“My pleasure, Ms. Charters. Or may I call you Serena?” Garrison asked.
She wondered if a woman had ever refused him. “Serena is fine, Mr. Warrick.”
“Oh, please,” he said, laughing. “There’s only one Mr. Warrick here, and that’s Granddad. I’m Garrison, chief flunky for the House of Warrick.”
Cleary gave her son a sidelong glance that he ignored.
Serena hid a smile. Perhaps a possessive mother was the reason that the charming young scion didn’t have a wife at his side.
“Enough nonsense,” Warrick said curtly. “Bring me the bloody sheets now.”
Garrison rolled his eyes but made no other objection. “If I may . . . ?” he asked, holding out his hand for the portfolio.
For an instant Serena’s fingers tightened on the leather. A peculiar sense of possessiveness gripped her. She had to force her hands to loosen. It was ridiculous to be so wary. The man who owned the baronial splendor surrounding her certainly wouldn’t simply grab four leaves from a manuscript nobody had ever heard of.
“Of course,” she said.
She handed over the leather portfolio and told herself she was an idiot for the silent cry of objection that rose within her when the pages left her hand. She was acting like a mother cat with only one kitten.
It was an effort, but she forced herself not to follow Garrison as he crossed the costly rug and laid the portfolio on an antique table in front of his grandfather. The surface of the table gleamed with a mosaic of semiprecious gems—lapis and malachite, ivory and ebony, carnelian and mother-of-pearl. For all the attention Warrick paid to the table, it could have been made of clay.
With surprisingly nimble fingers, he undid the buckle on the portfolio and opened the leather wide with the impatience of a conquering knight spreading a woman’s thighs. Silence filled the huge room while he turned the first sheet, then the second, the third, the fourth.
He looked up, pinning her with dark eyes. “Where did you get these?”
“I inherited them from my grandmother.”
He said something that she couldn’t hear, something that sounded very much like bullshit.
“Excuse me?” Serena said.
“Where are the rest of the sheets?”
Serena was sure that hadn’t been what the old man said, but she answered anyway. “This is all I have.”
He snorted. “Likely story. Want to try again? Where are the rest of the sheets?”
“Yes, let’s try again,” Serena said tightly. “I don’t have any other pages.”
Warrick gave her a look out of eyes that had faded from their original brilliant blue but had lost none of their searching clarity. “When did she die?”
“A year ago.”
“Why did it take you so long to get these appraised?”
Irritation flared. Serena subdued it and tried to remember that Warrick had the reputation of being as brilliant an appraiser as he was rude. Even so, she had no intention of going over the whole sad, sordid tale of her grandmother’s death.
“I’m a busy woman,” Serena said through her teeth.
“And I’m an old man. I don’t have time to waste with a clever young baggage who thinks to take up where her purported relatives left off.”
She stared at him, wondering suddenly if he wasn’t more than a little bit senile. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
He snorted.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said evenly. “I’ll take the pages somewhere else to be appraised.”
“Waste of time. We both know exactly what they are. How much do you want for the lot? A hundred thousand?”
“There has been a misunderstanding.” She spoke with great care, because she hated to add to the stereotype of redheads and quick tempers. “I’m not here to sell these pages.”
“That I believe,” Warrick retorted. “Two hundred thousand.”
Serena looked at the other people in the room. They met her glance with barely subdued curiosity.
“Three hundred thousand. Each,” Warrick said. “But for that I want the rest of the book. All of it, mind you. I won’t be fooled.”
With a feeling of unreality, Serena turned back to the old man sitting in the high-backed carved ebony chair. “No.”
A flush of anger tinted his pale, wrinkled cheeks. “If you think you can fuck with—”
“You’re tired,” Carson cut in. His cool words overrode his employer’s rusty voice. “It’s been a long day for you. We’ll discuss this again when you’re rested.”
For several moments the two men traded stares. Then Warrick hissed something under his breath, stood, and stalked from the room.
