Lure of Song and Magic

by Patricia Rice

  He wasn’t sure how Pippa stood on the subject of dotty ladies who might be her mother. Probably as ambivalent as she was about singing the seal song to find Donal. Which meant he had his work cut out for him.

  Pippa’s cell rang. He watched in curiosity as she fished it out of a pocket of the miniscule bag she’d left on the table.

  She raised delicate eyebrows as she listened to the overexcited voice on the other end. If he could hear it across the room, she must be getting an earful.

  When she closed the phone, she gave him a look rich with implication.

  “That was the pastor of the church. It seems your crew is measuring the auditorium. And oddly enough, this is Sunday.”

  Chapter 24

  Finished with the dishes, Pippa followed Oz outside to the pool while he employed his masterly phone skills in connecting all the right people to pull the clueless crew out of a church about to fill with Sunday morning parishioners.

  He’d retrieved his suitcase from the car and donned a white, open-necked, pullover linen shirt, very Hollywood, before breakfast. It was probably meant to be tucked into slacks, but he’d stuck with his jeans, so he had an L.A./surfer look happening. Business professional to good ol’ boy in ten seconds flat. She wasn’t certain where the real Oz fell on that spectrum.

  He just looked so spectacularly at home that she couldn’t help sitting back and admiring. So she adopted her lotus pose and attempted to find her center while he paced back and forth.

  She wasn’t too successful. Somewhere over the last few days, she’d lost her center. She felt as if she were floating in outer space, or maybe cyberspace, untethered. Everything she believed was no longer true.

  She’d used her Voice, and Oz hadn’t keeled over dead. She’d actually used it to help a little. Such a leap shattered the world she’d built around herself without adding all the other complications.

  She had a mother. Maybe. And more family, somewhere.

  Pippa wasn’t too clear on how Oz’s son was involved. Or why she hadn’t been killed in the accident. But she was very clear that some wretched stranger had access to her musical library, her thoughts, her soul. And apparently her pain hadn’t killed anyone who had listened to her songs. Which put her right back where she started—was she wrong about her Voice?

  Oz shoved his phone back in his pocket and watched her warily.

  “Now does one of us throw the other in the pool?” Pippa asked with curiosity.

  He grinned, the masculine angles of his face lightening as if the sun came from within. “There are better things to do in a pool besides fight.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re talking about swimming?” She arched an eyebrow, if only to fight back the butterflies swarming in her midsection when he looked at her like that.

  “Is the pool heated?” He strode over to the pole with the pool’s electrical equipment box.

  “Nice thought, Oswin, but we have more important things to do with the day. Did you pull your overeager techies out of the church?” The butterflies were most likely because she had a sinking feeling that now that Oz had found her mother, he expected her to go on a stage and read books and sing in front of an audience. And it wasn’t happening.

  But she’d promised… She didn’t have real, official proof that Gloria was her mother, but she knew in her heart—she had a mother again. She was trying to be wary, but joy and excitement kept intruding. Gloria believed in her Voice. Or she was scamming her.

  Whatever. Oz had found her mother, and he deserved to have his son back in return. Pippa didn’t know how to fix that. Or if she even ought to believe Gloria that Donal was alive. Mixing cynicism with hope was a Molotov cocktail for sanity.

  “The crew has been unemployed for a while,” Oz said. “They’re eager to do a good job. I’ve sent them scouting the town for possible set design. You don’t turn the pool’s heater on?” He flipped a switch inside the box and strode back toward her with a decidedly heated look.

  “Wastes energy.” Rather than waste more of hers, Pippa swung her legs over the side of the lounge, stood, and strode for the house. “I want to talk to Gloria. There are no cliffs near Bakersfield. I was abandoned in Bakersfield.”

  She might not have found her center, but she had her focus. She didn’t want Gloria to be a liar, if only for the sake of Oz’s son. But it was better to find out now, before their hopes climbed.

  “Drive or walk?” he asked as she grabbed her purse and headed for the front door.

