Ysabel (43 page)

“It isn’t exactly the same,” he said finally. “I don’t get her as an aura like the other two, or Aunt Kim. Or my own.”

“You can see your aunt, inside?”

He nodded. “If she’s close enough, and isn’t screening herself. Same with them.”

His mother sighed. “And . . . Ysabel?”

“Different. I just have a feeling she was here, like she was at the cemetery.”

“Why?”

“Jeez, Mom.”

She frowned. “I take it that eloquent phrase means we lack an answer?”

He nodded. “Yeah. We lack an answer.”

“Maybe because of Melanie,” his father said suddenly. “Maybe you’re picking up Melanie, not Ysabel.”

“Ed! You’re as bad as they are.”

His father still looked strained.

“Let’s have lunch,” his mother said, after a moment. Ned saw her looking closely at his dad. “We have to wait, anyhow.”

They picked a café near the end of the street. The inside looked flashy in an old-fashioned way, lots of green and gold, but on a day like this it was way nicer outdoors.

His father bought a newspaper next door. He found a report on the return of the skull and the sculpted bust. No details that seemed to matter. The police hadn’t any idea who had returned them, other than that it had been a man in a black leather jacket, on a motorcycle.

Grey
, Ned thought.

“At some point,” his father said, mostly to himself, “I’m going to have to call her family.”

His mother looked at him again. Then she surprised Ned a bit by reaching out and squeezing her husband’s hand.

Aunt Kim called as they were finishing lunch. The Fontaine de Vaucluse was jammed with tourists on a Saturday morning in spring. It was theoretically possible (Ned’s father relayed) that Ysabel might be hiding in a tourist shop among lavender sachets and olive oil samples, but unlikely. Kim and Greg were heading back to the villa.

They phoned Dave. He reported that the three of them were still climbing about and around Fort de Buoux. No one else was there at all, it was windy, and there was a pretty compelling altar right at the top. As advertised. But the “no one else there” included any sign of a red-haired woman Kate was supposed to recognize if she saw her.

They were about to work down the steeper, wilder side of the hill, to see if there were any caves or recesses where she might have ducked out of sight, out of the wind. They’d head back after that.

“Be careful,” Ned’s father said to his brother-in-law. “Watch your knee.” He hung up.

“He can’t go clambering around rocks with that leg,” Meghan said.

Edward Marriner shrugged. “What am I going to do? If he can’t, he can’t.” Worry was written on his face. He looked older. Ned didn’t like seeing him like that. It made Ned feel fragile, somehow.

They went back to the cathedral. Ned walked into the dimness and past the baptistry on their right. He saw the
grate covering the floor there. He didn’t stop. Nothing there now, nothing to see. It had been a trick, anyhow. Items borrowed from the museum, now returned.

The cloister door was open. There were three people outside, with a severe-looking guide. She had stopped in front of the squared corner pillar by the far door to the street. She was lecturing, and pointing. The visitors, holding cameras, looked bored.

Ned went left, away from them, towards Ysabel.

He was beset with complicated feelings. Too many associations. It was less than a week since he’d first come here.

The rose was gone. Not a surprise, but for some reason it disturbed him. He wondered who would have taken it. Maybe just the gardener? He wished, suddenly, he’d thought to bring flowers.

His father had a small digital camera and was taking snaps of the cathedral walls and the roof where it came down towards the cloister. A different sort of shot, about lines and light. Ned was glad to see him working. It was hard to see him so distressed, so obviously helpless. It made Ned feel as if he was the one who was supposed to make everyone else feel better.

His mom had gone over to the tourist information on the wall. She’d put her glasses on and was reading. Ned remembered: a diagram showing how the cathedral complex was laid on top of the Roman forum, another one identifying the figures on the columns here. Saint Peter at one corner, a bull, an eagle, David and Goliath. The Queen of Sheba.

He let himself slide slowly down, back against the wall, until he was sitting on the tile flooring in front of her. He looked at the sculpture. So little there, so much implied. A hint, an echo.

He knew what his mother was going to say. What else
could
she say, reading what was posted on the opposite wall? The Queen of Sheba, it said.

