The Sign of Seven Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  “You made salad?” Quinn asked.

  “My specialty. Chop, shred, mix. No cooking.”

  “Now, I’m forced to be good.” Quinn gave up the dream of two slices of pizza, settled on one and a bowl of Layla’s salad. “We made progress,” she began as she forked up the first bite.

  “Yeah, ask the ladies here how to make tallow candles or black raspberry preserves,” Fox suggested. “They’ve got it down.”

  “So, some of the information contained in the books we’re going through may not currently apply to our situation.” Quinn raised her eyebrows at Fox. “But one day I may be called on in some blackout emergency to make a tallow candle. By progress, however, I mean that there’s a lot of interesting information in Ann’s journals.”

  “We’ve read them,” Cal pointed out. “Multiple times.”

  “You’re not women.” She held up a finger. “And, yes, Essie is. But Essie’s a woman who’s a descendent, who’s part of this town and its history. And however objective she might try to be, she may have missed some nuances. First question, where are the others?”

  “There aren’t any others.”

  “I disagree. There aren’t any others that were found. Essie said these books were passed to her by her father, because she loved books. I called her to be sure, but he never said if there were more.”

  “If there’d been more,” Cal insisted, “he’d have given them to her.”

  “If he had them. There’s a long span between the sixteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds,” Quinn pointed out. “Things get misplaced, lost, tossed out. According to the records and your own family’s oral history, Ann Hawkins lived most of her life in what’s now the community center on Main Street, which was previously the library. Books, library. Interesting.”

  “A library Gran knew inside and out,” Cal returned. “There couldn’t have been a book in there she didn’t know about. And something like this?” He shook his head. “She’d have it if it was to be had.”

  “Unless she never saw it. Maybe it was hidden, or maybe, for the sake of argument, she wasn’t meant to find it. It wasn’t meant to be found, not by her, not then.”

  “Debatable,” Fox commented.

  “And something to look into. Meanwhile, she didn’t date her journals, so Layla and I are dating them, more or less, by how she writes about her sons. In what we’re judging to be the first, her sons are about two to three. In the next they’re five because she writes about their fifth birthday very specifically, and about seven, we think, when that one ends. The third it seems that they’re young men. We think about sixteen.”

  “A lot of years between,” Layla said.

  “Maybe she didn’t have anything worth writing about during those years.”

  “Could be,” Quinn said to Cal. “But I’m betting she did, even if it was just about blackberry jam and a trio of active sons. More important now, at least I think so, is where is the journal or journals that cover her time with Dent, to the birth of her sons through to the first two years of their lives? Because you can just bet your ass those were interesting times.”

  “She writes of him,” Layla said quietly. “Of Giles Dent. Again and again, in all the journals we have. She writes about him, of her feelings for him, her dreams about him.”

  “And always in the present tense,” Quinn added.

  “It’s hard to lose someone you love.” Fox turned his beer bottle in his hand.

  “It is, but she writes of him, consistently, as if he were alive.” Quinn looked at Cal. “It is not death. We talked about this, how Dent found the way to exist, with this thing. To hold it down or through or inside. Whatever the term. Obviously he couldn’t—or didn’t—kill or destroy it, but neither could it kill or destroy him. He found a way to keep it under, and to continue to exist. Maybe only for that single purpose. She knew it. Ann knew what he did, and I’m betting she knew how he did it.”

  “You’re not taking into account love and grief,” Cal pointed out.

  “I’m not discounting them, but when I read her journals, I get the sense of a strong-minded woman. And one who shared a very deep love with a strong-minded man. She defied convention for him, risked shunning and censure. Shared his bed, but I believe, shared his obligations, too. Whatever he planned to do, attempted to do, felt bound to do, he would have shared it with her. They were a unit. Isn’t that what you felt, what we both felt, when we were in the clearing?”

  “Yeah.” He couldn’t deny it, Cal thought. “That’s what I felt.”

