A Grave Tree (3 page)

Sylvain gave Ian a careful look. “I think,” he said, “if you’ve finished eating, it would be best to continue this discussion in private.”

Ian shifted his gaze to Abbey, Caleb, and Mark. Digby had emerged from Ian’s pocket and was perched on his shoulder, happily consuming a piece of filo, his whiskers twitching. Farley had taken up a post beneath Ian’s chair, his wide pink tongue hanging out of his mouth and his eyes fixed on Digby.

“They’re going to need to know,” Ian said. “The Council, what’s left of it, is meeting later this week. They’ll be discussing Selena’s plan to find a way to the parallel universe. I think they plan to support her. You need to be at the meeting, and so should they.”

“We don’t need to remind those clowns that these children exist,” Sylvain replied.

Digby scampered down Ian’s shoulder and onto the table, where he delicately retrieved a larger piece of pastry from Ian’s plate. Sylvain flinched but didn’t say anything. A strand of drool emerged from Farley’s mouth.

“I somehow doubt they would forget,” Ian said. “They’re assets, and they’d be a heck of a lot safer prepared. What if something happens to you?”

“It’s not up for discussion,” Sylvain said.

“Marian isn’t always right.” A darkness crept over Ian’s face, replacing his normally insouciant expression, and Abbey wondered again if he could be trusted—and who he had been pointing the gun at that night in Abbott’s Apothecary. Her mother and Ian had obviously dated once, or had a past of some sort, if the photo she and Caleb had found in her mother’s yearbook—of photo of her mother and Ian holding hands—was any indication.

“Ian’s right,” Caleb thrust in. “We’re tired of being cooped up here.”

Sylvain ignored Caleb. “About her own children, I would say she’s pretty right,” Sylvain answered. He shifted his gaze to Abbey, Caleb, and Mark. “I’d appreciate it if the three of you do the dishes while Ian and I talk in the office.”

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Ian said, and then flipped Abbey and Caleb a glance as if to say that he had tried. He held out his hand to Digby, who ran back up onto the small man’s shoulder, and then Ian rose and followed Sylvain into the little office down the hall. Farley padded behind them, his toenails clicking on the wood floor, and settled on the runner carpet just outside the closed office door.

Abbey’s emotions and muscles felt like a bundle of jagged nerves as Mark automatically started clearing the table, cutlery clanking against the heavy dishes in his meaty hands. She stalked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Rain pelted from the sky in silvery sheets, and broad puddles pooled in the small clearing in front of the house.

How had Ian gotten to the cabin? Had he driven? Maybe they could steal his car and escape. But where would they go? And was there a ghost lingering outside, waiting for them to depart the safety of the cabin? Despite Abbey’s desire to leave, Sylvain seemed to be exerting an odd hold on them that prevented them from running away. Ian had said that Sylvain was an extuit—an expert in influencing people and situations. Was he using witchcraft to keep them docile and hidden away? It certainly felt sometimes that he had sprinkled them with a magic dust of words.

Caleb beckoned her from the corner of the living room, where he hovered over his laptop.

“I’ve been running secret searches on Quentin Steinam,” he said. “Simon taught me how to encrypt what I do online.”

“And?”

“Well, I’ve been making a list of things he’s invested in—the computer industry, the mining industry, chemical engineering, aeronautics. He was pretty active until about a year ago, and then it’s like he just dropped off the face of the map. But look at this.” Caleb gestured to an email on his screen. “It’s from Simon. He’s been looking through those files of Sylvain’s. Apparently there’s some photocopies of ancient texts. He can’t read any of the words, but he says there are some English words in the margins that refer to Quentin and Quinta with a slash between the words, like they’re the same thing. You said Jake referred to Quinta and said Selena worked for her. So I’m thinking Quentin became Quinta.”

Abbey blinked at her brother. She preferred questions that could be answered with a mathematical formula, or at the very least a Bunsen burner. Was Caleb suggesting that Quentin Steinam had had a sex change? “Is there a Quinta Steinam?”

“Not that I can find.”

