The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  He’d been a hearty man, heartily loving to his only child, but always a little abstracted; a good dad, when he was there, but a man who had lived the robust and aggressive center of his life outside, in the world, not at home.

  As a boy, Nick had adored him, missed him, and modeled himself on him.

  No wonder there had been such a sudden, sharp change in the man upon Grandfather Geoffrey’s death! Charles Griffin’s bluff, forceful nature had shrunk to hollow silences and brooding stares as he watched his own son study, play, and plan the blithe, adventurous future of a handsome lad with a Trust Fund.

  For Nick, that had been a hard time, full of desperate anxiety that somehow he was failing his father, so he was the cause of his father’s gloom.

  God, the self-centeredness of youth!

  In self-defense, he had begun calling Charles “Old Sourpuss” behind his back. This made him feel worse—cowardly and treacherous, but also more adult, as if he had somehow seen through his father’s facade to the “real” man. He supposed some sort of estrangement like this happened in all families, one way or another, so that a boy could separate from his parents enough to become his own person, an independent adult. But those last years had been so strained and so full of wounds given and taken; he deeply regretted his behavior now.

  Because Charles had never shared the secret.

  He was sure that his father had never told Serena Griffin about the curse—the curse, for God’s sake, who tells his family about a curse? Charles must have been hugging it to himself that whole time, trying suffocate it out of existence.

  Then he’d begun a series of long and strenuous business trips, ending in the disastrous one to Colombia from which he had not returned.

  Once he was officially declared dead, Serena Griffin had recovered some frail cheer and had filled her leisure time reveling in company with her widowed older sister. Nick used to rendezvous with the two of them in Europe, Canada, or Costa Rica. A quick series of strokes had killed her, on a visit to Belize.

  His comfort now was that his mother hadn’t known, he was sure. A strong man protected the people he loved, or how could he respect himself enough to deserve their love in return?

  In that tradition, he had never talked about any of this with Jess. A sense of shame that came with the story, although shame for what, precisely, he was never sure, and that plus the sheer absurdity of the “family curse” had kept him quiet about it. Now, of course, he could never tell her. She mustn’t be drawn any farther into his secret struggle than she already had been, all unknowing, by the crash of that damned car.

  * * *

  Sometimes he was furious with her for blundering into the trap he had set for the enemy—the play, the goddamned play—despite his efforts to keep her away from it.

  He was afraid for himself, too, haunted by a relentless sense of being dragged into a whirlpool by an inexorable current. He moved through his days clenched with the effort to regain some kind of control. That must be the purpose of the harbinger—to shock a man out of his normal rationality and make him easier prey.

  It had worked, all right.

  For now, during this waiting time, all he could do was try, as hard as he had ever tried to do anything in his life, to keep Jess at arms’ length while still doing his best to protect her. He staked out the theater, he watched the building she lived in from a doorway across the street. He was her unknown guardian angel, while she thought he had discarded and deserted her.

  She’d be angry at him for that. Jess was no fainting violet, to be moved around like a piece on a chessboard, not even for her own good.

  And for all he knew, his surveillance only increased her danger. But he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

  How in Hell had this happened? What an incredible distance he’d come from the careless confidence of his younger days, when he had danced and drunk and partied his way through a seemingly endless crowd of admiring friends and willing girls!

  Before he’d met Jess. Back to Jess, but no wiser about what to do, besides what he was doing already.

  He swore in weary resignation and got up to fill a glass with cold water and put on the short white terrycloth robe from the hook in the bathroom door. Feeling lonelier than he had ever felt in his life, he sat down at the desk, massaged his bad leg a moment, and drew out of the drawer the packet he had brought with him from the basement safe at Rhinebeck.

  Then he took the ruby from its nest of soft black cloth and studied it, hefting its weight in his palm.

