River of Eden (4 page)

With the snake gone, she grabbed the duffel bag and headed off for a quick cleanup at the bathhouse.

“I
T'S TIME YOU CAME BACK
into the fold, William,” Gabriela said from behind her big mahogany desk piled high with papers and various potted plants, most of them straggling toward death's door. At sixty-eight, she had hair that was white as snow and was twisted into a tidy French roll at the back of her head. Her hands shook slightly with palsy, but her mind and her eyes were crystal clear, missing very little of what went on at RBC or anywhere else in the Amazon. “You've been running wild for too long.”

Will could hardly disagree with her last statement, and he could hardly agree to the first, which left him in a bit of a bind.

“You could water your plants,” he suggested, lifting one limp leaf where it lay comatose on a neatly bound research proposal.

“I'm a botanist, not a gardener,” the old woman informed him with a haughty arch to her brow, “and you're avoiding the question.”

Will looked up. “I'm taking Annie Parrish to Santa Maria. That's what you wanted, isn't it?”

“Partly. It would be nice if you could set aside a few days of whatever it is you do all day long and make sure she's on terra firma once she gets there.”

“ ‘Nice' isn't the word most people think of when they think of me,” he said nonchalantly, picking up a smooth stone from off her desk.

“I know you better than most people,” the old scientist said, undaunted.

He rubbed his thumb over the stone. Gabriela
had
known him. There had been a time when a lot of people had known him, but they didn't know him now. Will set the stone down, not bothering to correct her.

“Didn't she work in Santa Maria before? Everything I've heard had her up there until she shot her lover in Yavareté.” He named a town far to the west of Santa Maria, a town on the Rio Vaupes where it crossed the border from Colombia into Brazil.

“I found her in Yavareté, yes,” Gabriela said carefully, “but she wasn't there by choice.”

Will paused, his fingers resting on the edge of a cobalt-blue bowl filled with seed pods. “Found?”

“She'd been taken there for questioning.”

“Taken by whom?” He picked up part of a broken seed pod containing four Brazil nuts,
Bertholettia excelsa.

“Corisco Vargas,” the old woman said after a short hesitation.

Will looked up and caught her clear-eyed gaze with his own.

“Where, exactly, did you find her?” he asked. He knew Corisco Vargas. Everybody on the Rio Negro knew the bastard.

“In a jail cell.”

“What kind of shape was she in?” It was a loaded question, loaded eight ways from Sunday, and Will doubted very much if he was going to like Gabriela's answer.

He didn't.

The old woman shrugged, her hand making a slight, dismissive gesture.

“You know the way of these things. To save face, the government sent her home and—”

“I heard she was deported,” he interrupted, dropping the broken seed vessel back into the bowl.

“Not officially. There were no papers.”

“And the lover?”

“There was no lover.”

No lover.

“Then who the hell did she shoot?” He was beginning to doubt if anything he'd heard about Annie Parrish was true.

Gabriela made another negligent gesture. “A
garimpeiro
working for Vargas.”

It was an interesting quirk of Brazilian politics that allowed Vargas, an army major, to also be one of the country's most notorious, illegal gold-mining entrepreneurs. Vargas had operations in the Serra Pelada and was opening more mines along Brazil's northern border.

Santa Maria was only about a hundred miles from that border.

“If she's planning on messing with Vargas, you shouldn't have approved the research that got her back into the country,” he said, moving on and lightly skimming his fingers over a book. They came away dusty.

“She's brilliant,” Gabriela said, as if that both explained and excused everything.

He wiped the dust off on his pants and looked over at the old woman, pinning her with his gaze. “She's jaguar bait, and we both know it. Do everybody a favor and send her back to the States, and the next time you ask me to take somebody on my boat, don't leave all the fun parts out.”

He turned to leave, planning on getting on the
Sucuri
and getting as far away from RBC and Annie Parrish as possible.

Dr. Gabriela Oliveira had other ideas.

“You owe me, William, and I'm calling in my markers.” She paused for effect, then added, “All of them.”

