Lioness

by Nell Brien

  A large wing-back chair concealed its occupant. Light from a floor lamp pooled on a green baize-covered table covered in pieces of a dismantled rifle and cleaning rags. The corners of the room were in shadow. Along one wall, rifles were racked in glass-fronted gun cabinets that gave back a splintered reflection of the portrait of Morag over the fireplace. She couldn’t see him, but his presence filled the room.

  She shouldn’t have come here.

  “I just saw Stephen N’toya leave this house,” she said.

  Campbell rose to his feet. He replaced the gun rod on the table, then turned to face her, wiping oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste. He showed no surprise at her presence. “I don’t know any Stephen N’toya.” He dropped the cotton waste on the table. “The man you saw was Isaac Mwega, field rep for a Dutch film company. They want to do a documentary on rhinos.” He went on, giving her no time to comment. “What are you doing here?”

  Could she have been mistaken? She’d seen Stephen N’toya only once since college, and that, too, had been at night, in the park across from the hotel. “It was Stephen N’toya,” she insisted.

  Campbell shrugged. “And I say I don’t know a Stephen N’toya. If you want to come to my office, I’ll show you the paperwork on the rhino documentary Mwega came here to discuss.”

  “Morag came to my hotel tonight,” she said.

  “Oh. So you’ve met.” He shook his head. “Jesus. My back was turned for five minutes and she skipped out. What did she want?”

  “Well, for one thing, she wants you to know she isn’t out with Dougie Maxwell.”

  “She didn’t need you to deliver that message. Maxwell’s in the hospital.” He gestured to the corner of the chesterfield in front of the fireplace. “Come in, for God’s sake. You’re hovering in the doorway like a bloody servant. What else did she want?”

  “She said you had a letter for me.” Cat moved into the room until she stood behind the end of the chesterfield. All thought of Stephen N’toya had fled.

  Her words seemed to take him by surprise. “So you just decided to make a courtesy call, is that it? Emphasis on courtesy, I hope. I’m tired of fighting.”

  “Then why do it? Most people manage to settle their differences without using their fists.”

  He grunted. “But nothing’s as satisfying as beating the shit out of a man who deserves it.” He looked at her. “Except maybe loving a woman who needs it.”

  “Love? That wasn’t love. I doubt you know the meaning of the word.”

  “And you do, of course. But you’re probably right. It’s a bit outside my line of country.”

  He went over to a table by the window, selected a bottle from among half a dozen others and picked up a glass. “Scotch?”

  “Yes. All right. Thanks.”

  He came toward her, his masculinity hitting her like a shock wave. As she reached to take the drink he held out, her eyes dropped to his hands. The grazed knuckles were beginning to scab.

  He followed her gaze. “Don’t look so bloody prim. Maybe men don’t take a personal sort of action in your part of the world, but here it’s not exactly unknown. Sit down, Cat. You’re making yourself nervous, standing there ready to run.”

  “Do you work at being a bastard, Campbell, or does it come naturally to you?” She sat in the corner of the chesterfield, leaning forward to put her drink down on the table in front of the fireplace.

  “Morag was everything you expected, no doubt. The classic femme fatale.”

  “I never for one moment thought—”

  “Of course you did. You thought I was sleeping with her. Naturally you didn’t check the facts with me first. That would have been too bloody reasonable.”

  “Your word has been so trustworthy, of course. Have you ever once told me the truth?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Why would I expect this time to be any different?”

  “If you’d waited for me at Maasai Springs, I would have told you what you wanted to know.”

  “I seem to remember a promise to take me to see where Joel died. You didn’t mention it was in Tanzania. Tom M’Bala did.”

  “I planned to take you across the border without anyone knowing.”

  “Why? What was the point? Secrecy for its own sake?” She made a dismissive gesture. “I came back to talk to the policemen who wrote the report about my brother’s death. There was a report, I suppose?”

