by Maddy Hunter
I spat a mouthful of local flora and fauna at him. “I’m fine, just…give me some room.” I boosted myself to my knees and swiped a gob of mud from my chin. “I suppose I should look at the bright side. A mud treatment like this would cost me big bucks aboard ship.” I pondered the gunk on my hand. “You suppose it’s the right kind of mud?”
“I’m sorry, Emily,” he apologized again, helping me to my feet. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to —”
I held up my hand for silence. “I’ll warn you next time I decide to stop. Okay? Now, can we just keep walking?”
I set a pace traipsing through the leaves and mud at double time, keeping my eyes peeled for hidden tree roots and my ears pricked for the roar of a waterfall.
“You’re a nice person, Emily,” Jonathan’s voice echoed out behind me. “If I’d fallen on Beth like that, there would have been hell to pay. Did I tell you I thought I saw her last night? Outside the infirmary. Wouldn’t that have been an awful coincidence? Beth showing up on the cruise with her new boyfriend? I’m sure glad I was wrong, but no kidding, her tattoo was exactly like Beth’s.”
A cluster of ferns tickled my mud-caked shins as I ducked beneath the branch of an unfamiliar broad-leafed tree. “A lot of women are into permanent disfigurement these days,” I conceded, “as long as it’s done tastefully.”
“Beth called it durable body art. She said using one’s anatomy as a living canvas was very cutting edge.”
I could remember when having two holes pierced into the same ear was considered cutting edge. Oh, God. I was a ma’am. I was getting old.
“Did you know that the shoulder has replaced the chest as the venue of choice for body art these days? Unless you want something more panoramic, like the Pacific fleet. That’s where Beth’s tattoo was. On her shoulder. A pink rosebud with a trail of leaves twining after it. It was awesome.”
I slapped an insect dead on my arm and kept walking. “What were you doing in the infirmary last night? Were you sick?”
“Captain’s orders. He recommended I ask the doctor for something to calm me down. But the person who really needed the tranquilizer was the blonde who looked like Beth. Man, she was chewing out that girl in the yellow vest something fierce. What a temper.”
I arched my brows at that. Bailey had been wearing a yellow vest yesterday. And she’d left the infirmary last night before the second seating. “Do you remember anything else about the woman in the yellow vest? Age? Hair color?”
“She was probably your age. Midtwenties or something.”
Aw, bless his myopic little eyes.
“And her hair was all pulled back into a long curly ponytail. You couldn’t miss her hair. It looked like she’d backed into a cat. That’s about all I can remem — No, wait. She was wearing really stylish glasses. The kind I might be able to afford after I find a new job.”
Bailey. It had to be. But why would anyone be picking on her? Especially after what she’d been through yesterday. Then again, if she was number two on someone’s hit list, being yelled at was the least of her problems. Which reminded me.
“Hey, Jonathan, would you do me a favor and save Percy Woodruffe-Peacock’s business card? The captain might want to take a look at the writing on the back. It could be important. Okay?”
“I won’t let it out of my sight,” he said, sounding thrilled to be asked.
As we forged ahead through a little mushroom field, I became aware of a noise in the background that I hadn’t heard before. A far-off sound that was neither bug nor bird. A deep, continuous rumble that echoed through the forest and sent shock waves up my legs.
“Do you hear that?” asked Jonathan, impressing me that he could hear anything through those ear flaps of his.
I nodded. “Sounds like a freight train, which means it’s either a tornado…or our waterfall!”
We bounded over rocks and gullies and hurtled decaying tree trunks. When the rumbling grew so loud that it vibrated the bones in my chest, I spied an unexpected plateau through an opening in the trees, and a river of angry white water cascading downward into a circular pool that was rimmed by spurs of fractured rock.
I stepped into the opening and stared in awe, my mouth hanging open. The Secret Falls. Wow. I hadn’t expected them to be so tall. So noisy. So…so…
“I say!” I heard Basil Broomhead shout over the roar of the falls. “I do believe we’ve found it!”
