“Well, there’s a protest going on in front and customers are leaving left and right, so obviously the conference was a huge success.”
“Customers are leaving? It’s not because of me, is it?”
“I have no idea. Merlin’s meeting with some of them—in full Merlin mode, which you really have to see. I have a feeling it has more to do with Ramsay putting the whammy on them.”
“And?”
“What?”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Apparently, his wasn’t the only face that gave away feelings too easily. “And one of Ramsay’s reasons for joining Spellworks was the fact that MSI was harboring you—and that you were the one causing all the trouble.”
His shoulders sagged and he seemed to wilt. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Sorry. He’s a real jerk. Which is why we need to bring him down. You’re sure you don’t want to see if James and Gloria know anything?”
He shook his head. “No. And I’d better come up with a better plan, right away.” He began pulling papers together and stacking books.
“Maybe you’d think better with some food and rest,” I suggested.
“I don’t need another mother,” he snapped. “I think I’ve more than met my quota of mothers.”
I stood up and put my ball cap back on as I fought to control my temper. “Excuse me for caring about your well-being. How insensitive of me,” I said, forcing my voice not to quaver.
I made it all the way to the door before he called after me, “Sorry about that. I’m just—well, I’m not good company at the moment.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” I turned to give him a faint smile. “I’ll check on you later.”
As I headed down the stairs, it occurred to me that Owen wasn’t the only one who could talk to James and Gloria. Facing Gloria would be only slightly less scary than going alone into the dragons’ lair, but even if getting the information didn’t prove to be the key to beating Ramsay, I thought Owen needed the answers about his past before he could move forward.
Chapter Sixteen
I went home to change into some nicer clothes, fix my hair, and freshen my makeup. Gloria wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to face at anything other than my best. I checked the train schedule on Marcia’s computer, then took the subway to Grand Central and caught the Hudson line. The little town where I got off the train looked different from when I’d last seen it. I’d been there for Christmas, when there was snow on the ground. In summer, the lawns were lush and green, with brightly colored flower beds.
I hadn’t called ahead, so there was no one to meet me at the station, and there were no cabs in sight, but it wasn’t too far, just up a steep hill, so I set off walking to the home where Owen had grown up.
The town was a magical enclave, populated with magical people of all kinds, so it wasn’t odd to see fairies running errands and gnomes working in gardens. I couldn’t help but wonder what these people thought of the rumors about Owen. When I’d been here for Christmas, they’d all adored him. Did they regard him with suspicion now?
My feet had spawned a blister or two and I was slightly out of breath by the time I reached James and Gloria Eaton’s home, a brick gingerbread-like concoction on a hill over the town. The house didn’t look quite as magical as it had with an icing of snow on the peaked and turreted roof, but the flowers in the garden made up for that. I was tempted to check to see if they were made of gumdrops.
It took a few minutes after I knocked on the door before James came to open it, his elderly black dog at his side. His appearance took my breath away. He seemed to have aged a dozen years since I’d seen him last, and I’d have bet that most of that had come since yesterday. He’d already been white-haired, but his skin stretched tighter across his cheekbones, his eyes looked hollow, and his shoulders were stooped. “Katie! This is a surprise,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I probably should have called first, but I need to talk to you.”
“Yes, we should talk. Do come inside.”
James was being cordial enough, but then he was the easier of Owen’s foster parents. Gloria would be another story, I was sure. She was the only person I’d seen really able to scare Owen. There was something about her that made me want to stand at attention whenever I was near her.
That made what I saw next so shocking that I couldn’t believe my eyes. Gloria, who was tall, stiff, and quite formidable, lay slumped on the sofa, looking even older and more frail than James did. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, like she’d been crying for days. She may have scared me, but my heart went out to her.
When she saw me, she struggled to sit up. “How is he?” she demanded, only a trace of her usual starch in her voice.
I hesitated, not sure how to answer. Did she want to be reassured, or did she want the truth? Oh, who was I kidding? This was Gloria. She’d want the truth. “I honestly don’t know. He’s being weird. And stubborn.”
