Everyone always says that when you return to the home of your youth, it looks tiny. But to Amaryllis, this house has taken on the proportions of a fortress. So many memories. So much time lost in reconnecting with her past.
She slips through the busy traffic, checking behind her to see if the tail has found her. Satisfied that she’s alone, she climbs each neatly shoveled porch step, clambers over the wooden (green now—once they were red) floorboards and stands at the door. She closes her eyes and pushes the bell. She takes a breath so large that her lungs hurt. At first, she thinks her moment of connection is fruitless, for there’s no answer. Her stomach flutters, as she figures whether to leave a note in the mailbox. But then a voice coos inside. Amaryllis rings again.
“Who’s there?” the voice repeats. Amaryllis realizes an unseen eye is peering through the peephole, trying to figure out if this visitor is a political huckster or an Avon lady.
“It’s Amy!” she hears herself shout.
The door flies open, warm air rushes toward her fear-taut face, and Freya stands in front of her, all soft, round and comforting. Her hug is like falling into a big, warm down quilt.
“Amy Quigley, my Lord help me. Get yourself in here. Why didn’t you call?” Freya grabs her visitor by the frosty woolen sleeve and yanks her into the toasty living room. City of extremes. Amaryllis smiles. She never liked the blandness of Los Angeles. She can handle the weather here. If anything, it makes things more interesting.
“Oh my, oh my,” Freya says, alternately hugging Amaryllis and then standing back to stare. “After six years, you’re suddenly standing right here in front of me! When did you get into town?”
#
Freya fusses like a woman with a royal visitor, peeling off Amaryllis’ coat and puffing up cushions on the couch. She creates a cozy place to sit, plops Amaryllis there, then goes to the kitchen (twenty steps away—Amaryllis counted them when she was twelve) to fetch coffee and cookies.
“I got here this week. A business thing,” Amy calls. “Don’t go to any trouble on my account.” But Freya is back with all sorts of edible delights. She smiles like a woman who’s been given her youth back again.
“Gol-lee, Freya, Salerno butter cookies,” Amaryllis laughs as the goodies plunk down on the walnut coffee table. “How homey can you get?” She pulls in the smell of old paint and antique wood, chopped onions in the kitchen, and Freya’s lilac perfume. The old home is as cluttered as ever, with Freya’s collection of needlepoint creations crowding the walls, and odd curios from distant lands filling shelves. On the bookshelves, they are placed in front of the hundreds of volumes of books throughout the rooms. She guesses the volumes are double-shelved, knowing the family’s reading habits. No one was ever without a book in hand in this home.
A new addition is a sign with a cross that reads “And the Word was the Lord.” She never knew anyone in the household to be religious. They started out Roman Catholic but drifted away from the church. Amaryllis and Sean stayed away from organized religion, even when lured by some evangelical type who was canvassing the city, searching for “born-agains.” She didn’t trust the guy. But, maybe Freya fell for his pitch. She decided not to mention it.
“Whatever are you doing here in January?” Her aunt asks, pushing aside a mystery paperback. “No one visits us at this time of the year. It’s suicide.”
Amaryllis laughs, knowing full well that Chicago hasn’t had the extreme temperatures of her childhood in many years. But everyone loves to re-tell the old stories of a great deep freeze. Global warming and El Niños actually have kept the temperatures relatively moderate, and there isn’t even much snow these days. Cross-country skiers have been complaining. This winter, however, the Arctic Air decided to descend. Great timing.
Amaryllis leans backs into the Victorian couch, banging her head a bit on the wooden frame, rubs her scalp, and launches into the story of Garret and his abduction. She edits the parts about his photos and the Mexican adventure, but admits he had something the perps wanted bad enough to kidnap for.
Freya, a devotee of police potboilers and true-crime paperbacks, listens with her blue eyes frozen in a state of shock. She looks like a cat that has suddenly found itself in the middle of a flock of sparrows. A real, bona fide mystery just makes her glow.
