A Grave Tree Read online

  Sylvain shook his head. “I don’t know, but we’d better go inside.”

  “Was it…?” Abbey hesitated.

  “Witchcraft?” Sylvain said. “Possibly. But I don’t know. Either way, we’d best get inside.” Sylvain turned and headed down the path, and Mark followed so closely that he was nearly on Sylvain’s back.

  Caleb looked at Abbey and shrugged, then hooked his fingers into Farley’s collar and started to drag him back through the woods to the path. The dog continued to stare and lob growls in the direction the ghosts had gone.

  Abbey shuddered and beat a hasty retreat herself. No need to be out in the rain with specters.

  Sylvain tried to be chipper over a dinner of beef stroganoff with a sherry demi-glaze and filo-wrapped asparagus, but the visitors had obviously spooked him. Farley lay across the threshold of the door and, aside from scarfing down his dinner with his usual gusto, refused to move from the spot, even to take up his usual place by the fire. Mark ate only small amounts of his plain noodles and sauce-free meat. The rain continued to pound on the cabin roof, and Abbey rather wondered if they might end up careening down the mountainside in an avalanche of mud and trees.

  “So what was it?” Caleb said finally, bluntly breaking up Sylvain’s talk of the weather and of repairs to his old stone mansion, which Selena, Nate, and Damian had blown up a few weeks before.

  Sylvain shook his head. “I don’t know. There are many in the non-witching world who believe in ghosts. Maybe they do exist and have nothing to do with us.”

  “Maybe,” Abbey said.

  “I may have to go and retrieve some of the old texts I keep stored in the vault in my library and see if there are any references,” Sylvain said with a careful smile. “I’m sure it’s all fine.”

  “Right. That’s why we’re holed up in the woods and our parents and Mrs. Forrester have vanished. Why aren’t we even looking for them?” Abbey said.

  The smile slipped from Sylvain’s lips. “Your parents were quite clear. They don’t want you getting involved. More salad?”

  Abbey ignored the butter lettuce and crumbled blue cheese that Sylvain proffered, his long thin fingers wrapped around the cheery ceramic bowl. “Right, instead they want us to live a normal life in a little cabin away from all suggestion of civilization?”

  “I’m sure this is only temporary,” Sylvain said. “Until they…”

  “Until they what? Come back?” Abbey spat the words. “What if they don’t come back?” Her eyes flooded with tears, which she blinked back ferociously.

  “Abbey’s right,” Caleb said. “We have a right to know what’s going on.”

  Sylvain set down the salad bowl. “If your parents don’t return, your mother has made arrangements for you. There is a trust fund, and you are to go live with her cousin Monica in California. I believe she is your Great-Aunt Marge’s daughter. I will deliver you there myself. Mark will stay…” Sylvain paused and then continued, “with me. But I assure you, your parents will return. They are very capable, and I have the utmost faith in them.”

  Abbey rose from the table, bristling with frustration, and was about to say something scathing when Farley erupted into barks and began running back and forth maniacally in front of the door.

  A sharp knock cut through Farley’s agitated noise. Sylvain leapt up from the table and peered through the curtain onto the front stoop. Then he let the curtain fall and reached over Farley to open the door.

  Ian stood on the threshold, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his beret sodden and a deep shade of tan.

  Farley stopped his crazed barking and ran at Ian, his tail wagging euphorically, no doubt looking for Digby the rat. Farley had shown a great interest in Digby, and although Ian believed this heralded the start of a great friendship, Abbey rather suspected Farley actually wanted to toss Digby in the air and shake him like a beach ball.

  “Glorious evening for a stroll,” Ian announced. “I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a spot of coffee and a sit by the fire.”

  After hanging his wet things near the cozy glow of the fireplace, Ian dug into his serving of stroganoff, asparagus, and butter lettuce salad with relish.

  “I haven’t been able to find her,” he said without warning after he had taken several bites. Abbey leaned forward. Who was he talking about? Her mother? Mrs. Forrester? Selena?

