Private Demon

"This is not about harming her. It's about saving her. You think you know Richard, but I am the only one who has been close enough to know him completely. I know exactly what he would do to Alexandra. I will never permit her to suffer that fate, even if it means killing her." He handed the files and the disks to Jaus. "You may send this by private courier to Dundellan Castle. Mark them for Richard's eyes only."

"If Alexandra discovers you are doing this, she will leave you," Jaus warned.

"If she did, she would not remember it," Cyprien said. He met Jaus's narrow gaze. "Alexandra is still human enough to be affected by any Kyn talent. With mine, I can make her forget anything I wish."

Jema wandered down the hall and checked through each open door she passed, but she couldn't find her mother and Daniel. She was about to give up and return to the party when she saw a closed door and heard her mother complaining.

There she is. She opened the door to look in, and saw her mother and Daniel with their backs toward her. They were looking through the shelves of what appeared to be Jaus's library. She opened her mouth to ask them what they were doing.

"I don't want to put her in your private hospital," Meryl said. "People will ask too many questions. I've told you, the only way to be sure is to kill her."

As if she were sleepwalking, Jema slipped inside the room.

"I never agreed to murder, Meryl." Daniel took down a heavy volume to look behind it. "Our arrangement won't hurt anyone. Jema will be locked away, safe and sound, and you'll have her millions to spend."

"They're not her millions; they're mine," her mother snapped.

The doctor sighed. "Once Jema turns thirty, there's no more risk of the estate going to charity. She inherits everything James had placed in trust for her. We've done the paperwork; you're her legal guardian. The board of trustees will no longer have any say as to what you do with the money."

Jema pressed herself back against a wall, but neither her mother nor Bradford noticed her.

"It still won't be mine until she's dead," Meryl told him.

"I don't know how you can be so callous," Daniel complained. "Jema is your daughter. She's all you have left of James, for God's sake."

"James hated me because of her. He blamed me for almost killing her in the cave-in. Did he care that I nearly died? That it turned me into a cripple? No. All he wanted was his precious daughter." Meryl wheeled over to begin searching a desk.

"James was upset over what you did," Daniel said. "If he had lived, he would have forgiven you."

"He would have divorced me, you idiot. Why do you think he changed his will before he left for Greece? It was as if he knew I'd spend the next thirty years keeping the sickly little bitch alive just so I could get what I was due." Meryl looked over at her reflection in the floor-length mirror. "I can't stand another minute of it. Do you know what it's like, watching her walk around and smile and do everything I can't? She should be in this chair. No. She should have died in that godforsaken cave. Then James wouldn't have stopped loving me."

Jema looked across the room, aware that in a moment Meryl would move close enough to see Jema's reflection in the mirror. Jema in the mirror… Jema in the mirror… the conversation she'd had with Luisa, the one she'd forgotten.

The one I refused to think about. It all came back to Jema, who stood paralyzed and lost in the memory.

Roy's looking for something for your mama. Luisa had stopped by Jema's office after she had finished her shift. You know if we got an ah-midge, Miz Jem?

She had smiled. What's an ah-midge?

Don't you make fun, now, Luisa said, lifting her nose and posing in a deadly imitation of the events coordinator in a huff. I'm going to night school. I get my diploma; I'm gonna start college courses. Then you'll see—I'll talk as nice as you, and so will my baby.

I know you will. Jema admired Luisa and how hard she worked, not only to support herself and the baby she was expecting, but to improve her situation in life. She made a silent promise to do what she could to help the girl.

Luisa had looked out of Jema's office and frowned. Maybe it's Roy you looking for, Miz Jem. See your nameplate in the mirror over there?

Jema had gotten up to look. The sign on her office door, JEMA SHAW, was reflected in a display mirror that had been temporarily moved downstairs, and read WASH AMEJ.

See? Jema backward spell ah-midge. Don't worry, Ms. Jema. I won't tell no one. I know how to keep a secret.

Luisa had left, giggling over the joke. The next day her mother had called, choking out the news through her sobs that Luisa had been attacked and burned, and was not expected to survive the night.

The words pounded inside her head.

Jema. Amej. Image. Homage.

Meryl went past the mirror and began poking through books on another shelf. Jema looked into the mirror, where she had no reflection, and went cold. The same thing had happened that night, at the museum, after Luisa had left. When she had stood looking at the reflection of her name. She had been thinking about Meryl. Thinking about how her mother looked at her sometimes, as if she wished Jema would just disappear. Then it happened, just as it did now. She had turned transparent, and then invisible.

