part of the house. A design set blossomed from the outside in, from the site plan to the main floor plan to specific elevations and details.
As she moved through the drawing set, an image of the house began to form in her mind. She glanced from the key on the main floor plan to an elevation of the main ballroom, and turned back to make sure she had read it correctly. That was odd. The elevation key was different from the one that resided on the site plan. Most architecture keys were made up of numbers and letters such as "A 2.1 /1" inside a small circle, but this number tag was elaborately decorated with twisting patterns.
Ingrid pulled a chair out so she could sit down and look more closely at the tiny cartouche. There was something intriguing about the dense pattern of shapes. The swirling lines appeared floral in nature, suggestive of the arabesques of art nouveau, and as she continued to stare at them, the shapes began to resemble letters; but if they were letters they were from a language she could not understand, had never seen before. They weren't Egyptian hieroglyphs or any dead language that she had a passing familiarity with in all her time on earth.
She went through more of the drawings and found several similarly decorated tags, not just room tags and wall tags, but tags for fixtures and finishes, each emblazoned with the elaborate script, and each one unlike the other. She had never seen anything like it in any drawing set before. Ingrid was familiar with the standard architectural keys, and was certain that whatever was written around the keys was not meant for any builder or contractor. Drawing keys were meant to carry the reader from one drawing to another, but these keys had some other function hidden within them, one that had nothing to do with the architecture or construction of the house.
Ingrid pulled her phone from her pocket, zoomed in on one of the strange tags, and snapped a picture. She dropped it into an e-mail. While she couldn't read the language, she knew someone who might, thinking of the letters she always kept in her pocket.
Chapter eleven
The Sunshine of Her Life
So this is what it felt like to be a grandmother. Joanna had never been privy to that particular experience. Not with those bachelor girls of hers, who chose to live alone for centuries. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise: look at what creating all those half-deities did for the Greeks. Messy. Perhaps Freya would change her mind when she and Bran were wed, but Ingrid was probably a lost cause.
There was no doubting it, little Tyler Alvarez had captured her heart. After the incident with the blackberry pie, Joanna, like her daughters, had become more and more daring with practicing her magic. She delighted in surprising him. She made his toy soldiers come to life, and they spent hours sending their troops into battle. With Joanna in the playroom, the teddy bears talked and the puppets danced without strings. She was a nanny and a conjurer, the best kind of playmate. She even showed him Ingrid's pet griffin. "This is Oscar," she told him. "No one outside of the family is allowed to see him. But I want you to meet him."
Oscar nuzzled Tyler's hand and swished his lion's tail proudly as Tyler fed him his favorite snack, Cheetos.
"It's our secret," she said.
True to his word, the four-year-old never said anything to his parents about what Joanna was capable of doing. Besides, for Joanna, making a few inanimate objects approximate life was easy. It didn't take much to entertain a toddler.
That afternoon she was tackling the garden. She always kept a tidy little bed behind the house. Something small, although of course with her talents for keeping things growing she had the largest, juiciest vegetables in the Hamptons. She grew corn and zucchini, cucumbers and cabbage, beefsteak tomatoes as large as basketballs. She was weeding the little plot when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the number, and her heart began to race when she saw it was the Sunshine Preschool. The school did not make it a habit of calling during the day, which could only mean one thing: something had happened to Tyler. Her hands began to shake as she answered the phone.
"Joanna?" asked the calm voice of the director. Marie May had founded the school thirty years ago, and in a small