Hushed, harsh commands urged the soldiers to finish their grim work. Soon the truck was loaded and the men all seated on the benches beneath its canvas cover. A shadowed officer slammed the tailgate and the vehicle left, the spinning tires spitting gravel while the senior conspirators mounted their own vehicles and followed. Silence quickly re-established itself as the master of the night.
THREE DAYS LATER, outside the dark Ipatiev House, Captain Martin Powell folded his camera, stowed it in its leather case, took a much-needed swig from his canteen, and wiped the back of his tanned hand across his narrow moustache. He was one of forty drab-olive-and-dust-uniformed soldiers, many of whom stood at ease, smoking and batting idle conversation around in the warm sun. Except for a small Russian escort in their midst, the armed men were members of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force, there to reinforce the anti-Bolshevik forces. They’d secured the area and were nearly done investigating, having not found the royal family they’d come to liberate but instead discovering evidence of unknown sinister acts committed in a small, cramped room in the basement. The blood had been hastily washed away, but uncountable bullet holes remained.
The voice of Powell’s commander cut through the chatter to his right.
“That’s it, lads! We have a train to catch. Load up and move out! Powell, retrieve the team in the basement!”
“Yessir!” Powell snapped off a sharp salute and jogged to the back door of the manor house. The milling soldiers double-timed back to their waiting trucks, still alert for attack, while their Russian escort boarded their own vehicle. Powell leaned inside the dark stairwell and relayed the order. “Basement detail! Move out! Double time!!”
A half-dozen soldiers trotted up the stairs and out into the bright sunlight, carrying battery-operated lanterns and flashlights. To give them room, Powell stepped into the shrubs flanking the doorway. His heel trod on something neither shrub nor soil and he turned to inspect the unexpected.
Casually lost in the soil between the shrub and the wall was a book—small, cloth-bound, simple. Around an estate so utterly stripped of any personal belongings, this one little, torn, and stained item spoke clearly to him of something dark and wrong in this place of revolution. Before he had an opportunity to examine the book closer, a barked command reminded him of duties best not forgotten. He dropped the curious little volume into his satchel with his camera and hurriedly joined his Expeditionary Force fellows on a truck just as the group of vehicles chugged off after their wary Russian hosts.
EVENTUALLY, OVER IMMEASURABLE time, the pain and terror sloughed off and away and an arm’s-length-distant warmth surrounded Anastasia. She felt… cradled, in a place of safety. But she was restless, too, because somehow it was all wrong and she shouldn’t be here, in this place, this formless darkness. In spite of the coziness, fear trickled back in.
There was faint, unfamiliar music and laughter, growing, moving near, and she thought that a special moment, an important moment, had at last arrived. Then the music and laughter faded, leaving her with just the arm’s-length benevolence. No, that wasn’t entirely true, because there was, just beyond the cocoon of warmth, a deeper darkness, a chasm just waiting for her to step away from wherever she was. She steadied herself and waited.
Inside the chasm, the darkness waited, too.
Chapter One
@TheTaoOfJerr: “It’s no good pretending that a relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently…”
Present Day
WITH ONLY THREE and a half weeks until Christmas, an unseasonably early deep-freeze slammed Southwestern Ontario and started icing over the Thames River that bisected the dozing town of St. Marys, twenty minutes down-river from Stratford. Jeremy Powell—twenty-four, determined, and stubborn—was bundled tightly against the knife-edged cold in his much-worn, fire-engine-red, Eddie Bauer parka. Refusing to give in to the cold, he snapped another photo of the short icefall forming where the river flowed over the low dam a hundred yards from Queen Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. Jerry moved his tripod-mounted Canon to capture another angle, marvelling at how the subtle pastels of the ice-reflected evening light changed the images ever so gently.
He was so bundled against the cold that when his cell phone rang, the theme from Mission: Impossible was too muffled for him to be sure he’d heard it at all. He stopped and listened and the second ring seemed clearer. Hurriedly, he yanked his gloves off, stuffed them under his arm, and frantically searched the large pockets of his bulky jacket, trying to find the phone before it went to voice mail. On the final ring, he found it and snapped it open.
“Jerry here.”
“Jerr, it’s Manny Werinick, out on Vancouver Island.” The Aussie accent was thick and the deep voice full of joy.
“Mr. Werinick… hi.”
“It’s ‘Manny’, mate. Nothing but.”
“Manny, then.” Jerry smiled. Manny seemed to ooze glee and even standing in the freezing cold a couple thousand kilometres away, Jerry felt the glow. “Did you get the email I sent, with the audio files?”
“I did, Jerr.”
“Great! Have you had a chance to listen—”
“With a voice like yours, Jerr, you could woo the joey from a wallaby’s pouch. Your résumé kicks ass, too. The job’s yours if you want it, mate.”
Jerry’s breath caught. “Really? Wow. I didn’t expect your decision quite so soon. I haven’t even told my girlfriend or my family that I applied for it. When do you need my answer by?”
“Monday’ll be soon enough, mate. Just think on it over the weekend and get back to me.”
“Thanks, Manny. I guess I’ll talk to you Monday.”
“Looking forward to it, young fella. Have a great weekend, and enjoy the bloody cold one last time, cuz it’s never like that here in Victoria.”
“One more reason to aim for the West Coast, then.”
“One of many, Jerr, one of many. Monday. Gotta run, mate. Cheers.”
“Cheers.” The call ended, Jerry stared at his phone, now oblivious to the cold, damp air freezing his bare hand. “Sonofabitch. I got it! ‘Jerry Powell, Station Manager’. Damn, I like the sound of that!”
TWO HOURS LATER, Jerry sat in the cozy, warm Riverside Diner on the limestone- and heritage-lined main drag of St. Marys, wiping rib sauce off his fingers. It was the kind of retro diner the locals cherished and the tourists expected, with a dozen Formica-topped, steel-trimmed tables and four green-vinyl-wrapped booths. The Riverside was only a third full with the usual post-dinner coffee crowd, mostly due to the cold, but also because the local minor hockey team—the Lincolns—were still beating up the visiting rival London Nationals in the second period. This left Jerry to share the last booth, the one in the shadows at the back, with Haley Simmons, his on-again-off-again, nearly-divorced, live-in girlfriend of the last two years.
The long photo shoot in the cold and a belly full of Riverside ribs had Jerry wanting to be ensconced in the warm comfort of their own apartment, slippers on his feet and Netflix on the big screen. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have had dinner at home, Haley. There are a couple things I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Sorry, Jerry, but there’s something I want to tell you and I really don’t want to do it at the apartment.”