3 A Basis for Murder (4 page)

I interrupted. "Only because Jamie came to save me."

"Good old Jamie." Douglas spat the words out vehemently. "No, of course I wasn't going to call anyone to kill you. I was playing along with Cassandra."

I supposed he could be telling the truth, and he
had
returned my necklace. Still, I didn't trust the guy.

Douglas must have taken my silence as a sign that I was coming around, so he pressed on. "I'm your contact at the Society, which by the way, is called
The Orpheans
."

Despite my rather enormous interest, I was puzzled. "What, the Society itself is called
The Orpheans
? Or are just the members called
The Orpheans
?"

Douglas was clearly irritated. "What does it matter?"

I kept on. "I suppose Freemasons are called Freemasons, as they are members of - what - Freemasonry? Okay then, I suppose it isn't so strange that the Society doesn't have an actual name, but the members are called
The Orpheans
."

"Thank you." Douglas's tone couldn't have been more sarcastic if he tried. "May I continue?"

I waved him on.

"
The Orpheans
are a hereditary group. That is, most people are born into it. There are some new members, but the Keepers are from a long line of ancient Welsh Druids."

I was the newest Keeper, having inherited that position when my aunt, the last Keeper, was murdered. "What do Keepers do?" I was on the edge of my seat. This was the first time I had heard from the Society, err,
The Orpheans
, since I had learned of their existence on my recent trip to England.

Before Douglas could answer, I posed another question. "Druids, you say? I knew my family was of Welsh ancestry of course, but no one ever said anything about Druids." Douglas opened his mouth, but I kept speaking. "Hmm. So why are they called
The Orpheans
? That's ancient Greek. You'd think they'd have a Welsh name, like, um..." My voice trailed off. I couldn't for the life of me think of a single Welsh name.

Douglas took the opportunity to open his mouth again, but then I thought of something else. "What do Druids do anyway? Do they make human sacrifices? I'm sure not comfortable with that."

I looked up to see that Douglas's face was bright red. He stood up abruptly. I'm sure he would even have left the restaurant, but the waitress returned with the spring rolls. Douglas sat back down, and when the waitress left, leaned over close to me. "Misty, please stop playing twenty questions," he said through clenched teeth. "If you can possibly keep quiet for a few minutes, I'll tell you everything I know. Deal?"

I nodded, somewhat subdued, and took a bite of a spring roll.

With a stern warning glance at me, Douglas began. "
The Orpheans
are a secret society, centuries old in fact, beginning with the ancient Druids, and continuing until this day. The Keepers are descended from the Welsh goddess, Morgane, also known as Morgane Le Fey which means Morgane the Faerie."

I squirmed in my seat. I was dying to speak.

"What is it?" Douglas almost spat the words.

"Isn't Morgane a person, not a faerie? Keith, my boss, has me researching faerie for an article; I haven’t come across any Morgane before."

Thankfully Douglas didn't appear angry with my question. "According to Irish mythology, faeries are those who can go between worlds, ours and the Otherworld. They were the same size as we are; it was only in Victorian times that the idea of faerie as miniature winged entities came about. Now I'm not saying that these winged creatures don't exist, mind you, but those faerie are nothing to do with the ancient Irish faerie. In fact, faeries were originally said to be the Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland who were able to travel between worlds."

I risked another question. "So you're saying that basically, faerie were simply people or entities from the Otherworld, which was another realm of some sort." I ate two spring rolls in one go.

Douglas nodded.

I tried to take it all in. I was more than excited to be finding out about the Society; I'd been kept in the dark far too long.

"Now I'm getting to your role in all this."

I was on the edge of my seat, hanging on Douglas's every word.

"It's not just the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh that had this idea. The Europeans in general believed that certain people could cross between worlds. The Keeper of the Society is someone who can see into other worlds; that's why you can see ghosts."

I sat there, my jaw hanging open. "What? Are you telling me that I can see into another world, another realm? What's in the other world? Is it like another dimension? Or what? Or like a parallel universe?"

Douglas simply shrugged. "How would I know?"

"But the Society sent you here to tell me," I interrupted. "And what do faeries have to do with Druids?"

"How would I know?" Douglas said again, this time more forcefully. "
You're
the researcher. That knowledge is passed down from Keeper to Keeper, and since the last Keeper, your aunt, was, well, murdered, she wasn't able to pass the knowledge onto you. I suppose you have to figure it out for yourself."

I sighed, and looked out the window, at the little droplets of rain coagulating against the glass, and then onto the street below. The rain cleared for a moment, and I saw a man who looked like Jamie ducking into a store. I did a double take. Was I seeing things? Why would Jamie be in town and not tell me? Was he following me, or Douglas?

"Misty!" Douglas's tone was insistent.

"Sorry, Douglas; I'd zoned out. I just thought I saw someone who liked like - oh, never mind."

"Looked like Jamie?"

I nearly leaped out of my chair. "Yes! How did you know? Did you see him too?" I looked out the window again, but the rain had cut visibility to a minimum.

"I've thought I've seen Jamie around here recently, but didn't know if it was him or not. After all, I don't know him as well as you do." The sneer in Douglas's tone was all too obvious. "Anyway, I took this photo on my phone the other day. Is this him?"

Douglas slid his phone across the table to me. I caught my breath. It was Jamie all right, sitting in a local café with a woman whose back was partly to screen, but who nonetheless looked attractive even from that angle. Jamie was smiling broadly. My stomach immediately knotted. "Where was this taken?"

"Only a few blocks from here."

"When?" My voice came out high pitched.

"Two days ago."

