High Tide (31 page)

Narrowing her eyes at him, she held out her hand. “Show me.”

After a look about him to check that they weren't being watched, and with a chuckle, he handed her two gold nails.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“I know you. You're not one of those Southern gentlemen who helps ladies over fallen logs. You're more of a Get-offyourrear-and-let's-
do
-it sort of guy, so when I saw you helping Lisa, I figured you were up to something, like hiding the fact that you were pulling nails out of trees.”

“Lisa thinks I'm a gentleman,” Ace said with a bit of a smile.

“Lisa likes your money, and if you don't know that, you aren't the man I thought you were.”

At that Ace grabbed her, pulled her into his arms, and began kissing her. “I've missed you,” he said as he kissed her
hair and her eyes. “Do you hate me? I never meant to lie to you, but—”

“I know,” she whispered as her mouth hungrily ran over his neck. “I know. You're sick of women who want you for your money.”

“I never had a chance with a woman who didn't know who my family was, and—”

He didn't say any more, because his hand was on her breast and moving lower. And Fiona's knees were giving way as they both began to sink to the ground. Around them were luxurious jungle plants, and overhead the birds called to each other, and Fiona had never wanted anything like she wanted this man. It didn't matter that there were other people not more than twenty feet away. For all the two of them were aware of other people, they could have been alone on an island.

But Lisa's frantic screams brought them back to reality.

“What now?” Fiona murmured. “She see a spider?”

But Ace had lifted his head to listen; then in the next second, they heard the unmistakable sound of a shot, followed instantly by another one.

Fiona started to plow through the brush to go back to camp, but Ace grabbed her arm and led her around, quietly through the plants, so they were entering the camp from a different angle. At one point he halted, put his finger to his lips, then gestured. Fiona stood perfectly still while a snake that had to be forty feet long slowly slithered past them. When it was gone, he motioned to her to continue walking.

“Poisonous, right?” she whispered.

“Deadly.”

“Of course.”

He broke through the plants, then stood for a moment staring; then, frowning, he turned back to Fiona and shrugged his shoulders in puzzlement. She stepped forward and looked ahead. Jeremy, Suzie, and Gibby were staring down at something on the ground. Lisa was lounging against a tree root looking as though she were about to die.

“She saw the snake,” Fiona said in disgust.

“And they shot each other in terror,” Ace added jokingly; then they both smiled.

Straightening, Ace left the shrubs and walked toward the campers. “I want to know who has a firearm,” he said. “And I want it turned over to me now.”

Lisa, who moments before looked as though she were dying, leaped up and threw her arms about Ace's neck. “It was me. I found her. She was … Oh, Ace, honey, it was horrible. I don't know how I'm going to recover from this. My therapist—”

Looking up, Ace saw Suzie step back from the little circle, and her hands made a motion that meant, Come and see for yourself.

And when Suzie stepped back, Fiona could see into the group. There on the ground, wearing men's overalls and a plaid flannel shirt buttoned up to her neck, was Rose.

“Not again,” Fiona sighed, hands on hips.

“What does she mean, ‘Not again'?” Lisa half screamed. “Ace, that woman is
dead
. Doesn't she realize that? What is wrong with her?”

Ace peeled Lisa's arms from around his neck, then walked to the body. “I guess it's too late to try to see footprints that we could follow.”

Fiona didn't want to think about what the reappearance of Rose's body meant. They were being watched, being followed. She glanced down at the clothes Rose had been shoved into. “All cotton,” she said. “At least she's still ‘natural.'”

At that the fear left Suzie and Ace too, and they began to laugh.

“You three are sick,” Jeremy said. “You're really sick. I'm beginning to think that you
did
kill that nice old man, Roy Hudson.”

At that Ace spun around and grabbed Jeremy's shirtfront. Jeremy had discarded his too-hot jacket long ago.

“That's right, lawyer, we are all sick. And the person or persons who keep killing everyone involved in this is even sicker. Now, I want you to give me your gun, and do it now.”