“What else did Simon say?”

“Just that there’s a note saying, ‘The center is moving—Quinta holds the key and the trees of the mother and father.’ He’s going to use some algorithm to try to figure out the language. He agrees with me that we have to try to find Quinta, although he suggested, in his Simon way, that we do it without leaving the cabin.”

“A key? Like the key to the tunnels?”

Caleb elevated his shoulders in a shrug. Abbey was silent, her mind spinning, trying to make sense of the words. The trees of the mother and father? Madrona meant mother. What was the tree of the father? Or were Madronas the trees of the mother and father? What did that mean?

“Tomorrow,” Caleb said. “When Sylvain goes to get Jake. We’ll make a break for it. We need to go after Mom and Dad.”

She almost said something about Simon warning them not to leave the cabin, but her twin’s eyes had turned fierce, and she knew there was no talking him out of it. Besides, she didn’t really want to.

Her heart sped up a little at the prospect of staging an escape and potentially finding their parents.

Acceleration.

Her first physics lesson in acceleration had been about acceleration due to gravity. Objects falling toward earth accelerated at 9.8 meters per second per second due to the force exerted by gravity.

Acceleration as a result of gravity was a nice predictable force. Leaving the cabin would likely invite a whole array of unpredictable forces.

Bring it on
, she thought.

Mark studied the isogonic map of the United States for the seventh time. The set of black lines that converged at the pole and then extended outward and across the states like harp strings blurred and swam the longer he stared. The line of zero declination ran almost through the eastern portion of Missouri, pretty much down the Mississippi River.

He had become a bit diverted yesterday looking at the geography of the Mississippi, the tenth largest river in the world, and had spent some time considering the role of rivers in determining political boundaries (in this case the boundaries of Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa). He’d also paused briefly to consider just how large the Mississippi watershed was (it was very large), but now he was back on task and looking at the isogonic map again.

The 2010 map was not at a scale that allowed him to determine the exact location of the line of zero declination. He’d ordered a larger scale map from the US Geological Survey, at a cost of three hundred and twenty-seven dollars (which was quite pleasantly divisible by three), but did not expect it to arrive for two weeks.

The line of zero declination (where magnetic north and true north were the same) was drifting a few degrees westward each year, and the rate of westward drift had accelerated in recent years (which had concerning implications for the possibility of a pole reversal, but Mark didn’t want to think about that). Based on the online magnetic declination calculator on the Geological Survey site, and on his own back-of-the-envelope lining-up of features from other maps, he felt fairly certain that the line passed almost right through Coventry. It still sat slightly east of the center of Coventry City, but at the current rate of westward movement of nine degrees a year, he was pretty sure it would run right through the center of Coventry sometime this year. He just wasn’t precisely sure when.

He had just typed up his thoughts (and added in a few what he felt were pithy comments regarding the historic significance of the Mississippi) and emailed them off to his new online friend, Luanne, whom he had met a few weeks ago in a group forum for people with Asperger’s who were interested in maps. He had tried to tell Abbey about zero declination, but it seemed she either didn’t understand or didn’t think it was that important (which was odd, because she was usually the first to grasp the relevance of things).

Ian had stayed late into the previous evening, and the murmur of voices could be heard in the bad man’s office long after Abbey, Caleb, and Mark had finished the dishes and gone to their respective rooms. (At Abbey’s suggestion, Mark was endeavoring to refer to the bad man as “Sylvain,” at least when he was using his speaking voice. However, in his non-speaking internal voice he was having a hard time making the switch. He referred to Ian as “the bad man with the beret, a rat, and nasty dogs.” Even though Abbey had indicated that she did not think the dogs were the beret man’s, Mark had seen him talking to one of the dogs at the college, so Mark could not be sure. He had checked the driveway very carefully after the two bad men had retreated to the office to ensure that the dogs were not lingering in the driveway waiting to pounce.)

