“It’s a bone flute,” I said. “They both are. From nearly identical bones, I think.”
“What a terrible gift for a child,” said the ghost.
Just behind him, Sam said the same thing.
I peered at the ghost. “Why? I can tell it’s a bad object, but why specifically a bad gift for a child?”
“They call Coca. They bring bad luck upon the child so it will be carried off by monsters.”
“What’s Coca?” I asked.
But it was Sam who answered. “Coca? It’s a dragon—a sort of Portuguese boogeyman. I sing the song to Martim sometimes when he’s being really difficult. Dorme, menino,” she began singing, “dorme agora, ou o Coca vem te comer. Basically it’s ‘Be quiet, little one, go to sleep, or the Coca will come and get you.’”
“Oh, that’s a lovely sentiment,” I said.
“About as nice as any fairy tale with girls in glass coffins and witches who eat kids,” Sam shot back in an unusual flash of temper. She calmed herself and continued. “The legend says Saint George killed Coca, but it’s really a fertility thing—every year there’s a festival where the knight is supposed to kill the dragon, and if he doesn’t, the crops will fail. What does that have to do with my daughter?”
“The ghost says this flute calls Coca to take children away—though in this case I think it was the other way around,” I said.
The old man ghost looked away, as if he were about to cry. “The poor girl. You must find her quickly. Bruxos who make such things, they cannot have any good in mind for her.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” I looked at the ground, noticing that a bit of the black-and-white residue left by Purlis’s companions had been pulled through the hole with the flute. I addressed the ghost. “I know who put it there. But did they make it, also?”
The ghost shrugged. “I cannot say. The ways of bruxos . . .”
I nodded. “Thank you. Again.”
He nodded himself away.
Quinton was waiting patiently for me to return my attention to the living. Sam was eyeing me a bit askance. I guessed that my tendency to talk to what looked like empty air disconcerted her. But she was more worried by the flute Quinton was holding.
“Another one? Who put it there and why would they do that?”
“Is there a gate near this location?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “The alley gate is just beyond the roses.”
“Then my guess would be that your father’s creepy companions put it here. It makes a noise in the Grey that was probably supposed to lure Soraia out to this part of the garden so they could snatch her. It turned out they didn’t have to, but they couldn’t come back for it and risk meeting you again after they’d taken her, so they left it behind. They probably thought you’d never find it. I’m willing to bet it’s unique in some way we can try to track down.”
“And we’ll probably need Carlos for that, I’m betting,” Quinton said.
“Well, he is the local expert on bits of dead things.” I turned to Sam. “We need to take both of these with us and show them to a friend who might be able to tell us where they came from or who made them. And that may help us find Soraia.”
“May?”
“It’s not a certainty. It seems likely, but I’ll admit, I am making an educated guess here.”
Sam chewed on that thought for a moment, shifting the baby on her hip without conscious thought. Obviously, I still wasn’t quite a sure thing for her. She loved and believed her brother, but it’s a little hard to take seriously a woman who throws herself down on the ground to talk to ghosts, I suppose.
“It’ll be all right,” Quinton assured her. “I know all this sounds a bit crazy, but I told you about Harper and you know I wouldn’t lie to you. She knows what she’s doing.”
Sam looked at him. “I know. I know and I trust you, but it is somewhat hard to swallow. . . .”
“You didn’t have any problem with what Dad may be up to, but you choke on the idea of a woman who talks to ghosts? Sam . . .” Quinton was disappointed and shook his head.
She looked down. “It is a bit . . . strange to see someone talking to the air. . . .”
“You haven’t seen the really strange stuff yet.”
“I hope I won’t.”
I interrupted. “It won’t matter if we don’t get this investigation back on track.” I fixed my gaze on Sam. “Earlier I asked you if Soraia claims to see things you don’t see or if she has imaginary friends. You indicated she did. So, tell me more about what seems to be going on with her and how long that’s been the case. Your father didn’t take her because she was a convenient child he had access to. He took her for some specific reason, which appears to be something about Soraia herself, not just leverage to draw Qu—” I had to stop myself and remember to use the name she did. “I mean Jay—back into his web. What does she see, or say, or do . . . ?”
Sam shifted from foot to foot, juggling Martim in a preoccupied manner. “She told me about the man near the fireplace—the same one you described and . . . talked to. I was very startled when you said the same thing. And she said there are fairies in the yard—which is exactly what all little girls think, isn’t it?”
“Not me. I never saw a fairy in my life except in toe shoes and a tutu—and only because they made me wear the tutu.”
“Oh. Well . . . sometimes she seems to know things she really shouldn’t. . . . I mean that she has no way of knowing them, not that they’re the sort of things little girls shouldn’t know about. Where are Daddy’s missing keys or does Mommy’s patient have cancer. . . . Sometimes things happen near her that are . . . just extraordinary. She was swarmed by honeybees once, and not a single one stung her. They just flew up to her like she was a queen and buzzed around for a while, then flew away. And there’s a green woodpecker she says talks to her—she calls it Tio Pássaro,” she added, giving Quinton a significant look that was lost on me. “I think it’s one of the fairies. I’ve seen the bird in the lemon tree in the backyard, although I know they’re not tree-borers. Once in a while, Soraia wishes for things to happen and they do—which is where the woodpecker came from. We were having lunch outside one day, and she wished aloud for the bird to fly down from the tree so she could give it a bit of her bread, and the woodpecker flew down and landed on the tabletop beside her, though it wasn’t very interested in the bread. It’s been around ever since, though . . . I haven’t seen the bird since she was taken.”
“And none of these things gave you an idea that there was something unusual about your daughter.”
“They didn’t happen all in a rush. It was one odd incident at the time. Then some other time another odd incident, but they never seemed threatening—except for the bees and they didn’t harm her, so I thought it was just a fluke. They never seemed to have a pattern. My daughter is not a freak, just a gifted little girl.”
I chose not to take up the gauntlet of “freak,” but that didn’t mean I wasn’t a little pissed off by it. “These sorts of things aren’t really the usual little-girl thing,” I said. “Fairies and make-believe and invisible friends, yes. Seeing ghosts, magical wishes, talking birds, and knowing the answers to questions she can’t even formulate, no. The bee thing—definitely way out of the norm, but that could, as you say, have been a fluke of nature. But fluke or not, your daughter is a very special girl. And I don’t mean in that usual Auntie-says-so kind of way. She has a touch of something that goes well beyond the normal and I think that’s why your father took her. Unfortunately, that means that whatever he’s up to is pretty strong magic. This project of his has taken some gruesome turns, but everything he touches—and destroys or subverts—is either paranormal or closely connected to the paranormal. Governments have done paranormal research in the past—there’s always someone thinking the freaks might be the answer to some political problem—but what your father is up to goes well beyond bending spoons, trying to read cards that are in another room, or staring at goats until they faint.”