The Fountain of Youth (Order of the Black Sun Book 15) Read online

  “You’re welcome, Dean Patterson. I trust things are going swimmingly for you and the faculty?” Purdue asked cordially. To his side he could hear Mrs. Patterson snigger, but decided to ignore it.

  “Very well, yes, thank you,” Daniel said, smiling and shaking Purdue’s hand. “I had no idea you knew Dr. Gould. Small world.”

  “Smaller than you think,” his mother said loud enough to herself to make sure they overheard.

  Purdue chuckled. “I thought that was why you invited her to teach here, because of her affiliation with me?”

  “No, my wife is responsible for inviting Dr. Gould. Dr. Christa Smith, department head,” he said proudly.

  “Can’t say I’ve heard of her,” Purdue said thoughtfully, “but that doesn’t mean anything. Just because I move in academic circles doesn’t mean that I know everyone.”

  “Who’s that up there? My eyes are not what they used to be,” Mrs. Patterson asked, shielding her eyes with her hand and looking up at the balcony.

  “Oh, shit! I forgot about Mrs. Cotswald!” he exclaimed. “Please excuse me, Mr. Purdue. I have to conclude my business.”

  “Certainly,” Purdue replied, and watched the Dean run back into the rain again.

  “Feisty and zealous, that man,” Purdue remarked to Mrs. Patterson. “Does he take after his mother, then?”

  Mrs. Patterson laughed, “I hope so. My side of the family has always been very young at heart…and not too clumsy in age either.”

  Mrs. Cotswald paced across the wet corridor as she waited for Dean Patterson to return, thanking her lucky stars that she’d invested in shoes that did not torture her ankles. Elated to hear some movement downstairs, she descended to the ground floor where the landing continued on into another landing that led to a level below. Intrigued, Mrs. Cotswald peeked over the wrought iron balustrade, but was disappointed to see that the stairs dropped into a closed trapdoor.

  A yelp of fear escaped her at the sight of the dead-end stairs that no doubt led down to some sort of dungeon or torture room, the product of her abusive history along with her creative imagination. Looking around her, she found that nobody was present and her curiosity beckoned.

  As softly as she could, Mrs. Cotswald carefully took each step down, but no matter how gently she stepped, the iron would sound her approach like a gallows bell. Before she could make it to the third step from the top landing the trapdoor sprang open. Both the two women emerging, as well as the curious visitor shrieked in woeful surprise.

  “Mrs. Cotswald?” Clara asked as Christa peeked past her bottom to see.

  “What a surprise!” Christa remarked. “To what do we owe this tremendous pleasure?”

  “I was waiting for Dean Patterson and thought to explore a bit,” replied Mrs. Cotswald, smiling.

  “You shouldn’t explore around here,” Christa warned. “The wet cold and the eroded old stairs are dangerous if you don’t know your way.” She finally stepped onto the ground floor landing and smiled at Mrs. Cotswald. “You could catch your death here.”

  Wishful thinking, you devious bitch, Mrs. Cotswald thought as she read the deceit in Christa Smith’s eyes.

  “Ah, there you are!” Dean Patterson cried as he jogged closer, soaked and trying to catch his breath.

  “Darling! What on earth did you do to get so wet? You’ll get sick,” Christa moaned, removing her cardigan to drape it protectively over his shoulders.

  “I was just checking on my mother,” he panted.

  Christa uttered an insensitive scoff, “You shouldn’t be such a mama’s boy, Daniel. She’s made it this far in life; she doesn’t need protection.”

  “No, it’s not that. She was with a stranger,” he smiled cordially, “who turned out to be the great David Purdue! Can you fathom? Lovely having such a famous explorer and an old friend of St. Vincent’s visiting us at the same time.”

  “Why is Mr. Purdue gracing us with his presence?” Christa asked.

  Removing his glasses to dry them, Dean Patterson smiled as he said, “Oh, he is here to surprise Dr. Gould.”

  Clara stiffened, but Christa’s hand found hers surreptitiously and squeezed it.

  Chapter 26

  Mrs. Patterson waited with Purdue, but they decided to go and look for Nina when it started to loom towards the evening darkening of the sky.