It was true. He did owe her, more than enough to cover the hassle of hauling Annie Parrish up the Rio Negro, but he'd taken on another debt that far exceeded any hold Gabriela had on him, a debt wrapped around him as tightly as his own skin. This close to payback, he wasn't interested in dealing with somebody who could easily turn out to be more trouble than she was worth.

He felt the weight of the old shaman's crystal lying against his chest, his protection for now, and had no regrets for the bargain he'd made, or for the “lost” year that had changed the course of his life. For what he'd seen, and heard, and felt, and known three years ago, there had been no choice but to follow Tutanji into the forest. A year later he'd emerged, and for the last two years Tutanji had charged him with plying the rivers of the Amazon. The cord that held him to the medicine man had grown ever longer; his search had ever expanded, until he'd finally found the demon Tutanji sought—Corisco Vargas.

And Vargas was a demon, more so than anyone knew. Annie Parrish couldn't have picked a worse person to tangle with, not in all of Amazonia.

“I could just shoot her now and save us all a lot of trouble.” It was the voice of experience speaking. Will knew enough about Vargas to imagine what the Yavareté jail had been like, and the thought was enough to churn his gut.

“And I could just shoot you now and save us even more,” another voice said from behind him.

Will didn't know whether to laugh or swear out loud. He did neither, only turned toward the door leading from Gabriela's office to the garden to see Annie Parrish standing there in the last rays of a dying sun.

“When did you come in?” he asked out of curiosity.

“Just before jaguar bait,” she said clearly, as if an apology might be in order.

In good conscience, Will couldn't retract a word. Dry and all scrubbed clean, with her hair fluffed out, her clothes too big for her small frame, and her eyes wide behind the glasses perched on her freckled nose, she looked like exactly what he'd called her—a cat snack. Contrarily, she also looked mad enough to chew nails.

“For the record,” she went on, “I'm planning on staying as far away from Corisco Vargas as I can get, and the last ‘jaguar' that tried to take a bite out of me ended up with a bullet in his leg.”

“So I heard.” He was glad to hear her stance on Vargas, but the whole Amazon Annie thing was starting to look like a hoax to him—because the woman simply didn't fit the description, any of the descriptions. And she sure as hell didn't look as if she'd survived a Yavareté jail, with or without Vargas involved. An experience like that would have left its mark, and other than the scar near her temple, she had one of the most unmarred faces he'd ever seen, not a perfect face, but an interesting face
with pretty skin and delicate, feminine features. She was physically fit and as sleekly muscled as anyone who had walked the Rio Vaupes and lived to tell the tale, but there wasn't a hard edge on her. Not anywhere, he thought, letting his gaze sweep the length of her body before coming back up and getting waylaid by the flinty glint in her hazel eyes.

It was all he could do to fight off another grin. The cat snack came complete with claws. Good, he thought. Given her chosen destination, she needed them, the sharper the better.

“William and I were just finishing up discussing the terms of your passage,” Gabriela interjected diplomatically. “If I thought the RBC launch would actually be fixed in a week, I would recommend waiting. It would certainly give me much less to worry about, but I know you don't want to miss the height of the peach palm harvest.”

Peach palm harvest? Will couldn't say for sure, but Annie Parrish didn't look as if she were thinking about peach palms, not with her mouth that tight.

“You've got nothing to worry about, Gabriela,” she assured the old doctor. Then her gaze slid in his direction, and her attention focused on him in a way he found interesting, if rather obvious. She was checking him out through her little gold-rimmed glasses, sizing him up, and trying to figure out just how much trouble he could possibly turn out to be.

More than she needed, he could have told her—but he didn't.

“Are you still leaving at dawn?” she asked.

He nodded, intrigued. By his own standards, there wasn't a square inch left on him to inspire anyone's confi-
dence. He was damned surprised to find out that Annie Parrish's standards were even lower than his own.

She turned to Gabriela. “Is there anything else?”

“No,” the old woman said. “I just wanted you to know William and his boat had arrived.”

“Then if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get Carlos and start loading my gear,” she said, naming RBC's old caretaker. She hardly glanced at Will on her way out the door. “I'll be on the dock at dawn.”

Will nodded, waiting until she was out of earshot before he turned back to Gabriela. There were a whole lot of bad ways for the situation to end, and only one good one.

