’t match anything her mother had recorded in her diary. Mom had saved all her letters from her late husband, so she wouldn’t have erred so badly in recording his address. Still, the city matched one of her entries, Missoula, Montana, the same town Hartanna had settled in years ago. That couldn’t be mere coincidence.
She opened the journal to the back page and withdrew a photo from its inner pocket. Holding it up, she gazed at the man and woman posing in front of a fireplace. The man held a little girl in his arms. Wearing a frilly blue party dress and patent-leather shoes over white lacy socks, the curly-headed toddler had to be less than two years old.
Marilyn touched her own hair. Those curls had straightened long ago, but the birthmark on the girl’s exposed calf proved her to be a much younger version of Marilyn Bannister, or, rather, Marilyn Peters at that time.
Focusing now on her father, a short, muscular man with a closely trimmed goatee and curly hair, both as black as his narrow eyes, she let her memories wander. When her father had visited about ten years ago, he was clean shaven, and his youthful appearance had startled her. After thirty years of aging, he should have had wrinkles and gray hair, but he seemed to be as young as the man in the photo. At the time, she had attributed his appearance to hair dye and facelifts, but she hadn’t let him stick around long enough to find out. His probing questions had raised lots of red flags, so when she asked Walter’s dad to show him out, making him leave seemed like the best option. After all, how could she trust a father who had abandoned his family?
Soon, her thoughts drifted to a time she saw Palin, the dragon slayer. At Dr. Conner’s office suite at the University of Montana, Palin had grabbed Billy, pressed a dagger against his throat, and dragged him out of the office. She and Walter fought him in the hallway—lunging, punching, kicking. Every memory seemed like a split-second frame from a movie. Dark facial hair of some kind obscured Palin’s face, and streams of sweat and blood glistened on his cheeks. But the images flew by too quickly. All she could think about at the time was grabbing the dagger that was cutting her boy’s throat, getting him away from that monster with the …
She held a hand to the bandage on her own throat and finished her thought. Get him away from that monster with the dark eyes! She pulled the photo closer. Could it really be true? Up to this point, her effort was just a computer search, a sleuthing expedition. Now she had thrust a shovel into her own father’s grave, digging toward his coffin while glancing around in the darkness to make sure no ghosts were lurking.
A clock on the wall gonged several low tones, tolling the midnight hour. She slid the headset on again, just in time to hear a bagpipe whining the final measure of “Stairway to Heaven.” Cringing at the notes, she spoke into the microphone. “Larry, can you drill down that Missoula entry? What’s the date, and where did the data come from?”
A calendar appeared on the larger monitor, its pages flipping through the months. When it reached November, the number eleven flashed red in one of the thirty date squares. “November eleventh, nineteen-eighty-two. I obtained the data from a criminal records search. Apparently Mr. Peters violated local traffic laws by driving eighty in a fifty-five zone. He never paid his ticket.”
“Can you bring the address up on a map?”
“One moment.” A digital rendering of Missoula appeared on the screen with a red pushpin graphic in the northeastern quadrant. “The pointer indicates the vicinity of the traffic violation, but the home address is not in the mapping database. The address he gave to officers could be erroneous.”
She leaned close to the screen and searched the area surrounding the pushpin. “But he must have shown the police a driver’s license. Even if that had a fake address, he would’ve had to show proof of insurance to get it. Let’s concentrate on this guy and see if we can track him down.”
“Affirmative. My external search is almost complete. I will transform into a digital tracking hound momentarily.” The map faded, replaced by a cartoon hound sniffing through a pile of haphazardly stacked papers.
Marilyn laughed. The dog looked remarkably like Hambone, the blue tick hound that had helped them track Jared to his mountain cave when he was in dragon form.
A knock sounded on the door leading to the hallway. “Mrs. Bannister?”
Marilyn pulled off her headset and swung around. “Come in, Edmund.”
The door pushed open. Edmund eased in, carrying two steaming mugs of coffee. “I hope I am not disturbing you. The lass said you would sleep better knowing I am inside, so I wanted to let you know I am here.” He handed her one of the mugs. “Is there any way I can assist you?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.” She held up the photo, taking a sip of her coffee as he looked at it.
“A family portrait?” he asked.
She set down her mug and nodded. “Do you recognize the man?”
Pinching the corner of the photo, he drew it closer. “He seems familiar, to be sure, but I can’t quite place him.”
“Think back to your days as King Arthur’s confidante. Who else stayed by the king’s side?”
Edmund’s brow arched up. “Ah! Yes! Now I remember. This man looks very much like the king’s scribe, the one who also acted as Devin’s squire, the ignoble Palin.”
Marilyn took the photo and, looking at it again, sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid? Is something amiss?”
“Not really. I just learned something that troubles me. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.”
“Very well.” Walking backwards, he bowed his head. “If you no longer have need of me, I will check the door locks and retire to William’s bedroom.”
“Thank you, Edmund. Good night.” When the door closed behind him, Marilyn slid the headset back on. A sniffing sound filled her ears, matching the animated bloodhound on the screen. She adjusted the microphone again. “Almost done, Larry?”
“I am compiling your data as we speak.”
The hound dug a hole and vanished. Seconds later, the spreadsheet returned, black characters on a white background, with the first several rows in light blue. An identical spreadsheet appeared on her desk screen as well. She set her finger on one of the blue cells. “Why did you highlight some of these, Larry?”
“Those records are related to the Marshall Peters in Missoula, oldest to newest. Since the first two have their origin in England, I suggest that you use them to dig further.”
She picked up a phone on the desk. “What time is it in Scotland?”
“Shortly after six in the morning. No offices are likely to be open.”
She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket and read the hastily scrawled digits. “Sir Patrick gave me Sir Newman’s phone number. My guess is that he is an early riser.”
>
“At least he will be one today.”
She pushed her headset down around her neck and cradled the phone at her ear. After punching in the numbers, she waited through the trills. “I guess he must be asleep, it’s—”
“Hello. Newman here.”
“Sir Newman. It’s Marilyn Bannister. I’m sorry to wake you up.”
“Oh, I wasn’t sleeping. I was feeding the fish in our moat. I very nearly dropped my cell phone in the water when it vibrated. I thought a fish had jumped into my coat pocket!”
“How is the museum going?”
“Splendidly! Once we repaired the castle turret, we conducted a bit of theatre for the museum patrons, a knight rescuing a damsel in distress from the turret window. I played the knight, but I had a bit of trouble climbing down the ladder with the damsel. You see, she wasn’t exactly a petite young lady, and we fell from several rungs up. The crowd thought it was part of the act and applauded with great enthusiasm. At the next day’s show, the crowd doubled, so we have fallen from the ladder at every performance.”
Marilyn held her fingers over her mouth, stifling a laugh. “Aren’t you afraid of getting hurt?”
“That was a concern, so we installed rubber padding at our point of impact, but if we don’t time our fall properly, and the lady lands on top of me, I do get a bruise or two.”
“Sounds painful. Listen. Do you have an e-mail address?”
“Yes. Newman at Hinkling Manor dot com.”
She jotted down the address on a notepad. “Great. I’m sending you some data about a man named Marshall Peters. I think he’s really Palin. Sir Patrick said you could help us track down where he lived in England.”
“I know a few people in London who could help us, but I cannot get there myself until late this afternoon. It is a fair drive from Glasgow, if you’ll remember.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I don’t mean to pry into your business, Mrs. Bannister, but I need to know what we’re looking for.”
“Of course you do.” She picked up the photo and propped it against her monitor. “We think Devin is on the prowl again, so we’re looking for any clue to help us find out who could have captured and reconstituted his energy.”