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

“Who does he mean by ‘he’?” asked Olivier. “Where’s he taking you, and why doesn’t he want us to come along?”

Before I could think how to reply, Bambi resolved the problem—though I admit I wasn’t quite sure how she did it.

“I am Halle’s daughter,” she told Dark Bear. “I’ve come from Vienna to reveal what I know about the man who was Sam’s father and Ariel’s stepfather—Earnest Behn.”

“Ah,” said Dark Bear with no expression. “I understand.”

I threw Jason in my backpack and gave him a pat. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the house when I wasn’t sure where we were going or how long we’d be gone. I slung the pack over my shoulder along with my regular satchel, gathering up what I thought we might need for a hike in the mountains with Jason along for the ride. I hopped onto the front seat of Dark Bear’s Land Rover while Olivier and Bambi took the back. This enabled me, turning to listen to Bambi’s story, simultaneously to watch the rear window and be sure we weren’t followed.

“Okay, folks,” I said to Bambi and Olivier, once we’d pulled out of town and were headed north along the Continental Divide. “I can’t tell you where we’re going, because I don’t know myself. But I know who Dark Bear is taking us to meet. I therefore assure you this is no boondoggle. We’re getting to the bottom of everything, once and for all.”

Olivier was regarding me with a puzzled expression, then slowly the dawning light crept over his face.

“My God!” he cried. “Do you mean to say he’s not really dead?”

I nodded slowly. At least I’d managed to do one thing in all this time: keep Sam’s living, breathing existence a secret from just about everyone on the planet. But all that was about to change, as it must if we were to unravel this mess.

“But if Sam is alive … then whom did Wolfgang kill?” asked Bambi, quicker on the uptake than I’d thought when we’d first met.

I glanced at Olivier uncomfortably.

“Oh no,” said Olivier, as he suddenly got the picture. “All this past month, I’ve felt something was horribly wrong. It wasn’t usual for us to communicate personally while on assignment, but I knew Theron Vane had gone to San Francisco the same week your cousin was killed. It seemed odd to receive no news at all, after the brutal murder of someone who was helping with a case I’d been working on myself for five years. I even thought to contact Theron on my own, but I decided there must be some good reason why he was keeping silent.” He smiled grimly. “It now appears that there was.”

As we wound our way up into the thickly forested pine country with its swift, dark rivers and sheer drops of sparkling waterfalls glimpsed between the trees, I inhaled the pine scents and listened to Bambi’s story. As she told it, the last few pieces of the puzzle I’d been both hunting and dodging for so long finally fell into place.

“My mother Halle was raised by her father, Hillmann von Hauser,” she said. “As you see, Wolfgang and I, too, use our grandfather’s name.”

“I understood, from a phone call with my mother Jersey, that you and Wolfgang had two different fathers,” I said, not really wanting to make a public issue of Bambi’s illegitimate paternity by my own obnoxious father, Augustus. But I was the one to be let in for another surprise.

“Different fathers, yes, but with the same family name,” Bambi told me. “Wolfgang’s father, my mother Halle’s legal husband, was actually Earnest Behn.”

I was no longer shocked by such revelations about my family. But in view of what Bambi had said earlier about Wolfgang being the instrument of Sam’s death, I knew this was truly important, since it meant that Sam and Wolfgang shared the same father, Earnest. They were half brothers—just as Bambi and I were sisters through my father, Augustus. I glanced at Dark Bear, who noticed it from the corner of his eye as he drove, and nodded in affirmation.

“Yes, I knew of this,” he said. “I knew Earnest Behn for many years. Earnest was a very handsome man, and rich. He came to northwest Idaho, well before the war, to purchase mining properties, fifty thousand acres north of Lapwai containing numerous untapped mountains and caves filled with mineral resources—a large chunk of Mother Earth to be so exploited. The war, of course, made him even richer.

“After the war, when Earnest was in his mid-forties, he returned to Europe, married the young woman Halle, and stayed in Europe for some time. They had a son, Wolfgang. Suddenly Earnest returned to his property north of Lapwai, without the woman or child. He said they had died. He asked permission to marry my daughter Bright Cloud, whom he had known from her childhood. She was very attracted to him, but it was … uncustomary. Earnest Behn was a white man from foreign lands. How did we know he would be willing to learn our ways? How did we know he would not leave the country again, perhaps never to return?

“When I asked him if he loved my daughter, Earnest Behn said he believed himself incapable of love—a remark that, to be plain, my people cannot understand. To admit such a thing is as much as saying you are already dead. He promised he would care for my daughter, however, and that any child they had between them would be raised on the reservation among our people—a promise he failed to keep. For when Bright Cloud died, Sam’s father took him from the reservation. Then he married your mother Jersey, and we feared Sam would be lost to us forever.”

Dark Bear said this without bitterness, though he looked as if he were deep in thought. Then he added, “Earnest Behn said something else very strange, just before his