For The Love Of Lilah tcw-3

by Nora Roberts

  "Alex." Suzanna bit down on the inside of her lip to maintain the properly severe maternal disapproval. "Do you want to eat that cereal or wear it?"

  "She started it," he muttered.

  "Did not," Jenny said under her breath.

  "Did too."

  Another glance at their mother had them subsiding to eye each other with grim dislike over their cereal bowls.

  "Now that that's settled." Amused, Lilah licked her spoon. "What's your marvelous idea, Aunt Coco?"

  "Weil." She fluffed her hair, absently checking her reflection in the toaster, approving it, then beaming. "It all has to do with Max. Really it's so obvious. But, of course, we were worried about his health, then it's so difficult to think clearly with this construction going on. Do you know one of those young men was out on the terrace this morning in nothing but a pair of jeans and a tool belt? Very distracting." She peeked out of the kitchen window, just in case.

  "I'm sorry I missed it." Lilah winked at Max. "Was it the guy with the long blond hair tied back with a leather thong?"

  "No, the one with dark curly hair and a mustache. I must say, he's extremely well built. I suppose one would keep fit swinging hammers or whatever all day. The noise is a bother, though. I hope it doesn't disturb you, Max."

  "No." He'd learned to flow with Coco's rambling thought patterns. "Would you like some coffee?"

  "Oh, that's sweet of you. I believe I will." She sat while he got up to pour her a cup. "They've literally transformed the billiard room already. Of course, we've a long way to go–thank you, dear," she added when Max set a cup of coffee in front of her. "And all those tarps and tools and lumber make things unsightly. But it will all be worth it in the end." As she spoke, she doctored her coffee with cream and heaps of sugar. "Now, where was I?"

  "A marvelous idea," Suzanna reminded her, putting a restraining hand on Alex's shoulder before he could fling any soggy cereal at his sister.

  "Oh, yes." Coco set her cup down without taking a sip. "It came to me last night when I was doing the tarot cards. There were some personal matters I'd wanted to resolve, and I'd wanted to get a feel for this other business."

  "What other business?" Alex wanted to know.

  "Grown–up business." Lilah dug a knuckle into his ribs to make him laugh. "Boring."

  "You guys better go find Fred." Suzanna checked her watch. "If you want to go with me today, you've got five minutes."

  They were up and shooting out of the room like little bullets. Surreptitiously Max rubbed his shin where Alex's foot had connected.

  "The cards, Aunt Coco?" Lilah said when the explosion was over.

  "Yes. I learned that there was danger, past and future. Disconcerting." She cast a worried look over both her nieces. "But we're to have help dealing with it. There seemed to be two different sources of aid. One was cerebral, the other physical–potentially violent." Uneasy, she frowned a little. "I couldn't place the physical source, though it seemed I should because it was from someone familiar. I thought it might be from Sloan. He's so, well, Western. But it wasn't. I'm quite sure it wasn't." Brushing that aside, she smiled again. "But naturally the cerebral source is Max."

  "Naturally." Lilah patted his hand as he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Our resident genius."

  "Don't tease him." Suzanna rose to take bowls to the sink.

  "Oh, he knows I don't just like him for his brain. Don't you, Max?"

  He was mortally afraid he would blush in a minute. "If you keep interrupting your aunt, you'll be late for work."

  "And so will I," Suzanna pointed out. "What's the idea, Aunt Coco?"

  She'd started to drink again, and again set the coffee down untouched. "That Max should do what he came here to do." Smiling, she spread her manicured hands. "Research the Calhouns. Find out as much as possible about Bianca, Fergus, everyone involved. Not for that awful Mr. Caufield or whatever his name is, but for us."

  Intrigued, Lilah thought the idea over. "We've already been through the papers."

  "Not with Max's objective, and scholarly eye," Coco pointed out. Already fond of him, she patted his shoulder. Her interpretation of the cards also had indicated that he and Lilah would suit very well. "I'm sure if he put his mind to it, he could come up with all kinds of wonderful theories."

  "It's a good idea." Suzanna came back to the table. "How do you feel about it?"

