by Lisa Jackson
Inside the large stone fireplace the fire had burned down to glowing embers, the red logs about to break apart. Heavy shades were drawn across the windows, and two young women were in the room, one standing by the hearth and staring at Savannah through sharp eyes, her blond hair several shades darker than that of the one in the wheelchair, whose hands were folded in her lap, her expression eager and expectant.
“Ravinia, Lillibeth.” Catherine waved them away.
“Who are you?” the standing girl asked Savannah.
“I told you both to wait in your rooms,” Catherine said crisply. “Lillibeth?”
Sighing, the girl in the wheelchair turned her chair around and headed toward a back door.
The dark blond girl stood her ground and repeated, “Who are you?”
“I’m Detective—”
“Ravinia.” Catherine’s tone was fierce.
“You never have people here this late,” she retorted, flipping her long hair over her shoulder with one hand in a gesture of disdain. “Tell me why. I have a right to know. We all have a right to know.”
“I’ll tell you about this later. For now, I need to speak to Detective Dunbar alone.”
There was a moment when Savannah thought Ravinia was going to challenge Catherine some more. Her lips tightened rebelliously. Seeing it, Catherine added, “Isadora, Cassandra, and Ophelia are upstairs, and Lillibeth’s gone to her room. Go on now.”
Ravinia’s eyes, a dark blue, flashed fire, but she turned and headed to the stairs. She hesitated on the bottom step, her hand on the heavy oak newel post, and said through tight teeth, “I’m not like them.” Then she gathered her long skirts and bolted up the stairway to a second-floor gallery. From where she stood, Savannah could see Ravinia run along the hallway, until she finally turned a corner and disappeared.
Catherine sighed. “Ravinia’s the youngest.”
“The youngest of how many?” Savannah asked.
Catherine acted like she didn’t hear her as she said, “Let’s go to the kitchen.”
Savannah followed after her to the east side of the lodge and a large room with an impressive oak plank trestle table big enough to seat twelve. Catherine indicated for her to take a chair at the table, and when Savannah did, she sat down across from her. The scents of onion, tomato, and beef broth still lingered, and she could see a large pot of something cooling on the stove. Beef stew was her guess.
“What is it you wanted to talk about?” Savannah asked when the older woman lapsed into thoughtful silence.
She clasped her hands in front of her and set them on the table, looking down at them. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I need to know about my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Yes. Mary Rutledge . . . Beeman.”
Savannah waited, wondering where she was going with this. For a moment she’d thought Catherine meant some other sister, though the only one on record that she knew of was Mary. “She’s deceased?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” When Catherine still seemed reluctant to proceed, Savannah said, “I don’t know a lot about her.”
“But you’ve heard the rumors about Mary.”
“Some.” You couldn’t live in or around Deception Bay without gleaning some information about the Colony whether you wanted to or not.
“Have you read A Short History of the Colony, by Herman Smythe?”
“The book at the Deception Bay Historical Society?”
“If you can call it a book,” Catherine said and sniffed.
“Not yet.”
“Don’t bother.” Catherine’s blue eyes grew chilly. “Most of the genealogy inside it is correct,” she admitted grudgingly, “but there are errors and omissions, and what’s written about my sister is mostly erroneous.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I never cared what Herman wrote. He was more harmless than most of my sister’s . . . men. But maybe it’s time to set the record straight.”
Savannah waited expectantly. She already knew that Mary Rutledge Beeman had been very sexually active during the seventies and eighties and had given birth to a lot of children, almost one a year, during that time, most all of them girls. There was the belief, maybe even proof, that Mary’s children possessed extra abilities beyond the normal, abilities that defied explanation. A Short History of the Colony explained much of that, apparently, though Savannah had yet to read it herself. Despite Catherine’s condemnation of the book, it was something she planned to rectify right away.
“I want to tell you about my sister’s death,” Catherine said at length.
“Okay.”
“I want to set the record straight, and I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Unless a crime’s been committed, the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department might not be the government body to contact.”
“I’m aware of that.” Catherine pressed her lips together, then said, “I’ve explained my sister’s death over the years in a number of ways, none of them completely truthful. I’ve said she died from a miscarriage suffered from the result of a fall . . . or sometimes I just said she just died from a fall. In truth, both were a lie.”
Now she had Savannah’s attention. “What did she die of?”
“She didn’t. Not then. Not back when I said she did.” Catherine unclasped and reclasped her hands several times. “She was living on Echo Island.”
“Echo Island.” Savannah regarded the woman skeptically.
“I know. It’s barely more than a rock. It’s owned by my family, and I guess that means just me now, until I bequeath it to the girls. But there is a cabin on it, and I assure you that Mary lived there for years.”
Savannah couldn’t help staring at her. What in God’s name was this all about? “But she is dead now.”
“Yes.”
“You think a crime’s been committed? A homicide?” Savannah asked, guessing. What other reason would she have to reach out to the TCSD?
Catherine seemed about to answer, swallowed her reply back, thought hard for a moment, then finally said, “What do you think of us here at the Colony?” There was a sneer in her voice when she said “Colony.”