Why would Jamie be here of all places? I lived in a small country town; nothing ever happened here. The most exciting thing was the weather warning of a "sheep farmers alert" which did not mean that residents needed to beware of sheep farmers; simply that the weather was going to be very cold. Still, I was uncomfortable that Jamie was in Australia and hadn't let me know. I didn't want Douglas to see my discomfort, so changed the subject. "What were you saying?"

"I asked if you'd had any experience at all of seeing into another realm. It may be insignificant; something you didn't quite realize at the time."

I scoffed at him, rather rudely. "Hardly; I think I'd notice if I'd seen into another realm, even accidentally." Then, out of the blue, I remembered when I'd been poisoned by a voodoo priest and had felt that I'd slipped into another dimension or some sort of other world. I had thought at the time that it had been a side effect of the poison.

I looked up to see Douglas staring at me. "You have been, haven't you? What did you see?" His voice betrayed his eagerness.

I felt a warning chill right through my bones. Why was he quite so interested? Something just wasn't right.

* * *

If human, cats might play solitaire, but they would never sit around with the gang and a few six-packs watching Monday Night Football.

(Time Magazine, December 7, 1981)

Chapter Six
.

I hadn't told Douglas anything, and in turn, he hadn't told me any more about
The Orpheans
. I doubted I could trust him. Just trying to figure out any possible agendas that he may have had put me in a headspin. The rainy day matched my gloomy mood, and I trudged back to the office with my doggy bag. I was going to eat the leftovers for dinner.

Melissa had not returned to the office, so I scurried past Skinny's open door and hurried to my storage cupboard which doubled as my office. I booted up the computer and googled
Druids
. It wasn't my day. The first site I opened played loud Celtic music. I looked for the sound icon as fast as I could and muted it. Too late.

"
Misteeeee
!"

Oh no.

Why do some websites have music anyway? Don't they know that some people are secretly accessing websites at work, for goodness' sake?

I hurried to Skinny's office. Her face was bright red, and she was clearly in a rage. She pointed to the chair opposite her desk and barked, "Sit!"

I sat, thinking that even a dog would have gotten a treat. Skinny waved the form in my face. "What's this?" she yelled.

"Err, the form that you made me fill out."

"Don't be smart with me, Misty." Her voice rose even higher. "You know very well that you weren't supposed to fill in the times that you went to the toilet or made coffee. This is ridiculous. Well, it just shows that I made the right decision in choosing you from the other journalists to have your hours cut, with this type of behavior." She thrust the form at me. "Make sure that you fill in the time you got back from lunch, and I want the Port Macquarie ghost article by first thing tomorrow morning. Do a good job on that article, Misty; take it to the next level. Go!" With that, Skinny pointed to the door.

I walked back to the storage cupboard that doubled as my office with my nerves on edge. Skinny sure knew how to rub me the wrong way. I quickly proofed the Port Macquarie ghost article, and then checked to see if the computer was on mute. I opened a window on a website about Port Macquarie just in case Skinny turned up, and then opened another tab to google ancient Welsh Druids.

An hour later, and I'd pretty much learned that no one these days knew anything much about ancient Druids, due to the fact that they wrote nothing down, and the accounts that we do have were written hundreds of years after their time. Great.

I was about to give up when I stumbled across a web page which had every ancient account on the subject of Druids. The first was written by Julius Caesar. I had seen the remake of the film
The Wicker Man
with Nicolas Cage, so found the passage intriguing. Caesar said that some tribes of the Gauls had huge figures made of wicker work, specifically wood and straw, and then they filled the figures with live people. They then set the wicker figures, people and all, on fire. Caesar said that the people think that their gods prefer thieves to be sacrificed this way, but if they ran out of thieves, they didn't hesitate to use innocent people.

Yikes! I had thought that human sacrifice had something to do with the Druids, although Caesar didn't directly blame the Druids for it, just the Gauls in general.

I read on, hoping that other ancient dudes wouldn't agree with Caesar on the subject of Druids and human sacrifices. I was to be disappointed.

The next ancient writer was a Greek man by the name of Strabo. He had been a famous geographer and historian about two thousand years ago. It started off well, with Strabo saying that the Druids had a better sense of justice than anyone else, but then it deteriorated rapidly. I read with some concern that the Gauls used to stab a person through the back with a saber, and then do divinations from the way he thrashed around when he was dying. Strabo also said Druids had to be present at all sacrifices.

I shuddered, and tried to take small comfort from the fact that Strabo didn't actually say that the Druids themselves did the sacrificing. Strabo also mentioned the wicker man: a huge figure made from straw and wood, into which the Gauls placed wild animals and cattle as well as human beings, and then burned them to death. He also said that they killed victims with arrows, and impaled them in the Druid temples.

What had I gotten myself into? I hardly dared read any more, but I forced myself to go on. There wasn't actually much else. I found that less than two thousand words had been written by ancient authors, and that of these, Caesar was the earliest. Some historians even considered that Strabo had copied Caesar. That cheered me up - if Caesar was the only actual account of the alleged human sacrifices, perhaps they hadn't happened after all. I didn't fancy being the Keeper of a society that was into human sacrifices.

I got up and peered around the door of my cupboard / office. No sign of Skinny. I couldn't hear her yelling at anyone, so figured she was out. I hurriedly walked to the staff room and poured a coffee, and then quickly walked back to my desk. I sat at the computer and stared at the screen for inspiration.

By the time I got home, I was pretty miserable, even though on the way home I'd bought three tubs of caramel and butterscotch ice cream and a large amount of chocolate. Comfort food works for me. I could always diet, or perhaps even exercise if I got really desperate, later.