Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Who won’t?”

  “Cuckoo.”

  “One o’clock and none is well,” she muttered. “At two do we get to meet cuckoo-cuckoo?”

  Erik laughed, pulled her close for a one-armed hug, and said, “I suppose I shouldn’t tease you, but, damn, it’s fun to fence with someone as quick as you are.”

  She was in the middle of hugging him back when she realized what she was doing. She pulled away so fast that she stumbled.

  “Easy, there,” he said, steadying her with quick hands. “The walk is uneven. Tree roots keep growing and tiles don’t.”

  “Then I’ll have to watch where I’m going very carefully.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t worry. I’ll catch you if you stumble.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve been on my own two feet for a long time.”

  Hoping his irritation didn’t show, Erik turned away and opened the front door lock without even noticing his favorite design set into the door, a stylized tree of life. It seemed like every time he made a little forward progress with Serena, she jumped backward. At this rate he would still be trying to see those illuminated pages on the Fourth of July.

  “I’ll show you around in a few minutes,” he said, pulling her almost gently into the house. “But if we don’t hurry, he’ll be gone.”

  “Who?”

  “My attack cuckoo, remember?”

  “Erik, you’re worrying me.”

  He glanced down, saw that she was mostly teasing, and urged her quickly through the house into the kitchen. A glance at the spa told him that they were just in time.

  “Stand next to me here,” he said quietly. “Now, don’t move. Without turning your head, look out at the spa. See him?”

  Serena did as she was told and saw a large mottled brown-and-cream bird drinking with quick, nervous darts of its head.

  “Cuckoo my rear,” she said, barely moving her lips. “That’s a roadrunner.”

  “Which is a member of the cuckoo family.”

  “You’re teasing me again.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Bloodthirsty, aren’t you?”

  “About promises and vows, yes.”

  He looked at her violet eyes for the space of one breath, two, and then said, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Serena wanted to smile, but couldn’t. Erik’s tawny eyes were intent, almost predatory, and so familiar her heart squeezed. A shiver went over her skin, leaving her feeling as though someone was walking on her grave. Again.

  “Good thing death won’t be necessary,” she managed. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for yours.”

  “Another compliment.” He smiled and wished she wouldn’t run if he kissed her the way he wanted to. “You’ll turn my head.”

  “Not before you turn my stomach.”

  He laughed so hard that the roadrunner started and flew up to the top of the wall. “Just for that, I may leave the Irish out of your coffee.”

  “Good idea. I have a long drive home.”

  “Leucadia, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  He glanced out at the angle of the sun. “There’s plenty of time. Did you eat lunch or would you like a snack?”

  She hesitated.

  “That means you didn’t eat lunch and would like a snack,” Erik said. “How do you like smoked salmon?”

  “Any way I can get it.”

  “You’re about to get lucky.”

  He walked around the kitchen pulling a plate, cups, silverware, and a can from cupboards and drawers. He handed her the can.

  She looked at the label: KING SALMON CAUGHT BY ERIK NORTH. “Really?” she asked.

  “Really. I have friends up north.”

  She pried up the tab, pulled off the top of the can, and inhaled deeply. “Yum. Mr. Picky will never forgive me.”

  “Mr. Picky?” he asked, even though he knew that was the name of her pet. She wouldn’t know that he knew, which was something he had better keep in mind instead of watching her lick her lips.

  “My cat. He’ll smell salmon on my breath and be really mad at me.”

  “I’ll give you a mint.”

  “You could give me gasoline mouthwash and Picky would still know. He has a thing for smoked salmon.”

  “Want some bread or crackers to go with it?”

  “Only if it will make you feel better.”

  Smiling, he handed her a fork. “Enjoy.”

  She took a bite of salmon and made a husky sound of pleasure. “You must have caught this one in heaven.”

  “Alaska.”

  She was too busy rounding up a stray crumb of fish with her tongue to answer.

  Abruptly Erik turned away and began cutting pieces of cheese from a big chunk of Gouda. If he kept on watching her lick salmon off a fork, he was going to start thinking with his dick. Not smart.

  So he washed off grapes, sliced up an apple, and put out a tube of sesame crackers. “Coffee? Tea? Soda? Water? Beer? Wine?” he asked, not looking at her.

  “Coffee,” she mumbled, then swallowed quickly. “Please.”

  “Black or doctored?”

  “Sugar.”

  He started to pour out the morning’s leftover coffee, only to have her grab his wrist.

  “I’d rather drink it out of a cup than the sink, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “I was going to make a fresh pot.”

  She glanced around, saw a microwave, and said, “Don’t bother. I’ll just nuke it.”

  “No wonder you use sugar.”

  He poured the cold coffee into a mug, nuked it, and handed the steaming cup to her. He smiled when he saw that most of the salmon was already gone.

  “Want another can?” he asked.

  “My cat would execute a contract on me if I ate more than one can.”

  “Mr. Picky is a cat assassin?”

  “If you can have an attack cuckoo, I can have a cat assassin.”

