This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Dan had been right again.

  The only thing the two brothers had ever seriously argued about was Gabe’s refusal to finish college and then his desire to put off the Orinoco assignment until he could find out if Joy was pregnant. Dan said he would handle that problem just like he handled all Gabe’s other bills.

  Gabe had exploded. Joy’s not a bill, she’s a woman who loves me!

  Dan wasn’t buying it. That’s what you said about Whatshername, the cutie from Christchurch, New Zealand. Once she learned that the Venture wealth didn’t exist, she took off.

  Joy is different, Gabe had insisted.

  I’ll tell you what’s different, little brother. You broke Mother’s heart when you left school. She got over it, finally, when you started making a living writing articles. Now you stand to make more than a living—you could have enough left over to help support her if the construction market hits the toilet again. Don’t fuck up your career just when it’s getting launched.

  Gabe had wanted to argue that Dan was just bitter because his own fiancée had dropped him a year ago when she found out she would be marrying into the hard-working middle class rather than the leisured wealthy class. But yelling about women who wanted money more than love was useless. Dan believed what he believed, and had the scars to prove it. Making Dan bleed all over again wouldn’t help.

  So Gabe emptied out every bank account he had and borrowed money against his Orinoco job. Finally he had $3,744 to leave with Dan for Joy if she was pregnant.

  Few people outside the family knew that Gabe worked for every penny he spent—and he spent as little as possible. Invariably the personality magazines and columnists referred to him as a “scion of the wealthy Venture family” first and a journalist second.

  It was the lure of easy money that had put him in the center of two paternity suits before he came to Cottonwood Wells the first time. The fact that he hadn’t even slept with one of the women and positively hadn’t impregnated the other was proved only after long, very public wrangles that had taught Gabe more about yellow journalism, easy women, and greed than he’d ever wanted to know. Since then he’d become very adept at spotting women who wanted more from him than a mutually pleasurable time.

  Joy had been different. He’d trusted her not to be after his supposed wealth.

  He’d been wrong.

  When Dan told her that $3,744 was all the money Gabe had in the world, she took it and had an abortion. So much for her protestations of love.

  Then why are memories of Joy an obsession? Gabe asked himself for the hundredth time. Why do I keep circling around them like a vulture around carrion?

  “Mr. Venture?” The postal employee’s voice was gentle and patient, like her eyes watching the weary man in front of her. He looked dead on his feet, pale beneath his tan, his green eyes the only thing alive in a face lined with something deeper and more painful than physical exhaustion. “Will you be able to take the other mail?”

  Gabe yanked his mind back from the questions that had been haunting him more and more since the accident in the Andes. He’d come to New Mexico to find answers, not to repeat the same old middle-of-the-night questions until he wanted to scream or curse or cry like a child.

  “Excuse me?” Gabe said, his voice ragged.

  She smiled encouragingly. “I noticed that we were supposed to forward that package and the trunks to Cottonwood Wells if you didn’t pick them up in ten days. Are you going out there right away?”

  He nodded as he picked up his package. He was too tired for casual conversation with strangers.

  “There is other mail for the Wells,” the woman said hurriedly. “Fish has been out at the cave for three days, so no one has picked it up, and he won’t be back here for three more. Would you mind taking the mail with you? One of the packages is express. Must be important.”

  “Sure.” Gabe smiled and shook his head, ashamed. “I should have thought of that myself. It’s really remote.”

  Unless Cottonwood Wells had changed, it was as isolated as any place he had visited anywhere on earth. No electricity except by a portable generator that rarely worked, water pumped by windmill into a tall tank and delivered by gravity to the cottages, communications dependent on mail, rare visitors, or a temperamental shortwave radio.

  As for Lost River Cave itself, it was like another universe. There had been nothing to equal it in all Gabe’s years as a roamer.

  Or maybe it was that nothing else had equaled Joy.

  “Thanks,” the employee said, smiling and handing Gabe a pile of mail for Cottonwood Wells.

