Jane woke to a riot of grackles in the tall fir outside her window. Marvin was tearing at the rug in front of the locked door. She opened it, ran down the stairs behind him, and let him out. Then she unlocked the pet door to the basement. After a shower, she brewed up some French roast and took it to her computer where she checked the Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Oil and gas prices were mimicking a roller coaster. On Monday, she might move some money if the conditions were right.
She wandered outside, quite aware that she was avoiding the dank basement for the moment. She strolled through the yard sipping her coffee, enjoying the tepid sunlight of a November morning.
Bells rang in the steeple of the New Marienborn Moravian Church announcing the beginning of Sunday school. She walked over to the hedge and glanced through a small gap in the boxwood hedge. Cars filled the parking lot. People walked in, greeting each other, some dressed in jeans, others in nice dresses and suits.
She briefly considered calling David, but decided against it. She could face the dark basement on her own. Jane veered off to the shed. She was going to find out if that wall was solid even if she had to do some damage. She picked a strong hammer from the pegboard on the wall, then a larger one just in case. A crow bar leaned against a corner. Grabbing it, she made her way into the basement, taking two flashlights and new batteries with her. The cats followed, hoping for more mice. Winston stretched out on the concrete floor and was soon snoring. Some watchdog.
Rummaging around, she found two milk crates and set one flashlight on each, illuminating the wall as best she could. The old, knotty pine paneling, expensive for a basement and even a closet wall, had darkened over time to a deep honey. Starting at one end, Jane walked the ten feet or so of wall, pushing against the paneling as she went. Nothing gave way. She tried higher on the wall with no results. With her ear to the paneling, she tapped, listening for any change in the sound. About half way, the tap hollowed out, changing key. She kept going and after about three feet the echo from the panel deepened again. About the width of a door.
Containing her excitement, Jane went back to the hollow sound and tapped higher up. Her knuckles produced the same empty echo. She continued along the panel until the echo changed back to a solid sound. She grabbed a flashlight and turned the beam to high. Sure enough, just where the sound changed one panel ended and another began. Working her way along the edge, she pushed against it, hoping to spring a lock. About a third of the way down the wall, the panel moved inward and with a click, swung open.
Marvin ran inside.
“Wait,” she called after him.
Suzie B followed.
“Damn,” she muttered. Grabbing the flashlight again, she pulled the panel fully open, took a deep breath and stepped inside. She’d expected a continuation of the concrete walls of the basement, maybe even a packed dirt floor, but instead she found smooth walls painted a soft ivory. Beneath her feet ran a maroon carpet, as dark as spilled blood. There was something familiar about it.
She listened but heard nothing. A couple of feet inside the corridor, a sconce with an amber glass covering hung on the wall. Better not switch on a light and give away her presence, although it might be too late for that since she’d been tapping and banging.
Jane followed the well-appointed hallway until she came to a set of stairs that led down. She stepped onto old wood, worn into a dip in the middle from the passage of many feet over more than a century. The next step groaned beneath her weight. She paused, but heard only silence. She crept down the old staircase, testing each step to see if it would hold her, hoping to avoid more creaks. The structure was sturdy. At the bottom, two corridors stretched off at a right angle. Picking the left one at random, Jane walked about five feet before coming to another door. Leaning her ear against it, she listened. Silence. She tried the handle and it turned. She pushed the door open and stuck her head around the door, then stepped inside. Out of habit, her hand reached for a light switch. She found one and after a moment’s hesitation, flipped it on.
Dappled light yellowed the ivory walls to papyrus. Two large metal stars with tiny flower cutouts suspended from the ceiling created this effect. Paintings hung at intervals, separated by curtained alcoves. The room was redolent of rose incense. At the other end of the room hung an enormous painting in vivid reds and oranges. Jane walked toward it. The piece had the look of William Blake, which didn’t surprise her given Miss Essig’s collection upstairs. She wondered if this was what her visitors had been after.
The colors resolved into forms, and they stopped her dead in her tracks. A man sat on a stool of some kind. Great golden wings rose from his back. The halo around his head erupted into gold and scarlet, a look of ecstasy on his face. And he might well be ecstatic. A woman straddled him, her long, luxurious curls entwining with her own wings, her limbs wrapped around her mate, her head surrounded by a vivid aura, her face tilted upward. One of her arms stretched up toward a figure of Christ standing in a garden, a beatific look on his soft, androgynous face, graceful hands held out as if offering comfort. His side dripped blood. Bees flew around his wound as if it were a flower.
