Jan Burke - Dear Irene

In between calls, I cheerfully went through my mail sorting routine, opening Christmas cards and humming “Jingle Bells” to myself. All the same, when I was down to the final group, I opened them carefully, using the letter opener to pull them out, so that I didn’t touch the contents with my hands. Four flyers for meetings I would not attend. One more to open. Did it really matter that I was careful? I stopped humming when I unfolded it on my desk.

Dear Cassandra,

Have you missed me? You must be patient.

Thalia is next. It has already begun.

You tell me you need time to prepare. I will give you the time you need. Wait for Janus.

Enjoy the Saturnalia, Cassandra.

Thalia will learn the agony of Tantalus and more. Who helped Psyche to sort the seeds that

Venus placed before her?

Your beloved,

Thanatos

My phone was ringing again, but I didn’t answer it. As soon as it stopped, I called Doris, and in as calm a voice as I could manage, asked her to hold all my calls.

“I don’t think John will like it,” she began. “We’re getting a big reaction to your story.”

“Yes, well, I’ll talk to John.”

I called John on the intercom, asked for a moment of his time, used a folded strip of paper to cover my fingers when I gingerly picked the letter up by a corner, grabbed a mythology book, and somehow made it to John’s office without dropping anything.

He looked up from reading copy and raised an eyebrow as I dangled the letter forward and dropped it on his desk.

“Is it going to bite?” he asked sarcastically. But his face set into a frown and he swore under his breath when he saw what it was. He read it, then said, “Since we hadn’t heard any more from him, I was hoping this creep had been run over by a car or something.”

“Are you going to turn it over to the police?”

“You know how I feel about that, Kelly. I’m not going to let the Las Piernas Police Department tell me what we can and cannot publish, but I’m not going to impede a homicide investigation. Have you already called Frank about this?”

I was dismayed by the question. “Of course not.”

“Just wondering how far all this nooky-nooky stuff had addled your reporter’s sensibilities. So what does this letter mean?”

“Thalia is one of the Graces. She represents Good Cheer. Not much of a clue as to the identity of the next victim, I’m afraid.”

“‘Enjoy the Saturnalia,’” John read. “Does he mean Saturday?”

“Maybe, but I would guess he means Christmas, because he tells me to wait for Janus. January is named after the god Janus.”

“That’s Roman, not Greek, right?” he asked.

“Right. Thanatos mixes in some Roman references in this letter. Saturnalia was a Roman winter festival in honor of the god Saturn. It was held in late December and there was feasting and exchanging of gifts. Someone once told me that’s why Christmas is celebrated in December, because the early Roman Church made use of a pagan holiday for their own – converting it, you might say.”

“‘Thalia will learn the agony of Tantalus and more,’” John read aloud.

“Tantalus – his name gave us the word ‘tantalizing.’ He’s in Hades, and stands in a pool of water that shrinks away from him whenever he bends to drink from it. When he stands up, it fills up again. And over his head, there’s a fruit tree with wonderful fruits that are always just beyond his grasp. He’s always hungry and thirsty, with relief within sight, but out of reach.”

“Not short on cruelty in those stories, were they?”

“No. But Tantalus had it coming. He killed his own son and boiled him in a cauldron, then invited the gods to a banquet with his son as the soup du jour.”

“Cripes.” He was looking at me as if I had authored the tale.

“That’s really the way the story goes,” I protested.

“Tantalus thought he could show that the gods were fools, but they knew what was on the menu and decided to skip a meal and punish him. They restored his son to life. Cannibalism was frowned upon by the gods. They didn’t like measly little mortals trying to outwit them, either.”

He shook his head. “What about Psyche and the seeds?”

“Oh, that’s a great story – Cupid and Psyche.” I started to thumb through the book.

“Just give me the part about the seeds,” John said, looking like he wasn’t ready to hear too much more about the Greeks and Romans before lunch. “It’s not gory, is it?”

“No, no, it’s a love story,” I said, reading over it quickly. “It’s told in Latin by Apuleius.”

“Never mind that. What happens in the story?”

“Psyche was a beautiful woman. Venus was jealous of her. It was actually being claimed that she was more beautiful than the goddess, which offended Venus to no end. So Venus sent her son, Cupid, on a mission to make Psyche fall in love with the most vile creature on earth. But once he saw Psyche, Cupid ended up falling in love with her instead.”

“What about the seeds?” John groused.

“The middle part of the story is really very-”

“Look, get to the seeds. Someday when I’m in a better mood, you can tell me all of it.”

“You, in a better mood? I suspect we’ll be sitting by a very, very warm fire. Our host will have horns, but we’ll have lots of time on our hands-”

“Kelly, I swear to God-”

“Okay, okay. Condensed version. Psyche and Cupid loved each other, but as things happened, they were separated. Psyche decided to search for him, but Venus put a few obstacles in her way. Venus gathered a huge pile of the tiniest seeds – poppy seeds, millet, things like that – and told Psyche to sort them by nightfall. As Venus knew, it would have been impossible.”

“So who helped her?” John said through gritted teeth.

“Pardon?”

“The question in the letter! Who the hell helped her?” he shouted.

“Ants.”

“Ants.”

“Yes, the ants took pity on Psyche and an army of them helped her. Venus came back to find the seeds sorted. There’s another story about ants-”

“Never mind,” John said. “This guy Thanatos doesn’t make a lot of sense. Some Muse of Good Cheer-”

“Grace of Good Cheer.”

“Okay. Some Grace of Good Cheer will know the agony of Tantalus, he wishes you a Merry Christmas – or happy Saturnalia – wants you to wait until January, and puts something in here about ants.”

“I agree it doesn’t make much sense. The last one didn’t make much sense either, until after the professor was murdered. Are we going to run it?” I asked.

“Of course.” He used the intercom to call Lydia into his office.

“What about Frank?” I asked.

He thought for a moment, then said, “He can have the original.” He picked up the letter and walked over to the copier with it before I could protest about fingerprints. I didn’t say anything about it, knowing it was unlikely that the forensics lab could lift a good print from the paper, even if Thanatos had not used gloves.

Lydia came into the office, and John handed her a copy of the letter. The minute she saw what it was, she looked over to me. I tried for nonchalance. I could see she didn’t buy it.

“Tell Mark Baker to get on this right away,” John was saying. “Kelly can fill him in on the translation. And tell Design I want to run the letter on A-1 tomorrow – anybody has any objections, see me. I don’t see how they can argue. For all we know, someone out there may be able to foresee that they’re in danger if they read this.”

A passage in the letter came to mind. “‘It has already begun,’” I quoted, suddenly feeling a little shaky. “I think we may be too late to warn the victim.”