Chapter Fifteen #3
“Go get dressed, hon. I’ll make your tea,” Nick said. “I can drive you up to Granny Lily’s workshop and guard the entrance while you guys traipse through purgatory.”
“Purgatory.” Grace smiled and kissed Nick. “Wait a minute. No headache?” she asked, looking at Daniel. “Blurry vision?”
He smiled as he held out his arm to her. She touched it and then peered at him. “How?”
“By not fighting it.” He leaned over and whispered to her stomach. “Thanks for the advice, Lily-girl.”
“Dress now, talk later,” Nick growled.
Daniel pointed to the kitchen. “Coffee’s ready.” Nick was notoriously grouchy until he had his coffee.
Daniel got himself a cup and went looking for his laptop.
He found it in the keeping room, along with all of Jamie’s origami figures in various stages of folding or unfolding.
Some looked like bees. They were larger than most origami he had seen, as if they had been folded using someone’s business papers—yellow highlighting, black underlining, handwritten notes, and all.
He carried his laptop to the breakfast bar and went online, where Nick offered him a reheated biscuit.
“Thanks.”
“So, you going to call and warn her?”
“It would be… Well, would you believe me in her shoes?” Daniel shook his head. Besides, I’ve got time to get down there and… Well, tell her what I saw. Then I’ll bring her back here. She’ll be safe until we figure this thing out.”
Nick frowned and took a gulp of his coffee. “So better in person then. Where is she again?”
“Dallas somewhere. One of those Renaissance festivals.”
“Dallas. Okay.” Nick took another gulp of coffee and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. “I had a feeling the foundation might need some speed and flexibility. I’ve been looking into private charters for a while now. I assume it’s worth the cost and the carbon footprint?”
“Private jet?” It was Daniel’s turn to blink. “You’re kidding?”
“My wife wasn’t thrilled with how long it took you to get home from Italy, given what happened, or the idea that we might someday be stuck in Atlanta waiting for a commercial flight when her brother desperately needs her here, even if that hasn’t happened yet…
or won’t ever happen…or…you get the idea.
” He entered the pass code into his phone.
“Honestly, I don’t know how you stay sane dealing with this stuff.
But whatever happens, I plan to keep my wife happy. ”
“Seriously?” Daniel had to think about that for a minute.
“Yeah. And speaking of keeping Grace happy, your friend Dr. Morgan emailed to say one of the journal pages is ready. We can pick it up next week, if you want to go with,” Nick said. “Or she said she could bring it here—”
“No!”
Nick’s eyebrow went up.
Daniel swallowed. “Sorry. No. We can go to Raleigh. I don’t want to risk Diana coming up here.” He didn’t ever want Dr. Diana Morgan to drive onto this mountain.
Nick nodded without judgement. “Copy that.”
Daniel blew out a breath. “About this flight. We’ll need to return through Knoxville to grab her car.”
“No problem. They fly almost anywhere. It’s just a question of whether they can make something available in Knoxville on short notice,” Nick said. “I’ll take you to the airport. That way you can return together in her car. Safer that way.”
“A charter jet.” Daniel shook his head. It sounded ridiculous to someone like him. “How about a rental car in Dallas?”
“I might get you closer than that.” Nick pointed to Daniel’s laptop. “Find out where her festival is. There are airports big enough for these smaller jets all over the place.”
Grace walked in and headed for the teakettle. “So, why would someone kidnap our Mel?”
So now she was our Mel. “I think the guy that kidnapped—kidnaps her is one of the muggers from Florence.”
Nick straightened. “What?”
Daniel shook his head. “When I got in that fight in Florence, I saw one of them—in the future. But I had no idea what I was seeing. He was about to attack someone in a costume. From a distance I thought it was a kid.” He shrugged.
