Fire Raiser (24 page)

“And the flowers have all been different,” Holly mused. “Roses, violets, gladioli—” She caught herself with a hand on the wall, startlement making her clumsy, as usual. “Lulah, all these bouquets are seriously magical flowers. White rose for secrecy, snapdragon for deception—”

Lulah stared at the vase of lavender roses. “And those, for enchantment. They’ve been in every vase thus far. What have we gotten ourselves into here?”

Holly had heard that note of worried perplexity in her aunt’s voice perhaps five times in her life. Before she could ask something stupid and useless, Lulah started down the stairs again.

After two more landings—decorated with various combinations of flowers, but always featuring white and lavender roses—Holly asked, “Are we level with the first floor yet?”

“Oh, we’re below the real cellar. I know you can’t feel it, but we are.”

“I should have counted the number of steps.”

“What for? You know that thing people say sometimes when they’re casting a Circle? A place that isn’t a place and a time that isn’t a time? Well, a distance isn’t a distance, either. In fact, I’d be surprised if there were the same number of steps going up as there were coming down. This much magic packed into this restricted a space—people probably tramping up and down all the time—”

“So why isn’t there anybody here?”

“You want to thank our luck or chase it away by insulting it with questions?”

“You sound like Jesse in his ‘never look a gift dragon in the mouth’ mood.” Holly hiked up Cam’s pants. “Did he make that wooden thingy?”

“The silver that binds it, yes. But the talisman is Leander Cox’s work. He’s been experimenting with combinations, and thought you and Bella would be a good place to start. Rowan is good for dowsing for metals as well as for water. I was guessing Cam would sense the former. Didn’t know there’d be both.”

“So gratifying to know my daughter and I are inspirational.” She thought about Bella and Kirby, tucked up in their beds—no, their beloved Uncle Alec was at Woodhush, they’d be clamoring for stories and games, or sitting in his lap as the thunderstorm rolled from valley to mountains. It felt odd, not being able to hear it anymore. Outside was lightning and rain, but within this stairwell all was hushed. Perhaps the white roses ensured that, as well.

Holly wondered what the hell she was doing here, gallivanting around a magical staircase, looking for who knew what, when she ought to be at home. It wasn’t as if she was all that much use. Besides, she wasn’t a free agent anymore, with responsibilities to no one but herself. She had a husband and children. And never mind that investigating this place had been her husband’s idea; that was his job. It was hers to . . .

. . . to write books. Only she had no idea what she wanted to write next, and no book had shoved its way to the front of her mind, demanding to be written. She’d done some short stories, a few articles, but that was all. It was her job and she hadn’t been doing it for more than two years and sooner or later it was going to make her crazy.

Back in the day, had she snagged up like this, she probably would have taken a trip somewhere. Florence, London, Athens—even a quick driving tour of New England or a week in D.C. spent wallowing in the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress—but there was no place she wanted to be except home with her family. She didn’t miss taking off whenever she felt like it—and the next time she did, it would be with Evan and the children, to show them the places she loved. It was always more fun when there was somebody along to share it with, like the long, lovely summer she and Susannah Wingfield had spent in Europe years ago—God, how she missed Susannah.

She touched the diamonds on her wrist, swallowing the sudden upsurge of grief. It never got easier; sometimes she thought she might be getting used to it, but—

She bumped up against Lulah and nearly sent them both sprawling. She was framing an apology when she saw what had startled her aunt into an abrupt halt.

They had reached the bottom of the stairs. To their left was a door. A hospital door. Complete with a push-pad on the adjoining wall and a rectangular window and a single word in orange script.

“Surgery?” Lulah wondered.

“As in ‘plastic’?” That would fit with a spa hotel.

“Why put it at the bottom of a magical staircase?” Lulah snorted.

