Betsy sat up quickly, untangling her legs from the sheets.
“Is something wrong? Has something happened to my mother?”
“Well, that’s why I’m calling. She was supposed to be back to teach a class yesterday, but she didn’t show up. I was only informed of it this morning or I would have called you earlier.”
“She’s not there?”
“No, the last we heard from her was when she submitted a monograph by e-mail for proofreading, and that was several weeks ago.”
Betsy’s pulse began to pound in her head. She forced herself to breathe deeply. The voice on the phone went on.
“We hoped she might have been in contact with you.”
“I had an e-mail from her a few days ago. Let me get it.”
She stumbled out of bed, clutching the phone, and opened her laptop.
The computer whirred to life. She clicked on her in-box.
“OK, here it is. It’s dated—December fourth, so six days ago.
SORRY I CAN’T BE WITH YOU AT THE RED BOOK DIALOGUES—I KNOW YOU WILL ENJOY IT THOROUGHLY. I AM GOING BACK ONCE MORE TO VISIT CACHTICE CASTLE AND BECKOV CASTLE TOMORROW, HOMES OF COUNTESS BATHORY.
There was dead silence on the phone.
“Is that all?” the dean finally asked. “No mention of returning to Chicago?”
“No, nothing. She just ends, ‘I will send you a postcard, darling.’”
Again a silence. The dean filled it at last. “She was doing research in Slovakia and Hungary. She has a deadline for the book in mid-January.”
“I knew she was doing research, but didn’t know what she was working on.”
“She didn’t tell you? Yes, she has a publisher lined up and a title. Countess Bathory: A Study of a Madwoman. ”
Betsy blinked in the early light filtering in through Japanese paper blinds. The bedroom was awash in an eerie rosy pink. “Study of a madwoman? What kind of historical treatise is that? She’s no psychologist, she’s a historian.”
“She told me the publishers came up with the title. The point is that she was in Eastern Europe researching Countess Bathory. She had a special week-long seminar on the Habsburg Dynasty to teach this week. I can’t imagine why she hasn’t written or called. She had a hundred and twenty students waiting for her to appear.”
“That’s not like my mother. She would never miss a class without—”
The heat clicked on and the floorboards creaked. A branch rasped against the windowpane.
Betsy realized she had stopped talking midsentence. She could hear a faint buzzing on the line.
“Yes,” the dean said at last. “That’s why I am so concerned.”
Betsy sat down at her computer and began to hunt through her e-mails. The pink glow of the rising sun reflected on her screen.
Shit, Mom. What have you gotten yourself into now?
Her mother was never good about itineraries, so the e-mail mentioning Countess Bathory was the only clue to where she had gone.
When Betsy looked on the internet, she found hundreds of entries for Countess Bathory, some spelling her Christian name as Elizabeth, some as Alzabeta or Erzsebet—English, Slovak, and Hungarian spellings. The countess had at least a half a dozen castles in the lands that were now Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia, but were then part of the Habsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire. But Royal Habsburg Hungary was just a meager crescent, a stingy slice of territory. More than two-thirds of the once mighty Hungarian Empire was either part of Transylvania or had fallen to the Ottoman invaders.
In what remained of Royal Hungary, Countess Bathory owned more lands than the House of Habsburg itself.
Betsy checked the two castles her mother had mentioned in the e-mail: Čachtice and Beckov, both reduced to ruins. They were less than fifty kilometers from Bratislava and about fifteen kilometers from each other.
Why hadn’t she mentioned that she was researching Bathory, when she normally stuck to the Habsburg kings? Rudolf II and his younger brother Matthias, in their fraternal struggle for the crown, were usually her focus. Why, suddenly, this Bathory woman?
Betsy clicked on travel articles and excerpts of books. Most of the write-ups described the ruins of Čachtice, at the foot of the Little Carpathian Mountains.
Then she read:
BLOODY LIZ WAS RUMORED TO HAVE TORTURED AND KILLED PEASANT GIRLS DURING HER MURDEROUS REIGN. SHE IS ACCUSED OF BATHING IN THE BLOOD OF BEAUTIFUL YOUNG VIRGINS IN ORDER TO KEEP HER YOUTHFUL APPEARANCE ETERNAL. COUNTESS BATHORY, ALONG WITH HER ANCESTOR, VLAD THE IMPALER, WAS THE BASIS OF BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA.
Betsy realized she had stopped breathing. She drew a deep breath, filling her lungs to capacity, and tried to quiet her mind.