  “Wonder where that darling child is? Usually she naps around 4 p.m. and I bring her dinner around 6 p.m. almost every day. This is the first time that she’s been this late,” Mrs. Patterson told Purdue. He didn’t like it one bit, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions too soon.

  “Maybe she’s finishing up some marking or making copies, or whatever it is lecturers do at smaller institutions,” he speculated. But in his gut he could feel that something was wrong. After Lieutenant Campbell shared with him that the Order was on Nina’s trail because of her blood work, he half expected her to be the target of some abductor sooner than later.

  Purdue had tried umpteen times to reach her by cell and by e-mail without success. This he’d expected, what with their shaky relationship and her need for space. But when Sam had told him not even he had access to her, Purdue knew that the ailing historian was hell-bent on disappearing. But now he at least knew why she was being so distant, though it wasn’t much of a consolation.

  “Should we go and look for her, perhaps?” Mrs. Patterson asked Purdue out of the blue. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t like this one bit. The poor woman is sick as a dog, smokes herself to death, and is a creature of habit. Who knows where she could be?”

  “I concur, Mrs. Patterson,” he said firmly. “You seem to have a gut for trouble, as do I.”

  She chuckled as she opened up her brolly. “My boy, if you only knew my aptitude for smelling trouble, you would make me your bodyguard. Come. We’ll start at the archive room where she works when she’s not teaching.”

  With Purdue’s lanky body bent to share Mrs. Patterson’s umbrella, they traversed the beautiful garden through the threatening weather to see what was keeping Nina at this hour. When they arrived at the plummeting stairwell the trapdoor was open, as it always had been.

  “She works down there?” Purdue asked.

  “Yes, my dear,” Mrs. Patterson said.

  “Odd,” he replied. “She’s terrified of small spaces.” He dipped his head under the ceiling as he came down the stairs. Somewhere in his Nazi-weakened trust Purdue was wondering if the nice old lady was leading him into a trap, only to have the trapdoor slammed behind him. But his paranoia was unfounded. She was right on his heel, calling for Dr. Gould into the pitch darkness.

  “Wait, Mr. Purdue,” she whispered. “There is a light switch here.”

  A click disappointed their expectations, but ignited their concerns. “Why are we looking for Nina in a dark room, Mrs. Patterson? It’s not like she would be sitting in the dark, would she?”

  “No, that would be stupid of us. I just thought that she could be lying on the floor, passed out or something. That lady is very ill, you know,” the elderly woman told Purdue. “Nosebleeds and headaches, nausea and fainting spells plague her daily. It’s conceivable that she could be lying in the dark.”

  “I see,” he said, fumbling for his tablet. Part of the device contained a sharp LED light.

  “What’s going on here?” Christa asked from above them. “You will break your necks down there in the dark. The lightning blew the wiring on this grid.”

  “We’re looking for Dr. Gould,” Purdue explained, patiently returning up the steps behind the Dean’s mother. He had no idea that he was leaving Nina behind in her slow acting coffin, unable to scream from behind centuries of thick stone.

  “Nina went to see her specialist in Wolverhampton for tests,” Christa informed them with a splendidly played nonchalance. “She took the short break of the public holiday to get her treatment done. Apparently the poor thing has been really under the weather.”

  “Oh, damn,” Purdue sighed. “Would you
know the name of her doctor there, Dr. Smith?”

  “No, I’m afraid she didn’t say, Mr. Purdue. But I’m sure she should be back by next week. In the meanwhile, would you like to stay for dinner?” Christa invited pleasantly.

  “I would rather just get on to Wolverhampton, thank you Dr. Smith,” Purdue gave her a cordial nod and smiled.

  “No, you won’t,” she insisted. “There is no way the Patterson’s will allow a guest to drive in this hellish storm. Absolutely not. And you can stay for the two days until she returns.”

  “That is awfully kind,” Purdue replied. “I would hate to impose. And I am unannounced too.”

  “Rubbish,” she said, and gave Purdue a wink. “After all, we’re already preparing a dinner for Mrs. Cotswald too, so you will not be imposing at all. We have more than enough.”