“What do I think of you?” Savannah hiked her shoulders. She wondered if she was just wasting her time. Now that she’d seen the inside of the lodge, she was kind of over all the mystique. It was just a rustic, roomy home where people lived a simpler life. No serious woo-woo evident.
“You must have some impression. The locals surely do. Some people think we’re Wiccans, or so I’ve heard.”
“I’m not really sure what Wiccans are,” Savannah said with a smile. “Witches of some kind, I guess, but I don’t believe in any of that.”
“I’ve been careful not to add to the rumors. My sister was promiscuous. That’s a documented fact. She had many lovers and many children from those lovers. She was indiscriminate . . . and she was also touched by madness.” Catherine looked past Savannah, toward the fire, but her gaze was clearly down some hallway to the past. “At that time when Mary’s mind was failing, I took matters into my own hands. I radically changed the way things were handled here. I wasn’t about to let Mary turn Siren Song into a brothel. She had young daughters growing up around her, and she didn’t even notice.”
“What about sons?” Savannah asked.
“Not many.” Catherine stopped, and Savannah realized she had interrupted her train of thought. She determined not to speak again unless asked a question, because she wanted to hear everything Catherine had to say about Siren Song and her nieces who lived there.
When Catherine spoke again, however, it was in a completely different direction. “What do you know about genetics, Detective Dunbar?”
Savannah lifted her palms skyward. “Uh . . . well . . . I know we get our traits from our genes and that genes are collected on chromosomes.”
“Very good, Detective. To be exact, there are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in the human body, and each chromosome is packed with genes, and e
ach gene holds myriad genetic information,” Catherine explained. “My family has the same genes as everyone else, as far as I know, but there are genes that scientists don’t really know the complete functions of. Some appear to be cancer inhibitive, and others can give doctors a clue that a patient has a susceptibility to a disease. I don’t know all the particulars, but I’ve done some reading on the subject.”
No kidding, Savvy thought. In her long dress, with its throwback design to another century, Catherine was the last person she would have expected to be in a conversation with about modern science, technology, and genetics. This time she remained quiet, however, waiting for the older woman to make her point.
“Have you ever seen pictures of chromosomes?” Catherine asked.
“Well . . . they kind of look like Xs. . . .”
“Yes, they come in pairs. Two Xs. Except for the sex chromosome, which can be XY if it’s male.”
Savannah nodded, not sure what else to do.
“There are twenty-two autosome chromosomes and one sex chromosome. The sex chromosome combines to form XX or XY, a girl or a boy. An ovum has only half of the pair, that is, one X rather than two, and the sperm has the other half, one X or one Y. An X from the mother’s ovum and an X from the father’s sperm produces a female child, whereas an X from the mother’s ovum and a Y from the father’s sperm produces a male child. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.”
“If you look through an electron or magnification microscope at the sex chromosome pair for a female, you’ll see two Xs. If you look through the microscope at the chromosome for a male, you’ll see an X and a Y, because the bottom tail of the X is shortened in the male. That’s why it’s called Y. Again, you end up with XX for female, XY for male.”
“So, that’s why they’re named XX or XY? Because of the way the chromosome actually looks?”
“Generally speaking. The women of Siren Song have two Xs, as all females do,” Catherine said, finally getting to the point she was making with her talk on chromosomes. “Most of us here at Siren Song have something a little extra, part of our own particular genetic brew. One or several of our genes seem to be . . . different. Some of us also have physical anomalies, like an extra rib bone.”
“Don’t women have extra rib bones, anyway?”
“Yes, but some of the women of our clan, for lack of a better word, have even more. And there are other differences as well. Some not so physically obvious. Mental changes.” She stared pensively past Savannah. “The results of our gifts can sometimes be a little dangerous, it seems.”
“Gifts?” Savannah questioned, ignoring her earlier advice to herself.
“We’re different, Detective. I’m sure you’ve heard. We do have special abilities, which can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. It’s not something I care to go into in depth, but be assured those abilities are real.”
“Okay.”
“Mary possessed a dark gift. A gift that ruined her.” Catherine pursed her lips and shifted in her chair. “She entranced men.”
Savannah was inclined to believe many women had that same gift, often to their detriment as well, but declined to say so. “Do you have a gift?” she asked cautiously.
“Not that you’d notice. What I have is my sanity, which is cold and hard.” Now she did smile, but there was no humor in it. “You knew my ‘cousin’ of sorts, Madeline Turnbull.”
Mad Maddie. Savannah kept the moniker to herself, but she said, “We met.” A psychic with a surprisingly accurate track record, Madeline Turnbull had predicted that Savannah would have a boy before Savvy was certain she was even pregnant. Shortly after that meeting, Savannah was called to the nursing home where Maddie resided, and arrived to learn that she had died. Her death was later confirmed to be a homicide.
“There is madness sometimes,” Catherine said. “Sometimes the stronger the gift, the closer you dance to the edge of that madness.”