  Family history had it that the ruby had been used more than once as gambling stakes in desperate times, and small fortunes had been won by Griffins betting on it. Shares in it had been secretly sold, the money invested, the rich returns used to buy back full ownership with profit to spare. They called it “the Griffin Luck”.

  But someone else, it seemed, had repeatedly asserted a deadly claim on it all along.

  He turned to the documents that accompanied the gemstone. The older papers, interleaved with acid-free blanks for preservation, were foxed and stained with age. He drew them carefully out of their envelopes. They were notes and letters from Griffin males who had come and gone before him. Maybe there was a solution hidden somewhere here, and he’d overlooked it.

  From Abel Griffin, slave-trader: “Let him come. I shall set stout fellows upon him and take him in chains. With his skin soot-stained I will sell him off in Charleston, and go home laughing with my profit. A man who has dealt in heathen souls from the darkest Continent has no fear of silly spirits come a-chasing from the Old World after lost plunder. The stone is ours by right of conquest and inheritance. He shall not have it.”

  The second was from Turner Griffin before his death in a shipyard accident while refitting his whaling ship REAVER.

  “I, Turner Griffin of Wellfleet, master of REAVER, have received my patrimony upon the death of my father. It is a deadly gift; but by God’s grace and the Griffin Luck, I have made my fortune. We remove to San Francisco, as soon as I have made REAVER ready for sale to some captain who will do well by her. The stone I will have made into a brooch for my Lisbeth to wear. Surely the virtue of such a woman can overcome even a hellish curse.”

  In another hand at the bottom ran several neat, small lines: “I would have thrown the ruby into the sea after they buried Turner, but my son would not permit it. He has been told a tale of the stone as the anchor of the Griffin luck. Such luck! The Devil’s luck, I dared say. But he will not listen. Heaven help us all. Elizabeth Denby Griffin.”

  There were more, notes and letters and declarations, most mentioning the ruby with pride and possessiveness. The page from Nick’s own father was headed: “To my son:

  “The enemy is real, he demands the ruby, but it’s my death that he really wants. I suspect that the stone is just an excuse.

  “He can’t be killed by any means I know. Yes, I hired people to kill a man. They failed, so despite my best efforts, you will someday personally come to understand the desperation that drove me to it.

  “I’ll try again to draw him off, away from your mother and you. Some of my associates live in parts of the world more primitive and haunted than ours. They may know some tricks that I don’t (and that he doesn’t know either), so with their help I may be able to deal with him once and for all.

  “If I don’t come back, I’m afraid your turn with this enemy will come. I wish I had good advice to give you. All I can think of is, consider choosing to have no children of your own. Let our line and its curse end, at least, and at last. I’m sorry I haven’t been a better father, and a better man. To tell the truth, though, if I had it all to do over again, I would probably do just the same. We are what we are. Look after your mother as best you can, and never let her know any of this.

  “Goodbye, Nick. You’re too good to be a Griffin anyway from what I have seen. Maybe our damned demon will understand that and let you be. I wish I could count on it. I wish I’d believed before, in time to figure out a sure solution.
But no such luck. May yours be better.”

  It was signed Charles Turner Griffin, with a “ps” appended in a shakier, less bold hand: “I tried just to destroy the damned thing, but literally couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  Nick had puzzled over these pages in the past, wondering whether his father had had a psychotic break before that final journey. He’d imagined that there was a curse, all right—a heritable insanity that might claim him too. His wild younger days had not been entirely careless and joyful.

  He’d done impetuous, angry things that he wished he could undo—later, when he learned the truth. Often, after the accident, he had gone into the basement to pray, clumsily and without conviction, over these papers, to brood over them in black anger, and sometimes to weep over them.

  To tell the truth, he’d also been eager for a confrontation with whoever, whatever, the demon was. But now, because of Jessamyn, his impatience was tempered with sickly dread that she would be involved in the finish, whatever he did to prevent it.

  Too restless to go back to bed, he phoned called up David Schoen. After half a dozen rings the phone was answered.

