by Rachel Lee
“Lady, for someone who claims to feel isolated, you sure do your best to keep everyone at a distance.”
She understood that. He could see it in her eyes, could see the way they shadowed with hurt, then flared. She jumped to her feet and wrapped her arms around herself, then began to pace the kitchen.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said.
He didn’t bother to reply. She wasn’t looking at him, and anyway, he didn’t think she wanted to hear anything he had to say.
“If you’re going to keep throwing that moment of weakness up at me, we’re not going to be doing business much longer.”
He was tempted; he was sorely tempted. But some lingering remnant of moral fiber wouldn’t let him take the easy way out. So he waited. Finally, she started talking.
“All my life, I’ve been alone. When I was little, and made friends during the school year, summer would always come and we’d leave to go on a dig somewhere. And when I came back in the fall, my friends would have found new friends. Or I’d come back to a different school because my father had taken a position at a different university.”
She shrugged, but this time the gesture didn’t irritate him, because it was plainly directed at herself. “It was no big deal. I had a lot of advantages other children didn’t have. I visited places some of them can only dream about. And as I got older and could start participating on the digs, I learned a hell of a lot.”
She faced him then. “The point I’m making is that I prefer being alone. It’s served me well. And the one time since childhood that I let somebody get close, it proved to be the biggest mistake of my life.”
He suddenly had the worst urge to go to her and hug her, because he knew in his gut what he was hearing was bravado, and not a word of it was true.
“I’ve learned a lot of things that some people never learn,” she went on forcefully—which also meant louder. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t consciously shouting. “I learned to be self-reliant, to get by on my own resources in almost any situation. I learned to take care of myself.”
He nodded, not knowing whether she cared what he thought, and not sure what he thought of this proud little exposition except that it was making him feel very sorry for her.
“Anyway,” she said, “when I was talking about being isolated earlier, I was talking about being deaf. And all I meant was that it makes conversing so difficult.”
Bullshit, he thought. If that was what she had meant, then he was the Pied Piper of Hamlin. He was tempted to tell her to get a shovel, but he resisted the impulse. She had a Ph.D. all right, in horse manure. But maybe the worst of it was the sneaking suspicion that she really believed all this rationalization.
She was looking at him, as if waiting for his response. Trouble was, he was a lousy liar, and if he said what he was really thinking, they’d only get into an argument.
So he hid behind a question. “Who was the person you let get close to you?”
“Which person?”
“The one who hurt you.”
She turned her back to him and he felt a spark of anger. He’d been ignored before in his life, but there was something especially annoying about the way this person ignored him by turning her back. The urge to turn her around and make her face him nearly overwhelmed him.
But then she surprised him by speaking. “My husband,” she said presently, repeating what she had told him before. “My ex-husband. He left me after I became deaf. He said he couldn’t handle it.”
There had to be more to it than that, Dugan thought. Because any guy worth his salt who loved a woman would have stuck around if that’s all there was to it. Of course, there were plenty of guys who weren’t worth their salt. Some were something you wanted to scrape off your shoe. But how had a woman like her become involved with such a slug?
“What else happened?” he asked, even though it was useless because her back was to him. But the sound of his voice had the effect of bringing her around, and it was less intrusive than touching her.
Although he was beginning to think that he needed to avoid touching her for reasons other than not wanting to offend her. Mostly because the thought of touching her was beginning to sound too good.
“What?” she asked.
“What else happened? There was more than your deafness, wasn’t there?”
Her face darkened. “It’s none of your business.”
“No? Well, here you are, dripping your angst all over my kitchen floor, telling me I don’t know you at all, but I do know you were crying earlier about being isolated, and I do know you said someone hurt you and it was the biggest mistake of your life. Now, since we’ve come this far, why don’t you just tell me all of it? Then I’ll shut up and leave you in your isolated ivory tower.”
He didn’t know if she understood a tenth of what he’d just said. He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by it himself. What he did know was that he wanted the whole story, not just the antiseptic bits and pieces she had shared with him.
“I’m not in an ivory tower! I’m deaf. It cost me my husband. He couldn’t handle it even though he’s the one who made me—”
She broke off sharply and whirled around, giving him her back.
But this time he was having none of it. He rose and went to her, taking her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. She stiffened and glared up at him. “Let me go.”
“No. Not until you answer me. Your husband made you deaf? How’d he do that? Tell me, Veronica.”
She looked up at him, a mixture of emotions racing across her face. Then, in a burst she cried, “You want to know? It wasn’t really his fault. He’d had a couple of beers, but it was the other driver who caused the accident. And I lost my hearing and our baby.”
Then she pulled away from him and hurried out of the kitchen. A few moments later he heard the front door close behind her.
He thought about going after her; she was upset and raw. But it wasn’t raining anymore, and she was staying only a couple of blocks away. And because she was raw, he didn’t think she could handle any more of him just then.