Grimacing agreement, Holly slapped the metal pad. The door swung inward with a
whoosh.
A half-circle desk centered the room, with all the usual nurse’s station trimmings: chart rack, computer, monitoring screens. But no telephones, and nothing resembling an intercom. The only sign of occupancy was a pink-and-blue coffee mug (CRYOCACHE—FOR CONSTANT CARE) stuffed with Bic pens, the caps chewed like doggie treats. Halls branched to right and left, and another windowed door stood open directly behind the desk.

Lulah led the way through the second door. Down each wall were two more doors, with signs projecting above them. RECORDS and PRIVATE were on the left; on the right, PHARMACY and a surprise.

“Cryopreservation?” Holly frankly gaped.

“Later,” Lulah decided, long-legging it down to RECORDS.

Holly followed. “Why isn’t anyone here? And why are the doors mechanical and not magical?”

“Do I look like the Oracle at Delphi? There’s no magic in here that I can sense at all. It stopped at the entry.” Switching the overhead lights on, she paused before a desk. “We’re at least fifty feet underground—and it’s fifty feet of solid rock, so forget about me trying to get through it. You fiddle with that machine, I’ll check the paper.”

Seating herself obediently at the desk, she clicked the computer on and started exploring. Lulah was opening filing cabinets, and by the increasing vehemence of her cussing was having no luck at all.

Holly accessed folder after folder, wondering why nothing was password-protected until she realized that anybody who could get down here would be in on the whole thing and thus trustworthy. She found inventories of bedsheets, blankets, pillows. There were charts detailing orders and deliveries of drugs to the pharmacy (but no lists of drugs delivered). Someone was writing a novel in his or her spare time—a medical thriller by the look of it, in French.

“Nothing,” she said over her shoulder. “Let’s try the door that says PRIVATE.”

For the first time, they encountered a lock. A mechanical one; nothing magic about it, according to Lulah. But she used magic to open it.

“More of Leander’s work?” Holly asked as Lulah rolled a smooth wooden marble between her palms. This, too, was a half-and-half construction, sealed by Jesse McNichol’s metalcraft in silver.

“Oak,” she affirmed. “And some of its own mistletoe. Struck down by lightning, which is why Leander was able to use it. Hush, now.”

Holly waited, incapable of sensing the power Lulah called on, even though she knew the power inherent in oak and mistletoe. Sometimes she thought it was astonishing there were any oaks left, for the Druids’ sacred groves had been chopped down and burned all over Europe from the time of Julius Caesar onward. No Witch killed an oak tree; nature had killed this one, enabling Leander to use its wood, which was the more profoundly powerful for the lightning that had felled it. Mistletoe, aside from the frivolous tradition of kissing, had much more critical associations; the one Lulah was after right now was obviously its ability to open locks.

A few minutes later Holly was seated at another desk, this time with a laptop coming to life before her. Lulah stood behind her, watching.

“If this one is password-protected, we’re screwed,” Holly warned. “Unless you’ve got a way of getting a computer to rat out its owner—”

The computer was not password-protected. Dozens of file icons appeared. In German.

Fourteen

EVAN WATCHED HOLLY AND LULAH start down the stairs, speculating for just an instant on what life might be like if his wife were the type of woman to go home and stay there. Had he given such an order, she would have told him to go to hell at his earliest convenience. In fact, he had once contemplated giving that order—back when they were first dating, the night of a triple homicide. In the years since, he’d been occasionally tempted but had never followed through. Which made him, he supposed, just as pussy-whipped in his own way as Gib Ayala.

“Onward and upward?” Nicky asked.

“Onward and upward,” Evan agreed.

The thing of it was, he mused as they climbed, you had to love a woman for what she was, not what you thought you could make her do or be. His mother had married his father planning to be the wife of a police captain. Lachlan had no way of knowing if ambition had been part of his father’s psychology; by the time he was old enough to question, observe, and understand, all that was left was the nagging and the sneering. Seeing potential, encouraging the work, supporting ambition—those were things you did when you loved someone. But trying to control and manipulate—it lacked respect, he decided. To use one of Holly’s favorite words, it wasn’t honorable.

