Fire Raiser (37 page)

Cam half-turned in the seat to look at Holly’s profile. She was smiling a little.

“So you’re wondering,” she said, “if you’re psychic, psycho, or truly psychotic.”

“Can we leave Freud out of this? I know what the stupid dream means.”

“It’d be pretty hard to miss,” she acknowledged. “We’re almost home, so tell me just one thing: did you let the man out and take up residence yourself?”

“No. I went back up the stairs and out the front door. I decided not to reopen the house after all, I guess. I don’t know what happened to the guy.”

“Did you leave the door open?”

“Yeah.” He peered through the rain at the familiar outlines of Woodhush—smiling in spite of himself, as always, at the preposterous pillars-and-portico out front. “Should I have gone back and dragged him out?”

“I think it’s his choice, now that the door’s open, whether he wants to stay or leave.” She parked the car and switched off the engine. “I’m so tired I don’t know if I can even sleep. Is there a level of exhaustion beyond exhaustion?”

“If so, I’m right there with you, Freckles.”

“Not too tired to do something about whatever Uncle Alec did to protect my kids, I hope. I mean, it’d be nice to be able to get into my own house.”

He gestured with one hand, then the other. “Your wish, my command—sometimes I get them mixed up.”

It amused him, once they were inside, to watch her turn into Lady of the Manor. Tim and Laura, splendidly ignorant of what had surrounded them for the past few hours—and Alec had learned a couple of new ones, Cam had discovered while untangling the layers of Wards—required nothing more than thanks and a crisp fifty each for staying until dawn to watch the kids.

“You might want to go pick up your brother Matt, by the way,” Holly added as she saw them out. “He should be over at Dr. Steinmetz’s place—he can tell you how much fun we all had tonight.”

“That was just evil,” Cam chided as she closed the front door.

“Not my problem,” she said serenely. “Come upstairs and meet the twins.”

On their way past portraits familiar to him from childhood, past the gorgeous antique quilts on display that he had helped to preserve, he said, “You’ll have to come up with a story sooner or later for what went on. You might as well try one out on me.”

“I assume you’re referring to what we called up by way of your cigar.”

“Was that what did it?”

“I don’t know.” She linked her elbow with his as they climbed. “I’m just the Spellbinder, all I ever do is stand around—”

“—with your thumb in the air. Yeah, Evan said. You did a lot more than that tonight.”

“Not on purpose, believe me. But when you think about whose land this used to be—all of it, from Virginia down to Georgia—and whose blood is in our veins, it’s not terribly surprising that to summon Earth, Air, Fire, and Water brought that particular magic. If we were in Ireland, or Wales—or even Portugal, where the Madeiras line comes from—”

“Because of who we are? Or because the
genius loci
can hear us better there?”

“Again with the Latin. And come to think of it, the last time anything like that happened to me, I was on Long Island, which isn’t exactly Cherokee territory. So it’s probably all bullshit.” She opened a door—her old room, he noted—and conjured a tiny flame to a candle high on a shelf. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “They’re asleep.”

They tiptoed over to the beds. Kirby sprawled on his back, black hair curling around his forehead and cheeks, mouth open, one arm tight around a stuffed panda bear. He looked ridiculously like his father, even at two years old. Bella was a little curl of clenched fists and hunched shoulders, as though she went about sleeping with the same determination she would bring to anything else in life. Though she had inherited the Flynn dark auburn hair and pale complexion, she had exactly three freckles that Cam could see—one on her left cheek, two on her right. He touched the long widow’s peak—also Evan’s—with one finger, smoothing back her hair.

“Gorgeous,” he murmured.

“They are, at that,” Holly replied complacently. “I’m completely without prejudice, of course.”

“And so am I.” He hesitated, then asked in tones more wistful than he’d intended, “Lend ’em to me every so often?”

“You say that now, when they’re silent and immobile,” she teased. “Wait until they wake up.”

CONSIDERING THE HOUR and the events of the previous night, Lachlan thought it might be rational for everybody to go to bed until noon and start the inevitable discussions after everyone had slept. The only rational person proved to be Nicky. Growling something about being too old and feeble for this nonsense, he disappeared upstairs into the Wisteria Room. Cam was too wired and too worried about Jamey to follow his uncle’s example—and when Holly made noises about making breakfast, he barricaded the kitchen door with his own body and threatened to dissect her with a rusty hoof pick if she so much as looked at an egg.

“You don’t know where anything is anymore,” she protested.

“I’ll figure it out.” He turned and let the door slam behind him.

Evan grinned his congratulations at his wife. “Give him something to do? Nice. Gets us all fed, too.”

