Ward looked at him doubtfully, but finally nodded. “Please wipe your feet before you enter.” He led them to the director’s office.
Patricia Carroll was a tall, gangly woman with a large nose and short, gray hair. She welcomed them with a curt not and did not invite them to sit down.
“I am afraid I cannot tell you anything more than what I told your colleague, Miss Paige,” she said.
“I’m afraid there has been a misunderstanding,” Constance said. “Miss Paige is our friend. She has gone missing.”
Carroll glared sharply at Ward, who was lingering in the doorway. “That was not the message you conveyed to me, Mister Ward.”
Sweat broke out on Ward’s brow. He ran a hand through his thinning black hair. “It was Junina who took the message, Headmistress. She has been having a difficult time of late. Ever since…”
“You may go!” Carroll said sharply. She narrowed her eyes slightly, as if trying to send a message to Ward.
Ward gave a bob of his head, turned, and hurried away. His heels clicked loudly on the marble floor as he fled. When the sound faded into silence, Carroll relaxed and motioned for Constance to close the door.
“I apologize. Junina was a resident here when this was a home for troubled young women. She does not have a place in the outside world, but she is quite bright, so I kept her on as a staff member.”
“If I may, what do you mean she doesn’t have a place?” Stone asked.
“She is a Yakama Indian by birth. No one around here will hire or marry her, and she refuses to return home. Something about a childhood trauma.” Carroll gave a small, sad shake of the head.
“I am sure you are very busy, so we shall not demand much of your time,” Constance said. “We are tracing our friend’s last known movements. Might you have any idea where she went after she left here?”
Carroll shook her head. “We spoke only briefly. She was reporting on the history of this building, and I have only been employed here for a year. I told her what I knew, and then turned her over to Junina. No one knows this place the way she does.”
“Do you know what they talked about?” Stone asked.
Carroll stiffened. “Of course not. I am not Mister Ward, lingering in doorways or hiding around corners.”
“Please accept my apologies. I only wondered if Junina might have discussed their conversation with you.”
Carroll closed her eyes for a moment and her shoulders sank. When she opened her eyes again, her demeanor had changed. “It is I who owe you an apology. Things have been difficult here. My staff believe the ridiculous ghost stories about this building, and I just learned that Ward has been encouraging them. He has them all convinced that a devil is buried beneath the old wine cellar. None of them will go near the place now. Of course, there is nothing down there but dusty old crates. It hasn’t been used for wine storage since the original headmaster of the girls’ home died.”
“We understand,” Constance assured her. “Would it be possible for us to speak with Junina?”
Carroll looked at them each in turn, as if taking their measure. Finally, she made a curt nod. “You may. She is working in the office near the front doors. I only ask that you stop questioning her if she becomes upset. She is fragile.”
As they made their way to the office, they passed Ward. He was engaged in a quiet but intense conversation with a bear of a man clad in a dark green boilersuit. His arms and legs were like tree trunks, and he had no visible neck. Auburn hair was thin on his head, but thick on his neck, arms, and chest. He had a broad face, flat nose, and sharp, beady eyes that flashed with cunning. The man made a show of looking Constance up and down, and when Stone took a step toward him, he smirked and cracked his knuckles.
“Enough of that, Klaus,” Ward snapped at the man. “You have work to do.”
“Ja. Is true.” Klaus locked eyes with Stone for a split second before vanishing down a flight of stairs. Ward offered a halfhearted apology and scurried away.
Stone shook his head. He had half a mind to speak to Klaus in private, but reminded himself that they had more pressing matters to attend to. They paused outside the office door.
“Listen,” Stone began. “It won’t take two of us to speak with Junina. You can handle that by yourself.”
Constance frowned. “You aren’t going after that ape of a man, are you? Because I don’t need a white knight.”
Stone grinned. Trinity had said much the same to him more times than he could count. “I’m going to look for the wine cellar she mentioned.”
Constance frowned. “For what reason?”
“Just a hunch. It might be nothing, but if Ward doesn’t want the staff poking around down there, maybe there’s a secret he’s hiding.”
“What might that have to do with Trinity?”
“Probably nothing,” Stone admitted. “But I sense Ward is hiding something, and Trinity has a much sharper nose than I for that sort of thing, and she’s twice as curious and three times as reckless as I am. We can’t discount the possibility that she started nosing around here and ran afoul of someone or something.”
Constance relented and sent him away with a final admonition.
“Don’t be gone long, and please, stay out of trouble.”
Stone laughed. “What makes you think I would get into trouble?”
Interlude 3
The handholds on the side of the steep cliff were few and far between. Stone tried to follow Gideon’s path, but the small man scrambled up the sheer face like a spider up a wall.
“Are you a spider or a man?” Stone mumbled. For a moment, he imagined Gideon scurrying up the side of the Washington Monument, his hands and feet clinging to the smooth marble. He chuckled and kept climbing.
He reached the top and let out a groan. Gideon was picking his way across a frozen, deeply crevassed slope.
“An icefall! That is simply wonderful.”
An icefall was a steep, deeply crevassed surface of a glacier, unstable and drawn inexorably downward by the pull of gravity. It was essentially a slow-moving ice waterfall. Stone had climbed one before, but not without gear. Still, he had no choice.
He made his way along the slick, irregular surface, careful not to break an ankle in one of the crevasses. He took a measure of satisfaction in the fact that Gideon was not moving much faster than he.
Stone’s muscles burned. Sweat poured freely down his face and stung the corners of his eyes. The cold seemed to soak through his gloves and boots.
“He had better be leading me to the monastery,” Stone grumbled.
He had made it two-thirds of the way up the slope when something came flying through the air, headed directly for him. He dodged to the left as a chunk of ice the size of a bowling ball smashed into the spot where he’d been moments before. He landed awkwardly, lost his footing, and skidded back down the slope before arresting his fall.
“Where did that come from?” he muttered.
He looked around for Gideon but there was no sight of him. Surely the small man couldn’t have hurled something that size. Stone shielded his eyes against the angry glare of the sun reflected off of ice. Off to the side, he caught a glimpse of something large and dark disappearing into a crevasse.