  “Yes. But you know everything there is to know about it. We brought his body back, Cat. That’s all. It seemed at the time the best thing to do. It still seems to me the best thing. If you think that’s sinister—” he shrugged “—I’m sorry.”

  “I’m still going to talk to them. Joel sent me sketches,” she said abruptly. “They arrived after he’d been buried. How did they get to me? You were in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Is it important?”

  “It is to me.”

  Campbell frowned “He probably gave them to Lynnie Masterson, one of the Flying Doctors. She was in the same area we were and dropped in for a meal. Lynnie was likely delayed getting back to Nairobi and posted them after the accident.” He glanced at her face, gave a grunt of impatience. “Why are you determined to find a conspiracy of some kind? He didn’t mention it to anyone because there was no need to.”

  “Those sketches arrived seven weeks after Joel died.”

  “I’m not surprised. Our postal system is hardly the model of efficiency. Bloody wonder anything gets where it’s supposed to at the best of times.”

  “Would it be possible to meet Lynnie Masterson?”

  “Last I heard, she was up around Turkana, working in the refugee camps there. People are pouring over the borders. She’s a dedicated doctor, it’s not likely she’d make too much effort to take time away from starving babies to talk about a letter she posted in Nairobi for a stranger.”

  Cat’s fingers tightened on the glass, and she looked away from him. He made her suspicions seem so ridiculous. She was beginning to think they were. But she’d wait to hear from Father Gaston before telling him about the camp above Maasai Springs. She looked up at the portrait above the fireplace.

  “Is Morag your daughter?”

  “What do you think?”

  Irritated, she said, “I think that no one answers a straight question. When I asked Morag, she went into some sort of movie-star pose and said she was her mother’s daughter.”

  Campbell crossed the room, swung back the drapes. He opened the French doors, looked out into the garden. A fresh breeze stirred the branches of the jacaranda trees.

  “I don’t know what gets into her sometimes. Sheer bloody-mindedness, I think.”

  “Campbell. Is she?”

  “Of course she’s my daughter.” Campbell turned back into the room. He switched on the portrait light above the gilded frame. “This is her mother.”

  Had he hesitated? Or had she imagined it? Cat studied him for a moment before she turned her attention to the portrait. Light flooded the canvas. Morag, but not Morag. The girl was riveting, on the brink of womanhood, fourteen, maybe fifteen. Pale hair lifted by a breeze, wide blue eyes focused on something only she could see. She’d been painted against a wide African background—sun-drenched plains dotted with flat-topped thorn trees and grazing animals, mist drifting among three distant jagged peaks. There was challenge in the tilt of her head, the smile touching her lips. The artist had caught a wild, untamed quality.

  “She’s breathtaking.”

  “Yes. She was,” Campbell said. “She was my cousin. Fiona Sinclair. She was killed just after this was finished.”

  Cat tried not to show her shock. She took a beat before looking at him. He was staring at the portrait. The air around him seemed dense with pain.

  “She was sixteen when she died. Morag was two months old. I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. She was a child. I wasn’t.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking, Campbell.” But she was. “What happened?”

 
“She was killed in the bush. Lions. Wild dogs. I don’t know. By the time I got there, the tracks had been obliterated. Her body was never found.”

  Cat looked at him, speechless with horror.

  “I was away when it happened. At the university in Edinburgh.”

  “Then you must have been very young, too.”

  “No. I wasn’t. I was eighteen. But I was a seasoned hunter and experienced.” He glanced at her. “There were always plenty of women, usually in love with some romantic bullshit about ‘great white hunters.’ Anyway, I wasn’t a boy.”

  He began to prowl the room. Only zebra skins were scattered on the dark polished wood, but he made no sound. Tom told her that he seemed to think like an animal, moved through the bush like one. It was a rare gift, Tom said.

  “I’d like to know about it, Campbell.”

  “Satisfy your curiosity?”

  She made no effort to hide the pain his remark caused.

  He looked away. “I was old enough to know she was too young. It didn’t make any difference.” He hesitated. “Listen, I don’t talk about this kind of thing. Not even to Tom. So I’ll just tell you that I wanted her more than I’d wanted anything in my life.”