“And lets us hole up in the office with Jamey’s BlackBerry.” She produced it from the pocket of the abbreviated Armani trousers.

“You’re a devious bitch, and I’m glad you’re on my side. Come on, let’s see what we can get out of the thing.”

Downloading into his computer was the work of ten minutes. While he watched the screen pop file after file, not knowing yet if any were as incriminating as he hoped, Holly went on-line for information she eventually shared with him.

“The first thing we do is have all of them tested.”

He looked up from financial reports he didn’t want to slog through anyway. “HIV?”

“Sex trafficking is a driving force in the global spread of AIDS.”

“We can’t test without consent. And the results are privileged information.”

“We have the names of all the johns. We’ll make some discreet phone calls.” She rolled her chair over to the printer and snatched up some pages. “Listen to this. ‘The younger, the better,’ this one pimp says. ‘At ten or twelve, they’re free of diseases.’ And how about this one—‘If a man isn’t getting it at home, what’s he going to do? They come to a house, buy what they need, and you know what? When men pay for it, the nice local girls are safe from getting raped. Better the foreign whores than our own girls.’ ”

“Holly—”

“This is from a law enforcement official in a country that shall remain nameless. ‘The prostitution takes place in the other countries. We have no responsibility for it. No crime has been committed here. The rights organizations scream at us for not protecting these whores, but who’s buying them? Germans. Italians. Greeks. Israelis. Arabs. Americans. Every country in the European Union. Every country in the Middle East. Every state in the United States. These places are where the crimes are being committed—and they blame us for them!’

“But this is my favorite so far. Listen: ‘They send money home, the family survives. It’s survival sex, that’s what it is. At least with me, they get a cut. I’m helping feed their families back home. Besides, they know what they’re getting into—how stupid do you have to be to realize that being hired to go to another country as a waitress or a nanny isn’t prostitution? Any girl that stupid, she has only herself to blame.’ ” She glanced around as if looking for something to throw—and someone to throw it at.

And then Evan saw something he’d never witnessed before, not in the almost five years he’d known her. He watched her find a book.

Or perhaps he was watching the book find her.

All she did was sit in the chair. She hardly seemed to be breathing. But the very stillness of a woman so constantly in motion told him everything he needed to know. He couldn’t have said exactly what it was that changed in her face, in her eyes. He only knew the changes were there.

He wondered how Erika Ayala could begrudge her husband moments like this. Yes, Holly was far away from him right now, deep inside her mind’s twists and spirals of knowledge, intuition, instinct, talent, experience, and the wealth of words and yet more words. What she felt, what she was thinking, were only shadows to him, fleeting traces around her mouth and brows, sparks that lit her eyes. She had gone where he couldn’t follow. Moreover, she neither needed nor wanted him there.

She came back to him. She would always come back to him. He smiled at her across the partners’ desk, and her consciousness of having been gone made her give a rueful shrug and say, “Sorry. Zoned out.”

“Caffeine?” Knowing it wasn’t.

“Flash of insanity.” She picked up a pen, set it down, glanced at her computer keyboard. “I got snagged on something E. L. Doctorow said. Something to the effect of, the historian tells you what happened, but the novelist tells you how it felt.”

“It’s more work, though, in a way,” he mused. “Being a novelist. You have to be accurate with the dates and places, like the historian—but you have to get inside people’s heads, imagine exactly how life feels to them.”

“Each is difficult in its own way, but a novel hurts more.”

“What would that matter, if it made a good book?”

Sinking back in her chair, she swung it from side to side for a few moments. “You realize, of course, that you’ll have to live with me while I’m writing?”

“Did I marry a writer, or just somebody who types a lot?”

“I get crazy,” she warned.

“This would be different from usual?”

“I mean it, Evan. All I’ve done for the past couple of years are short stories and some articles. This
would
be different. I’ve always lived alone while I was working on a book. I never had to worry about anybody else being around, or how late I stayed up, or what might or might not be in the fridge for dinner.”

“So you’ll be hell to live with, you’ll neglect the kids, and deprive me of regular mind-blowing sex? I have to say, lady love, that these last couple of years while you’ve been jonesing for a book to write, you’ve had your moments. They’re my kids, too, and I won’t let you neglect them. As for the sex—”

She was laughing. “If you tell me you don’t really need for me to be awake—”

“Nah, it’s usually more fun when you’re conscious.” He grinned back. “As long as you’re not doin’ a Denise, with the reanimated corpses and the zombie sex, I can handle it.”

“You’ve actually read one of her tomes?”

