Tears of the Jaguar (27 page)

Royal regalia?
she thought. Maybe she should e-mail Marissa Stroud. She was the expert, after all.

She tried another search: “Skipton painting theft.” Instantly she had several local news reports on the theft of the painting “and various papers, some antique” from the castle. The second had an image of the picture itself. She copied it to her hard drive, then opened it and considered it.

It was conventional enough. A portrait of a seventeenth-century lady, pale and formal, against a black background. She looked severe, and her finery was restrained rather than luxuriant. A woman of purpose. At her feet were arranged the people in her life, staff, servants, children, husbands, and fathers. The news story said it was Lady Anne Clifford—the name rang a bell from when Deborah had been reading about her earlier at Skipton Castle. The painting in the coat of arms in the picture matched that on the Mayan ring, except that there was still no ellipse overlaying the lower part of it.

Deborah sighed. She had hoped that the stolen painting would have completed her search for the crest and pointed her onward, but it didn’t.

So why steal the painting?
she asked herself
. What does it reveal that someone wants to keep secret?

She considered it again. Maybe it was the material of the picture itself, something written on the back of the canvas, or—if she was going to be really conspiratorial—a shadow painting underneath the surface image. But unless she could lay her hands on the painting itself, she could do no better than scrutinize the image on the screen and hope there was something there.

She went back to the woman’s face. It was pale and austere, and the eyes stared back at her with something like hauteur. They were cold, dark eyes, and the mouth was hard, without mirth or compassion. Then, without warning, Lady Anne smiled.

Deborah recoiled, thrusting herself away from the desk but staring at the image on the computer screen.

What the hell...?

The image was still staring back at her, but now her thin lips wore a hard, sinister smile.

It must be some kind of computer animation,
she thought
. Someone hacked the site and tinkered with the graphics. Some kind of flash program...

But Lady Anne shook her head very slightly and her eyes sparkled black as beetle shells. No, she seemed to say, this was no computer glitch.

Deborah had backed all the way to the bed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the grinning woman’s face, which seemed even paler than it had before, cadaverous, as if the skin had grown translucent and Deborah was seeing bone beneath it. And then the eyes rolled back till only the whites showed, and Lady Anne’s mouth began to open, wider and wider, till it filled the screen, and inside was only darkness, but squirming with living, terrible
things, and Deborah shrank back, eyes closed, trying to shut the image from her mind.

She clamped her hands over her eyes, hiding in the dark, but somehow that made it worse, because she was sure that the woman had somehow climbed out of the computer and was now in the room. Deborah had started to sob frantically, eyes still closed, moving farther and farther up the bed, burying her face in the pillow. At the foot of the bed she felt the woman coalesce, skeletally thin and pale in her heavy black dress and lace.

I won’t believe it
, thought Deborah.

And she opened her eyes.

She stared at the foot of the bed and there was nothing there, just the desk and its chair askew. The laptop open. Deborah had already breathed out with a kind of relief before she realized that the computer screen that had featured the painting now showed just an empty gilt frame, and that the door into the piggery was wide open. Standing there, framed against the blackness of the Pendle countryside beyond, was Lady Anne Clifford.

Except that it wasn’t her exactly. She was hooded, partially, and the face was...
wrong
somehow, but not in ways Deborah could pinpoint. She seemed older, more hunched.

Demdike?

She didn’t know where the idea came from, particularly since she had no idea what the witch would have looked like, but come it did, and forcefully. The old woman stood there still and silent, staring at her, and Deborah felt like the breath had left her body. For a moment the room seemed to surge, and she clung to the bed to steady herself, and in that moment the colors seemed to blur and swirl as if she was going to pass out. She felt cold with dread but could not take her eyes from the figure in the doorway, who stood there, motionless.

Deborah sat bolt upright on her bed, terrified. She could think of nothing to say or do, as if Lady Anne—or Demdike—had drained her of all will, all self-control. It was like being
inside a dream. She could sense disaster ahead, but watched herself unable to resist gliding toward it.

The old woman—who was no longer hooded—was beginning to mutter soundlessly, her lower jaw working but the words impossible to hear.

Chattox!

Her eyes were still hard and black, fixed on Deborah, and something was moving under her dress, an animal that laced itself between her feet. Deborah gazed at the ripples in the coarse dress fabric that the movement made, fascinated with horror, and saw the creature’s leg stray from the folds, so that she flinched and looked away.

Then she could hear the words Old Chattox was saying, questions about Skipton, and Lady Anne, and Edward de Clifford, and she was sure that if she could answer them all, the witch would leave her, would let her live. So she said everything she could think of, all she had discovered so far and how, not remembering and articulating, but just opening up the knowledge she had as if she was pouring it out like milk from a pail.

She talked, and the time passed, and then she realized that she was alone. The computer screen showed the Lady Anne painting as it had always been—smileless—and the room was cold. Deborah closed and bolted the door, then shut the computer down and crawled into bed in her clothes, staring fixedly at nothing, waiting for sleep or dawn, whichever came first.

