Katherine Neville - The Fire

‘Or at least, it’s cooking our dinner,’ she added with a smile. ‘I may not know much about chess, but I do know a lot about calories.’

‘Calories?’ said Lily in astonishment. ‘Like the kind you eat ?’

‘There’s no such thing as a calorie,’ I pointed out. I thought I could see where Key might be going with this.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I beg to differ,’ said Lily, patting her waist. ‘I’ve packed on a few of those nonexistent “things” in my time.’

‘I’m afraid I do not understand,’ Vartan chimed in. ‘We were talking about a dangerous game of chess where people were killed. Now are we discussing food?’

‘A calorie isn’t food,’ I said. ‘It’s a unit of thermal measure. And I think Key here may have just resolved an important problem. My mother knows that Nokomis Key is my only friend here in the valley, and that if I ever had a problem she’d be the first and only one I would turn to, to help resolve it. That’s Key’s job, she’s a calorimetrician. She flies into remote regions and studies the thermal properties of everything from geysers to volcanoes. I think Key’s right. That’s why my mother built this fire: as a big, fat, calorie-laden clue.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Lily. Looking more than exhausted, she went over and swept Key aside. ‘I need to recline for a moment on some of my thermal properties. What on earth are you two talking about?’

Vartan looked lost as well.

‘I’m saying that my mother is underneath that log – or at least, she was, ’ I told them. ‘She must have had the tree placed here months ago, on removable props, so when she was ready she could exit through the stone air shaft under the floor and light the fire from below. I think the shaft may vent to a cave just downhill.’

‘Isn’t that a rather Faustian exit?’ said Lily. ‘And what does it have to do with the Montglane Service or the game of chess?’

‘It has nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘This isn’t about a chess game – that’s the whole point, don’t you see?’

‘It has to do with the formula,’ Key pointed out with a smile. This was, after all, her area of expertise. ‘You know, the formula you told us the nun Mireille worked on in Grenoble, with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The same Fourier who was also the author of The Analytic Theory of Heat. ’

When our two brilliant grandmasters sat there like lumps, staring at us with blank expressions, I figured it was time to clarify.

‘Mother didn’t invite us all here and then leave us in the lurch because she was trying to make a clever defense in a chess game,’ I told them. ‘As Lily said, she’s already made her move by inviting us here and leaving that piece of cloth right where she hoped Lily might find it.’

I paused and looked Key in the eye. How right she was – it was time to get cooking, and all those clues Mother had left now seemed to fall into place.

‘Mother invited us here,’ I said, ‘because she wants us to collect the pieces and solve the formula of the Montglane Service.’

‘Did you ever discover what the formula was?’ Key repeated Vartan’s question.

‘Yes, in a way – though I’ve never believed it myself,’ said Lily. ‘Alexandra’s parents and her uncle seemed to think it possible that it was true. You may judge for yourselves from what I’ve already told you. Minnie Renselaas claimed it was true. She claimed she was leaving the Game because of the formula created two hundred years ago. She claimed that she, herself, was the nun Mireille de Remy who’d solved the formula for the elixir of life.’

Hexagram 50: The Vessel

The Vessel means making and using symbols as fire uses wood. Offer something to the spirits through cooking it… This brightens the understanding of the ear and eye and lets you see invisible things.

– Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching

I hid the drawing of the chessboard inside the piano and shut the lid until we could figure out what to do with it. My compadres were unloading their luggage from Key’s car, and Lily had just taken Zsa-Zsa outside in the snow. I stayed indoors to finish cooking our dinner. And to think.

I’d raked the ashes and stuffed more kindling beneath the huge log. As I stirred the Boeuf Bourguignonne, the liquid bubbled away in the copper kettle hanging from its hook above the fire. I added a splash of burgundy and stock to thin the broth.

My mind was bubbling pretty actively, too. But instead of clarifying something within my mental vessel, the bubbling seemed only to have congealed into a lumpy mass at the bottom of the pot. After hearing Lily’s tale and its outcome, I knew I had too many ingredients interacting with one another. And each new idea only seemed to ignite more questions.

For instance, if there really was such a powerful formula as this longevity elixir that some nun had been able to solve nearly two hundred years ago, then why hadn’t anyone done it since – namely my parents? While Lily had indicated that she’d never believed the whole story herself, she claimed that the others had. But Uncle Slava and my parents were all professional scientists. If their team had put together so many pieces of the puzzle, why would they hide them instead of trying to solve it themselves?

But it seems, as Lily told us, that no one knew where the pieces of the Montglane Service had been buried and who had buried them. As the Black Queen, my mother was the only one who knew to which of the four she’d assigned each piece for hiding. And my father alone, with his prodigious chess memory, was the one she allowed to know where the pieces were actually hidden. Now that my father was dead and my mother was missing, the trail was cold. The pieces could likely never be found again.

Which led to my next question: If Mother really wanted us to solve this formula now, thirty years later – and if she was passing the torch to me, as all indications seemed to suggest – then why had she hidden all the pieces so no one could ever find them? Why had she failed to include some kind of map?

A map.

On the other hand, maybe Mother had left a map, I thought, in the form of the drawing of that chessboard and those other messages I’d already retrieved. I touched the chess piece that still lay concealed in my pocket: the Black Queen. Too many clues pointed to this one piece. Especially Lily’s story. Somehow she must tie it all together. But how? I knew I needed to ask Lily one more critical –

I heard tramping and voices in the mudroom. I hung my soup ladle on an overhead hook and went to help with the bags. I instantly wished I hadn’t.

Lily had picked up Zsa-Zsa from the snow, but couldn’t get back inside. Key wasn’t exaggerating when she’d mentioned on the phone my aunt’s pile of designer luggage: valises were piled everywhere, even blocking the inner door. How had they ever fit all this into one simple Aston Martin?

‘How did you bring all this over from London? The Queen Mary ?’ Key was asking Lily.

‘Some of these can’t go up the spiral stairs,’ I pointed out. ‘But we can’t leave them here.’

Vartan and Key agreed to haul only those that Lily had designated as most critical up the stairs. They’d remove the excess bags to the spot of my choosing: under the billiard table, where no one would trip over them.

The moment they’d departed the mudroom with the first load, I crawled over the piles of bags, pulled Lily and Zsa-Zsa inside, and shut the outer doors.

‘Aunt Lily,’ I said, ‘you told us that no one but my father knew where each of the pieces was hidden. But we do know a few things. You know which pieces you buried or hid yourself, and Uncle Slava does, too, with his own. If you could remember which pieces your team was missing at the end, then we’d only have to figure out my parents’ two parts of the puzzle.’