The Island of Dangerous Dreams (2 page)

“How about you?” I whispered. “I thought you cared about me.”

He shook his head and stepped away from me. “It’s over, Andy,”

“No! Rick, if you could just try to understand about Mrs. Lankersham—”

“It’s not just the Mrs. Lankersham thing. It’s—well, it’s just time for both of us to move on.”

“I don’t believe it,” I insisted. “I won’t!”

“You’re making this tougher than it needs to be.”

I could feel the tears on my cheeks, but I didn’t try to brush them away. “
I’m
making it tough?” I shouted at him. “Don’t try to blame
me
!”

Rick just shrugged. “Grow up, Andy,” he said.

I watched him walk away. I would never forget that moment.

“Andy.” Mom laid her hand on mine, jolting me back to the present. “I also thought that you might like to get away from Bayport for a while.” She added hesitantly, “Now that you and Rick aren’t dating any longer.”

“That sounds too final,” I said quickly, her words making everything even worse. “Maybe …”

I stopped, and Mom tried a tentative smile. “Honey, you have to face facts. Rick’s dating another girl. It’s time for you to go out with other boys.”

“I don’t want to. It wouldn’t be any fun.”

“You’re only seventeen, Andy, and Rick was just a first love.”

I stubbornly shook my head, but she didn’t stop.

“You have to let go,” Mom said.

I folded my arms tightly across my chest and said, “I don’t want to talk about Rick.”

“Okay,” Mom answered. “Then let’s talk about your father and me. We’re honestly trying to work out our problems, and I know that we will, given a little quiet time together.”

They wanted me out of the way, while at the same time I wanted to cling to them. I tried to hide the pain and keep it light. “Get rid of the kid,” I said. “Send her to the movies. Ship her off to camp. Sell her to the gypsies.”

“Andrea!”

I winced at the hurt in her eyes. “Take it easy, Mom,” I said. “You’ve heard of ‘laughing to keep from crying.’ I’m trying to tell you that I want things to work out too. Of course I’ll help. I’ll go to visit Aunt Madelyn.”

“Thank you,” Mom said.

“Will Madelyn?”

“Will Madelyn what?”

“Thank me for coming? I can’t imagine her wanting to have me as a houseguest for a whole month.”

However, Madelyn wrote a lovely, gracious letter of invitation in a backhand script as elegant as her thick, cream-colored stationery. I accepted on a sheet from a speckled-gray, recycled notepad that was the only paper I could find in the house.

More than a dozen times during the next few
days I stood by the telephone, staring at it. Maybe if I called Rick, maybe if he heard my voice …

“Don’t go, Andy,” he’d say. “I’ve missed you. I want to see you again. Now.”

Once I even picked up the receiver and dialed the first three digits of his phone number. But I couldn’t go through with it. I’d call when I came back. That would be a good time to work things out. Not now, but after I came home again. If Mom and Dad could solve their problems—and they would, they had to!—then why couldn’t Rick and I?

While I packed my shorts, T-shirts, and jeans, I tried to keep from thinking about Rick and zeroed in on positive thoughts about visiting Madelyn. Palm Beach was practically next door to Disney World and not very far from the Everglades and Cypress Gardens and all sorts of neat touristy stuff. Surely Aunt Madelyn would want to entertain her one and only niece by going with me to all these places. Wouldn’t she?

It didn’t take long after I arrived in Palm Beach to find out that she wouldn’t.

“This is a golden opportunity for you to broaden your horizons,” Madelyn informed me. “We’ll give you a good introduction to the world of art.”

“I know something about art,” I told her. “Last summer I did some volunteer work at our Bayport science museum, and the museum chairman, Dr. Sammy Kirschman, was a real nut on South American artifacts.”

“A ‘real nut on artifacts’?” Madelyn mimicked. “I do believe, Andrea, that there is a great deal
more about art for you to discover.” Aunt Madelyn looked at me as though she’d been handed a hopeless case, and we set off in her little white BMW for a tour of her favorite art museum—the Sartington, where she was curator. It was the first art museum of many.

