“I know,” Eslin interrupted.
“—and Johnny Byrne. The old guy just called him Johnny, you know, like he knew him. And Rachel kept saying, real quiet, ‘Oh, Johnny, poor Johnny.’ That’s just how she said it. Real soft, like she was surprised, or sad, or maybe both.”
“Then what?”
“Then Gage said, ‘That son of a bitch, that goddamn son of a bitch,’ real loud, he was really mad, then Ethan said, ‘Keep your voice down,’ and he shut the doors. I crawled out of the plants, hotfooted it into the butler’s pantry where my mother keeps those stupid little white jackets she makes me wear. I was putting one on, had it half buttoned, and then Rachel came screaming into the kitchen, ‘Josefina! Josefina, help me!’ and my mother went running back into the sun-room with her. I thought the old guy had had a heart attack or something, so I ran after them. They didn’t see me, they never did.”
His forehead knotted and he turned his head to one side. “I stopped just inside the room, far back by the door, so I guess that’s why. Ethan was on the floor in front of the fireplace and Gage was on top of him. He had his hands around Ethan’s throat and his knees on his arms pinning him down. The old guy was trying to haul Gage off Ethan, so was Rachel, but they couldn’t budge him. My mother was shrieking at him in Spanish—she forgets English when she gets mad or scared—then she grabbed a log out of the woodbox and whacked him with it between the shoulder blades. She knocked him off Ethan, and Rachel and the old guy picked him up—Ethan, I mean, not Gage. Gage just sat there on the floor watching them.”
Ramón paused. Impatiently, Eslin gestured for him to continue.
“They put Ethan on one of the couches with his head back. He was having trouble breathing, his eyes were bugged out, you know? And he had big red finger-marks on his throat. Rachel was crying, my mother was cussing Gage in Spanish, and the old guy was just standing there looking real pale. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t have come.’ He said that five or six times, then he left. I don’t think anybody even saw him leave. I left, too, went back to the pantry and took off the white jacket and split for the stables.”
The crease in his forehead relaxed and he sighed. “I didn’t see Ethan for a day or two and when I did, he was wearing a paisley scarf—an ascot, he told me it was—around his neck and his voice was real hoarse. Well, I was serving lunch later that same day and when I bent over to take his soup bowl, I saw his neck under the scarf. It was black and blue.”
“Where was Gage?”
“Gone. He split right after the old guy left. He didn’t come back for a week or so. Ethan had a couple detectives out looking for him but they never found him. He came back by himself.” Ramón took his hands out of his pockets; they were curled into fists, his knuckles white. “We’ve got to find Ethan. For Gage’s sake we’ve got to find him. You know what I mean?”
For a moment she didn’t say anything, and Gage, holding his breath and listening on the other side of the door, tensed against the cold stucco wall.
“Yes, Ramón, I know,” she said, her voice so soft Gage could barely hear it. “We’ll find him, one way or the other we will.”
“What do you mean?”
“I talked to Doctor Fitzsimmons a while ago….”
Letting his breath out in a slow, inaudible sigh, Gage closed his eyes, leaned the back of his head against the wall, and listened to her tell Ramón about Faber and Alberto. He should tell her the rest of it, but he couldn’t. He wanted to go out there, take her in his arms, and confess everything, and probably would have if the phone hadn’t rung.
“Hi, Doc,” Eslin said, trying to make her voice sound bright but not quite managing it.
Drawing a deep breath, Gage straightened and picked up the towel he’d cast over the back of a chair. His hands shook just a little as he draped it around his shoulders and walked around the doorjamb into her bedroom. Eslin glanced up at him, and he wrapped his hands around the ends of the towel so she wouldn’t see the tremor still rippling through his body.
“Oh, here’s Gage, why don’t you tell him?” She held the phone out to him. “Doc,” she said, rising as he walked toward her. “Now I’m going to take a shower.”
Smiling, she laid the receiver in his outstretched hand and disappeared into the bathroom. The door shut behind her and he sat down on the side of the bed beside Ramón. He might’ve imagined it, but he could’ve sworn that the boy drew away from him as he did.
“Hello, Fitzsimmons,” he said, raising the receiver to his ear.
