Fire Raiser (29 page)

Natasha looks at her with the empty expression perfected these last months. It has worked with everyone but the tall man. It does not work with this woman, either.

“You have a secretive face, and there’s quite a lot you’re hiding behind those lovely blue eyes, but the air around you tells the truth. I’m no expert in that kind of reading, but I know enough to know you can understand me. If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I propose to take you and your friends back home with me to Virginia, where the people who kept you will never find you. Once you’re there, you can decide what you want to do next—go back to your home, stay in this country, whatever it is you want to do. You’ll make the decision. You’ll decide if you trust me.”

Against everything she’d learned since waking up in the blacked-out upstairs room in Budapest, she does trust this woman. Something stirs inside her, vaguely recognized from odd, isolated instances in the past—things she can’t remember with any real clarity, the way images in dreams are vivid one instant and mist the next. But it is something, it is familiar, and it makes her trust this woman.

At length she gives a short, sharp nod.

“Good girl.” Poppy smiles and gets to her feet, chair scraping the concrete floor. “You just rest, honey, and when we’re ready to leave I’ll come get you. All right?”

She doesn’t respond again—after so long forbidding response in the muscle and skin that could betray her with a movement or a flush of color, she cannot release control so quickly. But Poppy only smiles again, and walks away.

THE WHOLE WORLD is a soggy mess. It takes hours to drive past the debris strewn through every street—trees, cars, bits of houses, furniture that floated out and flowed along with the water and then sank into the sucking mud. At last the car reaches an area looking slightly less like a war zone.

Poppy hasn’t said much. She has the radio on, listening to news reports. Everyone is angry. The incompetence of the government is the only topic. People are being blamed and other people are defending them, and themselves, and quite often the “discussions” become shouting matches. At this point Poppy usually changes the channel. There are appeals for food, clothing, water; phone numbers and addresses are recited; people read out lists of names of missing persons. Natasha finds it interesting, in a remote way, that Americans are so eager to help, rushing to give money and collect clothing and offer shelter to total strangers. To other Americans. Not to her.

The other passengers are silent. Natasha recognizes them. Marika is “special,” like her; the other girl and the boy are whores from downstairs. She doesn’t know and doesn’t care if they understand enough English to follow the news on the radio. The hours pass, the sunlight dims, and Poppy pulls the car into a lot with a sign that says REST STOP. She points to the bathrooms as she begins talking into a cell phone.

Natasha thinks for a moment about slipping away. That Poppy doesn’t accompany them to the bathroom means she trusts them to return—or perhaps she simply knows that they have no other choices, nowhere to go. But Natasha speaks English. She might be able to—

There is a smear of blood on her underpants. She takes them off, puts them in the metal box labeled DISPOSAL, and walks back to the car.

She is half-dozing in the darkness when she feels a sharp cramp in her abdomen. Someone on the radio is complaining again about
feemuh
. Natasha sits very still and stares unblinking into the swath of road illuminated by the headlights, bordered by metal railings and languid trees. When the pain returns, her whole body clenches.

Glaring headlights shine directly into her face, startling her. Poppy pounds a fist onto the horn, hits the brakes, wrenches the steering wheel, loses control of the car. It slews toward the metal barricade, smashes, skids sideways, skitters to a stop. Poppy curses furiously. One of the girls in the back seat is crying in huge terrified sobs.

The seat belt traps her. She struggles to find the release catch, and her stomach cramps again.

“You idiot!” Poppy yells out the open window. “You ran me off the road!”

“My apologies.” He leans down, and all his white teeth are shining as he smiles. “Hello, Natasha.”

She feels a warm gush of liquid between her legs.

Poppy’s breath catches. “You know this girl? How do you—”

“Now, madam, if you—” He falters, and suddenly looks at Poppy as if he recognizes her. “Ah! No wonder you found her. You will be so good as to restore to me my property.”

“Your ‘property’?”

“I know what you are. I know how you found her. And now I will take her back.” He gestures with one thick-fingered hand. “It’s a strange location, this. Here for a very long time, invisible except to those with capacity to see.”

All at once Poppy mutters something under her breath, and her right hand rises from the steering wheel to trace a brief pattern in the air.

“No, do not trouble yourself. It will not work here. Can’t you feel it? The power that prevents power’s use. Someone was creative, and deeply skilled.”

“How did
you
find her?” Poppy asks, her fingers stealthy, sliding toward the door handle. “How did you get ahead of us?”

“You stopped, and made a phone call. I must ask you to stay still. Put both hands on the wheel. Marika, get the other girl and that boy out of the car. Carefully.”

It hurts now. It hurts very much. In a blackened haze spiked with acid, it hurts.