What twisted psychological condition did this woman have? Preying on girls, obsessed with their blood! Was it a genetic predisposition for psychosis, passed down through generations of inbreeding among the aristocracy?
A dog barked in the neighborhood. Ringo growled. She glanced up at the windows, but the paper shades were lowered. No one could see her. She turned back to the glow of the computer screen.
There were no hotels near Čachtice, not even a bed-and-breakfast. This was a tiny village at the foot of the mountains. The closest hotels were about thirteen kilometers away in the spa town of Piestany. Betsy couldn’t picture her mother staying anywhere fancy, so she began e-mailing every small hotel and B & B she could find in the Piestany area. She couldn’t think of what else to do. And the repetitive act of copying and pasting the same brief query about a sixty-five-year-old university professor, traveling alone, gave her something to occupy her mind. Command-V, command-V—paste, paste, paste.
Why would her mother be interested in a murderous psychopathic countess?
Betsy searched through her file cabinet. She had gone through the Ps three times already, each time more carefully.
She stopped, thinking. Of course!
Under M, for Mom.
Betsy found the file. Her mother had granted one session with her daughter, and one session only. It was a kind of graduation present to Betsy, to share the one dream Grace had ever remembered.
It was a dream Grace had had the night Betsy was born.
“Don’t you dare analyze me, Betsy. I’m only sharing this because I never, ever dream. It must have been provoked by indigestion or the first spasms of childbirth.”
It was clear that she wanted her daughter to hear this dream. Grace was such a left-brained academic, systematic and almost scientific in her meticulous research in history. She was so unlike Betsy or her husband, their Jungian world of dream interpretation dismissed as “malarkey.”
Once Grace started talking, her words flowed.
I dream I am floating through a dense cloudbank that hugs mountain walls. The air clears and it is a winter day in a river valley.
There is a village below me. A fairytale village, dusted with snow. I see a tall church steeple and wooden cottages with straw-thatched roofs. Rosy-cheeked children play in the streets, though I can’t hear them. They wear rustic clothes of long ago: the boys in wool caps and breeches, the girls with white kerchiefs and long aprons.
I feel that it is Eastern Europe, but I hear no voices, no accents to confirm this. It is a soundless dream.
I veer away to a pond. White steam rises from the water and ice clings to the bare branches of the weeping willows. Frost outlines the bark eyes of the birch trees, staring solemnly.
Everything glitters as the sun’s rays filter through the fog coming off the water in gentle waves, ghosts gliding over the pond.
A brittle shelf of ice lines the shore, a jagged silver plane on the dark water. Ducks float peacefully beyond, occasionally plunging to pull at strands of grass below the surface. They seem oblivious to the cold, their fat bottoms tipped up to the winter sky.
I feel at peace in a world of winter beauty.
Then I see her: a girl, submerged, coated in ice, her eyes open, blue and clear. She stares blindly, her long hair sparkling with frost. I have the impression she has tried to tear off her clothes, there is a rip in her bodice. A rose-colored mark blooms just above her breast, contrasting sharply with her flawless white skin.
Everything about her is beautiful. Except that she is dead.
Betsy shuddered and closed her eyes.
Where are you now, Mom?
Chapter 18
CARBONDALE, COLORADO
DECEMBER 10, 2010
Betsy called the American Embassy in Bratislava, asking how to locate a missing person.
“Has she registered with the embassy?” asked a bored male voice. She heard the ping of an incoming e-mail in the background.
“No, but she entered Slovakia on her American passport.”
“Name, please?” he droned.
Betsy could tell this man was not going to help her. She knew the type, the tone of voice, the desire to be rid of her quickly so he could update his Facebook.
She gave him her mother’s name, age, description.
“She was doing research in the Bratislava area, possibly also in Čachtice and Beckov.”
“I have no record of her registering with the embassy. Was she planning to stay more than a month?”
“Six weeks. I think.”
“She should have registered with the embassy if she was staying that long,” said the voice, with an admonishing tone. “I have no record of her.”
“Can you tell me how to go about locating her? Can you contact the police department in Bratislava, or the areas around Čachtice or Beckov?”
“No, that is not a service we offer. Besides, it might infringe on her civil rights.”
Betsy’s hand tightened around the phone receiver.
“Her what?”
“Dr. Path may have decided she wanted to remain in Slovakia without contacting anyone. We have to protect our American citizens’ rights.”
“You are a complete idiot, do you know that?”
“Excuse me?”
“No, I won’t!” Betsy said, punching the END-CALL button on her phone.
She held her head in her hands.
What should she do now? There wasn’t anyone else in her family to call for help. Betsy was an only child.