The Elemental Mysteries: Complete Series (93 page)

Giovanni shook his head. “Quite the opposite. It was almost as if he was waving a flag, then ducking out of sight.”

He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.

“So what if the locations were the clue? There has to be a—a method. A pattern, some—”

“I thought the same,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought the locations must be some kind of code or pattern, but there was nothing. I even played with the latitude and longitude for each city, looking for some kind of method to the seemingly random appearances.”

“So why did you send the postcards?”

“In the back of my mind, I thought that perhaps the cities would mean something to you. I thought that perhaps you would see something I wasn’t.”

He could feel her sigh as he stroked her back to try to ease the tension building in her muscles.

“No,” she finally whispered. “Those weren’t even places he talked about going. I mean, some of them were, but they were all fairly major cities, so there wasn’t anything that stood out.”

“Yes, after that first sighting in Iraklion, all the cities were major urban—”

“Where?”

“Iraklion or Heraklion. Crete. It was the first place I got any news of him. The director of the Archaeological Museum—”

“You didn’t send me a postcard from Iraklion.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think to start sending them to you until I’d left Crete, and by then—”

She bolted up, staring into the fire, and he heard her heart begin to race.

“Crete?”

He sat up next and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry I didn’t send one from Iraklion, but it’s hardly a major city. He didn’t even stay very long—”

“But it’s
Crete
!”

He frowned. “Beatrice, I don’t understand—”

“Knossos. Minos.” She turned to Giovanni with burning eyes. She clasped his face between her hands. “It’s Minos, Gio. The minotaur!”

“Beatrice, what are you trying to tell me?”

She began shaking her head and a desperate look came to her eye.

“Not breadcrumbs. Not breadcrumbs…it’s a
labyrinth
.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cochamó Valley

March 2010

Beatrice’s heart raced.

“Daddy! Daddy, the string game, Daddy!”

She tore out of the bedroom, searching for the unassuming reference book she’d spotted on the bottom shelf in one of the living room bookcases years ago.

“Beatrice, slow down. You’re going to trip if you don’t—”

“I’m going to find the treasure!”

“You think you’re clever enough to solve the puzzle, Mariposa?”

She searched for the blue binding as Giovanni rushed out of the bedroom to join her. “Beatrice—”

“The string game. I called it the string game when I was little,” she muttered. The book wasn’t where she remembered. Her eyes raked over the shelves in the living room, searching for the familiar book as the memories poured over her.

“What?” Giovanni’s voice called from the edge of the room. “The string game?”

“Stephen, are you two playing that silly game again? I’m going to trip and break my neck one of these days!”

“Relax, Mom. But don’t go in the living room, okay?”

“Grandma, I’m in the maze right now!”

She finally spotted it on the bottom shelf in the bookcase closest to the front door; she rushed over. “It used to drive my grandmother nuts. She was always tripping over the strings that we put up.”

“
Tesoro
, what are you—”

“Theseus and the Minotaur. My dad read me the story…I don’t know how many times. It was my favorite.” Her hands pulled the book out and raced over to the large kitchen table, slamming it down.

“Beatrice, if you need an atlas, I have much better editions—”

“No, no, this is the one we had.” She waved her hand as she opened it. “We had this one in our house. It would be this one.”

“Look for the clues, Mariposa. I left you clues all over the house; find them and follow the string to the treasure.”

“Like Theseus. Follow the string out of the labyrinth!”

“When I was a child, my father would read me the Greek myths. I loved them. He read them to me over and over again, but my favorite was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.”

“The minotaur in the labyrinth?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Theseus goes to Crete, right? His father sends him to King Minos of Crete.”

“In Knossus, the ancient excavation site right outside of Iraklion.”

“Exactly. Theseus kills the Minotaur in the middle of the labyrinth, but then he has to find his way out of the maze again. Luckily, he was smart. He tied a string near the entrance and held onto it so he could find his way out again.”
 

She opened the atlas and flipped to the large map of Greece, pointing toward the island of Crete. “There’s no way my father picked that location at random. It was our game; he was telling me to play the string game.”

“What’s the first clue?”

“
‘What goes up when the rain comes down?’
”

“Solve the riddle, Beatrice.”

Giovanni was standing in a corner of the living room, his arms crossed as he stared at her like she was a crazy person. “Can you please explain from the beginning? What is the ‘string game?’”

She looked up at his beautiful, confused face and smiled. “I love mazes, always have, partly because of that story. Solving mazes, building mazes. I told my dad one time that I wanted to build a labyrinth at our house, but how do you make a maze in a little, tiny house, right?”

“…
‘comes up when the rain’
…an umbrella!”

“Where do we keep the umbrellas?”

“By the door!”

“Go, find my umbrella and tie your string.”

Giovanni was shaking his head. “I still don’t—”

“So he made up this game, the string game. He would leave me clues to random places in the house. I would have to tie a string when I found the first clue and that would start the game. Then I’d find the next clue and tie the string there.”

She began to see Giovanni’s eyes light in understanding. “And you would find the clues and keep tying.”