  “Yes? Is everything all right?”

  “More or less. David, I want you to call the Burch people again tomorrow. I want an earlier appointment.”

  Schoen cleared his throat. “I had to work to get us signed up for Friday, Mr. Griffin. We won’t get in any sooner.”

  “Then we’ll go up tomorrow and just drive around the neighborhood, check out the local library and historical archives, the newspaper morgue—”

  “It’s done. That’s how I’ve found out as much as I have.”

  “It won’t do me any harm to have a look for myself.” In case you missed something. Bullshit! Schoen wouldn’t have missed anything. He was one of the best investigators in the business—he had found out about the document in the Burch Collection, hadn’t he?

  “All right,” Schoen said. He didn’t say, It’s your money, pal; if you want to pay me to do a search for you, and then pay me to take you over the same ground that I’ve already been over, that’s fine with me. He didn’t complain about being yanked out of his sleep in the middle of the night, either.

  Good money bought good help; Charles Griffin had used to say that. Nick grimaced, not comfortable at seeing aspects of his father’s more thoughtless behavior in his own now. He didn’t like himself much for rousting the hired help out of bed in the pit of pre-dawn morning because he couldn’t sleep himself.

  But need drove him. He gripped the phone tighter and said, “Exactly what is this ‘Burch Collection?’ I’ve never heard of it before.”

  Schoen told him again (Nick wondered if there was a Mrs. Schoen holding her pillow wrapped around her head in hopes of getting back to sleep).

  “Burch was an eccentric, a spiritual seeker, I guess you’d say now. He was a devotee of Madame Blavatsky, and he corresponded with Conan Doyle on spiritualist matters. He traveled all over America attending seances and watching dowsers at work—that was a secondary speciality of his, actually; there’s a whole sub-collection on it.

  “But his main subject of interest was New England hauntings, superstitions, that kind of thing. He even visited H.P. Lovecraft at one point, presumably to see if the old horror-spinner wasn’t practicing journalism instead of fiction.

  “Over the years, Burch built up a sizable file of documents on his obsession, everything from newspaper accounts to locks of hair and dowsing rods. When his niece went through his study after his widow’s death, she realized that though most of these objects had been tossed by her aunt she could still save the papers, which she thought might be valuable someday. She’s the one who set up the archive and got some funding to find a home for it.

  “Apparently there are dozens of old diaries, ships’ logs, office account books, letters, and legal papers—deeds, wills, sworn statements, that kind of thing—as well as a mass of oral accounts that Burch either took down himself or had collected by students he got to do some of his fieldwork for him. Did I tell you he was a professor of medieval English?”

  “You told me,” Nick said.

  “Well, when I was checking on your ancestors in Wellfleet I stumbled on a retired librarian who remembered hearing that one of Burch’s assistants had made a local sweep of old documents back sometime between the two world wars. That was the explanation she’d been given for some gaps in the Wellfleet town archives.

  “The present Burch curator, George Pease, affirmed by phone that they acquired at that time a hand-written document with a Griffin signature, and there’s no problem with letting us see it. I got the feeling Pease was flattered by our interest. He’s very, very part-time; ditto access to the collection itself. Rumor has it that they’ve had to sell off some prime pieces to keep going.”

  Nick said sharply, “You didn’t tell me that before. There’s no chance the Griffin papers are gone, is there? Sold with other things, and the curator’s forgotten?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t think we need to worry about that, Mr. Griffin. This isn’t what you’d call ‘prime’—like something with a Conan Doyle signature, for instance. I think we’re on okay.”

  Nick thought of the unknown enemy, the “demon” of the stories on the desk and shivered: not really, David; not really okay. “Very good, Mr. Schoen. Sorry to have gotten you up. I’ll expect you here after breakfast with your written report.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Griffin,” Schoen said. “Goodbye.”