“With refueling a seven a.m. arrival time in Oaxaca is the best time we can make.”
“We’ll be on our way by then.”
“How’s Eslin? She sounds—well, not like herself.”
“She’s had a headache that finally went away today. She slept like a log last night, but it takes a day or two to catch up.”
“I gave her some pain pills. Will you make sure she takes them? She hates pills.”
“I’ll see to it.”
“Thank you. Good night.”
“G’bye.” Gage handed the receiver to Ramón; the boy took it and put it back in its cradle. “Clean up and hit the sack, pal. Four-thirty comes early.”
Ramón nodded, bounced off the bed, and left the room.
Shivering in just his blue pajama bottoms, Gage walked to the French doors and stood there staring at nothing until Eslin came out of the bathroom in her white nightgown. She looked like a dark-haired wraith in the thick glass, and he watched her chafe her arms as she hurried across the cold room to the bed, throw back the spread and the sheets, and slide beneath them.
As he turned around, she leaned off the side of the bed, picked up her purse from the floor, and took out her collection of tourist brochures. Tendrils of dark hair clung to her temples, and his neck chain, the horseshoe nail winking at him in the lamplight, swung free of the ribboned front of her gown as she bent to put her purse back on the floor.
“What are you looking for?” Gage asked, tossing his towel on the footboard as he raised his left knee onto the bed and stretched out on his side next to her.
“I don’t know yet.” Eslin swept her hair over one shoulder as she plumped a pillow behind her and leaned against it. “I will when I see it, though.”
She drew up her legs, stacked the folders in her lap, and opened one against her knees. Her eyebrows drew together as she studied it. Droplets of water glistened in the hollow of her throat.
“Can I help?” he asked in a low voice.
“Maybe.” She closed her fingers around the neck chain, pulled it out of the front of her gown, and leaned toward him. “Feel this.”
She meant the horseshoe nail, not the soft swell of her breast. He closed his thumb and forefinger around the nail and frowned.
“It should be warm,” Eslin said, “from the heat of my body if nothing else, but it’s been like a little chip of ice since around four o’clock this afternoon.”
It had been just as cold Thursday night when her scream had wakened him. His right shoulder hadn’t bothered him in days but began to throb as he remembered what that had meant.
“Something else,” Eslin said quietly, as Gage’s knuckles brushed her left collarbone. “I don’t know if you noticed, but it was warm when I found it in Ganymede’s stall, as warm as a freshly toasted slice of bread, and it should have been cold after lying buried in straw for all those weeks.”
“You haven’t been feeling well these last couple days.” Gage glanced up at her; her eyes were soft and shiny and his heart started to pound. “Maybe your body temperature’s lower than normal.”
“Maybe.” She bit her lip, then slowly raised her hands to her throat. “Or maybe you should take the neck chain back.”
He reached up and closed his right hand around her left wrist. “Let’s see if we can’t warm it up first.”
She knew what he meant and flushed. He loved that, how easily she blushed, almost as much as he loved her eyes, her name. Jesus, what
would she do if she knew all the Roundtree secrets?
“What about Ramón?” Eslin asked, nodding toward the door.
“That’s easily taken care of.” He rolled off the bed, crossed to the door, shut it, and looked at her over his shoulder as he locked it.
His face wasn’t gray anymore, or lined. That one errant lock of hair that had made her think of Heathcliff the very first time she’d seen him drooped over his forehead as he smiled at her. It made him look boyish and vulnerable, not at all like a man who’d nearly killed his brother. She remembered then that she’d compared Gage and Ethan to Cain and Abel that first day in Ganymede’s barn, remembered the stricken look on Ethan’s face and Gage’s wary, half-raised eyebrow.
He pressed his right hand to the wall switch, and the lamp went out. Feeble light from somewhere beyond the French doors managed to filter through the glass and dispel some of the darkness in the room, all but the very black outline around Gage. She knew the reason for it now, and slid the straps of her gown off her shoulders as she held her arms out to him.
He shed his pajama bottoms first, then stretched out on his left side next to her. With his right hand he tugged off her gown, and eased her gently onto her back. As he slid on top of her to nuzzle the cleft between her breasts, the horseshoe nail touched his cheekbone.
