Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  Laura shrugged. “Rome? Athens? Knossos? Hersonissos? The family were notorious travelers; all the men being high ranking diplomatic politician types. But they weren’t senators, mostly praetors. The entire Roman Empire at the time was their home. There's Tyre of course, but I don't think you really want to go there to research.”

  Cash had to think for a moment where Tyre actually was. When she realized it was in Lebanon, she shook her head. “Quite nearby, but no...”

  Laura nodded to the hill. “Aurelia lived in Greece primarily until she was pregnant with her son. Then suspecting it was a boy, they housed themselves for a time in Rome. With the frequent political squabbles there though, it’s thought she went away with her children. Most likely to Corinth, that’s my thinking at least. But perhaps back to Greece, there was a huge settlement with a classical school and many political residences near the shore on the other side of that strait.”

  “There was?” Cash asked.

  Laura nodded. “A Roman one. This whole area was a hotspot for early Greek literature. Not just this island.” Laura finished her cup, nodded to Cash's, which was growing cold. “Ever been to Crete?”

  Cash shook her head. “Only my second time to Greece actually. My husband spent quite a bit of time here when studying. And the house is his parents’. They came here quite often on their holidays. I had a trip here a few years back that I wrote about; one I’d rather much forget honestly.”

  “Is your husband’s family quite interested in the classics?”

  Cash shook her head. “Mother is a historian, just like Tim. Father is just rich.”

  Laura grinned. “There's no such thing as just rich.”

  Cash smiled. “He's an earl. Tim will inherit the title someday. So I guess sometime in the future, I’ll be a countess.”

  “Did you marry him for that?” Laura asked, serious and curious now.

  Cash shook her head. “No. We fell in love at the university. It's been a bit of a journey.”

  Laura nodded, taking the hint. “Your husband’s been to Crete?”

  Cash frowned. “Don't know, actually. Probably did go to Hersonissos.”

  “It could be a nice weekend for the family, if he has time,” Laura said, slightly downcast.

  Cash noticed the change in her. She had joked previously about Laura being a sapphist, but she reckoned this was confirmation. And confirmation Laura might be interested in being something other than friends.

  “Not jealous?” Cash said in a jocular tone. “You can always jump on that yacht of yours and follow.”

  Laura grinned. “Not on my own. And taking the ferry is a lot faster.”

  They kept talking after that, just small talk until Paddy began to complain. Cash dug her phone out and checked the time. “I think it's time to get some afternoon tea into this kid.”

  Laura nodded and got up. “You want to go home for it? I would offer you something, but I don't really have anything. I would have to go shopping first.”

  Cash pursed her lips. “I would almost rather we stay in town and find a nice restaurant. I'm sure you know one.”

  Laura nodded in response. Paddy fussed some more as if to answer the indecisive tone his mother was having.

  “Oh, but Paddy needs his rest. He needs to calm down a bit, eat and sleep before long.”

  “So, you'll be heading home then?”

  Cash nodded this time. “But, perhaps you could come with us?” she said.

  Laura thought about that.

  “How did you get to the beach last time?” Cash asked.

  “Bicycle,” Laura said. “I can go and get it. We can ride up together.”

  Cash nodded.

  Some ten minutes later, they were both riding up to the cottage. As they passed through the village between Molyvos and the house, Laura suddenly giggled.

  “What are you laughing at?” Cash asked her. As she looked sideways at Laura, she looked around at Paddy, who had his eyes closed and his little head had sunk down to his chest.

  “This reminds me of school days,” Laura said. “The view wasn't as nice, but we used to be a pack of girls, cycling to school and back.”

  “We never did that. In Oz, we had the school buses and in Wales, it was public buses.”

  “We had the option of taking the school bus or making our own way. Taking the school bus meant you had to arrive earlier and stay longer; regular buses never went right past the school, just stopped a few streets over, which sucked. A lot of us just cycled. We had more freedom that way.”

