by Jenn Bennett
He then informed us that hot water was available in the brass samovars at the front of each sleeper and that the public lavatories contained full-size washbasins . . . and some other details that I couldn’t focus on properly because I was acutely aware of the compartment’s lack of personal space. “Is there anything at all you desire at the moment?” he finally asked.
“To sleep in my own compartment,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Anything you need, just ring for me,” Rex said.
I raised my hand. “I’ll take every newspaper you have onboard.”
“Still addicted to crosswords?” Huck said, sounding amused.
I slanted a glance at him. “Still picking locks for fun?”
“She’s joking, brother,” he quickly told the attendant.
“Um,” Rex said, looking back and forth between us. “Newspapers will be on the dining car tomorrow morning.”
“I’m sure she can live without it tonight,” Huck assured him.
The attendant bade us a good night and bowed before closing the compartment door, muffling the intense clack-clack of the wheels gliding over the track. I took off my black beret and smoothed my wavy hair to cover my ears. Without the door open, the compact space shrank from tight to little more than a sardine can.
“Cozy,” Huck remarked, touching the compartment’s ceiling with his fingertips as if he were Atlas, holding up the world. “Remember being on that ship in the North Sea during that storm a few years ago? The berths were made for dolls, not people, and the walls were paper thin. We could all hear each other getting sick, like some kind of nightmarish echo chamber.”
“Ugh,” I complained, hanging my coat and camera case on a hook near the berths. “Don’t bring it up. Just the thought of that night makes me queasy.”
“Hey, at least this compartment is slightly bigger, and we aren’t on choppy waters. And we weren’t followed. We’re on a winning streak, banshee.”
I’d hardly describe today as anything remotely close to winning, but I could tell he was trying to put a sunny face on it, and maybe we both needed that right now. An unemotional truce between two old friends. Otherwise we’d both go bonkers. Or murder each other. Tomato, tomahto.
“Tell me more about those men who broke into my room,” I said, proud that I could sound so professional and adult. See? I could do this.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“We have all night. Might as well spill it all,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”
5
ALL RIGHT,” HUCK AGREED. “BUT there isn’t much to tell.”
He raised a silky, tasseled pull-shade on the window to peer outside, but in the darkness the only thing to see was his own reflection. I studied his face briefly while he squinted stubbornly. His impossibly thick brows had a certain way of knitting together into a single dark slash over his eyes when he was worried. Did he not think we were safe now? He caught me watching him in the glass, so I quickly averted my gaze.
“The last telegram I received from Father was a week ago,” I said, perching on the bottom berth. I set my travel satchel on the floor near my feet. “He said he was heading up the mountain.” He just failed to mention that he wasn’t climbing alone.
“Right, yes,” Huck said, now looking for his own place to sit. When he eyed the empty space next to me on the bottom berth, I gestured instead toward the floor, but to no avail; invading my space, he propped up a pillow and settled back against it so that he could lounge on the railway bed with his legs stretched out behind me. “Fox and I spent three days in Tokat, which is no Istanbul, let me just say. While you were having fun, taking photographs of phantasms and cursed buildings—”
I flashed him a rude salute with one hand.
“Well, that hasn’t changed,” he mumbled as if he were offended. Which was absurd, because he was the one who taught me the gesture when we were kids, a week after he moved into Foxwood. We practiced on everyone who drove to the front door to visit one afternoon, hanging out of my bedroom window and giggling like idiots until we heard a bear stomping up the staircase. Father was furious.
Huck exhaled heavily. “As I was saying, Fox and I were in Tokat, visiting some boring historic mansion and talking to clerics in a mosque. Then we hired a local guide to take us out of town and up a mountain to the spot Fox was intent on finding. It was supposed to be a gravesite, but it turned out to be just a bunch of dusty rubble in the back of the cavern. It took us most of an afternoon to uncover it and another day to dig into the floor. Rocky, backbreaking work it was. The workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza never labored this hard.”
He always exaggerated when he told me stories of where he and Father had been. Always. Once upon a time I had found it charming. “But you didn’t find Vlad the Impaler’s head?”
“Nor his crown. Only a small iron box about this big”—he showed me with his hands—“and inscribed in a mix of languages. Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Our guide translated the Turkish bit.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a warning. It said that the contents of the box were not to be disturbed and that death would follow those who ignored it, and there was a bit of dark poetry about rivers of blood—which was all I needed to hear. Even Pandora wouldn’t have opened this thing. I wanted to leave it be and get out of there. But Fox had that sparkle in his eye. You know the one.”
I did. My father’s love of treasure and exploration was intense. He lived for the thrill of discovery. Loved it more than anything. More than me, I sometimes thought. “Naturally, he couldn’t resist opening the box,” I said, toeing off my Mary Janes and kicking them across the cabin floor.
“Naturally.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The lid fell apart when he pried at the rust. It was all for naught. Completely empty.”
“Empty?” I said, frowning. “No rivers of blood?”
“Don’t sound so disappointed that we didn’t die on the spot.”
“A girl can dream. . . .”