So he quelled his impulse to rescue her. He knew at least some of where she was coming from, because he’d been there himself, and he remembered how having other people around had sometimes made his nerves feel scraped.
He found himself wishing he hadn’t pressed her for answers, not because it had been painful to hear, although it had been.
But because it made her seem too much like a kindred spirit.
Chapter 11
Orin wasn’t feeling well. He insisted that the doctor said he was doing just fine, that his cancer was still in remission, but Veronica had a hard time believing it. In the two months since they had arrived in Key West, he seemed to have shrunk.
“It’s just age,” he told her. “Honestly. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You ought to go back to Tampa and have another scan.”
“I’m supposed to do that in a month. That’s soon enough.”
But she didn’t believe it. Fear was nibbling at her heart constantly, and every time she got aboard the Mandolin to sail out for four or five days, she wondered if he would be gone when she returned.
She was supposed to leave again in the morning, but her heart was beginning to go out of the whole process. The magnetometer had found some anomalies early in the game, and Dugan and Tam had been doing an awful lot of diving ever since, going over huge areas of the seafloor with the metal detectors. Nothing. Not a thing, except some rubbish and a rusty propeller.
Day after boring day they sat out there on the water. Or at least she did. Tam and Dugan at least seemed to enjoy diving, if not the painstaking sweeping of the seafloor. Tam was a natural talker who tried to turn every evening into a party, but she still couldn’t understand what he was saying most of the time, which left her feeling cut off and cut out. Sometimes he’d break out his harmonica, though, and would play sea chanties and other haunting bits of music that she re
cognized. And sometimes Dugan would sing along.
She didn’t have enough confidence to do that, but she did enjoy listening. A lot of evenings, though, she just pulled out her hearing aids and hid in the silence. And Dugan never said a word about it, as if he no longer minded when she put up her walls of silence. In fact, ever since she had told him what had happened to her, he seemed to have pulled far away, so far away that she didn’t feel as if they were even casual acquaintances anymore. Now she felt as if they were utter strangers, even though they saw each other every day and talked quite a bit—but always about business.
She told herself it was no big deal; he was just an employee. But their three months were running out, and she wasn’t sure she could persuade him to extend their agreement. Tam, she gathered, kept talking about being done with the whole thing. Dugan didn’t say a word one way or another.
Now there was her father. She looked at him again, taking in the dark circles under his eyes and the lack of color in his face. He wasn’t healthy at all.
“I’m taking you back to Tampa,” she announced. “You need to see your doctor and get another CAT scan.”
He shook his head. “I’m fine. Just a little under the weather. Besides, you don’t want to give up your search. You need to prove me wrong before it’s too late.”
Something inside her flared. That bone of contention had been lying between them for many months, and they ordinarily avoided mentioning it. But now he had thrown it up in her face. “What is the matter with you?” she demanded. “You can’t possibly think this search is more important than your health.”
“Actually,” he said mildly, “I think your emotional health is more important than anything, including my physical health.”
“I’m just fine.”
“Are you?” He shrugged. “It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t see it. You’re angry with me, you’re driven, and you’re absolutely convinced that I committed a mortal sin by not telling you about the mask and your mother’s search for it. Never mind that I did it for your own good.”
“How could it possibly be for my own good to lie to me about what mattered to my mother? Were you ashamed of her? Damn it, Dad, it’s not as if she were a prostitute. She was an archaeologist searching for a lost artifact.”
“I wasn’t ashamed of her, Veronica. Never, ever. I think she was obsessed, but she wouldn’t be the first person in our field to be obsessed by something like this. And she had the added motivation of being related to the last surviving priestess. I could understand that.”
“Then what was it you couldn’t understand?”
“Nothing. I told you. I didn’t tell you about this because I was afraid for you. I knew it would consume you. And I feared you’d get hurt the way your mother did.”
She shook her head angrily. “Her death was an accident.”
“I disagree. But the facts are neither here nor there, Veronica. The fears I had kept me from telling you about it. In the long run, what does it really matter? Everything else I told you about her was true, and I told you everything else about her.”
“But you left out the single most important thing, Dad. You left out the quest that defined her. And you lied to me. I don’t like being lied to. Larry lied to me when he said he loved me. I don’t like liars.”
“I never lied.”
“Except by omission.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
She knew they were going to get nowhere with this discussion. He was convinced he was right; she was convinced he was wrong. And she couldn’t even find words that could adequately explain to him just how wounded she felt by his “omissions” all those years. Couldn’t explain how betrayed she felt by his unwillingness to trust her with the truth.
She also couldn’t escape the notion that he’d felt her mother’s quest had been insane. He kept calling it an obsession, and she didn’t think he meant that in the casual sense. He hadn’t trusted her mother’s judgment.
“You don’t think the mask existed, do you?”
