M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

My fingers stopped tapping.

“What is it?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Eric’s money,” I said. “How do you think he got it?”

“He inherited it, dear,” my lawyer said. “Much the way you did.”

“Inherited it?” I said, shifting my phone to the other ear. Chogyi Jake’s eyebrows rose a degree and he leaned forward in his chair.

“Yes,” she said. “The structures were a bit different, of course. Regulations on these things do change over the course of a few decades. But he came into possession in 1984, on the death of Michael Bishop Heller. He would have been your great-uncle. He was a charming man. I actually met him once, but that was when I’d just started with the firm. He still wore hats, and really men stopped doing that after John Kennedy.”

“Old-school.”

“Very much.”

“And—I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Where did, um, hat guy . . . ?”

“Michael Bishop Heller came into possession on the death of Amelia Norwich in 1966. She, I believe, had it from Nellie Skinner-Bowes in 1944, who had it from her father, Anderson Skinner-Bowes in 1927. The original principal was put in trust in 1866, and it was fairly large then, and primarily in gold. Of course, the Civil War had just ended, so the assumption is that Elias Barker, who actually made the investments, was relocating from someplace in the Confederacy.”

“And you just know all this stuff off the top of your head?”

I could hear the smile in her voice when she answered. “You are our most important client, dear. You must know that?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. So no one ever, I don’t know, got a gambling habit or lost a bunch of money in a divorce or anything?”

“No,” she said. “The investment strategy has been very consistent. Long-term, medium-risk investments with occasional more speculative short-term adventures at the client’s direct instruction. There isn’t a five-year period when the overall capital has gone down. Your uncle, God rest him, was a bit more profligate than you are, but even his habits never threatened to cut into the capital.”

“You mean he spent more than I do?”

“Considerably.”

“Okay, in the last three years, I’ve bought a house, a car, a bunch of motorcycles, God knows how many plane tickets, and started an ongoing research grant. Like on whims. I just called and had you do it.”

“The research grant was new,” she said, her voice a little wistful. “That’s mostly because it’s an ongoing expense. But we put some language in the paperwork that gets us a share in any patents that come from it, so there may still be a return. But all in all, no, dear. You fly on commercial airlines, for heaven’s sake.”

“First-class, though,” I said.

“Jayné, dear, I wouldn’t let you fly coach. I believe in frugality, but there are limits.”

I licked my lips. “How much of his expenditures do you have records of?”

“Well, I can’t say what he paid for in cash unless he forwarded on a receipt. But for any large-scale purchases, of course I’ll have full records.”

“Going back how far?”

“I already said, dear. Eighteen sixty-six.”

“You’ve still got the original records?”

“Yes.”

“Can I . . . how can I review those? I mean, Eric’s first, but if I can see all of them, that would be amazing.”

“Come to Denver. I’ll have the archives opened. Are you thinking of an audit?”

“Less of an audit,” I said. “More of an overview. Orientation. Something like that.”

“I would love to see you again, and I’d be delighted to go over any of our records with you. When would you like to come out?”

I looked at Chogyi Jake. His expression was the same calm smile as always. I wished sometimes he’d be a little easier to read. Or . . . no. That wasn’t right. I wished sometimes he’d make a few of my decisions for me, just so I wouldn’t have to. We could get in the car now and be there by morning. Going back to Santa Fe would have taken longer.

I had the visceral memory of the three tattooed wizards in my childhood home.

“There’s something I need to clear up here,” I said. “It may take a few days.”

“The week after New Year’s?”

“Let’s aim for that,” I said. “I’m not sure when exactly I’ll get there, though.”

“I’ll pencil it in for now. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Can I get a list of those names? The people who had the money back from whenever?”

“Will e-mail do?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It will be to you momentarily.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

We exchanged a couple rounds of pleasantries and farewells, and I dropped the connection and tossed my phone onto the bed.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Isn’t it just? I’ve got to say, I feel kind of stupid for not thinking of this before.”

“We aren’t businessmen,” Chogyi Jake said. “We fight vampires and demons.”

“Ex kind of was living in a garage, wasn’t he?”

“With a very nice car. He does like cars,” Chogyi Jake said. “I take it we’re staying for the wedding?”

“No. I mean, maybe. We’re staying until I can find the Invisible College and make damned sure they leave my family alone.”

He frowned. The light from the window caught the plane of his cheek, illuminating the spray of faint stubble there. A few whiskers down near his chin were coming in white.

“It may be difficult to find them,” he said. “They are like you that way.”

“Difficult for magic to track down,” I said. “Well, we’re clever.”

“And pure of heart,” he said. It was so deadpan, no one who didn’t know him would have recognized it as a joke. I laughed, though.

“So we should ace it, right?” I said. “Let’s go tell Ex what’s up. And maybe order a pizza. I know a really good pizza joint.”

“Thank God for the native guide.”

ELIAS BARKER. Toomey Conaville. Sarah Conaville. Elmer Bowes. Anderson Skinner-Bowes. Nellie Skinner-Bowes. Amelia Norwich. Michael Bishop Heller. Eric Heller. Jayné Heller. From 1866 to tonight. Turned out, I was part of a tradition. There was a line of people pressing back into history, and I had something to do with them. Some commonality. Literally, some business . I didn’t have any idea what it was, but I would. All I had right now was the moments that the baton had been passed. I wondered if they’d all been as lost and confused as I was, or if there was some manual that was supposed to come with the fortune. Something that explained the riders and my relationship to them.

Nothing was going to excuse what Eric had done, but context might haul it up into explicable territory. That would be a start. It might even be enough.

I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Ozzie snuck onto the foot of my bed and I didn’t have the heart to kick her off. She was snoring now, her legs twitching occasionally as she chased some dream-world squirrel. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep. In the hours since dawn, I’d found out I was actually Eric’s daughter, that my mother had been possessed by the Black Sun and was still half-crazy from the experience. That Eric’s money hadn’t just been Eric’s but had belonged to a long list of mysterious people leading back into the fog of history. I’d had whole years that were less eventful than today, and it left me feeling a little stunned.

Dad was not my father. I kept poking at the idea, waiting for it to explode on me. This was supposed to be where my whole sense of myself shifted, and it didn’t seem trivial. But it also didn’t change who I was. I’d been conceived in ritual sex magic orchestrated by my evil uncle while my mother was possessed by a rider who was also quite possibly bound against her will. That was way creepier than the joyless missionary-position indignity that I would have put my money on before, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I’d had a movie-set childhood where all the things I trusted in were lies and deceptions, but I kind of knew that already. What exactly was behind the curtain didn’t change much.