Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
“But who’s taking the risks now, may I ask? Who’s actually preparing to go onstage in front of everyone, armed with nothing but someone else’s words and her own native wit and talent, to be cheered or jeered when the curtain comes down? You, my dear; you, and me.”
“And Billy Calthorpe, and Anita MacNeil, among others,” Jess reminded him, amused to see Sinclair’s actorly egotism obliterating the lesser members of the cast.
“Jessamyn Croft,” he said with a sigh, “I wonder how you’ve come this far in the theater—and believe me, you have come far—without losing your sweetness and generosity.”
She blushed and began to deny any special virtue, but Sinclair touched her lips with his forefinger to stop her protestations. “As one who long ago lost his own best qualities, I know whereof I speak; and I know how important it is to be reminded that one can be both a fine performer and a decent human being.”
She was suddenly very aware of his physical presence beside her on the bench seat, the deep and supple voice flowed, the barest pressure of his thigh against her own.
Good grief, this was all she needed: advances from an attractive man, an accomplished man—a married man, no matter how rockily. She had to work with him, closely, for an unspecified length of time. Besides that, she liked him. What could she say to preserve the necessary distance between them without ruffling his feathers?
There was a considerable gap in their ages, and if she felt it he certainly must. Actors are sensitive about age, and with good reason. Then there was the production to think of. Backstage romances had a way of causing more trouble than they were worth (just look at her and Nick, starting out besotted with each other in “Barefoot in the Park” and look at them now).
The cab halted and a uniformed doorman opened the door. Upstairs in the foyer of the penthouse apartment, Walter met them, drink in hand, his beard bristling and his eyes glittering with energy.
“Jess!” he cried, turning away to call out to the crowd. “Here she is, everyone—our Eva in the making, the benchmark performance!”
He left Sinclair with Jess’s coat in his hands and drew her quickly after into the thick of the mob, introducing her to strangers, many of them bohemian friends of members of the company. Some of the dramatically turned out women, with stark makeup and outrageous clothes, looked more like performers than Jess did. And not just the women; the men too.
She glanced covertly at a handsome poet with a dramatic tattoo and hair shaven to a fine fuzz all over his scalp. He was deep in discussion with someone with an impressive, ram-like nose down which he gazed with heavy-lidded eyes like a Byronic laudanum addict of the nineteenth century.
The room was large and high-ceilinged, paneled and plastered with old-fashioned opulence. It was already crowded to bursting, hot and noisy. The waitstaff had to eel their way through the crowd, performing unnoticed prodigies of balance to avoid tipping drinks and finger food down the guests’ collars.
Jess had done more than one stint working for a caterer before her first theatrical successes had made that unnecessary. Now she felt for these hired servants, at the same time hoping fervently that she would never be reduced to that kind of work again.
Walter, who had been waylaid by their host Joshua Whitely—a heavy, round-faced man wearing a rather endearing expression of dazed delight—caught her eye and beckoned to her. Jess foresaw entrapment in one of those awkward situations where she would be introduced to someone she should flatter and charm so that he (it was usually a he) would write a check for a new computer, or additional lights, or a replacement for the worn stage curtain, or whatever was at the top of the theater’s current wish list.
She was an actress, not a saleswoman; she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the effort. She let some people step in front of her so Walter wouldn’t see her slip out through the French doors and onto the terrace.
Cold air only lightly flavored with cigarette smoke refreshed her. Several people stood by the wrought-iron railing at one end of the terrace, arguing about unions and ticket prices. They were mere silhouettes against the brilliantly lit buildings of the mid-Manhattan skyline, which glowed under a few washed-out stars.
Glad to stop smiling for a moment, Jess walked to the other end of the terrace and relaxed against the iron railing. It was too cold to stay out long without her coat, but she was grateful for a moment of relief. From here the conversation inside sounded like the insane babble of an asylum in revolt.
So much hope, so much excitement—and so much of it riding on her Eva. She should get herself home as soon as possible, make hot cocoa, and curl up in front of the television. If she stayed around here somebody might offer her something stronger than wine, and she might be tempted to accept.
Emotional extremes were part of the performer’s job, and at its best acting was a thrilling job like no other. According to a person’s nerves and nature, there could be a heavy price to pay for taking the roller-coaster ride. She didn’t condemn colleagues who indulged in recreational substances to relieve the stress, but she steered clear, herself.
So, go home.
But home was empty.
Nobody here but us chickens.
She began to find something attractive in the idea of slipping away for a nightcap with Sinclair, who for the moment had no loving wife to go home to—any more than Jess had someone of her own.
Dumb idea.
Jess had once fallen hard for a married man. It wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat.