  “Not surprising,” Sylvain growled, after a glance at Abbey, Caleb, and Mark, likely assessing the desirability of having them in the room during this conversation. “She’s powerful. We’d best be on our guard. The question is which side she’ll be on. She’s already managed to meddle in some of my business interests.”

  Ian flipped his fingers in the air, as if to imply that this last did not concern him, and took a generous bite of asparagus, the filo pastry crumbling onto his vertically striped, blue polyester shirt.

  Abbey watched Ian warily. The last time they had seen him, he had been charging at them with a gun, yelling that he couldn’t believe that one of them had done something and that someone—a her—needed to be stopped. Then Jake got shot, quite possibly by Ian. And afterward, when they were in the tunnels, Sandy had said—repeatedly—that Ian could not be trusted. But they became separated when the tunnels caved in, so Abbey hadn’t been able to ask Sandy why Ian was not trustworthy.

  Then again, Abbey wasn’t completely sure if she trusted Sandy either. But her mother and Sandy were clearly friends, and cuteness should not be a reason to distrust.

  “The others are moving in on Jake again,” Ian said. “We’re going to have to get him to safety.”

  Abbey jolted in her chair. Jake. She’d been so obsessed with her missing parents and her own virtual incarceration that she almost forgot about her note to herself about saving Jake.

  It was already March 7. Two days before she had to save Jake… again, somehow, according to the note. What did Ian mean? Was someone—Selena, Nate, or Damian, Abbey assumed—trying to kill Jake, or just use him again like they had before?

  Sylvain sighed and bent his head, his long silver locks falling over his eyes. “I’ll go get Jake tomorrow and bring him here. His parents trust me. I’ll have one of my employees at Salvador Systems make up a baseball camp and a scholarship story to make them happy.”

  Ian nodded, and Abbey tried to control the quiet lurch in her gut—or was it her heart?—at the prospect of Jake coming to join them. She extinguished it quickly; she was going to marry Sam, apparently, and have his baby.

  Change the future, but don’t change too much, her future self had told her. Her future self likely loved Sam and wanted to keep her baby, and if Abbey changed something—by dating Jake, say—would that baby cease to exist? Was that akin to killing a baby? The potential butterfly effect of time travel sometimes seemed more like an elephant effect; the massive beast careened haphazardly through her life on giant feet, making her question every decision.

  She tried to organize and control her spiraling thoughts. She idolized Sam. She had idolized him forever, since meeting him at science camp. Surely she would be very happy married to him. But he was ten years older than she was, and somehow, right now, her current feelings for Jake seemed more real than her past and expected future feelings for Sam.

  Sometimes knowing the future kind of sucked. How on earth was she going to save Jake? Again?

  “I’ve had no luck looking for Francis or any of the other missing ancients,” Ian said.

  Abbey turned her attention back to Ian sharply. Was he talking about Mrs. Forrester, who was named Francis, or one of the two Franks, who were also named Francis? Ian had mentioned that the ancients had disappeared a few weeks ago. At the time, she hadn’t thought much of it—after all, they were adults, and witches. Surely they could look after themselves. Maybe they had wanted to disappear.

  Sylvain gave Ian a careful look. “I think,” he said, “if you’ve finished eating, it would be best to continue this discussion in priv
ate.”

  Ian shifted his gaze to Abbey, Caleb, and Mark. Digby had emerged from Ian’s pocket and was perched on his shoulder, happily consuming a piece of filo, his whiskers twitching. Farley had taken up a post beneath Ian’s chair, his wide pink tongue hanging out of his mouth and his eyes fixed on Digby.

  “They’re going to need to know,” Ian said. “The Council, what’s left of it, is meeting later this week. They’ll be discussing Selena’s plan to find a way to the parallel universe. I think they plan to support her. You need to be at the meeting, and so should they.”

  “We don’t need to remind those clowns that these children exist,” Sylvain replied.

  Digby scampered down Ian’s shoulder and onto the table, where he delicately retrieved a larger piece of pastry from Ian’s plate. Sylvain flinched but didn’t say anything. A strand of drool emerged from Farley’s mouth.