Her image slowly appeared in the mirror, and then faded away again.

The museum had not been the first time. There had been other times she had forgotten, when she was a little girl. It had taken an hour of staring into the mirror at the museum before she could make herself reappear. That was what had frightened her so much that she refused to remember it. She'd hated mirrors ever since she was a child, and now she knew why.

Jema stared at her reflection. If I can control it…

Daniel Bradford walked right past Jema without seeing her. "I wonder if this is something special," he said, opening a glass display case and taking out a long, folded length of ancient linen. "Look at this." He showed Meryl one side of the cloth, upon which was the image of a Christlike face.

"It's a cheap reproduction of the Mandylion," she snapped. "Claimed to be one of the possible burial shrouds of Christ—and a piece of religious nonsense. The Homage would be something Greek. Something older, perhaps a pot or a carved chest."

"I've sometimes wondered if Jema wasn't the real Homage of Athos James brought back from Greece," Daniel said, his eyes crinkling with amusement. "After all, he did find her in the cave, where you gave birth to her. He certainly treated her as if she were some rare and priceless object. And he left all his money to her, and not a penny to you. Maybe it was his little joke."

"Only you would think of something that dim-witted, Daniel."

"Someone has to, I suppose." Daniel turned and looked directly at Jema. He walked over and took a book out of a shelf not six inches from her trembling shoulder. He sniffed. "Smells like Jaus is having his friends bob for apples out there."

Jema waited until Daniel walked away before she silently opened the door and fled.

Frantically Jema searched the masks of the guests, looking for anyone who might be Alexandra or Thierry. She saw a group of late arrivals walking in and hurried over to them. They were dressed in medieval animal costumes, with very realistic-looking masks.

She stopped a few feet from a man in a hyena mask. She didn't have to pull any hairs from the mask to recognize the fiber. It was the same hair she had found on the hate-crime murder victim. It was also the same type of mask the men who attacked her had worn.

Daniel Bradford considered himself a patient man. He'd had to be, working for Meryl Shaw. It was strange that after three decades of planning, waiting, researching, and doing what he was told—or, at least, acting as if he were—that he discovered that his infinite patience had suddenly come to an end.

"It's not here." Meryl slumped in her wheelchair. "Can we get into any other rooms?"

He set aside the shroud and put on a pair of latex gloves before he opened the medical case he was never without. Tonight he had tucked inside it a silver flask filled with Meryl's favorite brand of bourbon and a crystal glass.

"With all these people, it's going to look very strange." Daniel filled the glass from the flask and brought it to her. "Here, my dear. Have a drink."

"How thoughtful." Meryl sounded sarcastic, but she drank down half the glass with two swallows. "Oh, this is useless. Once I have the money, I can hire people to search this place. Find Jema, and let's go home. You can call the hospital and cancel the arrangements when we get back to the house."

"As I've told you repeatedly, Meryl, I'm not going to kill her." Daniel picked up the shroud and tugged at the material. Bits of ancient spun flax flaked from the linen onto his gloves, but the material was still remarkably strong. He wondered if it truly might be the burial shroud of Christ. Wouldn't that be appropriate?

"You'll do as you're told." She drained the glass and dropped it on the carpet. "Or would you like me to call the police and tell them how you've been practicing medicine illegally for the last thirty years?"

"I've done nothing but help you and Jema." That was mostly true. He had taken some steps to assure that Meryl would never leave her wheelchair, and he had burned the journal he had found among James Shaw's personal effects when they were sent from Athos to the States.

"They won't care, and this time they won't simply bankrupt you and take your license. They'll see to it that you'll go to prison." Meryl smiled. "Especially when I tell them how you're implicated in two murders: Roy's and Jema's."

Anger, something Daniel rarely felt, finally reared its small, ugly head. "I couldn't stop you from killing Roy, but I won't allow you to hurt Jema. She really is the Homage of Athos, you know."

"She's worthless, and you can't stop me, you pathetic weakling." Meryl shoved aside a stack of books, uncaring of the noise they made as they landed on the floor. "Who do you think they're going to believe is the murderer? The doctor convicted of experimenting on mindless old people at his nursing home, or a bereaved, helpless woman in a wheelchair who took him into her home and trusted him?" ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">