by Rachel Lee
As an archaeologist, she was accustomed to the interest of her colleagues in what she was doing. Usually it didn’t trouble her, but this time . . . this time it made her uneasy.
There was supposedly ten million dollars in bullion on the Alcantara. Her head wasn’t so far in the clouds that she didn’t know what a temptation that kind of sum would be to almost anyone. But she didn’t care about the gold; she only wanted the mask. It was hers. Her birthright. And even though she was going to put it in a museum, she still wanted to hold it in her hands and feel a connection with an ancestor who had been dead for three hundred years. A connection with her mother.
“All I want is the mask,” she said. “I don’t care what happens with the gold. The state can have it.”
“They’ll certainly try to take it,” Orin said drily. “But the mask—my dear child, you do understand that the mask is probably worth as much as the bullion. Maybe even more?”
No, she hadn’t thought of it in those terms, stupid as it made her feel now. She was an archaeologist. She thought of artifacts in terms of the knowledge they would provide about the cultures they represented. As far as she was concerned, the mask’s greatest value would be realized when it sat in a museum. She hadn’t been thinking about collectors whose sole interest was possession of the rare and beautiful. Dollar value didn’t matter to them, nor did knowledge. Owning something unique was all they cared about.
And the mask would certainly be unique. “I don’t have anything to worry about until I find the mask. And no one will know about that except Tam, Dugan, and me. They’ll keep quiet.” She was surprised to realize that she trusted Dugan that far. Apparently even with the strained distance between them, she had come to trust his word—and he had vouched for Tam.
“I’m worried about you,” Orin said.
“Me? I can take care of myself. You’re the one with cancer. And I’m going to take you back to Tampa for a checkup.”
“No. You stay here and continue your search. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll call my doctor and make an appointment. But you stay here. Just be careful, Veronica. There are all kinds of sharks in the water.”
She didn’t for a minute think he meant sharks that swam.
“So this mask,” Dugan said to Veronica. They were sailing out toward the search area, Dugan at the helm, Veronica beside him. Tam was on the bow again, getting even browner as he read yet another paperback thriller. It was a windy day, with choppy waves, as a dry front passed through.
She’d had her head averted as she watched the water, hoping to spy a dolphin. Hearing his voice, she turned quickly to him. “I’m sorry?”
“I was asking about the mask.”
“Oh. What about it?”
“What if it never existed?”
She felt her mouth twist wryly, and was surprised that she wasn’t getting even a little annoyed. For some odd reason it just felt so good to be sailing today that she couldn’t take offense. “It’s mentioned in more than one source. A friar who recorded something about the people during the conversion process mentioned it.”
“So it wasn’t just this one guy, this great-great-whatever-grandfather of yours.”
“No. But why would he lie about it anyway, Dugan?” The same question she’d had to ask herself just the night before with her father.
“I don’t know. To make it sound more dramatic? To make himself sound more important? What if his wife wasn’t the high priestess? But after learning that the island was wiped out by the same storm, he decided to invent a tale that would give him more of a cachet. More importance than just being a soldier who happened to have a native child.”
That was another possibility she hadn’t considered, and her stomach lurched. It was beginning to occur to her that her father knew what he was talking about when he called this an obsession. Even a modicum of objectivity would have made her consider all these questions months ago. Instead, she had accepted her mother’s quest as her own, and had never considered a thing except that Renata might have been wrong about the location of the wreck.
She spoke, the words heavy in her mouth. “It’s possible, I guess. But I’m still going to look. What I have to go on is more proof than you have for what you’re suggesting.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean you should stop looking. I just meant what if. What if you never find it?”
“That’s not an unusual state of affairs in archaeology. It’s something I have to live with.” Never mind that the possibility sometimes kept her awake at night, reviewing all her deductions about where the wreck lay.
“But it strikes me that this mask is more important to you than the average clay pot or whatever. You’ve got more hinging on it.”
That was true, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “No, not really. I just want to recover it because it would be such a singular find.”
“Hmm.” His tone told her that he didn’t really believe her, and she didn’t have the heart to keep on lying more forcefully.
The hum of the rigging and the slap of the bow against the waves was growing louder, as was the whine of the wind in her hearing aids, making it more difficult for Veronica to sort Dugan’s voice out of the cacophony. She was aware that he said something else, but other than a few vowel sounds, she missed it.
She turned toward him. “What?”
He raised his voice. “I just said I hoped you . . .”
The rest vanished in the background noise. Instinctively, she leaned toward him, bringing her ear closer to his mouth. At that moment, a wave unbalanced her, and Dugan grabbed her arm to steady her.
For Veronica, it was as if some hidden place inside her suddenly burst open, splitting her psyche. Some part of her was aware of the boat, of the wave, of the sharp rocking of the deck beneath her feet, but another part of her focused on something utterly different. The dry warmth of Dugan’s hand on her arm. The sprinkling of golden hairs on his legs. The closeness of his mouth to her ear. The sensation that she was playing out a plan as old as time. An almost mystical sense of emotional and sexual connection to him. A strange feeling that was almost déjà vu, but larger somehow.