  “I somehow doubt they would forget,” Ian said. “They’re assets, and they’d be a heck of a lot safer prepared. What if something happens to you?”

  “It’s not up for discussion,” Sylvain said.

  “Marian isn’t always right.” A darkness crept over Ian’s face, replacing his normally insouciant expression, and Abbey wondered again if he could be trusted—and who he had been pointing the gun at that night in Abbott’s Apothecary. Her mother and Ian had obviously dated once, or had a past of some sort, if the photo she and Caleb had found in her mother’s yearbook—of photo of her mother and Ian holding hands—was any indication.

  “Ian’s right,” Caleb thrust in. “We’re tired of being cooped up here.”

  Sylvain ignored Caleb. “About her own children, I would say she’s pretty right,” Sylvain answered. He shifted his gaze to Abbey, Caleb, and Mark. “I’d appreciate it if the three of you do the dishes while Ian and I talk in the office.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” Ian said, and then flipped Abbey and Caleb a glance as if to say that he had tried. He held out his hand to Digby, who ran back up onto the small man’s shoulder, and then Ian rose and followed Sylvain into the little office down the hall. Farley padded behind them, his toenails clicking on the wood floor, and settled on the runner carpet just outside the closed office door.

  Abbey’s emotions and muscles felt like a bundle of jagged nerves as Mark automatically started clearing the table, cutlery clanking against the heavy dishes in his meaty hands. She stalked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Rain pelted from the sky in silvery sheets, and broad puddles pooled in the small clearing in front of the house.

  How had Ian gotten to the cabin? Had he driven? Maybe they could steal his car and escape. But where would they go? And was there a ghost lingering outside, waiting for them to depart the safety of the cabin? Despite Abbey’s desire to leave, Sylvain seemed to be exerting an odd hold on them that prevented them from running away. Ian had said that Sylvain was an extuit—an expert in influencing people and situations. Was he using witchcraft to keep them docile and hidden away? It certainly felt sometimes that he had sprinkled them with a magic dust of words.

  Caleb beckoned her from the corner of the living room, where he hovered over his laptop.

  “I’ve been running secret searches on Quentin Steinam,” he said. “Simon taught me how to encrypt what I do online.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I’ve been making a list of things he’s invested in—the computer industry, the mining industry, chemical engineering, aeronautics. He was pretty active until about a year ago, and then it’s like he just dropped off the face of the map. But look at this.” Caleb gestured to an email on his screen. “It’s from Simon. He’s been looking through those files of Sylvain’s. Apparently there’s some photocopies of ancient texts. He can’t read any of the words, but he says there are some English words in the margins that refer to Quentin and Quinta with a slash between the words, like they’re the same thing. You said Jake referred to Quinta and said Selena worked for her. So I’m thinking Quentin became Quinta.”

  Abbey blinked at her brother. She preferred questions that could be answered with a mathematical formula, or at the very least a Bunsen burner. Was Caleb suggesting that Quentin Steinam had had a sex change? “Is there a Quinta Steinam?”

  “Not that I can find.”

  “What else did Simon say?”

  “Just that there’s a note saying, ‘The center is moving—Quinta holds the key and the trees of the mother and father.’ He’s going to use some algorithm to try to figure out the language. He agrees with me that we have to try to find Quinta, although he suggested, in his Simon way, that we do it without leaving the cabin.”

  “A key? Like the key to the tunnels?”

  Caleb elevated his shoulders in a shrug. Abbey was silent, her mind spinning, trying to make sense of the words. The trees of the mother and father? Madrona meant mother. What was the tree of the father? Or were Madronas the trees of the mother and father? What did that mean?

  “Tomorrow,” Caleb said. “When Sylvain goes to get Jake. We’ll make a break for it. We need to go after Mom and Dad.”

  She almost said something about Simon warning them not to leave the cabin, but her twin’s eyes had turned fierce, and she knew there was no talking him out of it. Besides, she didn’t really want to.