Garrison sighed in relief. “I’m sorry, Serena. Grandfather is a man of strong opinions.”
“His home. His privilege.” Serena went to the table and began buckling up the portfolio.
“You have every right to be angry,” Carson said, “but there’s no need for you to have made this long trip for nothing. We have a guest room for you and a safe for the portfolio, if you like. In the morning we can talk again. He’ll be more reasonable. I promise you.”
“Thank you, but no.” Serena gave Carson a tight smile. “I have work to do tomorrow.”
Actually, she planned on staying in Palm Springs, sleeping late, and then driving out to her grandmother’s house—her own house now—to see what was left after the triple disaster of fire, crime-scene investigation, and a year of neglect.
“Obviously Mr. Warrick thinks the sheets are valuable,” Carson said. “I’m uneasy about letting a young woman alone go driving off into the night with more than a million dollars’ worth of art. Let us keep it for you until you decide to sell.”
She tucked the portfolio under her arm and looked straight into Carson’s light-blue eyes. “Will the gate open automatically or do I have to call the house again?”
“I’ll show you out,” Garrison said.
“Nonsense,” Cleary cut in. “Let Paul do it.” She gave the portfolio a glance that was as cold as her voice. “When you change your mind about selling those sheets, call us. But don’t wait too long. The offer won’t be open indefinitely.”
In silence Cleary and Garrison watched Serena walk out of the room. The line of the younger woman’s back suggested all the things that she had wanted to say, Go to hell being foremost among them.
“Too bad Granddad was in such a pissy mood,” Garrison said. “She’s quite pretty in a fey sort of way. Nice ass, too.”
“Get your mind out of your crotch.”
“Not until I’m at least as old as Granddad.”
“You’ll never see the day,” Warrick said from the interior doorway. “Call Rarities Unlimited. It’s time for them to start earning their retainer. That blackmailing little bitch will regret trying out her teeth on me.”
Chapter 8
SAN JACINTO MOUNTAINS
EARLY THURSDAY MORNING
Head thrown back, muscular neck bulging, the bighorn sheep stood on a dry, rocky ridge and sniffed the wind for danger. There was man smell on the air, but it was a familiar odor to the ram. That particular scent had never meant danger to the small herd. On the contrary, sometimes the smell might mean that a salt lick would appear nearby. In the desert, salt was a treasure, almost as necessary for life as water or food or ewes.
The ram blew out air, rubbed his head on one front leg as though to rearrange the massive, curving weight of his horns, and began grazing again. Four ewes foraged nearby. Their woolly bellies protected and warmed the next generation.
Sixty feet away, Erik sketched rapidly to catch both the wariness and the acceptance of the wild sheep. The land around him was steep, desolate, rocky, and dry. It was also much more accessible than the sheep’s summer range. The bighorns had been driven to lower elevations by the coming of winter storms. A recent snowfall had made their normal haunts icy and covered over everything edible, but the only other sign of water was a wisp of cloud curling down from th
e highest peaks.
Today there was rain on the other side of the mountains, the wet side where clouds piled up and darkened until they shed life-giving silver tears. But there wouldn’t be any water at lower elevations on the Palm Springs side of the peaks, Erik’s side. It took a bigger storm to push rain over mountains more than two miles high.
The wind blew hard enough to make Erik glad for the Pendleton shirt he was wearing. The sheep came equipped with their own wool, but he had to import his. The thought made him smile while he added a final stroke to the sketch, turned over a new page, and began drawing quickly again.
He had spent much of the night poring over the maddening copies of pages from the Book of the Learned. No matter how much, how little, or what kind of light he had used, he could only make out occasional phrases written by a man long dead.
The thought that this time I will see her drives me like a starving wolf . . .
May Christ forgive . . .
I cannot . . .
. . . cursed mist, let me by!
