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"I understand."

"I shall be watching. I shall always be watching."

"And you'll see me a chastened and wiser man for all this," Ramses said. "I promise you."

"Well, then, Ramses the Great. We have a treaty, do we not?"

42

The Rutherford Estate

They were saying he should never set foot on the property again. That no one should. He had even heard nurses at the clinic suggest that the main house and tenant farms and even the old Roman temple be burned to the ground, and the land blessed by priests from every known religion.

They had infuriated him, these words. For this superstitious gossip had also taken hold among the other party guests being treated for shock and exhaustion at the same clinic where he'd taken his mother. And all of it upset him as nothing in his life had before. Not the loss of his beautiful companion in Cairo, Mr. Ramsey's mad friend. Not the loss of Julie, who had never truly been his to begin with. And not the long absence of his father, who even now had not sent word.

And where was his father? Another casino? Perhaps when the story broke across the Continent, he would be in touch. But for now there had been no telegram, no telephone call, no word of any kind--only another large deposit at the bank.

Throughout the night, Alex had managed to control his anger. He'd managed to turn his back on the gossiping doctors and nurses before lashing out at them. To worry a handkerchief between his fists whenever he felt the urge to tell those who had not been present for the horror to stop flapping their gums about it.

Instead, he'd been a perfect gentleman, a good sport. But both those roles were tattered costumes incapable of containing his confusion and grief.

When the police had questioned him, the supposedly logical explanation they were assembling became instantly clear.

While they weren't accusing everyone at the party of having suffered from a collective madness, they kept insisting that there were facts that needed to be addressed. Such as why had no one at the party recognized or known the people who had subsequently undergone such a horrific death? The police had managed to collect a few of their names from those who had chatted briefly with them on the lawn. And yet not one of these names was familiar to Alex, his mother, or any of the other guests to whom they'd spoken. The police had also managed to talk to the secretary who had assembled the guest list. She'd confirmed the names appeared nowhere on it. These mysterious people had come out of nowhere and vanished into nowhere. Perhaps, suggested the police, they had never actually existed at all?

And then there was the matter of the strange tunnel on the property. Alex had known nothing of this tunnel. Yet the police said there were tracks in the tunnel, and tracks cut in the lawn where the tunnel opened near the pond.

They were connected, these things, the police insisted. It was all some sort of misdirection, some sort of sleight of hand. A grand illusion intended to distract with chaos while some criminal activity took place. A theft, perhaps.

When Julie had finally reached him at the hospital by telephone early that morning, he had shared all these things with her, and his anger had boiled to the surface. How calm she had seemed. How soothing her words. She was terribly sorry they'd been separated in the chaos, but she and Ramsey were quite well, albeit as shocked by what they'd witnessed as everyone else. And it wasn't as if she had an explanation of her own. Care for your mother, she had said, that's what matters now. Care for your mother. They, on the other hand, would soon travel north to speak with the police.

And she was right, of course.

She was half right. His mother was very dear to him. But the house still mattered. The estate still mattered. And the crazy notion that some sort of theft had taken place had to be either proved or disproved. And so, after the nurses sedated his mother once more, he slipped away and returned to the house.

The fact that it was still standing startled him, which was absurd, of course.

A childish part of him had assumed the curses he'd heard visited upon the place by the party's traumatized guests had somehow managed to punch out the house's soaring windows, tear pieces from its roof, shred the hedges lining the long, curving drive to the front door.

Was the possibility really so absurd when you considered what they had all witnessed? People, living, breathing people, guests of the party, dissolving to ash before their very eyes.

And how would the police ultimately explain this?

A drug. They had all been drugged and subjected to some piece of visual trickery that was a cover for a great theft. But the police had searched the grounds throughout the night, had brought him and his mother detailed lists of the rooms' contents, right down to the jewels his mother had brought from London two days before.

Everything appeared to be in place. Perhaps when his mother got her wits more about her, she would notice something missing from the lists that should be there. But would it be so large as to require a secret tunnel to carry it away?

Alone now, Alex walked rooms that had just a day before been filled with laughter and delight, and then panic and screams. Could he fill them with his memories of childhood, of the toy train set his father had once helped him to build across the living room? Of the hours spent reading in the windows that looked out over the broad lawns?

Must go to the lawn, he told himself. Must face seeing it again now, or never.

What was the old saying about falling off a horse? Perhaps it wasn't quite fitting, considering he would have much preferred a broken bone to the shock of what he'd seen the day before.

Drugs. An illusion. A trick. A theft.

He was merely tasting these words, sampling them, seeing if they would prove digestible. And the answer would come only once he gazed upon the sc

ene of the crime again.