Once we were ensconced in seats as isolated as we could manage on the train, I prompted Quinton to restart the story he’d dropped in Lisbon.
“So, tell me what happened. Your dad snatched your niece. . . .”
Quinton let out a heavy sigh, the colors of his aura dimming and flashing red for a moment. “Soraia. Yes. Three days ago I picked up a message from Sam—that’s my sister. Her name is Samantha. Samantha Elizabeth Rebelo. She doesn’t use ‘Purlis’ or ‘Quinn.’”
“I’m following you,” I said.
“Sam married a Portuguese guy. Well, he’s half Dutch, but that doesn’t matter. Piet Rebelo. His dad was with the diplomatic corps and they met while she was taking care of our grandparents in Rhode Island and he was visiting some of his family that lived there—lots of Portuguese in Rhode Island. Piet is kind of like me—went into the family business in a manner of speaking. He works with one of the ever-changing EU trade-negotiation groups. Travels in fits. So . . . he’s currently out of town on business and Sam didn’t want to get the local cops involved in this because, while the Portuguese authorities are pretty serious about crimes involving children, she was worried about Dad’s government contacts hearing about it. She was afraid he’d find out through them if she’d reported it and maybe do something to her or Piet or the baby.”
“Baby?”
“She has a baby boy—Martim. He’s almost two and Sam was thinking about going back to work part-time. Soraia’s six, so she’s in school a lot of the time now and that makes it easier on Sam, but taking care of kids is a big job and Sam fears that if she calls attention to herself, Dad will find a way to spin it so she looks like a negligent parent instead of a victim. Neither of us thinks it’s a coincidence that Dad took Soraia right after Piet left town, so even if Sam had called him and he’d turned right around to come home, it would have been a day or more before Piet got here, and that’s extra time to Dad’s advantage.”
“So your sister didn’t call her husband? That’s kind of strange.”
“Not for Sam. She’s the supercompetent one. She rarely calls for help and she couldn’t even reach Piet initially. By the time I got in touch with her, she’d decided she didn’t want to let him know because he’d insist on getting the government and police involved. Sam believes that would play into Dad’s hands in a worst-case scenario and put her in a position of being unable to do anything herself. She doesn’t want to think the worst, but she does. Dad is up to something terrible.”
I felt a little odd about the situation. On the one hand, Purlis was dangerous and crazy enough to do everything his children feared. On the other, going after him alone and without any help from the police was going to be rough. But this wasn’t a typical kidnapping, so Sam might have been right in feeling that the police would be more of a hindrance than a help. The most important thing was that there was a six-year-old girl in the hands of a man I thought wasn’t safe or stable.
I nodded. “I wouldn’t put anything past your father.”
“Me, neither. But the thing that worries me is that I haven’t been seeing much sign of the paranormal side of his project and I’m afraid Soraia may be why.”
I frowned at him. “In what way?”
“I have a bad feeling that whatever he’s up to is just waiting on some triggering event, and the timing of this makes me think Soraia is meant to be part of that.”
I felt ill and fell silent, thinking about all the horrible things magic could make of a six-year-old girl. . . .
SIX
It was nearly five o’clock when we disembarked in Carcavelos. The houses were mostly plastered and painted in soft colors like smaller versions of the grand Baroque buildings I’d seen in Lisbon, but the town reminded me of Manhattan Beach, an upper-middle-class beach suburb of Los Angeles. The architecture and the light were totally different, but the laid-back surfer kids, the well-heeled family houses in yards filled with shaggy palm trees behind stuccoed walls covered in purple bougainvillea, and a practical but recent-model car in the driveway were entirely familiar. The sidewalks were stone tile here, too, and, as Quinton had said, the street signs were mostly plaques mounted on the corners of buildings at the intersections. Only a few major streets with no convenient location for such signs had the kind of signboards I was more familiar with. I also found it strange that the stop signs read STOP and not some other word.
Quinton watched me puzzle over them. “It’s the universal traffic sign—everyone uses it.”
I felt quite provincial for not knowing that and I think I blushed, but it was hard to be sure since although it was cooler on the ocean coast than it had been in downtown Lisbon, I could no longer kid myself that the air was less than warm. I’d been too long in the cool, moist air of the Pacific Northwest and had lost my California-girl tolerance of the heat.
We walked around for a while, trying to figure out where Sam’s house was, since neither of us had been there and we didn’t have the convenience of a cell phone with GPS navigation. We found a shop that sold trinkets and books for tourists to read on the beach, bought a local map, and asked the way to the international school, which Quinton knew was quite close to Sam’s house. The clerk directed us to Saint Julian’s with a lot of hand gestures and English that wasn’t quite as good as his speed of spitting it out.
We walked down the tree-lined Avenida Jorge V, past a long stretch of empty land on one side and houses on the other. An old stone wall painted with fading graffiti separated the pedestrian walkway from the vacant acreage that rolled lower than the street level. The area beyond the wall wasn’t cultivated or maintained except in a very basic way, so it didn’t seem to be a park. The tourist map identified the area as a former quinta—an estate in this case that had once been the vineyard and country home of a Portuguese nobleman. The school was housed in the old manor house, according to the tourist guide, so we were heading in the right direction. The slightly overgrown area and the trees made for a pleasant walk in the gently weeping music of the Grey—a gentler version of the sound in Lisbon—though I’m not sure either of us appreciated it. The magical energy of the area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn’t acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do.
After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to follow a smaller road into the residential area. The houses were all different from one another in size and grandeur. Some were huge, two-storied cubes with balconies that sat in the middle of massive walled yards, while others were narrow at the front and ran deep into a small yard like a shoe box. The only thing the houses had in common was plaster. Every house—even the few that were obviously built of stone—was covered in a coat of painted plaster under a red clay tile roof. One impressively large house and its surrounding wall were painted the same bright magenta as the bougainvillea that flowered in the yard next door, but most were painted in softer colors. Not every house had a wall, but it was common enough that those without were the noticeable exception.
Sam’s house had a wall and palm trees, but I couldn’t tell anything more about the place from the distance at which we had paused. I sank a bit into the Grey, while Quinton kept an eye on the area in the normal world. The illuminated corona of Sam’s house was spiked with jagged red bolts of anger that seemed at odds with the gleaming bands of bright blue that curled around the house and yard and drifted up over the edges of the wall like a cloud. Streaks of black and white that looked like old barbed wire made paths around the outside of the wall, cutting through the blue only at the front gate in thin traces.