“Why decorate?”

“Huh?” He glanced over his shoulder at Cam.

“Why the chest of drawers and the flowers and the footstool with the needlepoint cushion?”

A step ahead of them, Nicky said, “My dear boy, please don’t start being a cliché at this stage of your life. ‘Why decorate?’ Could you possibly have asked a gayer question?”

“Nick!” Lachlan exclaimed. “I’m shocked. The
really
gay thing to do would be to criticize the color scheme.”

“Oh, shut up, both of you,” Cam suggested.

The poor guy was taking hits from all sides tonight, Lachlan reflected. And from Holly, regarding Jamey, it would only get worse—probably because she wasn’t gleefully exercising all her control-freakishness on her characters. It was Cam’s misfortune to have been caught when she had nothing else to occupy her. Lachlan didn’t know damn-all about Cam’s history with Jamey, but it seemed to him that Holly wasn’t so much trying to manipulate Cam as she was trying to shove him in the direction he wanted to go anyway. And there was the difference: she’d seen what was true about him and Jamey—anybody with eyes could see it—and she’d pester them until they resolved it themselves. They’d have to be the ones to do it; after all, it wasn’t as if she could lock them in a bedroom together and—

“All right, all right,” Nicky said as they reached another small landing. “Why
are
there cabinets and footstools and bowls of flowers?” He pointed to the squat cut-glass vase stuffed with blue violets and white and lavender rosebuds.

“Well, we’re supposed to be exploring. . . .” Cam crouched beside the cupboard. It was a pretty thing, Evan noted, carved with an owl on one door and a peacock on the other. Cam opened the doors and pulled out what looked like a portable DVD player. There was no cord for plugging it in—and no wall sockets to plug it into, Lachlan noted with a quick glance around. But there was a cable with another kind of plug.

Nick was frowning again. “If this staircase is bespelled, and we know it is, why don’t they just have a magic window in the wall?”

“Maybe they don’t have the chops,” Evan said.

The older man gave a disdainful sniff. “Amateurs.”

“Not necessarily.” Cam sat cross-legged on the floor and hit the button that activated the screen. “Dad used to say there was only so much magic you could fit into a certain space before you got overload. It’s like this negotiation that goes on between Witchcraft and the real world. Give-and-take. You can tweak things just so far, you can use only so much power, before it stresses real-world physics—”

“Theorize later,” Lachlan told him. “What I’d like to know is what they want to look at. Do you see anyplace to hook that thing up?”

They set about exploring the nearby walls with eyes and fingers. Nothing. Then Nicky got down on hands and knees and started inspecting the carpet and the border of wood on either side—and there it was, a little outlet one step down from the landing. The plug fit perfectly.

Onto the screen sprang a neat, spare menu of numbers:
102
,
105
,
208
,
210
,
314
,
315
. Cam called up
102
.

It produced, as Lachlan had immediately suspected, a view of a hotel room. In the elaborate bed—canopied and curtained in lace with heavy velvet swags—were a man and a woman, sound asleep. Five seconds of this, and the angle switched to show the bathroom, and after another pause a different view of the bed. Then it was back to the original picture before it cycled through again.

“Three cameras.” Nicky reached over and pressed PAUSE, and the rotation obediently stopped on the second perspective of the bed. “Very well, I bow to modern technology. This must be set up to record, yes?”

“I’m in 314,” Cam mentioned with studied casualness.

Crouching beside him, Lachlan asked, “Did you do anything weird?”

“I took a nap. I took a bath. I got dressed.”

“And we changed shirts. I hope it gave somebody besides Holly a thrill. Is there anything in the memory?”

It turned out there wasn’t. And there was no DVD in the drive.

“I guess they don’t expect to record anybody tonight,” Evan decided.

“Why did they put me in a monitored room? Do they know I’m gay, and were waiting for me to seduce one of the busboys so they could blackmail me?”