Chapter 7
A chorus of groans and curses thundered in disappointment. To the left of the pool, where a sweep of sparsely forested terrain sloped upward to an impossible height, heads popped up from behind rocks, trees, ferns, and stumps, like ducks in a shooting gallery. Basil knelt before a freshly dug hole, thigh to thigh with Percy, brandishing a clod of mud in the air. “See here! I’ve found it!” Percy thwacked his arm and looked to be admonishing him to shut up. Basil screwed his face into a petulant pout and thwacked him back.
“So what have you found?” Nils yelled at him.
“Hey, I was digging in that spot first!” shouted the honeymooner who’d been all over his bride. “Whatever that thing is, it’s half mine!”
“Nice try, bud,” a middle-aged woman in a straw hat balked. “Finders keepers.”
Oh, no! Poor Tilly. It was so unfair that someone else had found her treasure. Talk about rotten luck. I regarded the mob of treasure hunters who’d abandoned their minor excavations to gather around Basil.
On the other hand, if Professor Smoker’s killer had set his sights on acquiring whatever Griffin Ring had buried here over two hundred years ago, Tilly’s not finding the treasure knocked her out of contention as a future target for foul play. That certainly made my life a lot less stressful.
I observed the mob dynamic playing out around Basil and smiled. Gee, how nice that he’d found the treasure. And so quickly.
I caught movement in the tail of my eye and shifted my gaze to find Nana picking her way toward me over the rocks. “I guess you heard,” I said in greeting. “Someone found the treasure. Is Tilly devastated?”
“Pffft.” Nana waved her hand dismissively at the crowd. “It won’t be nothin’.”
Crows of laughter suddenly erupted from the crowd, along with hoots and snickering. As quickly as the crowd had gathered, it dispersed, leaving Basil and Percy to ponder a silvery object resting in Basil’s palm.
“Can you see what that thing is?” I asked Nana. She’d undergone cataract surgery a few years back, so her eyesight was even better than mine.
“Bud Lite. Some other fellas already dug up two other cans. I’m thinkin’, six-pack.”
Not knowing whether this was reason to be encouraged or discouraged, I looked out over the landscape, searching for familiar faces. “How come I’m not seeing any of our group out there in the fray?”
“Alice, Osmond, Margi, Bernice, and Lucille are on them rocks over there, gawkin’ at the waterfall. They never seen one before. Bernice and Lucille seen them famous Rhine Falls when we was in Switzerland; they just can’t remember doin’ it. Don’t know where the Dicks and their wives are — probably halfway to Tahiti by now. And you might wanna separate Bernice and Margi on the trip back upriver ’cause a Margi’s eye.”
“What’s wrong with Margi’s eye?”
“Nothin’, other than it’s big as a boiled cabbage because Bernice steered ’em into them branches what hang over the riverbank.”
I winced. “Is she in much pain?” I started to go for my Excedrin.
“Nah. She’s got a cold pack on it now, so that’s holdin’ the swellin’ down.”
I stilled my hand. “Wow. She’s prepared for any emergency, isn’t she? She actually brought a cold pack with her?”
“What she brung with her was one a them jumbo condoms a hers, so she just filled it with water and tied it off. Works real good. Only thing is, folks are startin’ to stare ’cause they’re wonderin’ what she’s doin’ with a breast implant stuck on her face.”
Jonathan came bulldo
zing through the leaves on his pale, spindly legs to stand cautiously beside me. “Wow,” he said, gaping at the waterfall. He clomped around in the other direction. “Wow,” he said, gaping at the slew of divots gouged into the ground. “Funny no one mentioned land mines to us.”
I remembered my manners and introduced him to Nana, who scrutinized his hat with wistful eyes. “My Sam used to have a cap with earflaps like them. Only his was beaver. A real nice one, too. Used to wear it ice fishin’. L. L. Bean. Had a lifetime guarantee against pillin’, mattin’, and mites.” She sucked the corner of her lip into her mouth. “Can’t recall what I done with it after he passed on.”
Jonathan whipped off his hat to show Nana the duckbill. “See this? Mine’s signed by Bill Gates. It’s a little hard to decipher his handwriting, but it really says Bill Gates. This hat is my most prized possession.”
“My Sam was partial to that hat a his, too.” A grin suddenly lit Nana’s face. “Shoot. I remember now. I buried him in it.”
