Sleeping Beauty (68 page)

She looked up and met his eyes, and they exchanged a smile. She did not probe how she felt, or even wonder about it; she just let it settle within her. She trusted him; it felt right that they were together, in this safe haven, while the storm built outside.

“This is a good place to be,” Josh said casually. He was organizing place mats, plates, and wineglasses on a tray. “It wouldn't be hard to forget that, as our friend Tyler said, we've got a hell of a mess here.” He paused, contemplating the silverware in his hand, then laid it on the plates. “Except that we can't forget it. And you're right; I have to figure out what comes next.” He took napkins from a drawer and folded them. “And there's the rest of it. What we can do for Leo and Gail. And the whole town. I don't see anybody having an easy time in the next few days or weeks. Unless we find out that one of my trusted workmen had a grudge against Leo or the company—I don't believe it, but—”

“No, I don't believe it, either.” Anne stirred the pasta sauce with a long wooden spoon. Tendrils of steam wound upward, curling around her white sweater and flushed face. She was more relaxed than Josh had ever seen her. She was stunningly beautiful, and there was a new serenity in her face that drew him toward her and made him ache to take her in his arms. “Something is terribly wrong here, Josh. It's not logical for a workman, or anyone, to put that bolt in your Dumpster. There are trash cans all over town between the gondola and Riverwood; there's no reason to choose someone's home unless—”

“It was supposed to be found,” Josh finished quietly.

“Which means someone had to find it.” They carried the tray and bowls of food to the living room and arranged them on the glass coffee table. “There's only one way that could
happen. There wasn't any search for it; it would take an army to go through every Dumpster and garbage can in Tamarack, and it would be weeks before they got to Riverwood.”

“So someone told them where to look.”

“Yes.”

Josh was at the fireplace, lighting the kindling. He knelt there, staring at the thin flames as the wood caught. “I don't know anyone who hates me enough to do that.”

“It may be someone who thinks you're convenient because you left town that day. Something like that.”

He shook his head. “It still wouldn't make sense. I haven't the remotest reason to damage the gondola.”

“Or Tamarack?”

He turned to her sharply. “You know I haven't.”

“Pretend you're Tyler. Someone calls you and tells you the missing bolt from the gondola is at Josh Durant's house, and sure enough you find it there. What do you know about Josh Durant? It's pretty certain you know about the tour of the gondola; you told me you talked to a few people when you were there. And anyway, you weren't trying to keep it secret. And a lot of people know you left town the morning of the accident. And then there were the Egyptian investors.”

“Tyler doesn't know about them.”

“He might. That wasn't a secret, either, and anybody who was at dinner on Christmas might have told other people.”

Josh sat beside her on the couch, watching the fire. “So what? I only found them; I don't have anything to do with their buying into the company.” He paused. “Unless Tyler thinks I do. That I'm using them. That I'm the one who really wants to buy into it. But that's crazy, too. He has no evidence for that; no reason even to think it.”

“No. Unless . . . Unless someone suggested it to him.”

“Why would—? Well, I suppose if we believe someone led Tyler to my house to find the bolt, we can believe someone would suggest almost anything to him. But what would he do with it? Why would I sabotage the gondola and send all the tourists scurrying home? Nobody's lining up to buy a
business in trouble—” He stopped. “But of course the price would be lower.”

“Yes.” There was a silence. “I don't believe it,” Anne said decisively. “It's too weak. No prosecutor would go to court with it.”

“If that's all they've got,” Josh said.

“Can you think of anything else?”

“No, but I wouldn't have thought of stringing those things together and coming up with that conclusion, either.”

“I'm going to call Kevin,” Anne said. “I don't think they have any kind of case against you, but he may see things I don't. Anyway, he has to be part of this. He can join us for coffee.”

But when she returned to the living room, she told Josh he had an appointment for the next morning, in Kevin's office. “He doesn't want to go out; he says we've had six inches of snow already and they're predicting fourteen to twenty.”