  Mrs. Patterson watched her daughter-in-law pretend to be a human. It was chilling to see. But she was not about to embarrass her son by calling out his callous wife again. Not tonight.

  In the main building’s cozy ballroom, the dinner table was decked out and the guests the residents gathered with wine and eclectic cuisine. Mrs. Patterson took her place next to Purdue, while Mrs. Cotswald sat across from them along the dining table. Their hosts sat at the heads of the table, and Mrs. Clara Rutherford was seated at Christa’s right.

  Christa smiled as her husband chatted as he poured the drinks, keeping her eyes on the interesting field of play before her. One by one she surveyed them.

  Look at them, all gathered at my table. Three widows, Christa thought. The billionaire genius who donates towards Daniel’s beloved academy, oblivious to the betrayal of his own medical staff who sent the woman he loves straight into the claws of the Black Sun organization to be used as an incubator.

  Purdue looked a bit tense, not the usual flamboyant extrovert his reputation dictated. Christa figured he was just feeling out among all the strangers. Probably worried about his stubborn little bitch, she sneered. Then her eyes fell on some of the others. Oh, sweet, tenacious Mrs. Cotswald, the idiot who can’t tell when she’s unwanted. Probably the reason she got the shit beat out of her by Raymond all those years before she married the corpse in the archive room.

  “Happy, deary?” Mrs. Patterson asked loudly, her remark drawing all eyes towards the smiling Christa. She hadn’t realized that her self-perceived superiority was showing on her face.

  “Oh, um, yes, thank you, Anna,” Christa said amicably, successfully fooling all the others that she was smiling with affection. As soon as they’d all returned to their conversations she continued taking stock. And let us not forget the matriarch, Anna Patterson, bred by SS and turned traitor. Adoptive daughter of Prof. Ebner’s good graces, having been raised by one of the Order’s finest scientists and now? You’ve chosen to turn your back on us and you’re now only alive because I need your son to manage your estate when I kill you.’

  Christa’s black heart throbbed eagerly as her victorious disdain escalated. In fact, had she not been so desperate to tap Nina Gould’s precious blood over three days or more, she could have wiped the slate clean of the smaller vermin she was beholding. Purdue’s nosy prying to find Nina and Mrs. Cotswald’s annoying recurrence blighting Christa’s harvesting of Gould’s powerful sanguine elixir made them both intolerable obstacles she had to bear with. Daniel seemed ignorant of his wife’s doings. To him, her meetings and clandestine projects were much like a book club, a hobby to keep her busy when she wasn’t working – something to help her forge alliances with other women. He was almost correct in that assumption, barring the murderous tendencies when she did not get her way.

  Now and then she would exchange looks with Clara, both hoping to maintain the charade until the others retreated to their respective corners and they could check on the progress of Nina’s exsanguination. Christa wondered what Daniel would do if he knew that Clara was in fact her child. How would he react if he knew that St. Vincent’s administration manager was, in reality, the product of Christa’s involvement with one SS-Oberstrumbannführer Martin Hertz for the Lebensborn project?

  He knew about her fetish for the antique font in the garden. She’d had an obsession with the moss-covered stone ornament that used to tap the underground river that had now run dry, but Daniel would never believe such nonsense as that of it being a Fountain of Youth. All he knew was that the water spring was one of the reasons he hadn’t sold the property before, because his wife loved it so much. Nowadays she didn’t even look at it, and yet she still fought to keep the fortress. Why, he did not know.

  “Mrs. Cotswald, you told me you’ve been looking for your daughters all your life. May I ask how you lost them?” Dean Patterson asked.

  She gracefully wiped her mouth and she took a hefty helping of wine before she replied. “Many years ago, I was a young dancer in Latvia. I belonged to a Ballet Company that toured throughout Europe during…” she stopped. She could hardly share her true age with the people around the table, and mentioning that her tale was set during World War II would have been absurd.

  “During?” Purdue asked, eager to hear her story.

  “Um, during dark times in Poland, where I come from,” she recovered. “As I said, I was a dancer, but a terrible injury sustained on stage one night caused me my career.”

