High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  And when he at last came, she was with him; feeling the explosions that rocked her body made every part of her quicken.

  “I love you,” he said as he collapsed against her sweaty, nude body.

  She kept her legs wrapped about him, holding him tightly to her as she caressed his hair. She wanted to know every part of him, know his body as well as her own.

  And she wanted to know what was inside of him. She wanted to share herself with him in a way that she had never shared with anyone else.

  Maybe it was good that they had come to know each other under such adverse circumstances, because she knew that in the future she’d never have to pretend with him. She and her women friends had joked that there was a “dating” personality that a woman kept with a man. “Until she lands him,” Ashley said. “Then she can be herself.”

  Fiona had never been past that “dating personality” with a man, not even Jeremy. Not until she’d been accused of murder, that is.

  But because of the way she’d met Ace, she had been her worst with him. He’d seen her tired and grumpy. He knew her sarcastic side and her spiteful side. He knew that she could be smart and she could be dumb. He even knew that she could sometimes be calculating and mercenary.

  But he still loved her.

  “A penny,” Ace whispered into her ear as he moved to lie beside her, her head on his shoulder.

  She smiled into the darkness. “I …”

  “Out with it,” he said gently. “Whatever it is, I’ve heard worse.”

  “When my father visited me, I tried to be the best little girl in the world,” she said quietly, then said no more.

  Ace took a moment to consider what she’d said. “In the hopes that he’d like you so much that he’d take you away with him instead of leaving you in boarding school.”

  “Right,” she said, and there was a lump in her throat. “Those newspapers that talked about my lonely childhood weren’t too far wrong.” Turning, she put her mouth near on his neck. “But you …”

  Again Ace hesitated. “But I love you even though I know that you are one bad-tempered lady.”

  “I am not!” Fiona protested. “At least not unless I’m being hunted for murder.”

  “And you find yourself with a man you dislike thoroughly.”

  “Well, you weren’t very nice to me,” she said in protest. “And, Ace Montgomery, if you tell me again that I broke that damned alligator of yours, I’ll … I’ll …”

  “What?” he said, laughter bubbling in his throat, and his hand was beginning to move over her hip. “You’ll set fire to my ticket booth?”

  “I thought I just did set fire to your ticket booth,” she said throatily, then nibbled on his ear.

  “Oh? I don’t remember. Why don’t you show me again?”

  “Okay,” Fiona said as she moved her leg over his. “I think I will.”

  Twenty-two

  “So where are they?” Fiona said at the first sign of daylight the next morning. She had already struggled into her clothes and was on her knees inside the tent.

  Still lying down, Ace yawned as he looked up at her. “Don’t you want something to eat first? Or drink? Or—”

  One look at his eyes and she knew what else he had in his mind besides food. Already his bare foot was running up her calf.

  But she moved away from him. “What I want is a bath first and a life second. And I can’t have either until we solve this mystery and get out of this swamp.”

  Still yawning and rubbing his head, Ace sat up in the tent; then when his head hit the ceiling, he lay back down. Fiona was backing out of the nylon.

  “Even if you do see the lions, how’s that going to tell you who killed Roy and Eric and Rose?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but all of it helps. Do you think I have lice in my hair?”

  “More likely leeches under your clothes. Why don’t you remove them so I can check your skin?”

  “Good try, but no. Get dressed and get out here,” she ordered, but there was a soft smile on her lips. Almost over, she kept thinking. Their ordeal was almost over; she could feel it.

  Once she was outside the tent, she looked around and instantly knew that she was standing in something that was man-made. Nature hadn’t done this. Besides, the Florida swampland was very flat, but this place was … It was like a two-story stone house, but it was hidden and seemed to be almost underground. In the front of the place vines hung down and old vegetation grew, so that it was almost dark inside.

  When Ace emerged from the tent, Fiona hadn’t moved but was staring about her. “What is this?” she whispered, for the place had an eerie feeling.

  “I think it must have once been a burial place for some ancient people. It took a long time to build.”

  While she stood in one place, Ace took two steps away and picked up something from the ground, something shiny, then held it out to show Fiona. It was a silver pen, corroded and dirty.

  “Yours?” she asked.

  “My uncle’s. I gave it to him.” Ace’s hand closed over the pen, and he looked about him. “I think maybe my uncle came here often, and I think he knew very well what I had seen when I broke my leg. But he told my parents that he knew every inch of the reserve and that there was no ‘stone cave’ that I kept describing.”

  “So how did he keep you from exploring and finding it again?”

  Turning, he gave her a crooked smile. “He said this was government land and there were bombs planted over here. When I was older and knew that was a lie, I just assumed there was quicksand or too many ’gators or whatever. And also, when I was older, I wasn’t here that often and …” Trailing off, he kept looking. “When you get older, you lose your urge to explore, and besides, whenever I started to walk this way, my leg began to hurt.”

  “I don’t know how you can tell one place from another,” Fiona said under her breath.

  “You want to see the lions? You want to see what has cost so many lives, my uncle’s included?”