  Max considered. Though he didn't put any stock in tarot cards, he didn't want to hurt Coco's feelings.

  Besides, however she had come up with the idea, it was sound. It would be a way of paying them back and a way to justify staying on in Bar Harbor a few more weeks.

  "I'd like to do something. There's a good chance that even with the information I gave them the police won't find Caufield. While everyone's looking for him, I could be concentrating on Bianca and the necklace."

  "There." Coco sat back. "I knew it."

  "I'd wanted to check out the library, the newspaper, interview some of the older residents, but Caufield shut down the idea." The more he thought about it, the more Max liked the notion of working on his own. "Claimed he wanted everything to come out of the family papers, or his own sources." He moved his cup aside. "Obviously he couldn't give me a free hand or I'd find out the truth."

  "Now you have a free hand," Lilah put in. It amused her that she could already see the wheels turning. "But I don't think you'll find the necklace in a library."

  "But I may find a photograph of it, or a description."

  Lilah simply smiled. "I've already given you that."

  He didn't put much stock in dreams and visions, either, and shrugged. "All the same, I might find something tangible. And I'll certainly find something on Fergus and Bianca Calhoun."

  "I suppose it'll keep you busy." Unoffended by his lack of faith in her mystical beliefs, Lilah rose. "You'll need a car to get around. Why don't you drop me off at work and use mine?"

  Irked by her lack of faith in his research abilities, Max spent hours in the library. As always, he felt at home there, among stacks of books, in the center of the murmuring quiet, with a notebook at his elbow. To him, research was a quest–perhaps not as exciting as riding a white charger. It was a mystery to be solved, though the clues were less adventurous than a smoking gun or a trail of blood.

  But with patience, cleverness and skill, he was a knight, or a detective, carefully working his way to an answer.

  The fact that he had always been drawn to such places had disappointed his father bitterly, Max knew. Even as a boy he had preferred mental exercise over the physical. He had not picked up the torch to follow his father's blaze of glory on the high school football field. Nor had he added trophies to the shelf.

  Lack of interest and a long klutzy adolescence had made him a failure in sports. He had detested hunting, and on the last outing his father had pressured him into had come up with a vicious asthma attack rather than a buck.

  Even now, years later, he could remember his father's disgusted voice creeping into his hospital room.

  "Damn boy's a pansy. Can't understand it. He'd rather read than eat. Every time I try to make a man out of him, he ends up wheezing like an old woman."

  He'd gotten over the asthma, Max reminded himself. He'd even made something out of himself, though his father wouldn't consider it a man. And if he never felt completely adequate, at least he could feel competent.

  Shrugging off the mood, he went back to his quest.

  He did indeed find Fergus and Bianca. There were little gems of information peppered through the research books. In the familiar comfort of a library, Max took reams of notes and felt the excitement build.

  He learned that Fergus Calhoun had been self–made, an Irish immigrant who through grit and shrewdness had become a man of wealth and influence. He'd landed in New York in 1888, young, poor and, like so many who had poured into Ellis Island, looking for his fortune. Within fifteen years, he had built an empire. And he had enjoyed flaunting it.

  Perhaps to
bury the impoverished youth he had been, he had surrounded himself with the opulent, muscling his way into society with wealth and will. It was in polite, exclusive society that he had met Bianca Muldoon, a young debutante of an old, established family with more gentility than money. He had built The Towers, determined to outdo the other vacationing rich, and had married Bianca the following year.

  His golden touch had continued. His empire had grown, and so had his family with the birth of three children. Even the scandal of his wife's suicide in the summer of 1913 hadn't affected his monetary fortune.

  Though he had become somewhat of a recluse after her death, he had continued to wield his power from The Towers. His daughter had never married and, estranged from her father, had gone to live in Paris. His youngest son had fled, after a peccadillo with a married woman, to the West Indies. Ethan, his eldest child had married and had two children of his own, Judson, Lilah's father, and Cordelia Calhoun, now Coco McPike.

  Ethan had died in a sailing accident, and Fergus had lived out the last years of his long life in an asylum, committed there by his family after several outbursts of violent and erratic behavior.