  Cash grinned. “There is a certain freedom to it, I have to say.”

  “Doesn't feel like that when you have to cycle through the snow to get to school, though,” Laura laughed. “Wintertime was school bus riding time.”

  Cash laughed too.

  Back at the house, Cash carefully took Paddy from his seat, making sure not to wake him. She walked inside and laid him down to sleep and then went out to lock away the bike. She then rushed into the kitchen to make tea. She knew she had all the ingredients for something, she just didn’t know what.

  It was only when Laura told her she would make some meatballs with the ground lamb she had dug out of the fridge that Cash got an idea of what to do. For some reason, she had gone into a bit of a panic, but Laura had snapped her out of it.

  An hour of cooking and chatting passed and then Cash woke Paddy to have his meal. He was cantankerous from the moment she woke him, and he didn’t seem to be very hungry at all, but in the end he did eat quite a bit of food.

  Cash had some baklava in the fridge and that served as dessert before Paddy got some warm milk and lay back down to sleep.

  Cash stood by the side of her son's bed for a while after tucking him in. He often didn’t want to go straight to sleep and would protest if she left before he dozed off. She looked out the window at the northern side of the house, where Paddy's room was. It was darkest there and coolest. The window looked out over the strait and the beach and the terrace.

  Down below, Laura sat with a glass in hand, reading a book she had taken from the small library on the ground floor of the house. Cash wanted to go down there again. She enjoyed the Flemish woman's company more than she had enjoyed anyone for a while. And she was a useful fount of knowledge. But there might be a whole well of trouble if she were not careful.

  Chapter Three

  Cash was surprised to find Tim could still manage to get some time off. She had reckoned he had used up most of his vacation days, but it seemed he could actually make it to Crete for the weekend. As a result, she immediately began making her plans to travel on the following Tuesday. She needed to plan ahead properly with Paddy. It was just no longer possible to go anywhere on a whim.

  To her disappointment, there were no seats left on the flights to Heraklion that week, so she began looking at other ways of getting there. The only way she could find was to take the ferries. It would mean a bit of island hopping and leaving almost immediately, but if she was to make it, she really had no choice.

  That evening, she found a huge backpack and filled it with all the clothes and food she could. The diaper bag was also stuffed full. In the attic of the house was a stroller, and she brought that down and cleaned it up. It was actually a bit small for Paddy and he didn’t like being in strollers anymore, but she wanted him to have a comfortable place to sleep. She could hang a blanket from the hood to the cushion, giving him as much darkness as he needed.

  On Wednesday morning, she set out. Laura picked her up. She had managed to borrow a van from a friend and had some errands to attend to in Mitilini anyway, so she’d offered to take Cash and Paddy to catch the ferry.

  The ferry to Chios was pulling up to the dock, as the van arrived at the quay.

  “This is your stop, I think,” Laura said. There was a hint of sadness in her voice.

  Cash noticed it and held off on getting a squirming Paddy from his seat. The boy didn’t like sitting still in a stationary car. When it was in motion, he was u
sually quiet enough, but the moment the vehicle would come to a stop, he would be overcome by an urge to escape.

  “You're going to be alright here? It’s not the most pleasant work you're doing, though necessary.”

  Laura nodded. “Yeah, I'll be fine. It’s just been nice to have some good company.”

  “I guess I’ve been that good company then?” Cash smiled.

  Laura nodded seriously. “A bit of intelligent conversation with a nice person. There’s lots of coast guard lads and fishermen here and infernal do-gooders but that doesn’t amount to a whole lot of intelligent interactions.”

  “You're a do-gooder. Helping the less fortunate and all,” Cash rebuked her.

  “Yeah well, better doing that than being on the dole in Belgium.” Laura pulled a face that was halfway between a laugh and a frown. “Op den dop, ze,” she said, adding the Flemish phrase.

  “Can't fault that thinking,” Cash nodded. “Being on the dole sucks.”

