“That was taken just before she married Edward,” I recalled. “After they got married, I never saw her smile again.”
“Most mothers will sacrifice their own happiness for their children,” Lynne said.
“I would rather have made my own opportunities than have her prostitute herself as she did.” I stared wistfully at the photograph. “She used to tell me an angel gave me to her, that God had sent me into the world for a special purpose. Can you believe that?”
“Actually, I can,” Lynne answered honestly.
“I’ve always suspected I was the product of rape,” I confided. “If not Edward, then someone else."
“Angry or not, you still love her,” Lynne said.
“I loved her, perhaps too much,” I said. “I was never able to love anyone else after she left me.”
“What about your sister?” she asked. "You love her, don't you? "
"I was always protective of Sarah," I told her. "As children, we only had each other. Edward was too busy to be a real father to either of us. He was too busy changing the world."
"It's good that you and she were close."
I smiled. “I used to drive her quite mad by telling her the labels on her designer dresses should be on the outside so everyone could tell who had designed them—otherwise, it was pointless to wear them at all.”
“I don’t even own a dress,” Lynne admitted then. “I haven’t worn one in maybe ten years.”
“A pity,” I said, smiling at the thought. “You have lovely legs. I do enjoy looking at them.”
“Glad you like the view.” She stood up and started clearing the table.
“In fact, you’re quite nice all over,” I went on, getting up to help her. “I like to look at you when you’re out at the site in shorts and a T-shirt, and the humidity makes the shirt cling to your—”
She laughed. “Is sex all you ever think about?”
“It is when I’m not getting any.”
She rolled her eyes. “I think I'd better get started on those dishes.” She threw me a dishtowel. “I’ll wash, you dry.”
I nodded. “Fair enough.”
She focused her attention on the sink, trying not to let me see her smiling. “It never fails,” she said.
“What?”
“My nose itches,” she said, wrinkling it up in a vain attempt to relieve the problem.
“Turn around, I’ll scratch it for you,” I offered. As she turned to face me, I dipped my fingers into the soapsuds before scratching the tip of her nose, leaving bubbles in my wake.
“Thanks, that was a big help.” In retaliation, she scooped up a handful of suds and swiped her hand across my face. I spit bubbles, then, laughing, stuck my hand down into the sink and pulled up a large cup full of soapy water.
“You wouldn’t!” she laughed.
“Wouldn’t I?” I advanced on her menacingly, about to dump it down the front of her shirt, when we were interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Oh, bloody hell!” I dropped the cup back into the sink, threw down the towel and stormed off to my bedroom, slamming the door. Would we ever have enough privacy?
I brought my motorbike to a stop and sat there in the darkness for a bit, getting my bearings. I wasn’t sure how far I’d gone from the site, and I’d left my watch on the kitchen table.
I knew it had to be late. I’d had to get away, to cool off. Every time I found myself getting close to Lynne, about to make my move, we inevitably were interrupted by someone or something. It was unbearably frustrating. I wanted to take our relationship to the next level, but I was no longer sure what that next level should be.
I was also still thinking of my mother. I took out my wallet and removed the small photograph I’d shown Lynne earlier. There were times I was still so angry with Anne, I couldn’t bear to look at it, and other times I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Lynne was right. I loved my mother and I hated her, sometimes simultaneously.
Lynne reminded me of Anne in so many ways—her stubborn devotion to her faith, her principles, her simple, natural manner. Like Anne, Lynne seldom wore makeup, and when she did, it was minimal. The only jewelry I’d ever seen her wear was an inexpensive wristwatch and a silver crucifix on a chain around her neck. She paid no attention to fashion and her hair was never sprayed, gelled or moussed. She eschewed manicures and pedicures and called them “silly”.
Like my mother, Lynne was genuine…and her feelings for me were genuine. Those feelings drew me to her, a powerful, irresistible magnet.
For as long as I could remember, I had been able to read the thoughts and emotions of others simply by being in contact with them. I recalled one incident in particular. My mother had left Edward. She was pregnant with Sarah at the time…
We were living in Scotland, and one morning we'd encountered a neighbour outside our building. The woman had always been kind to us, and I got up on her lap to give her a hug. “That’s my wee laddie,” she laughed, holding me tightly. “You’re such a sweetheart.”
I was overcome by a strange sadness and drew back. “I’m sorry, Maddie,” I told her.
“Sorry about what, Andrew?” she asked, puzzled.
“I’m sorry you have cancer. I don’t want you to be sick.”
“Andrew!” my mum hushed me.
Maddie looked at Mum. “How could the lad know?” she asked. “I only just found out myself yesterday.”
Mummy was surprised. “You do have—”
“Colon cancer,” Maddie said with a nod.
Until that day, I had believed my ability was completely normal, that everyone could do it. That day, my mother told me about the angels…
“You are different from everyone else, my baby,” she told me. “Special.”
“Special…how?” I asked.
“You were a gift from God,” she said, taking me in her arms. “I didn’t even know I was going to have a baby. Then one day an angel, the Archangel Gabriel, came and told me I would be blessed with a special baby who would grow up to be God’s messenger.”