It was so cold it burned his skin.
Chapter 27
The dream began as slowly as ice melts in early spring. It trickled into Eslin’s sleep, dripping hollowly in her ears as it pooled green and cold across the fabric of her mind. Oh so cold. The dream was even colder than the horseshoe nail lying frozen against her breast.
She couldn’t breathe for the weight of the nail. A bubble of panic swelled in her chest, her lungs heaved, and the ice cracked with an echoing pistol-like report. Chunks of it flew apart, hissing and popping, colliding with one another and breaking into smaller pieces that spilled over the edge of her subconscious.
Eslin slid over the precipice with it, rolling and tumbling down the crystalline waterfall from her nightmare. She bounced from one jeweled green rock to the other—no, not jeweled, moss covered. She saw that now as the cascade roared in her ears and she plummeted head first into the cold emerald pool.
The glassy surface shattered as she struck it, exploded into thick green slabs of ice that fell one on top of the other, not randomly, but in patterns like rows of bricks. Only they weren’t bricks but stones, their mortared edges no longer sharp but rounded and crumbling. Incredible age and weather had worn away their once smooth surfaces.
They’d stood there in the midst of half-fallen walls for hundreds of centuries, no longer green but dun colored with the passage of seasons beyond counting. The dust of crumbled pillars lay thick on steps carved for giants to climb, gray, gritty dust lifting in a cloud raised by a wind so fierce and sudden that it took Eslin’s breath away. She watched it drift across the flat beaten earth, watched it swirl into a shape, a long-legged shape with a streaming mane and tail that was no longer gray and gritty but blood-red and breathing.
It was Ganymede, running effortlessly beneath a cloud-shrouded moon, a small figure hunched over his withers. A small figure in the Kelly-green-and-gold silks of Roundtree Stables. Shadows raced with him, blacker than the night rushing past him, shadows with shiny, ebony-hard eyes—
Eslin woke with a jolt, her body trembling. Drawing and holding a deep breath, she closed her eyes and concentrated on memorizing every detail of the images she’d seen in her dream. When she opened them again to blink at the dawn-gray ceiling overhead, she heard Gage snoring lightly beside her, and the morning cries of birds beyond the French doors. Gooseflesh rose on her breastbone as she raised her right hand to the horseshoe nail and picked it up between her thumb and first finger.
It was still cold, not nearly as cold as it had been in her dream, but cold enough to make her shiver as she turned her head on the pillow and looked at Gage. He lay sprawled on his stomach, his lips parted, his left cheek burrowed into the pillow. No wonder she was cold. The white chenille bedspread had fallen on the floor, and most of the sheet lay mounded on the small of his back beneath the tattered tape spanning his ribs. Whiskers stubbled his cheeks and chin, and dark spikes of hair, stiffened by the sweat he’d worked up before he’d fallen asleep in her arms, bristled around his ear.
Remembering the feel of his slick shoulder blades beneath her palms made Eslin want to snuggle into the curve of his body. She didn’t, though. Instead, she rolled out of bed, groped under the sheet for her nightgown, and pulled it on. The tiles were so cold on the soles of her bare feet that she nearly jumped back into bed, but she clenched her chattering teeth and swept the chenille spread off the floor.
The brochures she’d forgotten when Gage had slid into bed beside her spilled out of its tangled folds, most of them bent and crumpled, several skittering under the four-poster. Wrapping the spread around her, Eslin dropped to her knees and collected them all. With her chenille toga draped around her, she carried them to the upholstered chair, curled herself into it snugly, and began searching for the ruined palaces with the giant steps she’d seen in her dream.
The birds had stopped singing and the first pale rays of sun were sifting through the French doors when Gage woke up groaning. Eslin watched his body arch and stretch, watched him roll his face into the mattress, and his back tense suddenly as he groped toward her pillow with his right hand.
He shot up on his knees then and twisted toward her, blinking sleepily.
“What time is it?” He yawned.
“Six forty-five, but don’t panic.” Eslin untangled her legs from the spread and raised it above her ankles so she wouldn’t trip over it as she headed for the bed. “You forgot to set the alarm, but it doesn’t matter. Monte Alban doesn’t open until nine.”