“Possibly,” Nick said. “But I think you’ve hit on a very interesting idea. Six monitored rooms, with viewing and recording—it may not be just the spa that is, shall we say, full-service.”

NEITHER HOLLY NOR LULAH knew German.

“We’ll have to take this up to Nicky to figure out what’s in it,” Holly said. “Damn. I was looking forward to learning
something
about this place!”

“And you with a husband whose favorite composer is Mozart!” Lulah pointed a long finger at one of the icons.

Holly thought for a moment, then said in a resigned tone, “Shocking degeneration of a formerly competent brain.
Die Zauberflöte
, okay, I get it.
Zauber
is ‘magic’ in German. That’s likely to be an interesting file, though I doubt we’ll be able to read it. But what the hell does ‘
der Puff
’ mean?”

“Let’s find out.”

Within the file were documents, clearly labeled, readily understandable: the months of the year were almost all the same in German as in English. Holly opened up November 2004, the month Westmoreland had opened for business.

There were six columns to the page. First came the day of the week, then the date. On some days there were no entries, but on others there were as many as a dozen. Each entry in the third column was a man’s full name, most of them obviously American—which meant everything from Smithfield to Valenzuela to Van Slyke to LaPierre to Goldberg. The ones that were not obviously American were the ones with three names—like the excruciatingly Russian Vladimir Vladimirovich Mironov—or the ones with the umlauts and tildes and circumflexes still attached. Most people who’d been in the United States for more than a generation, or who weren’t snottily precious about the ancestral spelling (Denise Josèphe came to mind), had discarded accent marks long ago. The fourth and fifth columns were numbers. The last was reserved for a given name only.

“Adela, Kurt, Evva, Sofiya, Franciszka, Katya, Ruzena, Vilmos—”

“Not a Chuck or Mary Jean in the lot.” Lulah shook her head. “Jurek, Magda, Raisa—am I being xenophobic, or am I hearing Eastern Europe in all these?”

“And the other names are all male, there’s not a woman on the—oh, Aunt Lulah, this can’t possibly be what it looks like.”

“Tell me what you think it looks like and I’ll tell you if I think it’s possible.”

Holly opened up more monthly records. “Here’s Bill Smithfield on November 8 and December 28, 2004. Evva, then Katya—” She flicked back and forth among documents, doing a find for Smithfield in each. “January, nothing . . . February 4, Katya again . . . skips March, but twice in April, Katya and then Raisa . . . May, June, July . . . here he is again in August of last year, with Katya.”

“Keep going,” Lulah said grimly. “Find another name.”

“Last year, Myron MacGowan in May with—with Kurt, in July with Vilmos, September—here’s a new name, Rafaello—how the hell did he get in here? MacGowan with Rafaello in October and again in November—what are the numbers for? Twenty-three-dash-twenty-four, twenty-dash-twenty-two—”

“Date, customer, girl—or boy—”

“And a time!” Holly exclaimed. “The dates are European style, month second—so the times must be on a twenty-four–hour clock!”

The two women looked at each other for a brief, silent moment. Then Holly went back to the book and picked out a name she recognized.

“Grant Newbury. September 24, 2004, Raisa, 21-22, which would be nine to ten in the evening, 105—”

“Room number?” Lulah hazarded. “Wait a minute—didn’t you go out with Grant Newbury in high school?”

Holly nodded. “A few times. Voice like an archangel. He soloed in the choir at St. Andrew’s.”

“Damn. All right, where were we? Room numbers?”

“If so, only six of them are used—the same numbers recur. Okay, Grant Newbury. October . . . November . . . the tenth, Magda, 23–24. Again in November, the thirtieth, 19–20. Nothing in December. Nothing in January. February 19, 2005, Adela, 17–19. May 22, Evva, 18–19. April 8, Evva again, 21–22.” It went on. And on. While tracing Grant Newbury she saw names she recognized from five different counties and as far away as Richmond and Washington. The foreign names—Dutch, French, Italian, German, Russian—she was willing to bet would line up with the guest register upstairs at the front desk, and the spa appointments book, and flights into and out of Shenandoah Airport.