Beatrice nodded. Her heart pounded in her chest. “They could be any location in the house. There was never a pattern. Totally random locations. There would be riddles, or drawings, or…anything, really. The goal of the string game was to find the locations and tie the string—”

“And then follow it.” He rushed to look over her shoulder as she found the world map in the center of the book. Her eyes raked over the pages crowded with cities, borders, latitude, and longitude.

“The cities where you found my dad
were
random. They were meant to be.”

“But where does it lead?” He shook his head. “I stopped getting clues from him after he showed up in Santiago two years ago. I thought he had found our house here and that’s why he was so close. I stayed here for months in the middle of summer that year thinking that he would show himself before I gave up and went to New York.”

“Did you find it, Beatrice? Did you find the treasure?”

She grabbed his arm. “No, no, you’re missing the point of the game. Once you mapped out the points and tied off the string, you had to—”

“Follow it back!” he said with a smile. “Clever man. You follow the string back like Theseus out of the labyrinth, but...” His face fell.

“At one point in the web—” She held out her two index fingers and crossed them. “—the strings would touch.
That’s
where the prize was.”

“Found it, Daddy!”

“And that’s where your father is,” he murmured.

She shook her head and fought the tears that she felt pricking the corner of her eyes. “It was our game. I’m the only one who would be able to figure it out.”

“And you would only solve it if you were cooperating with me.”

“Exactly.”

They both looked down at the map on the table. She grabbed a pencil from the counter, put the tip on the small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and looked at Giovanni.

“Do you remember where he went next?”

He nodded. “Budapest. The next sighting was in Budapest.”

She began to drag the pencil north.

“Wait.” He held up a hand. “You need something—”

“Oh, a straight edge, just give me a magazine or—”

“Got it!” He tossed her a thin book from the end of the table.

“Okay...Budapest, Hungary.”

Her pencil stopped on the map, and she looked up.

“Then Warsaw.”

She moved the book and her pencil tip traced a light line over the soft, pastel colors of the map, each thread drawing them closer to the mystery of her father’s whereabouts.

“Stockholm.”

“Novosibirsk.”

She could feel his crackling energy fill the room as he listed the cities. “It will be a major city,” he mused. “It’s much easier to stay hidden in a major city.”

Beatrice looked up at him. “Okay, next?”

“Shanghai.”

“Madras.”

The line dipped and traced over the world, zagging north and south as each city was reached, slowly working east, then south.

“Johannesburg.”

“Lima.”

“San Francisco, right?”

“Yes, then El Paso.”

“Boston.”

“Tripoli.”

“Santiago,” she whispered, and her breath hitched when she saw the faint lines finally cross in front of her. Tears spilled down her face and she felt his hand on her shoulder as he took the shaking pencil from her grasp.

“Very well done, Beatrice! There’s my clever girl.”

“Found it, Daddy! Can we go for ice cream now?”

He held her as she cried, her tears soaking the front of his shirt.

“So close,” Giovanni murmured as he stroked her hair.

“Brasilia. He’s in Brasilia.”

Brasilia, Brazil

March 2010

“Why would he come here?” she asked over the steady hum of the engine.
 

“In a way, it’s very much like Houston,” Giovanni said as he steered the old car through the wide streets of the Brazilian capitol. Though it was built in the 1960s as the modern ideal of contemporary city planning, Beatrice thought the capitol and fourth largest city in Brazil seemed empty.

“What do you mean, it’s like Houston?”

He turned right at the small road leading to the resort where Isabel and Gustavo’s contacts had informed them a quiet vampire going by the name “Emil Gonzales” owned a cottage on the shore of Lake Paranoá.

“If you are trying to remain anonymous, you go to a city like Brasilia. With the popularity and proximity of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the immortal population here is very low and tends to mind its own business.”

“So not very much politics?”

“Practically none. It’s like a ghost town,” he said quietly, his eyes scanning the low, red painted cottages with dark roofs. “There,” he said, “the one on the end.”

She gripped her seat as he parked along the curb, almost unwilling to step out of the car, afraid of what she might find. Giovanni hadn’t had any sign of her father for the last two years. He’d dropped off the radar when he finished giving the clues to his location. If they had been together two years before, she thought, she might have seen it sooner.

As if reading her thoughts, she heard him say, “If we’ve lost him because of my own stubbornness—”

“Can we save that for another time, please?” she murmured as she eyed the small house surrounded by low palms. The cottage was part of a larger resort, though some of the apartments and cottages were privately owned. The gardens surrounding it were well tended, but because it was part of the hotel property, there was no way of knowing who took care of them.

She took a deep breath and reached across the car to squeeze Giovanni’s hand. “I’m fine; let’s go see if anyone’s home.”

He pulled her toward him and laid a gentle kiss on her lips before giving her a small smile. His eyes were shuttered, and his shoulders were fixed. She knew he thought they would find nothing.

They walked toward the low cottage tucked into a quiet corner at the edge of the lake. Streams ran through the grounds, under small footbridges, and trickled over rocks through the lush gardens.

“Definitely a water vampire,” he muttered, taking her hand as they crossed a small bridge. “And a smart one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s surrounded himself with his element. The lake, the streams. For him, this is an excellent defensive position.”

“Oh.”

They drew closer to the small house and she heard him drawing deep, testing breaths.