Josh was opening the bottle of wine he had brought from the wine cellar. “I'll have to borrow Leo's snowshoes to get home,” he murmured absently.

Anne went to the front door and opened it. A blast of wind blew snow across her stockinged feet. The snow was falling steadily, a heavy curtain of flakes shining in white streaks in the light from the lanterns flanking the door. “I don't think you should go anywhere, with or without snowshoes,” she said. “Kevin's right; it's a night to stay home.” She slammed the door against the wind, and locked it.

Josh looked up. “I'd like that, if you don't mind. As I recall, this house is full of guest rooms.”

Anne felt a rush of gratitude and warmth at his casual matter-of-factness. They would have a night straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. She wondered if that was easier for Josh than for most men because he spent so much time in the past. She smiled to herself. I'll have to ask him sometime, she thought.

“Three,” she said, as casually as he. “One is mine; you have your choice of the other two. Gail keeps them ready; they're always having unexpected guests.”

“Good. I'll tell Kevin whatever you and I decide tonight.”

Anne smiled faintly. “This isn't my specialty, Josh; I don't want you to think I can do the same kind of work I do in divorces.”

“I like the way you work.” He poured some of the deep red Barolo into his glass and tasted it. “And I admire Leo's cellar. I keep finding more reasons for cherishing him as a neighbor.”

“If he stays here. I don't know what's going to happen with the company.”

Josh filled their glasses. “Dinner,” he said, and handed her a plate.

“Thank you. I can't believe it, with everything that's going on, but I'm starved.”

Josh raised his glass. They were sitting close to each other; when Anne touched her glass to his, their hands brushed. “To my lawyer,” he said.

“To my client,” she responded easily.

They filled their plates and ate quietly for a few minutes, watching the fire curl and leap around the piñon logs. “This might become a habit,” Josh said thoughtfully. “The first time we planned to go out to dinner, we changed our minds and cooked together in my apartment.”

“Last September,” Anne murmured.

“The eighteenth,” Josh added. “We raided the freezer that night, too. You wore red silk. And we listened to Beethoven and Mozart.”

Anne remembered. The evening had been warm and uncomplicated; more pleasant than she had anticipated. But still, all during it, and in all their times together after that, there had been her wariness, her instinctive withdrawals, her fears. She watched the leaping flames and wondered what had happened in the months from that night to this to make everything feel so right. Time, she thought. Weeks and months when Josh was becoming part of her life, slowly, gradually, without planning or pressure. And something else. Tonight he was in trouble and she was helping him. Tonight, for the first time, she did not feel he stood on an indestructible platform of triumphs while she balanced on a
fragile base patched together by her defenses. She had always been able to help strangers; now she could help someone close to her, and that gave her a new feeling of strength, and ease.

She put her plate aside. “We have to talk about strategy.”

Josh nodded. “Yes. But I have a favor to ask. We have all tonight, and early tomorrow, for strategy, and I'm in no hurry to get to it. If someone's trying to frame me, it won't change in the next few hours, and at the moment it seems a lot more manageable than it did earlier tonight. Wine and the fire, I suppose, and being with you; I just can't work up a strong sense of urgency right now. What I really want is to tell you about Egypt. I've been wanting to since we took the first step into the tomb.” He shook his head. “It seems like years ago. It's the damndest thing; I was flying so high; I'd found everything I'd dreamed of and I knew you'd be waiting for me . . . And then Tyler was there and it all blew up.”

Anne was watching him somberly, offering no soothing words, waiting for him to work out his feelings by himself. “But that's for tomorrow,” he said. “For tonight I want to get back to the wonder and beauty of what I found, and I want to do it with you. One of these days, when we get through this damn business, I want to take you there, but for now I want to tell you about the tomb and try to make you see it. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “I'd like that very much.”