He watched her coming over, putting her reading glasses back in her purse, taking out sunglasses. Her hair was really red in the sunlight, darker when she crossed into shade. She came up and stood beside Ned and looked at the worn, pale sculpture in front of them. She shook her head, and sat neatly down beside him, legs extended, crossed at the ankles. She took off her sunglasses and looked some more.

“She was beautiful,” she murmured.

He swallowed. “Who?”

“Ysabel,” she said.

Ned began to cry.

She looked at him quickly. “Honey, what . . . ?”

“You don’t . . . you don’t think it’s the Queen of Sheba?”

His mother handed him a Kleenex. “Ned, dear, with Melanie gone, and what I’ve seen in less than a day, I’m not going to doubt you here.”

“Honest?”

She made a face. “Don’t fish, child.”

Ned had to smile, even as he struggled for control. He wiped his eyes. “I . . . it matters a lot to me that you believe me.”

His mother didn’t smile this time. “Because I didn’t believe your aunt?”

“Partly that. Not all.”

She touched his cheek. “Someone still has to be logical here, Ned.”

“I’d volunteer,” his father said, coming up. The three tourists and the guide were still on the far side. “But I’m not sure where I parked my logic.”

“Well find it,” his wife said. “I mean, Ned may be using some kind of intuition or psychic thing here, but you and I can’t. We don’t have it. This can’t just be about oracular pigs, or reading bird entrails, like the Celts did.”

“Romans did bird entrails too,” Edward Marriner said. “A whole class of priests was trained in it.”

Ned saw his mother stick out her tongue at his father. He had
never
seen her do that. “Fine, be that way. But they didn’t do human sacrifice.”

“True enough. Other nasty bits.”

“I’m sure. But we still have to try to
bring
something to this, you and I. We have to think. Ned does his thing, whatever it is, or Kim does, and we—”

She stopped, because Ned had stood up.

He was replaying a phrase in his head, over and over like a tape loop:
they didn’t do human sacrifice
.

And then, like some kind of silent explosion in his mind, he locked onto the other thing his mother had just said.

Oracular pigs.

He felt himself starting to tremble.

The boar. Seen below the villa, above it under the
moon. He saw it again in his mind, turning away from him, rejecting him.

But no. Not away. Turning
for
him. The slow, calm movement, looking back both times at Ned, then ahead again, before moving off.

He took a deep breath. He looked at the sculpted column, at Ysabel, then down at his hands.

“We better get back to the house,” he said. “I know where she is.”

THEY WERE WAITING
for him to speak, assembled in the villa again. Ned felt shaky; his hands were sweaty. This was too large, it felt
massive
. But he was also sure of himself. He was absolutely certain, in fact.

“Go ahead,” his father said.

Edward Marriner’s voice was quiet, his eyes calm. He didn’t look weary or worn down any more. He’d been like that since Ned had spoken in the cloister and they’d started back for the van, and home.

Ned does his thing
, his mother had said. She was looking at him from across the dining-room table, hands in her lap, no notebook, just waiting.

He cleared his throat. “We were . . . we were really close to it last night. Mom was. When she reminded us of the word Ysabel used.”

“Sacrifice?” Uncle Dave said.

He was sitting in the armchair by the piano, leg up on a hassock, an ice pack on the knee.

Ned nodded. “Yeah. So we did the obvious thing and started thinking about Celtic sacrifice places that
Melanie might have known about. And that was close to being right.”

“What did we miss?” Kate Wenger asked. She was still wearing his sweatshirt.

“One thing, and something else no one but me could have known. No one missed that, except me.”

He looked at his mother. Aunt Kim was leaning on the doorframe behind her, where her husband had been the night before.

“The Romans did at least one human sacrifice here,” Ned said. “And Melanie knew it, because she
told
me about it.” He looked at Greg, and then Steve. “That time I was really sick? When you two went up to the ambush site to look for a photo spot?”

They both nodded, said nothing.

Ned took another breath, let it out. “That’s where she is. Ysabel, Melanie.”

“The mountain?” Steve said.

“Yeah,” Ned said. “She’s up on Sainte-Victoire.”

