Once Every Never Part 9

"Sit down, girls."

Clare and Al glanced nervously at each other. Milo was waiting for them in the museum's Great Court. They'd decided it was best not to gang up and rally to Clare's defence before they knew if she actually needed defending.

Maggie waved them toward a couple of hardbacked chairs in a corner of the curator's office. She was positively crimson with rage as she gripped a sheet of paper in one hand so tightly that it creased around the edges of her fingers.

"This. Is. Intolerable."

Clare swallowed.

"What on earth would make anyone think they had a right-any right-to take something that quite simply and by all rational argument does not belong to them?" Maggie's voice skirled upward. "Not only that! This theft is a crime against history. A crime against humanity! The artifacts in this building are a legacy meant for all. Not just scholars. Everyone! The lofty and the common alike. Everyone can come to this inst.i.tution and gaze upon its contents and be amazed. But only if those contents are not b.l.o.o.d.y stolen away and-G.o.d knows-probably sold on the black market to some crackpot recluse who runs around naked late at night in a private vault stacked with n.a.z.i-looted Monets and crates full of smuggled tribal fertility G.o.ddesses-"

"I didn't mean it!" Clare blurted, unable to withstand any more of her aunt's frothing tirade. "I swear I won't sell it to a naked crackpot!"

"What ...?"

"Uh ... I ... won't sell it to a crackpot?"

"Sell what?" Maggie's righteous anger dissipated into a cloud of confusion in the face of Clare's baffling outburst. "Good Lord, Clare, I don't have time for games."

"No. Of course." Clare backpedalled furiously. "Sorry."

"The torc is an irreplaceable piece of history. Worth far more than its weight in gold, which is substantial."

"The ... torc?" Clare and Al exchanged confused glances. "The Snettisham Torc." Maggie rolled her eyes. "Oh for the love of-The great big s.h.i.+ny gold necklace thingy that was sitting on the table in the restoration room yesterday. Surely even you must have noticed that?"

"I noticed it ..." Al squeaked.

"There, yes, you see?" Maggie turned back to Clare.

"Uh ... okay ..." Clare's mind raced. Of course she'd noticed the "great big s.h.i.+ny gold necklace thingy." She'd probably even left a fingerprint on it. It had sent her hurtling back through time! But now that she realized Maggie wasn't accusing them at all, Clare started to calm down. "Right. The torc. And it's what now?"

"Stolen." Maggie's glare was positively baleful. "Were you listening-even a little-when I told you why I wanted you to meet me here instead of back at the townhouse?"

"Uh ..." The phrase "stolen artifact" must have set off Clare's inner auto-pilot back in Milo's office.

"I surrender," Maggie sighed and threw her hands in the air. "The television wins. Your mind is mush beyond reclamation. Clare, I'm going to have to stay late today to help Dr. Jenkins and the police with the investigation, and I'll most likely have to come in early tomorrow, too. It's getting on, I haven't shopped for the groceries, and I didn't want you roaming the city all evening without food or money. I thought perhaps you could wait for me and eat in the museum's cafeteria ..."

The girls shuddered in tandem. The museum's "wrapped sandwiches" tasted far more of "wrap" than "sandwich." And anyway, food was the last thing on either of their minds. As gently as she could, Clare took her agitated aunt by the wrist.

"Mags?" she said. "Look. Don't worry about me, okay?"

Maggie's normally calm, cool, unflappable exterior seemed to be on the verge of crumbling. Clare had never seen her so upset, and it made her think there was something going on here. Something else going on. She gave her aunt's arm a little shake.

"I know this is important, Mags. And I know that my mother probably has you convinced that I can't tie my own shoes without triggering a minor apocalypse somewhere in the world or altering the flow of history"-Okay, Clare thought, that last one is maybe a little too close to the truth-"but I can totally fend for myself while you take care of this. Without incident."

Maggie smiled wearily in something approaching grat.i.tude. Her eyes, Clare noticed, were red-rimmed. She patted Clare's cheek and, without another word, went over to where her purse sat on a table. She fished around in it and pulled out a bank card.