  Fiona opened her mouth to say yes, but there was part of her that wanted to run back outside into the hot Florida sun and never look at a cave again. But she found herself nodding; then when he reached for her hand, she took a deep breath and followed him.

  He turned on the flashlight, then led her behind the tent, then down some stone steps, and she realized that most of the structure must be underground. With each step downward, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up straighter. It was as though a thousand eyes were watching them.

  “I don’t like this place,” she whispered.

  “Lots of dead people in here, I’d think,” he said cheerfully.

  “Very funny. You don’t think the guys who had the lions built this, do you?”

  Ace gave a snort of laughter. “I think this has been here thousands of years, and I think archaeologists would love this place. The lions are relatively new, only five hundred or so years old I’d guess, but then I don’t know much about Chinese art.”

  “We’ll take them back with us and ask someone,” Fiona said, clinging to Ace’s hand, her eyes searching the stone walls that dripped water under the vines that clung to them. Lizards scurried about, making her jump with their quick movements.

  “Great idea,” Ace said. “I’ll carry one and you get the other one.”

  Fiona could only nod at his words as they went down two more steps. In front of them was what looked like an iron door. “In the future, I want to read about adventures, not have them. I really and truly do not like this place.”

  “You ought to see it in total darkness with a broken leg. Then you’d really like it.”

  “If that was a joke, it needs some work. Do you have a key to that lock?”

  Reaching out, Ace gave a tug on the huge lock hanging on the metal door, and it came away in his hands, rusted through. When he pushed on the door, Fiona fully expected it to crash on broken hinges, but it swung inward easily.

  “As I suspected,” Ace said, his voice full of dis
gust. “Uncle Gil must have come here often enough that he replaced the door hinges. When I was here, they’d barely move. I had to shove against them with all my might, and when they did move, I slipped and pow! One leg crunched.”

  Fiona wasn’t going to think about the pain he must have gone through then. “You don’t suppose he installed electric lights, do you?”

  Ace stepped into the blackness that was behind the door and disappeared for a few seconds. To Fiona, left behind in the darkness on her side of the door, it was an eternity.

  “How about a lantern?” Ace asked, and his voice in the stillness made her jump. “Calm down, will you?” He handed her the lantern while he struck a match from the book he carried in his pocket.

  “Now, get behind me and walk slowly. I don’t like the look of this floor.”

  “I don’t like the look of the floor or the walls or the ceiling or—”

  “Ssssh!” Holding himself very still, he listened. “Did you hear that?”

  “I heard everything: snakes, lizards, spiders, all—”

  “There! There it is again. Don’t you hear it?”

  She didn’t know the sounds of the swamp well enough to know when something was unusual or not. “Could we just get these things and get out of here?” she said. “A police station is beginning to seem like a pleasure dome.”

  Ace listened for a moment longer; then he led the way past the door and into the inner cavern.

  It was a small room, with stone walls, ceiling, and floor. But there was no vegetation hanging down these walls, no lizards darting about, and the stones were relatively dry.

  And sitting in the middle of the room were two huge stylized lions, the kind that sit in front of Chinese restaurants. Only these were bigger than any she’d seen before, at least five feet tall, and they appeared to be made of solid gold. And they had big green stones for eyes.

  “Oh,” Fiona said, then sat down on the floor to stare at them. There was something regal about these huge creatures, something that made her feel that she was in the presence of majesty. “Oh.”

  While Fiona sat and stared in relative silence, Ace went to the first lion and ran his hand over the creature.

  “My theory is that these were on the ship that went down and these were what all the murders then and now were about.”

  “How did they get here?” Fiona whispered. She still couldn’t bring herself to do anything but look up at them in awe.

  “Winches I’d guess, log rolling. A lot of muscle.”

  “No, I mean, that ship we read about didn’t go down off the coast of Florida, did it?”

  “I don’t think so. Remember the diver and the men who pulled them out of the sea? The ship could have gone down on the other side of the world.”

  “And someone made a map,” Fiona said softly. “A map that my father had.”

  “That your father stole and falsified,” Ace said as he examined the eyes of the second lion.

  Fiona didn’t protest. It was a little late to try to believe that her father or anyone else on earth was a saint. “How?” she asked.

  “I asked ol’ Gibby a few questions about why they never found the lions, and I put two and two together. I don’t think your father meant to die when he did; I think he meant for you to have these.”

  Fiona looked at him in disbelief. “They’d look great in my foyer.”

  Ace smiled at her joke. “I only met your father once, but he helped me and, to me, that says a lot about him. I think he must have felt guilty about leaving you to be raised by strangers, so he wanted to give you something, and I think he meant to go with you on an expedition and find these.”

  “Ah. Sort of a father-daughter night at the PTA, complete with door prize.”

  “Smokey wasn’t used to the ordinary. He was into some pretty underhanded—” Breaking off, he looked at Fiona. “Anyway, that’s my theory. Someone took the original map and made a copy of it, a copy so good, so well aged that Edward King, who had the map originally, couldn’t tell it from the real map. Gibby said that King had even put—”

  “I know, he put his initials in one corner in disappearing ink, and when the map turned out to lead nowhere, he held the map over a candle flame and there the initials were.”

