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

the dripping boots before I stepped onto the orientals, raced across the open, book-lined living room, and made a dive into pillows to grab the phone on the floor.

I kicked myself at once for even picking it up: it was Augustus.

“Why did you leave?” were the first words out of his mouth. “Grace and I have been nearly at our wits’ end, trying to find you. Where have you been?”

“Having fun playing in the snow,” I told him, rolling over on my back in the pillows and cradling the phone to my ear. “I thought the party was over; were there other treats in store?” I unbuttoned my wet trousers and tried to wriggle out of them so I wouldn’t get pneumonia down here in this bitterly cold dungeon—or, more likely, develop mold. I could see my breath in the air.

“Your sense of humor has always seemed to me ill placed, at best,” Augustus informed me coolly. “Or perhaps only your sense of timing. When you vanished just after the reading of the will, we phoned your hotel and were told you had checked out earlier that same morning. But once we’d heard the will, of course, Grace and I had agreed to a press conference—”

“A press conference?!” I said, sitting bolt upright in astonishment. I tried to keep the phone to my ear as I yanked myself out of my wet parka and pulled off my sweater, but I only caught Augustus’s last words:

“—must be yours as well.”

“What must be mine?” I asked. I rubbed my hands hard over my goosebumpy body, stood up, and dragged the phone over to the fireplace. I was tucking pinecones and paper under the pile of logs already stacked as Augustus replied.

“The manuscripts, naturally. Everyone knew Sam had inherited them, how very valuable they must be. But after Earnest’s death no one could locate Sam. He seemed to have been swallowed up. When I tried to discuss it during dinner after the funeral, you seemed to want to avoid the issue. But now that it’s known you’re not only Sam’s principal heir but his sole heir, naturally matters have changed—”

“Naturally?” I said with impatience as I lit a match under the kindling and watched with relief as the flames leapt up at once. “I have no idea what manuscripts you’re talking about!”

And stranger still, I thought, regardless of what they might be worth, why on earth would someone with my father’s predilection for privacy ever dream of agreeing to a press conference? It was more than suspicious.

“You mean you don’t know of them?” Augustus was saying in an odd voice. “How can that be, when the Washington Post and the London Times and the International Herald Tribune were all here? Of course, there was nothing we could say, since the manuscripts were not in the hands of the executor, and you had vanished as well.”

“Maybe you could clue me in, before I freeze to death,” I said between chattering teeth. “What are these manuscripts Sam left me—no, let me guess: Francis Bacon’s letters to Ben Jonson, admitting that Bacon really did, as we’ve always suspected, write all Shakespeare’s plays.”

To my surprise, Augustus didn’t miss a beat. “They’re worth a good deal more than that,” he informed me. And my father was a man who understood the meanings of words like “worth” and “value.” “The very moment you learn anything about them, as I’ve no doubt you will,” he went on, “you must notify me or our attorneys at once. I don’t think you quite appreciate the position you are in.”

Okay, I thought, I’ll give this one more try. I took a deep breath.

“No, I suppose not,” I agreed. “Could you see your way to share with me, Father, what the whole world already seems to know? What are these manuscripts?”

“Pandora’s,” Augustus said curtly, the name sounding bitter as acid in his mouth—as well it might.

Pandora was my grandmother—my father’s loving mother, who’d abandoned him at birth. Though I’d never met her, by all accounts she’d been the most colorful, flamboyant, and outrageous of all the Behn women. And with our family tree, that was going some.

“Pandora had manuscripts?” I asked my father. “What kind?”

“Oh, diaries, letters, correspondence with the great and near great, that sort of thing,” he said in a dismissive tone. Then, casually, he added, “It’s possible she might even have written a memoir of sorts.”

I might not see eye to eye with my father on most things, but I knew him well enough to know when he was pulling my chain. He must have been calling here every fifteen minutes for the past two days; that’s why I’d heard the phone ring twice during my brief time outside. If he was in so much of a panic to reach me, and this stuff was so hot that he had to give in to a press conference, why was he playing footsie with me now?

“Why all the belated interest?” I asked. “I mean, Granny dearest has been dead for years, right?”

“It’s generally believed that Pandora left these manuscripts in trust to the … other side of the family,” my father said stiffly. I started thinking just how complex my family relations actually were. “Earnest must have had them under lock and key for decades, for he had many offers,” Augustus went on. “But he couldn’t evaluate their true worth because apparently they were all written in some sort of code. Then your cousin Sam …”

Holy cow!

I stood there before the fire in my skivvies, phone in hand, as my father’s voice flapped on like meaningless noise in the background. Good lord—they were in code!

Sam had vanished just when his father Earnest died. He was out of touch for seven years, and now he was dead. And what coincided with that hiatus? Sam’s inheritance—including, perhaps, that of these manuscripts. What was Sam’s profession and calling? What had he lavished his time upon teaching me even since childhood, that got me my very