He refilled their wineglasses and reached behind him, turning off the lamp, leaving the room in darkness except for the bright, dancing light of the flames. Anne's face glowed in the firelight and he wondered if his face looked the same: warm, rosy, peaceful. They could sit here all night, he thought, with the storm outside and the fire within; this was their time, separate from the rest of the world. They would be inundated with everything else quickly enough, the next day. “I don't have photographs or slides,” he said. “I haven't had them developed. All I have are words—”

“And passion,” Anne said softly. “And I'd like to share
that with you, and everything you saw. Through your words, and your voice.”

Josh felt a rush of joy. Instinctively, he put out his hand to take hers. But he stopped before he touched her. Not yet, he thought, not tonight; one step at a time.

“The door had been plastered over,” he began. And his voice filled the quiet room, and Anne's imagination.

*   *   *

“THE NEW KING TUT!” trumpeted newspapers and television commentators the next day, as soon as the Egyptian government and the Los Angeles Museum of the Ancient World jointly announced the finding of Tenkaure's tomb. “UCLA PROFESSOR DISCOVERS TOMB OF KING TENK!” “TOMB INTACT, FILLED WITH FABULOUS RICHES!” “TOMB'S TREASURES TOP TUT'S!”

Like homing pigeons, the reporters swooped down on Los Angeles. When they learned that Josh was not there, they wheeled about and flew straight to Tamarack. For some of them, it was the second time in a week; they had been there to cover the gondola crash. For the science reporters, it was the first time, and they used the flight to read hastily purchased histories of Egypt, especially the tumultuous times in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

And then, when they got to Tamarack and were renting cars and buying maps of the town, some of them picked up a local paper and read that Josh Durant, the famous archaeologist, had been charged with causing the gondola accident, and was out on bond.

It was a reporter's dream: two major stories in one place with one villain who was also a hero, or the other way around. “FIRST A TOMB, THEN A CELL?” headlined
USA Today,
and the New York
Daily News
shouted, “PHARAOH-FINDING PROF NABBED FOR GONDOLA CRASH.” The headlines were picked up by papers around the country and reported with flourishes on television's morning shows and evening news. Only the
Los Angeles Times
was restrained, since Josh was one of theirs.

The reporters camped at his house, their cars parked
along the narrow road in a scraggly line that stretched almost the full mile to Gail and Leo's house. On the day they came home from Albuquerque, the cars were the first thing they saw. Leo looked at them in bewilderment as Gail turned into the road to their house, driving between the high banks made by the snowplow early that morning, when the storm ended. They had gone straight to the Tamarack hospital from the airport, to spend the afternoon with Robin and Ned. Now it was almost dark, and the clouds were low again; more snow was predicted. Leo strained to see how far the cars stretched. “What's going on? Nobody has a party at four in the afternoon.”

“It has to be reporters, because of Josh,” Gail said. “Damn them, why can't they leave him alone? Why didn't the storm hang on so none of them could get there? How did they even know he was here? Someone in Los Angeles must have told them. Why couldn't they keep it to themselves?”

“It's too good a story,” Leo said. He got out of the car, carrying himself carefully so he would not jar any bones and send tremors through his aching head. “I guess that's why we couldn't get him on the phone this morning; he's probably not answering it. Let's go over there; he's practically under siege.”

“You can try to call him again, but you're not going there,” Gail said firmly. “You know what the doctor—”

“Right, I know. But I have to get to the office tomorrow, Gail. You're going to drive me and I'll be fine.”

“I know you will,” Gail said. She walked beside him into the house. “I'm not so sure about Tamarack. Or us.”

“They're all coming over tonight, aren't they?” Leo asked abruptly.

“All of them but Vince; he told William he had to stay in Denver. I tried to make them wait a few days, but they're scared. They want to sell, right away, to anybody who comes up with a decent offer.”

“They promised to wait for those Egyptians. What's got into them?”

Gail shook her head. “I didn't tell you in the hospital; the Egyptians changed their mind.”

Leo swore softly. “It's a good thing Robin and Ned aren't home yet; I wouldn't want them here tonight.” He walked carefully to his study off the living room.