“Slowly now, Natasha,” he says, and she flinches, for he is right next to her, leaning in the open car door. “I found her the same way you did,” he tells Poppy, flicking a finger against the dangling silver disk of the bracelet.

Poppy looks startled, then shaken—and then she says with terrible contempt, “You’re a parasite. You have nothing of your own, so you—”

“Enough,” he says softly. “Enough.”

It is the last thing she hears before the pain overwhelms her.

Three days later, she wakes up in Virginia.

IT’S A STUPID BOOK.

The others—about Viking conquests, a queen who stitched an endless tapestry, a poet, an artist, the mistress of a king—were interesting at least for the history. This one drones on and on. France is always cold and rainy, Palestine is always hot and sandy. Guillaume keeps galloping his horse into battle and waving his sword at Saracens and whining about Elisabeth. Elisabeth is forever tending her castle and fending off suitors and whining about Guillaume.

A very stupid book.

But she has folded the last load of sheets and pillowcases, bedspreads and towels, and she has nothing else to do.

She thinks for a moment about sneaking down the stairs, just for a change of scenery. But in the last weeks she has grown so big and so ungainly that it’s a chore just to walk down the hall to the therapy room. She hasn’t been on any floor but this one, in fact, for five months—not officially, anyway.

A few days after she woke up here, he took her down the stairs to sit on a footstool with a screen on her lap, and made her watch while a girl spent an hour with a man in a bed. In all this time, from Hungary to Albania to Italy to Mexico to New Orleans to Virginia, she has never watched the act. He did not allow her to look away, his fingers like thick claws at the back of her neck. She watched as the girl’s mouth gaped wide and the man filled it. She saw the man’s face contort as he shouted the name of the Son of God, over and over and over again.

“Be a good girl, Natasha, and that will not happen to you.”

As hard as she worked not to feel anything, learning to ignore and repress her senses, she could not control the anger (triumph?), the helpless panic (ecstatic power?) that flared along her nerves as he screamed Jesus again, and Jesus, before slumping back across the bed.

But she had no time to sort out these feelings, for the heavy fingers shifted to her shoulder and wrenched her around to face him. He was blatantly shocked. Then he laughed low in his throat. When he spoke, his words were German. She understood every one of them.

“Of course. I was right. It needs the place and the air and the water and the magic all together—I told them it would, I
knew
it would.” More laughter. “You, little one, you will be the success. I would have brought you here before, but I didn’t want to risk the child—and now that I know you
can
conceive, in this place you will be my success. And you don’t even know what you are!”

He has not taken her back to the landing and the chair and the screen since then. She has gone back by herself.

The first time, it was very late at night, and completely quiet. She sat with the screen on her lap and her eyes on the screen and watched the man and the girl in the bed. She was ready that time for the response inside herself. She recognized it now. She had first felt it in Italy, when the
Dottore
had groped and pawed at her, and the gold crucifix glinted with fire. She knew, with a stinging in her blood that she later decided must be how power felt, to anticipate the surge of energy racing along her own nerves.

She cannot call up that power on her own. She has only the memory of it, and at times the desire to feel it again is so sharp that she risks leaving her room and seeking out the screen where she could watch. Usually she is disappointed: there are no people in the rooms, or only people who were alone, or couples doing ordinary things like getting ready for bed, or talking, or showering, or simply sleeping. But three more times she is rewarded for daring to descend the stairs.

Now that she is too heavy and awkward to move with the stealth required, she quite often calls up the images in her head for cold analysis. She dissects the sensations, the timing, the images. The
Dottore
with his golden crucifix. The first man, calling out to Jesus. The second had begged to be forgiven, raised his hands into the air and begged God to forgive him. One of the men sang. He actually
sang
to the rhythm of his own body. Another had included the name of a woman in his litany. Not Mary or a saint; someone called Lisa. And then he started to cry. The last one she’d watched had cried, too, because he was scared. He hadn’t even caught his breath—and she hadn’t even felt the whiplash of power begin to fade—before he was muttering to himself about someone would find out and he was in so much trouble and Jesus God Almighty what was he going to do?

She hoards these memories for their evocations of power. She sorts and categorizes, hungers to feel it all again. Except for the books, and the daily walk down the hall to the therapy room, and the baskets of clean linens that are brought to her each morning and afternoon for folding, she has nothing else to do.

There had been another time of power for her, a time that had nothing to do with watching the screen. Downstairs, all the way down where the surgery and examination rooms are, he had been waiting with his little vial and his long syringe. He sprinkled white crystals of salt in a circle around the bed, lit four candles of varying colors, then changed into a pristine white lab coat. “My vestments,” he told her with a smile. And though there was no culmination of sexual energy, she felt the now-familiar surge and quiver and burn. That there is something besides sex that kindles power intrigues her. What the salt and candles have to do with it, she has no idea.