“I’ve read the reviews. They usually make me want to use disinfectant on my brain.” He spared a glance for the list of files taken from Weiss’s computer and the laptop, then decided to save it all for later, when he could go over it with Jamey. “By the way, I’m guessing this isn’t going to be the long-awaited sequel to
Jerusalem Lost
.”

“No.”

“No medieval stuff? No swords and castles?”

“This will be contemporary. Even topical.” She paused. “People won’t be very happy.”

He grinned again. “Fuck ’em.”

A weary sort of commotion at the front door turned their heads. A minute later Holly laughed silently as Jamey’s voice called out, “Cam?”

“Honey, I’m home?” Evan winked at her.

“It should be that easy. Peaches wouldn’t know ‘easy’ if it kneed him in the balls.”

A few minutes later, the baby was put to bed in a cradle brought down by Cam. Alec sported a cast, Jamey wasn’t even limping, and nobody said much of anything besides “Pass the butter” for the next fifteen minutes during a mass plundering of scrambled eggs, andouille sausages, corn muffins, mandarin orange slices, and gigantic mugs of coffee just this side of lethal.

And then the twins woke up.

Twenty-two

KIRBY AND BELLA’S SHYNESS with Cam lasted about as long as it took him to flip the lid open on the old upright piano. That this was Jamey’s suggestion startled him; that the twins were thrilled when actually allowed to touch the hitherto forbidden keyboard was less of a surprise. The racket they made learning “Chopsticks” brought Holly to the parlor door, her whole face a desperate plea. Pausing in his placement of four small index fingers on the appropriate keys, Cam concentrated for a moment. All noise ceased beyond a ten-foot perimeter of Persian carpet. Holly mouthed a heartfelt
Thank you!
and returned to the office.

Fourteen renditions later, some of them very nearly right, Jamey prevailed on Cam to play something else. He seated Bella in his lap while Kirby stayed beside Cam on the bench, watching fascinated as first a Chopin nocturne and then a Scott Joplin rag emerged from the piano with the touch of fingers on black and white keys. A glance down at the boy showed awestruck, worshiping blue eyes, as if this was magic beyond even Aunt Lulah’s.

“Haven’t you ever played for them?” Cam asked Holly later, when Nicky had taken the kids upstairs, putatively for room-straightening but by the sound of it for the War of the Stuffed Animals. “I know you’re not any good, but at least you could’ve shown them how the thing works.”

“You taught them ‘Chopsticks,’ you despicable man. I was hoping for at least another six months or so of peace and quiet—” She paused as shrieks and growls filtered down from upstairs. “Relative peace and quiet,” she amended. “Come into the office, both of you. Thoughts have been thunk, and we need your input.”

Lulah had returned to her own house to sleep. With Alec sacked out in the Wisteria Room and Nicky looking after the children, Cam, Jamey, Evan, and Holly sat in conference around the big double desk, supplied with yet more coffee.

Evan got down to it. “I did some checking with an old buddy of mine at the Marshals Service—man, he was pissed off when he called back. Even a year later there’s still twenty different agencies you gotta go through to find out what’s goin’ on in New Orleans. Anyway, this spring somebody finally took one of the trafficked boys around and found the house Weiss used. Same kind of thing on a smaller scale. Dorm rooms and a medical setup. All abandoned, though, dammit—though the kid did give descriptions, and one of them sounds a lot like Herr Weiss. I sent copies of the passport photos from Weiss’s safe. He says he’ll get back to me if the kid recognizes anybody.”

“Not to malign my new home,” Jamey said, “but why did Weiss move here? What’s the attraction?”

Cam exchanged looks with Holly. “Witches.”

Holly refilled her mug, then passed the carafe to Jamey. “Lulah says the old bloodlines are dying out. Originally there were five or six Irish families—realizing that this comprehends a vast cousinage—they all knew each other back in the Old Country, they all settled around here for mutual aid and protection. The population grew when more Witches moved here—Welsh, Scots, Breton—they even allowed the English in!” She winked at Cam, who made a face at her. “But one way or another they heard that Pocahontas County’s a good place to live if you’re magically inclined.”

“Some of my father’s people came here from Salem in the late 1680s, just before the Witch Trials,” Cam said to Jamey. “Holly never lets me forget I’m part English.”

“Not your fault, dear,” she soothed. “Anyway, by the mid-1800s, the area’s lousy with Witches. But that’s also when the country really opens up. People leave, other people come here to live, kids who went away come back married to persons who are not, shall we say, of the same faith. The percentage of Witches born to each generation goes down. But there’s still a lot of us in PoCo, compared to the general population.”