He snorted a soft laugh before sneaking a look at my face, as if he needed visual confirmation that I wasn’t serious.
“Pandora’s box was a bust,” I said. “Then what happened?”
“We headed back down the mountain and returned to Tokat. Fox was in a black mood, due to not finding anything in the cave and to the fact that it seemed two men were following us and we didn’t know why, but we had to take the long way around the town to shake them off our tail. And when we returned to the fleabag hotel we’d been staying at before the climb up the mountain, the hotel manager discreetly told us that someone had been inquiring as to our whereabouts.”
“The plot thickens.”
“On top of that two people had left Fox messages, urgently requesting to meet with him.”
“Who were they?”
“The first one was a cleric at a mosque. We met him right before we left for the mountain. Nice enough fellow. Fox left after dark to meet up with him and didn’t come back until midnight. By that time I was already half asleep and in no mood for a late-night chat, so he told me we’d talk in the morning about a new game plan for the ring.”
“Did you?”
“No. When I woke up late the next morning, he was rushing out the door to meet with someone else. Didn’t say who. Just told me to run into town and see if I could charter a small plane because we were leaving that afternoon to fetch you in Istanbul. Or he was. I was going back to Belfast.”
“I see,” I said coolly. So my suspicions were right: he’d had no intention of seeing me on this trip. I filed that in the back of my mind, curbing the hurt and resentment that threatened to rise, and prompted him to continue.
“Right, yes, so . . . I got dressed and left the hotel. At first nothing was wrong. I walked. Ate. Asked around, trying to find anyone with a plane—crop duster, whatever. Came up empty, so I tracked down the only car rental in town—which reminds me . . . Is Pooka still at Fox
wood? Or did he sell it? He wouldn’t tell me.”
Pooka was Huck’s car, a convertible with white-wall tires, which he’d Frankensteined together from several junked automobiles; Huck had built the engine himself. Lots of memories in that stupid old car. Our first kiss. Plenty of fights. Midnight rides to a secluded spot near the river.
The night after he left, I slept in the back seat, crying into the patched-up leather until Father found me.
“It’s still in the garage,” I said.
A small bolt of joy crossed his face. “Yeah?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, where was I?” he said, smiling briefly, as if that piece of information about Pooka was inconsequential. But was it?
“Right, well, as I was saying, I rented the car in Tokat, and that’s when I started seeing people in the shadows. The same people from the mountain were following me.”
“You don’t mean the men who broke into my room, do you?”
He nodded. “Them and some other mate. He wasn’t wearing black vestments like the rest of them, but that’s about all I could tell you. Maybe he was their leader, or maybe he was someone else entirely. He kept his distance, so I barely got a look at him.” Huck shook his head, dismissive, and crossed his arms. Shadows filled the deep hollows below proud, high cheekbones and accentuated the sharp line of his jaw. “This is going to sound daft, but I thought . . .”
“Yes?”
“I thought I saw a wolf following me.”
“A wolf? Are there wolves in Turkey?”
He shook his head, blinking rapidly. “I was probably imagining it. Maybe it was just a stray mutt, salivating over my exquisite leg meats.”
He chuckled to himself, but when our eyes met, I knew he was serious. He’d seen something. What that was exactly, I didn’t know. But it had spooked him.
“I believe you,” I said.
He exhaled forcefully, as if trying to rid himself of the memory, and absently scrubbed the top of his head with his fingers. “I swear to all the saints, banshee, I’d never felt so paranoid. I can’t even explain it. I just knew in my gut something didn’t feel right. And when I got back to the hotel with a rental car a few hours later . . . Fox was already gone.”
“And you have no idea where he went? No clue at all?”
“None. Apparently he left the journal at the hotel desk about a half hour before I showed up. I searched the hotel lobby and restaurant. Our room. The street outside. Nothing. He just disappeared. All I know from the hotel manager is that a few minutes before I left to fetch a car, Fox left the hotel himself. An hour or so later, he strode through the lobby, went up to the room, and rushed back down with the journal. The hotel manager said he seemed distracted and unnerved. Like something had scared him.”
I’d never seen my father scared. Not since Mom died.
The train rocked, clacking along the tracks. I didn’t know what to think about everything Huck had just told me. My father’s mystery meetings. The men following Huck. A wolf in the streets of Tokat . . . It all sounded like something straight out of one the pulp magazines that Huck liked to read—Amazing Stories, The Black Mask, Weird Tales. It was just that this story was missing half the pages. I pressed him for more information, but there was nothing more to give.
Maybe my father’s journal would shed some light. I retrieved it from my satchel and unwrapped the leather straps that bound it; then I opened it up on my lap.
Thick pages were covered in my father’s neat scrawl. A few things were stuck here and there—receipts, addresses, a flattened Tootsie Roll wrapper. Three photographs. The first was of Jean-Bernard, smiling in front of a fountain. He was an extraordinarily handsome man; I remembered my mother joking that he was unfairly prettier than her. I wondered where—and when—it had been taken.
The next two snapshots, however, were far more interesting.
“Is this . . . ?”
