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  Adam took a deep breath. “But the tea hadn’t hurt me much because there was thick scar tissue across that area of my chest.”

  “From the ‘oozing sore,’” Taylor said softly.

  “Yes. It was a scar I’d had as long as I could remember, and I’d thought little about it. My cousin Sarah said she guessed that I’d fallen against some rocks, but she didn’t know for sure. Since there was a big chunk of my life that I didn’t remember, the scar seemed the least of it. It was tight, and sometimes when I moved my arm over my head, it would pull a bit, but I never really paid any attention to it.”

  “Until that day,” Taylor said.

  “Right,” Adam answered. “On that day, one of my cousins, who was a year younger than me and so didn’t remember anything about the kidnaping, said it was an ugly scar and I ought to get a plastic surgeon to fix it. Then her brother, who is six years older than I am, said, ‘Maybe he should see what’s under it.’”

  “The brand,” Darci said. “It had been hidden by the scar tissue.”

  “Yes. As soon as my cousin said that, his mother told him to go into the house and get her a sweater even though it was eighty-five degrees in the shade.”

  “Did you ask your cousin what he meant by that?”

  No. I could see by his mother’s face that she didn’t want to talk about the kidnaping and what had happened. I’ve always felt sorry for her because she tried really hard to make me part of her family, but she couldn’t. I know she blamed herself for....”

  “For your sadness?” Darci asked.

  “Yes. My sadness and my feeling that I never belonged.”

  “So what did you do?” Taylor asked.

  “The next day I left and flew to New York, where I consulted a plastic surgeon. I told him I wanted the scar tissue removed carefully because there was something under there that I wanted to see. It was more than a brand. The skin”—he sounded as though he was talking of someone other than himself—”had been deeply cut first, and the branding iron had a black pigment on it. When the scar tissue was cut away, the black design could be seen clearly.”

  “And that’s when you realized that there was more to this than you’d been told,” Taylor said, sitting back in the chair and looking at Adam in speculation.

  “Yes. First I started searching for the information the ‘normal’ way. I went to private detectives, and I even got into the FBI files, but there was nothing there. Finally, when I’d exhausted every other route, I went to see a psychic. But all she said was that my parents were dead and that their death was surrounded with evil. It was very annoying to hear such silliness. I wanted to know who, how, and most of all, why.

  “Why were my parents killed before a ransom could be paid? My father started liquidating stocks the moment he heard I was missing. But nothing was paid. What happened to their plane? Thousands of questions ran through my mind.

  “But the psychics I consulted had no answers for me, and I was left feeling more frustrated than I’d been before I went to them.

  “I had decided not to see any more psychics when one of them called me and said that Helen Gabriel wanted to talk to me. Since I’d never heard of the woman, the name meant nothing to me, but the psychic on the phone said that I had to call Helen. As far as I could get out of her, this Helen Gabriel was a psychic’s psychic.”

  “Real as opposed to hype,” Taylor said from experience.

  “Yes,” Adam answered.”It seemed that this woman didn’t take on clients. I mean, you can’t make an appointment to see her. You have to be invited to go to a session with her.” Adam looked at Taylor. “You’ve met people like her?”

  Taylor smiled and looked as though he was considering whether or not he should tell what he knew. “There are twelve women . . .” he said softly.

  “Who can change the world with their minds,” Darci said, her eyes alive with excitement. “Avatars.”

  When Taylor smiled at his daughter, there was such love—and pride—on his face that Darci blushed with pleasure. “Later, when this is over, I want you to tell me about your marvelous education that has allowed you to know such an obscure piece of information as that one.”

  Extremely pleased, Darci looked at Adam, who had an I-told-you-so look on his face. He’d said her father would see that she was educated.

  “So what did Helen tell you?” Taylor asked, and from the way he said the name, Adam was sure that Taylor knew of the woman.

  “At first, she was a disappointment because she told me that she wasn’t sure what had happened to my family. But then she threw me for a loop because she said that one of my family was still alive.”

  “I bet that made you crazy,” Taylor said. “Oh, yes. I wanted to hire mercenaries and attack whoever was still holding one of my parents, but I didn’t know where to start looking or whom to attack. And that’s when Helen told me that there was only one way on earth for me to find out the truth about the past. She said there was a woman in Camwell, Connecticut, who had in her possession a magic mirror. When she told me that, I nearly walked out. I’ve always been a realist. Even as a kid I hated those stories of magic this and magic that.”

  “That’s true,” Darci said, smiling. “He knows nothing about fairy tales.”

  “I think Helen read my mind, because she then said there was some magic that was real. She told me that the mirror had once belonged to Nostradamus. Truthfully, I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. But she said that if I could get that mirror, then it could be seen what had happened to my family. I want you to notice that she always said ‘family,’ and not ‘parents.’ I didn’t realize this until later.”

  “And the mirror is where Darci came into it, right?” Taylor asked.

  Adam couldn’t look directly at Darci because he didn’t want her to hear what else he’d been told. When he did finally speak, his voice was barely above a whisper. “I was told that I could steal the mirror, but that only a virgin past two-and-twenty could see the visions in it. If I didn’t have the virgin, the mirror would only be an old piece of glass. So she told me to put an ad in the New York Times and I’d find the virgin who could read the mirror.”

  “You mean that not one of those women you interviewed was...?”Darci said.

  “Not one of them,”Adam answered, smiling at Darci, but he wasn’t about to tell her that she was the oddity, not them.

  “Amazing,” she said.

  Adam turned to look at her. “Not that I’m complaining, but why haven’t you...? You know?”

  Darci shrugged. “I’ve never met anyone who even tempted me,” she said honestly. What she didn’t say, either aloud or in her mind, was, “until I met you.”

  “Then why are you engaged to marry Putnam?” Adam said with more anger than he meant to display.

  “Oh,” Darci said. “That’s business.”

  “What kind of business makes you engaged to a—?”

  “How did you find out you had a sister?” Taylor cut in. He didn’t like the anger, and he didn’t want them to lose track of Adam’s story. There would be time to tell about Darci’s problems in Putnam later. Since what Adam knew might be able to help them tonight, his story was more important.

  Reluctantly, Adam quit questioning Darci. “As I said, I didn’t notice that Helen kept saying ‘family’ instead of ‘parents,’ but then one day she mentioned ‘the three of them.’ I asked her if she meant me as the third person. Helen looked surprised and said, ‘No, I mean your sister.’ I thought she’d lost her mind. It took me a while to get it out of her that, to her, just because the girl was a fetus when the kidnaping took place, didn’t mean that the child wasn’t viable. And it still angers me that no one in my family bothered to tell me that my mother was pregnant when I was kidnaped.”

  Adam took a breath. “And that leads us to today.” For the last few minutes, he hadn’t looked at Darci, as he was afraid that what he was telling them would again make her angry. He’d hired her under a pretext, saying he wanted a p