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

Idaho, abandoned or in disuse at this time of year. Arriving at Sun Valley a bit earlier than I, Sam had learned there wasn’t that sort of shelter near the ski mountain, so he’d scouted until he found this one, about a two-mile ski from the main road. But most of the area was so open I could easily have been tailed, unless I arrived so early there was barely light enough to see.

Once we’d reached the deserted cabin where Sam spent the night, we snapped off our skis, banged the snow from our bindings, planted our skis and poles in the snow around back, and went inside, where Sam stirred up the dying coals of last night’s fire and threw on a few more logs. The place had no other heat nor any plumbing, only pump water just outside the door. Sam jacked the handle to fill a tin pot with water, put it on the fire for instant coffee, and drew up a stool beside the rump-sprung chair where I’d already taken a seat.

“Ariel, I know you may not understand a lot of what I’ve done, or why I’ve done it,” he began, “but before I begin to explain about all that’s happened, I need to catch up on last week: why you didn’t show up for our phone call, what you know about the missing package, and whatever you’ve learned so far from Laf.”

“All right,” I agreed reluctantly, despite the million questions I needed to ask. “But first—if you didn’t send the manuscript I spoke of, then I need to know something right now, because I’ve met someone who told me he sent it to me himself. Have you ever heard of a Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser?” Seeing Sam’s quick twist of a smile, I added, “So you do know him!”

But Sam shook his head. “It was just—I don’t know—I guess it’s just the way you said his name.” Sam was looking at me with an oddly closed expression. “I think I imagined you always as my little blood brother, my twin soul,” he went on. “But just now I felt … What I mean is, who exactly is this guy, Ariel? Is there something going on here you’d like to tell me about?”

I could feel the hot blood suffusing my face. That damned Irish skin I’d inherited from Jersey showed every pulsating emotion the second it happened. I put my hands over my face. Sam reached over and pulled them down. I opened my eyes.

“Good lord, Ariel, are you in love with him?” he said. He jumped up and started pacing around in a circle, rubbing his forehead with his hand, while I sat there not having a clue what to say.

Sam sat down again and leaned toward me with urgency.

“Ariel, apart from anything else I may privately feel about the situation, this is hardly the moment for a blossoming romance! You’ve said you just met this man. Do you know anything about him at all? What’s his background? Have you any idea just how dangerous this untimely ‘friendship’ of yours might prove to us both?”

I was so upset by this outburst, I felt like throwing something at him. I jumped to my feet just as the coffeepot boiled over. Sam grabbed a glove to rescue it from the fire. This gave us both a quick moment to settle down.

“I didn’t say I was in love with anyone,” I told Sam in the calmest voice I could muster.

“You didn’t have to,” said Sam.

He was fiddling with the coffeepot, not looking at me. Then he turned so I couldn’t read his face, and he started to measure instant java into cups. As if he were speaking to himself, he finally said:

“I’ve only just realized that I understand your emotions, right now, far better than I seem to understand my own.”

When he turned back to me with the two cups of coffee, he was wearing a slightly strained smile. He handed me my cup and then ruffled my hair as he used to do when we were kids.

“God, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I have no right to tell you who to care for, or to cross-examine you the way I’ve just done. I guess I was surprised, that’s all. But you’re smart enough not to fall for someone who might put us both in danger. And who knows? Maybe there’s some link in this situation that will help us out of the mess I’ve gotten us into, once we can figure it out. By the way, this Wolfgang K. Hauser—I’m simply curious—did he tell you what the ‘K’ stands for?”

Surprised, I shook my head. “No, he didn’t. Why? Is it important?”

“Probably not,” said Sam. “But the next time you see him, you might just ask. Now let me hear your story about this past week.”

So I took a deep breath and we sat down again, and I filled Sam in on everything that had happened. Well, almost everything. After Sam’s reaction to the way I’d even spoken Wolfgang’s name, I did leave out the detail that he’d spent the night with me as well as with the manuscript. But about all the rest I was straight.

By the time I’d finished the exhaustive summary, I myself had begun to see just what a pivotal role Wolfgang Hauser seemed to play in the story. But maybe that was because so far the plot had hinged on the wrong parcel. The real parcel sent by Sam remained missing. I was about to find out just how dangerous it really was.

“I can’t believe it’s still missing,” Sam said grimly, reading my thoughts. “But there’s something here that just isn’t adding up.”

I asked Sam why the contents of the missing parcel were so valuable that everyone on the planet seemed to be after it—including members of our own family who hadn’t spoken to one another in years—and so dangerous he’d had to fake his own death.

“If I knew all the answers,” said