“Oh, my God,” Jane whispered.
On the low table in front of the painting sat a small version of a standing stone, its surface rough, rising to a rounded point. Balancing this piece on the opposite side sat a chalice cut from alabaster. A gutted candle in a glass holder gave off a strong scent of beeswax. It reminded her of Christmas Eve.
Jane turned and looked at some of the other paintings. Their subjects met her expectations—Christ meeting with his disciplines, a close-up of Jesus with his crown of thorns and hands folded in front of him, a third of Count Zinzendorf preaching to a crowd of early Moravians, rays of light falling on his heart and around the room. She pulled one of the blue curtains aside and found a door painted the same shade of blue. It opened into a small chamber, the same color blue, only slightly larger than a closet, furnished with a simple ladder back chair and a side table. On the wall hung a print just like the ones she’d found in Miss Essig’s Blake room featuring a bed in a simple bedroom enclosed in an elaborate scrolled border.
In a larger alcove sat a double bed neatly made up with white sheets and covered by a quilt with the same star pattern as the one she now slept under. Jane touched her star pendant. Two white robes hung on a hook on the back side of the door. A white cap with a blue ribbon. Hadn’t married women worn blue, unmarried pink?
Jane shifted uneasily, then opened a drawer in the small wooden bedside table, painted blue to match the walls, and found a pamphlet with the seal of the OGMS on it. She opened it and leafed through the pages, finding hymns and some liturgy. Moravian hymns were catalogued by tune name, and the name for the first one caught her eye: Seelenbrautigam.
Soul bridegroom. Jane whispered the translation.
All the implications coalesced in her mind. Overwhelmed, she slammed the book shut. Ran out to the main room, found a bench and sank onto it. After a minute, she looked back down the length of the room to the painting and the altar—there was no other word for it.
Bells clanged somewhere above her head and echoed down the hallway. She jumped up, startled by the sudden noise, and wrapped her arms around herself. Time for church.
Time for church indeed, she thought. She wondered how many of the people settling into their pews right now, opening their hymn books, shushing their children, had any inkling of what lay beneath them. She imagined her grandmother’s reaction.
But why was she scandalized? She’d been to feminist workshops reclaiming the goddess or exploring sexuality. Hell, there’d even been a seminar where they looked at their genitals in mirrors, trying to challenge cultural conditioning that told them the vagina was dirty and disgusting. She’d gotten tickets to the opening of the artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Plates around a dinner table, painted with labial folds as flowers, each one for an important feminist figure.
But this? She was not prepared for this. Jane shivered, trying to accept what she was seeing. These were rooms for sacred, ritualized sex. What else could they be? Right under a Moravian church? She hugged herself tighter.
After a minute, Jane gave herself a shake and walked back to the room with the bed. She checked to see if the drawer in the bedside table was completely closed and pulled the star quilt taut. She didn’t think she’d touched anything in the main chamber, but checked to be sure, then walked back to the door, turned off the lights and made her way back down the hallway. She paused where the corridor branched off and listened. Footsteps sounded from the direction she hadn’t explored. Growing louder.
She ran to the basement opening and ducked through, closed the panel quietly behind her, raced up the stairs to the kitchen and stood at the sink, heart racing. No sound came from the basement steps behind her. After a few minutes, she figured no one was following her. Jane turned around, wondering what to do next and noticed the thermos from Anna sitting on the counter.
“No, they couldn’t possibly . . .”
She picked it up, screwed off the top and took a whiff. It smelled like chamomile with honey. But she’d found it in the kitchen last night. If it had more than chamomile in it, then that faint singing would never have awakened her.
Jane rummaged in the pantry. Toward the back of the top shelf, she found clean mason jars. She took one down and poured the herbal concoction into the jar, washed out the thermos and set it in the drainer. But where could she take the liquid to be tested? She reached into her pocket for her cell phone, but it wasn’t there. Had it fallen out while she was in that room? She’d checked everything carefully. She picked up the house phone to dial her number, then imagined whoever belonged to the footsteps finding her mobile. She hung up the house phone and ran up to her bedroom. The cell sat on the dressing table.