“I wonder where he learned that?” James muttered, and I had to fight not to laugh.
“I think it’s getting to him, but it’s taking a while to sink in,” I said. Even though I hadn’t been invited to do so, and Gloria was someone who took that sort of thing seriously, I sat on the chair across from the sofa. “The big question is, is it true? If it is, who really knew? Right now, Owen doesn’t seem to want to even think about it, but I believe it’s important to get to the bottom of this. What did you know?”
James sat next to Gloria on the sofa and said, “The situation is, as you may imagine, complicated. We didn’t know who he was, but we did know he was a special case because his abilities were unusually strong in someone that age and because of the difficulties he’d already gone through. That can be a recipe for disaster if the child isn’t properly trained.”
“The Council wanted us to train and monitor him,” Gloria continued. “But we were not supposed to become emotionally involved. Doting, overly permissive parents have been the downfall of many a powerful child. In the nonmagical world we had the rights of foster parents, but within the magical world, guardianship rested with the Council, and they could take him away at any time. We had to remain neutral so we could objectively observe his progress.” Her voice cracked. “It was a difficult situation—if we showed signs of loving him too much, we would lose him, and yet we soon came to love him too much to bear the thought of losing him. Our inexperience as parents probably meant we weren’t able to strike quite the right balance, and we erred on the side of duty.”
“We had always wanted children of our own, but we were not blessed in that way,” James said, placing a hand over his wife’s. That simple gesture brought tears to my eyes.
Gloria gave a crooked smile. “And then one day they brought us this little boy. He was so small—he was rather sickly at first. He hadn’t been taken care of very well. He was so quiet, and we later learned his vision was weak. I was expected to treat him as though he was a pupil at a single-student boarding school, and I was his matron. If I ever seemed too attached to him, then I would have been deemed unfit for my job.”
Tears spilled from her eyes, and I was pretty sure my own cheeks had become wet. “That must have been awful for you.”
“It was wonderful and awful, all at the same time.”
“We were very proud of him,” James added.
“It was only much later when we heard the rumors that Mina Morgan had been pregnant and noticed the timing,” Gloria said. “Then we figured it out.”
“Do you think anyone official knew? Someone on the Council, maybe?” I asked.
James shook his head. “I never got that impression. And I was afraid to ask in case no one did know. We didn’t want to be the ones to attach that stigma to Owen.”
“We may have been a little stricter with him after we became suspicious,” Gloria said, sitting up straighter, “but that was for his own good. We wanted to be sure he was nothing like his parents. If something had gone wrong with him and we hadn’t mentioned our suspicions, then we would have felt responsible.”
“So, if you didn’t know, and the Council didn’t know, and Merlin didn’t know, then how did Idris and presumably Ramsay know?” I asked. “Does Ramsay have evidence, or is he merely putting two and two together like you did and making a wild accusation?”
“We’ve known Ivor Ramsay for a very long time,” James said. “He knew we were bringing up Owen, and he knew what we knew about Owen’s background, but he never showed any signs of suspecting that Owen was anything more than a particularly powerful magical child.”
I braced my hands on my knees and leaned forward. “I presume you’ve heard about Ramsay’s announcement about taking over Spellworks?” They both nodded. “We believe he’s been behind it all along, and it’s all part of a plot to either discredit or do away with Merlin so he can eliminate that deterrent and go for absolute power. I think that if we can show that Ramsay knew who Owen was all along, then we can prove that he isn’t the noble, upright guy he’s claiming to be, and that’s the way to get to him. If he knew, then that means he’s been the one hiding that secret from the magical world, and then that brings up the question of why. I was wondering if you have any information on where or how Owen was found in the first place. He said something about a fire station, but that was all he would tell me. He’s reluctant to look into this, and I suppose I can understand that, but we need to figure it out.”
The life snapped back into Gloria’s eyes, and she became the woman who’d nearly frightened me to death when I first met her. She threw off the knitted shawl from around her shoulders and came to her feet with ramrod-straight posture. “I know we have some information. Let’s go look.”