I have nothing against art museums. In fact, I really like art museums. Mom and I often go to the Houston Museum of Fine Art when we’re in the city, and once, on vacation, Dad, Mom, and I spent a whole, wonderful day in the big Art Institute in Chicago. We saw what we wanted to and skipped the exhibits we didn’t like, and nobody at either place asked questions to see if I was paying attention.

On my fourth day in Palm Beach, Madelyn and I drove down the coast to visit a museum where Aunt Madelyn had an appointment with the curator. She left me in the South and Central American room among the squatty clay figures and broken pots.

“You’ll enjoy this display, since you have a smattering of information on artifacts,” she said. “The museum has a few excellent pieces of hammered-gold jewelry from the Mayan period that will fascinate you. We’ll discuss them when I get back.”

I hated to admit to myself that Aunt Madelyn could be right, but when I found the case containing the gold jewelry and stared inside, my eyes widened with surprise. It wasn’t the same kind of gold that was in Mom’s wedding ring or Dad’s wristwatch. It was a deeper yellow and looked softer and more pliable. There were crude marks
from what must have been some kind of mallet, but at the same time there was a delicate intricacy in the designs.

A guard sauntered into the room and stood nearby.

I looked up at him and smiled.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered, “but they don’t belong here.”

He stretched his neck to glance into the case, as though we weren’t talking about the same thing. “Sure, they do.” His voice was puzzled. “They’re the property of the museum.”

I shook my head. “They’re really the property of the country of Mexico.”

“Naw,” he said, while he studied me to see if I was joking. “The museum owns all this stuff in here.”

“It was stolen,” I told him, and proceeded to fill him in on everything Dr. Kirschman had told us about how countries desperately try to hang on to their artifacts, but looters steal them from archaeological digs and sell them to people who smuggle them into the United States to brokers. Then brokers here sell the artifacts to certain art dealers, who in turn sell them to wealthy art collectors anywhere in the world. I even told him what Dr. Kirschman said about some collectors paying so much money that a lot of crooks who specialize in art theft had gotten into the act.

The guard blinked a couple of times after I finished and said, “Are you trying to tell me that this museum is dealing in stolen artifacts?”

“No,” I said. I bent to peer at the card in the
corner of the case. “These pieces were donated. But the person who donated them knew they were stolen.”

He looked puzzled and shrugged. “Does it make any difference how or why the artifacts got here?”

“Of course it does,” I said. “It does to me. It should to everybody. Stealing is stealing, whether it’s from somebody’s house or somebody’s country.”

Aunt Madelyn walked toward us so quickly that her high heels on the marble floor click-clacked as fast as typewriter keys. “Andrea,” she said, “I’ve had an important phone call. We’ve got to get back to my office.”

As we hurried out I looked back at the guard, who was bent over, scowling at the contents of the glass case filled with Mayan gold.

Aunt Madelyn drove too fast and kept drumming her fingertips on the steering wheel. I think she forgot I was seated next to her, because a couple of times she mumbled something to herself.

It made me nervous. Just a few more miles per hour and we probably would get a good aerial view of the highway. I knew she hadn’t filed a flight plan. I decided to break into her private world of race-car driving by saying something subtle, so I blurted out, “That must have been some telephone message!”

Aunt Madelyn’s lips parted in surprise and she gave me a quick glance, swerving into the next lane and near-missing a camper truck. In return the driver tried to damage our eardrums with a long blast on his horn.

The combination must have worked. Aunt Madelyn’s right foot eased up on the accelerator and she leaned back against the seat, taking a long breath. “The phone message,” she repeated. “Oh, yes. The call was from a friend of mine.”

“Urgent?”

“Moderately so.”

I wasn’t going to figure that one out. “A male friend,” I decided aloud.

“A
business
friend, Judge Justin Arlington-Hughes,” Madelyn said, with the same hungry eagerness that she had used in the restaurant last night when she’d ordered a lobster soufflé. “I think he called because …”

She stopped, so I asked, “Because why?”

Madelyn shrugged. “I’m not going to second-guess.”

“Good idea,” I said in an attempt to keep the conversation rolling, but she slipped me one of those narrow-eyed, probing glances, as though she thought I was trying to be funny, and stopped talking to me. I used the time to think about Rick. I missed him terribly. Mom was wrong in telling me I had to let go. She didn’t understand how much I cared about Rick.

