The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“You think so?”

“Of course,” he said. “I knew the first time I encountered her and heard her endless speeches about your ‘charmed life’ and ‘irresponsible behavior’ and all her advice on how you ought to plan your entire existence.”

“Everybody knew it,” said Reuben. “Everybody. I was the only one who didn’t know it. But why were we ever engaged then?”

“Hard to say,” Felix answered. “But she does not want a child now and so she will sign the baby over to you, and I’d act on that promptly if I were you. And she will happily marry your best friend, Mort, of whom she is not mortally resentful apparently, and may perhaps have a child with him later on. She’s a practical woman, and she’s beautiful, and she’s very smart.”

“Yes to all of that,” said Reuben.

His mind was running with the most unexpected thoughts, thoughts of baby clothes, and cribs and nannies, and picture books, and soft fleeting images of a little boy seated in the window seat against the diamond-paned glass and him, Reuben, reading to that child from a book. Why, all Reuben’s favorite children’s books were still in the attic on Russian Hill, weren’t they, the lavishly illustrated Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and the venerable old poetry books from which Phil so loved to read.

Some hazy sense of the future emerged in which a boy was striding through the front door with a backpack full of textbooks, and then it seemed he was grown into a man. And the future shifted, clouded, became a fog in which Reuben would have to leave the warm circle of his family, and his son—have to, have to flee—unable any longer to disguise the fact that he wasn’t growing older, that nothing was changing in him—but then this boy, this young man, this son, would be with them, with Grace and Phil, and Jim, and with Celeste, too, and Mort perhaps, a part of them, after Reuben was gone.

He looked at the windows, and suddenly this little world he’d constructed collapsed. In his memory, he saw Marchent beyond the glass, and he was shuddering once again.

It seemed a long time passed in which Reuben sat there in silence, and Felix stood quietly by the fire.

“My boy,” said Felix softly. “I hate to intrude on your happiness just now, but I was wondering. Would you come along with me, perhaps, to the Nideck Cemetery? I thought you might want to come. I talked to our attorney this morning, you know, Arthur Hammermill. And well, it seems Marchent was indeed buried there.”

“Oh yes, I do want to go with you,” said Reuben. “But there’s something I must tell you first. I saw her again. It was last night.”

And slowly, methodically, he relived the chilling details.

8

THEY HEADED FOR the Nideck Cemetery under a leaden sky, the rain reduced to a drizzle in the surrounding forest. Felix was at the wheel of his heavy Mercedes sedan.

Arthur Hammermill had seen to Marchent’s interment in the family mausoleum, Felix explained, according to clear instructions in Marchent’s will. Hammermill himself attended a small ceremony for which a few residents of Nideck had gathered, including the Galtons and their cousins, though there had been no public announcement at all. As for the murderous brothers, they had been cremated, based on their own instructions to “friends.”

“I’m ashamed that I never thought to visit her grave,” said Reuben. “I’m ashamed. There can’t be the slightest doubt that whatever is causing her to haunt, she’s unhappy.”

Felix never once took his eyes off the road.

“I didn’t visit the grave myself,” said Felix in a tormented voice. “I had some convenient notion that she’d been buried in South America. But that is no excuse.” His voice went dry as if he were on the verge of breaking down. “And she was the very last of my own blood descendants.”

Reuben looked at him, wanting so badly to ask how this had played out.

“The very last of those related to me by blood in this world, as far as I know. Since every other scion of my family has long ago withered or vanished. And I didn’t visit her grave, no, I did not. And that is why we are doing it now, isn’t it? Both of us are visiting her grave.”

The cemetery was behind the town, and occupied about two city blocks, flanked by scattered houses on all four sides. The road here was patchy, badly in need of repair, but the homes were all vintage Victorian, small, simple, but well-built frame houses with peak roofs much like the Victorians Reuben had always loved in countless other old California towns. That several here and there were brightly painted with fresh pastel colors and white trim struck him as good for the town of Nideck. There were multicolored Christmas lights twinkling in windows here and there. And the cemetery itself, bound by an iron picket fence with more than one open gate, was rather a picturesque spot with well-kept grass and a great sprinkling of old monuments.

The rain had let up, and they didn’t need the umbrellas they’d brought with them, though Reuben wound his scarf around his neck against the eternal chill. The sky was dark and featureless, and a white mist enveloped the top of the forest.

Small rounded tombstones made up most of the graves. Many had rich scrollwork and deep lettering, and here and there Reuben glimpsed a poetic epitaph. There was one small mausoleum, a house of stone blocks with a flat roof and an iron door, and this bore the name NIDECK in ornate letters, while several other Nideck tombstones were scattered to its left and right.

Felix had a key for the iron door.

It made Reuben very uneasy to hear the key grind in the old lock, but they were soon standing in a very dusty little passage illuminated by a single leaded-glass window in the back of the little building, with evidence of what must have been coffin-length crypts on either side.

Marchent had been laid to rest to the right, and a rectangular stone had been fitted in place near the head or the foot of the coffin, Reuben could not guess which. It gave her name, Marchent Sophia Nideck, the dates of her life, and a line of poetry, which surprised Reuben. It read: WE MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER OR DIE. The poet was W. H. Auden, and his name was inscribed in small letters beneath the quote.

Reuben felt light-headed. He felt trapped and sick, and almost on the edge of collapsing in this little space.

Quickly, he hurried outside, back into the damp air, and left Felix alone inside the little building. He was trembling, and he stood still, fighting the nausea.

It seemed more than ever ghastly to him, perfectly ghastly, that Marchent was dead. He saw Celeste’s face, he saw some sweetly illuminated image of the child he was now dreaming of, he saw all the faces of those he loved, including Laura, beautiful Laura, and he felt the grief for Marchent like a sickness that would turn him inside out.