  “Going off that, Ann knew, and while she may have told her sons when they were old enough, that part of the Hawkins’s oral history could have been lost or bastardized. It happens. I think she would have written it out, too. And put the record somewhere she believed would be safe and protected, until it was needed.”

  “It’s been needed for twenty-one years.”

  “Cal, that’s your responsibility talking, not logic. At least not the line of logic that follows this route. She told you this was the time. That it was always to be this time. Nothing you had, nothing you could have done would have stopped it before this time.”

  “We let it out,” Fox said. “Nothing would have been needed if we hadn’t let it out.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” Layla shifted toward him, just a little. “And maybe, if we find the other journals, we’ll understand. But, we noticed something else.”

  “Layla caught it right off the bat,” Quinn put in.

  “Because it was in front of me first. But in any case, it’s the names. The names of Ann’s sons. Caleb, Fletcher, and Gideon.”

  “Pretty common for back then.” Cal gave a shrug as he pushed his plate away. “Caleb stuck in the Hawkins line more than the other two did. But I’ve got a cousin Fletch and an uncle Gideon.”

  “No, first initials,” Quinn said impatiently. “I told you they’d missed it,” she added to Layla. “C, F, G. Caleb, Fox, Gage.”

  “Reaching,” Fox decided. “Especially when you consider I’m Fox because my mother saw a pack of red foxes running across the field and into the woods about the time she was going into labor with me. My sister Sage? Mom smelled the sage from her herb garden right after Sage was born. It was like that with all four of us.”

  “You were named after an actual fox? Like a…release-the-hounds fox?” Layla wanted to know.

  “Well, not a specific one. It was more a…You have to meet my mother.”

  “However Fox got his famous name, I don’t think we discount coincidences.” Quinn studied Cal’s face, saw he was considering it. “And I think there’s more than one of Ann Hawkins’s descendents at this table.”

  “Quinn, my father’s people came over from Ireland, four generations back,” Fox told her. “They weren’t here in Ann Hawkins’s time because they were plowing fields in Kerry.”

  “What about your mother’s?” Layla asked.

  “Wider mix. English, Irish. I think some French. Nobody ever bothered with a genealogy, but I’ve never heard of any Hawkins on the family tree.”

  “You may want to take a closer look. How about Gage?” Quinn wondered.

  “No idea.” And Cal was more than considering it now. “I doubt he does either. I can ask Bill, Gage’s father. If it’s true, if we’re direct descendents, it could explain one of the things we’ve never understood.”

  “Why it was you,” Quinn said quietly. “You three, the mix of blood from you, Fox, and Gage that opened the door.”

  “I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS ME.”

  With the house quiet, and night deep, Cal lay on Quinn’s bed with her body curled warm to his. “Just you?”

  “They helped trigger it maybe, but yes, me. Because it was my blood—not just that night, but my heritage, you could say. I was the Hawkins. They weren’t from here, not the same way I was. Not forever, like I was. Generations back. But if this is true…I still don’t know how to feel about it.”

  “You could give yourself a tiny br
eak.” She stroked her hand over his heart. “I wish you would.”

  “Why did he let it happen? Dent? If he’d found a way to stop it, why did he let it come to this?”

  “Another question.” She pushed herself up until they were eye-to-eye. “We’ll figure it out, Cal. We’re supposed to. I believe that.”

  “I’m closer to believing it, with you.” He touched her cheek. “Quinn, I can’t stay again tonight. Lump may be lazy, but he depends on me.”

  “Got another hour to spare?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled as she lowered to him. “I think he’ll hold out another hour.”

  LATER, WHEN HE WALKED OUT TO HIS CAR, THE air shivered so that the trees rattled their empty branches. Cal searched the street for any sign, anything he needed to defend against. But there was nothing but empty road.

  Something’s in the wind, he thought again, and got in his car to drive home.

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN THE LOW-GRADE urge for a cigarette buzzed through Gage’s brain. He’d given them up two years, three months, and one week before, a fact that could still piss him off.