She called Lois Williams. The call rang through to her voice mail, but just as Jane took a breath to leave a message, Lois answered. “Jane. What’s up?”
“I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but—”
Lois’s hearty laugh interrupted her. “Oh girl, we’ve got to get you out of the South.”
This warmed the chill in Jane’s belly a little. “Maybe so. Listen, some weird things are going on. I found a secret stairway behind the closet—”
“A what?”
“Stairway. It leads to the basement.”
“Maybe it was built during the Civil War. You know, to hide from us Yankees.”
Jane wondered how many martinis Lois had drunk already. “I need to have some tea analyzed to see if there’s a sedative in it.”
Silence.
“Lois?”
“What did you say?”
Jane repeated herself.
“That’s what I thought you said.”
“I want to get it tested. Does your firm have any contacts down here?”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” She told Lois about the two visitors, the sounds she’d heard last night and the room. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell her what she’d found there. Not yet. “This Anna, she’s probably the one who left me the tea. I want to know if she was trying to knock me out last night so I wouldn’t hear anything.”
“Jane, this is serious.”
“Why do you think I called you?”
“Okay—” Lois seemed out of breath “—I’m heading up to my computer. We have a contract with a national lab. I’ll see if they have an office in Greensboro.”
“Winston-Salem,” she corrected.
“Whatever. I’ve got the address in my computer. Call you back.”
Jane sat in the rocker in the corner of the bedroom looking out at the tall evergreen just outside. A robin sat on a branch looking back at her. And if the tea had something else in it besides chamomile? What then?
She jumped when the phone finally rang. “Yeah?”
“Got the address,” Lois said. “I called and said we had an emergency. Do you know where Baptist Hospital is?”
“Of course.” Jane’s tight shoulders relaxed a little.
“What’s with you guys down there? Is everything religious?”
Jane laughed. “Not really.”
“The lab is just down the street from the hospital.” Lois gave her the name and address. “They’ll be expecting you.”
“Thanks.”
“Will you be safe tonight?”
“I’ve got things locked up.”
“Yeah, right. Sounds like that place has more holes in it than a round of Swiss cheese. I’m going to ask the local police to drive by and keep an eye out.”
“Don’t.”
“Why ever not?”
“It’ll get back to Anna. This is a small town.”
“Jesus,” Lois said. “You’d better take care of yourself.”
“I will. I’ve got Miss Essig’s bulldog with me.”
Lois snorted at this, then said, “Listen, I’m doing a little checking on this OGMS. I’ll call when I get the report. Can you get me some clear copies of those old documents? They were just too blurred.”
“Yeah, I’ll go by the archives tomorrow.”
“In the meantime, the lab will send me a copy of their findings. I told them to give you one, too.”
“Talk to you later.”
Jane grabbed her purse and keys, and went down to the kitchen. She wrapped the mason jar of tea in a dish towel to cushion it and placed it in a cloth grocery bag. Then she called Winston. He ambled into the kitchen and sat down, head cocked. “Want to go for a ride?”
The bulldog barked in the affirmative.
“Come on, then.” They jumped into her car and drove across town.
Baptist Hospital had grown since she’d been born in it. The glass-front structure dominated the hill above the freeway. The receptionist at the lab just half a block away told her it would take an hour for the results and asked for her fax number.
“I’ll come back to get my copy.” She didn’t want anything going to the house, so she gave them her cell number, then drove down Hawthorne Road to the park where she ambled around with Winston, to his great delight. She’d always liked this neighborhood, with its big hill rounding up from the creek in terraced streets dotted with old Queen Anne homes. During her senior year in high school, she’d worked in an Italian restaurant just across the road and bugged the owner to let her sing once in a while. That same year, she and her best friend had driven in the little Peugeot her uncle had bought her to Reynolds High School to take an advanced placement course. Every inch of this town brought back memories. Jane realized she was trying not to think about the present. Better to wait for facts than let her mind run through various scenarios. But run through scenarios was just what it did. She walked faster, but her thoughts kept pace.