"The PIN is your birthday, duck-month and day," she said and handed it over.

Clare blinked at her, surprised by that somehow.

Maggie brushed it aside. "I didn't figure anyone would ever guess that."

"Probably not." Clare recovered herself and grabbed the card before Maggie changed her mind.

"No trips to Aruba, please. And scout's honour you'll at least try and keep from burning London to the ground."

"I'll at least try. Scout's honour."

"And, oh yes! Not one word of this to anyone. The police are keeping this matter strictly under wraps for the moment. Now keep in touch and off you go," Maggie said, already turning her attention back to the matter at hand.

Clare and Al looked at each other and headed into the outer office. Suddenly its door flew open and Dr. Jenkins burst in, flapping like a penguin in a pencil skirt as she hurried past.

"Well, there'll be no help from that high-priced security firm we hired!" she squawked at Maggie in the other room. "They can't even contact the guard. Gone on vacation, he has. To the Turks and Caicos-some b.l.o.o.d.y beach resort with no b.l.o.o.d.y phones-won't be back for three b.l.o.o.d.y weeks! I thought he looked like the surf-b.u.m type ..."

The girls moved back toward the inner office so they could hear what was going on. Clare peered around the half-open door.

"What about the cameras?" Maggie dodged a bit to the side to avoid the curator's flailing arms.

"They show nothing. Nothing!"

"How can that be?"

"They've been rigged-the digital files and their backups of that day are both gone-replaced with a repeating loop of an empty restoration room. The night guardsman never suspected a thing." Dr. Jenkins rubbed her temples feverishly. Strands of reddish-brown hair had escaped her tight bun and were sticking out comically around her ears. "I really wish thieves would stop watching caper films. They get far too many ideas."

"Not 'they' ..." Clare watched as her aunt's expression darkened. "Him."

"Him, who?"

"Morholt." Maggie almost spat the word.

"Don't be ridiculous," Dr. Jenkins said sharply. "He's dead." "I beg to differ. He's very much alive."

"Oh Magda, really! Those rumours are just that. Rumours."

"No, Ceciley, they're not. I know Stuart Morholt."

"Knew him. In university, Magda. So did I-in case you've forgotten-but that was a very long time ago and every insane whisper you've heard about him since is just mad storytelling. Bunk. He was a liar and a fraud and a two-penny con artist and mischief-maker. You know he drank himself unconscious and burned to death in a fire on one of his silly 'spiritual retreats' over four and a half years ago."

"What if he didn't?" Clare's aunt sank wearily into a chair, her hands still twisting the sheet of paper. "I never believed that. I think he's been lying low and biding his time until he could steal something like the torc to use in one of his arcane rites."

"Oh now, really!" Dr. Jenkins scoffed. "Surely you don't truly believe all that Druid nonsense. For heaven's sake, Magda-"

Clare went cold at the mention of the word "Druid." Al leaned forward, straining to catch every word.

"-It's farcical, I tell you. All that posturing of his back in the day. Claiming to be some sort of Celtic mystic, for heaven's sake! It was all just to get the skirts to swoon over him. I'm sorry to say, he was girl-mad. And I think that you-"

"He wasn't girl-mad. He was power-mad."

Dr. Jenkins just shook her head. "Professor Wallace, honestly. I'm surprised at you."

Maggie shot to her feet, eyes blazing. "Really, Ceciley! Are you? You may have chosen to forget that night in the Midlands but I never have. I remember it as if it were yesterday and I remember the look in that poor young man's eyes. We made a terrible mistake and we all share the blame, but Stuart Morholt-"

"I don't care to discuss the distant past," Dr. Jenkins said stiffly.

"You're a fool if you think to underestimate Morholt. A b.l.o.o.d.y fool!"

"Magda!"

"You didn't really know him, Ceciley," Maggie continued. "You didn't know him the way I did. And you didn't get this in your email inbox today!" She slapped the paper down on the tabletop.

Dr. Jenkins blinked, picked up the crumpled sheet, and began to read. Her eyes grew wide behind her gla.s.ses. "This ... this can't be real."