“Was the angel my daddy?” I asked.
“Yes, he was,” she said. “He put you in my arms, and you were the most beautiful baby I had ever seen.”
“Why did he not stay?” I challenged. “Declan’s daddy is still around.”
“Angels have to return to heaven,” she patiently explained. “They can’t just stay here.”
“I want to see my daddy,” I insisted.
“One day, perhaps,” she said evasively.
I’d been too young then to understand that my mother had been mentally ill. I believed my father had been an angel, until my mother left one day and didn’t come back, and I stopped believing in anything or anyone…
Lynne was asleep when I finally returned in the early hours of the morning. I noticed her bedroom door was ajar when I entered the trailer. I wondered if she was still awake and went to find out. She wasn’t. I stood in the doorway for a long time, watching her sleep. She lay on her left side, her hair a dark mass on her pillow, the jersey in which she slept hiked up over her hip. Watching her stirred feelings in me that I fought to reject. Had it been a simple matter of lust, I could have dealt with that—but I was fighting emotions I'd not experienced since childhood. I tried to tell myself it was the situation we were in, the place, the isolation, even the fact that she had said no.
But this one was different from the others. Why? I asked myself, believing that knowing the answer would take away the allure. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to stroke her hair, to feel her skin against mine, to taste her…all familiar responses, to be sure. But I wanted more than the physical. That was unsettling.
18
Lynne
When I woke early the next morning, I went to see if Connor had returned. I found him in his room, fully-clothed and asleep, lying face down on the bed.
I wish I knew what’s going on in that head of yours, Merlin, I thought.
Connor opened his eyes and rolled over on his ba
ck. “Have I overslept?” he asked when he saw me standing in the doorway.
I shook my head. “I was just checking to see if you had come back,” I admitted. "You weren't in the best of moods when you left."
He pulled himself upright. “You’re concerned about me. I’m touched,” he said, scratching the back of his head. His hair was rumpled, his eyes only half open, and still I found him more appealing than any man I'd ever known.
“Hungry?” I asked, trying not to think about that.
“Now that you mention it, yes.” He looked up at me. “I seem to have fallen asleep with my clothes on. I wouldn’t have minded if you had elected to take them off for me, you know.”
I shook my head. He was persistent, I had to give him that. “You came in so late, I didn’t even know you were back until just now,” I told him. “I’ll go get breakfast started.”
“Thank you,” he said then.
I didn’t get it. “For what?” I asked.
“You never question me,” he said. “You never press me for details of where I’ve been.”
I shrugged it off. “It’s none of my business.”
“We live together.”
“Not in that way.” I hesitated, wanting answers but not feeling I had the right to ask. “Connor, tell me one thing, will you?”
“If I can.”
“Why did you choose to ask your stepfather to fund the dig? Really? I’m sure you didn’t do it just for a one-night stand—”
He grinned. “Not for just one night, no.”
“I’m serious,” I insisted.
“So am I.”
“I’m sure you could have had any woman you wanted back in London,” I started. If I was wrong about this, I was going to end up feeling pretty foolish. “Probably had them throwing themselves at you.”
“I might have. Your point?”
“I can’t figure you out. You’ve said that you’re only looking for sex, yet you left a female buffet behind in London, you ignore Pam’s advances—”
“I do have the option of changing my mind, don’t I?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“I want you.”
“Why—because I turned you down?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “Is it so hard for you to believe I could want only you?”
“Yes.” That much was the truth.
“I’m not some dog out to mate with whatever happens to be in heat at the moment.” He looked offended by the suggestion that this might be what I was thinking.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t mean to imply you are.”
“If you must know why you’re so important to my needs, I’ll confess,” he conceded with gravity in his voice. “I’m part of a top secret experiment. I was created in a laboratory—a superior man in every way. There are only ten of my kind. We have to go out into the world and mate with normal women to produce hybrid offspring who will be of superior intelligence and physicality.”
“And why is it necessary for you to mate with normal women?” I asked, amused.
He looked genuinely sad. “My kind cannot survive for long in the outside world, you see. We need women like you to help our children to thrive.”
“Why can’t you survive?” I asked, playing along.
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said solemnly.
I almost thought he was serious.
The months passed quickly, and before we knew it, it was June. Connor and I were closer with each passing week, but in spite of his persistence and my fading willpower, we still had not crossed that line.
One afternoon, with the sun high in the cloudless sky, the heat was unbearable—but the hottest part of summer had yet to arrive. I wondered what we'd be dealing with in the next two months.
I went to one of the coolers, took out two bottles of water and gave one to Connor. “Take a break before you drop,” I ordered.
He looked up at me for a moment, unsmiling, then opened the bottled water and took a long swallow. I watched him, concerned. He could be so stubborn sometimes. His face was red and he was perspiring heavily as he worked with a faulty GPS rover. He was dirty and sweating, dressed in old jeans that were worn at the knees and a filthy Sturgis T-shirt.