Savannah didn’t know if she believed fully in these “gifts,” but there had been a number of inexplicable incidents concerning the women of Siren Song, and it was clear that Catherine believed completely, and, well, she didn’t want to piss her off. Besides, what did she know, really? The world was full of the unexplained.
Catherine looked down at her clasped hands, which had turned white under the pressure, and she slowly released them. “But it’s the Y chromosome, the missing piece, that seems to intensify the effects in the males. They do feel their gifts more strongly. Luckily, there aren’t many males born to us. But when they are, it’s just . . .” She lifted a hand and let it fall into her lap.
Savannah thought of Justice Turnbull, a distant relative of Catherine’s. He’d focused on the women of Siren Song with an unrelenting passion to kill, and his own death some six months earlier had been a blessing for Catherine and her brood. He’d definitely suffered from mental issues; there was no denying that.
Savannah had a sudden really bad feeling about this, and as if in response, the baby inside her started furiously kicking. She laid a light hand under her right ribs and asked, “What happened to them? The males?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they’re not here, from what I can tell, so where are they?”
Catherine frowned, as if Savvy had asked an unseemly question. “Mary adopted out her sons, except for Nathaniel, who was sweet, but slow. He died when he was young, but he wasn’t strong.”
“How many were adopted out?”
“Several.”
“You’re kind of loose on the numbers,” Savvy pointed out.
“We just felt it was better if they were raised by others.”
“Because being male, their gift would be . . . too much to handle?”
“Mary had a lot of children, and she wasn’t capable of taking care of so many of them.”
“But the males were more difficult as a rule,” Savannah said, pressing. “That’s what you’re saying.”
Catherine wanted to deny it, but in the end she went back to genetics. “I believe that with the female, the two Xs counterbalance each other, but with the males, on that missing part of the X that makes it a Y, there is no counterbalance, and therefore whatever gift you’ve been given is stronger and can manifest itself in psychotic behavior, which it has.”
“You’re talking about Justice Turnbull,” Savvy said and felt a particular chill when she considered his extreme cruelty and fixation.
“Mary, like Justice, possessed a dark gift, but Justice’s was more intense, and he was so focused. . . .”
“Are you saying you think he was involved with your sister’s death?”
“No, not Justice. But maybe a man . . .”
“A man with your family’s ‘gift?’ ” Savvy questioned.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m skittish and overly careful, but Mary couldn’t leave men alone. Wait here. . . .”
Savannah hazarded a glance at her watch as Catherine left the room. Catherine was skittish and overly careful, but she clearly had something specific on her mind.
She heard the older woman’s tread on the stairs, and as her footsteps faded away, she heard the sound of quick approaching feet, and soon another young woman entered the room, one she hadn’t met before. She stood at the edge of the kitchen, her shoulder-length hair ashy blond, her eyes a faded blue, her pupils and irises seemingly disproportionately large compared to the whites of her eyes. She was barefoot, and her dress was a blue and yellow calico print that swept her ankles.
“Hello,” Savannah said.
“Hello,” she answered, her eyes drifting to Savannah’s protruding stomach. “I’m Maggie.”
“I’m Detective Dunbar. Savannah,” she said.
“You’re having someone else’s child?”
Savannah stared at her. Did she mean what it sounded like she meant? “I’m a surrogate for my sister,” she admitted. “How did you guess?”
“I didn’t guess. I knew. That’s why they call me
Cassandra, even though my real name is Margaret.”
Like Cassandra, the seer of mythology, Savvy thought.
“Aunt Catherine says my mother thought it was more appropriate. Because of the myth, you know.”
Savvy nodded.
“Do you have a name for him yet?”
Savannah ran a protective hand over her large mound, a little boggled by the switch in subjects. “Um . . . no . . . My sister will name him.”
“You’re from the sheriff’s department,” Cassandra said, her voice taking on an urgent tone. Footsteps sounded on the stairs again, and Cassandra edged closer. “I told Aunt Catherine about him and about the bones. I knew about Justice, too. But now he’s coming. He came for Mary, and he’s coming for us, too.” She gazed hard at Savannah and added meaningfully, “All of us.”
“But Justice is dead,” Savannah said, feeling more than a little shivery at the girl’s intensity.
“Not Justice. There are many heads to the Hydra. You cut one off, and another grows in its place.”
“Who’s coming? What does he look like?”
Cassandra shook her head, squeezing her eyes closed. “I see only his beauty,” she whispered, then darted around the edge of the kitchen counter and into an alcove that led to a back room. “Be careful,” she warned.
By the time Catherine appeared, Cassandra was long gone, but Catherine’s gaze followed the girl’s departure as if she’d left a vapor trail behind. Her mouth tightened, but she said nothing as she set a tooled-leather box on the table. She laid her hands on either side of it, bracing herself, and then she drew up her chin and flipped back the box’s lid. From inside she withdrew a plastic bag and held it toward Savannah. Within the plastic lay a knife with a curved blade.
“My sister was killed with this.”
Savvy stared at the knife, and Catherine slid the bag across the table to her. “How do you know this?”