True to their word, the lab called in just over an hour, rescuing her from her imagination, and she drove over to pick up the results. The receptionist handed her an envelope through a slot in her little glass cage. Jane sat in the one chair in the alcove that passed for a waiting room, opened it and scanned the list of chemicals, which turned out to be all in Latin. She went back to the desk. “Excuse me.”
The round-faced woman looked up.
“Would it be possible to get a little help interpreting this?”
The receptionist rolled her brown eyes and with a sigh picked up the phone. Jane couldn’t hear what she said. Then the woman turned back. “Someone will be right with you, ma’am.”
After a minute, a lanky man with thin blond hair and bulging eyes opened the door and led her to an office with a small round table and two chairs. They sat. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I need some assistance reading this.” She slid the report over to him.
He pulled a pair of silver reading glasses from the pocket of his white lab coat and hunched over the paper. “These ingredients here—alphabisabolol and bisabolol oxide derivatives, farnesene, matricine, chamazulene, apigenin and luteolin—suggest this is some kind of herbal concoction.”
“What do those chemicals do?”
“They’re anti-inflammatory and anti-spasmodic mainly.”
“Would this add up to chamomile tea?”
“Could be.” He shrugged.
She let out a long sigh of relief. “Anything else?”
He peered back at the sheet of paper, running his thin forefinger down the list, stopping toward the bottom. “Barbiturates.”
A jolt of adrenaline straightened Jane’s spine. “How much?”
“Let’s see.” He chewed on his lip.
“Is the dosage lethal?” she asked.
“For an adult? No. But there’s enough in there to knock someone out for the night. It would depend on the weight of the subject.”
Jane jumped up and refolded the report. “Thank you for your time.”
He blinked, startled. “Glad I could be of—”
The door closed, swallowing his last word. Jane hurried outside, jumped in the car and pointed it down the hill, then found her way onto the interstate. She drove. She had to think. Anna had tried to drug her, which meant she was involved in the tantric room, as she’d come to think of it.
Winston whined, then turned and licked the closed window. Jane grimaced, but opened it for him. He hung his head out. They reached Clemmons. She took the closest exit and headed toward Tanglewood Park.
Jane guessed she wouldn’t want to be interrupted if she had a sex party planned. But she wouldn’t drug someone to hide it. She’d invite them to join in. She guessed. Actually, she’d never been to an orgy. Had a three-way in college once, but that had been during the sexual revolution. What she’d heard last night hadn’t sounded like wild debauchery. There’d been singing—then a chant. Maybe it had been some sort of sexual ritual. There seemed to be small rooms along each side for privacy. Had she heard more than two voices?
Weren’t these people some of the leaders of the church? It had seemed that way during Miss Essig’s funeral. If that’s where the sound had come from. She hadn’t explored the whole underground structure yet. And how had Philip and Margaret known about chanting? If those were their real names.
What if Miss Essig had been involved when she was alive? The rooms hadn’t looked new. Those steps were worn. They’d definitely been there a while. She must have known. The thought made her cringe.
Jane pulled to a stop behind the last car in a long line to get into Tanglewood Park. It was Sunday afternoon, after all. She didn’t want to sit and wait. To face the possibility that her beloved music teacher—the most proper and self-contained woman she’d ever known, the woman she’d modeled herself after as a budding adolescent, the woman who’d shepherded her through college, who’d been a second mother, her mentor in female independence and grace—had either been involved in group sex or been drugged so she wouldn’t know it was happening. A cold shiver ran the length of Jane’s body.
She pulled the car out of line and headed back to I-40. She drove toward Mocksville. If she moved fast enough, maybe she could outrun the logical, but completely unacceptable, inferences arriving in her mind. Her Blackberry rang.
It was Lois. “Barbiturates.”
“They told me,” Jane said.
“I want you out of there. Somebody tried to kill you.”
“But it wasn’t a lethal dose.”
“Maybe they’re just incompetent. Maybe they’ll get the dose right next time.”
“Next time?” Jane shook her head. “I’m not going to let them do this to Miss Essig.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
“What are you talking about? She’s dead. You’re the one they’re after now.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. If they didn’t want me in the house, why call me at all? Why tell me about the lot?”
Jane pulled the car over and more tears rolled down her cheeks. Winston whined and tried to lick her face. She pushed him away.
“The lot? There’s an empty lot next to the house?”