  An interesting story, Max mused, but most of the details could have been gleaned from the Calhouns themselves. He wanted something else, some small tidbit that would lead him in another direction.

  He found it in a tattered and dusty volume titled Summering in Bar Harbor.

  It was such a flighty and poorly written work that he nearly set it aside. The teacher in him had him reading on, as he would read a student's ill–prepared term paper. It deserved a C–at best, Max thought. Never in his life had he seen so many superlatives and cluttered adjectives on one page. Glamorously to gloriously, magnificent to miraculous. The author had been a wide–eyed admirer of the rich and famous, someone who saw them as royalty. Sumptuous, spectacular and splendiferous. The syntax made Max wince, but he plodded on.

  There were two entire pages devoted to a ball given at The Towers in 1912. Max's weary brain perked up. The author had certainly attended, for the descriptions were in painstaking detail, from fashion to cuisine. Bianca Calhoun had worn gold silk, a flowing sheath with a beaded skirt. The color had set off the highlights in her titian hair. The scooped bodice had framed...the emeralds.

  They were described in glowing and exacting detail. Once the adjectives and the romantic imagery were edited, Max could see them. Scribbling notes, he turned the page. And stared.

  It was an old photograph, perhaps culled from a newspaper print. It was fuzzy and blurred, but he had no trouble recognizing Fergus. Thie man was as rigid and stern faced as the portrait the Calhouns kept over the mantel in the parlor. But it was the woman sitting in front of him that stopped Max's breath.

  Despite the flaws of the photo, she was exquisite, ethereally beautiful, timelessly lovely. And she was the image of Lilah. The porcelain skin, the slender neck left bare with a mass of hair swept up in the Gibson style. Oversize eyes he was certain would have been green. There was no smile in them, though her lips were curved.

  Was it just the romance of the face, he wondered, or did he really see some sadness there?

  She sat in an elegant lady's chair, her husband behind her, his hand on the back of the chair rather than on her shoulder. Still, it seemed to Max that there was a certain possessiveness in the stance. They were in formal wear–Fergus starched and pressed, Bianca draped and fragile. The stilted pose was captioned, Mr. and Mrs. Fergus Calhoun, 1912.

  Around Bianca's neck, defying time, were the Calhoun emeralds.

  The necklace was exactly as Lilah had described to him, the two glittering tiers, the lush single teardrop that dripped like emerald water. Bianca wore it with a coolness that turned its opulence into elegance and only intensified the power.

  Max trailed a fingertip along each tier, almost certain he would feel the smoothness of the gems. He understood why such stones become legends, to haunt men's imaginations and fire their greed.

  But it eluded him, a picture only. Hardly realizing what he was doing, he traced Bianca's face and thought of the woman who had inherited it. There were women who haunt and inflame.

  Lilah paused in her stroll down the nature path to give her latest group time to photograph and rest. They had had an excellent crowd in the park that day, with a hefty percentage of them interested enough to hike the trails and be guided by a naturalist. Lilah had been on her feet for the best part of eight hours, and had covered the same ground eight times–sixteen if she counted the return trip.

  But she wasn't tired, yet. Nor did her lecture come strictly out of a guidebook.

  "Many of the plants found on the island are typically northern," she began. "A few are subarctic, remaining since the retreat of the glaciers ten thousand years ago. More recent specimens were brought by Europeans within the last two hundred and fifty years."

  With a patience that was a primary part of her, Lilah answered questions, distracted some of the younger crowd from trampling the wildflowers and fed information on the local flora to those who were interested. She identified the beach pea, the seaside goldenrod, the late–blooming harebell. It was her last group of the day, but she gave them as much time and attention as the first.

  In any case she always enjoyed this seaside stroll, listening to the murmur of pebbles drifting in the surf or the echoing call of gulls, discovering for herself and the tourists what treasures lurked in the tide pools.

  The breeze was light and balmy, carrying that ancient and mysterious scent that was the sea. Here the rocks were smooth and flat, worn to elegance by the patient ebb and flow of water. She could see the glitter of quartz running in long white rivers down the black stone. Overhead, the sky was a hard summer blue, nearly cloudless. Under it, boats glided, buoys clanged, orange markers bobbed.