But as she went through the months, something else began to niggle at her mind. Something about the dates. It wasn’t magic, it couldn’t be magic—she didn’t have any magic to quiver a warning or wave a red flag. It was just her brain making extra work for itself, grinding gears because she didn’t want to acknowledge what was becoming more and more obvious with every name she saw written over and over again.

“Pillars of the community,” she said at last, leaning back and folding her arms, glaring at the laptop screen. “Respectable, hard-working, church-going men—Cornell Hendricks, famed in song, story, and the Mormon Temple, on the same night and at the same time right next door to his good ol’ fishin’ buddy Norm Valenzuela—who went to Confession the next morning, I’ll bet you anything, and said his Hail Marys and heard Mass—”

“You can’t be forgiven if you haven’t sinned,” Lulah commented acidly. “Hasn’t been a real brothel in this county for fifty years. The men have to drive over to Miss Follett’s in Glenrose for their diversions.”

“Let’s get Louvena to print a special edition of the
Record
,” Holly suggested.

“And ruin how many marriages?”

“Like they don’t deserve it!”

“Their families don’t. Who says prostitution is a ‘victimless crime’? And what about these girls? Evva and Ruzena and Sofiya—not to mention Kurt and Vilmos. When they were little kids did they say, ‘My friends all want to be teachers or firemen or farmers when they grow up, but I want to be a whore’?”

“Oh, God,” Holly breathed. “Prostitution. The names. Eastern European names.” Something went very hollow inside her chest and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. “Lulah . . . Evan and I went to Reverend Deutschman’s meeting at Calvary Baptist. Remember we brought the flyers and handouts home with us?”

Holly could see the printed pages as if she held them once more in her hand. In the 1970s, human trafficking had focused on Southeast Asia, mostly Thai and Filipina women. The second wave, in the ’80s, had been centered in Ghana and Nigeria. Then had come Latin America’s turn, especially Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. But these days the nations no longer behind the Iron Curtain, the places where free-market capitalism had replaced communism with often disastrous results, were prime hunting grounds for traffickers. The girls were young, comparatively well-educated, pretty, and with no future at all in their homelands. Easy prey for anyone willing to sell them—including the administrators of orphanages, the girls’ own relatives, and the village priest.

They vanished from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic—with names like Evva, Ruzena, Sofiya, Kurt, Vilmos . . .

She didn’t believe it even when she said it aloud. “They’ve been trafficked. Like the ones the Calvary Baptist ladies found in New Orleans, and the ones Poppy was bringing back here.”

Calvary Baptist . . . second of the seven church fires . . . Poppy and the Calvary Baptist ladies had found trafficked children in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina . . . there were trafficked children here at Westmoreland . . . Grant Newbury, Hugh Chadwick, Norm Valenzuela . . . church-going men with wives and families . . . seven burned churches since last September . . . beginning with Old Believers right after Hurricane Katrina and then Calvary, before the Baptists had started the anti-trafficking campaign . . . and not all the churches had been Baptist . . . the Lutheran church in December, the Episcopalian in April . . . St. Andrew’s, where Grant sang in the choir. . . .

She knew then what had been gnawing around the edges of her mind. The twenty-four–hour clock times had addled her, but the connection had finally clicked. Stabbing at the keyboard now, she opened April 2005, and found the entries for the date St. Andrew’s had been torched.

Grant Newbury, nine to ten, 105, Evva.

“Lulah, is there any paper? Find some paper and write this down. Make columns for date, time, church—”

“Don’t you mean ‘customer’?”

“No. Just stay with me on this, Lulah, please—I think I might be right but I need you to see it, too. Date, time, church, ignition point. Another chart—date, time, and
now
a column for customer.”