“Yeah,” Huck confirmed. “That’s the original ring, there. The one that the man who hired Fox has in his possession—his name is Rothwild. A Hungarian, I think. He’s nuts for Vlad the Impaler. Knows everything about the man. And for some reason he thinks his ring is fake. A reproduction or something.”
The black-and-white photographs showed a crooked band of bone with carved symbols on the side and some odd hatching along the top. Fascinating that this crude, strange ring could be the cause of so much chaos. My heartbeat increased, head spinning with what I knew about the ring from my Batterman’s Field Guide to Legendary Objects. Shame that I didn’t have access to an archive with more information about Vlad. If Father had only told me about the ring before we crossed the Atlantic on this trip, I could have helped him research, as I normally did. Maybe then we wouldn’t be in this situation, hiding like mice while he put us all in danger.
I slipped the photographs into the back of the journal and thumbed through the pages, glancing at dates and places my father neatly logged at the top of each entry. It was so strange to have this in my hands, when it had always been off-limits. For him to just hand it over and trust me to keep it? Very odd.
Something caught my eye when I was flipping through the entries. A page had been torn out. “I wonder what this was,” I murmured, feathering my fingertip over the ragged edge that remained. Then I noticed something on one of the pages that flanked the tear. It appeared that Father had written a word in cipher. Not just in this entry, but three pages later. And another. A word or two here and there . . . a few longer phrases. Huh.
Puzzle pieces began rearranging themselves inside my head.
“Did you look through this already?” I asked Huck.
“What answer do you want to hear?”
“The honest one would be nice, but I know that’s difficult for you.”
His stare was hot lava pouring down a mountain. Absolute fury. “I never lied to you,” he said in a low voice. “Not once. Not even about the weather.”
I hated the way he affected me. “Apparently you’ve changed, because it seems to me you’ve been lying to me since you left home, running around with Father, God only knows where. Did you watch me check into hotels in Germany and France? Were you tailing us this spring when we sailed to Mexico, waiting for the moment that I was safely tucked away before joining Richard Damn Fox for an exciting no-girls-allowed expedition?”
“He visited me in Belfast this summer before he went to Jean-Bernard. That’s it. He sent me a train ticket and asked me to join him in Tokat. I arrived there a day before him. I thought—”
“You thought what, Huck?”
He threw an arm up in frustration. “I thought you’d be there with him, okay? I made myself sick, sitting in that tiny hotel room, thinking you were going to walk into the lobby with him. When he came alone . . .” He shook his head, eyes darkening as he muttered, “It doesn’t matter now. Fox tells you only what he thinks you need to know, nothing more. You should know that better than anyone.”
He wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly how my father operated. Never admit mistakes. Never say you’re sorry. Keep everything to yourself. Those were my father’s personal mantras. He trusted no one but himself, and sometimes maybe not even that.
But what surprised me more was Huck’s confession. He’d expected me to be with Father in Tokat? Had he made himself sick because he wanted to see me, or because he was dreading our reunion? I was too chickenhearted to ask.
After a tense moment Huck shook his head and exhaled loudly through his nose. “Yes, I breezed through the journal a little. I didn’t have a lot of time, between the hiding and the driving and—”
“Bathing?”
One corner of his mouth tilted upward. “I smelled like a dead yak, banshee. You should be thankful. Anyway, what I did peep at in the journal was boring, and almost none of it was about me. Isn’t that the only reason to read someone’s private diary?”
“Well, when you were not-reading it, did you notice the code?”
“What code, now?”
�
��The cipher,” I said. “He’s used it in several places.”
Huck sat up in the bed to look over my shoulder. “Like, espionage?”
“Like, he didn’t want casual snoopers to read what he was documenting.”
Father had always loved ciphers, and he was good at both writing and cracking them. He’d even helped decode enemy messages during the war. He’d taught me cryptography before Huck moved in with us, when I was a young child. . . . The Caesar Shift. The Cardan Grille. The Scytale Wraparound. He used to leave me coded messages in my room, mostly silly things. A lot of jokes and a few clues about where he’d hidden one of my books or a piece of chocolate.
But when my mother died, so did our ciphers; I guess we were too busy grieving to keep it up. I turned to crosswords for my word fix, and he turned to obscurer treasures that required more and more time out in the field.
Discovering that he’d been using ciphers privately made me feel a little marshmallowy. And now I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d intended for me to decipher his journal. I mean, why else would he have instructed Huck to give it to me? Why not just let Huck keep it safe?
“Uh-oh. What’s that?” Huck asked, waving his finger at my face. “That look right there—I recognize that. You’re excited, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Should I be?”
“This is the most interesting thing Father’s done in years,” I insisted, feeling a rising sense of momentum for the first time that day. One that cut through the tension between us and made me temporarily forget our issues.
There were too many journals entries to skim at once; it would take hours to go through them all. Longer still to crack his code—I once spent an entire month diligently deciphering a message he wrote out for me, only to find that it said: STOP DECIPHERING CODES AND GO TO BED. Where to start with this cipher, though? Sometimes starting at the end has advantages, so I sneaked a look at the journal’s final page:
