Autumn Thorns Read online

  . . . was back at the table, staring at the runes on the piece of paper. My skin was covered with goose bumps and my teeth chattered like crazy. My phone chimed and I shook my head, trying to sort myself out, as I picked it up.

  Peggin was texting me. Can I come over? I need to talk to you about what I found out. I took the rest of the afternoon off.

  Sure, I texted back. I could use a good sounding board.

  Be there in twenty.

  I felt like I’d just been shifting between worlds.

  Maybe because you have been, dork.

  Yeah, yeah, I told myself. I wanted more caffeine but decided to wait until Peggin arrived. Instead, I aimlessly crossed to the kitchen door and stared out the window into the backyard. The gardens were overgrown, yet I knew that Grandma Lila had always kept them neat and tidy, and she hadn’t been gone long enough for them to grow into the tangle they were now. Frowning, I moved back to the table, where I jotted down everything the Crow Man had said while I could still remember it. I was just finishing up when the doorbell rang. Peggin was at the door.

  She was wearing a pair of capri pants, a button-down V-neck cardigan, and a rain jacket. She had braided her hair back in a French braid, and she was wearing a pair of sneakers, for once. I frowned. The capris and sweater were her to a T, but usually she wore a cute coat and ballerina flats with them.

  “What’s going on? You look dressed for . . . well . . . what’s up?”

  She shrugged out of her coat, draping it on the coat rack. “Kerris, I found out the answer to one of your questions, at least.” The perkiness had vanished, showing an underpinning of worry and more than a little fear.

  I motioned her toward the kitchen. “Want some coffee?”

  “Latte, please. Triple, lots of syrupy goodness. Mocha if you can, actually.” She let me bundle her into a chair and turned to watch me as I flipped on the espresso machine.

  “Which question? And by the way, did Diago ever come back? How’s the man we helped last night?”

  She shook her head. “Mike’s doing fine. No more problems, and we think he’ll heal up without incident. He’s out of the woods. Kerris, I was in the back room today doing some filing. We keep older files in the storeroom, and the current patients out front in the cabinet. Corbin was out to lunch, so I was the only one there. Anyway, after talking to you, I had a thought. I was supposed to archive your grandparents’ files into the inactive cabinets and . . . I got curious. I had a look through them.”

  “What for?” I frowned. “Couldn’t you get in trouble if Corbin found out you did that?”

  “Yeah, those files are confidential. I never would have but . . . after what you told me, I knew there was a way I might be able to verify something for you. Otherwise, I never would have done something like this. This is the first time I’ve ever broken the rules—at least as far as work is concerned.” She sounded desperate for me to believe her.

  “I believe you—I know you wouldn’t have done this if you didn’t think you could help me. And . . . they’re both dead, so . . . What did you find out?”

  “Your grandfather? Duvall? He was sterile. He couldn’t father children. The test was done before your mother was born.”

  “That verifies what Ivy suspected, then.” I began jotting down notes as she talked. “Which means . . . that he’s not my grandfather.”

  “Right. I decided to double-check so I took a look at his and Lila’s blood types. I cross-matched them against your mother’s blood type. Lila was AB, and Duvall was type O. Tamil was type AB.”

  “And . . . that means?” I didn’t know much about blood, other than it was red.

  “Just that there’s no way those two blood types can pair up to produce an AB child. Duvall couldn’t have been Tamil’s father, even if somehow he regained his fertility.”

  “Then that proves it. Duvall’s not my blood grandfather.” I leaned forward, a thought striking me. “Did Aidan Corcoran have a file in the archived section?”

  She nodded. “Yes—because Corbin took over Doc Benson’s practice and he kept all of the files. I thought of that, too, so I did some digging and found his records. Aidan’s blood was type A. He could have been Tamil’s father.”

  I stared at my latte, stirring quietly. “So my actual grandfather is quite possibly Lila’s guardian. Something else happened today.” I told Peggin about my visit to the Crow Man.