  He turned up the radio to take his mind off it, but the urge was working its way up to craving. He could ignore that, too; he did so all the time. To do otherwise was to believe there was solid truth in the old adage: like father, like son.

  He was nothing like his father.

  He drank when he wanted a drink, but he never got drunk. Or hadn’t since he’d been seventeen, and then the drunkenness had been with absolute purpose. He didn’t blame others for his shortcomings, or lash out with his fists on something smaller and weaker so he could feel bigger and stronger.

  He didn’t even blame the old man, not particularly. You played the cards you were dealt, to Gage’s mind. Or you folded and walked away with your pockets empty.

  Luck of the draw.

  So he was fully prepared to ignore this sudden, and surprisingly intense desire for a cigarette. But when he considered he was within miles of Hawkins Hollow, a place where he was very likely to die an ugly and painful death, the surgeon general’s warnings seemed pretty goddamn puny, and his own self-denial absolutely useless.

  When he saw the sign for the Sheetz, he decided what the hell. He didn’t want to live forever. He swung into the twenty-four-hour mart, picked up coffee, black, and a pack of Marlboros.

  He strode back to the car he’d bought that very evening in D.C. after his plane had landed, and before he’d paid off a small debt. The wind whipped through his hair. The hair was dark as the night, a little longer than he usually wore it, a little shaggy, as he hadn’t trusted the barbers in Prague.

  There was stubble on his face since he hadn’t bothered to shave. It added to the dark, dangerous look that had had the young female clerk who rung up the coffee and cigarettes shivering inwardly with lust.

  He’d topped off at six feet, and the skinny build of his youth had filled out. Since his profession was usually sedentary, he kept his muscles toned and his build rangy with regular, often punishing workouts.

  He didn’t pick fights, but he rarely walked away from one. And he liked to win. His body, his face, his mind, were all tools of his trade. As were his eyes, his voice, and the control he rarely let off the leash.

  He was a gambler, and a smart gambler kept all of his tools well honed.

  Swinging back onto the road, Gage let the Ferrari rip. Maybe it had been foolish to toss so much of his winnings into a car, but Jesus, it moved. And fucking A, he’d ridden his thumb out of the Hollow all those years ago. It felt damn good to ride back in in style.

  Funny, now that he’d bought the damn cigarettes, the urge for one had passed. He didn’t even want the coffee, the speed was kick enough.

  He flew down the last miles of the interstate, whipped onto the exit that would take him to the Hollow. The dark rural road was empty—no surprise to him, not this time of night. There were shadows and shapes—houses, hills, fields, trees. There was a twisting in his gut that he was heading back instead of away, and yet that pull—it never quite left him—that pull toward home was strong.

  He reached toward his coffee more out of habit than desire, then was forced to whip the wheel, slam the brakes as headlights cut across the road directly into his path. He blasted the horn, saw the other car swerve.

  He thought: Fuck, fuck, fuck! I just bought this sucker.

  When he caught his breath, and the Ferrari sat sideways in the middle of the road, he thought it was a miracle the crash hadn’t come. Inches, he realized. Less than inches.

  His lucky goddamn day.

  He reversed, pulled to the shoulder, then got out to check on the other driver he assumed was stinking drunk.

  She wasn’t. What she was, was hopping mad.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” she demanded. She slammed out of her car, currently tipped into the shallow ditch along the shoulder, in a blur of motion. He saw a mass of dark gypsy curls wild around a face pale with shock.

  Great face, he decided in one corner of his brain. Huge eyes that looked black against her white skin, a sharp nose, a wide mouth, sexily full that may have owned its sensuality to collagen injections.

  She wasn’t shaking, and he didn’t sense any fear along with the fury as she stood on a dark road facing down a complete stranger.

  “Lady,” he said with what he felt was admirable calm, “where the hell did you come from?”

  “From that stupid road that looks like all the other stupid roads around here. I looked both damn ways, and you weren’t there. Then. How did you…Oh never mind. We didn’t die.”

  “Yay.”

  With her hands on her hips she turned around to study her car. “I can get out of there, right?”

