Читать книгу Love's Golden Spell - William Maltese - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

THE ROLLS ROYCE SILVER SPIRIT was long, roomy and had all the creature comforts, including a television set and a bar. However, Janet couldn’t get comfortable. She was leaving Lionspride. Again. Nothing horrible had developed from Christopher’s stolen kiss and his insults. They merely confirmed what she had known all along: the past was over and done, never to be lived again.

She was disappointed and knew why. She touched her fingertips to her lips. The feel of Christopher’s stolen kiss lingered somehow. She was disgusted by the pleasure evoked by the memory of his mouth on hers.

That kiss set her up. It took her by surprise, as though hinting of worse things to come. The resulting horrors, though, were figments of Janet’s overactive imagination. Christopher had enjoyed a delicious meal. He’d played games in the darkness of the basement. He’d terrorized her with a few suggestive words and looks. Then, satisfied that he’d paid her back for her plotting against him, he’d sent her on her way. He was a king tired of his court jester, offering her a used dress in reward for stale amusements.

She put herself in his position. He graciously consented to let her into his home. He personally greeted her, trying to make her feel comfortable. He offered her punch after her long drive from the city. He cooperated in every way, only to have it dawn on him that she was there to do a hatchet job on his family.

Well, Janet didn’t feel guilty. Fair play was a luxury owed those who played by the rules, and the Van Hoons never did that. Their fortune originated with Petre Van Hoon’s swindling of a poor native who didn’t know a diamond from a pretty stone.

Janet laughed—not in amusement, either. It was ironic to have witnessed Christopher drooling over a diamond just as Petre Van Hoon must have done. Christopher was no ragged vagabond with only the belongings on his back, but the same greedy gleam was in his eye. She had seen it there when he was packing her off moments after that precious stone had entered his life.

She leaned into the luxurious leather of the seat. Ahead, the largest man-made structures in the world were piled high across the horizon. Some of the rock crystal in those enormous heaps of mine tailings were dragged from over two miles beneath the city. The foundation of Johannesburg was honeycombed with kilometers of tunnels stretching in all directions. As much traffic went on below the surface as on the streets above. All for the sake of gold.

Christopher’s hair was gold. Christopher’s eyes were gold.

She wouldn’t think of Christopher’s hair, or his eyes. She wouldn’t think of him, period. He had lost something in his transition from boy to man, just as Janet had lost something in her painful journey from girl to woman.

The car stopped. She didn’t wait for the chauffeur to get out and open the door for her. She opened it herself. She wasn’t a pampered woman who couldn’t take care of herself without a paid retainer’s assistance. Those women were of Christopher’s world. She was of quite another. Those women draped themselves in animal skins that brought the leopard, cheetah, lynx and tiger to the brink of extinction. Janet wanted to save those animals. Not just the ones killed to satisfy some society matron’s twisted notion of fashion. Not just those massacred to bolster some hunter’s macho image. Rhinoceros were slaughtered for their horns, believed to restore sexual prowess to impotent Asian men. Elephants were killed for their tusks, made legal tender by uncaring speculators.

Christopher had a room full of elephant ivory. With each elephant killed, the source of that ivory was depleted by one. Christopher became richer. When all the elephants were dead, like the quagga and bluebuck were dead, Christopher would be a very rich man.

Damn it, he was rich enough already! He shouldn’t think of how to add more money to the family coffers. He should take steps to insure that his children would see live elephants instead of just pictures of them.

But Christopher was childless. He wasn’t married. Janet felt funny inside as she swept through the doors of the Carleton Hotel. The hotel was part of a vast complex of boutiques, movie theaters and restaurants, none of which claimed her attention. She wasn’t all that interested in the spectacular view of city lights from her hotel window, either.

The bed had been turned down by the night maid. Janet searched a suitcase for her cotton pajamas. Her negligee was in the closet, but she didn’t want it. It was too provocative against her skin. She shouldn’t have brought it. It was extra baggage. Pajamas were more practical where she was going.

The negligee was black silk. Christopher had dressed her in black silk, like a doll, tossing her aside as soon as a honey-colored diamond came along.

The phone rang. Her sweet visions were of his calling to apologize—better yet, telling her that he realized who she was, that he was angry for not realizing it right away, that he wanted to see her again. She was a fool for letting them get off to such a ridiculously bad start. There were memories to talk about after sixteen years.

It was Jill. She wanted to make sure Janet was back safely. She wanted to satisfy her curiosity. Tim and Roger had rushed her away from Lionspride grinning from ear to ear like two Cheshire cats. “Janet really landed herself a big one this time!” Roger had said as they drove off.

Janet was in no mood to talk about Christopher. She wanted to forget him. All the interesting tidbits Jill wanted to hear hadn’t happened. “Did you get the tapes ready for shipping?” Janet asked, using business to counter Jill’s snooping. There was silence at the other end. “Well?”

