Full Circle

by Shannon Hollis

  The audience laughed and applauded, and while Jones announced they were cutting to commercial, Daniel sat motionless while memory attacked him.

  Because a woman like that did exist.

  And he’d chased her out of his life long ago.

  2

  “SEXUAL CURIOSITY, my aunt Fanny!”

  Cate Wells snapped off the TV with a vicious stab of her thumb and threw the remote—not against the wall, because that would damage it—but into the corner of the couch, where it bounced off a pillow and onto the floor.

  Fuming, she rammed her feet into slippers shaped like the man-eating bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and stalked into her bedroom. The nerve of that man! He was everywhere she looked these days—on The Jah-Redd Jones Show, in the papers, even in the Vandenberg University bookstore, where the obnoxious book he was so enthusiastically promoting on talk shows was stacked ten deep on a front-table display.

  As if anybody but a gullible public could mistake him for a serious scholar and field researcher when the wretched thing was called Lost Treasures of the World: Adventures in Archaeology.

  How utterly lame.

  As lame as those women in the studio audience, screaming and drooling like a lot of hormone-ridden teenagers. Most of them were old enough to be his mother. Granted, the cheekbones and the iron planes of his jaw hadn’t changed in the eight years since she’d seen him last. And the obliging close-ups of the camera had shown eyes that were as dark and shuttered as they’d ever been. But the boy she’d fallen for on the short southern nights of the dig in Mexico where they’d worked together for one enchanted summer was gone forever. That boy had shared her love of discovery—whether it was the secrets hidden by layers of soil and rock, or the secrets hidden by diffidence and sexual uncertainty.

  Sexual curiosity, indeed!

  Thank heavens she’d never told a soul about their aborted relationship—not even her closest girlfriends or her parents in San Diego. He had been a secret she was prepared to take to her grave. What a pity he hadn’t been quite so discreet.

  Cate pulled the five-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheet up to her chin and willed herself to go to sleep. She had appointments in the morning and a paper to proof that was guaranteed to knock the socks off the tenure committee, and she needed a clear head.

  But the sight of Daniel, older but just as charismatic and sexy in his jeans and boots, disturbed her dreams as thoroughly as he’d disturbed her peace of mind—and, it must be confessed, her body. Her brain, usually so dependable, decided to take her on a trip down memory lane. The dig site, baking under the relentless Mexican sun, where archaeology students from universities across the country had been cycled in and out for brute labor disguised as summer credit. A moon the size of a gold doubloon lighting Daniel’s face as he’d leaned in, as dirty and sweaty as she was, for that first kiss. That last night, when they’d slipped off to find a cool cave to lay their sleeping bags in, where she’d panicked at the very last moment and run, humiliating herself and no doubt earning his undying contempt.

  But oh, those days between the first kiss and the cave…those days had been filled with her first experience of intense sexual longing. He had been all she’d been able to think about—her body becoming a kind of tuning fork with a single frequency: Daniel Burke. Lying here in the dark of her bedroom, her unsatisfied lust triggered dreams of him. A stealthy hand cupping her derriere as the group of students stood listening to a field lecture. A hard thigh pressing hers as they ate together in camp. Kisses that practically blew the top off her head as they abandoned the others and sneaked off behind rock outcroppings to explore each other in private.

  At four in the morning, Cate woke to find herself wet and aching, staring into the dark.

  She’d followed his career—it was pretty hard to avoid it, with Newsweek and the American Journal of Archaeology doing their very best to give his exploits legitimacy. It was only at moments like this, in the deepest dark, when her defenses were down and she was unable to keep the lid of professional disdain on her natural honesty, that she could admit how much it had hurt when no call or letter had ever come. It wasn’t as though she was hard to find. All the faculty at Vandenberg were listed on the Web site, and she was in the Queens phone directory. When she’d made associate professor at Columbia and then taken the position at Vandenberg shortly afterward, the papers had made a nice little fuss about nabbing such a coveted job out from under hundreds of candidates when she was so young.