“Monte what?” He asked, yawning again as she settled her chenille-cocooned body on the edge of the bed.
“Monte Alban,” she repeated, handing him one of the brochures. “The Zapotec ruins outside the city.”
Gage scratched his rumpled hair and blinked at the color photographs.
“I dreamed about it last night,” she told him quietly, “I saw Ganymede running across the courtyard.”
That woke him with a start. He threw back the sheet and jumped out of bed.
“I’ll wake Ramón,” he said, grabbing his pajama bottoms off the floor and tugging them on.
“Slow down.” Eslin rose on her knees, the spread sliding off her shoulders as she caught Gage’s left elbow and drew him down on the bed. “We can’t get into the ruins until nine, and we have to go there first—it’s the only reference point I’ve got.”
“Oh.” He frowned, then raised his hand to her breast and closed his thumb and index finger around the horseshoe nail. “Still cold,” he murmured.
“I know.” Eslin trembled at the warm brush of his knuckles against her skin.
He raised his eyes to her face as he worried the nail between his thumb and finger. The chill in the gold-plated metal crawled up his arm and slid down his back as he gazed into Eslin’s luminous, deep-blue eyes.
“ ‘A harmonious and successful life,’ “ he said softly, “ ‘depends on the cooperation between the conscious and the subconscious.’ “
The words sounded like something Rachel would say, not Gage, and that made Eslin shiver.
“What are you talking about?” she asked him.
“The divinatory meaning of the Lovers.” He let go of the neck chain, which fell gently against her breasts. “Just part of it, the only part I remember exactly. I looked it up in one of Mother’s tarot books. That’s why I left it in your room, that’s what I meant it to say.”
“Oh,” she said breathily, wondering why he’d been so adamant then, when she’d confronted him in Ganymede’s barn.
“There’s another part,” Gage went on. “I can’t quote it, but it says something about the lovers standing in complete harmony with nothing to hide from each other.”
She raised her chin and looked at him. He wasn’t smiling, but gazing at her intently.
“This kind of stuff scares the shit out of me, Eslin. Nothing good has ever come of it for me. I’ve tried to accept it, but just when I think I can, that I can live with it, something like this goddamn horseshoe nail happens and it freaks me out all over again.”
“Only because you’ve never learned—”
“I’m not sure I want to learn,” he interrupted. “I’m doing this for Ethan. Once this is over, I never want to talk about clairvoyance or parapsychology again. Understand?”
Oh, Gage, please don’t, she wanted to beg him, but didn’t. She simply nodded and whispered, “I understand.”
“I heard you scream when Kroenke broke into your house. It woke me up. I thought it was my mother at first, but it wasn’t. When I touched the neck chain it was icy cold, just like it is now.”
“Oh, my God.” Eslin gasped. “I wish you’d told me this before.”
“So do I,” Gage said grimly. “But the point is that this is not a good sign.”
It was the third bad omen in less than twenty-four hours, but Eslin didn’t tell him that.
“I don’t think we should wait until nine o’clock,” she said. “Want to try sneaking into Monte Alban?”
“I’ll wake Ramón.” He kissed her quickly, and pushed himself off the bed.
Less than half an hour later, with the two-way radio Gage had found in Ethan’s suitcase now locked in the glove compartment, they were driving west toward White Mountain and the hills of Azompa and Tecolote. For luck Gage had put on the blue-and-mauve windowpane check shirt Ethan had brought him in the hospital. He’d also put on the only pair of work jeans he’d brought with him and his old Dingos. Eslin and Ramón were similarly dressed, in jeans and boots, heavy green sweaters, and long-sleeved shirts. Green was his lucky color, and he had a feeling they were going to need a lot of luck.
Gage kept watch in the mirror, but the road behind them remained empty. His apprehension increased as the highway climbed the hills he’d been so glad to get the hell out of the night before. While they were certainly less treacherous to drive on than the Sierra Madre Occidental, these ancient mounds of rock covered with thick green blankets of grass and moss still made him uneasy.
Lynn Michaels Page 23