The only thing she knows for certain is that she has a baby in her belly. And from the restless twitches that started this morning, she thinks that perhaps it will not be inside her for very much longer.

She has a healthy body, a certain blood type, a fertile young womb. These things make her valuable. Whatever she might feel—and she doesn’t feel much anymore, except that fretful craving for power—whatever she might think, whatever else goes on inside her, none of it means anything. In the last weeks she has come to feel that there is a frozen crystal skeleton inside her that the birth of this baby will either melt or shatter. She contemplates both endings with no more than casual curiosity. She does not matter. The baby matters. When it comes, he will have no more use for her. And it may be that she will become one of those girls in one of those rooms.

And so, when a man appears in her doorway, even though she has never seen him before she sees him without fear. She still has value; the baby is still inside her. Perhaps he has come for the child—which is moving now with intent, kicking and poking painfully. It suddenly hurts so much that she is startled into an uncontrolled reaction when the blond man blurts out a soft exclamation.

“
Te jó Isten!
”

Her eyes widen as she hears her own language for the first time in longer than she can recall. He flinches as if in pain. As if he is hurting for
her.

Sixteen

ONE OF THE THINGS Jamey Stirling most appreciated about Pocahontas County was that he could campaign for office without having to organize an actual campaign. He’d seen enough of such things to enjoy their absence. There was no manager to tell him where to go and what to do, no finance guru soliciting funds and doling them out one grudging dollar at a time, no scheduler or press secretary, not even a gofer to get him coffee. It was all on him. He did his job during the day, and on evenings and weekends accepted invitations to speak at events like tonight’s, to dinner in people’s homes, to coffee and pie at meetings of various county social and charitable organizations. Some nights he just hung out at one of the watering holes or diners, or Mrs. Paulet’s hardware store. It was the kind of politics everyone pretended still obtained all over the country. It was really possible only in places like this, where billboards and yard signs were considered bad taste and no one would dream of airing a commercial on the local radio station. A candidate declared, spent time getting to know people not already encountered in the course of his job and life here, sent out one or two mailings, printed up a few window signs for people who asked for them, and that was it.

His father and brother had offered to come run his campaign. He’d declined with thanks, knowing how difficult it would be to explain PoCo political customs to men who hadn’t worked on a level below governor or senator in twenty years.

Running unopposed, he wasn’t worried about getting the votes he needed to claim for real the job he’d been doing for almost a year now. He knew he’d done good work for this county. People knew him and liked him. What he worried about was what he hadn’t done yet. He’d spoken the exact truth this evening: the church fires were really pissing him off. And now he had something new to be really pissed off about. Whatever Bernhardt Weiss was up to in his magic-infested Westmoreland Inn, Jamey was going to prosecute him on as many counts as he logically could.

His problem was figuring out what constituted “logical” when one was dealing with Witchcraft.

Gotta have a talk with Evan about that,
he decided as he leaned against the wall and kept glancing back and forth, downstairs and upstairs.
A very long talk.

But before that happened, he had to have an even longer talk with Cam.

He’d told the truth as well when he’d said he’d taken this job because he was sick of cities. But always in the back of his mind had been the notion that one day Cam might show up. Not mentioning him, especially to Holly and Lulah, had been almost intolerable. The closest he’d ever come to it was admitting that he’d been at Yale Law around the same time as the cousin they adored. He tried not to be obvious, whenever he went to Woodhush, about going into Evan and Holly’s shared office to look at the family photos strewn across the walls. Once or twice he’d sat casually down at the upright piano where Cam had learned to play. And Kirby, with his bright blue eyes, really did look a lot like Cam. . . .

In short, he’d had it bad for twelve solid years, and he knew it. And now that Cam was finally within reach again, Jamey decided he was tired of waiting.

Except there was more to talk about now than just them. There was magic.