  “What the hell are you supposed to do next?”

  “If I didn’t know that it was futile, I’d think about heading back to Seattle. This is all just too weird. But I guess . . . one thing at a time. It would help if I could find my grandmother’s private diary. Especially now that we know about Duvall.” A thought struck me and I jumped up. “Come with me. I want to check out something. I read something in Lila’s Shadow Journal.” I motioned for Peggin to follow me upstairs to the sewing room, making sure all the lights were on as we went. I had no desire to face the Ankou again.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Lila mentioned a hidden room where she kept vials of graveyard dust. Maybe her diaries are also there.” I gazed around the sewing room, then went over to the attic and peeked in. Something wasn’t jiving, now that I looked at it. There was a space between the two . . . I hurried over to the wall of the sewing room that flanked the attic and began rapping against it. Peggin followed quietly. The fourth tap on the wall reverberated with a hollow sound. “Here! Look for any sign of a hidden door.”

  We scoured the wall, and a few minutes later, Peggin drew my attention to a small lever by the floor, snugged up against a bookcase. I told her to wait while I drew the dagger from my tool bag. I wanted some weapon, even a small pointy one. Armed, I motioned for her to go ahead, and she pulled the lever.

  A slow hiss sounded as a door—seamless against the wall—slowly opened inward to a dark room. Shivering, I peeked in and to the right of the door, saw a light switch. One flick flooded the secret room with a dim light. As I softly stepped through, Peggin followed me, propping open the door with a step stool she found nearby.

  The secret room was small—about eight by eight, and one wall was lined with shelves and cupboards. The other wall had a built-in worktable, with more cupboards above it. The air was musty, but there was no real dust buildup.

  “My grandmother must have been in here recently.” I nodded to a paper plate with the crusted remains of a peanut butter sandwich. The bread was moldy but it obviously hadn’t been here more than a couple of weeks. I slowly moved to the shelves. There, rows of mason jars lined two long shelves—jelly-jar size, each filled with dirt and each bearing a label with a name and date on it. I picked up one and examined it. Rodger Lyons: December 12, 1989. Mary Lou Singer: September 8, 2010. The dates went back to 1936, before Lila was born. The handwriting on the jars was different as well, up until the late fifties, when I recognized Lila’s entering the mix.

  “What are they?” Peggin crept forward, staring at row after row of jars. Another box of empty jars sat on the floor near the shelves.

  “Graveyard dirt. From every death my grandmother and great-grandmother presided over.” I counted the jars. There were ten deep per row, and they spanned three room-length shelves. “There must be almost two thousand jars here. Two thousand deaths my grandmother and great-grandmother presided over—that they worked their magic on.” As I stared at the wall of glass, it hit home that each jar represented someone who had died, who had passed on. A light gone out in this world, looking to move on to the next.

  “What does the P stand for?” Peggin pointed to the letter—written in red—on some of the jars. Most were from before the 1950s.

  I thought for a moment. “Pest House Cemetery. These were people buried in the Pest House Cemetery before the modern section was added.” I frowned. “Ellia never mentioned these bottles. I wonder if she knows that Lila collected graveyard dirt from e
very person. I have to find out why it’s done, and I suppose I better follow suit. Yet another question, but I’m guessing I’ll find the answer in her journal.”

  “Speaking of journals, you were looking for her private diary?” Peggin held up a notebook. It was a composition book, and on the cover was written 2015. She passed it to me, and I flipped through it while she began to open cupboards and drawers.

  I flipped through the pages. Lila’s writing. “Yeah, I think this is it. But if this is just for 2015, then where are—”

  “Here.” Peggin motioned to one of the cupboards.

  I peeked inside and saw a stack of notebooks. There was one per year, dating back to 1954, the year my grandmother turned thirteen. Her handwriting was bigger then, with the looping letters and exaggerated dots of most teenagers. “Almost sixty years of journals. Sixty years of records. I’ve got my reading cut out for me.”

