Their memories lie under Matthew Cooper’s stone and wrapped in Anne Lynburn’s silk.
She had thought it was about their bodies, but this was a key. A hidden key meant there was a lock somewhere, an important lock.
Kami knew that, but though she held fast onto the key she could not make any plan for what to do or how to find that lock. She could not envision anything but her mother’s face, frozen forever.
Kami knew she was shaking, because Ash knew she was shaking. She felt so distant from herself that Ash seemed closer. His distress and affection was a comfort. This was how she had been comforted all her life. Every hurt in childhood, every secret pain, had been washed away by someone who could reach inside her and feel all she felt. She put her head down on his shoulder, and shook until she was still.
She did not even remember that Jared was there until she finally lifted her head and saw him standing and watching her and Ash. He did not say a word. She did not know what to say. She hardly knew how to feel. It was as though she had been turned to stone as well.
Chapter Thirteen
Your Secret Heart
Kami’s family still went to the flat above Claire’s restaurant. Even if their mother was lost, the boys still needed sleep.
Her father tucked them into the bed Kami’s mother had been sleeping in, and he slept on the floor beside them and insisted Kami sleep on the sofa in the little sitting room. The flat was only three rooms, four if you counted the small bathroom. There were memories of her mother everywhere that Kami looked. A hairbrush with her glinting light hair in it, a book that she had left open and would never finish, a smudged mirror. Kami wandered the house for most of that night laying her hands on each object, as if she could somehow get one last touch from her mother, passed on through these last small things she had handled. But they remained lifeless and meaningless in her hands. Love was not magic: it could not transform anything.
Kami crawled back onto the sofa when the sky was pale gray, like white stained so badly that no matter how many times it was washed it would never be clean again. She went to sleep holding Matthew Cooper’s key tightly.
When she woke up, new light striking the old metal in her hand was the first thing she saw, and the key seemed like a talisman. She could not allow herself to think of anything else. She had a mystery to solve, and so she could get up.
She had to go somewhere, but she did not want to go alone. So she fished her phone out of her pocket and called her first choice for company.
“Hey, Angela,” she said. “Want to come with me to the graveyard?”
“I absolutely do not,” Angela told her. “But I’ll see you in ten minutes.”
Angela met her outside Claire’s. Kami sneaked down the dark narrow stairs as quietly as she could. She tried not to look at the quiet restaurant her mother had been so proud of, but she had it memorized: the swinging doors that hid the kitchen, the little colorful paintings, the one big blank white wall that her mother had always wanted Dad to paint a mural on, the tables with their white circular tabletops and curling iron table legs.
When Angela opened the door and handed in a dress and a bra, the large glass front of Claire’s immediately became a problem.
“I think this might fit,” Angela said. “And this is my sports bra. Obviously, as I have never participated in any sport, it has never been worn.”
“Thank you! Be my lookout, okay?”
“Sure,” said Angela. “If somebody comes by, I’m happy to say ‘Kami, you’re changing your clothes in front of a giant window on the main street of town, someone is going to see you naked, and I’m going to laugh.’ ”
“Your unfailing support means the world to me!” Kami said, pulling off her pajama top, which was basically charred rags at the back.
It turned out that Angela being so much taller meant that there was extra fabric to go over all of Kami’s extra flesh. The dress fit: it did not matter that it was black and plain and spoke to Kami of nothing so much as beautifully tailored boredom.
When Kami emerged, Angela looked at her for a considering moment.
Kami spread her hands in a self-deprecating gesture. “Not really me, is it?”
“You’re always you,” said Angela, and linked her arm with Kami’s, something she would not have done on any other day. “And you’re all right. For a lunatic nudist.”
Kami tucked her cheek against Angela’s shoulder and walked leaning against her as they went into the town square. It must have rained sometime after Kami had fallen asleep: the air had a fresh, damp springtime feel to it, and all the dust on the cobblestones had washed away. The fragments of Matthew Cooper’s statue were still there, washed clean and scattered like unearthed bones on an archaeological dig.
Kami saw the gleaming statue that was her mother out of the corner of her eye, but she did not dare look at it head on. She could not betray her mother by shaking and weeping and doing nothing else, by despairing and losing her mother’s only chance to survive. She had to carry on, so she did, walking fast and leaning against Angela until they were past the square and turning up Shadowchurch Lane. Angela supported Kami’s weight and let Kami set the pace.
“So what are we searching for?” Angela asked as Kami unlinked their arms and stepped under the stone horseshoe arch into the churchyard and round to the graveyard.
“Anne Lynburn’s grave,” Kami answered. “We have to dig it up.”
Angela blinked. “Oh, great,” she said slowly. “I was definitely hoping you were going to suggest grave robbery. I would have been disappointed if it had been anything else.”
“There was a key hidden in Matthew Cooper’s statue, and there was a note in the books that said their memories lay in Matthew’s stone and Anne Lynburn’s silk. I think they used silk for her shroud. I think whatever this key opens will be with Anne.”
Kami drew the key out of Angela’s exercise bra, which just about fit with some brimming involved and yet was where she had to keep things because Angela’s dumb dress had no pockets. She showed the key to Angela.