  No, it was clear that when Daniel had told Jah-Redd about wanting someone who was loyal and who had sexual curiosity, he had been making a dig at her.

  Bastard. She would absolutely not waste another thought on him. Her body could just calm down. Instead of masturbating and giving him control of her body again, she would think about her paper. That would do the trick.

  She would think about her career plan, which was laid out in nice, achievable steps where she did the right things and talked with the right people, and success was a natural outgrowth of a good strategy. Columbia, to start. Then the move to Vandenberg, a private university that had its quirks but whose reputation was stellar. Tenure by the age of thirty. After that, perhaps a book of her own. A serious, scholarly work, unlike that of some people she could name.

  Success. The right career path, a book, a reputation people would give their eyeteeth for. That was what was important here, not memories of the past, no matter how disturbing.

  Despite big helpings of positive visualization, it was only thanks to an extra-large latte (no whip) that she was able to get herself to the gym, then to the subway and onto the campus a couple of hours later. The walk across the quad to the Horn Building normally lifted her spirits, especially on an early summer day like this, when the sun warmed the granite dome of the Memorial Library to terra-cotta and students sat on the amphitheater-like plaza steps like flocks of birds sunning themselves. Darn Daniel anyway. He’d managed to take even that small pleasure from her.

  Which wasn’t the most mature and logical attitude to take, but she wasn’t feeling mature or logical this morning, thank you very much.

  In her tiny but carefully decorated office, Cate dumped the day’s mail on her desk, put her purse in the bottom left drawer, and extracted the paper with its sticky tabs and red corrections from her briefcase. A glance at the calendar told her she had thirty minutes before her first appointment, a woman named Morgan Shaw who wanted to talk about an artifact but who would not tell Anne Walters, the department administrative assistant, a thing more.

  Cate gave a mental shrug. Every now and again she got one of these—someone who dug up an arrowhead and figured they’d discovered a Native American burial site, or someone who found something in Uncle Lester’s attic that had to be an ancient treasure. She’d become quite skilled at letting people down gently.

  She turned her attention to the mail. Circulars, notices, memorandums from the department head, who knew better than to kill trees by sending memos in hard copy, but insisted on doing so to make himself feel he’d accomplished something. Cate sighed and picked up a glossy brochure giving her final notice of a conference in Big Sur, California.

  Then a name caught her eye.

  Keynote speaker and featured presenter: Daniel Burke, “the real Indiana Jones.” Dr. Burke will present the keynote speech at Saturday’s luncheon and will also present his latest paper, Silent Voices: Tracing the Trade Routes through Pre-Columbian Pottery, on Friday night. After the presentation, Dr. Burke will sign his new book, an event that will be open to the public.

  “Be still my heart.” Bad enough his face invaded her living room. Worse that it had inhabited her dreams. But to barge uninvited into her office, her citadel where only she was in control—that was just too much.

  Cate aimed the brochure at the trash can and fired it with a flick of her wrist, where it landed with a swish amid a lot of other things that she didn’t need and no longer cared about.

  The digita
l clock on her desk flipped from 9:29 to 9:30 and Anne Walters leaned in the door. “Dr. Wells? Ms. Shaw is here for her appointment.”

  Cate turned her back on the trash can and its obnoxious contents. “Thanks, Anne. Send her in.”

  “I’m going to run out for another coffee. Want one?”

  Anne knew the location of every espresso bar in a ten-block radius. “You are a goddess. Extra-large, no whip.”

  “Back in fifteen.”

  Morgan Shaw, tall, blond and professional, came in with a confident stride and a hand outstretched in greeting. When Cate shook it, she got the impression of self-assurance mixed with a whole lot of anticipation. Whatever the woman had to show her, it meant a lot to her.

  Ms. Shaw shook back her mane of hair and smiled. “Dr. Wells, thank you for seeing me.”