Standing here with a Glock in his hand, he examined the wall with the door he couldn’t see. Nothing magical about it. It was a wall. It had silk on it. It had wainscoting. It looked exactly like the wall on the other side had looked. Turning, he frowned at the wooden chest and the fresh flowers, just as innocuous as the wall. The cabinet door was carved with various things: single keys at each corner, and a castle gate below the huge central griffin. For obvious reasons, he had long ago looked up pictures of heraldic griffins. The body of a lion, with the head, wings, and talons of an eagle; a fierce and mythical animal, and the only part of anything in this hallway that even hinted at magic. Certainly the flowers were innocent. He recognized rhododendrons and sweet peas amid the lavender roses, and thought the tall plant must be papyrus—yes, had to be, although whether it was the symbol of Upper or Lower Egypt, he couldn’t recall. The point was that none of it had anything to do with magic—

No. The point was that the papyrus was
symbolic
. So were the keys, the griffin, the gate. Everything in heraldry meant something—each color, each geometric design, each animal or bird or flower or creature that didn’t really exist. How many times had he walked into a Southern home to find it rife with carved and painted pineapples, emblem of hospitality? And Justice, blindfolded, carried sword and scales. Nobody in this modern world thought in symbolic terms. But when the vast majority of people had been unable to read, images and all their associations had taken the place of words. About the only thing Jamey could think of that was comparable these days was the red octagon that everywhere meant STOP.

Rhododendrons and sweet peas, roses and papyrus; keys, castle gate, and griffin. He had no idea what any of them meant in the language of symbols. But he was entirely sure the Witches would know.

Even the wood that the cabinet was carved of—hadn’t Lulah McClure handed her nephew a little wooden charm to help him find the doorway?

As Jamey stood alone and alert on that landing, he believed and not believed and believed again about twenty times. Every time he decided it was all perfectly insane, he looked at the wall again. Every time he recalled that one minute he’d been sopping wet with rain and the next he’d been warm and dry, and told himself that “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” didn’t work that way, he looked at the wall again.

Now he looked at the cabinet and its bouquet of flowers. A wooden cabinet. A vase of flowers. How could anything so utterly commonplace be at all magical?

He looked at the wall again. The shape of a hand indented the silk. Pushing, prodding, testing. It didn’t come through. He couldn’t remember what movie it was where somebody’s face had done pretty much the same thing—as if it had been wrapped in plastic, or was pressing outward against a balloon that wouldn’t pop.

He could stick around and wait for the hand and the person attached to it to come through the wall. This was a non-starter; whoever it was knew about the magic, and therefore quite probably could work magic. Glock or no Glock—and he was fairly certain Evan had handed the gun over just to make him feel better—he had seen enough tonight that he really did believe that he didn’t want to pit one or even ten bullets against whatever it was Witches could do.

That left downstairs or upstairs.

He stuffed the Glock into his waistband at the small of his back and quietly moved the footstool so that anyone coming through the wall would trip over it. The sound would warn him to make some kind of noise that would turns heads upstairs, not down. Down was where the women were. Upstairs . . . okay, he might as well admit it. Upstairs was Cam.

He took the steps two and three at a time. As he climbed, logic nattered an irksome reminder that there were only three floors to Westmoreland, that if he counted landings he would know where he was—and that adding together the number of steps he had taken thus far would put him at the top of the Washington Monument.

“Jamey—? What the hell—?”

He looked up and saw Cam, Evan, and two girls in nightgowns and bathrobes.

Curiouser and curiouser?
Alice hadn’t known the half of it.

LACHLAN HAD TO ADMIRE JAMEY’S sangfroid. Instead of gaping like the village idiot, stuttering out questions, or just plain failing to react altogether, he got to the important part with the first words out of his mouth.

“Somebody’s trying to get in. They’re not succeeding. And I’m assuming you want to get these young ladies out.”

“That’s the idea.” Evan shepherded his charge gently down the steep stairs to the next landing. “And since that’s the only entrance we know about . . .”

“Do you think they might give up and go away?” Cam asked with no real hope.

Evan shook his head. “I think they might go find another door into this place—one that Cam didn’t lock. There’s gotta be more than one, right?”

This did not fill the younger men with delight. Evan shrugged and kept descending the stairs. He let Cam explain where they’d found the girls, and listened while the two speculated about finding a place to stash them. But when Jamey, alluding to Nicky’s suggestion about the “services” provided at Westmoreland, asked if they might possibly be working girls, Evan interrupted with, “No. There’s only two of them, and they were hidden away with magic. And there wasn’t anything in that closet but the bathrobes and some plain shirts and things.”

Cam feigned astonishment. “No black leather boots? No fringe and sequins?”

Lachlan flashed him a look that warned against further one-liners. This stairwell was finally having the same effect on him as the rest of the Inn; every step he took rasped from his boot heels up his spine, grating his nerves like Tillamook cheddar.

So when a figure came into view far down the staircase, his hand was halfway to his Glock—which wasn’t there—before he recognized his wife. She blinked at him, knowing the aborted move for what it was.

“Hot damn,” she murmured. “I finally got to startle somebody tonight. Stand down, Sheriff, it’s only me.” Gaze sweeping over him, Cam, Jamey, and the two girls, she said, “You found company upstairs, but we found an operating theater downstairs.”