“But now I’ve got more details, and these guys are either really desperate, really stupid or both, because they do it in the middle of a crowded Renaissance festival. ”
“Not necessarily stupid,” Nick said. “Easier to get away in a crowd of terrified and confused people, especially if they are in costume. But still, hard to drag an unwilling hostage. I should check on that RV fire again. You think she did something that pissed someone off enough to do all this?”
“Not sure. But they’ve traveled from Italy to Florida and now Texas.”
Nick nodded. “That is a long way and a lot of risk. That means whatever it is, it’s big.”
“Yeah.”
“What could it be?” Grace asked.
“Trying to keep her from writing something? I don’t know, but she might.” Daniel found the festival site online. “Got the location.”
Nick checked the map on the screen, gave Daniel a thumbs-up, and walked off with his phone to his ear.
Daniel and Grace navigated the twists and turns that led into the heart of the mountain.
Nick hadn’t been happy about staying behind in the cave’s anteroom, but it was a safety precaution—someone needed to know they were down here.
And Nick had reminded Grace to be extra careful, since she was spelunking for two.
“You know, Mel’s pretty special,” Grace said after they had negotiated the entrance.
“Yes, she is,” Daniel agreed.
“The vision you had says there is a future for you two, right?”
“Grace.” Daniel cut her short. “I told you what happens when I try to have a relationship with anyone. It doesn’t work.”
“But—”
“All I see are endings, and some are worse than others.”
“But clearly you have feelings for her and I think she has feelings for you,” Grace insisted.
“So did Diana,” Daniel said. “Look, I’m willing to accept whatever chaos this gift brings into my life at this point. Put me on the rack and I’ll suffer to save lives. I can live with that. But that doesn’t mean I have to stretch myself out and ask for more torture, does it?”
“But I think she might—”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Daniel interrupted. “Maybe after Mel’s safe.” He didn’t intend to talk about it then either, but Grace didn’t need to know that. Still, he couldn’t turn off Lily’s voice in his head. There is always loss, if you love. But without love, there is nothing.
They were silent the rest of the way. They turned a corner and went down a final gentle slope that emptied into a room of carvings. Daniel stopped in the opening.
He couldn’t think of any words that would adequately describe how it felt to stand here.
This was where Grace and Nick had found the photograph that proved Granny Lily had healed herself of terrible burns that should have left her disfigured and crippled for life.
It was where they had found the journal that hinted at Granny Lily’s own experience with the old magic.
In many ways, this room had saved Grace, giving her confidence in her ability and the hope of understanding it. This was where Granny Lily had long ago laid her hand in an ancient handprint, and Grace and Nick had followed suit over a century later.
Now it was his turn.
As he stood in this place that had turned their lives upside down, he was still reluctant to commit to this…whatever it was.
“Breathe and relax,” Grace said. “Close your eyes and listen.”
So he did. He tried to still the anxious voices in his head, all of them saying the same thing. Mel. Mel. Mel. One by one, slowly, with each breath, they stilled.
Then he heard it. No. He felt it. Through his feet now.
A rhythm. The barely registered harmony that wove itself beneath the noise of his mundane existence—the mountain, crooning in his ear, humming under his heart since he could remember.
No matter how far away he had roamed, that song had followed him.
Grace’s hands guided him, and when he opened his eyes, he saw the swirl of carvings.
In the moving beams of their flashlights, the figures seemed to dance to that unheard rhythm. They had likely danced here for centuries upon centuries.
Grace walked toward the wall, and he followed.
Follow Mommy now, Lily had said.
He had a feeling that meant much more than just following Grace into this cave.
Primitive carvings, stylized figures and symbols that seemed somehow familiar were scattered in expanding spirals around a single human handprint carved into the stone.
In the palm he saw the tiny letters: LLHW and 1892 in white.
Lily Loreena Hickey Woodruff. Granny Lily.
But the size of the hand was exactly the same as his.
And it had been the exact size of Grace’s hand when she was a child—and an adult.
