“You mean, the only two rings she doesn’t have are yours and mine?”

Arturo nodded. Finally, Maria could see why he looked so sad.

“How do you know all this? I mean, I’m guessing you didn’t write that book yourself.”

“You guess correctly. Esmerelda and I didn’t sell our rings, of course. We discovered their magic after joining the Rimbaud Brothers, and it was only a short matter of time before we had climbed the ranks from cleaning the elephants’ slop to starring in the show, putting our powers on display as if they were cheap parlor tricks. When we were first confronted, it was not by the Black Widow, but by the Orb Weaver.”

Maria remembered the drawing of the orb ring from the book. She tried to imagine the kind of person who might have worn it, but the problem was, the rings could belong to anyone. It’s not like there was any meaningful connection between the nature of the rings and the nature of the people who found them. She had to believe that.

More importantly, whoever had worn the orb ring back then couldn’t be the person still wearing it now. The Black Widow had the ring. Maria gulped.

Arturo continued his tale. “The Orb Weaver was a well-meaning gentleman named Adrian Eberly. Our troupe was in Sion for a week of performances, and this man, Mr. Eberly, had read about Esmerelda and me in the paper. He guessed right away what we were meddling with. I’ll never forget it — he found us in our tent, claiming to be an admirer and wondering if he could speak to us privately. But no sooner had we welcomed him in and offered to hang his coat than he turned to us and said, sure as death, ‘You have rings, don’t you?’

“At first, we pretended to have no idea what he was talking about. But Mr. Eberly was no fool. He beckoned his orb weavers, one by one, and they came hurrying into the tent in an obedient line until they had filled every inch of the ground around us.

“‘Do you know why humans fear spiders?’ he’d said, and for all that I’d seen through my own ring, I found myself afraid. ‘It is in part because they can move in any direction without warning. But in larger part because, for all their quickness, they choose to wait for their prey. A patient spider can defeat even the most powerful lion.’

“His orb weavers climbed the walls of our tent, and they began furiously spinning a web to enclose us. Esmerelda and I were terrified, but we dared not move. Mr. Eberly was clearly more powerful than we were.

“‘In this book,’ he’d said, removing from his coat the tome you discovered tonight, ‘you will find the terrible history of the eight rings of the Order. Wealth, power, greed, and deceit are etched onto these pages. The powers of Anansi have led countless unsuspecting victims astray. But there is no one more greedy or deceitful than the present possessor of the Black Widow ring.’

“It seemed the Black Widow had been seeking out the other ring bearers and obtaining their rings at any cost. As Mr. Eberly put it, if he had found us so easily, the cunning Black Widow couldn’t be far behind.

“I’m ashamed to admit it now, but Esmerelda and I thought Mr. Eberly was insane. It was not that his story made no sense, mind you — at that point, we’d begun to wonder ourselves whether these magical rings were entirely decent. It was more that his manner was so frantic, so absurd. He was a bad performer. We didn’t know yet that the rings had that effect on everyone in the end. We were young, and this man was old.”

This last line had been aimed squarely at Maria, surely. And true, she’d been thinking more and more that Arturo sounded crazy — paranoid like Grandma Esme always had been — even when his story explained so many things. But then, she herself had become a bit less sane since she first put on the Brown Recluse ring. Her behavior at Claire’s party seemed proof of that.

“We didn’t listen to his warnings, Maria. We thanked him, and said we would be more careful about whom we showed our rings. But we refused to cancel our performance that evening. He left us the book, hoping it would change our minds, and begged to see us again before our show. But that afternoon, we learned that Mr. Eberly had fallen from the tower of the castle of Tourbillon. Even then, we accepted the story that he was a madman who had suffered a terrible accident. We couldn’t see it for the portent it was.”

“Hang on,” Maria said, jumping to her feet. “Where did you say this performance was?”

“In Sion. It’s a mountain town in the corner of Switzerland, near Italy.”

“And the Black Widow was there?”

Arturo nodded.

“She’d been following us for days — the Orb Weaver was just a bonus. That night, she was at our performance, waiting in the audience to spring her trap. Esmerelda’s lion, Cocoa, saved our lives. Unfortunately, we couldn’t save his.”

“Wait. You mean the Black Widow …”

“I’m afraid so, Maria. The Black Widow had us surrounded. We wouldn’t have stood a chance had it not been for Cocoa’s sacrifice. He knew right away who was commanding the spiders. He leaped at her from the ring, and managed to take a piece of her with him.”

As Arturo said this, he touched his right ear, and Maria gasped. The feeling had been building inside her ever since the funeral, when Luellen had held her hands as if she was searching them. A jewelry appraiser who wore a hat like a mask — Maria must have been grieving indeed not to have noticed it before.

“I think I know who the Black Widow is,” she said. “I think I’ve met her.”

Arturo grimaced, but he didn’t look surprised. So he knew the Black Widow’s real identity, too.

“It’s Derek’s aunt Luellen, isn’t it? She told me at the funeral she’d seen you and Grandma Esme perform in Switzerland. I almost didn’t believe her.”

“Luellen chased us relentlessly in the years after that horrible night. Our lives became a nightmare game of cat and mouse, moving from one abandoned building and false identity to the next, never feeling like we could trust anyone we met.”

“Why didn’t you just leave the rings somewhere?” Maria asked. “Put a big sign on them that said, ‘Here you go, now leave us alone’?”

“The thought did occur to us. But we knew too much. And the legacy of the rings is one of fear and distrust. The reason the Black Widow always kills her victims is that she doesn’t want anyone left to oppose her. She only has power while she has the rings. She can’t risk having an army rise up against her to take that power away.”

That Maria had been in the same room with this woman, while her grandmother’s casket had been resting less than ten feet away, made her want to scream.

“So what happened?” she asked Arturo, trying to piece together a complete picture of her grandmother. “I mean, one minute you and Grandma Esme are on the run together, the next minute, she’s going to yoga on Tuesdays and Thursdays and organizing church functions on Wednesdays and Sundays.”

Maria couldn’t keep all the bitterness out of her voice. Maybe the anger rising in her chest was keeping her mounting fear at bay, or maybe it was just building alongside it. Either way, there was the fear, and there was the anger. Why had Grandma Esme left the ring for her? Why had she let Maria get trapped in her story, instead of taking it with her?

Arturo looked stricken. “You think I abandoned her, is that it? You think I left her here for Luellen to find? I’m the only reason she had a life here for as long as she did. I’m the only reason that —”

He broke off with a gutteral sound between a snarl and a sob. This was clearly a case he had made before, if only to himself. It wasn’t as convincing as he wanted it to be.

Arturo took a deep breath and tugged at the sleeves of his suit coat. He really did look like an old little boy, if that made any sense. It was like after so many years in hiding, he had stopped growing up. He was Peter Pan’s lost shadow.