A King's Ransom

“Grace,” she whispered. “I need grace.”

His mother had never been religious. “Do you want me to get the chaplain?”

She shook her head, frustration and pain on her face. “Vespers,” she whispered through cracked lips. “The oldest of enemies. Guardian, promise me.”

“I promise,” he said, for the last time.

One last, gasped sentence. “Stay friends with Dan Cahill.”

She closed her eyes, and her hand went limp. She died two hours later.

Now the agony of that night swept over him again, and he wanted to crash to his knees and sob. He wasn’t over his mother’s death.

But he had to be strong. He had to figure this out. Deathbed promises, made in a swirl of words he didn’t understand. The pain in her eyes. The way she gasped for breath.

What if those things she was trying to tell him … were real?

Stay friends with Dan Cahill. He’d thought she was just reassuring herself that her son would continue his only friendship after her death. But now, in his head, he heard her voice. He heard the urgency of it.

He glanced desperately at his brother. How could he find the words to tell him? Jake would never believe him about Astrid. He’d say she was delusional, that she was full of painkillers… .

Jake was already dialing.

“Please, Jake!”

The desperate emotion in his voice made Jake stop.

Atticus thought fast. He had to give Jake a reason to go find Amy and Dan. His brain was suddenly firing with connections, and he had a feeling that only Dan and Amy could answer his questions.

“Interpol won’t listen,” he said. “Maybe you’re right – what if Dan and Amy are after something else? And they’re using Dad’s name. What if they implicate him in the crime?”

“All the more reason to call the authorities,” Jake said.

“No,” Atticus said. “All the more reason to go to Prague.”

Kutna Hora was a picturesque city that had once sat on top of Europe’s most prosperous silver mine. Back in medieval times, it was second only to Prague in importance. St. Barbara’s Cathedral was renowned for its Gothic magnificence, and the town was popular with tourists. Amy and Dan milled with them as they exited the train station. Most headed for the cathedral or the mining museum in a fifteenth-century castle.

“Do you know what the Czechs used to do with people they didn’t like back in ye olde medieval days?” Dan asked Amy. “Throw them out the window. Really, I read it on the train. It’s called defenestration. It happened in the fourteen hundreds. And there was this event called the Great Defenestration in the sixteen hundreds, where this one group of guys threw this other group of guys they didn’t like out the window of Prague Castle. They actually lived, because they landed in a dung heap. Now, there’s a soft landing. But it started a trend. There’s actually an index entry for defenestrations in the guidebook. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Since when are you interested in history?”

“I’m not. I’m interested in wild acts of defenestration. Do you think we could arrange to meet Casper Wyoming in Prague Castle?”

“Sure. Keep thinking, Dan. Come on, let’s find the bus.”

Amy bought bus tickets at a tabac and asked directions to the bus for Sedlec. It was an easy walk to Masarykova Street.

The ride to Sedlec wasn’t long, and soon they were pulling up in a small suburb. They jumped off the bus with several other passengers. A tourist with a camera and a backpack approached them. “Is this the way to the bone church?” he asked Amy.

“You mean All Saints?” Amy asked. “I think it must be that church up ahead.”

“The bone church?” Dan murmured as he walked away.

Tucked next to the side of the church was a cemetery. Dan saw a skull and bones, like a Jolly Roger, at the entrance.

A real skull. With real bones.

“Cool,” he breathed. “It’s like the Church of Pirates.”

They paid their money and walked in. There were a few others in the chapel, walking back and forth, studying the decorative garlands, the splendid white chandelier, and the sculptures against the walls.

It was all fairly magnificent – and then you noticed what everything was made of.

“It’s all bones,” Dan said in awe. “Human bones! Is this the coolest thing in the world, or the creepiest? Or both?” He glanced over at a skull sitting on a pile of finger bones. “Dude? Can you lend me a hand?”

The skull stared back, its lower jaw missing. “Cat got your tongue?” Dan asked.

Amy grinned. She was always glad to see the goofball in Dan reappear. She consulted the pamphlet. “There are the bones of at least forty thousand people here. Lots of them died of the plague. When they built the church above us, they turned this chapel into an ossuary – a place for bones. But there were so many that in 1870 they finally asked this guy to … uh, arrange them. So he did this.”

“What a cool ye olde spookmaster dude,” Dan approved.

They walked around in awe. What Amy had thought were carved stone garlands hanging from the balconies above were arm and leg bones. A skull stared at them blankly, a leg bone clamped between its jaws.

“The chandelier is made up of every human bone,” Amy whispered to Dan as they looked above their heads.

Despite the creep factor, there was something so beautiful about this place, Amy thought. The fluttery edges of the hip bones looked like enormous flowers. The lineup of finger bones was a delicate necklace. A carved, painted cherub blew into a golden horn while casually balancing half a skull on its knee.

Dan wandered over to an alcove. Behind a wire screen was a mound of bones stacked in perfect rows. Alternating rows of skulls sat on the arranged bones. Their hollow eyes stared out. Some almost seemed to have expressions. One leaned over, resting on the next one, and Amy found herself drawn into those black, black eyes.

Somehow the creepy feeling left her. Death surrounded her, but here she and Dan were standing, living and breathing, and all these bones were just evidence of many lives lived before hers.

Dan gripped the wire grating. He moved closer to the skulls, staring, staring. His lighthearted mood was suddenly gone. Amy felt a flutter of alarm. What was he seeing?

“We’re breathing in death,” he murmured. “Every day.” He half turned to Amy. “Everybody dies. Why do we run away so hard and so fast, when it’s always there?”

“We run away hard and fast because we don’t want to die,” Amy said.

Dan seemed mesmerized by the black holes in the skull. Amy was afraid of his expression.

Dan shook his head. “It all seems so … futile.”

“Futile?” Amy had never heard Dan use that word before. “You mean, pointless?”

“Yeah. I know the meaning of the word, Amy. I’m not quite as dumb as everybody thinks I am. I know, I’ve got the photographic memory, but you’ve got the brains, right?”

Dan’s tone was sarcastic. Not teasing, but flat and almost mean.

“Not right,” Amy said, shocked. Was that what Dan really thought? “Nobody thinks that.”

Dan turned his back on her to gaze at the bones. “Futile. Stupid and pointless.”

Amy took a breath. She felt the hurtful sting of Dan’s tone, but she had no urge to stamp off. There was something heading for Dan, something that cast a huge shadow, and her first instinct was to grab his arm and pull him away from the darkness she saw. But that would just make the darkness grow.

“It doesn’t seem that way to me,” she said. She kept her voice quiet. “It seems to me that we’re doing what all these people did. Just … trying to live in the best way we can. Protecting the people we love. We give it everything we have. Just like these people probably did.”

Dan didn’t say anything. It was like he hadn’t even heard her.

“And I don’t think you’re stupid,” she added fiercely.