Free The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville

attempting to behave like a human being. Things were starting to look up.
    I glanced around at the walls of the restaurant, which were done up with lattices covered in painted vines. They were scattered with a few tiny red painted lizards, which seemed to be basking in invisible sunlight. The table groupings were separated by large plantings of fresh chrysanthemums—flowers that are offered in tribute to the dead in all Italian cemeteries.
    I’d begun and ended the day in a cemetery. Only that afternoon, I’d looked up the word in a bookstore. From the Greek koimeterion , a sleeping chamber; koiman , to put to sleep; or Latin cunae , a cradle. It was nice to think of Sam, wherever he was, as cradled in sleep.
    “He was so young,” Grace was saying between little sobs as she took another bite of steak tartare. She adjusted her diamond bracelet, adding the telltale words “Wasn’t he?”
    The truth of the matter was, Grace had never met Sam in her life. My mother’s divorce from Augustus had been nearly twenty-five years ago, and he and Grace had been married for little more than fifteen. In between was lots of proverbial water beneath the bridge, including how Sam got to be my brother without actually being the son of my mother or father. My family relations are rather complex.
    But I had no time to think of that, for Grace had moved on to her favorite topic: money. As she switched to it, her tears miraculously dried and her eyes took on a luminous glow.
    “We phoned the lawyers this afternoon from the suite,” she told me, suddenly filled with buoyant enthusiasm. “The reading of the will, as you know, is tomorrow—and I think I should tell you that we got some good news. Though they won’t give out the details, of course, it does appear that you are the principal heir!”
    “Oh, goody,” I said. “Sam hasn’t been dead a week, and already I’ve profited. Did you dig out exactly how rich I’ll be? Can I retire from my labors right now? Or are the tax folks likely to take most of it?”
    “That’s not what Grace meant, and you know it,” said Augustus, who was designing forms in his crème de volaille as I jabbed at the capers on my Scottish salmon. They rolled around the plate and evaded my fork. “Grace and I are only concerned for your own interest,” he went on. “I didn’t know Sam—at least not well—but I’m sure he cared a great deal for you . After all, you practically grew up as brother and sister, didn’t you? And as Earnest’s only heir himself, Sam must have been very—well, comfortable financially?”
    My late uncle Earnest, who’d been in the mining and mineral business, was my father’s older brother, and rich as Midas. On top of that, he died with every cent he’d made, because spending money was of no interest to him. Sam was his only child.
    When my parents, Augustus and Jersey, divorced I was still very tiny. My mother ran around with me for a number of years, visiting all the capitals of the world. She was welcome in such places, since she’d been a famous singer long before marrying my father—which is how she met the Peanut Farmer and nearly everyone else of high social visibility. The Behn men had always liked flamboyant women. But, like my father, they often had trouble actually living with them.
    Jersey had been drinking for years, but everyone expected opera singers to be swilling champagne as if it were water. It wasn’t until Augustus announced his betrothal to Grace—a clone of Jersey at a similar age, but twenty years her junior—that the bottle came out of Jersey’s closet. She fled with me to Idaho, to consult my widowed, hermitlike uncle Earnest about financial matters—my father had invested all her earlier musical income in himself, another Behn male trait—and to everyone’s surprise, Jersey and Earnest fell in love.
    And I, a child who’d grown up like Eloise at the Plaza, eating pâté de foie gras before I could pronounce it, suddenly found