CHAPTER 12 JAMESON
JAMESON
The old man’s map was a map to nowhere and nothing.
Jameson had scoured it over and over again, and when that had proven a fool’s errand, he’d turned his attention to the Royal Suite itself.
His grandfather had built the place; the wall-behind-the-wall, the pearls, and the map were a testament to that. There had to be something else here.
There’s always something else, Heiress. Another layer.
More games. Traps upon traps. Riddles upon riddles.
By four in the morning in Prague—seven at night for Jameson’s body, which was still back on Pacific time—he had hit a wall.
He ended up back in the foyer, staring at the mural with its intricate, swirling lines.
Carrying tension in every muscle, Jameson stepped back, willing the seemingly abstract design to solidify into something more concrete before his eyes.
He’d been over and over this, but there had to be something—
Yes. Do you see it, Heiress? If he fixed his blurring gaze just so, Jameson could pick out eight human figures, four male and four female, composed of those swirling lines.
The objects were harder to decipher—at first. A wall.
A lion. A tree. A horse. A ship. A harp-like instrument of some sort. A cavern. A snake.
Jameson had always had the ability to let a puzzle or mystery utterly consume him, the way light was consumed by a black hole. His focus unparalleled, he saw nothing but the wall. Every curve. Every swirl. Every figure.
Without warning, the mural split as the door to the suite swung inward, sending Jameson’s body surging into threat mode—fight mode. He was already hurtling toward the intruder when said intruder called out: “I come bearing cranky pastries!”
Xander? Jameson stopped himself just short of going for his brother’s throat. Xander didn’t even bat an eye. He simply nodded to the mound of baked goods in his hand, impressive both in their number and the fact that he’d managed to acquire them before dawn.
“Cranky pastries?” Jameson repeated. His body was thirsting for the fight it had been promised, but this was Xander, so Jameson forced his pulse to slow and the red haze to recede.
“The pastries,” Xander explained in a lofty tone, “do not appreciate being kept in the dark, especially about things that matter. People who matter.”
“Did Alisa send you?” Jameson didn’t have time for this.
“Alisa doesn’t even know I’m here,” Xander replied. “Imagine a game of Where’s Waldo where Waldo is devastatingly handsome, handy in a fight, and capable of visualizing in four dimensions and yet no one is even looking for Waldo. Or making use of his substantial skillset.”
In other words, Xander had found out that something was up and had gone rogue.
“You shouldn’t have come.” Jameson shifted his gaze back to the wall, to the mural.
Xander set his pastries down, and the next thing Jameson knew, he was airborne. He really should have seen that flying tackle coming.
“Not in the mood, Xan,” Jameson said, as they crashed to the floor and he tried to extract himself from beneath his younger brother, but Xander was tall, wiry, and had an advanced understanding of Newtonian physics, and it was suddenly very clear: For once, Xander Hawthorne was not playing around.
“She’s my Avery, too,” Xander said fiercely, once he had Jameson pinned.
“I know she disappeared leaving behind nothing but a highly suspicious note, and I know the other thing I’m not supposed to know, too.
” Xander, unlike Grayson, didn’t say Alice’s name.
“I’m not afraid of you, Jamie. I’m not afraid of whatever this is.
And you are going to deal me in, whether you want to or not. ”
She’s our Avery. Dozens of memories hit Jameson all at once: Avery and his brothers, his brothers and Avery and all of them, together. Secret Santa. Hawthorne Capture The Flag. Hot Potato And Avery Is The Potato And The Potato Is Not Amused.
Jameson felt something give inside of him—or maybe break. “Fine, Xan. You can help.” Accepting Xander’s help was the smart thing to do. The Avery thing.
Xander held Jameson’s gaze for a moment, then let loose of him. “We shall seal this agreement, as all civilized gentlemen do, with baked goods.” Xander retrieved his pastries, took a giant bite of one, and handed another to Jameson as he turned toward the mural. “What am I looking at?”
Jameson stood, accepted Xander’s offer, and answered the question. “Something.”
The mural had to be something, because Jameson didn’t have anything else.
“The old man’s work, I take it?” Xander executed a visual sweep of the wall.
“You have to let your focus blur and look for the images,” Jameson told him. “See there? A man. And that one’s a woman.”
Xander tilted his head to the side.
“That’s a wall between them,” Jameson continued. “And…”
“A lion?”
Xander sees it, too. That thought grounded Jameson. He wasn’t seeing meaning where there was none. He wasn’t just making things up out of desperation. That realization propelled him onward. A man. A woman. A wall. A lion.
It took Jameson the span of two more seconds to get there. “Pyramus and Thisbe,” he breathed.
In Greek mythology, the two lovers had fallen for each other by talking through a crack in a wall. They’d been meant to meet under a mulberry tree, but a lion had scared Thisbe away, and when Pyramus had discovered her torn cloak, he’d thought her dead—and killed himself.
Something, Heiress. This is something. Jameson turned to the next section of the wall. “A ship. A horse. A woman.”
Xander didn’t even hesitate. “Helen of Troy.”
Jameson’s mind raced as he turned to the final section of the mural. “And last but not least: a man and a woman, a string instrument of some sort, a snake.”
“Is that a harp?” Xander asked. “Or a lute?”
“A lyre,” Jameson said, the rush of adrenaline into his blood more powerful than any drug.
“It’s a lyre, and the man and woman are Orpheus and Eurydice.
She was bitten by a snake and died. You see this?
” Jameson gestured to the lines surrounding the figure.