“So now, we’re waiting for them to release him tomorrow so we can get him home,” Amaryllis continues, ending her story with a satisfying gulp of roasted java. “You got any tea?”
“Tons, hon,” Freya says, jumping up to run to the kitchen. “But what about those bad guys? Who are they? Professors?”
Amaryllis laughs at the idea but then begins to remember the fine details. Men with assault rifles and Brits in tweeds. Access to Versed. A university hospital affiliated with the University of Chicago. What a curious connection. And why did Garret end up in Hyde Park on a university campus instead of dumped in a Compton alley?
“Partially, but what could professors want from us?”
Freya returns with a pot of steaming Lapsang Souchong—Amaryllis can tell by the smoky scent. It’s been her favorite, and Uncle Sean’s, since childhood.
“You know, your mom,” Freya’s eyes mist as she sits, so she turns her head to avoid her niece’s eyes. “She knew a great deal of things those other academics didn’t want to acknowledge.” She waves a chubby hand at the bric-a-brac in the hutch cabinet across the room. “Go look at it. It drove them all crazy.”
For the first time since she wore a pair of Keds sneakers, Amaryllis steps up to the highboy and peers inside the heavy glass. There are two framed photos of her parents: one a wedding photo with “Mr. and Mrs. Kristoff Lang” engraved on the frame. Lang? Did someone change my name? Is this a different man than my father? That photo had never been displayed when she was a girl, she was sure of that. She turns and casts a quizzical eye at Freya, but Freya points with a special emphasis, urging Amaryllis to look at everything on display. The other photo shows the couple dressed for Scuba diving in Florida. Mom, neé Maggie Quigley, was blonde and slightly squat, sat in a boat with her wetsuit zipped to her chin. Alongside her was the man she remembered, even after a couple decades’ absence, as Dad. He was tall, lanky and poker-faced with dark hair that had a wavy, independent streak, like Amaryllis’. His soft, dreamy hazel eyes remind her of her own.
“No, not the photos,” Freya urges. “The stuff. Look at that tablet to the right.” On the ledge lies a clay rectangle about one and a half inches thick. It’s impressed with figures Amaryllis has never seen before—not pictographs, but swirling, biting incisions into clay. Quite clearly a language and not random decoration. Next to the tablet lies a flute, decorated with serpent’s heads. The shelf below features hard stone flasks—hollowed out with machine-like precision. She’s seen these vases in her youth and always thought they were modern. She half turns toward Freya.
“All ancient as hell,” her aunt says, gathering the crumbs from their morning snack. “Your parents begged me to keep the collection here, because they feared someone at the universities would try to destroy the objects.”
Confusion thuds at Amaryllis’s brain.
“Who would do a thing like that?” she cries. “Destroy artifacts? Academics save these things because they are priceless.”
“Listen, kiddo, there’s plenty you don’t know,” Freya says, with a lopsided smirk. “There have been tales of barges dumping artifacts into the ocean if they seem out of context. Professors can be vicious backstabbers like anyone else. And this is not my usual conspiracy theory stuff, either.” She nods at her collection of UFO books. “Most of this material here is garbage. But the items on the shelf before you are real.”
“What does all this mean? What are these things?” Amaryllis asks, her voice diminishing and becoming childlike. She doesn’t know why she has to ask these questions. Things used to be so clear-cut at home. There’s clatter as Freya puts down a couple empty plates and then runs to wrap her tall niece in her short arms.
&n
bsp; “Sweetie, we had to keep things quiet to protect you. But it really is time you heard the whole story. We were waiting until you ever came home to tell you everything. It’s something you have a right to know, but it felt too cold to rattle it off on the phone or write it all in a letter. Face-to-face is the best communication for something this personal.” Freya scratches her head, as she mutters something to herself. Then she looks up, as if making up her mind.
“Come back for dinner or stay while I make it if you like. I’ll make sure Nora is here for the meal and I’ll make sure Sean is home, too. He’s not going to work late tonight. That is, if you have time.”