  “You’re welcome.” For almost taking my mind off an obsession, he added silently.

  He carried the small trunks one at a time to the car. The pavement sent transparent, shimmering waves of heat up to meet him. It was hard to believe that in a few hours the air would be chilly and the sun’s searing embrace just a memory. The wide temperature swings were one of the stark contrasts of desert lands that always surprised and fascinated Gabe. Australia’s Outback, Africa’s Sahara, the Atacama of Chile, the Great Sonoran Desert of America, Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert, the Empty Quarter—location didn’t matter. The underlying realty of a desert was the same everywhere in the world. Drought. Heat. Unveiled sun. A clarity of life and death that knew no equal in any other landscape on earth.

  Except one—the dark mysteries and startling beauties of a cave carved by water deep within the very bones that supported the desert itself. Water glistening on impossible stone sculptures, air saturated with moisture, coolness that varied only a few degrees from season to season. In all ways, the caves of the Guadalupe Mountains were the opposite of the arid, light-drenched land above them.

  Like the desert itself, life and death were intensely focused in caves. The margin was very fine. A frayed rope, a body too tired and chilled to revive, rocks kicked loose to strike a caver far below. The rewards, too, were very fine. Virgin landscapes of a beauty seen only in dreams. A sense of being in the presence of something far greater and more enduring than a single human life. The feeling of having touched eternity.

  That’s why I came back, Gabe assured himself. That will all be here long after the woman and the I-love-you lies are gone. The fantastic stones and the silence and the darkness pierced by a single cone of light. It’s all still here, waiting for me. It will answer some of my questions and make me forget the rest.

  It will give me peace.

  It will be enough.

  The other half of his mind pointed out coolly, It better be. The cave is all there is. Joy is gone as surely as the baby she got rid of.

  He had no answer for the caustic voice within him. When he’d left Cottonwood Wells and Joy, he’d planned to be in South America only for a few months, four or five at worst. Jungle fevers, politics, and wretched weather had stretched the assignment into a year. The resulting articles had been gathered into a book that made his career. For the first time since his father died, Gabe could help his family out financially.

  Six years ago he’d come out of the Orinoco Basin flushed with fever and so tired he staggered . . . and he’d read Dan’s old, brief message. The New Mexican cutie was satisfied with $3,744 and an abortion.

  Reading those words had brought a fury that was still with Gabe. His rational mind said that of course a twenty-year-old wouldn’t want to be tied down with a kid and no husband and no money to help her out. The rest of his mind said that lots of younger women got pregnant and kept the baby and worked their asses off, especially the women who truly loved the baby’s father.

  It wasn’t like Joy had been totally on her own. She was very close to her parents. They’d been a long way from rich, but they would have helped their daughter until Gabe was back in civilization and able to help her himself.

  Joy hadn’t wanted to wait around.

  At the time, Gabe had wanted to track her down and tell her what he thought of her. Instead of giving in to his fury, he took a long assignment on the Indian Ocean. Again
, a series of articles became a best-selling book. He didn’t stop to enjoy not having to worry about every dollar. He took another assignment in the Sahal. Then another in Tierra del Fuego, and another and another and another, world without end.

  None of it was enough.

  Although he had gotten over the sting of being taken in by sexual experts, he had never gotten over the rage of being taken in by innocence.

  Three

  SUN POURED OVER THE CONVERTED RESORT COTTAGE where Joy lived. The resort had failed years ago, leaving behind ten weathered, sand-roughened cottages and a “lodge” that had burned down before Joy was born. An old ranch house was similarly ruined. The desert had little wealth and it gave what little it had grudgingly.

  Even if the land wasn’t a gold mine in terms of making money, it was beautiful to Joy. The cottonwood trees spread huge branches and blessed shade over the cottages and the seeps that made the difference between life and death in the desert. Water lay just beneath the dry surface of the earth. There wasn’t enough water to make a cattle ranch profitable, much less the irrigated fields of a farm. There wasn’t even enough for a decent resort. The man who had last owned Cottonwood Wells had gone broke. When he died, he willed the weathered remains of his dream to the university. Then Joy’s parents had discovered a new passage below a cave known only for a failed guano mine, and the university permitted them to explore farther. Joy was thirteen.