  Cat remembered her own first love. Jim Banks. She hadn’t thought of him for years. A golden surfer in Malibu.

  “Fiona’s mother and Jock were brother and sister. Penny and her husband were killed on the way back to their farm in Tanzania when Fiona was eleven, and she came to live with us. She was a gawky kid, I didn’t really take much notice of her. Then I went away to the university in Edinburgh, and when I came back from my first year, she was different. All sidelong glances and tossing hair. Unpredictable. Moody. She knocked me over.”

  Campbell sat on his heels, held a lighted match to the logs in the fireplace. Flames curled around the wood, caught and flared into sap-filled color. “Ancient history.”

  “Not to me. Please. Go on. What about your mother? You don’t talk about her.”

  He stared into the flames. “My mother was killed in the Mau Mau Rebellion, when I was young. Our housekeeper, Mary, took care of me after that. Anyway, Jock never even noticed what was going on. He was out in the bush most of the time then, only got back to the farm occasionally. He adored Fiona. Never questioned why I didn’t want to go out with him. He’d never wanted me to be a professional hunter and thought I was coming around to his point of view. He knew it was coming to an end, anyway. We had endless discussions about adapting to the new Kenya. Land was being turned over to Africans for farming and that meant hunting as a way of life was at an end. He was right. There was no pretense of sport anymore. It had already started, the dregs of armies after what they could get. No permits, but it didn’t matter. Everyone was paid off. It was find the herds, get the machine guns, hack the ivory.” He got up, replenished his drink. “I never even knew she’d had a child until she was dead. She never wrote.”

  “No one else told you? Your father? Tom?”

  He shook his head. “I thought she was angry because I’d refused to defy Jock. I’d told him I didn’t want to go back to Scotland, that I wanted to start hunting full time. He wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t want to leave her, but I thought we had plenty of time, and I couldn’t defy Jock. I just thought we’d marry as soon as I got home for good. We quarreled about it before I left. She wouldn’t even come to Nairobi to see me off.”

  Cat could see the sheen of perspiration on his face and realized how hard this was for him. He probably never had spoken about it before. He went from the fire to the open French doors. Curtains billowed in the cool, jasmine-scented breeze. He looked into the garden, his back to her.

  “What happened to her?”

  “After I’d left, Jock was off with a safari client. Mary could not stop her from going on some half-baked expedition with a neighbor upcountry and a friend of his. A lawyer from Italy. No cooks, no trackers. No one. It seems they fought over her, and the bastard slammed off in a jealous rage, left her alone in the bush with this Italian office wallah from Rome who knew nothing about the bush. No weapons even if he’d known how to use them. The Maasai brought in what was left of him. We never found Fiona’s body.”

  He filled the doorway into the night, one arm braced against the frame, his solitude shared with a phantom. He’d shut her out, and Cat wanted to touch him, call to him, “I’m here. Alive.”

  “They sent for me, and the Maasai helped us search. Tom was with me. There wasn’t any point. They all knew it, but they helped, anyway. They tried. Anyway, that’s it. That’s the story of Morag.”

  Cat wondered why Morag said she was not his daughter, but it was a question she’d ask Morag directly. She went over to him, put a hand on his arm. “Campbell.”

  He turned and pulled her to him. He held her as if he wanted to absorb her into his own body.

  I love you. The words formed in her mind but she didn’t speak.

  Campbell held her away from him. He said, “Cat, I think you should leave—”

  “No, you don’t,” she said.

  “You should have seen Thomas’s face when he saw the interior of that tent.” Cat grinned. “He asked how I felt after the mad nyumbu. I told him a large bull had got me and I felt pretty good. I thought he was going to laugh out loud, but he managed not to.”

  A jug of delphinium and shasta daisies stood in the center of the plain wooden table in the kitchen. With a soft plop, a stem of delphinium showered dark blue petals onto the well-picked steak bone on her empty dinner plate.