  He grinned. “I’ll send some salmon home with you.”

  “I should refuse.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how good this salmon is?” She licked the fork clean and sighed.

  Erik decided it was a good time to call Rarities. Either that, or do something really stupid like feeding Serena smoked salmon tidbit by tidbit—with his tongue.

  “I’ve got to check on something,” he said, turning away. “I won’t be long.”

  She made an indecipherable sound and began eating grapes, apple, cheese, and crackers with equal parts of pleasure and efficiency.

  Erik went up the stairs three at a time, strode down the flagstone hall with its old Persian carpet, and went into his bedroom. Everything was neater than he had left it, which meant that the housekeeper provided for by his grandfather’s trust had been at work while he was gone. Without a glance at the familiar furnishings, he sat at his desk near the big bed and passed all the information/speculation he had on to Dana and Factoid.

  Though he was only gone a few minutes, Serena was down to the last grape and slice of cheese. The look on her face said that she had enjoyed every bite.

  “Okay,” he said. “Wash your hands and you can see my etchings.”

  She gave him a look from beneath her thick mahogany eyelashes. “Etchings, huh?” She turned on the sink faucet and began washing her hands. “They better be illuminated.”

  “Will you settle for illuminating?”

  “No.”

  “Once more, you’re in luck.” He handed her a small towel. “They’re illuminated. But you’d be surprised at what some of those scholar-scribes thought worthy of illumination.”

  “If sultans can commission instructive rugs for their seraglios, then I suppose medieval kings were entitled to amuse themselves, too.”

  “Instructive rugs? Interesting.”

  “Only if you read Arabic,” she said, drying her hands briskly. “Poems, not pictures.”


  “Art, then, not illustration. I’m afraid the medieval scholars of Europe were more, er, direct in their description.”

  “Depiction,” she corrected. Pornography, after all, wasn’t noted for wasting time on words.

  “That, too.”

  Serena snickered, then fell silent, wondering what medieval lust would look like. Probably pretty much the same-old same-old, once the clothes and hairstyles were discounted.

  “That’s an odd smile,” Erik said as he led her down a hallway. “Share the joke?”

  “No joke. Just that some things don’t change.”

  “Like body parts?” he suggested dryly.

  She shrugged. “And looking at sex as body parts. Part A goes into Part B, repeat as necessary.”

  “Put that way, it sounds pretty boring.”

  “Put that way, it is boring.”

  He gave her a sideways glance.

  She didn’t notice. She had just discovered the old photographs that lined the hall, Edward Curtis’s sepia chronology of a time and a people now gone.

  Erik wondered what Serena was thinking about as she studied the weathered faces of Chumash Indians whose difficult lives were written in each wrinkle and line. When he looked at the photos, he couldn’t help thinking about what it had felt like to know that your ancestral line ended with you; no second chances, no hope, nothing but a blank stretching into the future. Extinction.

  What might someone do when faced with that certainty? What would a man or a woman be capable of to ensure that there was a future other than emptiness?

  He had been asking himself those questions ever since the first time he looked into the dark, intent eyes of the vanished Chumash and was old enough to realize just how final and inevitable death was. He still didn’t have any answers.

  Then he thought about a recently deceased Ellis Weaver, four ancestral illuminated leaves, and a modern granddaughter who didn’t know how much trouble ancient history could cause.

  “Grandmother had a photo like this,” Serena said slowly. “The oasis and the stout palms, and a woman who looked as worn and gritty as the palms themselves. G’mom said the woman’s eyes were like holes burned in eternity, letting time bleed through.”

  “Cheerful woman, your grandmother.”

  Serena smiled slightly. “Yes, I guess she was rather dour. But then, how does a mother feel who loses her only child?”

  “Not happy,” Erik agreed. “Did she blame herself for her daughter’s death?”

  “She never talked about it. But she didn’t believe in God or the devil.” Serena turned away from the photo and met Erik’s uncanny bird-of-prey eyes. “That meant she had only herself to blame.”

  “Do you blame her?”

  “No. I blame whatever it is that makes people so different. I love the desert. My mother loathed it. It was a prison she escaped from as soon as possible. The fact that she ran to a different kind of prison . . .” Serena shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she loved communal poverty. I hope so. She certainly didn’t have much life to enjoy. When she died, she was almost ten years younger than I am now.”

  Erik thought of his own parents, who had loved each other and their children, and would have loved their grandchildren just as much. Even though his parents had died too soon, they had left a legacy of love that grew each time their daughters laughed with their own children, kissed their hurts, and ran to their husbands’ waiting arms.

  For the first time Erik wondered how he would have felt about life and trust if his parents had died when he was five and he had been raised by his mother’s mother, who was as mean-spirited a woman as had ever lived to see the far side of ninety.

  No wonder Serena was reluctant to trust him. She had no reason to trust life. Fourth of July might have been an optimistic date to see the pages. Halloween, perhaps.