  “Yeah. Then there’s the flat tire.”

  “What flat…Oh for God’s sake! You have to change it.” She gave the flat tire on the rear of her car an annoyed kick. “It’s the least you can do.”

  Actually, it wasn’t. The least he could do was stroll back to his car and wave good-bye. But he appreciated her bitchiness, and preferred it over quivering. “Pop the trunk. I need the spare and the jack.”

  When she had, and he’d lifted a suitcase out, set it on the ground, he took one look at her spare. And shook his head. “Not your day. Your spare’s toast.”

  “It can’t be. What the hell are you talking about?” She shoved him aside, peered in herself by the glow of the trunk light. “Damn her, damn her, damn her. My sister.” She whirled away, paced down the shoulder a few feet, then back. “I loaned her my car for a couple of weeks. This is so typical. She ruins a tire, but does she get it fixed, does she even bother to mention it? No.”

  She pushed her hair back from her face. “I’m not calling a tow truck at this time of night, then sitting in the middle of nowhere. You’re just going to have to give me a ride.”

  “Am I?”

  “It’s your fault. At least part of it is.”

  “Which part?”

  “I don’t know, and I’m too tired, I’m too mad, I’m too lost in this foreign wilderness to give a damn. I need a ride.”

  “At your service. Where to?”

  “Hawkins Hollow.”

  He smiled, and there was something dark in it. “Handy. I’m heading there myself.” He gestured toward his car. “Gage Turner,” he added.

  She gestured in turn, rather regally, toward her suitcase. “Cybil Kinski.” She lifted her eyebrows when she got her first good look at his car. “You have very nice wheels, Mr. Turner.”

  “Yeah, and they all work.”

  Fourteen

  CAL WASN’T PARTICULARLY SURPRISED TO SEE Fox’s truck in his driveway, despite the hour. Nor was he particularly surprised when he walked in to see Fox blinking sleepily on the couch in front of the TV, with Lump stretched out and snoring beside him.

  On the coffee table were a can of Coke, the last of Cal’s barbecue potato chips, and a box of Milk Bones. The remains, he assumed, of a guy-dog party.r />
  “Whatcha doing here?” Fox asked groggily.

  “I live here.”

  “She kick you out?”

  “No, she didn’t kick me out. I came home.” Because they were there, Cal dug into the bag of chips and managed to pull out a handful of crumbs. “How many of those did you give him?”

  Fox glanced at the box of dog biscuits. “A couple. Maybe five. What’re you so edgy about?”

  Cal picked up the Coke and gulped down the couple of warm, flat swallows that were left. “I got a feeling, a…thing. You haven’t felt anything tonight?”

  “I’ve had feelings and things pretty much steady the last couple weeks.” Fox scrubbed his hands over his face, back into his hair. “But yeah, I got something just before you drove up. I was half asleep, maybe all the way. It was like the wind whooshing down the flue.”

  “Yeah.” Cal walked over to stare out the window. “Have you checked in with your parents lately?”

  “I talked to my father today. It’s all good with them. Why?”

  “If all three of us are direct descendents, then one of your parents is in the line,” Cal pointed out.

  “I figured that out on my own.”

  “None of our family was ever affected during the Seven. We were always relieved by that.” He turned back. “Maybe relieved enough we didn’t really ask why.”

  “Because we figured it, at least partly, was because they lived outside of town. Except for Bill Turner, and who the hell could tell what was going on with him?”

  “My parents and yours, they came into town during the Seven. And there were people, you remember what happened out at the Poffenberger place last time?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I remember.” Fox rubbed at his eyes. “Being five miles out of town didn’t stop Poffenberger from strangling his wife while she hacked at him with a butcher knife.”

  “Now we know Gran felt things, saw things that first summer, and she saw things the other night. Why is that?”

  “Maybe it picks and chooses, Cal.” Rising, Fox walked over to toss another log on the fire. “There have always been people who weren’t affected, and there have always been degrees with those who were.”