Mark’s room was next to the office, and even though the
very
bad man (Dr. Ford, father of Mark’s half-sister, Sandy) was convinced that Mark was deaf, Mark actually had very good hearing. In fact, as he lay on his bed trying to drift off to sleep, there were a few moments in the lull of half-sleep when he almost felt himself to be inside the office with Sylvain and Ian, listening to their conversation.

This was very disconcerting, because although Mark understood that scientists believed everyone in the world dreamed—because dreams served some important physiological or psychological function—Mark did not dream. Thus this seeming arrival in the other room jarred him fully into awakeness every time, and he was forced to study the repetitive lines and knots in the log cabin walls in order to calm himself and drift off again. (On previous nights, he’d formed a variety of long and wide faces from various clusters of three knots just before falling asleep. However, in the aftermath of seeing the ghost, the knot faces no longer seemed quite as friendly, and he made a concerted effort to connect several dots in the shape of islands on the sea of brown wood instead.)

Now, in the morning, he was left with the uncomfortable feeling that he had heard or imagined some things that had been exchanged by the two bad men in relation to his sister and a mining operation. There had also been some reference to the Sinclair kids, and the belief that genetically it had to be one of them. Mark did not know what “it” was, but it had sounded ominous. They had also talked about the ghosts, and the fact that if Marian was able to follow Peter, there was a second Alty. These revelations seemed to be bubbling around in the back of his consciousness like partially forgotten skiffs of information. They were there, but not in any meaningful way that he could draw forth.

Staring at the isogonic map was not calming him, and Mark decided to shift to something more reliably soothing, such as the flood records of the Mississippi River. The rain still pounded from the sky, and the bad man bustled about the kitchen preparing what he referred to as “shirred eggs.” Abbey and Caleb milled about the living room and had been speaking in low tones and eyeballing Mark whenever the bad man was turned away making loud sounds with pots or cutlery.

(Although Mark was not adept at interpreting facial expressions, he was fairly certain he had seen these particular ones before, usually just before Abbey or Caleb declared that they needed to head to the stones, and that Mark must come with them, because he was the Energy for the stones, at least the ones near his and Abbey and Caleb’s houses on Coventry Hill. However, the bad man had destroyed the stones on Coventry Hill, so they could not be planning to do anything in that regard.)

Part of him did want to go back to the future and try to find the fifth map to which the clawed woman and the very bad man had referred. However, trips to the future were usually accompanied by some form (or many forms) of very unpleasant danger, so Mark had decided that he was quite content to remain here in the log cabin (and hope that the fifth map would somehow come to him), even though he was fairly certain he would not like shirred eggs.

He’d just study the high-water levels reached in the 1993 flood and ignore Abbey and Caleb. Then he would check to see if Luanne was online yet. He was sure she’d be interested in talking about the 1993 flood.

*****

“So, I have to go and retrieve Jake today,” Sylvain said, folding his long thin fingers together over his empty plate.

Caleb was digging into his third helping of eggs, and Mark cautiously spooned Rice Krispies into his mouth and eyed his eggs as if they might step off the plate and assault him. The rain fell out of the sky in streaks of silver, and the puddles in the driveway had turned into lakes. If Abbey and Caleb were going to make a break for it on foot, it was going to be a wet and muddy escape, and Abbey didn’t even want to think of what filmy white phantoms might lurk in the trees beyond the cabin. Sylvain had spent a few minutes earlier that morning wandering around in the trees where they had seen the ghosts. If he had seen anything, or come to any conclusions, he did not seem inclined to share.

“What did Ian mean that we’re ‘assets’?” Caleb said, his orange hair standing in an askew bouffant and his eyebrows arranged in an ornery manner. From the side, he looked like an angry red peacock with freckles.

Sylvain sighed and remained impassive for a few seconds. “Let’s just say there are not many of us left who have clear links to the old bloodlines, and therefore, there are not, in the minds of some members of the Guild, many of us who are likely able to manifest any sort of witchcraft. Since you are among those left, and you are young and therefore potentially malleable, there are those who would view you as assets, I suppose. But I think Ian was overstating it a bit, and you don’t need to trouble yourselves with that.”

“Right, because we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in lockdown,” Caleb said.