“It’s a big mountain, Ned,” his father said. “There’s a lot of ground to cover up there. And I—”

Ned held up both hands. “No, Dad. I know exactly where. Because all of this,
all
of this, is about Melanie now, I think. The changed rules, searching instead of a fight. They didn’t expect that. And she’s hiding in a place she knows I know about.
We had to know, too.
”

“We’re putting a lot in the idea that Melanie’s . . . spirit, whatever, is inside Ysabel,” Edward Marriner said.

“We can do that, Ed,” Aunt Kim murmured. Her arms were tightly crossed on her chest.

No one said anything for a moment.

“All right. Fine. You said you know the place, Ned. Where?”

His mother’s first words since they’d gathered back here. She was gazing at him, that calm, attentive expression he knew.

So, looking at her, he said, “She’s at some chasm. Melanie called it a garagai, it’s somewhere near the top.”

“And she’s there because . . . ?”

It was almost as if this had become a dialogue between the two of them. She used to quiz him like this, for science or social studies tests, when he was younger.

“Because she told me about it. That’s where the Romans, Marius, threw the Celtic chieftains down a pit, a place of sacrifice after the battle, so they couldn’t ever be reclaimed to be worshipped and help the tribes.”

“Oh, God,” said Kate. She put a hand to her mouth. “They even
talked
about that, at Entremont, the three of them.”

Ned nodded his head. “Yeah, they did. I thought about that, too. Melanie knew we were there. I’d called her, remember?”

“Is that the second thing?” his mother asked softly. “You said there were two.”

“No. The garagai is in her notes. The other thing was entirely me. I . . . twice at night, I saw that boar
when I was by myself, and both times it . . . both times I think it was signalling me. I didn’t get it, till just now. Till you said something in the cloister. I don’t know why it was doing that, but I’m pretty sure.”

His uncle sat up, shifting his leg. He had an odd expression on his face.

“What kind of boar?” he asked.

“Huge one. Almost white. Greg saw it when Brys stopped us on the road.”

Greg was nodding his head. “Really big,” he said. “I could have wrecked the van, hitting it.”

“Go on, Ned,” Uncle Dave said.

Ned looked at him. “I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but I think it was pointing to something, both times. It came out, waited for me to see it, then it turned around and faced the mountain and looked back at me. And then it went off. I didn’t know what was going on. And . . . and this is weird, but the first time was before Beltaine. Before anything even happened. I know that doesn’t make sense.”

“Time can be funny in these things,” his aunt said.

“So you think she’s by this chasm,” Ned’s mother said calmly. “All right. Good. That’s our first stop tomorrow. We get directions and go look.”

Ned shook his head. His hands were trembling again.

“Mom, no. I have to go now. One of them’s going to figure this. They’ve had so much longer with her, with Ysabel. They heard her say
sacrifice
too. And they know that place.”

“Ned . . .” his father began.

“Dad, I’m
really
sure. I’m shaking with it, I’m so positive.” He held up his hands to show them.

His father looked at him. “That’s not what I was going to say. Ned, I believe you. There’s something else. You’re forgetting.”

“What?” Ned said.

It was Steve who answered him. “Dude, you can’t go up that mountain.”

“I have to.”

“Ned,” Greg murmured, “we saw you there. You looked like you were dying, man. I haven’t seen anyone throw up that hard since . . . since whenever.”

Ned stopped. He took a steadying breath. He swore. Neither parent said a word.

He
had
forgotten. Or, he’d half remembered because he knew he’d been sick when Melanie told him about the garagai, but he’d blocked out what it would mean to go back there. To climb.

Even the recollection made him feel ill, right here. He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I have to try. I need to go, like, right now.” He was almost twitching with the need to be gone.

His father’s tone was gentle. “It’s past four o’clock, Ned. You can’t do it in the dark.”

“Won’t be dark. I’ll get my sweats and I’ll run. I’m a runner, Dad. I can do this. And maybe”—a sudden thought—“maybe I’ll be better when I get higher up? My problem was the battlefield. I think.”

He looked at Greg and Steve.

“And maybe you won’t,” Greg said, shaking his head.

“Dude—” Steve began.

“All of you
listen
!” Ned said. He heard his voice rising. “Melanie is
gone
if we screw this up. Look, I’ll take four Advil or whatever, and sunglasses, and my phone, and I’ll run. Please stop arguing. We can’t argue. We need to move. I have to know exactly where this place is.”