Evan took up the story. “I called Elias Bradshaw in New York. He’s promised some definite numbers to confirm, but the sense is that no other community that started the way this one did—the German immigration into Pennsylvania, for instance—still turns out the number of Witches PoCo does.”

Jamey stirred sugar into his coffee—deosil, Cam noted, wondering if he’d always done it that way or if somebody had explained a few Witchy things to him—and mused, “Is there something about the environment, the air, water, soil, vegetation, whatever, that makes for magic?”

“That’s the theory.” Evan leaned back and propped his feet on the desk. “It could be one reason Weiss set up shop here. Of course, there’s also Holly. I’m still wondering why he didn’t take a sample somehow when she was there that time.” He picked up his coffee, shook his head, and set it back down. “I might as well mainline this stuff. You’re looking thoughtful, Counselor. Full of thought. Overflowing, one might say.”

“You’re blithering,
a chuisle
,” Holly said with a sympathetic grimace. “That’s my department.”

Jamey smiled tiredly. “Cam said there was so much magic in that staircase that it overloaded. But the clinic downstairs was free of magic. It was all technology.”

A white cat, sleek and arrogant, jumped up onto Jamey’s knees and settled down to supervise. Cam realized he didn’t know if this was a Bandit, Brigand, Butch, Sundance, or Pretty Boy Floyd. Geeze, even the family cat was more comfortable with Jamey than with him.

“If environment counts,” Jamey continued, long fingers smoothing the cat’s lush fur, “when you’re trying to breed a Witch—” He broke off. “Christ, that sounds cold.”

Holly nodded. “Science usually is. There are a lot more warm fuzzies in thinking that God made people specially and specifically than in our being a product of six billion years of genetic mutations.”

“What I was getting at is that you say the girl was a Witch. She was an environment, too. And that sounds colder than ever.”

“Both my parents were alcoholics,” Evan said slowly. “My mother more than my father—I don’t know, are there degrees of being an addict? But chances were good that my sister and I would be alcoholics as well.”

“But you’re not.”

“Neither of us, that I’ve ever been able to tell. So, yeah, genes are important, but environment might play a big factor—”

“Like being gay,” Holly interrupted. “There’s no piece of DNA people can point to and say ‘This person is homosexual.’ Identical twins can turn out one gay and one straight. Is it a predisposition triggered by environment or experiences? The very fact that identical twins occupy separate places in space and time—”

Evan cocked a brow at her. “I draw the line when the lectures start getting Einsteinian. We’ll agree that genes and environment are both important factors, and leave it at that, okay?”

“So stipulated for the record,” Jamey put in.

“Thank you, Counselor,” Evan said.

“I’m still back on the question of who spelled the place,” Cam said. “And why Weiss could sense Witches but—”

“—but wasn’t any more a Witch than I am?” Holly smiled ruefully. “I think that may factor psychologically into what he was doing.”

“Wait a minute.” Jamey sat forward, gray eyes alight. “Part of the environment around here is magic—all the Witches you were talking about earlier—and if it’s not some deep dark forbidden secret, might I get a list one of these days?”

“Sure. You’re family now,” said Evan. When Cam frowned, he widened his eyes, the portrait of innocence.

“Thank you,” Jamey replied, blushing a little. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Environment. Witches are part of this environment. Weiss would be the perfect project manager. Like putting a teetotaler behind the bar in a roomful of alcoholics.”

“You can’t sense magic that isn’t there.” Evan nodded. “I like it. But that still doesn’t tell us who put it all together for him in the first place.”

Holly swirled coffee around in her mug. “If we posit that this person or persons stayed here at Westmoreland very early on, to set the spells, then we may find a name or two in the guest register that Nicky or Alec would recognize. Start with 2004, when Westmoreland opened—” She bent over her computer and began tapping keys.

Cam poured and gulped black coffee, scalding his tongue. “As far as the unwilling ‘guests’ are concerned, I’ve got a friend at the INS. I can give her a call and we can start tracing how these children got here. We might be able to shut down a trafficking ring or two, if we’re lucky. If the victims will talk to us.”

“I called Reverend Deutschman on the way back here,” Jamey said. “He’ll assume responsibility for them, place them with foster families. I think that maybe after a while, they’ll be convinced that they’re safe, and be able to tell us something of what happened to them.”

“What do you want to bet not a one of them wants to go home?” Holly stabbed a key and sat back. “I saw a piece on-line a little while ago about Iraqi girls who fled to Syria and ended up in the sex trade. A Muslim girl who goes home is killed. It doesn’t matter if she was kidnapped, threatened, drugged, tortured. She’s been defiled and for the sake of the family honor has to die. And don’t tell me that Europeans don’t do such things. These girls—and boys—might not get killed for what happened to them, but would any of them have a life?”