  Tired and chilled, Nick climbed back into bed. He hated the idea of leaving Jessamyn here in the city even just to go up to New Paltz, but the Burch Collection find sounded too promising to be left to anyone else to examine.

  Assuming it was anything at all. Maybe it was just some tale of a poltergeist in the carriage house, or ghosts from a long-forgotten Indian burial ground.

  Or maybe it was much more.

  Temptation

  Jess had a drink at Anthony Sinclair’s apartment after rehearsal. His obvious loneliness had touched her, and a nervous vulnerability that he usually concealed better. He was a high-strung man.

  While their Director talked about the improvements he saw, he could sweep them all into his own enthusiasm. Afterward—as Jess and Anthony had agreed over a light meal when the session finished —seen in a colder light, what it boiled down to was more work, harder work, for the actors, and more expected of them.

  The play hinged, naturally, on the interaction between the two leads, Marko and Eva. He was the elder son of the powerful family on whom leadership fell with the death of his father. Eva, though essentially a sort of spirit, was also his niece, returned home from a wandering life. She brought with her word of what that family’s interests had wrought against poor and helpless people elsewhere; and what price must be paid in return.

  Others in the cast cheerfully encouraged Jess and Sinclair to spend time together, on the theory that this would help to create a strong undercurrent of feeling between them on the stage. They both went along with it, only partly in jest.

  Jess found herself attracted to Sinclair’s air of world-weary vulnerability combined with a surprising playfulness. There had been no man in her life since leaving physical therapy. Maybe it was time there was.

  It’s like being a widow, she thought; here she was, slow-dancing to mellow jazz in Anthony Sinclair’s living room at two o’clock in the morning. Anthony was not-so-subtly coming on to her. He hummed a counterpoint to the sax melody, and the warm contact of his body was making her bones feel softened.

  He was a well-built man, experienced, demonstrative, probably a dream as a lover—the first few times, anyway. Real-life but short-lived romantic liaisons were not uncommon in productions of plays about intense emotions and family bonds. And she was needy tonight, she realized, in a way she couldn’t recall having been for a long time.

  Working with a handful of excitable, dedicated professionals on a passionate play, day after day for hours at a time, had roused
her sleeping senses and the appetites of her healed body.

  Still, she told herself (even as her arm tightened around Anthony’s shoulders), she wasn’t some dewy-eyed ingénue fresh out of drama school. She knew better than to believe that she, from among all women, would be the one to permanently win Anthony Sinclair away from his wife’s side—assuming that she wanted him on that basis, which wasn’t all that alluring an idea to begin with. Most theatrical men—like their female counterparts—were fickle, nervous, egotistical people; they had to be, to be able to do their work.

  It didn’t make for stable home-lives.

  Jessamyn had sown some wild oats (so to speak) of her own, so she didn’t hold a weakness for sexual adventurism against her fellow professionals. Forever at risk of public failure, rejection, and ridicule in their work, they sought approval and acceptance wherever they might find it.

  Sally Sinclair was currently featured in a musical on Broadway. It was said among the crew at the Edwardian that if an opening that suited him appeared in that show’s cast, Anthony would find a way to get out of his obligations in “The Jewel” and go join his wife.

  Jess didn’t need to get any nearer to someone who might be that unreliable.

  “Anthony,” she said, leaning lightly against him in apology for what she was about to say, “Anthony, I don’t think—”

  “Hush,” he murmured, turning her in a swift circle with expert and elegant assurance,” of course you don’t, but let an old man dream a little, won’t you?”

  “Dream on,” she said, “but it’s getting pretty late, Methuselah, and we’re both up for a big scene tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “Just as well,” he said, stepping away to reclaim his half-finished drink from a side table by the sofa. “Anything more than a friendly dance and Sally knows about it, somehow. Then there’s more hell than ever to pay. I do not know how the woman does it. She’s some kind of genius—the evil kind.”

  “Come on, Anthony, you love her to pieces, and it’s mutual; who are you trying to kid?”