  A year ago, even a few months ago, all the cottages would have been alive with activity as teams of cavers and scientists explored Lost River Cave. But not now. There simply wasn’t enough money to support that level of exploration any longer. Her team was down to herself, four grad students—two of them would soon leave—and an amateur caver called Fish.

  Frowning, Joy looked up from the computer that kept track of the finances for Lost River Cave. A quick glance at her watch told her that she still had plenty of time to pick up Kati at the Childer ranch, which served as a school bus stop. Then she remembered that Kati was spending the week with her closest friend, Laura Childer.

  A feeling of hollowness settled in Joy. Without Kati, there wasn’t much reason to go back to the cottage at the end of the day. She wished she hadn’t let Kati spend the week at the Childer ranch.

  Instantly Joy scolded herself for being selfish. It would be cruel to keep Kati from sharing a large family’s warmth just because Joy missed having her nearby. Susan Childer was a wise, laughing ranch wife who had eight children and would have loved eight more.

  Between the comings and goings of all the Childers and their friends, it sometimes seemed that half the kids along New Mexico’s southern border lived at the Rocking Bar D. Joy had even lived there herself, earning room and board and pocket money while she worked her way through the university, thanks to a generous scholarship. When she received her master’s degree, she was invited to complete a Ph.D. while living at Cottonwood Wells and exploring Lost River Cave.

  It was a wonderful opportunity, but it had been wrenching for Kati to leave the Childer family. Even now she spent as much time at the ranch as she did in the cottage at Cottonwood Wells. Joy simply didn’t have the heart to deny her daughter the chaos and companionship of a big, loving family.

  Unconsciously Joy sighed, remembering her own childish dreams. She’d been her parents’ sole child, a “lonely-only,” as she called herself. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t do that to her own child. She’d have a houseful of kids, and they would all grow up laughing and fighting and sharing and exploring caves and everything else the world had to offer.

  It hadn’t turned out that way.

  The older Joy got, the more she realized that life offered everything and promised nothing.

  Deliberately she turned her thoughts to something else. Wailing over the past didn’t do any good and could do a lot of damage in the present. The plain fact was that Kati would have no sisters or brothers. After Gabe’s betrayal and her parents’ sudden death, Joy simply didn’t trust life enough to love.

  She’d tried dating a few years ago. Bad idea. Being abandoned by the man she loved had killed the passion that sent a woman willy-nilly into a man’s arms. It wasn’t that Joy didn’t hunger for sensual satisfaction. She did. But she’d learned that it came only in her memories and dreams. Having Gabe walk away had cut her too deeply, too completely, for her to risk passion again. Being touched by other men made her very uneasy . . . and at the same time, being touched brought a longing for Gabe so vivid that it terrified her.

  She’d stopped dating and started looking at sperm banks. In the end, she just couldn’t do it. She wanted to know what the father of her child looked like, to hear his laughter, to see his eyes darken with passion as he—

  “Dr. Anderson?”

  The deep-voiced call came from the front porch of the little cottage. Joy took a fast breath and dragged her mind out of the past.

  “Come in, Davy.”

  Moments later the screen door snapped shut behind Davy Graham. The grad student filled the doorway with equal parts of muscle and eagerness. Both were very helpful to Joy in her job as leader of Lost River Cave expeditions. His size was also a problem. His broad shoulders had become a joke around camp because some cave passages were very tight. In order to get through the various limestone squeezes, Davy had to strip down to his shorts, put one arm over his head and the other along his side, and wiggle on his stomach through the fine silt that cavers called cave mud.