  “That’s terrible,” Mrs. Patterson frowned.

  Mrs. Cotswald shrugged and sighed sadly, “I was young and I got involved with a…military man…with whom I had two children.” She told her tale as nonchalantly as she could, trying not to make too much of an impression. “But, of course, he left and I could not care for my girls. Having been dismissed from the ballet company, I’d had to rely on the charity of art lovers and friends to get by. Eventually, I had to give up my baby girls for adoption or see them starve. The adoptive parents kept in touch with me about my children, as long as I never visited them.”

  “You weren’t allowed to let your children know you?” Daniel gasped. “That’s barbaric.”

  “Perfect word, my boy,” she replied with a crack in her voice, “Perfect word.” Holding out her glass to Daniel for more wine, she cleared her throat and tried not to weep. He obliged gladly and sat down to hear the rest.

  “As long as I remained a ghost, they would send me pictures and tell me where the girls were schooled, and so on. But somewhere around 1966 I lost touch. At the time my then husband sent me to a boarding house in Steinhöring. From there I was admitted to a secret mental asylum in Graz, Austria. From then on I couldn’t find my daughters again, until I followed the adoption trail to Hampshire,” she smiled such hope that Daniel wished he could embrace her. “But the trail ran cold again when Prof. Ebner died.”

  Clara and Christa looked at one another knowingly. Purdue was touched by Mrs. Cotswald’s story, but he could feel that she had omitted the core truth. He planned to extract the actual, although unbelievable, truth from her before the night was over. If she was familiar with these people at St. Vincent’s, she would be able to provide him with a little more insight on which of them, if not all of them, could have abducted Nina.

  One thing was plain to Purdue. He did not buy the Wolverhampton excuse for a minute and something told him that, if he left here, he would never see Nina alive again.

  Chapter 27

  “So, Mr. Purdue, how do you know Dr. Gould?” Daniel asked.

  Christa looked especially interested. Purdue was very well known, both as philanthropist and as explorer and inventor, but Nina Gould did not particularly stand out in academic conversation.

  “I’ve hired her as an historical advisor on several expeditions before,” Purdue said. “After so many years of working together we’ve become firm friends.”

  “Apparently you’ve had quite the tiff with some competitors for those relics you love to acquire,” Christa mentioned with her mouth full. She washed down her food with some wine and a deadly leer.

  “The Order of the Black Sun?” he mentioned deliberately, hoping to start sh
aking the cage a little. “It’s no secret that I’ve a tendency to get under their skins. But you know, it’s all about who is better and faster, I suppose.” He laughed, and quickly Daniel laughed with him.

  “I thought they were a myth,” Daniel told Purdue.

  “Oh no, Dean Patterson, they are very much active. In fact, they remind me of a cult of bored college students. Too much money and no productive way to spend their time.” Purdue chuckled, intentionally mocking the Order. It worked to his advantage. By using his ability to read faces he could clearly see that Christa Smith was immensely agitated. Regardless, he paid her no attention. Purdue had established where the head of the snake was. All that was left now was finding the sharpest machete to sever that head.

  “Maybe they could do more with those relics than to leave them gathering dust in museums,” Clara remarked. Purdue marked her too. Christa’s shoving foot against hers was too late.

  “What Mrs. Rutherford means to say is that some of those artifacts could be used to improve science in this day and age,” Christa corrected her daughter, but it was quite redundant.

  “That is cause for concern, Dr. Smith. Power should be reserved for those who have the welfare of all in mind, not a minority out to dominate the world with it.” Purdue smiled, and raised his glass. “Mrs. Rutherford,” he suddenly attended to Clara, “if I may ask, where is Mr. Rutherford?”

  “He’s dead, Mr. Purdue. He died falling from a cliff while he was on an expedition back in 1987,” she recited as if she had been taught the words.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied. But he didn’t care. Nina was the only thing on his mind and he had to play quickly to find out where she was. What Purdue did notice was the way in which Mrs. Patterson stared at Mrs. Cotswald. The two women looked the same age, both in early their seventies, and now that they sat opposite one another they looked remarkably alike.