Oh, God. “Where did you say Tilly was digging?”
“She’s not. She’s so upset about the mess everyone’s makin’, she’s just rockin’ back and forth, mutterin’ Swahili under her breath.”
I eyed her skeptically. “You know Swahili?”
“Learnin’ Channel special.” She gave the bottom of my tank top a tug. “Emily, them two hotties what we saw in the lecture room yesterday are diggin’ holes hell-bent for election. The blonde is drawin’ some kind a chart, and the brunette is takin’ measurements. Like they done stuff like this before.” She bobbed her head toward a humpbacked rock in the foreground. “There they are. Eleven o’clock.”
I’ve often wondered what the state of accurate direction-giving would be if the first clocks had been digital instead of analog. I followed her gaze. The two women were less conspicuous today than they’d been yesterday, dressed in cropped T-shirts and mid-thigh shorts, elbows pumping as they hollowed out a section of black earth. They appeared calm, focused, and methodical. Scientific, almost.
“They certainly are tidy,” I observed. “Look how they’re storing all the soil in that one isolated spot. Everyone else is so haphazard.” I studied their movements with an eagle eye. “They sure act like pros. They even look like they’ve gotten their hands on some special kind of digging implements. What do you think those things are?”
“Teaspoons,” said Nana. “They’d be better off with cereal spoons, but there was a run on ’em at breakfast this mornin’.” She pulled an enormous spoon from the pocket of her jacket and regarded it proudly. “I got the last one.”
I shook my head. “So tomorrow’s breakfast crowd shovels down their Cocoa Puffs with what? Forks?”
“But, Emily, don’t you think it’s suspicious that them two are here lookin’ for” — she sidled a look at Jonathan — “you know what? They got a map and everythin’.”
I sighed. “I’d be all over them if they were the only ones digging. But look at this place! Everyone’s digging. Everyone has a map!”
“That’s the thing, dear.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Bernice didn’t sell them two girls a map. She didn’t have to. They already had one.”
My eyelids flapped up into my head like jet-powered window shades. “Excuse me?”
Jonathan made a choking sound beside me. “That’s her.” Spinning around so that his back was facing the digging activity, he angled his head toward me and said in a stage whisper, “The blonde with Beth’s tattoo. She’s here!” He stabbed a finger toward the humpbacked rock.
I looked from the blonde, to Jonathan, to the blonde again. That’s the blonde he was talking about? She really got around. Staring daggers at Professor Smoker yesterday afternoon and cussing out Bailey last night. And…she had a map. The synapses in my brain started firing off like the cannon section in the 1812 Overture. Okay, now I was suspicious. I was really suspicious.
“I’m so nervous, my knees are shaking,” Jonathan confessed as he straightened his hat. “Did she catch me looking at her? Is she staring at me?”
He was wearing earflaps. Everyone was staring at him.
“IS THERE SOMEBODY HERE NAMED EMILY ANDREW?” a male voice belted out.
I looked out across the grounds to find a middle-aged guy in a lime green muscle shirt and flowered shorts waving a baseball cap in the air. I waved back. “I’m Emily!” But who in the world was he?
He trotted the short distance toward me, the flab beneath his muscle shirt bouncing up and down like the contents of a half-filled water balloon. He gave me a flinty look as he slapped a cell phone into my hand. “It’s for you. And I don’t give a damn if it is an emergency. I have to pay the roaming charges, so you better make it short.”
“An emergency?” I stared at the phone in dread. Oh, God. Had something happened to Mom or Dad? My brother Steve or his wife? The boys? Heart hammering in my chest, I raised the phone to my ear. “H-hello?”
“Ciao, bella.”
“Etienne? Oh, my God. Are you all right? What’s happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”
“You’re angry with me,” he said rather tightly in his beautiful French/German/Italian accent. “That should explain exactly what’s wrong.”
I opened my mouth to reply, my thought process derailed by the three curious sets of eyes riveted directly on me.
“You needn’t deny it,” Etienne continued. “You left without calling. You didn’t send a good-bye email. I feel fortunate that you bothered to send me your itinerary.”
I smiled stiffly at my expectant audience. “Hold on, would you?” I said to Etienne. Then to the trio, “It doesn’t sound good. You suppose I could have a little privacy?”