His heart tripped a bit, losing the rhythm. He had seen and felt things that were considered impossible within the boundaries of science, a place he had lived in happy ignorance his entire life.
So he took one last step outside those boundaries, because this wasn’t science.
It was magic, or at least preternatural, if he understood the meaning of the term.
His hand was steady as he reached forward and placed it in the handprint.
The carvings on the wall seemed to dance and swirl around his fingers.
Between one breath and the next, everything went black.
His first thought was that it was oddly warm and pliant, not cool and hard as he had expected. Then he realized his hand wasn’t in the handprint any longer but resting on Lily’s hand. She sat at the dining room table in his home at the old Woodruff home place—the old Taggart place.
She was older than she had been on the porch.
Taller. No longer a toddler, but still a child.
Her hand, held up in the air before him, fingers splayed in the same way as the carved handprint in the cave, was no longer so tiny.
She had her mother’s long, graceful fingers, and the air around them seemed to shimmer.
She looked so much like Grace had at that age, although he could see Nick in her as well.
“Mom’s right,” she said.
“About what this time?” he asked, with humorous exasperation.
Those silver-green eyes met his. “What Robert Browning wrote about the duke.”
She smiled, then glanced at someone seated next to him—someone who squeezed his hand and sent peace and reassurance swirling through him and the rest of the kindling. Alone, he could change very little.
Together, with infinitesimal shifts, they could change the world.
He closed his eyes.
“You have strong qualifications, but some of my partners have doubts.”
The man pushed the CV in front of him around on his desk.
He was speaking English, but Daniel heard a trace of a German accent.
The young woman sitting on the other side of the desk clasped her hands in her lap and lifted her chin.
Daniel recognized her. Francesca. An older Francesca, but he knew that face.
He could see the defiance in her eyes now, as if this was only the most recent in a long line of setbacks.
A strong voice rose within the kindling, though no one actually spoke.
“Shouldn’t you give her a chance, like the one you were given long ago? A chance to prove herself and perhaps change the world? Don’t you want to see if she can solve this problem, save this species, if you give her a chance?”
He knew that voice, and, with the other gifts in the kindling boosting it, that powerful voice insinuated itself into a man’s thoughts halfway around the world.
The man conducting the interview tapped a finger on her CV. “However, I believe I see something that my venerable colleagues don’t. I’m going to give you a chance, Dr. Sartori. Show us what you can do. Who knows, perhaps you’ll be the one to solve this—”
The carvings blinked back into view in front of Daniel’s face. He swallowed hard and started to take his hand from the handprint.
“Look,” echoed an ancient voice from somewhere in the room.
“Daniel?” Grace asked. “Are you okay?”
He was about to ask Grace if she had heard the voice, but then he saw the carving of a single stylized figure off to the right. It was a honeybee in the fashion of the ancient Greeks: wings, large eyes, striped body.
It reminded him of the origami bees that Jamie had been tinkering with yesterday. Mel’s origami bees. Mel.
Why were they trying to kill you, Mel? Not for something you’ve written, but something you’re going to write. But what?
I was already in Europe trying to get a completely different story from a rather uncooperative source.
Why follow you from Europe to America if you got nothing from him?
They didn’t try to kill you the first time. No. They were after your backpack.
The second time they wanted to get rid of you and the backpack before you could tell anyone.
And when they come for you next, it’s to kidnap you, because they need to know who else you’ve told.
What was in your backpack, Mel?
…a nice doctor I was attempting to interview yesterday folded some for me. He was even less forthcoming than you.
But he did give you a handful of paper bees…
Daniel pictured the origami figures left scattered on the coffee table—origami figures highlighted in yellow and underlined in black, with hints of handwriting on them.
Grace yelped as he spun around and nearly ran over her.
“Sorry. Are you all right? Lily?”
“Fine, although she’s dancing in there. What did you see?”
Daniel took her arm and pulled her toward the entrance. “I need to go unfold some bees.”