River of Eden

CHAPTER 1

MANAUS, BRAZIL

D
RENCHED TO THE BONE, DR. ANNIE
Parrish stood in the doorway of the ramshackle waterfront cantina called Pancha's and wiped what she could of the rain off her glasses. Putting them back on, she let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Water dripped off her green shirt and baggy khaki shorts, adding to the mud she'd dragged in with her off the street. The tropical afternoon rain poured down behind her, running off the cantina's tin roof and coursing in streams down the dirt slope to the black waters of the Rio Negro where it flowed past the city of Manaus, Brazil. Inside the tavern, a samba beat blared out of a radio, while a toothless young man added percussion with the rapid beat of his open palms against the bar.

A scattering of seedy-looking patrons littered the shadowy interior, their faces obscured by a pall of cigarette smoke, but it was the couple dancing in front of the bar that held Annie's attention.

The woman was mulatto, her skin a creamy café au lait color, her yellow halter top and orange sarong the
brightest things in the dingy room. Her partner was chameleonlike in comparison. The most noticeable aspect about him was movement—the flick and sway of his hips to the music, the flash of gold bracelets on his upraised arms, the rippling of his open, midnight-blue shirt against his sun-bronzed skin.

The woman was a sunburst. He was a star-flung night, his dark brown hair streaked blond in places and flying with every toss of his head, then falling back into multihued layers that hung low on his neck. Red seed bracelets stacked four inches high around his right ankle were revealed by the rolled-up legs on his black pants,
shoroshoro
seeds from the forest adding a susurrus of sound with every step he took.

Annie didn't have a clue who the woman was, but the man was William Sanchez Travers, and sure as she was standing there, he didn't look like any Harvard-trained ethnobotanist she'd ever seen, “defrocked” or not. He looked like the kind of man mothers warned their daughters about and the reason fathers kept shotguns. But he was Annie's best chance for getting upriver, and given that one asset, she was inclined to overlook a lot of faults.

With an absent gesture, she shoved her fingers back through her short-cropped blond hair, slicking the wet strands off her face. A quick pat-down of her pockets proved them bulging with the usual junk, too full to organize, so she stuffed what she could deeper, and ignored the rest. Tidied up as best as she could manage, she squared her shoulders. For better or worse, Travers was exactly the type of man she'd been looking for—broke enough to come cheap and shady enough not to ask too many questions. Annie knew plenty of men who fit
that description, but she'd worked in the Amazon long enough to add a third caveat: she needed a man who wouldn't slit her throat in the dead of night. When her research sponsor, Dr. Gabriela Oliveira, had recommended Travers, telling Annie he was back in Manaus and headed upriver to Santa Maria, Annie had figured the ex-Harvard botanist, no matter how degenerate, would more than fit the bill. Hell, she'd read every book he'd ever written— twice.

Now she had an offer to make.

As she started forward, the music slid into a lambada rhythm. Without missing a beat, Travers and his partner came together in a hip-swaying Latin swing that bordered on lewd. Then they took it over the border.

Annie's gaze dropped down the length of their bodies and quickly came back up in a warily skeptical onceover. Anything could happen on a dance floor in Brazil— and it looked like anything might.

She only hoped he and the woman stopped somewhere short of actual public copulation. She didn't have the strength for it after spending half the day looking for him in every seedy, portside dive in Manaus he was known to frequent. There weren't many he'd missed, and after observing his favorite haunts firsthand, she wouldn't put anything past him, even if only half of the rest of what she'd heard about him was true.

Three years ago, he'd forsaken academia and his fieldwork and disappeared into the Amazon rain forest. The rumors had been bountiful and gruesome: he'd been eaten by an anaconda; he'd taken one too many hallucinogenic trips on the
Banisteriopsis caapi
liana and was living in a near vegetative state in a cave near the headwaters of the Putumayo; or—and this had been
Annie's favorite—he'd had his head shrunk by the Jivaro. No bones or body, vegetative or otherwise, and no identifiable shrunken head had ever been found. A year later, he'd disproved all the rumors by resurfacing in Manaus safe, though not necessarily sound. The verdict was still out on his mental state—way out.

Looking at him now, Annie would guess he'd abandoned botany for his true calling as a
sambista.
The kind of moves he was making were grounds for arrest in some countries: arms down, shoulders loose and rolling, his hips doing a buck-and-shimmy against the woman's. Rumor said Gabriela had been the one to bail him out with Howard Pharmaceutical Labs, the company funding his research. Even so, half a dozen lawsuits were still waiting for him back in the States, compliments of old man Howard, who hadn't planned on his high-priced glory boy disappearing without delivering some new magically medicinal plant Howard Labs could make millions of dollars synthesizing.

Well, she thought, that bright hope had sure gone to hell in a handbasket, with the way smoothed by more than a few bottles of rotgut
cachaça
, Brazilian sugarcane alcohol. It was a damn shame, but all Will Travers was known for now was ferrying people up and down the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes and showing up in the Manaus bars often enough to qualify as a waterfront attraction.

At six feet, he had the gringo looks for it, tall and rangy, with that wild, sun-streaked hair and a face that had set more than one coed on the path to a botany degree.

Annie was way past the coed stage of her life, but from what she could see of him, he hadn't lost his poster-
boy looks, even if the veneer of his Harvard days had worn so damn thin as to be invisible.

He probably didn't know it, but he'd once one-upped her on a plant identification, getting his specimen in mere days ahead of hers. Since then, for all time, whenever anybody enjoyed a certain South American balsam herb in their garden, the label read
Dicliptera traversii
, instead of
Dicliptera parrishii.
It was as close as she'd ever gotten to getting the best of him. Then he'd gone and dropped out of the game—and that was the real damn shame.