  They were on the brink of a showdown every minute he believed she would let Syrene stand in front of a national audience, much less use her Voice.

  There had to be some other way of finding his son. And Gloria had all the clues.

  “Let’s walk. It’s only half a mile into town. Your legs won’t fall off.” That was snarky. He’d been walking back and forth without showing a bit of effort, but she needed distance.

  Oz fell easily into stride with her, shortening his loping gait to hers. It felt extremely odd—almost intimate—to have anyone accompany her up the garden path and into town. She was used to being alone.

  It felt even odder that he was tall and wide and formidable. She could see where women would fall into the fallacy of relying on big men to take care of them. She knew better these days.

  She just needed to realign her thinking. He was there for his son. She was simply an impersonal cog in the wheel of his search. She could live with that.

  They found Gloria sitting at an ironwork table on the B&B’s stone terrace, her hands folded in her lap as she gazed at the pots of blooming daffodils and tulips Amabelle had gathered on the wall. Or perhaps she listened to the blackbirds arguing in the evergreens.

  She looked up and smiled at them, although the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. Pain was still etched too thoroughly there, although Pippa thought she saw excitement too. Or maybe Gloria simply reflected Pippa’s confused feelings.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” Gloria said in a warm contralto. “I’ve disturbed your weekend enough as it is.”

  “Disturbed?” Pippa said, waving off Amabelle who had appeared at the back door bearing a tray. “I’ve possibly found my family and been told we could be an endangered species, and I’m so far beyond disturbed that I don’t think there’s a word for it.”

  Oz pulled a chair out for her. “You could sing about it,” he suggested, his voice warm with humor.

  “Don’t even go there.” Pippa took the chair and scraped it across the stones to the table. She was becoming too bold about expressing herself around him. She moderated her voice with a sigh of impatience. “I’m sorry. This is an impossible situation, and I’m not used to dealing with people much anymore.”

  Gloria studied her with warm concern. “For years, I lived with the grief of believing you had died with your father. I isolated myself as much as the nursing home did. My hands and legs were so useless that it was easier to lose myself in audiobooks than bother with the outside world. I missed your teenage years.

  “Living in Mexico these past six years after my release from the home, I didn’t immediately pick up the habit of listening to TV or radio, not until I’d refreshed my Spanish. Several times, I caught hauntingly familiar refrains, but the memories were too painful to consider. I’d last heard you as a toddler, so I convinced myself I was imagining things. Your range is so much more mature now! I preferred to think I was hallucinating. Not until about four years ago, when the Librarian sent me a few of your recordings and a picture did I dare believe, and by then you’d completely disappeared. We both may need sedatives to survive this.”

  Pippa ran her hand over her shorn hair, tugging at the roots to stay grounded. “I was found in Bakersfield. There are no cliffs in Bakersfield. I may not be who you think I am.”

  Gloria smiled and gently patted Pippa’s hand. �
��Your grandmother christened you Siren after we discovered your talent. You had a voice so crystal pure that it made grown men weep.”

  “Siren,” Pippa half-laughed at the irony. “I told the firemen my name was Philippa Siren Malcolm, not Seraphina, right? And they misunderstood. There’s nothing seraphic about me.”

  “I’ll never admit that your voice is anything short of angelic,” Gloria said, “although I’ll agree that you could scale the hide off a bull when angry. And if you didn’t get your own way, you became very angry. I wish I had been there to help you learn how to deal with your passions. Your foster parents had their hands full.”

  Pippa buried her face in her hands. Having planted his chair close, Oz rubbed her shoulders but blissfully stayed out of this. He had to be bursting with impatience, but he put her needs first, understanding she needed reassurance. Because he was empathic? If Donal was a Malcolm, did that mean Oz was a weird Malcolm too? She was avoiding the topic.

  “I should probably give the Jameses awards for patience,” Pippa agreed, weary from information overload. “But they took half of everything I made, so they didn’t come out too badly.”