Better just get out of here
, she told herself; but how to get through the crush inside without being endlessly diverted and detained? If only that airplane droning overhead were a flying saucer that would drop a transport beam down for her, she could slip away from all this uproar without having to first plunge back into it.
“Excuse me, but you will spill your drink,” said a male voice quite close by. Startled, she did spill the drink, splashing cold vodka and tonic across her instep.
“God, you scared me!” she exclaimed.
“May I take your glass?” said the stranger, from the shadow of a tall shrub in a wooden planter. He reached out to lift the glass from her fingers and set it down at the base of the evergreen. “Someone will retrieve it later, don’t you think?”
The shadow of the bush beside him seemed to stretch to cloak the man in its darkness. She could just make out the line of his cheek and the shine of his eye. His English was accented in an unfamiliar way. Curious, she cast around for some comment that would draw an answer from him. Accents were part of her professional interest.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d forgotten that I even had a drink in my hand. I might have dropped it on some poor passerby’s head down there.”
“Ah, well,” replied the other, his quiet voice shaded with humor, “an accident of life in the great city. This is part of the excitement people look for here, isn’t it?”
“Only a newcomer to New York would think so,” she said. “Mostly what people crave is peace, quiet, and not to get mugged.”
He leaned one elbow on the terrace railing behind him, his face still shadowed. “All milieus have their dangers.”
His voice was a youthful tenor, liquid with a curious, uninflected intimacy. It was as if she knew him so well that he didn’t need to stress his feelings for her to know what they were. It threw her back to the early days of her relationship with Nick, who had simply opened his heart to her as if even on such short acquaintance she couldn’t mistake his meaning.
“Believe me,” she said, “if there’s one thing New York has too much of, its dangers. And you are—?”
“Someone with a taste for theater but a small tolerance for large, noisy parties,” he answered. “From your tone, I think I have somehow offended?” He made a sharp little bow with his head, a European gesture. “I beg your pardon if I have annoyed you.”
Who was this guy? Jess felt a little thrill of interest.
“Are you a friend of the Whitelys?” she asked.
“Mr. Whitely asks me to consult about his collection.”
Jess thought of the various items she’d glimpsed on display in the apartment—Japanese kimonos spread flat like animal hides to show their designs, South American pottery that ran to goofy-looking little clay people doing uninterpretable things, exquisitely framed historic photographs of old New York.
“Which collection?”
“Most of them,” he answered. “My expertise is broad.”
“Are you a collector yourself?”
“Ah, no,” he said. “A traveler must keep his possessions light, isn’t that what they say?”
At that moment Sinclair hailed Jess commandingly from the open doorway; she spotted his aquiline profile silhouetted against the brightness inside. “Jessamyn Croft, what are you doing hiding out here? Come in and laugh at my stories; none of these stuffy young people will!”
As she turned to answer, Jess felt the hidden stranger stepped past her with a murmured apology—his breath stirred the hair of her temple, he passed so close—and she saw a man hardly taller than herself, broad-shouldered and elegantly tailored, cross the terrace and slip by Sinclair. In two strides the stranger had vanished into the crowd.
Her blood seemed to buzz as if she’d had something very odd indeed to drink. She wished she’d been able to see the stranger’s face.
Warnings from the Past
N
ick woke with a gasp and lay staring at the ceiling: bad dreams again, leaving him—where?
The elaborate plaster work around the base of the ceiling light fixture was alien, the mattress too soft, some kind of freshener in the air—everything was strange and disorienting. His leg ached and his heart was heavy with anxiety left over from his dreams.
No sign of dawn yet; he could only have been asleep for a couple of hours, after returning to the hotel from shadowing Jessamyn and her actor-escort to Joshua Whitely’s party. Ridiculous behavior, like some fifth-rate Bogart imitation in a crude noir film! He was no investigator, and no actor either; he ought to leave such shenanigans to puffed up stage personalities like Sinclair (who, to be fair, was a very good actor; Nick had seen him onstage before and had been impressed).
At least Jess hadn’t been wandering around all by herself in the middle of the night. And Sinclair was probably a more welcome escort than Nick would have been. He had worked pretty damned hard to open a gulf between himself and her, hadn’t he? That much of an actor he was.
But he couldn’t just leave Jess to the protection of others, people who with the best will in the world still had no idea of the danger she might be in; any more than she did herself.
He groaned and threw his forearm across his eyes. It had seemed so simple, when he had first made his plans. Stalking the woman he had meant to spend his life with instead of turning that new and happy page! It was a poor exchange. But he confronted another fate now, as the head of his family. What was unavoidable had to be accepted, didn’t it? With good grace, if possible.
The whole weird situation made him feel a thousand heavy years older than his true age. Older than he had been before the accident, that was certain.
If only he had an ally in all this; if only his father were still here.
His mind, counting his losses, came as always to his father, Charles Griffin.
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?”