Mr. Muscle Shirt executed a serious eye roll before jabbing a finger in the direction of where he was digging. “I’ll be over there when you’re done.”
Nana took Jonathan by the arm. “You go ahead, dear. Don’t fret none about us. We’ll just mosey around some.”
I settled on a nearby rock, my initial dread transforming into butterflies. “I’m back,” I said into the phone. “But you have me really freaked out. How did you know that guy was on the kayak adventure with me? How did you know he had a cell phone? How did you get the number?”
“I’m a police inspector, Emily. I do things like that regularly.”
“Yeah, well —”
“Do you want to tell me why you’re angry with me?”
I pinched my lips and stared dismally into space. “I was hoping we might have this conversation in person.”
“This is the best I can do for the moment. I’m working a big case that’s just come in, so —”
“You’re always working a big case.” I heaved a despairing sigh. “You’re always…busy.”
Silence.
I watched Nana pop the cap off a Magic Marker and scribble something on Jonathan’s cast. Aw, that was so sweet.
I heard throat clearing on the other end of the phone. “Long-distance relationships are the hardest relationships to maintain,” Etienne said with well-practiced Swiss logic.
Okay, that was encouraging. At least he was thinking about the “r” word. “You’ve finally come to that conclusion, have you?”
“One of my coworkers just bought a satellite dish. He saw it on an American television show. Have you ever heard of Dr. Phil?”
Men! How could they all be so clueless? What caused it? Testosterone? Beer? Drinking directly out of refrigerator milk cartons?
“Am I ever going to see you again?” I pressed, my heart breaking. “Because I feel as if you’ve put me on a shelf where all I’m doing is gathering dust.”
“Emily, darling, I —”
“No, don’t ‘darling’ me! Just let me finish. I don’t need a lot of glitz and glitter. I just want what my mom and dad have. What Nana and Grampa Sippel had. A simple life with each other. A shared future. Laughter. It’s not flashy; it’s not always perfect. But it’s quiet, and steady, and in its own way, it’s magical.” Th
e line crackled with static. “Hello? Are you still there?”
“I want those things, too,” he said in a voice that could have melted wax. “I love you, Emily.”
“I love you, too, but —”
“Don’t give up on me, bella. Please.”
I watched Nana drag Jonathan toward the rock where the cheerleaders were digging, and thrust her Magic Marker at them.
“You mean everything to me, Emily. I want what you want, but mostly what I want is…you. Beside me. Naked, except for a ring on your finger.”
Ring? Ring was good. Ring was very good! I watched the brunette inscribe Jonathan’s cast and hand off the Magic Marker to the blonde.
“Emily, will you believe me when I tell you this situation between us is going to change soon? Not months. Not weeks. But very soon?”
“What about the big case you’re working on?”
“Perhaps big cases don’t have a part in my life anymore. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your parents yet, darling, but I want what they have, too. Especially if it includes you.”
“What about your family reunion? Does the ‘naked’ and the ‘ring’ part come before or after your Nonna Annunziata’s approval?”
He laughed. “You need no one’s approval, bella, but perhaps you’d set the date aside anyway. Sicily is beautiful at that time of year, and I know an out-of-the-way cove that no one visits, except for an occasional gull. We’d have the whole beach to ourselves, and we wouldn’t even have to heat up the massage oil.” His voice dipped to a husky whisper. “The sun could do it for us.”
Oh, God. If I said no, would I be ruining the best chance I’d ever have for true love? What if he really was willing to change? Did I love him enough to give him one more chance? Was happiness waiting just beyond this hurdle, or was my life heading toward the “Why Did This Relationship Fail?” section of some woman’s magazine?
“Emily?” he prompted.
I watched the blonde slap the Magic Marker back into Nana’s hand and return to her digging, never raising her head as Nana tried to strike up a conversation. After a few moments of being ignored, Jonathan clutched Nana’s arm and assisted her around the pit. It was kind of sweet the way he held her forearm, guiding her to safer ground. The same way Grampa Sippel used to do when he’d take her ice fishing with him. I sat mutely for a heartbeat, wondering what she’d give to have Grampa back again.