  “Half?” Oz jerked as she hit on one of his business buttons. But he pulled back, muttering something about greedy bastards.

  She didn’t even bother glancing at him for fear of distraction. “I can see the flames of the car crash in my head. I don’t see how anyone survived. Where were we?”

  “On the coast highway.” Gloria pushed her water glass around, creating a wet circle on the table. “Mountain on one side, rocks and cliff on the other. Jordie hung on as long as he could, until we were almost past the worst of the cliffs, where the slope was more gradual.”

  Pippa wished she had somewhere to put her hands. She shouldn’t have waved Amabelle away, but she hadn’t wanted anyone around, either. She dug her fingers into her scalp and tried to keep it real. Her father’s name was Jordie. Jordie Malcolm.

  “Twenty-four years ago, air bags weren’t what they are today. I don’t know what happened to his seat belt. He tried to keep the car from overturning as we went down the embankment, but when we smashed into the rocks, he went through the window.” Gloria looked wistful. “He was a brave, wonderful man. I wish you’d had more of a chance to know him.”

  Tears leaked down Pippa’s cheeks at the horror described. She rubbed them away, but she didn’t dare speak.

  As if understanding, Gloria continued. “You were screaming. The car was crumpled all around us. I couldn’t move my legs. The semi must have gone on, but I don’t remember. I told you to get out of your seat. And you must have.”

  Pippa kept shaking her head, not recalling any of this, grateful that she couldn’t. Oz squeezed her knee beneath the table, reminding her that he was there, that she could fall into his arms and scream later. That helped.

  She ought to go to her studio and let all the pain and confusion loose and not rely on Oz. But she needed the comfort of his steady strength just to survive this moment.

  “I don’t know how I crawled out of the car, but I must have,” Gloria continued. “I remember it bursting into flames and screaming my voice raw. My legs were burned. I didn’t know if you’d escaped. I couldn’t see you. And then I passed out. The next thing I remember is the hospital and being told my husband was dead and that I’d been comatose for months.”

  “Months?” Pippa asked weakly. She tried to picture it all in her head, but she had no memory of being removed from that flaming scene. Cars must have stopped. The PCH was a busy highway. Someone had to have seen the fire. The ambulance would have come much later. By then, had she been spirited away? Why?

  “When I woke up, I wasn’t in a mental state capable of more than surviving,” Gloria said softly. “I regret that. Maybe if I’d been able to ask questions, demand to know what happened to you, the police might have looked harder. But I was heavily sedated for so long… I don’t even know how long. I was living off the state. If we had insurance, it expired before I was even aware enough to question. Sedation is the medication of choice in those places. It was years before I finally received disability, moved to an assisted living center, and regained enough sense to begin looking for answers. But I was still partially paralyzed. Communication was difficult. And so I cut myself off from the world—and you.”

  Pippa fought the sobs. She was good at fighting pain, but this was too raw, too real. Her mother had been alive all these years, alive and suffering while she’d been taking a road to glory. And self-destructing.

  Oz returned with tall glasses of tomato juice. She hadn’t even known he’d left. He set one firmly in front of her. “Drink. The past is done. Let’s figure out the future.”

  “No alcohol,” she warned, afraid to accept his offering.

  “No alcohol,” he agreed. “Herbs, seasonings, maybe some fizzy water. Anything to make tomatoes potable.” He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

  Pippa tasted the celery stalk and nodded approval. Gloria looked exhausted and as if she needed vodka, but she gallantly sipped the juice.

  “How can we figure out the future if none of this makes sense?” Pippa demanded, relieved to be released from the spell of her mother’s tale.

  Oz looked grim as he turned to Gloria. “Did you hide because of drug dealers or because of the Librarian’s warnings about that website?”

  “Both,” she said wearily. “Toward the end of my stay in the home, when I finally summoned the ability to learn the computer, I checked that website. Shortly after, a man showed up, asking questions. And the Librarian sent me an email telling me to get out.”