“Ironically circular, isn’t it?” Lachlan murmured. “Part of the money raised last night goes to rebuild burned churches, part to combat trafficking. And Weiss stood there, smiling and welcoming everybody, when the source of the church fires was a Hungarian girl he trafficked.”

“Whoa,” Cam pleaded. “I’m not current with this.”

“And I’m not understanding it,” Jamey said. “What do the church fires have to do with—”

Holly was typing again, so Evan answered. “The match-ups aren’t perfect, and I don’t understand a couple of them yet. But we think the girl was responsible for all but the Methodist fire.”

“Here’s what the ledger said about those nights.” Holly turned the laptop so Jamey could see the screen. Cam pushed himself to his feet and went around to the other side of the desk.

“Either she was watching it happen on the screen, or she sensed what was going on, I’m not prepared to say which. And it doesn’t matter.” Holly pointed to an entry. “November eighth, 2005, Jack Wheeler was with Jurek in Room 208 from one until two in the morning. The fire at First Baptist started between midnight and three—but I’m going to pinpoint it at the moment of Wheeler’s orgasm. Hang on a minute and I’ll tell you why. The fire starts in the vestibule, in a stack of benches that are being revarnished. Wheeler not only manages the store where the cans of varnish were bought, but his wife teaches a class at the church. There’s the association—and I’d be willing to bet they were together, at the church, painting those benches that very afternoon. So that night he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing, or having it done to him. I don’t know and I don’t care. He yells out ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ or ‘Holy shit’ or whatever he yells at times like that. His neurons are all firing, it’s power and chemicals and all the physiological things that go on with orgasm. I had it explained to me once that it was sort of a vision of eternity.” She traded glances with her husband, who frowned down into his coffee mug. “Think about St. Theresa and her raptures, all the saints who described visions. They use words like
ecstasy
and
ravishment
and
bliss
—and don’t they call nuns the ‘Brides of Christ’?”

“Now, that’s just kinky,” Cam objected.

“Yeah, kind of makes me feel squirmy, too,” Evan admitted. “But if the physical sensation is pretty much the same, then Wheeler’s brain is both completely focused and totally open—and the association of physical release, yelling out to God, and the place or thing he most recently associates with church—”

Jamey was shaking his head. “And benches catch on fire miles away?”

“You won’t get any forensics to play with,” Cam said. “But I know the feel of her magic. I’d—”

“The feel?”

“When I was playing the piano, I felt the same magic as I did when I bumped into the grand piano at Westmoreland. It’s like a signature, a fingerprint. What I was going to say is that if I take a field trip to the final church-burning—”

“You’re sure Gospel Baptist will be the final one.” It wasn’t quite a question.

Cam looked directly into shadowy gray eyes and said nothing.

“Like I said, Jamey,” Evan murmured. “You gotta trust them.”

“Okay, then, what
about
Gospel?” he challenged. “We’ve got a start time prior to midnight, in the office.”

Evan checked his own computer list. “August second, this year. Louis LaPierre is with Kurt from nine to ten in Room 208—and it’s important that all these guys were in rooms with a view, if you follow my meaning. That’s why we think this girl was actually watching and listening. That day, Louis had been in to see the minister at Gospel about the fire alarms he’d installed—”

“Irony on top of irony,” Holly observed in disgust.

“—and it turned out they didn’t work, as we found out when the arson guys went through it. Faulty wiring, skimping on materials—what do you want to bet he was sitting in that chair that afternoon sweating and praying that he wouldn‘t get caught?”

Cam was beginning to see the sense in this, and it made him feel more than squirmy. “So when he got off that night—”

“The office was his nearest and most recent association with a church. Or God.”

“That’s seriously sick.”

Evan snorted. “Ya think? Like I said, I don’t understand a couple of them, but this is the only thing that makes sense to Holly and me.”

“August second,” she blurted. “God
damn
!” She bent over the keyboard, typing feverishly. “The place opened in November 2004—would it be August or—yes! October! Here he is again in—February . . . in May . . .
there’s
August! October again, February again, May—”

Cam jumped up to look over her shoulder. Open files cluttered the screen, a single name highlighted in each. He saw at once that she was right. “Valentin Maximovich Saksonov,” he said, “avails himself of the services at Westmoreland around the dates of the Four Quarters.” For Jamey’s benefit: “October, February, May, and August are the big seasonal rituals.”

“Hallowe’en?” Jamey hazarded.