Alice could still smell him on her hair, a thought she liked even if the scent itself—some overly spicy aftershave that he wore in abundance—didn’t particularly please her. She considered showering before James got back, but didn’t feel like it. Actually, it was more than that. She kind of wanted James to figure it out. This might buy her some space, or might lead to a fight, which was OK too. Alice enjoyed a good fight from time to time, although it seemed almost pathetic to fight with James. She preferred a burlier adversary.

The guy she’d just slept with—Dimitri, he said his name was, though she didn’t believe it—was a better match for her. He’d impressed her by seeming even rougher and colder than her ex, who had once shoved her out of the car at a hospital ER with a broken arm and a black eye he’d delivered after she’d thrown a beer bottle at his head during a fight.

Once she and Dimitri had actually gotten down to it, they had barely spoken, and then—right when he was nearly done—he had began to mutter in some language she didn’t understand but that might have been Russian: little staccato words spat out at her, almost certainly insults. His eyes had been hard and sour, his mouth full of contempt, and she guessed what he was calling her. So she called him names right back, thrilled by the animal brutality of it, till they had finished and he had left.

He had worn his gun holster even after he had taken everything off. It may have been for self-defense, she guessed, but she was pretty clear he kept it on because he knew it made her hot. It was a weird-looking gun: small and almost round, a revolver with no hammer. She had nearly stroked it when she was on top of him, but had thought better of it. Not all the steel in his face was about lust, and she had quickly admitted to herself that part of her attraction to him was that he scared her a little.

Maybe more than a little.

How long would it be before things turned unpleasant? She liked his aggression, the fact that once he had decided he wanted her there was no question in his mind, no doubt, no hesitation, no politeness or game-playing, no inquiries into her feelings or her past. But she couldn’t deny he had been rough, and though she had enjoyed it, she knew that the more they did it, the more things would escalate, till she was bruised or worse. Maybe she’d wind up with a broken finger or jaw, or get dabbed with cigarette burns. Tough, she liked, but that shit she could do without.

But she didn’t think Dimitri could be as bad as her ex. There was something about him under the toughness. For one thing, he had nightmares. He hadn’t slept with her for more than half
an hour, but his rolling around had woken her. He spoke in his own language and woke up looking badly freaked out, though when she asked him about it he gave her a steely look and said it was nothing.

Fine by her.

But then he had made an entirely different request of her, one that made her rethink the way he had suddenly showed up on the beach. In a way, she was glad to find out that it hadn’t been a chance encounter, that he had been looking for her before they ever saw each other. If it took the shine off what she had assumed was just animal attraction, it elicited an altogether different sort of thrill. She was even amused to learn that it would almost certainly involve James.

She looked up as James came in the door three hours later and could instantly tell something was up. He didn’t ask her about her day or try to kiss her, but sat on the edge of the bed, sweaty and trembling, fingering the straps of a dusty duffel bag she had not seen before. She ignored him for a while, but he said nothing, and that started to worry her. When James had something on his mind, you couldn’t shut the guy up. She had decided to have that shower after all, and did so in the spirit of someone walking out of a fight the other person refuses to have. If she kept ignoring him, she figured, maybe he would get angry and they’d be able to move on.

But when she got out of the shower, still wet and with the too-short towel wrapped loosely around her—which always got his attention—he was still sitting there, staring at that raggedy duffel bag like it might explode.

“What’s in the bag?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Yeah? Looks like something.”

“It’s not.”

Alice frowned, then opted for a different tack.

“How were the ruins?” she asked.

“Didn’t go,” he said, still not looking at her. “Not the Tulum ruins. I went to Coba.”

“Coba?” she said, surprised. “What for?”

“Something I had to do.”

She paused then, considering him, and he finally looked at her. He looked weary and sort of spooked. He might even have been crying, which wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary for James.

“What did you have to do, James?” she asked, focused now.

He shook his head vaguely. “Nothing. Better you don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing, Alice. Leave it.”

He wasn’t telling her something, but he wanted to. She was sure of it.

“I’m going to head out in the morning,” he said. “Just me. I’ll pay up the room till the end of the week. After that, you’ll have to take care of it.”

Alice was genuinely shocked. He had obviously been steeling himself for this, planning the words so he could actually do what was so not in his nature and walk away from her.

“Where are you going?”

“Not sure yet,” he answered. “Just...away.”

“I could come with you,” she said. Her hair was dripping cold down her back.

“No,” he said, shaking his head again sadly, distantly.

“What’s the rush?” she said, taking a step toward him so that the hem of the towel she was wearing touched his knee.

She paused, watching him, feeling his weakness.

“What’s in the bag, James?”

“Nothing,” he said. His wide eyes made him look like a startled bird.

“Come on, James,” she said, taking another step toward him. “Why don’t you show me?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t.”