Amaryllis is Amy again, standing four-feet-tall at the dining room table, watching her aunt and uncle speak in hushed tones about “that thing in Florida.” She tries to block the memory from her mind, but it won’t leave. There always was a secret history to which she was not privy. Now, it is about to be unleashed.
“I’ve got to go back to the hotel, but I’ll definitely be back for dinner. May I bring my editor? I promise he’ll be discreet. He’s… he’s concerned about my safety and I’m afraid he’ll want to tag along with me at night.“
Freya darkens for a moment. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Amaryllis shifts from one foot to another, not wanting to alarm her protective aunt. “I’m being tailed,” she says. “I think the kidnappers brought the photographer here to lure me to Chicago. We don’t know why they’d do that, but we’re being extra careful. My editor would insist on watching out for me.”
Freya scrunches her mouth to one side.
“Your editor can come if he understands this is not for publication.”
“He’d never publish a private conversation. He’s more like a friend. Think of him that way.”
‘Seven, then.” Freya drags Amaryllis’ coat from the side chair and gets her ready for the deep freeze outside. She pats her backside as Amaryllis steps into an exhilarating gust.
#
“I hear you’re in town, long-lost flower. Weren’t you even going to give me a call?”
Amaryllis holds the hotel phone away from her ear for a second, sorting through all the male voices she’d ever known in Chicago. She’d been expecting a call from L.A., so her mental scan takes longer than usual. After a second, she makes the connection.
“Donny.”
“Well, hell, girl. I hear you’ve been in town for a couple days. I know you need time, but I’m still wounded.”
“Donny, we’re here on a rescue mission of sorts,” Amaryllis says tapping her fingers on the tabletop. Donny Gregorios certainly would have been the first person she’d visit on a social trip to Chicago. But not now. Not with this mess going on…
“Rescue mission? Sounds a little overblown, huh? I heard you just chewed out Alvarez and left him whining like a hurt puppy.” He lets out a throaty laugh. “Oh, and you’re taking your kidnapped photographer home.”
“How do you get this stuff? I didn’t tell a soul about the Alvarez encounter. You should have been a reporter yourself.” He responds by barking another laugh through the telephone line.
God, Donny. The kid from the apartment next door. That hell-bent, thrill-seeking nutcase. He kept her in continual trouble at Jerome Elementary School. And he was a nuisance at Webber Middle School, too. A blond-haired Greek boy who called her Wiggly Quigley and always beat her on bicycle races through the back alley.
Here was one person she definitely does not want to miss in her hometown. He’d been more than a brother, better than a best friend. Another lost kid—the son of a single mother who worked double jobs just to stay above water. Because of her schedule, Donny practically became an additional resident at the Quigley household. They’d play Scrabble until MTV’s dance countdown came on TV, then race to their schoolbooks before Freya came home, and pretend they’d been working hard on homework. Most nights of the week, Danny stayed for dinner, stealing Amy’s bread and giving her his lethal dose of Brussels sprouts. Once or twice he’d even sleep over on the old Victorian sofa—usually around Christmas time, when his mom worked even more hours to buy presents.
Donny saw more of Freya than he did of his own mother. The milk and cookies, the long talks about life, all came from the Sean and Freya household. But Donny regarded his mother as a goddess, right up until she died from breast cancer when he was twenty-seven.
When high school came along, adolescence hit and Donny and Amaryllis drifted in different directions: Amy gravitated to the school newspaper and yearbook, and Donny to sports. Jocks and “brains” never got along well, so they rarely saw each other amid whirl of classes and extracurricular activities. By graduation day, Amy was accepted at Northwestern University to study journalism and Donny won a full basketball scholarship at some out-of-state school that she had never heard of. He did all right by his hard-working mom. Amaryllis and Donny exchanged letters for a while. Soon the gaps in time became hard to surmount. They were on different paths and neither one wanted to admit it. So, they had let silence make the announcement for them.
Now, in her hotel room, time dissolves and she’s as close to Donny as she was when she first learned to ice skate. She realizes he’s been talking a blue streak while she’s been lost in the ozone.
