“It could be traced,” Reid answered.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
It was Reid who was paying attention to the underlinings in Zebulon’s books; his curiosity about Zebulon McAllister, whom his grandfather called evil, made him read many of them. “He’s not evil,” Reid said at last. “He’s the opposite of that, at least if the underlining means anything. But why would he have such an interest in psychic powers and telepathy?”
“Does he? What are you reading?” Then, “Because of Justin, I guess,” she said thoughtfully.
He handed her the book, pointing to the neatly underlined passage:
If a scientific study of such perception has proven that man can reach across hundreds of miles with his mind to touch the mind of another, then surely science has proven that more than the body-man exists: that there is another, and spirit, man dwelling within the body. And thus surely science will have, not as skeptics insist disproved the existence of a spiritual and higher plane, but have proved it.
“Reach across hundreds of miles—” Bethany whispered. She got up and took several of Zebulon’s own books from a shelf beside the fireplace, turning to the back flap of each until she found the one with his picture. They studied it together, heads bent over the page. A thin man, with short-cropped gray hair, a lean man, with dark, intense eyes.
The sky was beginning to show streaks of dawn when Bethany found, among some magazines and old albums on a top shelf, a stack of travel folders of Panama tied together with a string. She and Reid were both yawning, though they had drunk the whole pot of coffee, and Bethany, pouring over the folders in a rather fuzzy state, came wide awake suddenly at the sight of the stone ruins. “That’s where I stood,” she said. “There! There’s the shop, way in the back.” And when she came to the picture of a small plaza with a fountain in the center, she knew she had run through that square with the shouting boys chasing her. In many of the pictures there was a similarity in the shapes of the trees and in the way laundry hung on balconies and porch railings.
And then she found the picture of the molas. Red, red, they shone back at her, appliqued cloth squares showing birds and animals; and a light exploded in her mind: “I have to wake Justin!” she said, jumping up. But Reid pulled her back, pulled her down beside him. “But Justin,” she said, “Justin has some molas. Why would they have travel folders of Panama and—”
“I know, but wait.” He handed her a folder in which someone had written in the margin: We had dinner here last night. You would have loved it, the air was heavenly warm and there were parrots in the patio. The note was signed K.
“Could it be Kathleen?” Bethany whispered. “Justin’s sister Kathleen?”
“But maybe,” Reid said, laying silver on the table while Bethany fried pancakes, “maybe it just means that Kathleen sent the mola pockets to Justin when she visited Panama.”
“But if Kathleen was in Panama before she died, and if Ninea is in Panama—” she searched his face, eager and confused, and then yawned.
“That was a long time ago. You said Kathleen died ages ago. It could be—”
“It’s not coincidence!” She stormed, cross suddenly with lack of sleep, and with Reid’s too-cautious logic. And with anxiety, for it was as if layers and layers of tissue were turning back one by one, and something underneath was about to be revealed, something that she could not yet fathom, something that she was almost afraid of.
Reid put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be so practical I upset you. It’s just—” He looked deeply at her, trying to make her understand. “It’s just— Oh, forget it, it’s not coincidence, it couldn’t be. It’s just my nature to be skeptical, I guess. Come on, we’ll burn the pancakes.” And Justin, smelling pancakes, came sleepily to the door, her hair tangled over the shoulders of her robe. She yawned, looked questioningly at them, poured herself some coffee—and then she saw the box.
She stood silent for a long moment before she reached out and took it in her hands, running her finger over the birds, stroking them. Her blue eyes, when she looked up, were wide. “Wherever did you find it? It used to hold my toys when I was small.”
“Yours?” Bethany stared at her, knowing but afraid to see that there was a truth here. “I’ve always had it,” she said, searching Justin’s face.
“Oh, of course,” Justin said, smiling, taking her coffee and the box to the table and making herself comfortable. “It was your mother’s; I gave it to Marjory years ago.”
There was a long silence.
“But was there another?” Reid asked at last, so tensely that Justin stared at him. “Were there two?”
“Yes, Kathleen had one. She used to keep a set of toy soldiers in hers. She let Marjory and me play with them when she got too old.”
Bethany stood staring and feeling very strange. The pancakes burned, the smell of burning filled the room. She looked at them distractedly. Reid pushed her aside and began to scrape them out of the skillet.
“Is this the box the Zagdesha had?” Justin asked softly.
“Yes,” Bethany stammered. “But where—where—”
“Where is Kathleen’s box?” Reid asked for her.
“I don’t know.” A tone of excitement rose in Justin’s voice. “I haven’t seen it in years. Maybe Selma— Could Selma have it? Could she have used it to—?”
Bethany shook her head mutely, getting in Reid’s way so he took her by the shoulders and sat her down in a chair, then started making more pancakes.
“What—what—” What was in the box, Bethany wanted to say, but as she stared, the box itself seemed to grow more solid and Justin and the table to fade, to become almost transparent; then Ninea was there, a transparent shape too, superimposed over Justin’s reaching hand, and there were two boxes, one superimposed over the other, and Ninea was slowly opening the one that had not been there a moment before, sliding back the panel. Then Bethany’s head was bent with Ninea’s over the fine scrollwork on the back of the eagle, the tangle of curving lines. She could see Justin staring at her, bewildered, heard Justin say, as if she were a long way off, “What are you doing? What are you looking at?” Bethany put her hand to the eagle, but her fingers went right through it; and then Ninea faded, the box and the eagle faded; Justin and the kitchen table were solid once more and Justin was still staring, tense with curiosity.
Bethany stayed still for a long moment. Then, “What was in the box?” she asked breathlessly. “Open the box, Justin.”
Watching Bethany closely, Justin lifted the lid.
“Open it more,” Bethany whispered.
Justin reached inside the box and pushed the inner panel. It slid back, and the eagle shone up, catching the light so that Justin gasped. After a moment, she lifted the eagle out, its two heads screaming, and held it on the palm of her hand. She stared at Bethany, perplexed. “I’ve never seen this before. You wanted to know if I knew about the secret compartment, and I did. But I have never seen this. You want to know—”
She stopped short and studied Bethany, and the atmosphere of the room seemed to steady. Their minds touched easily for an instant. “You want to know the name of the man Kathleen had planned to marry,” Justin said. “It was Ruiz. Teodoro Peron Ruiz. But you—you already knew it was Ruiz, didn’t you? How did you know, Bethany?”
“Ninea told me. Well in a way she did. Ninea Ruiz,” Bethany said, watching Justin. She took the eagle from Justin, turned it over, and held it under the light. Why had Ninea—? She peered, trying to find a clue in the mass of tiny intricate lines that seemed to change their patterns depending on the way you looked at them. She glanced up, staring at the reflection of light on the kitchen table, and when she looked at the eagle again the lines seemed to have converged in a different way. They had taken shapes she could now recognize; and all at once she saw it: the letters woven into the pattern, letters that spelled Bethany—