  Campbell raised her hand to his mouth, speaking against her palm. “I’d told him to let you sleep. You weren’t embarrassed that he knew?”

  “No. I did wonder what Tom was going to say, though.”

  “When I got back and found you gone, I damn near had a fit.”

  “I couldn’t wait, Campbell.” She stroked his upper lip, enjoying the grate of stubble against her fingers. “I didn’t want you to know that I cared that much.”

  He hadn’t said he loved her. Not in English, anyway. It would not change anything. In a week, she would be back in Los Angeles. Less than a week if Patel Brothers came through. Their lives could never converge.

  “You haven’t shown me the letter Morag said you’d written me,” she said, smiling.

  “I chucked it.” Campbell divided the last of the wine between them. “You were not the only one mad as hell.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “About being mad as hell?”

  “No.” She let the petals drift from her fingers. “Are you always this closed about what you feel?”

  “Am I?”

  Cat forced herself to match his lighthearted tone. “You’re a hard man, Dan Campbell.”

  He didn’t reply, and she started to tell him about the phone conversation she’d had with the telephone operator, the visit to the State Law Office and the young thug who’d followed her, trying to make it sound funnier than it had been. “I’ve been trying to reach Stephen N’toya for days, so I guess everyone, including your Isaac Mwega, is beginning to look like him.”

  Campbell listened without comment, crumbling bread between his fingers.

  “Then I ducked into the storeroom of this little Indian grocery, and who do you think I ran into? Brian Ward! That’s one spooky guy, Campbell. I told Father Gaston about it. He’s trying to find out something about him.”

  “You’ve seen him since you’ve been back?”

  “I went over to his church. I’m laughing now, but at the time, I was scared to death. I needed to talk to someone and he knew Joel.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I thought you were a poacher. And a killer. And an ivory smuggler. And possibly a terrorist in your spare time.”

  Campbell laughed. “Well, you pretty well covered everything except bank robbery. What did he say to all that?”

  “Not much. I guess he thought I was a bit overwrought. He humored me, though. He’s looking into Brian Ward�
�and your poaching and smuggling activities.”

  “I bet he is.”

  “He told me to be careful.” She was suddenly serious, watching his reaction. “He thinks that maybe I’m in danger.”

  “Then I’ll just have to keep you under close guard until you leave.” He got up, opened a cupboard door, produced a canister. “Why don’t you make us some coffee while I make a few calls?”

  “Sure you can free up some time for me?” she teased. “I’ve got a few days.”

  Campbell dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “For you, sweetheart, I’d move heaven and earth.”

  As he left the kitchen, Campbell glanced back at her. She was filling the kettle at the sink, dressed in one of his shirts, her long legs barely covered.

  It was time she left. Past time.

  In the gun room, he picked up the telephone and dialed a number, listened to the ring at the other end, then hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rang. He picked it up.

  “Did she see me?” Stephen N’toya asked in Swahili.

  Campbell answered in the same language. “She certainly did. Went tearing after you, in fact.”

  Stephen swore. “What did you tell her?”

  “That you were Isaac Mwega, representative of a Dutch film company.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. She’s certainly not convinced she’s had the whole story about Stanton’s death. She’s still determined to talk to the men you’re supposed to be producing.” He dropped his bombshell. “Did you know she went to see our old chum, Gaston?”

  “What!”

  “You heard me. Gaston.”

  “I knew she was being followed, but he lost her when she jumped into that car.”

  “Gaston says he’s making some inquiries for her about Brian Ward.” Briefly, he repeated what Cat had told him.

  There was a pause, then N’toya said, “Maybe we should let the thugs take care of this…” His voice trailed off.

  “You’re a cold-blooded bastard, N’toya. I thought she was an old school friend.”

  “That was then. This is now. Priorities change.”

  “Be careful, Stephen,” Campbell said softly. “Nothing is going to happen to this woman. You understand me? Random mayhem to Joel Stanton’s sister would really get the old man asking questions. Do you want to risk that?”