The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

“I’ll fix you a spritzer; that’s light,” he said, and squirted the soda from a mesh-encased bottle, handing the wineglass to me.

“Where’s Grace?” I asked, taking a sip as he mixed himself a light Scotch.

“She’s lying down. She was quite upset by that little debacle your mother pulled this morning—and who can blame her? It was unforgivable.” Augustus always referred to Jersey as “your mother,” as though I were responsible for her very existence, rather than the other way around.

“Actually,” I told him, “I felt her display provided a well-needed touch of brightness to the entire morbid affair. I mean, I can’t really imagine providing brass bands, shooting off guns, and giving someone a medal all because, in the service of the U.S. government, he got himself blown into pieces like a dismembered patchwork quilt!”

“Don’t change the subject on me, young lady,” my father reprimanded me in his most authoritarian tone of voice. “Your mother’s behavior was absolutely shocking. Deplorable. We were fortunate that reporters were not permitted.”

Augustus would never use words like “disgusting” or “humiliating.” They were too subjective, involving personal emotion. He was only interested in the objective, the remote—things like appearance and reputation.

In that regard, I was a good deal more like him than I cared to admit. But I still couldn’t bear the fact that he was more interested in my mother’s comportment at a social event than in Sam’s brutal death.

“I wonder if people scream when they die like that?” I asked aloud.

Augustus turned on his heel so I couldn’t see his face. He went across to the bedroom door. “I’ll wake up Grace,” he informed me over his shoulder, “so she’ll be ready in time for dinner.”

“I don’t see how we can speak,” said Grace, blotting her eyes, which were swollen with tears, and brushing a wisp of stark blond hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “I don’t see how we can eat. It’s truly incredible to imagine how we can all be sitting here in a restaurant, trying to behave like human beings.”

Until that moment it had never occurred to me that someone like Grace had ever visualized the concept of attempting to behave like a human being. Things were starting to look up.

I glanced around at the walls of the restaurant, which were done up with lattices covered in painted vines. They were scattered with a few tiny red painted lizards, which seemed to be basking in invisible sunlight. The table groupings were separated by large plantings of fresh chrysanthemums—flowers that are offered in tribute to the dead in all Italian cemeteries.

I’d begun and ended the day in a cemetery. Only that afternoon, I’d looked up the word in a bookstore. From the Greek koimeterion, a sleeping chamber; koiman, to put to sleep; or Latin cunae, a cradle. It was nice to think of Sam, wherever he was, as cradled in sleep.

“He was so young,” Grace was saying between little sobs as she took another bite of steak tartare. She adjusted her diamond bracelet, adding the telltale words “Wasn’t he?”

The truth of the matter was, Grace had never met Sam in her life. My mother’s divorce from Augustus had been nearly twenty-five years ago, and he and Grace had been married for little more than fifteen. In between was lots of proverbial water beneath the bridge, including how Sam got to be my brother without actually being the son of my mother or father. My family relations are rather complex.

But I had no time to think of that, for Grace had moved on to her favorite topic: money. As she switched to it, her tears miraculously dried and her eyes took on a luminous glow.

“We phoned the lawyers this afternoon from the suite,” she told me, suddenly filled with buoyant enthusiasm. “The reading of the will, as you know, is tomorrow—and I think I should tell you that we got some good news. Though they won’t give out the details, of course, it does appear that you are the principal heir!”

“Oh, goody,” I said. “Sam hasn’t been dead a week, and already I’ve profited. Did you dig out exactly how rich I’ll be? Can I retire from my labors right now? Or are the tax folks likely to take most of it?”

“That’s not what Grace meant, and you know it,” said Augustus, who was designing forms in his crème de volaille as I jabbed at the capers on my Scottish salmon. They rolled around the plate and evaded my fork. “Grace and I are only concerned for your own interest,” he went on. “I didn’t know Sam—at least not well—but I’m sure he cared a great deal for you. After all, you practically grew up as brother and sister, didn’t you? And as Earnest’s only heir himself, Sam must have been very—well, comfortable financially?”

My late uncle Earnest, who’d been in the mining and mineral business, was my father’s older brother, and rich as Midas. On top of that, he died with every cent he’d made, because spending money was of no interest to him. Sam was his only child.

When my parents, Augustus and Jersey, divorced I was still very tiny. My mother ran around with me for a number of years, visiting all the capitals of the world. She was welcome in such places, since she’d been a famous singer long before marrying my father—which is how she met the Peanut Farmer and nearly everyone else of high social visibility. The Behn men had always liked flamboyant women. But, like my father, they often had trouble actually living with them.

Jersey had been drinking for years, but everyone expected opera singers to be swilling champagne as if it were water. It wasn’t until Augustus announced his betrothal to Grace—a clone of Jersey at a similar age, but twenty years her junior—that the bottle came out of Jersey’s closet. She fled with me to Idaho, to consult my widowed, hermitlike uncle