He swore under his breath when his attempt to adjust the rover failed. He finished the bottle and threw it down. I picked it up. “Face it, Mackenzie. You’ll always be a lab rat. There’s no shame in that.”
We were excavating the caves at the base of the mountain, but our equipment was not cooperating. “I’m ordering all new GPS equipment tomorrow,” he said, throwing a screwdriver in frustration.
“Don’t let it get to you,” I advised.
“Easier said than done.” He muttered something that I couldn’t decipher. When he was angry or upset, his brogue became so thick, he was difficult to understand. I suspected it was deliberate on his part.
Tim's Land Rover came to a stop nearby. Tim got out of the vehicle and walked around to the back to unload the supplies he’d brought back from Cairo. I left Connor to do battle with the rover and went to help Tim.
“Sorry I’m late,” he told me. “Some of the items we ordered didn’t come in, so I had to make substitutions.” He put the box down and took from it some folded newspapers, which he handed to me. “There’s some sort of mass deportation going on in Israel,” he said.
“Again?” I asked. Back in 2000, there had been a pilgrimage of cults arriving in Jerusalem, expecting Jesus to appear there. The Israeli government had deported all of them.
Connor never looked up from the GPS.
“I guess it’s never going to end,” Tim theorized. “Now they think the Messiah could come out of some lab somewhere, that he’s going to be cloned from the blood spilled at the Crucifixion.”
I laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”
Tim took a bottle of water from the cooler, opened it and took a drink. “Takes all kinds to fill the freeway, I guess.” He paused. “Remember that nutcase who claimed he could extract Holy DNA from the Shroud of Turin? I suppose it’s possible.”
I started to disagree, then changed my mind, remembering something. “The Shroud has Christ’s blood on it.”
Connor spoke up for the first time. “If DNA is available, if the Shroud is authentic, then yes, it might be possible,” he concluded, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief.
“Doesn’t cloning require preserved blood?” Tim asked. “The blood on the Shroud is two thousand years old—and dried up for more than a few centuries.”
Connor shook his head. “Actually, DNA can be obtained in a number of ways—a strand of hair, nail clippings, skin scrapings, saliva,” he explained. “Dried blood could be used. There would be gaps in the genetic code, to be sure, but that could be fixed with the addition of other human DNA. Gene sequencing can be done by computer—”
“I can’t believe the two of you are even discussing this,” I told them. “The whole idea is absurd.”
“Whoever does it—and someone will, eventually—will be credited with one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time,” Connor reasoned.
I disagreed. “Even if the physical being of Christ could be cloned, it would prove nothing. His power didn’t come from his flesh—it came from His spirit, from God.”
Connor gave me a skeptical look. “If you believe in that sort of thing.” He knew it would open a debate. Sometimes I thought he enjoyed those debates. The more passionate the better.
“Look around,” I said, extending my arms in an expansive gesture. “What have we been doing here?”
Connor looked annoyed. “Good question.”
Tim recapped his bottle. “I don’t think you’ve convinced him,” he said, noting the dispassionate expression on Connor’s face. “I doubt you ever will.”
I wasn’t giving up. “Archaeologists have unearthed evidence that events described in the Bible actually took place,” I went on. “What further proof do you need?”
&nbs
p; “I’m not saying I don’t believe He ever existed,” Connor told me, pushing his hair back off his face. “In fact, I’m certain He did. I’m also certain He was executed in Jerusalem—and yes, probably by crucifixion, since that was the usual method of the time and place. The Romans did go to great lengths to squelch any hint of insurrection. I just don’t believe Christ was any kind of deity.”
“So, Connor—who do you think He was?” Tim asked, genuinely interested. He parked himself on a wooden crate and waited for the scientific explanation.
“He was a revolutionary,” Connor answered without hesitation. “His influence was most likely political rather than spiritual. Was He not descended from the royal line of King David? He would have had a claim to the throne. At any rate, He ultimately became so powerful that He was seen as a threat and put to death to send a warning to His followers.”
“In other words,” Tim concluded, “a charismatic rabble rouser.”
Connor nodded. “Not exactly the words I’d use but close enough.”
I slam-dunked my empty water bottle into the barrel designated for trash. “You know, you two, not everything has a practical—or logical—explanation,” I told them. “It’s like debating which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
“The egg,” Tim said, laughing.
“The chicken,” I disagreed. “God created the first chicken. The chicken laid the first egg.”
“And you would know this—how?” Tim asked.
“I read it somewhere,” I responded with sarcasm.
“I didn’t say I agreed with him,” Tim quickly defended himself.
I turned to Connor. “So—you really think Christ was some kind of radical?”
Connor gave it momentary thought. “One who wielded enormous power, to be sure—no one else in history has ever had that kind of following, which probably accounts for the myth,” he concluded.
“Myth?”
“Legends happen when a story captures the collective imagination so that when it’s passed along to subsequent generations, it’s embellished with each telling,” Connor offered as an explanation. “In two thousand years, He went from activist to god.”
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