A wild vortex of panic suddenly rose in her.
She jerked her arm out of Dugan’s grasp and stepped backward, as if burned. Her eyes flew to his face, fearing he’d sensed what she had been feeling, terrified that he would realize just how vulnerable she was.
But all she saw there was genuine concern. “Are you okay?” he asked.
His voice twined with the sounds of the Mandolin, the restlessness of the sea, seeming to be part of them, making it seem to her that the boat and the sea were alive, too, and that he was part of them. Something similar to what she had felt with the storm.
She blinked and dragged her gaze from him without answering, trying to grasp reality again, trying to escape the strangeness of what she was feeling.
“Veronica?”
His voice came through clearly, past the breath of the wind that hummed in the sails, past the ceaseless whisper of the waves as they struck the boat. Reluctantly, she turned toward him, wondering if she would once again feel that unwanted connection.
But the world seemed to have returned to normal.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine. I’m fine. I just lost my balance.” In more ways than one. She wondered why her mind was playing tricks on her, making her feel as if she were tapping into something larger than simple reality. Making her feel as if she were tapping into some power larger than she could imagine.
Maybe her father was right. Maybe this was some kind of obsession. She wondered if her mother had felt this, too, this sense of connection with something beyond. If the search for the mask had been fueled by that as much as an archeologist’s desire to find a unique artifact.
Or was this quest tapping into something in her blood, something that had made her ancestress a high priestess. Was she experiencing some sort of genetic memory?
But how did Dugan fit into that, she wonde
red. Why her awareness of him so suddenly, and why had it felt so much like her awareness of the power in the storm?
But no matter how many questions she asked, there were no answers. The sun must be getting to her, she decided. It kept dazzling her eyes when it bounced off the waves, and maybe it had caused some kind of seizure. She’d read somewhere a long time ago that anyone could have a seizure induced by the proper frequency of strobing from a light source. Anyone. Maybe that’s all this had been.
She had to believe it. Anything else was unacceptable.
Dugan said something, but she wasn’t looking at him. When she did, he repeated himself.
“You’d better go below for a while,” he said. “The sun must be getting to you.”
She nodded and did as he said, glad to escape him. Glad to escape the feeling that the sea and the wind were trying to tell her something. Glad to leave her madness behind.
But a little while later he followed her. She was sitting in the galley on the bench, staring at her computer, pretending to review the squiggles that represented information from the magnetometer. She might as well have been blind.
He sat on the bench perpendicular to hers, and reluctantly she looked at him.
“Tam’s at the wheel,” he said. “We should be there in an hour.”
“Okay.”
“What happened up there?”
“What do you mean?” She didn’t want to admit anything.
“You looked terrified for a couple of minutes there. Dazed.”
She wanted to tell him he must have imagined it, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. “I don’t know. Some kind of weird déjà vu.”
“That’s always fun.” He smiled, then surprised her by reaching out to cover her hand with his. She knew she should yank away from his touch, because it felt too good and she couldn’t afford that, but she didn’t. “Sailors hallucinate sometimes, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yup. I guess the mind gets bored with the endless sameness of the waves and sky after a while, and starts supplying interesting images. It doesn’t usually happen if you’re really busy and there are a lot of other people around, but it can. Just staring out there for a long period of time seems to make the brain misfire.”
She appreciated his attempt to soothe her, but she didn’t know how to tell him so. She didn’t want to admit that she’d been hallucinating feelings, not images. That seemed worse somehow.
“I was on a long trip once, and during the heat of the day, I swear I saw a guy on a green surfboard skimming over the waves and giggling hysterically. Couldn’t have been real. Nobody can do that with a surfboard, and besides, he wouldn’t have been doing it fifty miles from the nearest land. But I saw it as clearly as I’m seeing you right now.”
A reluctant smile began to lift the corners of her mouth. “A green surfboard?”
“Green as new grass. It was wild.”
“I can imagine.” Her smile deepened at the image, then faded as she recalled what she had experienced. “I didn’t see anything. I just . . . felt it. Like I did in the storm. It was some kind of connection.”
“To what?”
“The water, the wind, the boat.” She didn’t mention the connection she had felt to him. “As if it was all alive.”
“I feel that all the time. It’s Gaia.”
She somehow didn’t think they had felt the same thing. Because what she had felt had been powerful. It had been other.
Apparently he sensed her disagreement, because he squeezed her hand, and said, “Maybe I don’t feel it exactly the way you did.”
“I don’t know.”
He said something she couldn’t make out, then added, “Maybe you’ve got something in your blood.”
It so closely paralleled the thought that had crossed her mind that she felt a shiver of surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re descended from that priestess, right? Take me. I’m one-eighth Native American. My granddad was a half-blood Cherokee. Anyway, he told me a lot of stuff when I was little about how the whole world was alive. As if the whole Earth, the planet, the atmosphere, the oceans—as if all of that is part of a living being. The ancient Greeks called it Gaia. My granddad called it something else, but I can’t remember the word he used. Anyway, I don’t worry about it when I feel it, because I was lucky enough to grow up with a man who considered that to be real. It’s different for you, I guess.”
