Giovanni was shaking his head. “I still don’t-”
“So he made up this game, the string game. He would leave me clues to random places in the house. I would have to tie a string when I found the first clue and that would start the game. Then I’d find the next clue and tie the string there.”
She began to see Giovanni’s eyes light in understanding. “And you would find the clues and keep tying.”
Beatrice nodded. Her heart pounded in her chest. “They could be any location in the house. There was never a pattern. Totally random locations. There would be riddles, or drawings, or…anything, really. The goal of the string game was to find the locations and tie the string-”
“And then follow it.” He rushed to look over her shoulder as she found the world map in the center of the book. Her eyes raked over the pages crowded with cities, borders, latitude, and longitude.
“The cities where you found my dad
“But where does it lead?” He shook his head. “I stopped getting clues from him after he showed up in Santiago two years ago. I thought he had found our house here and that’s why he was so close. I stayed here for months in the middle of summer that year thinking that he would show himself before I gave up and went to New York.”
She grabbed his arm. “No, no, you’re missing the point of the game. Once you mapped out the points and tied off the string, you had to-”
“Follow it back!” he said with a smile. “Clever man. You follow the string back like Theseus out of the labyrinth, but…” His face fell.
“At one point in the web-” She held out her two index fingers and crossed them. “-the strings would touch.
“And that’s where your father is,” he murmured.
She shook her head and fought the tears that she felt pricking the corner of her eyes. “It was our game. I’m the only one who would be able to figure it out.”
“And you would only solve it if you were cooperating with me.”
“Exactly.”
They both looked down at the map on the table. She grabbed a pencil from the counter, put the tip on the small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and looked at Giovanni.
“Do you remember where he went next?”
He nodded. “Budapest. The next sighting was in Budapest.”
She began to drag the pencil north.
“Wait.” He held up a hand. “You need something-”
“Oh, a straight edge, just give me a magazine or-”
“Got it!” He tossed her a thin book from the end of the table.
“Okay…Budapest, Hungary.”
Her pencil stopped on the map, and she looked up.
“Then Warsaw.”
She moved the book and her pencil tip traced a light line over the soft, pastel colors of the map, each thread drawing them closer to the mystery of her father’s whereabouts.
“Stockholm.”
“Novosibirsk.”
She could feel his crackling energy fill the room as he listed the cities. “It will be a major city,” he mused. “It’s much easier to stay hidden in a major city.”
Beatrice looked up at him. “Okay, next?”
“Shanghai.”
“Madras.”
The line dipped and traced over the world, zagging north and south as each city was reached, slowly working east, then south.
“Johannesburg.”
“Lima.”
“San Francisco, right?”
“Yes, then El Paso.”
“Boston.”
“Tripoli.”
“Santiago,” she whispered, and her breath hitched when she saw the faint lines finally cross in front of her. Tears spilled down her face and she felt his hand on her shoulder as he took the shaking pencil from her grasp.
He held her as she cried, her tears soaking the front of his shirt.
“So close,” Giovanni murmured as he stroked her hair.
“Brasilia. He’s in Brasilia.”
“Why would he come here?” she asked over the steady hum of the engine.
“In a way, it’s very much like Houston,” Giovanni said as he steered the old car through the wide streets of the Brazilian capitol. Though it was built in the 1960s as the modern ideal of contemporary city planning, Beatrice thought the capitol and fourth largest city in Brazil seemed empty.
“What do you mean, it’s like Houston?”
He turned right at the small road leading to the resort where Isabel and Gustavo’s contacts had informed them a quiet vampire going by the name “Emil Gonzales” owned a cottage on the shore of Lake Paranoa.
“If you are trying to remain anonymous, you go to a city like Brasilia. With the popularity and proximity of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the immortal population here is very low and tends to mind its own business.”
“So not very much politics?”
“Practically none. It’s like a ghost town,” he said quietly, his eyes scanning the low, red painted cottages with dark roofs. “There,” he said, “the one on the end.”
She gripped her seat as he parked along the curb, almost unwilling to step out of the car, afraid of what she might find. Giovanni hadn’t had any sign of her father for the last two years. He’d dropped off the radar when he finished giving the clues to his location. If they had been together two years before, she thought, she might have seen it sooner.
As if reading her thoughts, she heard him say, “If we’ve lost him because of my own stubbornness-”
“Can we save that for another time, please?” she murmured as she eyed the small house surrounded by low palms. The cottage was part of a larger resort, though some of the apartments and cottages were privately owned. The gardens surrounding it were well tended, but because it was part of the hotel property, there was no way of knowing who took care of them.
She took a deep breath and reached across the car to squeeze Giovanni’s hand. “I’m fine; let’s go see if anyone’s home.”
He pulled her toward him and laid a gentle kiss on her lips before giving her a small smile. His eyes were shuttered, and his shoulders were fixed. She knew he thought they would find nothing.
They walked toward the low cottage tucked into a quiet corner at the edge of the lake. Streams ran through the grounds, under small footbridges, and trickled over rocks through the lush gardens.
“Definitely a water vampire,” he muttered, taking her hand as they crossed a small bridge. “And a smart one.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s surrounded himself with his element. The lake, the streams. For him, this is an excellent defensive position.”
“Oh.”
They drew closer to the small house and she heard him drawing deep, testing breaths.