  Gotcha Passage, one of the main thoroughfares on the way to the cave’s lower levels, was Davy’s daily challenge. There had been talk of renaming Gotcha everything from Bloody Shoulders to Naked Squeeze in Davy’s honor, but Joy had stood firm. Gotcha it was and Gotcha it would remain.

  “Did you get the message to call Harry?” Davy asked, curiosity in his blue eyes.

  “Yes.” Knowing what he really wanted to ask, she said briskly, “It wasn’t a reprieve. The grant still runs out in six weeks.”

  For a moment Davy looked away. At twenty-three he hadn’t had enough harsh experiences to teach him how to hide his feelings. His disappointment was as clear as his hope had been.

  “I’m sorry,” Joy said. “I know how much you want to finish mapping what we’ve discovered. I wish you could too. Your maps are incredibly good. Someday they’ll save cavers months of time, and the techniques you’ve worked out in your computer programs will revolutionize underground mapping. No matter what happens, you should be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

  Her words were not only comforting, they were true. Despite his size, Davy was one of the best cave mappers she’d ever seen. His large, blunt hands had miraculous patience with muddy clinometers and Brunton compasses, as well as much more high-tech surveying equipment. Laser, sonar, or anything else they could beg, borrow, or charm from the military surplus store—no matter what, if it was electronic and could survey a cave, Davy made it work.

  “As for your three-dimensional computer model,” she added, patting his arm briefly, “it’s simply the best I’ve ever seen. Somehow I’ll find a way for you to complete the work and get your doctorate.”

  Davy’s smile was fast and crooked, but real.

  “In fact,” she said, “I’ve been talking with Dr. Weatherby of Subsurface Minerals, Inc. I asked him to consider funding your research when the grant runs out. He seemed interested, so I sent copies of your maps. If that doesn’t work out, there are other things we can try. USGS, for one. It will get done, Davy. Your work deserves it.”

  “Thanks,” he said simply. “Your support has meant a lot to me. Most faculty I’ve worked with only want to take credit, not give it.”

  She didn’t argue. She knew better than Davy how fiercely competitive the supposed ivory tower was. “How could I possibly take credit?” she asked with a sly smile. “Everyone knows that I couldn’t have hauled all that stuff through the cave without you.”

  He made a comic, pained face. “That’s all you see in me—a strong back a
nd a weak mind.”

  “But of course,” Joy said, wide-eyed, teasing him as she always had, keeping him at a distance while reassuring him that she valued him as an assistant and a person, but not as a potential lover. It wasn’t personal. She treated all men the same. “Why else would anyone put up with a moose like you?”

  He snickered. “Last time I was a walrus.”

  “Yeah. Wonder what you’ll be next time.”

  Smiling, shaking his head, he looked at his watch. Two o’clock. “Is the other team out yet?”

  Automatically Joy checked her own watch. Like Davy’s, it was a hardy stainless-steel model that could take water, cave mud, and scraping against rocks. “They haven’t checked in. Give them twenty more minutes, and then we’ll start for the cave.”

  “Okay.” He turned away. “I’ll go see if my computer has finished running the modeling program I just modified. Meet you at the washing machine in five.”

  The screen door snapped shut loudly behind him.

  The wind blew with a dry sound, then faded, leaving only stillness beneath the sun. Joy listened for a long moment, savoring the peace even as she thought about what lay ahead.

  Today she would be helping Davy survey one of the many intriguing leads that radiated out from the Voices. The big chamber on the second level of the cave was alive with liquid sounds that came from groundwater squeezing through limestone until it reached a cavern filled with darkness and air. Pulled by gravity and pushed by the weight of more water above, the groundwater fell through air and sank liquidly into the unearthly beauty of pools that had never known the sun.

  The huge cavern called the Voices fascinated Joy not only for its eerie, murmuring beauty, but because she was certain that somewhere within the echoing room there had to be at least one passage that would lead to unexplored portions of Lost River Cave. There was simply too little water falling into the Voices to account for all the ghostly voices she heard in the big room itself.