  “Smokey was smart. Like his daughter,” Ace said, smiling at her. “And Smokey knew a lot about maps.”

  “But he didn’t know much about people,” said a voice from the doorway, making both Fiona and Ace turn sharply.

  A man was standing there holding a gun.

  Ace started to lunge, but the man instantly turned the gun toward Fiona’s head.

  “Move and she gets it,” the man said.

  Fiona was looking at the man, looking at him hard. He wore jeans, but the legs were tight enough that she could see that his left leg was smaller from the knee down.

  “Russell,” she said under her breath.

  At that the man took his eyes off Ace and gave her the tiniest bit of a smile. “Smokey always said that you were the cleverest little thing he ever saw.” The words were complimentary, but they were said with such hatred that Fiona had cold chills spring up over her body.

  “So now what?” Ace said loudly, as though he wanted to distract the man from Fiona. “You kill us and take the lions? After all, you’ve already killed three people to get them, so why not two more?”

  He was in his late thirties, and Fiona could see that his hair was prematurely gray. Her brain was racing as she tried to remember all that her father had written about this man in Raffles. He had been young that year when they were looking for the treasure, eighteen at the most. Her father had liked the boy, and Fiona remembered being jealous when she was reading the letters her father sent. If she’d been a boy, maybe she could have been in one of her father’s stories.

  Smokey had written with compassion for the boy, telling how he’d had a mother who was a prostitute and how, in a drunken fit, she’d pushed him down a staircase when he was two. The boy had survived, but his left leg had never healed properly, so he always walked with a limp.

  “If we’re to die, maybe you should tell us why,” Ace was saying, and Fiona could see that he had concealed his lower half behind a lion so the man wouldn’t see that he was trying to pull a knife out of his pocket. For a horrifying moment Fiona had a vision of the two of them grappling and someone dying.

  But suddenly, Fiona’s mind was clear, very, very clear.

  She looked up at the man, who was just a few years older than she. “You don’t want the lions, do you?” she said softly. “You never wanted them.”

  At that both Ace and Russell turned toward her.

  Slowly, so as not to frighten him into movement, Fiona came off the floor and stood but a few feet from him. She was taller than he by at least six inches. “You just want me dead, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I want you dead,” he said, and there was no life in his voice.

  “And him too?” Fiona said softly. “Must he go too? Why don’t we let him go back to his fiancée, then you and I—”

  The man gave a snort of laughter. “His girlfriend and the lawyer have been having it off for days. That lawyer is after her money. She’s loaded, you know, and so is he.” With a sneer, the man pointed the gun at Ace.

  “That’s enough reason to let him go,” Fiona said. “This is between you and me, not him.”

  “Listen, Burke,” Ace said loudly, bringing the attention back to himself, “I’m not leaving here without—”

  “Don’t call her that!” the man shouted, then held the gun out in his trembling hand. “She doesn’t deserve that name!”

  “All right,” Fiona said calmly to the man. “He doesn’t know what’s going on, so he doesn’t understand. He just happened to be related to someone who was in the way. It’s not his fault.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. I know what you two were up to last night. I heard all of it.” He was a good-looking man except that there was something missing in his eyes, somet
hing that might be called sanity. Now, his mouth twisted into a smirk. “I even saw you two.”

  “As you said,” Fiona said with a little smile. “He’s rich. I was doing what I could to get him to give me money. I deserve money.” Her voice lowered. “Like you do.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Fiona saw Ace move, and she knew he had eased his knife out of his pocket. But what good was a four-inch blade against a gun? By now she knew Ace well enough to know he’d try to be a hero, and he was going to end up dead.

  In a quick movement, Fiona placed herself between Ace and Russell. Behind her, she heard Ace’s sharp intake of breath in annoyance. When she was between them, she turned so she could see both men at once.

  “I’d like to introduce my brother,” she said to Ace, then looked at Russell and said, “Half or whole?”

  “Only half,” he said. “I got the bad whore and you got the good one.”

  “I see,” she said, pretending to know more than she did.

  “Well, I don’t see anything,” Ace said loudly; then in one fluid movement he sat down on the rear end of the golden lion nearest the man with the gun. For all the world he looked like a man sitting in the company of friends. “One of you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “She’s the one that got the education, not me,” Russell said, his hostility unmistakable.

  “True, but you got to spend time with our father,” Fiona said, sounding like a jealous child.

  “Whoa now, I think you better start at the beginning,” Ace said in a half shout as he put up one hand.

  Why is he talking so loud? Fiona wondered; then she heard the tiny noise outside the open door. Someone was coming down the stairs, feeling his way down the old stone steps, using only the light that came from the lantern inside the room. But Fiona had to admit that half a ton of gold made good reflectors.

  “What did Rose know?” Ace asked loud enough to make the walls ring.

  “She saw you, didn’t she?” Fiona said, not quite as loud but loud enough to cover the tiny sounds the person on the stairs was making. “She recognized you.” Maybe it was at the mention of Rose, but Fiona suddenly knew who was on the stairs, and, more important, she knew how that person fit into the story.