I knew – and so did my mother – that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chessboard, with eight squares on each side.
In a nutshell – that was the thing we never talked about.
My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess – even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing that we never talked about), I was forbidden to play the game – the only thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.
My mother was so opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d never been able to follow her logic – if indeed, it was logic – to my mother’s mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.
But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.
I timed it: It took me twenty-seven minutes and – since I’d left the engine running – a gallon of hog-guzzling gas until I had figured out how to get inside.
By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lockbox. The keys to the cars were kept there.
Would I be justified in saying ‘Duh’?
I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn – and voilà! – a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lockbox opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle’s left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.
I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.
Within the dim interior light of the mudroom – an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out – I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin aprés-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I’d hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.
The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss rock chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on – but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.
The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.
I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: except for mine, there was not one print to be seen anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.
But how had she done it?
It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.
A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop Mother’s British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.
‘Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this godforsaken spot?’ came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. ‘And for that matter, where on earth are you? We’ve been driving around this wilderness for what seems days!’ There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking aside to someone else.
‘Aunt Lily?’ I said.
For it was surely she – my aunt, Lily Rad – my first chess mentor and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she’d been my mother’s best friend, though they hadn’t touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around – what on earth did that mean?
‘Alexandra?’ said Lily, confused. ‘I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren’t…on the best of terms.’
‘We’ve reconciled,’ I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. ‘But Mother doesn’t seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?’
‘She’s not there?! You can’t be serious,’ Lily said, fuming. ‘I’ve come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party – God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone’s guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I’m in Purgatory – and I’m fully able to accept that judgment. We haven’t seen anything resembling civilization for hours.’
‘You’re here? In Purgatory?’ I said. ‘That’s a ski area – it’s less than an hour from here.’ But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? ‘When did mother invite you?’
‘It wasn’t so much an invitation as an edict,’ Lily admitted. ‘She left the news on my cell phone, with no means to reply.’ There was a pause. Then Lily added, ‘I adore your mother – you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept—’
‘Neither could I,’ I said. ‘Let’s drop it. So how did you know how to find her?’
‘I didn’t! Good God, I STILL DON’T! My car’s by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there’s no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some…dune of snow – chasing some local rodent…AND – I might add – I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Dr Mengele in South America!’
She was hyperventilating. I considered it was time to intervene.
‘It’s okay, Aunt Lily,’ I told her. ‘We’ll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There’s always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver – we can put him up, too, if you like. I’m too far away, it would take too long to reach you. But if you’ll give me your satellite coordinates, I’ve a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge.’
‘Whomever he may be, bless him,’ said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.
‘It’s a she,’ I said. ‘And her name is Key. She’ll be there in half an hour.’ I took down Lily’s mobile number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she’d be more than surprised to learn that I’d turned up here with no warning after all this time.
As