She moved with a sense of purpose out of the living room and toward the study, with James, the dog, and me in her wake. If the information we needed was in that study, then I had a feeling this could take all day. Owen had learned his organizational skills from his foster father.
Once we were all in the study, James took the lead. “Now, where did I put that file?” he mused out loud. “I haven’t looked at it in ages, not since we first wondered about the possible connection between Owen and the Morgans. When was that, Gloria?”
“When Owen was ten. And as I recall, the information we had wasn’t of much use in answering the question, so I don’t know if it will help you, Katie.”
“If you can even tell me where he was found, I may be able to track back and find out how he came to be there,” I said, even as I got a sick feeling in my stomach from worry that Owen was right and this was a waste of time. I didn’t have another plan.
After trying three different file drawers, James came up with a large document file envelope. The heavy brown paper was faded, and it was closed by a fat rubber band. He swept a clear space on his cluttered desk, slid the band off the envelope, and opened it. There were a few official-looking documents and a sheet that looked like a typewritten carbon copy. “That’s the one that had the background information,” Gloria said.
James put on his reading glasses, skimmed over the sheet, then said, “Ah, here it is. Children’s Services picked him up at the fire station on Broome Street, where the firefighters said he’d been left.”
I took a notepad out of my purse and wrote that down. “It doesn’t say how he was left, does it? Did someone bring him there, or was he left on the doorstep in a basket?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“And what was the date?”
James smiled, “July fourth. They used that as his birth date because the doctors who examined him that day believed he was a newborn.”
“Then maybe that date is distinctive enough for someone to remember it,” I said. I gave each of them an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. This really helps.”
“You must tell us what you discover,” Gloria said. She hesitated, then said tentatively, “Should we perhaps go to him ourselves?”
I understood that she’d want to see him, but I felt like I was treading on thin ice with Owen by going behind his back this way, as it was. Dragging in his foster parents would be too much right now. “He refuses to call you. I don’t think he’s up for visitors. And I may need to keep you in reserve for when I really need to knock some sense into him.”
That evoked a slight smile. “I understand. Then please tell Owen what we told you. He may not be ready to speak to us yet, but he should know.”
“I will,” I promised. She insisted on feeding me a snack that was more like a meal, and then James insisted on driving me to the train station. By the time I was back in the city, it was the end of the workday, so I went straight home.
I hadn’t yet had a chance to tell Gemma and Marcia about everything that had happened, and Nita was already home when I got there, so I wouldn’t be able to anytime soon. I’d thought her presence might complicate matters since she wasn’t in on the magical secret, but it was nice to have an excuse not to talk about any of this for a while.
Nita went into throes of ecstasy at the idea of ordering in Chinese food. “I’ve always wanted to do this!” she gushed, gazing at the delivery menu for our favorite Chinese place. “But we don’t have any restaurants that deliver back home, unless you count Meals on Wheels for the old people. And we don’t have Chinese food.”
“It’s just takeout,” Gemma said with a shrug.
“But I have been living in a world without it,” Nita said with the kind of drama that you’d expect to hear about electricity or indoor plumbing.
“Welcome to the twenty-first century,” Marcia said, her lips twitching with wry amusement.
Once we had food and were gathered around the dining table, Nita said, “I have the early shift again tomorrow, so does anyone want to go out tomorrow night? We could have a big girls’ night out—something very
Sex and the City
.” She paused, chewing her lip, then said, “But you all probably have dates.”
“No, Philip’s got something going on,” Gemma said.
“And Rod’s barely even talking. He seems upset about something. That reminds me, Katie, I was going to ask you—” Marcia cut off when she caught my slight shake of the head.
The last thing I wanted to do was play
Sex and the City
when my life was more like
hex
and the city, but that wasn’t something I could easily explain to Nita, and I knew Owen wouldn’t be up for a date night. “Sure, sounds like fun,” I said, trying to sound a lot more enthusiastic than I felt.