Katherine Neville - The Fire

‘I was only given two of the pieces myself to hide,’ Lily admitted. ‘That leaves twenty-four pieces for the others. But only your mother knows if they each got eight. For the six missing pieces, I’m not sure after all these years that my memory is perfect. But I think I recall that we were missing four White pieces: two silver pawns, a Knight, and the White King. And the two Black pieces were a gold pawn and a Bishop.’

I paused, not certain that I’d heard correctly.

‘Then…the pieces that Mother captured and that you all buried or hid included everything else except those six?’ I said.

If Vartan’s story was true, there was one piece that must have been missing from the cache they’d buried thirty years ago. He’d seen it, alongside my father, at Zagorsk. Hadn’t he?

Vartan and Key were coming back down the spiral stairs at the end of the room. I couldn’t wait – I had to know now.

‘Your team possessed the Black Queen?’ I asked her.

‘Oh yes, that was the most important piece of them all, according to Mireille’s diary,’ said Lily. ‘The Abbess of Montglane took it to Russia herself, along with the chessboard she’d cut into parts. The Black Queen was in the possession of Catherine the Great, then seized by her son Paul on the empress’s death. Finally it was passed to Mireille by Catherine’s grandson, Emperor Alexander of Russia. Cat and I found it among Minnie’s cache in that Tassili cave.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked her, my voice weakening along with my grip on the situation.

‘How could I forget, with all those bats in that cave?’ said Lily. ‘My memory might not be perfect about the missing pieces, but I held the Black Queen in my own hands. It was so important, I feel sure your mother must have buried that piece herself.’

My temples were throbbing again, and I felt that same churning in my stomach. But Key and Vartan had just arrived for another haul of bags.

‘You look as if you’ve just seen the proverbial ghost,’ Key said, regarding me strangely.

She could say that again. But it was a real one: the ghost of my dead father at Zagorsk. My suspicions were back in full gear. How could Vartan’s and Lily’s versions of the Black Queen both be true? Was this part of my mother’s message? One thing was sure: The Black Queen in my pocket wasn’t the only one ‘behind the eight ball.’

As I was thinking this over, my ears were assaulted by the deafening clamor of the fire-engine bell ringing just above the front door. Vartan stared up at it in horror. Some visitor, undaunted at the prospect of having his hand bitten off by the bear outside, had reached into its maw and twisted our unique front-door chime.

Zsa-Zsa started yapping hysterically at the noisy bell. Lily retreated with her into the lodge.

I shoved aside a few bags and stood on tiptoe to peer out through the eagle’s glass eyeballs. There on our doorstep was a massed gaggle of folks in hooded parkas and furs. Though I couldn’t see faces, their identities weren’t to be a mystery for long: Across the snowy expanse I glimpsed with sinking heart the BMW parked just beside my car. It was sporting vanity plates that read SAGESSE.

Vartan, from behind, whispered in my ear. ‘Is it someone you know?’

As if anyone we didn’t know well would ever make the trek to this place.

‘It is someone I’d like to forget I know,’ I told him, sotto voce. ‘But it does seem to be someone who’s been invited.’

Sage Livingston wasn’t a girl who might graciously accept cooling her heels on the front doorstep, especially if she’d arrived with an entourage. With a sigh of resignation I threw open the doors. I was in for yet another unpleasant surprise.

‘Oh no – the Botany Club.’ Key took the words out of my mouth.

She meant the botanically named Livingstons, all of them – Basil, Rosemary, and Sage – a family of whom Key liked to quip: ‘If they’d had more children, they’d have called them Parsley and Thyme.’

But in my youth, they’d never seemed much of a joke. Now they were one more puzzle on my mother’s invitation list.

‘Darling! It’s been truly forever !’ gushed Rosemary, as she swept into our constricted mudroom before the rest.

Sporting dark glasses and swathed in her extravagant, hooded lynx cape, Sage’s mother looked even more youthful than I’d remembered. She briefly enfolded me in her cloud of endangered animal skins and bussed me with an ‘air kiss’ at either cheek.

She was followed by my old archnemesis, her flawlessly perfect ash-blond daughter, Sage. Sage’s dad, Basil, due to the clear constrictions of our broom-closet entry chamber, lagged with another man just outside the door – no doubt our ‘new neighbor’ – a craggy, sun-leathered chap in jeans, sheepskin jacket, western boots, and hand-blocked Stetson. Alongside the haughty Basil with his silvery sideburns and haute couture Livingston women, our new arrival seemed somewhat out of place at this ball.

‘Aren’t we expected to come inside?’ Sage demanded by way of cheery greeting, though it was the first time we’d laid eyes on each other in years.

She glanced past her mother toward the inner doors where Key stood, and raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow as if astonished she should find her here. There’d been little love lost over the years between Nokomis Key and Sage Livingston, for a variety of reasons.

No one seemed about to remove wet togs or to introduce me to our external guest. Vartan parted the wall of hanging coats and furs, stepped over some luggage, and addressed Rosemary with a charm I didn’t know chess players possessed.

‘Please permit me to remove your wrap,’ he offered in that soft voice I’d always regarded as sinister. Under these close conditions, I realized it might be interpreted slightly differently in a boudoir.

Sage herself, a longtime collector of designer men as well as clothes, shot Vartan a meaningful look that might bring a bull elephant to its knees. He didn’t seem to notice, but offered to take her coat as well. I introduced them. Then I squeezed past this intimate threesome, heading outside to greet the two men. I shook hands with Basil.

‘I thought you and Rosemary were out of town and couldn’t make it,’ I mentioned.

‘We changed our plans,’ Basil replied with a smile. ‘We wouldn’t have missed your mother’s first birthday party for the world.’

And just how did he know that it was?

‘So sorry, we seem to be here earlier than expected,’ Basil’s companion said as he peered into the luggage-and-coat-jammed entryway.

He had a warm gravelly voice and was much younger than Basil, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Pulling off his leather gloves, he tucked them beneath his arm and took my hand in both of his. His palms were firm and calloused from hard work.

‘I’m your new neighbor, Galen March,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m the person your mother convinced to buy Sky Ranch. And you must be Alexandra. I’m so glad Cat invited me today so I could meet you. She’s told me a good deal about you.’

And nothing at all about you, I thought.

I thanked him briefly and headed back to help clear a path for the new arrivals.

Things just got stranger and stranger. I knew Sky Ranch well. Well enough to wonder why anyone would ever dream of buying it. It was the last and only private parcel in these parts. Over twenty thousand acres, with a price tag of at least fifteen million dollars, it spread across mountaintops between the reservations, national forest, and our family lands. But it was all bleak rock high above timberline, with no water and air so thin you couldn’t raise herds or grow crops. The land had sat idle for so many decades that locals called it Ghost Ranch. The only buyers who could afford it today were those who could exploit it in other ways – ski areas or mineral rights. And these wouldn’t be the sort that my mother would ever welcome to her neighborhood, let alone to her birthday party.