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

“What was this huge emergency that called you away?” Olivier’s handsome, dimpled smile appeared around the half-open door from the steps, as he ran his fingers through his curly mop of brown hair and regarded me with large dark eyes. “Where did you disappear to? The Pod was asking after you every day, but I knew nothing.”

“The Pod” was the widely used nickname of my boss, the director and general manager of the whole nuclear site. It was used behind his back, for though his actual name was Pastor Owen Dart he was anything but shepherdlike. Indeed, the monogram was recognized also as his description: the Prince of Darkness.

I’d like to argue that this moniker was inappropriate to my boss. But to be perfectly frank, of the ten thousand employees working at the site—or even among the industry muckety-mucks in Washington he hobnobbed with—I was the only one I knew who hadn’t been scalded by the man. At least not yet. The Pod seemed genuinely to like me, and had handpicked me for my job while I was still in university. As a result of this unexpected affinity, not all my colleagues trusted me—another reason why Olivier, the dashing Québecois Mormon cowboy gourmet, was one of my few close friends.

“Sorry,” I said to Olivier, pouring hot water over the mush of brown sugar, butter, and rum in the two glass mugs and handing one to him. “I had to leave suddenly. There was an unexpected death in the family.”

“Oh gosh, no one I know, I hope?” said Olivier with a gallantly supportive smile—though we both knew that he knew no one in my family.

“It was Sam,” I said, trying to wash down the stick in my throat with the buttery hot liquor.

“Heavens! Your brother?” said Olivier, sinking onto the sofa near the fire.

“My cousin,” I corrected. “Actually, my stepbrother. We were raised as brother and sister. In fact, he’s more of a blood brother. Or I mean, he was.”

“My goodness, your family relations are somewhat complex,” Olivier said, mocking my own retort whenever anyone inquired about my family. “Are you quite certain you were related to this fellow at all?”

“I’m sole heir to his estate,” I told him. “That’s enough for me.”

“Ah—then he was rich, but not really close, is that it?” Olivier said hopefully.

“A bit of each,” I told him. “I was probably closer to him than anyone in my family.” Which wasn’t saying much, but Olivier didn’t know that.

“Oh, how dreadful for you! But I don’t understand. Why have I never heard of him, then, except for the name? He’s never been to visit, nor called that I know of, in the many years we’ve worked together and shared this humble abode.”

“Our family communicates psychically,” I told him. Jason was slaloming around my legs as if he were trying to braid a maypole all by himself, so I picked him up and added, “We have no need of satellites or cell phones—”

“That reminds me,” interrupted Olivier. “Your father’s been calling here for days. Wouldn’t say what he wanted—just that you must phone him at once.”

Just then the phone rang, startling Jason, who jumped out of my arms.

“They must be psychic to pick up our vibes at this hour,” said Olivier. As I reached for the phone, he finished his drink and headed for the door. “I’ll make you some pancakes before work, as a welcome home,” he tossed over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

“Gavroche, darling” were the first words I heard as I picked up the phone.

Good lord, maybe my family members had suddenly become psychic. It was my uncle Laf. I hadn’t heard from him in ages. He always called me Gavroche: French for a Parisian street urchin.

“Laf?” I said. “Where are you? You sound a million miles away.”

“Just now, Gavroche, I am in Wien,” meaning he was at his big eighteenth-century apartment overlooking the Hofburg in Vienna where Jersey and I used to stay—and where it was now eight hours later than it was here, or eleven A.M. his time. Apparently Uncle Laf had never gotten the hang of differing time zones.

“I was so sorry, Gavroche, to hear about Sam,” he told me. “I was wanting to come for the service, but your father, of course—”

“That’s okay,” I assured him, not wanting to open that can of worms. “You were there in spirit, and so was Uncle Earnest, even though he’s dead. I found a shaman who did a little ritual at the ceremony, then the military gave Sam honors, and Jersey fell into the open grave.”

“Your mother fell into the grave?” Uncle Laf said with the enthusiasm of a five-year-old. “Oh, but that is marvelous! Did she plan it, do you think?”

“She was drunk, as usual,” I told him. “But it was still fun. I wish you could have seen Augustus’s face!”

“Now I am really sorry I was not able to attend!” Laf said with more tickled enjoyment than I would have believed a man of his age, pushing ninety, could muster.

There was no love lost between my father, Augustus, and my uncle, Lafcadio Behn—perhaps because it was with Laf, my grandfather’s stepson by a previous marriage, that my own grandma Pandora had run off when she’d abandoned my father at birth.

This was the thing my family never spoke of, in public or private. Well, at least it was one of the things. It suddenly occurred to me that I could probably make a fortune—if I hadn’t just inherited one from Sam—by designing an entirely new model of complexity theory, based solely upon my family’s interactions.

“Uncle Laf,” I said, “I want to ask you a question. I know we never talk about the family, but I want you to know that Sam has left everything to me.”

“Gavroche, this is just what I expect of him. You are a good girl, and everything good should come to you. I have plenty of comfort on my own—do not you