  Cate waved her into the guest chair in front of her desk and settled herself in her own. “Did Anne offer you something to drink?”

  “Yes, she did, thanks.”

  “No trouble finding us?”

  “Not at all. I got very good directions from my sister, Cassandra. I’d like to thank you personally for rescuing her a few months ago.”

  Cate grinned with delight. Earlier in the year she had escaped the city and had been four-wheeling through the woods upstate, on her way back from her therapy cliff—the one she climbed when she really needed to clear her head and find her center again. She’d offered a lift to a couple of stranded hikers, and had stayed in touch ever since. “Cass is your sister? Then I’m doubly pleased to meet you. I understand you have an artifact that you wanted to show me,” she prompted. “How did you come by it?”

  Morgan leaned over and pulled her leather tote into her lap. “I have an antique shop in Fairfield, Connecticut. I found this in a late-Victorian dresser that was part of the stock I bought along with the shop.” She opened a cardboard container much like the ones the post office used, and extracted a wooden box. “I was hoping you could tell me a little about it.”

  Cate pulled the box closer. This was no relic from Uncle Lester’s attic. Weighing no more than her low-profile laptop, the box was so ornately carved that there was no room for a single extra figure on its surface. She tried to separate the images to discover some meaning or clue as to its provenance, but the figures merged into one another, almost seeming to lose themselves before she could fix them in place. There were flowers, a sun and a hawk, what looked like a tree and the wavy lines that in most cultures denoted water. There were animals—a hippo, a lion—and plants. A lotus. Reeds, maybe. There were musical instruments—a lyre, or was it a harp? A flute—or was it a reed next to a crocodile? And among the images were symbols, regular and uniform enough to indicate written language.

  “This is amazing.” When Morgan nodded, Cate realized she’d spoken aloud.

  “I can’t even tell what kind of wood it is, much less figure out what the carvings mean,” Morgan said. “I thought maybe cherry? Walnut? Not ebony, because it’s kind of reddish-brown.”

  “That much I do recognize.” Cate turned the box over to examine its underside. She caught a faint whiff of some kind of spice. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s bubinga, an extremely hard and durable wood from Africa. The person who carved it was obviously a very skilled craftsman.”

  “Can you tell how old it is?”

  “Other than ‘old’?” Cate, with the box at eye level, smiled over the top of it at her visitor. “I can’t be sure, but at a guess I’d say more than two thousand years. From some of the cuts in the curved lines, here, I’d say they used a hand awl, which might even put it at three thousand years.”

  Daniel would know.

  Yes, but the likelihood of Daniel seeing this box was nil, wasn’t it?

  She lowered the box and ran her fingers along a row of what looked like monkey heads. Or maybe they were irises. The more she looked, the harder it was to tell. “How does it open?”

  Morgan lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I was hoping you could tell me. There’s a compartment inside, I know that much, because I ran it through the security check at the train station on the way here and peeked at the monitor. But I have no idea if it contains anything, or how it’s opened.”

  Lost Treasures of the World, whispered that treacherous voice in her head. Daniel might have some information.

  Cate stifled the voice and glanced at Morgan. “Do you mind if I take some photographs? I could show the pictures to one or two of my colleagues and they might be able to identify the culture that produced these carvings.”

  Morgan shook her head. “Not at all.”

  Cate kept her field camera in the office just for moments like these. She put in a fresh roll of high-resolution film and tore the top sheet off her desk blotter to make a clean white surface. A ruler next to the box gave perspective. Then she carefully photographed each side in close-up, at midrange and from a couple of feet away, just as she’d been taught all those years ago in Mexico.

  “We can learn as much from the matrix in which a piece of pottery is embedded as we can from the potsherd itself.” The voice of their supervising prof, Dr. Andersen, sounded in her memory. “Your photographs should include this information. It could be important.”

