Trolls in the Hamptons (9 page)

I knew what he was going to say, so I said it for him. “To Paumanok Harbor.”

“Exactly.”

That would explain my crazy grandmother Bess who talked to spirits, and my mother's mother with her herbs and predictions, and my own mother's uncanny dog-whispering. Then there was Mrs. Terwilliger at the library who always knew what book I wanted before I asked. And Susan, who knew if I'd gotten into mischief. Mrs. Ralston could guess the sex of an unborn baby, and the harbormaster warned boats of coming storms long before they showed on radar. And it never, ever rained on the Fourth of July parade.

Yeah,Agent Grant's fable explained a lot. Or it would if I believed half the manure he was shoveling.

I
WASN'T BUYING IT. Grant told a pretty story, and God knew he had a pretty face to go with it. As my grandmother Eve—who was
not
a witch—always said, handsome is as handsome does, and this one had crossed the line when he or his ridiculous agency had put spyware on my computer. He expected me to swallow hogwash about an Evil Genius? That was straight out of one of my books, no, out of a lot of them. I often used that title as a placeholder until I constructed the perfect bad guy. This charlatan was using my notes, using me—but for what purpose? To get a plate of Mrs. Abbottini's lasagna?

I was glad when I heard Susan's key in the lock, but she just popped her head in to say they'd heard Mrs. Abbottini's TV from the hall, so she and Van were going to bring the flowers over. She handed me two other bouquets, one of roses, one of orchids, to put in water.

“The orchids are for you,” Grant said. “The rarer beauty.”

How could you throw out a guy who said things like that? And he was looking at me with such compassion and understanding, longing for me to believe his tall tale. I sat down again once I'd fussed with the flowers, but this time on the leather chair, away from him.

“No matter how odd my family and friends are, they are not witches and warlocks and creatures out of Tolkien. They are normal, everyday loonies, trying to raise families, make a living, and find a measure of satisfaction and happiness doing it. No one is out to destroy the world. They are just like everyone else.”

“Except they are not.” He brushed a dark curl off his forehead. “The world may think so, and they try to behave as if it were so. Some of them”—he nodded in my direction—“might not even realize how special they are. But you and your neighbors are far different from the average citizen.”

“No, they are just small-town eccentrics making wild guesses, playing the odds, counting on coincidence. I do not believe in any psychic hocus-pocus. My own father's warnings and portents never made any sense.”

“Tell me, have you ever heard of the Royce Institute in England?”

“Of course I have. Everyone in Paumanok Harbor has. The Royce people adopted the Harbor as a kind of sister city. The mayors visit back and forth, and there are always a few Brits teaching at the local schools. They offer free college to any graduate from the high school; free prep school if a junior high kid passes the tests. Room, board, travel expenses, tutoring, the works.”

I ought to know. My parents met there. My grandmother pushed for me to go, but I insisted on art school. Besides, it sounded like one big matchmaking operation. Nearly everyone who went got engaged or married. Grandma Eve swore the tea leaves said I'd never find my soul mate except through the institute, never be a complete person. So far she was right, but that didn't mean she wasn't wrong in the long run. We fought over it a lot before and after college. I guess she is still disappointed in me, but we don't speak much.

I did not want to talk about some fancy foreign university, but Grant was determined. “Well, here is another story, more a history lesson, but this one is easily proved. You can check online.”

As if everything on the Web was true. Hell, the Easter Bunny could have a MySpace page.

“The institute's full name,” Grant began as if I were eager for a lecture, “is not generally made public. The university is open to everyone; the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research is known to a large but select group. It was founded by a family of British noble-men and their offspring, the males of the family all possessing a unique trait: they could tell if someone spoke the truth or lies.”

Kind of like Susan, I thought, but did not say. She'd gone to England the summer after high school. I never asked what she did there.

He went on: “Some of the daughters developed the family gift also, so it was carried through the female line as well, not just the heirs to the earldom or their male cousins. One Earl Royce had an illegitimate son, the Harmon in Royce-Harmon, who married a Gypsy woman. She came from a family of fortune-tellers and horse-tamers, and possessed what was called ‘the sight.' The Rom were definitely descendants of the Unity world. Close breeding among their narrow circles kept the magic in their clans. The same with the Royces, the Harmons, and the other connected families who married second or third cousins, or in-laws to relatives by marriage. They bred well and often, widening the gene pool.”

Grant continued, and I was interested despite myself to hear that, with vast wealth, the Royce tribe started a foundation to keep track of their heritage. They knew little of genetics, at first, of course, but they did everything they could to nurture the “gift.” The institute was a way to foster the shards of magic wherever they found it, according to Grant, while keeping their members safe from harm. Which meant secret. They taught the students how to control their talents, and how to assimilate themselves in society.

“That's why they wished every child from your home-town, which their descendants had settled, to come to them for training, for shelter, and for testing, to keep the records straight and complete. A different form of your No Child Left Behind program. Yes, they do encourage selective breeding, to wed power to power and widen the gene pool. No one is ever forced or coerced, but psychics seem drawn to others like them. At Royce proximity takes over, matches are made; new talents are given birth to. You are the result of one such union.”

“Which was wretched for both of my parents.”

“Love matches the world over end in divorce. No one promised happily ever after, only similar understandings and possibly exceptional children, like you.”

