“You fucking amateurs,” she spat, and started to cry.
A few feet away Othiym’s followers stared at the door, their faces angry and bewildered. Virgie let out a wail.
“Ohh—she’s ruined everything—”
Like insects they scattered, and disappeared among the crowd. Annie tried vainly to stop sobbing.
“You better call someone. I mean like 911—” she choked, wiping her eyes and staring repelled at her blood-streaked fingers. “God, I don’t fucking believe this—”
From the doorway came a muffled laugh.
“Funny?” Annie whirled, hoarse with rage. “You think this is funny?”
For the first time Annie saw her savior: a striking long-haired woman in a purple dress.
“Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” the woman asked.
Annie gasped. “B-but you—you were—”
The woman only smiled. Not with mockery or amusement, but with the purest joy and longing Annie had ever seen. Smiled and nodded, just once, whispering—
“Oh, Annie—I’ve missed you so—”
—before the wind sent sand like rain raiding against the floorboards, and without a sound she melted into the darkness.
CHAPTER 15
Ancient Voices (Echo)
I DECIDED TO WALK home. The Metro would have been quicker and cooler, but the mere thought of all those thousands of happy tourists exhausted me. I stopped at a bookstore to order a copy of Waking the Moon, then headed back out.
More than ever I felt like a failure. Compared to Angelica—beautiful, eternally youthful Angelica, with her gorgeous hair, her string of books and villa in Santorini and bewitching (if false) green eyes—I was a failure. Here I was, thirty-eight years old, never married, no kids, no serious love affairs, still renting a house because I didn’t make enough money to get a mortgage. The most interesting thing that had ever happened to me occurred half a lifetime ago, but even that didn’t really count because whom could I tell about it? Who would believe it?
Or—and this was worse—who, after all this time, would even care? The only real friend I had was Baby Joe, because he was the only person who remembered me the way I was at eighteen.
And that was the way I still liked to think of myself. Not as Katherine Cassidy, the loyal civil servant who’d paid her dues at the National Museum of Natural History and after thirteen sober years had an office with a view, a government pension, five weeks of annual vacation and the occasional professional junket to New York or Chicago; but Sweeney, who had dreamed of discovering buried pyramids and sacred tombs, who could drink and dance all night and all day and still find her way home in one piece; whose friends were beautiful and magical and who for some reason, however briefly, seemed to find Sweeney enchanting too. Sweeney, who read poetry and saw angels and had glimpsed the Benandanti’s wasteland behind a hidden door; Sweeney, who had known the answer to the magic question when it was asked of her, and who had tried to remain loyal, courageous, and true till the end. Sweeney, whose one great love had taken a swan dive from the loony ward at Providence Hospital.
But Sweeney was gone, as surely as Oliver was. And to the rest of the world, to everyone except for Baby Joe and maybe Angelica or Annie Harmon, she had never even existed at all.
Dr. Dvorkin’s house was on one of the myriad little cross streets that make up the residential blocks of Capitol Hill. From the street, the house looked much like its neighbors, a wide three-storied century-old brick town house, the walls painted a dark red that had faded nicely over the years and went well with the butter-yellow roses tumbling across the black wrought-iron fence.
The real wonder of Dr. Dvorkin’s house could not be seen from the street. Because, for all the loneliness and boredom I’d lived with since leaving the Divine, the Benandanti had granted me this: a secret garden, my own hidden cottage in the woods. The garden itself was so lovely I was surprised it had never been written up in Washingtonian Magazine or one of the national shelter rags. But then I learned that Dr. Dvorkin had, indeed, been besieged with requests to photograph the garden, and always gently refused them.
“It’s my secret place. And yours now, too, of course. And I would like to keep it that way.”
The garden was behind the town house. It was bound on all sides by high brick walls overgrown with Virginia creeper, climbing yellow roses and morning glory and wisteria. There were flagstone paths winding through hostas and astilbes and a low dark green mantle of pachysandra, and around its perimeter all kinds of gorgeously exotic lilies. At the back of the garden, pressed up against one of the crumbling walls, was the carriage house, a nearly perfect square with a flat roof interrupted by a small belfry. It was made of red brick that had weathered to a soft rose that was nearly white. Ivy covered it, and wisteria that twined above the flagstone path that linked it to the main house.
Inside, the carriage house was cool as the hidden recesses of my own heart. From the rafters hung bunches of herbs I had bought at Eastern Market—valerian, lemon balm, mint. I inhaled gratefully, kicked my shoes off, and let my bare feet slide across the cool slate floor. I was home.
Downstairs the carriage house consisted of only one largish room, with a tiny bathroom tucked beneath the stairs and a miniature kitchen like an afterthought added on to one side. The main room had slate floors and the original exposed oak beams and joists. One entire wall was filled with bookshelves, and there was a small harvest table that held a lamp and a few domestic artifacts: a shadow puppet, a vase of oriental lilies, the sea urchin lamp that Angelica had sent me for Christmas so many years before.
Like the carriage house itself, most of its furnishings were borrowed from Dr. Dvorkin. He had more money than I did, I liked his taste, and so for all these years I’d just lived with his things. Against the back wall was a sagging Castro Convertible sofa bed, draped with a heavy kilim rug. Shaker chairs hung from hooks in the beams, and there was an abandoned hornet’s nest perched on a rafter in the corner. The tiny bedroom upstairs held a beautifully carved wooden bed from Sweden, a heavy armoire from Java, another kilim on the floor. Outside there were a couple of deck chairs and an old wicker table I’d salvaged from the curb.
Right now it was too hot to sit outside. I changed into an old T-shirt and turned on the radio. “All Things Considered” was starting, but I felt like I’d had enough news for one day. I fiddled with the dial until I found something more soothing—some nice madrigals, very dull, very pretty—then checked my answering machine for messages. There was only one, from Dr. Dvorkin, saying that he’d forgotten to tell me someone was staying in the main house, so I shouldn’t worry if I saw lights there later in the evening. I reset the machine and went into the kitchen and poured myself some wine, then flopped onto the couch.
“Well, here’s to Angelica,” I said. I finished one glass and poured another, then another. I didn’t usually make such a dent in a bottle of wine, especially on a work night, but this seemed like a special occasion, an evening for elegies and repining. The sad strains of the madrigals filled the little room, the slate floors cooled beneath my bare feet as the sun died and violet shadows crept across the deck and into the carriage house. From Ninth Street came the occasional hushed sound of a passing car, and I heard soft laughter from one of the neighboring houses. One or two stars glimmered in the darkness, and fireflies moved in a drowsy waltz above the hostas outside. I watched for lights to go on in the main house, trying to guess who Dr. Dvorkin’s newest guest might be—someone connected with the Aditi, probably, a visiting curator or diplomat. Maybe even one of Jack Rogers’s fire-eaters.