  Cate was surprised she remembered that much—the day they’d excavated the midden and found the fragments of pottery was the day Daniel Burke had arrived. Cate’s memory of anything but him after that point had been burned away by the force of their attraction. There was a thesis for you—The Passionate Flame: Biological Urges and the Death of Brain Cells.

  “—long it might take?”

  Cate blinked and resisted the urge to roll her eyes at herself. Damn that Daniel Burke anyway. Now she looked like an airhead.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” She put the camera back in its case and ran a slow hand over the surface of the box. She was not normally given to touching things. Her colleague Julia was always doing that, though—rubbing fabric between her fingers, stroking passing dogs in Central Park. Now Cate felt the same urge to touch this box. Something about the carvings invited you to follow them with your fingers, to touch them as though they were braille and had a message for you.

  “I was just wondering how long it might take to get an opinion from your colleague,” Morgan said, doing a good job of disguising her eagerness. But Cate knew that feeling—that excitement when you were this close to finding an answer that had eluded you. Some said that curiosity killed the cat. But curiosity was an archaeologist’s best friend.

  “I’m not sure,” Cate hedged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the glossy brochure advertising the conference, facedown in the trash.

  Daniel might help.

  No. No way. Not to satisfy her own curiosity, not to help out Ms. Morgan Shaw, would she get on a plane and fly across the country to see Daniel Burke strutting around Big Sur as though he were God’s gift to archaeology and women.

  “A couple of weeks? A month?” Morgan persisted.

  What are you afraid of?

  Nothing. The thought was ludicrous.

  So he had a rep for flamboyance. So he’d been on Jah-Redd last night. The fact remained that he was an authority on ancient symbology, and if anyone would know about this box, it would be him. Besides, she hadn’t taken in a conference since that one in D.C. last year. And she hadn’t seen the ocean since the Jurassic period—or at least it seemed that way.

  Think of it. Big breakers crashing on the beach. Someone else doing the cooking. Late-night conversations with experts from all over the world, in fields as diverse as geology, history and archaeology.

  The beach. No walls. No taxis honking and sirens screaming. Nothing but the vast Pacific, stretching out into infinity, and seagulls telling you about it as they wheeled overhead.

  “A couple of weeks,” she said suddenly, handing the box back to Morgan Shaw, who tucked it carefully into its container. “I’m considering a conference next weekend. If I go, I would show these photographs to an archaeologis
t there.”

  A smile as broad and warm as the California sun broke across the other woman’s face. “I’d love it if you could help. I don’t know what it is about this box. It’s not an obsession—it’s more like an itch that I just have to scratch, you know?”

  Cate did know.

  Because Daniel Burke had been the itch she’d been longing to scratch for the last eight years.

  3

  “FEEL LIKE HAVING A DRINK with me tonight before you head home?”

  There was a pause while Cate imagined Julia Covington checking her watch and raising her eyebrows. “Cate, it’s ten in the morning and already you’re scheduling drinks?”

  “I feel the need.” Thinking about a nice, cold glass of chardonnay was better than thinking about Daniel Burke. “So, can you? Or do you have plans already with Alex?”

  “Just dinner, but we don’t eat till late. The usual place at six?”

  “I’ll be there,” Cate promised with a little more fervency than strictly necessary.

  Jake’s was a real Irish pub just down the street from the Museum of Antiquities, where Julia was a curator. You could get anything from a pint of Guinness to a good French champagne—or a California chardonnay, if that happened to be on your mind. Plus they served shrimp wontons that were about as far from Ireland as you could get, but that Cate adored.

  The waiter put a big plate of them between Cate and Julia, and Cate dipped one in rice vinegar, savoring the tartness against the sweet shrimp on her tongue.

  “I’ve been waiting for this all day,” she sighed.

  “I’ve been waiting to find out what the emergency is.” Julia sipped her cabernet and eyed her friend with that narrowed gaze that meant Cate hadn’t fooled her one bit. “Either something happened at the department or you’ve got man trouble.”

  Man, she was good. “Both.”