His eyebrows, just beginning to grow back some hair, lifted. “I don’t doubt that it existed.”
“Then why do you think she was wasting her time? Why did you think she was deluded?”
“I never said she was deluded.”
“You imply it with everything you say. What’s at the root of all this, Dad? What?”
He sighed and looked away, staring out the window into the sun-drenched garden. Minutes passed while Veronica grew impatient and began to wonder if he was ever going to tell her the whole truth and stop treating her like a child who needed protection.
Why he felt a sudden need to protect her was something she couldn’t understand. He certainly hadn’t protected her from much when she’d been a child. Living at archaeological digs had taught her a lot about the rougher side of life, especially in small, impoverished towns, and cantinas and bars all over the world while her dad and his colleagues had a drink or two. She’d nearly been raped at the age of twelve, rescued only by a Mexican woman who’d heard her cries and had come running with the metate she used for grinding corn, to beat the man around the head. She’d been robbed in the market, had witnessed brawls and knife fights, and knew what a prostitute was by the time she was eight. Protect her from what?
Orin finally turned back to her. “I know I haven’t been the best father. I know you have a lot of difficult feelings about me right now. But don’t add that resentment to this discussion, Veronica. Let’s have this one as adult professionals. Colleagues.”
“We can’t discuss my mother as colleagues.”
“Of course not. I’m not talking about your mother here. I’m talking about the disagreement of professional opinion she and I had.”
This was certainly a new tack, Veronica thought. But her curiosity was aroused and she forgot her anger with him, at least for the moment. “What difference?”
“She believed Bernal’s account that the mask was taken aboard the Alcantara. I never did. Think about it, Veronica. Would that tribe really have let something so important to them be taken from the island? They believed that mask protected them from the wrath of hurricanes and waterspouts. Would they really have let anyone, even the high priestess, take it away?”
“If it didn’t go down on that ship, then what happened to it?” But she already knew the answer. It followed logically.
Orin spoke her thought. “It vanished in the hurricane that wiped the tribe out.”
It was the one question she hadn’t asked herself over the last months of preparation. Even as she had questioned the conclusions her mother had drawn about where the Alcantara had sunk, she had never questioned whether the mask was aboard.
She felt her stomach contract as she considered the possibility. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Because I needed anything that would get you out of that rocking chair and back into life. I’d have lied, cheated, and stolen to get you back, Veronica.”
“Did you?”
“Lie?” He shook his head. “No. But I didn’t tell you my doubts.”
She was feeling unpleasantly manipulated, but she couldn’t seem to get angry about it. Only sad. Depressed. She sat for a few minutes, wondering why she hadn’t just killed herself after Larry left her. There’d been nothing left to live for, so why had she hung around? Why had she given anyone the opportunity to manipulate her the way her father had? And now he was trying to rip it all away from her.
Her eyes felt hot and swollen as she looked at her father. “Why are you finally telling me this?”
“Because you wanted to know the truth of what I thought about your mother’s search. I told you. I disagreed with her on purely professional grounds.”
There was more to it than that, Veronica thought. More to his telling her this now. He was still afraid that her mother had been murdered, and she suspected he was still afraid that she might get hurt.
She closed her eyes, shutting him out, closing herself inside h
er own head and forcing herself to be objective. He might be right. Would the tribe have allowed the priestess to take the mask to Spain with her, leaving them unprotected? Would she have been willing to do that to her people?”
So little was known about the tribe, their beliefs, or what they might have done about this, though. All anyone knew about the mask of the Storm Mother and the tribe was what Bernal had recorded. And he might have lied, or simply not known the truth.
But she couldn’t imagine any reason why Bernal would have lied. A storm had destroyed the Alcantara, and there was nothing to be gained by lying about what was aboard her. Nothing at all.
But he might have lied about how the mask came to be aboard. Maybe his wife, the priestess, hadn’t been willing to leave her island. Maybe he had forced her to come along, and had brought the mask himself as a prize. There was no way to know what kind of man he had been, and what the circumstances were.
But there was absolutely no reason she could imagine that he stood to gain anything by lying about the mask being aboard the galleon.
She opened her eyes and found her father watching her. “Bernal didn’t lie. The mask was aboard the Alcantara. How it came to be there may be open to question, but he can’t have had any reason to lie about its being there.”
Her father gave her a half nod. “Perhaps not. So you’re going to continue the search?”
“Yes.”
“Then be very, very careful, Veronica. More people than you think know what you’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of our colleagues have mentioned your search to me. They’ve heard whispers of it in the community. There’s actually a great deal of interest. Which could put you in danger.”
“Just rumors,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone what I’m doing. Have you?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Someone knows. There are rumors. Most of the people I talk to simply shake their heads as if they don’t believe it, and I don’t say anything to change their minds. But it remains: People are interested.”