It didn’t take long to get back to Palm Beach and to the Sartington Museum, which was an elegant one-storied, gleaming-white building set like a centerpiece in its own little park of tropical yellow calla lilies, scarlet salvia, and gaudy purslane. We entered the carved doors of the museum under an arch of bougainvillaea that dripped clusters of dark red blossoms. The blond woman at the
desk in the entry hall looked up and smiled, as did the guard, who actually touched the brim of his cap to Aunt Madelyn.

The entry hall to the museum was an intimidating expanse of cool white marble. In the center of the hall stood a pedestal, upon which was a curled stone something that stared at me with one large blank eye. I got out of its line of vision by trotting after Madelyn into her nearby office.

It didn’t help. Dominating her office was a painting of two flat, purple people with double profiles, their tongues hanging out, and large round holes through their chests. They stared at me too. Pointedly ignoring them and hoping they’d get the hint, I dropped into a chair and thumbed through a magazine—art magazine, of course—while Madelyn called her friend, the judge. Finally she hung up the receiver and hurried around the desk. I jumped to my feet.

Madelyn clutched my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length and grinning so broadly that her face scrunched into a grimace. I could feel energy vibrating through her fingertips like a burst of electricity.

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “I can’t!”

“Believe what?” I tried to wiggle away from her hold.

Her smile crinkled again, making little cracks in her makeup. “I’ll get to that later,” she said. “First, I can tell you that Judge Arlington-Hughes has extended an invitation to spend the weekend at his home in the Bahamas.”

This caught my attention fast. I’d seen pictures
of those white sand beaches! “It’s nice of him to help you entertain me.”

“He doesn’t exactly know about you yet,” she said, “but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be included.”

She seemed very sure, so I didn’t worry about it. “Is his house near Nassau?”

Madelyn shook her head. “No. It’s not really far from the coast of Florida. The judge owns a small island in the Little Bahama Banks.”

“A whole island? Wow!”

Madelyn stepped back and smiled a catlike, secret smile. “Now, for the big news. I want you to keep this information to yourself, Andrea. This invitation was not given for purely social reasons. Justin has come into possession of a glorious Peruvian artifact and will show it to me there. I know he’ll give the Sartington first chance to purchase it.”

“Where did the artifact come from?” I asked her.

She blinked and, as though she were speaking to someone who wasn’t all there, said slowly, “From Peru, Andrea. I told you that.”

“I mean, has the artifact been in this country for a long time, or was it just smuggled in from Peru?”

She just stared at me, so I went on. “I wish you could meet Dr. Kirschman,” I added. “He’s the most terrific science teacher. You’d like him. Everybody likes him. Anyhow, last summer Dr. Kirschman told us that most countries in South and Central America have laws to prevent people from taking artifacts outside their countries, and
yet people steal them. Can you believe it? Stealing important parts of a country’s past?”

Aunt Madelyn gave me one of those impatient looks that I’d begun getting used to. “My dear girl,” she said, “you obviously know nothing about art collecting.”

“I know that a lot of the collections owned by wealthy collectors in this country are made up of stolen artifacts,” I told her. “And a lot of museums once got their collections in the same way. It isn’t right, Aunt Madelyn. It isn’t fair.”

She made an impatient shooing motion with her right hand. “But it’s business,” she said.

I was shocked. “Is the artifact stolen?” I asked. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Darling Andrea, if you had the vaguest idea of the type of work I do, you would know that there are times it is best
not
to ask questions.”

“Your judge friend stole the artifact.”

“Of course he didn’t! He—he obtained it from someone.”

“Who stole it.”

“Andrea! I should just leave you here!”

I thought about those clean beaches with the clear, turquoise water I’d seen in photographs and said quickly, “No. I’d rather go with you.”

“Then promise you’ll keep your opinions to yourself!” Aunt Madelyn said. “This will be a business deal with no room for childish, ignorant, pseudo-moralizing.”

One of the purple profiles looked as though it was about to gag. I didn’t want to stay and see if it would. “I’ll keep quiet,” I answered.

“Very well then,” she said, still irritated enough to add a miffed sniff. “Go to the ladies’ room and comb your hair. We’re going to meet Justin for lunch.”