  “Yeah.” Laura looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Anyway, you'd best be heading off or the damn boat will leave without you. Time and tide waits for no man… or woman. Not even for sweet, little Paddy there.”

  “Yeah, it sure doesn’t. We should be off.” Cash leaned over and kissed Laura on the cheek. “We'll talk. After all, I might need your expertise on some things when I get back.”

  Laura grinned and kissed Cash's cheek in return. “Do call on me anytime. You know any distraction will do.”

  Cash opened the door and slid from the van's passenger seat. She opened the back door and took Paddy from the child seat. Laura would be dropping it off on the carport at the house so Cash wouldn’t have to carry it with her the whole time.

  With Paddy looking disgruntled at her again and being told to not wander off, Cash slung her backpack snuggly over her shoulders, took the stroller from the van and placed the diaper bag neatly into the little rack on the bottom of it. She had taken a small bag of toys for Paddy, which she let him carry on his back like a big boy for the moment. It was easy enough to stuff that into the stroller with him when he got tired of carrying it.

  She’d tried picking up the boy and putting him to ride in the stroller, but Paddy was having none of it. In the end, she settled for letting him stand on the bar that ran under the carriage and holding onto the stroller's side, between the handle and the stroller itself. By the time Cash got the child and the luggage arranged and settled, she had to make haste; it was only a few minutes before their departure.

  The ferry to Chios was incredibly crowded. It looked old and decrepit as well. Cash was certain it would float, and she reckoned the engine would be well maintained, but she wasn’t at all comfortable on the thing. Perhaps it was because Paddy was with her, or perhaps it was simply the fact that whatever happened wouldn’t be in her control. To soothe her increasingly frazzled nerves, Cash sought out two life jackets and secured them on both her and her son.

  Cash didn’t feel uncomfortable in many settings. She could easily trek through the jungle on her own and be fine. She had been in war zones and not felt a shred of panic, but she didn’t like the ferry ride one bit. At a single glance, she could also see a lot of young men on the decks. There were a few women and children, but mainly the strangers that surrounded her were men.

  Suddenly she felt uncomfortable with what she’d chosen to wear as well. She had on sneakers, a pair of shorts, a top and a jacket which was quite sufficient for the weather and also quite modest. But with the unfortunate events of the New Year reported in other parts of Europe, she felt self-conscious wearing them. She had no idea whether anything like what had happened in Cologne could happen in Greece, but she was very conscious of the situation in this crowd.

  Cash suddenly realized she was thinking that way and frowned. She found it incredible she could be at ease in a war zone but be worried about such an incident now.

  As the ferry left the dock, Paddy climbed up into the stroller. He took his bag from his back and opened it. He took some toys from it and began to play with them. One of the toys he had in there was a Barbie doll. Cash had no idea how he had gotten a hold of it; it had just shown up one day. She presumed he had taken it from a girl in his nursery school and had asked some of the other parents about it, but nobody claimed to miss the toy, so they had just held on to it.

  Tim had been against letting Paddy play with it, feeling it was a girl’s toy, but Cash had just shrugged. By the time Tim's objections came, she had already seen Paddy play with the doll and it had not surprised her one bit. Today was no different. Barbie was obviously a giant and his fire truck was the hero fighting her. At the end of the day, Paddy’s actions had proved he was still a typical boy.

  Cash felt something brush against her bottom and turned as quick as a flash, instinctively grabbing for whatever it was. She was actually scared now, but her reactions were the same as always. She looked around and found she was holding the hand of a teenager who was staring back at her with something akin to hatred in his eyes.

  “You let go!” the boy shouted at Cash.

  Cash glowered at him and then realized he had been trying to reach into her pocket. There was an obvious bulge on both sides of her shorts, where her small travel purse and her phone were. Cash shook her head at the rookie mistake. She usually preferred carrying her money and phone on her person rather than in a handbag when she was traveling for easy access and it was harder for someone to steal them. But having her hands full with Paddy and their luggage, she’d dropped her guard a bit. She looked down and saw nothing was gone. Nor did the boy have anything in his hands.