“Reporter? What the hell would I become that for?” Donny lets out a hoot. Amaryllis remembers that sound from the old days when he grabbed the last chocolate or hid her homework. “I wanted to make some money. Don’t you know I’m an ambulance chaser?”
Now she is whooping, falling back on to the hotel bed and collapsing into giggles. “That’s not what I heard. You are with Ruby and Abbott, one the biggest firms in town. Even I know about them. You are into the big bucks.”
“And I’ve got connections, baby. Like to the P.D.”
“Ah, Alvarez.”
“You pissed him off nicely, Amy. I’ve got to hand it to you. I always knew you had it in you…”
“Listen, I want you to come to dinner tonight.”
“That’s why I’m calling. Freya asked me to come and said you’d be there.”
Nerves tingling up and down her backbone. “She said I’ve got lots to hear and I want you there to help me figure it out.” She watches the sunlight cloud over and begin that mystical winter fade into a sudden dusk.
“At your service.”
“Seven then.”
She places the receiver back in its place and senses a peculiar buzzing in her ears. The orb. It wants to speak to her again. This time it isn’t even near her but buried inside a towel in the room safe. With effort, she ignores the summons, lies down on the bed, and at four-twenty in the afternoon falls into a nap full of irritating dreams and senseless visions.
She’s in an ocean, clear and warm, but dangerous all the same. The water bubbles near her ears and she finds herself below the surface without a scuba mask or tank. An eel winds his body around her neck as she tries to surface. Her limbs refuse to move. The sea beast is trying to pin her to the seafloor. She whirls at the last minute to see the face of the eel and it is a dark-haired man with a mustache and haughty, pointed chin. I’ll remember you, she thinks, as she fights for air. As she thrashes with the demon, a soulless tone bleats.
Amaryllis is gasping on the bed and realizes the phone has been ringing. She grabs the receiver. Wright is ready to leave and will meet her in the lobby in fifteen minutes.
Okay. Okay. But the face of the eel floats in front of her for a few lazy seconds more.
CHAPTER SEVEN: DAMAGE CONTROL
He isn’t a large man, so only a few children stop their play and stare as he scrambles across the rocks separating the islands of the Bahamas from a restricted United States naval base. He aims high-powered binoculars at an installation not far from the coast of Florida. He watches for patrol boats and sensory mechanisms. His first assignment had been in Cuba, which turned up nothing of any value. Some submarine nuts were plying the waters for golden pirate booty, but they began getti
ng anomalous readings of the sea floor instead. They found triangular structures mapped all over the shallow ocean bottom, many bearing an odd resemblance to the pyramids in the ruins of the Maya.
London had not been happy with the reports of the sub’s findings and wired Ignacio Cruz to keep an eye on the mysterious expedition. But, the sub team had been so silent that Cruz had a hard time finding out if they even existed. They kept their trail clean of bar encounters, braggadocio, and displays of odd foreign customs: the things that usually give galleon hunters away.
So, the Brits ordered him away, to look into the Bahamian sightings. Another looney tunes outfit with a website is reporting satellite images of triangles in the blue sea off the large islands. They are using NASA and Landsat images and enhancing the results with their own computers. Some find the results thrilling, but Cruz considers it all heresy. Anything in those blue Caribbean waters would have to have stood above ground 8,000 to 10,000 BCE. To Cruz, it violates scripture. To London, it violates common sense. So, the satellite boys in their tin-foil hats must be disproved.
Some of the anomalies on the satellite website are in these restricted United States waters. Cruz, a Cuban citizen, has to take delicate care. The Committee already holds him responsible for bungling the submarine project.
Cruz knows he’s not the only one in disfavor, however. The rumor mill had already churned out the row caused by Landon Hewitt and his disastrous trip to the Azores. Instead of quashing rumors of intelligible, organized script on the sunken slopes of the islands, Hewitt brought along a brash young linguist who found a connection between the writing and proto-Egyptian language. Hewitt didn’t know how to shut her up.
Dateline: Atlantis Page 8