Evan countered with, “Exercise room, sunlamps, and a crash cart.”

“Cryogenics.” She held up a laptop computer. “And an appointment register—not, I make haste to add, for massages at the spa.”

Lachlan upped the ante. “Portable DVD player that hooks up to six different rooms for observation and recording at the Westmoreland Inn, Spa—”

“—and Whorehouse,” Lulah said as she joined them.

“And Home for Expectant Mothers,” came Nicky’s voice behind them. “Lulah, there’s a girl upstairs in labor.”

“Hell and damnation.” She pushed past them all, tossing over her shoulder, “Anyone who does a Butterfly McQueen impersonation will be lancing boils in embarrassing places for the next month.”

“Did I also mention,” said Holly, “that I think Lulah and I have figured out the church fires?”

“
Now
it’s a party,” Evan murmured.

GETTING MARIKA AND AGRAFYNA to safety was their immediate priority. Mindful of Jamey’s description of a hand trying to push through the wall, they waited a few twitchy minutes on the landing of the papyrus and rhododendrons. Absolutely nothing happened. Evan traded shrugs with his wife, reclaimed his Glock, and gestured with a flourish at Cam.

“If you’d be so kind as to open the door?”

“But of course.”

Evan took a long stride through the wallpaper. A moment later he was back. “All quiet. I can’t guess for how long, so let’s get them out of here.”

Holly stayed with Jamey, counting off minutes in her head. When he spoke, she flinched.

“Tell me about the fires.”

She held tighter to the laptop. “In here are names and times that coincide with some but not all of the arsons—it’s weird and it’s complicated, but I think it might end up being right.”

“Convince me,” he said.

“Okay, Counselor. Men who were here on the same nights and at around the same time the fires started have ties to the churches that burned. Example: St. Andrew’s, April 8 of this year. Start time between eight-thirty and nine forty-five p.m. Grant Newbury was here from nine until ten, in Room 105 with a girl named Evva. The fire was ignited in a cabinet where they kept their brand-new hymnals. Grant is a member of the St. Andrew’s congregation.”

“Not buying.”

He sounded like Elias Bradshaw at his judgmental worst. Well, she had to admit that the first example was a little thin. “On September 29, 2005, Hugh Chadwick was here from eleven to midnight. He’s a contractor specializing in brickwork—and the newly completed front steps were the ignition point at Old Believers Baptist.”

“Still no sale.”

She glared. “What do you want, signed confessions?”

“Evidence would be nice.”

“Jack Wheeler,” she said through gritted teeth. “November 8, one to two in the morning—”

“That was the First Baptist fire, with the varnish and the benches?”

“Yeah. Wheeler is the manager of that hardware emporium—”

“—where that brand of varnish is sold?” He shook his head. “I’ve met Jack Wheeler several times. I’ve had dinner with him and Lisa. He coaches soccer, she teaches dance, they have two great kids—” He broke off suddenly, frowning.

Holly shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, wriggling her toes within Cam’s wool socks. “I’m sure Lisa’s just swell, but she’s not equipped with what Jack Wheeler was here for that night.”

The silver-gray eyes widened, and he actually blushed.

“Damn it all, Jamey! These men were here for sex, and churches they’re associated with in one way or another burned down those same nights, in fires that started at the same times they were here!”

“It doesn’t tell me how.”

“Magic. The Methodist fire was the only one with no magic involved, and don’t ask me how I know that, but I do know it. That’s what was in one of the faxes that came in tonight—not about the magic, I mean, but there was actual forensic evidence of how that fire started. Which there isn’t for any of the others.”

“So which of the good gentlemen of Calvary Baptist was getting a blow job on October 9 last year?” he challenged.

“None of them,” she had to admit. “The only one here at the right time was some guy named Van Slyke, and Lulah says he belongs to Old Believers.”

Jamey said nothing for a moment. “All right. You’ve got me.”

“What? Why?”

“Calvary invited the Old Believers to join them that Sunday. My secretary told me all about it. Lots of arm-waving and praise-the-Lord. One of the Old Believers got up to witness to the combined congregations—”

“From the pulpit? Where the fire started?”

“From the pulpit,” he confirmed. “Where the fire started. Anyway, the service was such a success that a committee is ironing out doctrinal differences so they can become a single congregation. Ginny gives me regular updates.” He smiled slightly. “Ever since she learned that ‘Stirling’ was originally ‘Silberman’ she’s been gently evangelizing me. This year I may have to observe Yom Kippur for the first time since the rabbi’s wife said something about my
bar mitzvah
speech that my mother didn’t cotton to and we stopped going to temple.”