On another page he had fretted and worried over a note concerning the marriage of a young woman, Caoilfhionn of the Mist, to the son of Simon and Arianne, called Ranulf of the Rowan. The birth of a shared grandson to Dominick le Sabre and Duncan of Maxwell was noted. A full harvest received prayerful thanks. The arrival of three books from a Norman duke was celebrated. A place or a people called Silverfells was either cursed or mourned, perhaps both.
The fragments were maddening. He had worked until he was cross-eyed and bad tempered. Then he had checked for anything new from Rarities on tracing the provenance of his pages—Shel’s response was succinct and obscene—before he had finally fallen asleep.
Three hours later he had awakened restless and filled with adrenaline. He had dreamed of flying like a peregrine, coursing like a staghound, holding on to a violet-eyed sorceress who burst into flame that heated without burning. The colors had been vivid, the language that of his specialty, twelfth-century British, which was a mix of Norman French, Anglo-Saxon, and the exuberant patois that ultimately became known as English.
Too restless to sleep any more, he had pulled on hiking clothes and headed up into the San Jacinto Mountains. Illuminated manuscripts were his passion and his profession; sketching the vanishing bighorn sheep was his relaxation and his hobby. Before dawn, he had needed both.
He looked up, then resumed sketching. He doubted that the sheep would be around when his children were old enough to hike the steep sides of the desert mountains. That was assuming he ever had any; at thirty-six, he was no closer to fatherhood than he had been at sixteen. He had never expected it to turn out that way. If he had thought about the matter at all when he was young, he had assumed that he would have descendants stretching out into the unknown future just as he had ancestors stretching back into the unknown past.
Then the years had gone by and nothing had changed but his age. Realistically, he had to wonder if anything ever would. With each passing year he was getting harder to please, not easier. Females who would have interested him twenty years ago looked like children now. The twenty-somethings he met were married or caught up in their careers. The thirty-somethings were often harried and bitter after a divorce, wholly committed to their careers, or interested only in an undemanding affair.
Erik wasn’t an undemanding kind of man. He wanted a woman who was intelligent, passionate, honorable, strong enough to be a true partner, and interested in working with him to build a shared life. He had found many women with one or two of those qualities. Once he had found one with four out of five, but she was interested only in his mind.
A golden eagle plummeted down out of the sky, distracting Erik from his unhappy reverie. Instants later a rabbit broke from cover and raced in unpredictable zigzags through the rocks. Either too eager or too late, the eagle missed its kill. The bird screamed its irritation to the sky.
Erik whistled in exact imitation of the eagle’s angry cry. The raptor wheeled in a swift circle overhead, peering down as though to discover who his rival was. Erik whistled again. The sound was less fierce this time, more questing than threatening. The eagle answered in kind, made another circle over Erik, then beat its broad, powerful wings and flew up into the sky. The whistle that tumbled back down to earth sounded almost like a good-bye.
The vibration of Erik’s pager against his body was definitely a hello.
He would have been tempted to ignore it, but his bosses at Rarities were two of the few people who had his pager number. If they wanted to talk—especially about the pages from the Book of the Learned—he was more than ready to listen. The copies had haunted him all night long. He had dreamed of their letters whispering to him, telling him the secrets of the past. And then he had dreamed of mists and forests, a staghound and a falcon who was his eyes.
Smiling at his fanciful, medieval mind, he punched a button on the pager. One of Dana Gaynor’s numbers at Rarities Unlimited blinked in the pager’s small window. Moving slowly but not furtively, for he didn’t want to alarm the sheep, Erik reached into the rucksack beside him and pulled out his combination cell phone and computer. A flick of his thumb activated the first number in the speed-dial file.
Dana picked up her phone before the second ring. “Morning, Erik. Can you talk?”
“The sheep haven’t sold me out yet.”
“Lord, are you doing your mountain-goat bit again?”
“Sheep, Dana. We don’t have mountain goats in southern California.”
“Sheep, goats, whatever. Hooves and a bad smell.”
He laughed softly. Dana was a stickler for some kinds of details, but wildlife wasn’t one of them. “I hope this is about the pages Serena Charters sent to my home.”