“I do not see where I am anything special. And I do not believe I was preordained to be a . . . whatever you called me. I think the students at the school are brain-washed, that's all.”

“But the institute does much more than study genetics of the original families. Students from around the world come, anyone who appears able to foretell the future, read minds, control the weather, cure by touch. Swamis, shamans, witch doctors, fakirs, dowsers, you name it. Some of them would be hated in their own milieus, the way the half-breeds were despised and feared before the worlds split. People tend to distrust what they cannot understand.”

Like I did not trust him, not at all. But I listened.

“Psychics, though, can accept one another and work together. Great things have come from the institute's laboratories. We haven't lost a ship to the Bermuda Triangle in decades. The Loch Ness monster has been shrunk to manageable size for photo ops. Two asteroids have been moved before they posed danger to the planet. The lines between our world and the other have been kept impenetrable. Except now the labs have sensed a disturbance, centering around you.”

“All I did was write a story about a troll!”

“You visualized him. Perhaps from reversion memory. Perhaps he called to your subconscious mind. You never went to the village school and you never came to England to have your potential assessed. The deans are not certain what you can do. They have strict codes about not interfering unless the subject is a danger to him or herself, or the group, or the world.”

Just what I needed, someone else telling me I was not living up to expectations. Once again, Grant was insinuating I was a loose cannon, a single-handed wrecking ball. Well, screw him. Not literally, of course.

I fetched the last of the wine. I needed it, even if it gave me a headache. And how long could Susan and Van sit with Mrs. Abbottini anyway? Didn't old ladies and cops and chemo patients need their rest?

Grant turned down a glass, making me feel scuzzy for wanting a drink. I took one sip and set it aside. “It's growing late,” I hinted.

He ignored the hint. “Do you recall a few years back when a young woman from Paumanok Harbor got pregnant?”

“Which one? Paumanok girls get knocked up regularly.” Which was another reason I didn't have high regard for the place where I'd spent every summer of my life.

“This one would have been younger than Susan. Her name was Tiffany. Tiffany Ryland.”

“I remember the story. She claimed she'd been drugged and raped, but they never found the guy, so no one believed her. Typical backwoods small-town thinking.”

“According to the record, she decided to have the child, but her parents refused to support her decision, or an infant. Relatives in Montauk took her in. Tiffany gave birth to a son, but the baby was not right. Nicholas did not thrive, he would not play, and he did not speak. Social services had him to speech therapists and specialists. They declared him autistic. But he understood when spoken to, and he developed a language of his own, one no one else could understand. Tiffany's mother tried to get him declared a ward of the state because Tiffany was so young, but Tiffany was a good mother.”

“Better than hers was,” I said, outraged on that poor girl's behalf.

Grant ignored the interruption, too. “Then someone's great-aunt from Ireland, over for a wedding, heard him babble. She thought she heard traces of Gaelic, which neither he nor Tiffany nor the Rylands had ever spoken. She talked to one of the transfer schoolteachers, who convinced the young mother to take the boy to England, to the Royce Institute. People there searched every old record and document, and sure enough, Nicholas spoke a smattering of Gaelic, but mixed with the ancient eldritch tongue. No one alive had ever heard it spoken, or understood its nuances, but the child was obviously a crossbreed. The children of Unity are born speaking their language, understood by all without the divisive dialects found on our side. The scientists recorded every syllable little Nicky spoke, in hopes of establishing a vocabulary, a primer, a way to communicate better with him and others like him. What if autistic children were not defective, but were atavisms, or products of some hidden DNA? But the boy was kidnapped before the research could produce any results.”

“Most likely by some animal rights organization, for treating the boy like a lab rat.”

Grant frowned at me. “Nicky was treated like a prince. His health improved, and he learned to laugh and play. He was stolen away from the car crash that killed his mother.”

“Now that you say it, I did hear about that. ‘Local handicapped boy disappears while abroad.' The accident made the nightly news.”

“It was no accident. The car had been tampered with. Someone wanted that child.”

“I think the authorities questioned my grandmother and my aunt about Tiffany's mother in case she had him.”

“No, Alma Ryland did not want anything to do with the boy. She called him a freak, a disgrace. She'd not have stolen him, and I doubt she knew his value as a ransom prize. The woman did not grieve for poor dead Tiffany, letting the Royce Institute pay for burial in England. She did accept a big check from them, to renounce any familial rights to the child, should he be found.”

“I think she moved to the trailer park in Springs. Mom saw her name once in the local paper. DUI.” I don't know why my mother thought I'd be interested in the local gossip, but it was something for us to talk about without arguing.

“We keep an eye on her,” Grant said. “She quit AA years ago.”

I pushed the wineglass farther away.

“The boy is not there.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a picture of a little boy, perhaps three or four years old. Then he showed me a drawing of what Nicky Ryland might look like now that he was eight. “We're been looking for him for five years.”

Both pictures depicted a waif, a thin, pale child with big, sad eyes, the kind you wanted to pick up and hug, or ask if he was lost. “The Verbalizer.”

“Precisely. You see the troll, but Nicky Ryland can speak to him. Maybe he called your Fafhrd because he is so unhappy in his captivity. Maybe he was forced to send a message? We do not know. The only clue we have is from one of the telepaths, a missing person locator who has worked on the case for years. She thought Nicky might be in Manhattan. That's when we started paying more attention to you.”