“That’s the underworld, and this is Eurydice following Orpheus out of it. ”
There was one last image to the right of that: a male figure, alone.
“There was a test,” Xander recalled. “Orpheus was told that his love would be returned to the world of the living if he kept faith and led her out of the underworld without looking back. But eventually, he gave into his doubts and turned, and then she was gone for good.”
Gone for good. The words reverberated through Jameson. If he had to go to hell and back to find Avery, he would.
“What’s the pattern?” Xander said, his voice buzzing with the kind of energy Jameson recognized all too well. “The puzzle. The clue.”
“Myths. Tragic love stories.” Jameson’s brain turned over possibility after possibility as he thought about his grandfather, about Alice. “Maybe it isn’t a puzzle. Maybe it’s a story—their story.”
The old man had always said that when you loved the way a Hawthorne loved, there was no going back.
“Love.” Jameson stared at the mural, thinking out loud.
“Thisbe and Pyramus—a love that, in the eyes of the world, was not meant to be.” Jameson walked forward and touched the spot where he’d seen a lion the moment before.
“A death that wasn’t a death.” Jameson stepped back so that he could make out Orpheus again.
“He would go to the ends of the earth to get her back, but it’s hard for him to believe, hard to have faith. He needs to see her.”
“And this one?” Xander asked, nodding toward the woman and the ship. “Helen of Troy?”
Jameson flashed back—suddenly and abruptly—to the feeling of blood trickling down his neck, to a voice saying I think we can agree that this situation merits more than watching.
Jameson tried—desperately tried—to remember more, but there was nothing except the faintest smell of smoke and something about the price of wheat.
“Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” Jameson said, his voice coming out hoarse. “Launching all those ships. The Trojan War. What if Helen knew exactly what she was doing? What if she was the one in control the whole time? Damn it. If I could just remember—”
Jameson closed his eyes. For a moment, there was nothing, and then… the smell of smoke… voices.
And then Xander was calling his name, and Jameson realized he’d lost time—how much, he wasn’t sure. He opened his eyes to see Xander at the wall, running a hand over it, up and down, left to right.
“Xan?” Jameson’s body practically vibrated. “What is it?”
“You know how the old man liked to say that the mind tricks you into choosing between two options when there are really seven? This mural—is it a mesmerizing, swirling but somewhat random design? Is it a story? Is it a puzzle? Or…” Xander was moving faster across the wall now, his fingers skimming over the swirling lines of the mural like a roller coaster on a twisting track.
“Is it a depiction of a complicated system? A Rube Goldberg machine of sorts.”
Xander, a four-time national Rube Goldberg champion, came to a sudden stop—at the arrow.
Jameson’s stomach twisted and sank. “I’ve already solved that part.”
“You might have solved it.” Xander probed the arrow with his fingertips.
“But I haven’t.” Xander tested the lines of the arrow until there was an audible click, and the next thing Jameson knew, Xander was sliding the middle line leftward and rotating it counterclockwise until the three lines formed a triangle.
The wall-behind-the-wall began to rise, and the voice of Tobias Hawthorne—a voice Jameson would have recognized anywhere—filled the air.
“Alice, my Alice.” The old man lingered on his beloved’s name.
“You should have known I wouldn’t be able to stop looking—for you, for answers.
But I can assure you, my love, my love, my one and only love, that I will not be caught.
Love letters may take many forms. What I know is for your ears only—if you care to play. You always did love puzzles.”
Jameson took in yet another wall, newly revealed. It held a single shelf. On that shelf was a bottle of wine and what looked to be an offering plate—gold, like the mural.
“And if you don’t want to play, Alice, my Alice,” the voice of Tobias Hawthorne continued, “well then, I suppose you’ll have to find a way to stop me.”
Silence filled the air. Jameson had the wine bottle and the offering plate in his hands in an instant.
“A game,” he whispered. “The old man made one of his games for Alice. He built this suite and left a map of Prague for her, marking the hidden passages, showing off what he’d managed to figure out about her secrets.
” About their secrets, Alice’s and this group’s.
“He left the mural for her, too,” Xander replied.
“Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Helen of Troy.” Jameson’s mind was racing now. “Love letters may take many forms. And I would bet my life there isn’t wine in this bottle.”
Xander dug into one of his pockets and held an object out to Jameson. “Armadillo?”
The armadillo in question was a one-of-a-kind pocketknife Xander had made himself when he was seven, fashioned to look like his favorite animal at the time.
“You and your armadillos,” Jameson said, but what he was thinking was my love, my love, my one and only love. Those words, the old man’s words—they resonated with Jameson in ways he couldn’t even describe.
He took the pocketknife from Xander and popped out a corkscrew. In short order, the bottle was open—and, based on the smell, it definitely wasn’t wine. Jameson poured the liquid into the offering plate.
What next? It took him twelve and a half seconds to zero back in on the Grecian sculpture.
“The pearls.” Jameson grabbed them and dropped them into the offering plate.
The liquid bubbled, and the beads on the necklace began to dissolve.
When the process had finished, where a pearl necklace had once been, there was now a silver one.
Retrieving it, Jameson saw letters engraved on the silver beads.
He read them aloud: “A, C, Y, S, U, T, N.”
Do you see it? Avery asked in Jameson’s mind, her voice as clear as day.
I see it, Heiress, Jameson thought. The old man might have left this game for Alice, but it was theirs now.
“Scrambling those letters, I can make the words… any cuts?” Xander spit-balled.
“No,” Jameson said, memories coming to him, rapid-fire. A Hawthorne villa. A vineyard. A triangular mirror. “Tuscany.”