“I don’t know what to think about this,” Dana said after a moment. “I’m trying to be logical here. The painting’s drawn you from the first, and we know the legend is Celtic in origin. We look like the girls in the painting, so we identify with them.”

“How did I know the Gaelic? How do I know their names?”

Dana frowned into her coffee. “I can’t explain that.”

“I’ll tell you something else I know. Whatever locked those souls away is dark, and it’s powerful, and it’s greedy. It won’t want us to win.”

“The box and the keys,” Zoe interrupted. “You saw them. You know what they look like.”

“The box is very simple, very beautiful. Leaded glass, a high, domed lid, three locks across the front. The keys are like the logo in the invitations, like the emblem on the flag flying on the house. They’re small. Only about three inches long, I’d say.”

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Dana insisted. “If they had the keys, why hide them? Why not just hand them to the right people, and game over?”

“I don’t know.” Malory rubbed her temples. “There must be a reason.”

“You said you knew the names they called the couple making out under the tree,” Dana reminded her.

“Rowena and Pitte.” Malory dropped her hands. “Rowena and Pitte,” she repeated. “They couldn’t stop it either. It happened so quickly, so violently.”

She took a long, long breath. “Here’s the kicker. I believe it all. I don’t care how crazy it sounds, I believe it all. It happened. I was taken into that painting, through the Curtain of Dreams, and I watched it happen. I have to find that key. Whatever it takes, I have to find it.”

AFTER a morning staff meeting that included jelly doughnuts and a pissed-off reporter who’d had her article on fall fashion cut by two inches, Flynn escaped to his office.

As his staff consisted of fewer than thirty people, including the eager sixteen-year-old he paid to write a weekly column from the teenage perspective, having one reporter in a snit was a major staff glitch.

He flipped through his messages, punched up a feature on Valley nightlife, approved a couple of photos for the next day’s edition, and checked the accounting on ads.

He could hear the occasional ring of a phone, and even with his door shut, the muffled clatter of fingers on keyboards. The police radio on top of his file cabinet beeped and hummed, the television squeezed between books on a shelf was set on mute.

He had the window open and could hear the light whoosh of morning traffic, the sporadic thump of bass from a car stereo playing too loud.

Now and then he heard a door or drawer slam from the room beyond. Rhoda, the society/fashion/gossip reporter, was still making her annoyance known. Without looking through the glass, he could see her in his mind, spitting darts at him.

She, along with more than half the staff, had worked for the paper since he’d been a boy. And plenty of them, he knew, continued to see the Dispatch as his mother’s paper.