  “Well, at least you know where they are.”

  “At least I do, at that.”

  We explored the rest of the room and found more magical supplies, mostly what I figured were spell components, along with a variety of tools, implements, and books. The books were mostly Irish mythology. I was about to cart all the journals out to the sewing room when a glint in the corner of the cupboard caught my eye. I set down the notebooks and reached for the object. It was a silver box, about the size of a bar of soap. A red ribbon held the top on, tied in a bow. Feeling vaguely like a busybody, I pulled one of the ribbon edges and undid the bow.

  The box was silver, all right, with a simple embossed decoration on the surface of a crow and a moon. My birthmark and my grandmother’s birthmark. Quietly, as Peggin watched, I lifted the lid. Inside, on a pad of red velvet, was a heart-shaped cloisonné locket. I quietly opened the locket. Inside, I recognized a picture of my mother as a baby—I had seen one like it downstairs on the kitchen wall. On the other side of the locket was the picture of a man. I stared at him for a moment, thinking he looked familiar. And then I noticed the inscription on the back.

  To my darling Tamil. Your loving father, Aidan.

  There it was. Carved into metal. Proof that Aidan was indeed my actual grandfather. I held the locket, running my fingers over it. Peggin glanced over my shoulder at the engraving. I cast a look at her, feeling the weight of a hundred years on my shoulders.

  “If Duvall knew he wasn’t Tamil’s father, do you think that would make it easier for him to kill her? I want to know, Peggin. I want to put her to rest—to prove to the world that she didn’t just run away, that she didn’t abandon me. I wish I could figure out where her body is. I know that sounds morbid, but it might give us some answers and it would sure as hell give me closure.”

  “Why don’t you ask Penelope? You don’t need anybody’s permission, you know.” Peggin narrowed her eyes, and had hauled out her don’t-sass-me voice.

  I thought about the ramifications of talking to Penelope. I needed to meet her anyway, since I’d be working with her. And maybe, just maybe, I needed to do this on my own rather than having Ellia tag along. If I recalled, my grandmother had done plenty of things on her own without a lament singer there.

  “All right. Would you go there with me tonight?”

  “Graveyard creeping you out?” Peggin was repressing a smile.

  I stuck my tongue out at her. “No. It’s just . . .”

  “Just that it’s creeping you out?” She laughed then, and the mood lightened.

  Carrying the locket, and a stack of journals, including the one for 2015, I headed for the door. “Grab another stack of those, please. These will keep me busy for some time. It’s a good thing I’m a speed reader.”

  “You always did ace classes because of that.” Peggin obligingly grabbed an armful of the diaries, and then we headed downstairs.

  I stacked the journals on one of the side tables and she followed suit, and then we returned to the kitchen, where Peggin crossed to the cupboard. “You keep your junk food in here?”

  “I don’t eat junk food. Not much.”

  “Bullshit, what are these?” She held up a bag of potato chips and I gave in with a rueful smile.

  “Fine, so I do eat junk food. Yeah, chips are fine. Or cookies. Or whatever.” I thought over her question, though. “On a serious note, it’s not that the graveyard is creeping me out. It’s the idea of actually meeting Penelope. The thought doesn’t scare me as much as meeting Veronica, but jeez . . . I’ve spent years remembering my grandmother talk about the both of them. I run off to Seattle, then come back fifteen years later and boom, here I am, on their doorstep with little more than a ‘Hi, I’m back and have taken over?’ I’m not sure how either one will take it.”

  “Penelope probably won’t care. I think it’s more Veronica you have to be wary of. Penelope has the same ultimate goal as you do—keep the dead in their place. Veronica likes waking them up.” She poured the chips in a bowl and set them on the table, biting into one with a satisfied look. “Yum, salt. I love salt.”