"You'd better just hope not."

Suddenly, from behind Clare and Al a pair of uniformed policemen appeared and stalked past them into the inner office and closed the door behind them, effectively shutting the girls out from what was becoming a truly gripping conversation.

"Who the h.e.l.l is Stuart Morholt?" Al murmured.

"I have no idea," Clare said. "But I think we should find out."

"Oh yeah."

"D'you think this theft thing is a coincidence?" Al asked quietly as they walked through the Eastern Gallery on their way down to the Great Court.

Clare rolled an eye at her.

"Yeah. Me neither."

Clare's initial relief at not being the actual target of Maggie's wrath was fading and she was beginning to feel a gnawing anxiety. The whole thing had started out as some kind of crazy adventure, but it was as if she'd gone from playing with matches to lighting a raging bonfire: just what she'd promised Mags she wouldn't let happen.

10.

Milo pushed his gla.s.ses up onto his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose, gears evidently whirring away in the vault of his skull. They'd talked the matter half to death the night before after leaving the museum, but apparently Milo was still running his cerebral a.n.a.lysis programs. Clare wondered if he'd slept much. And then blushed furiously at the thought of him lying in his bed not sleeping. Thankfully, he didn't seem to notice the sudden rush of colour to her cheeks.

"Okay. So," he said, going over the sequence of events for the umpteenth time. "Nothing else on the table-nothing except the torc and the s.h.i.+eld-made you ... you know ..."

"Zot," Al chimed in helpfully.

Clare plucked a trio of malt-vinegar-soaked fries out of the newspaper cone in Milo's hand and folded them into her mouth. "Can we please come up with a cooler term for what I do?" she said. It was Sat.u.r.day morning, and the OS offices were deserted. They'd come back to retrieve the brooch-Clare had been feeling distinctly uneasy without it, and so Milo had agreed to fetch the thing, but only after picking up fish and chips on the way. Apparently, his brain didn't do so well on an empty stomach.

"'Zot' doesn't work for you?" Milo smiled faintly.

"I like 'zot,'" Al said. "It's very genre."

Clare glared.

"Okay. Okay." Al put up a hand. "Not 'zot.' So ... what do you want to call it then?"

"I don't know," Clare muttered, thoroughly embarra.s.sed that they were even having this conversation. "Never mind."

"No," Milo said, his expression thoughtful. "No, Clare, you're right. You should have a proper name for this. It's a gift, after all. A talent. And it's yours. You should call it whatever you want."

"But I don't know what it is," she said, looking back up into his eyes. It helped enormously that Milo was actually taking her seriously. It helped her be less afraid. A little.

"Well ... what does it feel like when it happens?"

What did it feel like? It tingled. And burned-like cinnamon or ginger-a hot, sweet spice that she could taste and feel. Like fire in her veins. Then everything around her would spark and sparkle, flare sun-bright with that lightning flash that made her whole being feel as if it were made of fireflies ... and then she would flicker away into star-spattered darkness ...

"It ... I ..."

Milo waited patiently.

"I ..." It was almost a whisper when she said it. "I s.h.i.+mmer." "

s.h.i.+mmer?" Milo nodded encouragingly. "You s.h.i.+mmer?"

"Yeah."

"I like 's.h.i.+mmer,'" Milo said, grinning.

"I like 'zot,'" Al muttered.

Milo ignored his cousin. "'s.h.i.+mmer' it is then, Clare. But whatever you want to call it, there has got to be something particular to those artifacts-a specific mechanism of some kind."

"Mechanism?" Clare frowned, picturing something mechanical.

"A trigger."

"Oh. Right. So what do you think that is?"

"Pfft." Milo waved his hand in the air. "I dunno. Magic?"

And there it was.

The M word.

Apparently it had just kind of slipped out, but Milo's mouth snapped shut the second it did, his scientific sensibilities shocked to their square roots. Because it suddenly seemed that, up until that point, Milo and the girls had been pretty actively avoiding uttering that particular word.

"Heh heh." Al s.h.i.+fted nervously. "Yeah ... magic."