“I live in New York; I have a permit,” Jeremy said, trying to pull himself up to his full height, but the top of his head only touched Ace's chin.

“This is not New York, this is
my
land, and here I'm the king, got it? Give me the gun.”

Reluctantly, with a face that threatened, but with no words, Jeremy handed Ace the small handgun he had carried inside his coat pocket.

Ace put the gun in his backpack, then started to put the pack on. “From now on, everyone stays together. There is someone following us, someone ahead of us. Anyone have any questions?”

“We aren't going to leave her here, are we?” Lisa asked in a whisper.

“Would you like to take her back to the cabin?” Ace asked, his eyes cold. “Would you like to move away from the
protection of the group and go back there alone? Is that what you want to do?”

“I don't see why you have to be so rude about it,” Lisa said, sticking out her lower lip. “Maybe you two are used to seeing murdered people, but Jeremy and I aren't.”

At that Ace blinked a couple of times, then looked from Lisa to Jeremy, then to Fiona. And when he looked at Fiona, he gave her a little smile before turning away.

“I'll lead because I know where we're going,” Ace said. “Burke, you stay near me, Suzie behind her, then Lisa and the lawyer. Gibby, you bring up the rear.” He looked at the older man. “How well armed are you?”

Fiona looked at Gibby. “Two pistols and a knife in his boot,” she said softly.

The old man smiled at her. “And … ?”

“I don't think I'll tell,” she said, smiling at him.

Gibby winked at her, then looked at Ace. “I'm armed well enough. Lead on, and, this time, I think you should lead us
all
the right way.”

Ace gave him an answering smile before turning away and starting to walk again. Once they were going, Ace said over his shoulder to Fiona, “Get what was left of the papers from her and read them to me.”

It took Fiona a second to translate his command, but she understood that he wanted the coffee-soaked papers that contained the story of how the lions got to be where they are. When her father had written her the story of
Raffles,
she had been immobile, so she'd read the story with intense interest. But when he'd sent the story about the golden lions, she'd been in the middle of a soccer tournament and she'd
paid little attention to what was on paper, much to the chagrin of her teachers. Therefore, she didn't remember much of the story.

Suzie had heard the “command” and she had the papers out and ready.

“They really are a mess,” Fiona said to Ace, doing her best to stay beside him as they walked. If she weren't as tall as he was, she'd never manage, and she was tempted to look back to see how short little Lisa was doing, but she restrained herself. Maybe Ace was trying to get rid of them. And maybe he knew that the two of them were the targets of whoever was out there, so he wanted to separate them from the group. So we can be shot first, she thought with a gulp.

“Well?” Ace snapped when she was silent for so long.

“It's difficult to make out,” she said. “There are just phrases, parts of sentences that I can read. But here goes. ‘Weather thick and foggy; two days later fog lifted; land straight ahead, black towering cliff face four hundred feet tall. Wind dropped; eerie calm descended; ship drifted toward cliff with everyone knowing it was going to crash. But cliffs seemed to …' I can't read this. ‘They … opened up,' I think it says. Yes. ‘The cliffs opened up as they approached their doom.
Something, something.
Ship drifted into cavern in rocks until mainmast ground against cave roof and ship wedged.
Something
… Ship sank before dawn.'

“There's a lot of missing text here. Someone, I can't read the name, was planning to seize the ship, but it wrecked before he could take over. After the wreck, he grabbed jewels and took command of the island. This is funny and I remember this. This horrible man dressed in scarlet robes from
fabric from the wreck. He was violent and autocratic. Killed one hundred twenty-five survivors, including women and children, and made Lucinda his mistress.”

She looked up from the torn, stained papers. “Even in the original there was no explanation of who Lucinda was, but at the time I remember imagining how beautiful she was. I thought …” A look from Ace made her look back at the papers.

“Let's see … Another man on the island, Williams, had forty followers and was able to repulse two attacks. He finally made a surprise attack and took … I can't read the name.