It was very different for her. She’d been raised by a man who respected science, and there wasn’t any room in her life for the kind of mysticism he was talking about.
Not that there was anything wrong with it—for other people. But not for her. She couldn’t afford to let that kind of thinking cloud her mind.
But hadn’t she already done that to some extent? Just last night her father had made her aware that she had neglected to ask some very important questions, questions that would have occurred to her on any other exploration.
But feeling as if she were somehow connected to the power of the storm, or the wind, or the sea—she didn’t want to allow herself to feel that. And she wasn’t comfortable with blaming what she had felt on some kind of genetic memory. In fact, the whole idea of genetic memory left her cold.
“Look,” said Dugan, snagging her attention and making her look at him, “why is it so impossible to think there’s something in the genes that predisposes some of us to feel these things? It’s not so crazy, Veronica. Something has to set a shaman apart.”
“Maybe.” But the word came reluctantly. She’d lost too many of her moorings in the past year to be willing to cut loose from any more. She needed to believe the world was objective, quantifiable, inanimate. She didn’t want to be listening for voices on the breeze or in the storm. She didn’t want to let go of hard-edged reality.
“I need a nap,” she announced suddenly. “I need some quiet time.”
Dugan didn’t say a word as she pulled her hearing aids out and stuffed them in the waterproof pouch that was never far away. Then, without another word, she got up and went back to her cabin.
It was safe in there, she found herself thinking, like a small child scared of the dark. She couldn’t hear the wind in the rigging or the whisper of the waves. And the creak of the boat as it skimmed the waves was inaudible to her.
It was silent. And she was beginning to believe that in silence lay safety.
Chapter 12
Luis had come back to Key West because nothing had happened. That sounded ridiculous, but the simple truth was, even with all he had read about these explorations for sunken ships, he found it hard to believe that Veronica Coleridge had found nothing at all after two months. Tam had told him all about her preparation and planning, the way she had even had an oceanographer determine which area she should look in.
It impressed Luis enough that he was actually troubled that so far nothing had been found. He knew it was possible that the assumptions on which the oceanographer’s calculations had been based might be wrong. Perhaps the Alcantara hadn’t gone down between the Marquesas and Key West. It was entirely possible that it had gone down in the reef to the south of the Keys, where most of the treasure ships had sunk. Apparently that was the official view of the archives in Spain. Tam had told him that, too. But Veronica had made a different determination based on some ancient letter from the lone survivor.
All of this Luis had passed on to both Emilio Zaragosa and El Desconocido. He saw no reason not to share equally with them at the present time.
But uneasiness brought him back to Key West. Because it was entirely possible that Tam was lying to him. Only with his own eyes would he be able to be certain that nothing had yet been found.
So he was back in the hot, humid streets, thinking longingly of the mountains of his native Venezuela, where it was cooler and dryer. He had, of course, through miscommunication, managed to arrive the very day the Mandolin put out for sea again. Which meant he would now have to cool his heels for four or f
ive days before he could have a face-to-face conversation with Tam.
Sometimes Luis felt cursed.
He felt even more cursed that evening when he called to tell Emilio that he had just missed Tam, so wouldn’t have any word to pass along for at least the next four days.
“That is all right,” Emilio said. “I have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” Por Dios, he hated Emilio’s prescience. His stomach sank sharply, and he felt another attack of heartburn coming on. “What feeling, señor?”
“I have the feeling that they are about to find something of importance. So I will be there next week, Luis.”
No. No! Madre de Dios, wasn’t his life difficult enough without Emilio on the spot, breathing down his neck? He cast about wildly, trying to find some reason to prevent Emilio from coming. “Why hurry?” he finally asked. “You can fly up here in a few hours if they find something.”
“Ah, so true, my faithful Luis. Except that I don’t want to fly up there. I can hardly supervise affairs from land. No, I will be sailing up on the Conchita. I need to be in place when they discover the Alcantara.”
He was cursed indeed, Luis thought bitterly when he hung up the phone. Damn Emilio and his uncanny knack for sensing things. Because he didn’t for a moment believe Emilio felt it necessary to be present personally to oversee what Veronica Coleridge did. Not unless Emilio, for some reason, no longer perfectly trusted Luis.
Beginning to feel as if eyes were boring into his head, watching his every movement, Luis slunk out to a bar. He thought about phoning El Desconocido with the lack of news, then decided against it. The Unknown One was simply going to have to wait a long time for an update, at least until Luis had figured out how to communicate without giving himself away to Emilio.
He didn’t believe that Emilio had proof of Luis’s infidelity. No. That was impossible. But Emilio sensed it. Which was why he had so steadfastly been trying to avoid Emilio these last two months. And perhaps that was what had tipped off Emilio?