  He just wished he didn’t have a feeling that time was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  Chapter 21

  PALM SPRINGS

  THURSDAY EVENING

  ‘Tis useless to moan and rend garments at the graveside of past betrayal. I trusted where I should not. I doubted where I should not. I lost before I knew what I had found.”

  “A Learned man is no different from other men. When a pitiless truth stands before us, we hide our eyes. When a beguiling lie sighs to us, we race toward it.

  “No, not we. I. I and I and I . . .”

  “Fool, to love the lie and flee from the loving truth.”

  “Mother of God, pity me as I stand naked by the graveside of what might have been, my clothes rent around me, my soul bare and shivering, moaning the name I loved too late.

  “Does she stand naked by a different grave?

  “Does she call my name in Hell?

  “Or does she live, and in living, curse my very soul?”

  Erik’s low voice seemed to shiver like black flame in the room as he laid aside the page he had been reading aloud from.

  An unreasonable sadness gripped Serena, sinking through her rational mind like talons. She turned away from him and forced herself to focus on the room, on the walls, on anything but the written words, echoes of an agony that was almost a thousand years old.

  Except for an efficient ventilation system that removed candle smoke from the air, she could have been in a medieval library. The windows were high and shuttered. Carved wooden chests filled with leather-covered books stood open around the room. High wooden tables held other volumes. Some were open. Some were buckled or strapped tightly closed to prevent the thick vellum pages from curling. There was no light but that shed by candles whose flames quivered and dipped with every invisible current of air, as though the candles lived and breathed in slow rhythms. It was the same for the open books, light shimmering across them so that pages with golden letters and designs seemed to breathe.

  Time was in the room, surrounding them, and it was alive.

  “That’s one of the pages from the Book of the Learned that I’ve resurrected,” Erik said.

  Blindly she nodded, unable to speak.

  “The original page is in a private collection in Florida,” he continued, looking at her back, wondering at her visible tension. “It’s a palimpsest. They were kind enough to let me photograph the page under ultraviolet light so that I could read the text beneath.”

  Not really hearing anything but a dead man’s living cry of despair, she nodded again. Her hair burned red-gold in the candlelight with each tight movement she made.

  “Do you know what a palimpsest is?” he asked quietly.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want to know?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s taken from a Greek word that means twice-scraped or scraped again. That’s how scribes erased mistakes or reused vellum; they scraped off the original lettering and wrote over the newly blank space. Vellum was very expensive.”

  Serena gave a sigh that sent the candle flames to swaying. “How did they do the erasing?”

  “If you were working with papyrus, you just washed away the ink. Vellum was more difficult, but more durable. Scribes scraped off small errors with a penknife. You could do a whole page that way, but it was quicker and easier to use a rough stone. Pumice was a favorite. I use it myself.”

  Slowly she turned around, one arm crossed defensively across her chest, one hand open on her neck as though to hold her unusual scarf in place. He kept wanting to touch it. Or her. Then he saw the shadows in her rare violet eyes and he felt like there were bands around his own lungs, squeezing.

  “Still worried that I’ll hurt you?” he asked quietly.

  “I . . .” She lowered her arms and let out another breath that made flames sway. “There’s something about what you just read. His pain. I could feel it.” She rubbed her palms against her arms as though she was cold and looked past him at the page lying so innocently against polished oak. “It’s crazy, but I felt it just the same. Poor man. What did he do to earn such pain?”

  “I don’t know.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve been seeking the Book of the Learned or whatever fragments I can find. I’m curious. I’ve always been that way.”

  “Where did that page come from?” she asked. “I mean, before the people in Florida?”

  “A small Chicago dealer.”

  “And before that?”

  “A large auction house.”

  “Warrick’s?” she asked sharply.

  “Christie’s.”

  She let out a broken breath. “And before that?”

  “A private individual, now dead.”

  “And before that? When did it first come on the market?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Rarities is searching now,” he said.

  “Why now? Why not whenever you first found the sheet?”

  “Then it was a hobby, and I only asked for the recent provenance of the sheet. The Florida couple gave me the three owners listed on their bill of sale.”

  “Only three? Even if there were more?”

  “Three is the accepted number to prove provenance,” Erik said. “Many artifacts don’t have even that. Lengthy, detailed provenance is a relatively modern concern growing out of Nazi thefts and, more recently, looted archaeological sites.”

  Serena bit the inside of her lower lip and wondered how much she could risk in pursuing her heritage . . . and, probably, her grandmother’s murderer. She didn’t want to trust anyone, but she had to start somewhere.

  “Do you have other pages from the Book of the Learned?” she asked finally.

  “A handful.”

  “Do you know anything more about where they ultimately came from?”

  “Ultimate provenance.” He smiled thinly. “No. Do you want to see them?”

  “Are they all like that one?”

  “Some are illuminated. Some have exquisitely rendered miniatures. Some have columns of treaty alliances in Latin and pithy summaries of allies in vulgate marginalia.”

  She smiled despite the ice prickling beneath her skin. “I meant are all the pages so bleak?”

  “No. And even that page isn’t completely despairing.”

  “You could have fooled me.” The torment in the words still made her shiver.