Jane explained how the lot was used to make decisions. Then she told Lois about the tantric room, tears seeping from her eyes. Winston kept trying to climb into her lap to comfort her. She scratched his chest to appease him.
“Jesus, Jane, these people are some kind of cult.”
“We’re just ordinary—” She stopped when she heard herself.
“You’re lucky you didn’t drink that tea,” Lois continued. “Then you’d have been the star in Rosemary’s Baby.”
The image pulled a sputtering laugh from her. She wiped her face with a paper napkin she found in the glove compartment. “I’m not convinced they’re dangerous. Decadent, yes.”
“The first sign—denial.”
“Come on, Lois.”
“I could arrange for private security, but it’s expensive.”
“Not yet.”
“I’m going to deepen our investigation of this Anna. And all the people who were at that meeting. I’ll let you know what we find out. In the meantime, you be careful.”
“Will do.”
Jane hung up, turned the car around and drove back to Miss Essig’s house. It didn’t feel like home anymore. When she arrived, everything looked quiet. It was past two o’clock and the church parking lot stood empty. When she opened the car door, Winston headed for the garden and she decided to let him be. She went inside. Still quiet. She opened the door to the basement and listened. Nothing.
Jane meandered through the bottom floor from the kitchen to the breakfast nook to the formal dining room, now full of boxes—each area setting off new memories. She settled at the piano in the long living room. Her fingers moved through a few scales, some chords, then she found herself playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune. Her heart swelled with the music. She’d learned the piece on this very piano with Miss Essig at her side, whose eyes had been fixed just above the mantle, staring out at her own private dreams, her elegant hands moving in the air counting time. She’d stood and applauded when Jane had finished the piece for the first time without making any mistakes. “Beautiful. Doesn’t Debussy speak straight to our hearts?”
Jane played for an hour, moving through piece after piece that evoked memories of Miss Essig, college and her amateur concerts, sinking into a trance. She found herself playing the opening of the music in her dream, but ran up against a blank. No sound rose to guide her forward. She played the beginning again, but the next phrase eluded her. Peace eluded her also.
✬ ✬ ✬
That evening, Jane decided to face the enemy. She walked to Dorothea’s house in the early evening to see what she could find out about last night. She hadn’t thought she could hide her emotional turmoil through a whole meal, but for a short visit, she could behave normally.
Dorothea greeted her with a big hug. “You didn’t come for supper.”
“I ate at home.”
“Missing anything?” Dorothea asked, a look of mischief on her face.
A chill ran through Jane. “Not that I know of.”
Dorothea pointed to a corner of the kitchen where a black cat lay curled up on top of a multicolored throw rug.
“Marvin,” Jane exclaimed.
He greeted her with a ‘meep’, then tucked his nose under his tail and closed his eyes.
“How did he get here?” Jane asked.
“Found him in the root cellar when I went down for onions.”
“How in the world?” Then Jane remembered him running into the hallway when she’d opened the panel in the basement wall. With everything else, she’d completely forgotten about the cats.
“Guess he was out wandering and found a way to get in. I thought it was locked up tight.” Dorothea shrugged. “He’s good company, though. Been watching me cook.”
“Where’s the root cellar, anyway?”
Dorothea gestured toward a door just off the back. “Just off the basement.”
Which meant the hallway and rooms somehow connected to this house. Unless there were other exits to the outdoors and he had found a way into the root cellar as Dorothea thought. Suzie B had followed him when he’d run into the hallway. If she turned up in a locked room, somebody might realize they’d come through the underground passage. And that Jane might know about it.
“Don’t worry,” Dorothea said. “He hasn’t bothered me.”
“I just don’t want him in the street is all.” The door to the dining room opened and one of the regulars came in, arms loaded with dishes. “Is Anna in her office?” Jane asked.
“No, she’s helping John at the church tonight,” Dorothea said.
Jane was disappointed and relieved all at once. She excused herself from cleanup and scooped Marvin up. She carried him across the street and into her yard, where she put him down. He sauntered over to the compost pile and crouched, ready for unsuspecting rodents. Inside, she found Suzie B curled up on a couch in the living room. The cat lifted her head and yawned, innocent of all wrongdoing. Jane was just glad she’d come back without causing more questions.