  She thought of the yacht, the Windrider, and though she searched as she had on each tour, she saw nothing but sleek tourist boats or the sturdy crafts of lobstermen.

  When she saw Max hiking the nature trail down to join the group, she smiled. He was on time, of course. She'd expected no less. She felt a slow tingle of warmth when his gaze lifted from his feet to her face. He really had wonderful eyes, she thought. Intent and serious, and just a little shy.

  As always when she saw him, she had an urge to tease him and an underlying longing to touch. An interesting combination, she thought now, and one she couldn't remember experiencing with anyone else.

  She looked so cool, he thought, the mannish uniform over the willowy feminine form. The military khaki and the dangle of gold and crystal at her ears. He wondered if she knew how suited she was to stand before the sea while it bubbled and swayed at her back.

  "At the intertidal zone," she began, "life has acclimated to tidal change. In spring, we have the highest and lowest tides, with a rise and fall of 14.5 feet."

  She went on in that easy, soothing voice, talking of intertidal creatures, survival and food chains. Even as she spoke, a gull glided to perch on a nearby rock to study the tourists with a beady, expectant eye. Cameras clicked. Lilah crouched down beside a tide pool. Fascinated by her description of life there, Max moved to see for himself.

  There were long purple fans she called dulse, and she had the children in the group groaning when she told them it could be eaten raw or boiled. In the dark little pool of water, she found a wealth of living things, all waiting, she said, for the tide to come in again before they went back to business.

  With a graceful fingertip she pointed out the sea anemones that looked more like flowers than animals, and the tiny slugs that preyed on them. The pretty shells that were mollusks and snails and whelks. She sounded like a marine biologist one moment and a stand–up comedian the next.

  Her appreciative audience bombarded her with questions. Max caught one teenage boy staring at her with a moony kind of lust and felt instant sympathy.

  Tossing her braid behind her back, she wound up the tour, explaining about the information available at the visi
tors center, and the other naturalist tours. Some of the group started to meander their way back along the path, while others lingered behind to take more pictures. The teenager loitered behind his parents, asking any question his dazzled brain could form on the tide pools, the wildflowers and, though he wouldn't have looked twice at a robin, the birds. When he'd exhausted all angles, and his mother called impatiently for the second time, he trudged reluctantly off.

  "This is one nature walk he won't forget any time soon," Max commented.

  She only smiled. "I like to think they'll all remember some pieces of it. Glad you could make it, Professor." She did what her instincts demanded and kissed him fully, softly on the mouth.

  Looking back, the teenager experienced a flash of miserable envy. Max was simply knocked flat. Lilah's lips were still curved as she eased away. "So," she asked him, "how was your day?" Could a woman kiss like that then expect him to continue a normal conversation? Obviously this one could, he decided and took a long breath. "Interesting."

  "Those are the best kind." She began to walk up the path that would lead back to the visitors center. Arching a brow, she glanced over her shoulder. "Coming?"

  "Yeah." With his hands in his pockets, he started after her. "You're very good." Her laugh was light and warm. "Why, thank you." "I meant–I was talking about your job." "Of course you were." Companionably she tucked an arm through his. "It's too bad you missed the first twenty minutes of the last tour. We saw two slate–colored juncos, a double–crested cormorant and an osprey."

  "It's always been one of my ambitions to see a slate–colored junco," he said, and made her laugh again. "Do you always do the same trail?"

  "No, I move around. One of my favorites is Jordan Pond, or I might take a shift at the Nature Center, or hike up in the mountains."

  "I guess that keeps it from getting boring."

  "It's never boring, or I wouldn't last a day. Even on the same trail you see different things all the time.

  Look." She pointed to a thatch of plants with narrow leaves and faded pink blooms. "Rhodora," she told him. "A common azalea. A few weeks ago it was at peak. Stunning. Now the blooms will die off, and wait until spring." She brushed her fingertips over the leaves. "I like cycles. They're reassuring."