  “Then you should have no problem coming out to the graveyard with me tonight to knock on Penelope’s tombstone.” I grinned.

  Peggin let out a snort. “Yeah, right. Of course I’ll come with you, but damn, woman, you need to think of a better way to show a girl a good time, you know?”

  I absently nibbled on a handful of chips. “You know you want to go.”

  “Yeah, I do. So why would Duvall have it in for your mother? It can’t be just because she wasn’t his child, unless he was looking to hurt your grandmother. But he would have done that sooner, wouldn’t he? And we can’t forget your father vanished. Did Duvall have a hand in his disappearance, too? I don’t know. I feel like there’s something we’re missing . . . or a piece of the puzzle we just don’t have yet.” She swallowed the mouthful of chips she’d just taken, and leaned forward, an excited glow in her eyes.

  I nodded. “Right. And if it’s something we’re missing, there’s not much we can do about it for now.”

  “He obviously knew she wasn’t his. He was tested sterile before Lila got pregnant. I wonder if he told her about it, though? Did she know he couldn’t father children? Maybe she thought he wouldn’t realize he wasn’t the father?”

  Why hadn’t I thought of that? It made sense. “Well, that makes sense. But why wait until Tamil was an adult? Until I came along? Unless something was tying his hands.”

  Still puzzling, I wandered over to the fridge and pulled out a box of breaded fish fillets from the freezer. I spread them on a cookie sheet, getting them ready to go in the oven. By the time I was done, Peggin was playing with my laptop. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking out the names of his buddies that Ellia gave us. Hmm . . . Here’s Heathrow Edgewater. He’s done well for himself. He owns the Peninsula Hotel, and his son works there with him. Looks like a shrewd businessman. Besides working together at the hotel, the pair have developed a real estate business that now earns a pretty penny—they cover the entire peninsula area and apparently they’re the number one earners in the area. Hmm . . . what’s this?”

  “What?” I glanced over her shoulder.

  “This link? It looks like it leads to a back-end list of names.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The website that this page is linked to doesn’t have a return link to the home page. Let’s see where the root link leads.” She erased the web address back to the root URL. “Cuchulainnshounds.com. What have we here?” The page that came up was a splash page to what looked like a club. It said very little—Cú Chulainn’s Hounds and a picture of the Celtic warrior in full battle dress.

  I glanced at Peggin. “Crap. Cú Chulainn . . . he’s an enemy of the Morrígan. And my grandmother was convinced that Cú Chulainn’s hag—whoever she is—is responsible for summoning the Ankou.”

  “Then we need to find out more about them.” Peggin leaned forward, exam
ining the screen. “Before we click on the Enter Here sign, are you working through a proxy server?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if they log IP addresses, they won’t be able to trace the fact that you surfed their site.”

  “How do I find out if I have one of those?” I wasn’t an Internet dunce, by any means, but neither was I terribly savvy. I knew enough to keep strong virus protection working on my computer, I scanned it regularly, I never opened an .exe program or file unless I knew who it was coming from and what it was, and I was cautious about phishing sites and e-mails. But that seemed pretty basic knowledge to me.

  “Let me see what you have here . . .” Peggin’s fingers flew over the keys and a moment later, she broke out into a wide smile. “You have a really good antivirus program; it offers a proxy server, a firewall, and safe-surfing options. Let’s just enable these and we should be okay, unless they’re computer geniuses. Go ahead.”

  When I clicked on the Enter Here link, it brought up a pop-up window in which to enter my name and password. “Definitely members only.” I flipped back to the other tab, where the list of names was still visible. There were at least one hundred names, though a D preceded a number of them.

  “You know, I don’t think that the person who created this website realized that a search on names might bring up the page. I think they meant this to be private, but they didn’t understand how search engine spiders work.” Peggin frowned.

  “Okay, let’s copy the names down, in case they get wise to the fact that their organization isn’t as protected as they seem to want it to be.”