“Send her home, Gabriela. You can get another researcher to finish whatever work she had going on in Santa Maria, or you could just let it go. She's been gone a year. There couldn't be much left of whatever she started.”

“Another researcher wouldn't be Annie.”

“Okay,” he conceded. “I'll go up there and check it out myself. If there's anything worth salvaging, I'll let you know. Then you can decide whether to send her or not.” He was headed in that direction anyway, straight to hell, the Cauaburi, and Vargas, and he could spare a couple of days to look over the Santa Maria station and file a report.

“You're not Annie Parrish, either,” the old woman said, and at that, Will did laugh out loud.

“I lost my reputation, Gabriela, not my mind. I doubt if her work is beyond my comprehension. I can still manage an assessment.”

“I know enough to only believe half of what I hear
about you,” Gabriela countered, “and given my observations and your lack of explanations, I do believe half of what I've heard since your return.”

“Obviously the bad half.”

She narrowed her gaze at him. “Don't fool yourself, William. It's all bad and some of it worse.”

He couldn't argue the point. “Which part makes you think I can't do what Annie Parrish can do?”

“Not can't do, but won't do. You're not interested in benefiting RBC. On the other hand, any work Annie does will come under the auspices of my institute.”

“Looking for a legacy, Gabriela?” he asked dryly.

In answer, she raised her hand. It shook like a leaf in the wind, but there was no wind coming in through the garden door. With a heavy sigh, she lowered her hand back to the desk.

“It's time, William. I'm getting older in a thousand ways every day, and the board knows it. They want Ricardo Solano in as the new director.”

Will knew Ricardo Solano. The man was good, but worked strictly by the book. Solano sure as hell would have never let Annie Parrish back into RBC.

“A legacy is built on years of work,” Will said, relenting from his hard line. “You've done the work. No matter what Annie Parrish finds or doesn't find, it isn't going to change how you're remembered.”

A tired smile spread across the old woman's face. “You're too cynical, William, just like me. Annie isn't. She still believes there are wonders in the forest, and it's the believers who find them.”

Or fools not quick enough to get out of their way, Will thought, exasperated with her reasoning, even with the shaman's crystal weighing heavily around his neck.

“I still say you should send her home.”

“No. She goes to Santa Maria.” The old woman was adamant. “You just get her settled. I'll be up as soon as the launch is fixed. I'm sure Father Aldo at the mission can keep her out of trouble in the meantime.”

“He didn't manage to keep her out of trouble last time.” It was a point too important not to mention.

“Father Aldo wasn't at fault,” the old woman said, absently sorting through a sheaf of papers on her desk. “Annie wasn't anywhere near Santa Maria when she came in contact with Vargas.”

“Then where the hell was she?”

Gabriela lifted one of the papers. It shook ever so slightly in her hand, but her gaze, when she leveled it at him, was steady. “I wish I knew. Nobody dared to question Vargas, and Annie wasn't talking. She still isn't. If you really want to know, you'll have to ask her yourself.”

It was a challenge, the gauntlet thrown, and Will wasn't naïve enough to think Gabriela had done it lightly. To the contrary, he'd just figured out why the director of RBC was being so insistent on having Annie Parrish travel with him.

“You want me to find out what she's up to, and it doesn't have a damn thing to do with peach palms, does it?”

“I don't think so,” was the old woman's unacceptable reply.

“I don't have time for this, Gabriela,” he said, his anger starting to break toward the surface.

Gabriela was completely unfazed by his unraveling control, meeting his glare without so much as batting an eyelash, her look cool, calm, and presumptuously appraising.

“I don't know what you've been up to the last two years, either, William, but I know it's a damn sight more than drinking your way down the length of the river, no matter what I've heard. I don't know where you were for those twelve months when you were supposed to be doing botanical research for Howard Pharmacueticals, and I don't know what happened to you while you were there, but I do know Elena Maria Barbosa Sanchez's son, and I think I know when he's in over his head.”

That she was close to being right didn't make Will any less angry. He wasn't in over his head yet, but he sure saw himself heading in that direction.