“It is. Your private quest just went public.”
His heart kicked up the pace. “How so?”
Dana ignored the question in favor of her own agenda. “Is your request to Research for provenance searches on your manuscript pages part of your private quest?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s on the house,” she said dryly. “The House of Warrick, that is.”
Erik thought quickly. Serena hadn’t hired him; she had merely made inquiries. If she decided to have him do the appraisals, there still wouldn’t be a conflict. Whatever he learned during his Rarities research became part of his expertise, which was exactly what she and Warrick paid for. “Is the old man having trouble deciding if the pages are worth appraising?”
“I’ll let Paul Carson explain. Garrison and Cleary Warrick Montclair will probably be here, too.”
“By here I assume you mean Rarities headquarters in Los Angeles?”
“Yes. Ten o’clock this morning.”
“Today?”
“The old man is nearly a hundred, what do you think?”
“I think I can’t make it before two o’clock even if the freeways are clear, and they won’t be.”
“The chopper will pick you up at nine.”
Erik let out his breath in a very soft whistle. The last time he had been chauffeured by the Rarities helicopter, he had been riding with the president-for-life of a small African country. The president’s passion, and eventual downfall, had been illuminated manuscripts. He had spent money on them that should have gone to military salaries, ammunition, and outright bribes.
“Factoid is now head researcher,” Dana continued. “Shel is swamped with chasing some damned Old Master through four wars.”
“Factoid? Should I be flattered or worried?”
“Be whatever you want except late.”
Chapter 9
LOS ANGELES
THURSDAY MIDMORNING
The helicopter wheeled like a falcon beneath the pilot’s steady hands. Idly Erik wondered if rides like this were the source of his recurring dream. Then he decided it must be his own imagination. He had dreamed of flying like a falcon and running like a staghound long before he had ridden in his first helicopter. In any case, Los Angeles was the opposite
of mist-shrouded oak forests and wild meadows swept by wind-driven rain. The hills of L.A. were carpeted by houses and eucalyptus trees. Coyotes rather than wolves sang, and they sang to each other about garbage cans set out at the curb for trash collection rather than a blood-humming chase through ancient oak forests after elk.
The headquarters of Rarities Unlimited was cut into a hillside high above the concrete sprawl of the city. On the border of commercial and residential zones, Rarities had the best of both worlds. More compound than office or house, Rarities was laid out like a small, very exclusive college campus, with walkways connecting five buildings. No building was more than three stories high. All except one of the buildings were set in a landscape design that owed much to Japan: serenity and evergreens, the sculptural presence of boulders, the soft murmur of water trickling over dark stones.
The exception to all the clean lines was Niall’s house. It was surrounded by an English cottage garden. No matter what the season, flowers climbed, towered, sprawled, bunched, and ran in careless riot around the wood-and-glass residence. Among the flowers grew herbs that were the source of a running argument between Niall and Dana. He insisted they were useless. She insisted that they were the only part of his garden that was useful.
The pilot lowered the helicopter down to the pad as gently as a butterfly settling onto a flower. Larry Lawrence was a former marine, former National Forestry Service firefighter, and former traffic reporter for KCLA. If it could be done in a helicopter, he could do it.
“They’re waiting in Dana’s conference room,” Larry said.
“Anyone else?”
“I brought in Garrison and Cleary Warrick Montclair. The Eiffel Tower, too.”
Larry was five feet seven and one-quarter inches. He disliked really tall men on principle. At just under six feet two inches, Erik was right at the edge of Larry’s tolerance. Paul Carson, aka the Eiffel Tower, exceeded Larry’s personal limit by several inches. Paul had been chosen for the Secret Service because there had been a series of presidents who topped six feet two. As Charles de Gaulle had figured out generations ago, tall guards made excellent bullet catchers for tall presidents. Larry had wanted to be a presidential guard in the Secret Service, but wisely had opted for the marines instead.
Moving Target Page 6