Angela sighed. “All right, Nancy Drew, let’s go grave-digging. Should be jolly larks.”
“The book said it would be along the farthest wall,” Kami said, and they both moved toward the wall encircling the little graveyard, where the oldest stones were leaning, as if away from the wind of time.
While Kami was searching, she remembered a promise she had made.
“So … how are you and Holly getting on?” she asked tentatively, skirting around a gravestone.
Trying to decipher a name almost worn away on a lichen-covered stone, Kami traced it with her fingers. She was fairly certain it said either Elizabeth or Hepzibah. For the dead lady’s sake, she hoped it was Elizabeth.
“Fine,” Angela said.
“Really,” Kami said encouragingly.
“Fine, and that’s final,” Angela snapped. “You may have decided this is the perfect time to be worrying about romance, but some of us actually have our priorities in order.”
Kami was silent.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” Angela said, after a pause. “It’s a sore subject with me, but I’m glad you have someone. I am.”
“I have a lot more than just one person,” Kami told her, and patted her arm. “I’m sorry too,” she added. “I should know better than to talk to you about feelings before noon.”
“Nothing’s happening,” Angela said. “I don’t want anything to happen. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” said Kami.
There was a skull and crossbones on one of the graves. Kami hoped that meant there was a pirate buried here. She hoped even more that one of the last remaining stones would be Anne Lynburn’s.
“How are things going with young what’s-his-face?” Angela asked, in what for Angela was conciliatory fashion, which of course meant not very conciliatory at all. “You know the one. Blond. Scowly. Bad attitude, which I have some sympathy for. Sloppy dresser, which I ha
ve no sympathy for at all.”
“Also a terrible driver,” Kami said. “Wild about the eyes. Daddy issues so numerous the issues may be compiled into a book called Who’s the Daddy? Both Options Are Evil.” She sighed and touched another gravestone, which was for someone cursed with the name of Edgar Featherstonehaugh. “Well, I’m pressuring him into having a relationship with me, and I don’t know how into it he is, and there are even worse problems than that, but apart from that, it’s okay.”
“Anyone would be lucky to be emotionally blackmailed or physically forced into romance with you, friend,” said Angela. “What a jerk.”
“Thanks,” said Kami. “Anne Lynburn’s grave isn’t here.”
“It sure isn’t. What a pity, I was really looking forward to my first experience violating a resting place.”
Kami punched her in the arm.
“It must be in the Lynburn crypt,” she said.
“Which is located in the evil lair of evil?” Angela asked. “Terrific.”
“Let’s go get Holly,” Kami proposed.
“She’ll be in the Water Rising, going through the books as usual,” said Angela.
Angela sounded a little resigned, maybe upset that she wasn’t seeing more of Holly—Kami couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was an emotion there that was not annoyance or anger, and with Angela that was unusual enough to be remarkable.
Kami said nothing, though, besides a mild “I think it’s awesome she’s become a blond bombshell research ninja. Her powers have multiplied!”
She rested her head against Angela’s shoulder again as they passed her mother, and again they said nothing.
“So you’re going to walk through fire again?” Holly asked, looking dismayed.
Holly and Kami were alone in the back room of the Water Rising, but everyone else—including Kami’s father and the boys—had congregated at the inn as well. Kami was pleased that Angela had stopped to talk to Ash, because otherwise she felt like they would gang up on her with their judgment of her lifestyle choices.
“Probably,” said Kami. “I hear you’re a sorcerer who held off Rob’s people when they burned our house and came after me and my family. I think that’s terrific. Want to come with me?”
Holly swallowed. “I’ll come, but I’m not very good.”
“I trust you. And I want to tell you something real quick before Angela comes in,” Kami said.
“We don’t have to talk about anything like that now,” Holly said, looking at Kami with soft, sympathetic eyes.
Kami turned her face away. “Sure we do,” she said, insistently chipper. “I tried to talk to her but she stonewalled me. The thing about Angela is that she’s really private and really straightforward at the same time, so, and I totally understand if you don’t want to do this, but I think the only move might be—”
“Telling her,” Holly filled in.
“That move,” Kami said. “Yes.”
Holly nodded, her curls bobbing and the face framed by those curls resolved. “It’s my fault she thinks I don’t like her. I’ll do it.”
Kami got up, ostensibly to look at the book Holly was studying; she hung over her shoulder and got hold of her hand.
“It’s not your fault,” she murmured. “You went at a different speed from someone else emotionally. That’s not your fault or their fault.”
“On that topic, how are things going with Jared?” Holly inquired.
“I want to interfere horribly in my friends’ love lives and keep my own embarrassing and pathetic one private, is that so much to ask?”
“Mmm,” said Holly, and gave Kami a grin that reminded Kami of when Holly had been the sunny confident school goddess she had barely known and envied a little. “Now that you know that I’m not at all interested in Jared, is it inappropriate to say that I did get the impression that he might channel all those simmering repressed emotions in a useful way? I mean being explosively good in bed.”
“Viking tiger in the sack, I have no doubt,” Kami said lightly, and felt a blush stage a hostile takeover of her neck and march up to claim the territory of her face.
