The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

more like what Laf said, a Nazi collaborator—by tomorrow the real Zoe Behn would be measured by me for the very first time.

Given the environment of secrecy, not to say treachery, in which our family operated, maybe Wolfgang didn’t know that our mothers, Jersey and Halle, were half sisters. It was also possible he was unaware the eighty-three-year-old bombshell Zoe, whom he’d found so charming, was actually his own grandmother. After all, I hadn’t known such things myself until tonight.

But one item Jersey explained was something Wolfgang couldn’t have been telling the complete truth about. It had to do with the week of Sam’s funeral. And it made my latest cryptic message from Sam seem even more ominous.

Before the funeral, like Augustus and Grace, Jersey had talked briefly with the executor about the reading of the will; but unlike Augustus and Grace, Jersey had had a reason to do so. She was acquainted with Mr. Leo Abrahams, who’d been Uncle Earnest’s attorney as well as executor of the estate when Jersey was left widowed by Earnest’s death. Now that Sam too was dead, it was understandable Jersey would want to know how, in future, her own income would be paid by the estate her stepson had managed these past seven years. But that wasn’t all.

When Jersey had learned I was likely to be Sam’s major beneficiary, she wanted to find out whether I understood just what that responsibility might entail—for an excellent reason. She herself had a better than average guess of what Sam might have inherited from his father. Maybe my mother hadn’t been quite as drunk as she’d seemed that day at the graveside. In hindsight, her astonishing behavior had certainly given us a breather from Augustus and Grace long enough to have lunch by ourselves. But when Jersey realized I knew zilch, she decided that once the rest of the family left town, she would corner me and fill me in on everything.

Jersey had brought something of her own to the funeral, and though she couldn’t say much right now, the little she could communicate was enough. She’d intended to give me what she’d brought after our talk—but I had vanished. So after much soul-searching, she’d wrapped it in butcher paper and twine and mailed it to me, with a note scribbled on the inside of the brown paper. This I’d unfortunately thrown away without seeing. But from Jersey’s brief description, as precise as she could afford to be on our transatlantic trunk line, I knew this was surely the rune manuscript I’d stashed in the Department of Defense Standards manuals at the nuclear site—just before I got those more deadly manuscripts from Sam, now tucked away at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. So Jersey’s document was the very rune manuscript Wolfgang claimed he’d received from Zoe and mailed me himself—a manuscript that Laf later assured me neither Wolfgang nor Zoe could possibly have possessed.

My mother and I agreed, for reasons of prudence, that we’d discuss the rest when I got back home. When I rang off the phone, Wolfgang was waiting outside the booth with our bags, and we headed for the airport taxi stand. As our cab swept into the wet black velvet Parisian night, I knew, just as Laf had repeatedly warned, I might be walking into the proverbial lions’ den without my whip.

Indeed, as I now grimly appreciated, it was entirely conceivable Wolfgang had never seen the rune manuscript until that night he’d spent in my room back in Idaho, just after the avalanche, when I myself was drugged and out cold. And if that were true, I understood with a horrible chill exactly what it would mean: that the man sitting beside me in this taxi, rolling down a dark French highway at midnight, might well have deceived me in everything he’d said or done, from the very first moment we’d met.

Our cab pulled up in a narrow street on the Left Bank before the Relais Christine; Wolfgang hopped out, paid the driver, and rang the bell at the gate.

“Our plane was quite late,” Wolfgang told the desk man in rather impeccable French. “We haven’t yet eaten. Could you give us our room key and stow our baggage while we go for a short meal?”

The desk man agreed, Wolfgang exchanged a healthy tip for our room key, and we went on down the one-block street to where lights were still glowing and numerous tables of what seemed ebullient after-theater people were still dining inside a chic, cozy bistro.

Our coquilles arrived, filled with a wonderful rich concoction of seafood seasoned with exotic Mediterranean spices. Something about a good meal and a full-bodied wine always seemed to make me truly relaxed and mellow—and to dull my survival instincts exactly when I needed them sharpest.

“It was rather a lengthy phone call you made just now to the States,” Wolfgang finally commented when our crispy green salad showed up afterwards. “Do you speak with your mother often?”

“At least every few years—without fail, rain or shine,” I told him.

“Perhaps this call was related, then, to the call you made earlier to your uncle?” he suggested. “You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet ever since we left Vienna.”

“I am often more of a blabbermouth than serves my own good,” I agreed. “But on the subject of my family, I’ve usually been reticent. Of course, now that it turns out you and I are actually related, I guess there’s practically nothing we couldn’t discuss with one another. That is, if we both decided to tell the truth, for a refreshing change.”

“Ah,” said Wolfgang quietly, looking down at his plate.

He picked up a crusty roll and broke it in two, studying the pieces in his hands as if expecting them to contain the key to some mystery. At last he looked up at me with those incredible turquoise eyes beneath thick lashes, which always made me more than a little weak in the knees. But I knew I’d better keep my