  “Then, if we want to believe that someone is tracking Malcolms,” Oz said, “they should be coming after me and my family. Half the family tree is Malcolms.” He threw back a gulp of his juice.

  Pippa assumed he’d added alcohol to his concoction, and she couldn’t object. Her horror was magnified by his confession—Malcolms were the missing link between her and Donal?

  He set the glass down and resumed his seat, sitting forward and suddenly taking charge of the conversation. “You said you’ve known about Pippa for four years. How did you find out?”

  “The Librarian, dear,” Gloria said gently. “After I called you to come get Donal after your wife died in Mexico, the Librarian rewarded me by sending me Pippa’s songs. She apparently believed Syrene might be my missing daughter, and she stole your recordings somehow. I recognized the seal song immediately. I gave you a stuffed seal when you were only a baby and told you about the selkies. It was one of your favorite stories.”

  Pippa’s brain went into overload. Gloria had called Oz? Her mother had been the mysterious woman who had saved Donal the first time?

  Pippa shoved back her chair and stalked away.

  Oz pulled out his BlackBerry and began punching buttons.

  Looking bewildered, Gloria sipped her juice.

  Chapter 25

  When Conan arrived at Pippa’s house to return her computer, he walked in the front door as Oz had instructed. Buzzed by his brother’s story of Malcolms and sirens and a mysterious connection to their family, he was ready to sit through operas if necessary to find out more. Unlike Oz, he had a secret obsession with old wives’ tales about families with superpowers, for reasons he wasn’t about to divulge to his cynical older brothers. He set the server box down on the kitchen counter and wandered to the glass doors leading to the pool where everyone had gathered.

  Oz was striving to look relaxed and unconcerned, lounging in one of the chairs, sipping water with lime, and pounding on his laptop. But Conan had learned enough this past year to read the tension in his brother’s stance. Oz was on full storm-warning alert, his formidable brain processing faster than a computer. If anyone made a wrong move, he would take them down before asking questions. Conan considered throwing a ball at him just to watch him go.

>   But the rest of the guests kept him in line. Sitting next to Oz, Pippa—Syrene—appeared as fragile as an old church window, and in a bright orange halter top and yellow capris with the sun glinting off her orange-red hair, more colorful than any dull church glass. Conan didn’t have Oz’s sensitivity to people, but even he could see that she wore clothes as a line of defense, letting the bright colors blind anyone from seeing the person wearing them.

  She was cuddling a dirty, gray lump that might have been a stuffed animal once but lacked shape, form, and most of its fur now. The offensive bitch had a soft, vulnerable underside. He enjoyed puzzles, and she was a fascinating enigma.

  Sitting under an umbrella at a table facing Oz and Pippa, an older woman with fading blonde hair and tired eyes watched Pippa with love and maybe disbelief. Conan wanted to hear her story too.

  The other pair were just a couple of Oz’s studio jerks, trying to look cool around the boss. He didn’t know why they were there. Logic 101—he’d not hear any stories while they were around.

  Conan pushed open the patio doors to make his presence known. Only Oz noticed, lifting a hand from the keyboard to signal the ice cooler. Score one for the man.

  Helping himself to a bottle of water, Conan unscrewed the top and stood in the shade near the house while he got his bearings.

  They were discussing set design. They’d dragged him up a mountain on Sunday morning to discuss cardboard cutouts? No effing way.

  He considered flinging bottles of water into the pool until someone acknowledged his presence, but that was boring, and he wanted the minions out of here. And he knew just how to do it while setting the storytelling in motion at the same time.

  Conan pulled out his iPod, selected a song, plugged it into his pocket speakers, and turned the volume up.

  “The Silly Seal Song” tinkled from the miniature speakers. Even without amplification, Syrene’s crystalline voice soared like birdsong at dawn.

  Pippa, the old lady, and Oz sat up and spun around as if on wheels. The other pair only looked mildly puzzled.