I flipped through pages until I found the right entry. “Look,” I told Huck. “Father mentions her here. The widow is the first person Father interviewed this summer—the widow of the collector who first owned Rothwild’s ring. The collector was Cezar Anca. He died the day after Rothwild purchased his bone ring. His wife’s name is Natasha. Read,” I told him, sliding the journal his way.
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
June 27, 1937
Bucure?ti, Kingdom of România
In taxicab. Jean-Bernard and I just paid a visit to Natasha Anca, the widow of a wealthy collector in Bucharest, one Cezar Anca. Rothwild purchased his bone ring from Mr. Anca last month before the man died. Hence, widow.
She tolerated my shoddy Romanian accent for several minutes, until I discovered she spoke English just fine. She was tall and leggy and blonder than blond. Jean-Bernard complained that my eyes were on things they shouldn’t be, but she was holding her sherry glass near the plunging neckline of her dress, and she kept tapping the glass withone red fingernail, click-click-click, like some kind of cannibalistic insect, luring a mate so that she could behead him.
Anyway, it didn’t matter, because when I asked her about the sale of Vlad Dracula’s bone ring, she confirmed that Rothwild was an acquaintance of her late husband, Cezar, that she didn’t know him well. All she knew was that Rothchild had been eyeing the ring for some time and that her husband had sold it to him in a moment of charity between friends. There was no documentation accompanying the ring—nothing historical that would authenticate it. That’s what she said. I’m not sure I believe her, but I didn’t have the patience to press her about it too far, because the room was filled with taxidermy that smelled of bad chemicals and hellfire, and my damn lungs were strained by a summer cold, so I couldn’t stop coughing.
Regardless, the interview seemed to be going nowhere, around and around, so we left. The only interesting thing of note was a photograph I saw in the hallway as we were being shown the door by the maid. It was taken in 1929 at some kind of fundraiser for a political cause, according the caption. It was Rothwild with his arm around Natasha. Which made me wonder if she was keeping secrets.
“Huh. I suppose you’re right,” Huck said as his eyes flicked across my father’s scrawled words. “Natasha is probably ‘the widow’ from Fox’s cipher.”
“She lives here in Bucharest,” I said excitedly. “We could go talk to her. Maybe she’s seen Father. Maybe she can point us in the right direction. Or, oh! Maybe Father is even there right now.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Huck warned.
“Andrei can help us find her address, I’ll bet.”
I was talking too fast, and I fully expected Huck to tell me I was mad. But he didn’t. He just stared at the journal entry, scratching his neck. And then his eyes met mine. “Well, then,” he said. “We’d better go before it gets too late.”
“Yes, let’s,” I said, happier than I should have been that he was willing to trust me and give this a chance.
“Let’s hope she isn’t really a praying mantis,” he added with a smile that revealed the attractive gap between his teeth.
If she could point us to where my father might be, I honestly didn’t care.
After paying the check on our hours-long meal, we dashed across the wet boulevard and flagged down Andrei at the desk. He was able to track down an address for the widow in minutes. By the time we’d hopped into a taxi and passed along the written address to the driver, it was well past seven o’clock and pouring down rain. An ominous start to our journey across the city and one that only worsened during the drive. Thunder and lightning cleared the streets of pedestrians and snarled the traffic. So badly, in fact, when we neared thestradawe needed to be on, we found it had been blocked by police, who were clearing away an automobile accident.
Our driver muttered something rapidly in a low voice that I couldn’t quite catch over the noise of the rain beating down on the taxi. In Romanian, I asked him to repeat himself, but he was busy rolling down his window to shout at another car that was trying to turn around in the middle of the street.
“I think he’s telling us we’ll need to walk the rest of the way,” Huck said. “The road’s blocked.”
“We’ll be soaked,” I said. If not from rain above, then from the water below that was flowing down both sides of the street like small rivers. I tucked my fur collar into my coat and did the same with the cuffs of my sleeves. “Oh, well. At least the rain’s slowing a little. Can’t be that far.”
Huck paid the driver the taxi fee and a bit extra to wait for us. At least, I thought it was understood. But as soon as we were out of the cab, it turned in the middle of the road, backed up, and then sped away in the opposite direction—and no amount of shouting brought it back.
“We’ll find another one,” Huck shouted, flipping up his wool coat’s wide collar and lapels to shield himself from the rain. “Come on.”
We avoided the uniformedpolitieiand made our way down a hill, trying to match up the numbers on the handwritten address to the homes that sat along the road. But half were unmarked, and others were hard to see in the dark. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel, Huck made a funny noise. I looked up and saw what he saw.
An ambulance. Police. A crowd of black umbrellas.
They were all gathered around a three-story house covered in ivy; gold light shone from two windows on the top floor like a pair of malevolent eyes. They looked down on the driveway, watching a scene playing out, and as we quickly approached, we saw it too.
A coroner’s van was parked there, lights flashing in the rain. And into the back, a bagged body was being loaded. Another body lay facedown on the wet pavement just outside the side entrance. From her uniform, she was a maid, and her head was bleeding so badly, even the rain couldn’t wash it away. Two other servants stood under a portico, weeping.
“Please tell me that isn’t Natasha Anca’s home,” I said as we gawked at the gruesome sight with the rest of the onlookers.
“That it is,” a middle-aged man to my side said in a heavy accent. “I hope you were not friends.”
“No,” Huck said. “Not friends. We didn’t know her.”
“Very good.” The man nodded approvingly. White hair stood out under the dark of an umbrella. His coat and suit looked well made and expensive. “I live two houses down,” he told us. “And ever since she and her husband moved in five years ago, she’s been a blight on polite society. Séances. Tarot card readings. Debauched parties and orgies...”