  She pushed him toward the entrance of the seating deck. A security guard was posted at the door. As Cash approached the man, she thrust the boy into his hands so he could handle the situation further.

  “Shove off!” she growled at the boy. The security guard’s reflexes indicated that pickpocketing had become a regular occurrence onboard the ferries. He caught the boy smoothly and pulled him close. “He’s a lifter, that one,” Cash commented to the guard as she pushed the stroller with Paddy onboard into the seating deck and allowed the door to close behind her.

  She sank into a seat with her back against the side of the boat, next to the stroller. It was best to keep out of the way and place herself in a position where something like that was unlikely to happen again, by her estimation.

  The deck was chaos personified. As Cash watched from the observation deck she saw people moving everywhere and others sitting still, looking almost depressed. A few men walked around selling snacks, a lot of people just stuck to their own little groups or families. A few who had driven on board sat down beside their vehicles to play cards or pass a bottle around. Cash was unsure what they were drinking, but was fairly confident it was ouzo, the local spirit.

  When she looked down at the stroller, Paddy had put his toys down and gone to sleep. He was curled up and well settled in. Cash pulled his blanket free and tucked him in. He stirred a little but didn’t wake up. Cash pushed the stroller into the shade of the deck, sat on a bench and leaned back against the wall as soon as she could. She had stuffed her tablet and a book into the diaper bag, which she took out and checked for a signal. Finding there was none, she put the tablet back and opened her book. She had found a translation of Herodotus's The Histories. The book had been recommended to her at a local bookstore as being the most accurate documentation of the politics, geography, and clashes of various known ancient cultures in Western Asia, Northern Africa and Greece at that time.

  She kept staring at the Greek text, rather than the translation. Cash couldn’t read Greek, she’d never studied it, but her mind was drifting. Having her new friend, Laura, with her would have made things a bit easier and more enjoyable. She turned a bit and leaned against the wall, looking out over the Aegean waves.

  Thousands of years ago, ancient ships had sailed these waters. Phoenicians, Greeks and Egyptians sailed all over the place to trade their goods from port to port. The Gree
ks would found cities, which became little units onto themselves, little states of Greece. When their own cities became too crowded or lacked certain resources, they would send out expeditions to found colonies, new cities to trade with which were loyal to them. They founded cities like Sebastopol in Crimea, Syracuse in Sicily and Marseille in France; which had been established by people from the coast she could now see passing by on the left side of the ferry. The thought of how much had happened since then struck her.

  In that time, that lands that are now Turkey were all Greek. The Persians invaded and became the dominant people inland, while the Greeks held the coastal cities tightly. To protect themselves from this threat, the coastal cities and the islands turned to Athens and her powerful navy to protect them, where the people on the Peloponnesos turned toward Sparta and its legendary warriors for security. The differences between oligarchical Sparta and democratic Athens caused tensions and eventually, that cold war turned into open war between the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League and the Athenian-led Delian league.

  Looking back at the history, the strange thing was how democratic Athens had actually oppressed her allies. She had demanded high military investments, particularly on the navy, and tribute from those who couldn’t do so. They forced their democratic system on their associates, though always making sure the people leading that city would remain loyal to them. Eventually, Athens became so confident of herself that her leaders stopped holding their meetings and moved the treasury from the island of Delos to Athens itself, ostensibly for protection as Peloponnesian and Persian naval power grew, but in reality so they could have ready access to it and utilize the funds for themselves; Athens flourished while the other states declined.

  But the Peloponnesians prevailed and killed Athenian democracy for a while until a revolution eventually restored it. In several wars between other states, Sparta and Athens would get involved, essentially turning the conflict into a proxy war. That only stopped when the Macedonians under Philip the Second conquered all of mainland Greece.