Holly stopped grinning and added in a low voice, “Kami, I can see you don’t want to talk about it, but I can’t just joke around. I have to tell you, I’m so sorry about—”
Kami wanted to say that she appreciated it but did not want to talk about her mother, but feared even trying to say that would make her throat tighten up too much for her to speak. Instead, she looked at the drawing on the page Holly’s book was open to. “I know you are. How’s the research going?”
Holly was tactful enough to stop talking, and disconsolate enough to sigh. “I keep wishing that there could be a movie montage. And I could put on a pair of glasses and flip pages at appropriate moments, until the music gets dramatic and I spot the crucial thing and I say ‘Voilà!’ ”
“I used to think that there was an awesome investigator lady called Viola, and when people made a discovery they would shout ‘Viola’ in her honor,” Kami said reminiscently. She turned a page and frowned at the sketch of a wall. “Is this about architecture?”
“It’s about the changes made to Aurimere over the years,” Holly said. “Basically a whole lot of ‘then we added essential drowned-lady décor’ and ‘then we turned the farthest wall into a rockery’ and ‘then—’ ”
“Oh,” Kami said.
“What?” Holly asked, somewhat apprehensively.
Anne was drowned and lost, the book had said, and Lynburns since then had filled their house with images of drowning women. The graveyard and the Lynburns’ crypt were both sacred ground, and Anne had died in a time when that mattered. She stared at the drawing of the wall, and remembered the wall she had knelt beside once, with Jared on the other side of it. She remembered the flowers strewn over the ground.
Kami felt her smile spread and warmth spread within her, the sudden sweet joy of discovering the truth. “Viola.”
The first thing to do was slip away from her father, who might have questions about why she kept insisting on going back to the lair of ultimate evil. Kami saw why so many teenagers who had adventures in books were interestingly tragic orphans. Parents were a real buzzkill, adventure-wise.
She would take fewer adventures, though. She would pay any price, she thought, if she could only find a way to free her mother from Rob Lynburn’s spell.
She thought she was getting out of the Water Rising clean, because she didn’t see her father anywhere around: there was only Ash and Lillian sitting at a table, and a few other patrons at as much of a distance from Ash and Lillian as they could get. She made for the door, at which point Lillian caught her arm.
“Where are you going?”
“Uh,” said Kami, eyeballing her wildly. “I’m going to buy some drugs.”
Lillian stared. “I beg your pardon?”
“This is a really stressful time for everyone,” said Kami. “So I thought maybe I could buy a little weed, take the edge off. I might be a while. This is a very clean-living town, apart from all the murders, so I don’t actually know any drug dealers. I realize Jared kind of looks like one, but he’s not, which is a shame because I think the drug dealer’s girlfriend gets her drugs free.”
“I realize you are attempting to be humorous,” said Lillian, after a pause during which she stared some more. “I don’t understand it.”
“Hey, you’re not the only family with a legacy. ‘Glass’ rhymes with ‘sass.’ Have you met my dad?”
“I have had that dubious pleasure,” said Lillian. “He is, in fact, meant to be meeting me in order to, and I quote, ‘teach me to integrate better with society, display leadership skills, win over the populace, and stop acting like a robot princess from space.’ I admit that the humor in his humor escapes me as well.” She paused and suddenly looked determined. “I’m going to start without him.”
She climbed off the stool and headed toward the group of people in the corner. Kami and Ash watched as they co
llectively shrank away.
“Come on, quick,” said Kami, and as if summoned by some spirit warning him of his child’s intended reckless behavior, her dad appeared through the inn doors.
He looked distracted. “Where’s Lillian?”
Kami checked over her shoulder. “Appears to be trying to wrest a screaming baby from the arms of her frightened mother in order to kiss it.”
“Oh no no no,” murmured Jon, and raised his voice as he made his way over. “Libba, we’ve talked about this!”
“The good news is the grown-ups are distracted by politics,” said Kami.
You mean that your poor father is distracted by my awful mother, said Ash, who was far too polite to say such a thing out loud and looked vaguely embarrassed to be thinking it.
Kami grinned. “Why quibble when we have the results we want!”
I wish I could ask you what you’re planning, but I know what you’re planning, said Ash. Lucky me. I know this is important information, but going to Aurimere at all is a huge risk.
“See, the thing is, if I ran a business it would probably be called Risky Business,” said Kami, and smiled at him. She felt affection radiating from Ash, so strong that she was startled.
He was right, though. The risks they were taking were worse now. Kami’s mother was lost. Jared had been tortured.
She didn’t know how to do anything than take greater risks in the face of greater danger, and hope that somehow they could all be saved.
As they walked out of the pub, Jared fell in with them. Kami let herself be weak and grasped for his hand. Jared linked his fingers with hers and matched her steps.
“We’re going to—” Kami began.
“I know,” said Jared. “Ash told me while it was happening. I was just grabbing my jacket.”
Kami felt wariness and something close to guilt pass between herself and Ash, as if Ash had been telling secrets about the things they both wished they had not done. She felt the urge to exchange a glance with him over her shoulder, but stopped herself from doing so because she didn’t want Jared to see the look, and then felt bad about that.