Stoker's Manuscript by Royce Prouty Read Free Book Online Page A

help.
    Next I checked my e-mails and opened the one from my brother. He said the nuns’ house received a notice of default after falling ninety days behind on mortgage payments. Add to that, two of them, including the Don herself, were experiencing failing health that required care in an assisted living facility. Luckily, the property had not yet met foreclosure, which meant there was still time. I vowed to approach Doug Carli about a loan as soon as I returned from Romania.
    A second e-mail relayed that he received a buyer’s call for a hardcover first edition of
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles. I had two of them, a 1960 Macmillan and a more valuable 1959 Secker & Warburg London international edition I found in an estate sale for ten dollars. I wondered if he remembered when we had found that first one—high school days. I found the crackling first edition for a dollar in the liquidation stack at a closing Carnegie Library in the north suburb of Waukegan. I’d long kept it in my personal favorites stash, a shelf of books that I never intended to sell, but I told Berns to consider the sale of both books as part of the collection plate for the nuns. The Macmillan was worth about a thousand dollars. The International, however, was signed (I had done the authentication myself), and it should fetch at least four thousand dollars.
    It was the least I could do for the nuns. As in most convents, they taught Catholic schoolchildren, prayed volumes, and did a lot of chores. The days of the American orphanages had passed a decade before, yet they took us in, just the two of us. I never knew why. But whereas my brother gave back in the form of his vows, I had never really given anything back. They were aging and needed help, the kind I might be able to provide. I resolved to give them a home now, a permanent one.
    The last e-mail had Mara’s name on it, coupled with a return-receipt-requested message. It simply asked if I found what I was looking for. I hesitated to reply, so I hoped that by hitting
Yes
to the received request she would know it was an affirmative reply. Before I could log off, another message arrived from Mara, saying,
Your journey begins now. Remember that your Mother taught you not to speak with strangers.

    Two days after relaying to Mr. Ardelean that I had indeed found the notes and two missing chapters, a notice arrived from the UPS Treasures Division that I was to pick up a package and bring two positive forms of identification. While there, I shipped the Knowles international edition my brother had successfully sold for $5,500. After fingerprinting and photographs at the UPS warehouse, I left with my package. Inside was my travel itinerary. I was to fly the very next day to Bucharest, where I would be met by a guide who would accompany me to the castle in Bran. There I would meet with Arthur Ardelean to discuss what I had found during authentication, and if the terms were acceptable, my fee contract would be finalized.
    Also enclosed was a bank account signature card with a return envelope to a Swiss bank and a wooden box secured in bubble wrap. Carefully I removed the container, roughly the size of a cigar box. It was heavy, handmade of black walnut, with a carving on top that looked like a dragon standing behind a crucifix with its tail partially wrapping the bottom of the cross. I opened the box carefully to find a silk bag with a drawstring. Lifting it I could tell it was a crucifix, and carefully I removed it from its bag.
    It was a six-inch tall Saint Olga cross, the type a Westerner might never see or appreciate. Made of solid silver and Slavic in design, its four ends were carved to the shape of three-leaf clovers, inlaid with an image of the Eastern Orthodox cross. The three bars were accurately placed, the lower bar angled properly left up and right down.
IC
and
XC
, the written symbols for Christ, were inscribed on the cross member, and an image of the sun shone the light of Christ above the