  Her heart sped up a little at the prospect of staging an escape and potentially finding their parents.

  Acceleration.

  Her first physics lesson in acceleration had been about acceleration due to gravity. Objects falling toward earth accelerated at 9.8 meters per second per second due to the force exerted by gravity.

  Acceleration as a result of gravity was a nice predictable force. Leaving the cabin would likely invite a whole array of unpredictable forces.

  Bring it on, she thought.

  2. The Phantom Effect

  Mark studied the isogonic map of the United States for the seventh time. The set of black lines that converged at the pole and then extended outward and across the states like harp strings blurred and swam the longer he stared. The line of zero declination ran almost through the eastern portion of Missouri, pretty much down the Mississippi River.

  He had become a bit diverted yesterday looking at the geography of the Mississippi, the tenth largest river in the world, and had spent some time considering the role of rivers in determining political boundaries (in this case the boundaries of Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa). He’d also paused briefly to consider just how large the Mississippi watershed was (it was very large), but now he was back on task and looking at the isogonic map again.

  The 2010 map was not at a scale that allowed him to determine the exact location of the line of zero declination. He’d ordered a larger scale map from the US Geological Survey, at a cost of three hundred and twenty-seven dollars (which was quite pleasantly divisible by three), but did not expect it to arrive for two weeks.

  The line of zero declination (where magnetic north and true north were the same) was drifting a few degrees westward each year, and the rate of westward drift had accelerated in recent years (which had concerning implications for the possibility of a pole reversal, but Mark didn’t want to think about that). Based on the online magnetic declination calculator on the Geological Survey site, and on his own back-of-the-envelope lining-up of features from other maps, he felt fairly certain that the line passed almost right through Coventry. It still sat slightly east of the center of Coventry City, but at the current rate of westward movement of nine degrees a year, he was pretty sure it would run right through the center of Coventry sometime this year. He just wasn’t precisely sure when.

  He had just typed up his thoughts (and added in a few what he felt were pithy comments regarding the historic significance of the Mississippi) and emailed them off to his new online friend, Luanne, whom he had met a few weeks ago in a group forum for people with Asperger’s who were interested in maps. He had tried to tell Abbey about
zero declination, but it seemed she either didn’t understand or didn’t think it was that important (which was odd, because she was usually the first to grasp the relevance of things).

  Ian had stayed late into the previous evening, and the murmur of voices could be heard in the bad man’s office long after Abbey, Caleb, and Mark had finished the dishes and gone to their respective rooms. (At Abbey’s suggestion, Mark was endeavoring to refer to the bad man as “Sylvain,” at least when he was using his speaking voice. However, in his non-speaking internal voice he was having a hard time making the switch. He referred to Ian as “the bad man with the beret, a rat, and nasty dogs.” Even though Abbey had indicated that she did not think the dogs were the beret man’s, Mark had seen him talking to one of the dogs at the college, so Mark could not be sure. He had checked the driveway very carefully after the two bad men had retreated to the office to ensure that the dogs were not lingering in the driveway waiting to pounce.)

  Mark’s room was next to the office, and even though the very bad man (Dr. Ford, father of Mark’s half-sister, Sandy) was convinced that Mark was deaf, Mark actually had very good hearing. In fact, as he lay on his bed trying to drift off to sleep, there were a few moments in the lull of half-sleep when he almost felt himself to be inside the office with Sylvain and Ian, listening to their conversation.

  This was very disconcerting, because although Mark understood that scientists believed everyone in the world dreamed—because dreams served some important physiological or psychological function—Mark did not dream. Thus this seeming arrival in the other room jarred him fully into awakeness every time, and he was forced to study the repetitive lines and knots in the log cabin walls in order to calm himself and drift off again. (On previous nights, he’d formed a variety of long and wide faces from various clusters of three knots just before falling asleep. However, in the aftermath of seeing the ghost, the knot faces no longer seemed quite as friendly, and he made a concerted effort to connect several dots in the shape of islands on the sea of brown wood instead.)