“Anyway, he took the bad guy prisoner. Then there's a lot missing here, but it seems that the captain of the ship and forty-five others had sailed for help and had returned, and when they got back, the bad guy, along with his henchmen, surrendered and were taken back to … wherever the ship came from and hanged.” Fiona began to riffle through the pages.

“Let's see … These other pages—oh, I see, they're the middle of the story. Everything is out of order. There's a long description of what the people went through while they were stranded on the island. I can only make out phrases.

“‘… drunk off of salvaged bottles of muscatel, ate cheeses and olives … built a camp of huts with palm-leaf roofs, decorated with Flanders tapestries … Apes on island, stole their food. They …'”

Fiona held the papers up and twisted them about. “ ‘They shot some …' I guess they shot the monkeys, but the flesh was nasty tasting … Oh! This is interesting. The island wasn't uninhabited as some of the sailors seem to have been eaten by natives. What else? ‘They … created saws out of
swords.' That sounds sensible. And … yes, ‘They killed a fifteen-foot crocodile, roasted it and ate it.' I think it says that the meat was very good.”

“It is,” Ace said succinctly. “What else?”

“‘They … met …' I can't make it out. Oh, yes. ‘They met the local king, gave him gifts of textiles, glass goblets, mirrors … and …' No, I can't make it out.

“That's all I can read except …” Fiona smiled. “I think it says that Sophia fell into a succession of fainting fits.”

“All that is very interesting,” Ace said, “but what about the lions?”

“Either the part about them is on the coffee-soaked pages and I can't read it, or this story doesn't match the map that was sent that year.”

“You don't remember anything about golden lions in any of the stories?” he asked, and his tone said that she was a moron for not remembering something so important.

“Don't start on me,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “You grew up in this swamp, on the site of the map, so why didn't you find the nails and the lions when you were a kid?”

“Actually, I did.”

That statement stopped Fiona in her tracks, but Ace reached back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her forward. “Please don't make a scene,” he said quietly. “Do you want the others to know?”

“Know what?” she asked, and there was a hysterical tone beginning in her voice. “Know that
you,
not
me,
have known everything all along?”

“If you start playing female on me, I won't tell you anything.”

“Me play female?” She pursed her mouth, ready to hit him with something. “ ‘Oh, Ace, darling, I can't lift this feather, and it's hurting my teeny tiny ankles,'” she mimicked Lisa.

“You're jealous, aren't you?”

“As jealous of her as you are of Jeremy,” she snapped back at him.

“Then that's quite a lot,” Ace said softly, and looked at her from under his eyelashes.

In spite of herself, Fiona's breath caught in her throat, and when she nearly tripped over a fallen log, Ace put his hand under her elbow to steady her.

“Still mad at me for not telling you that my family is fabulously wealthy and that I can easily afford to manufacture your swamp doll and set you up in your own toy plant so you can run it the way you want and never again have to worry that some jerk will fire you?”

At that overlong sentence, without a pause in it, Fiona had to laugh. “When you put it that way, it's not such a bad idea. Maybe I could stand it. But …” Hesitating, she looked away for a moment, then back at him. “But what about … about …”

“Lisa?”

“You
are
going to marry her, remember?”

“When you snooped through my house at the park entrance, didn't you wonder why her picture was under the bed?”

“I didn't—Okay, so maybe I did look and maybe I did wonder, but you've confessed undying love for her since I met you.”

“I was lonely, I went back to my parents' place for a month-long visit, and Lisa was there. We had a great time, what can I say? I thought I wanted to spend my life with
her. But when I got home, back to here …” He motioned his hand to include the swamp and the constant barrage of wildlife around them. “I knew that she wouldn't, couldn't, fit in. I was planning to break it to her gently, but …” He shrugged.

“But I came along and broke your crocodile, then woke up with a dead man on top of me and—”

“Alligator,” he said.

Fiona gave him a brilliant smile. “I know, but does Lisa?”