“You’ve the tapes,” Jill said. “Don’t you?”

“How could I have them?” Janet asked. Frustrated. Something was wrong. She didn’t need this. “I stayed at Lionspride, didn’t I? You called to see whether I was back. Right? Right!”

“But he said…,” Jill replied, leaving the sentence hanging.

“Who said what?” Janet asked, her heart sinking.

“The man who stopped us at the gate,” Jill continued tentatively. “He told us you wanted the tapes to play for Mr. Van Hoon at the house. He ran them back to you. Didn’t he?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Janet said, keeping her cool. There was no need to take out on Jill what wasn’t her fault. It was logical for her to have accepted the information as given. Everybody had video equipment nowadays. Christopher could afford the very best. “I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay? I’m a little tired right now.”

“But what about the tapes?”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow!” Janet insisted with finality. She hung up the phone, her hand gripping the receiver so tightly her fingers were bleached white across her knuckles. “That rat!” she forced out between clenched teeth. He was a liar like his father! If Donald Geiger hadn’t distracted him with that diamond, he would still be lying, insisting he wanted fair payment for tapes that he had no intention of letting her have.

She released her grip on the phone, her fingers hurting as she uncurled them. She paced, but it didn’t help. She lay down on the bed. She would sleep and worry about this in the morning. She didn’t need the tapes. She could say the Van Hoon wildlife collection contained extinct species, and Christopher couldn’t deny it. There were people who had seen the trophy room, and they could substantiate her story if Christopher called her a liar. Of course, a picture was worth a thousand words. Television audiences were visually oriented.

He was less flippant about the threat she offered than he appeared. The Van Hoon name was vulnerable to attack after all.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her mind. She was enveloped in the smell of exotic perfume. She had splashed the fragrance on extravagantly at Lionspride after finding a sixteen-ounce bottle in the bathroom. She had used too much; she smelled cheap. She felt cheap. Christopher Van Hoon’s toy, his plaything—tossed aside when he tired of her.

She wished he could be guiltless. It was his father— and the Van Hoon tradition most of all—that she hated. If she was obvious in pinpointing the extinct animals before the cameras, it was because she wanted Christopher to convince her she was wrong to condemn him. At eighteen, he had promised he would never kill another animal. Or was his promise never to kill another gazelle? It didn’t matter. It was a lie. He had said she could have the film if she stayed for supper. A lie. She had endured the brunt of his amusement for nothing. He had been laughing at her.

She got up, stripping off her pajamas, and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She scrubbed her body until her skin was raw, exchanging the exotic muskiness for the antiseptic blandness of soap. She would wash away all memory of him.

Her pajamas reeked of the perfume. She threw them in a corner and climbed into bed naked. She wanted to sleep, but the caress of the sheets against her nakedness was sensuously distracting. When she did sleep, she dreamed of Christopher.

He was young. He was standing in the shade of a blue-gum tree. He didn’t need the sun in the sky, because he carried sunlight in his hair, in the glow of his eyes, in the tan of his skin. Janet was in the dream with him. She was happy. God, it was so good to be happy! Ahead of her stretched unlived years of pain in which her father and husband died and left her. She would pick up the pieces each time she had this dream, remembering how it was to live in innocence, to laugh and touch in innocence, to kiss in innocence. Was it wrong to want it back?

She was filled with loss and futility when she awakened. She was Janet Westover, not Janet Kelley. She was twenty-nine, not thirteen. She was a widow, not a virgin. She wasn’t innocent, and there was no bringing back the past.

A knock on her door brought her back to reality. A second knock made her moan and wish whoever it was would go away. She was tired. It had taken her an eternity to get to sleep, and now this. She opened her eyes, surprised to see that the sun was shining through the window.

“Give me a minute!’ she said, throwing back the blankets. “I said, just…a…minute,” she erupted irritably as a third knock sounded. Her robe was in the closet, hanging next to her black silk negligee. She put on the robe, securing the belt at her waist. She opened the door.

He was standing there with his blond hair and golden eyes, deeply dimpled cheeks, and wide smile. “Hi!” he said. She was dreaming. His left hand was behind his back, his right hand extending a bouquet of golden roses. She could smell the heady fragrance of the flowers.

“There’s only one thing I want from you!” she said, wishing he wasn’t so handsome, wishing his eyes weren’t sparkling with good-natured humor.

“And surprise, I brought that, too,” he said, producing the tape spools from behind his back. “I did promise them to you, didn’t I? In exchange for supper, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose you spent last night erasing them,” she accused, taking them anyway.

“Janet, Janet,” he said, his low voice as teasing as it was chiding. “May I come in?”

“I’m not dressed,” she said, watching his wide smile spread.

“I know,” he retorted.

“No, you may not come in,” she replied. He was too handsome, too charming, too capable of being nice one minute and hurtful the next.

“Then will you come out?” he ventured playfully. “I’m taking a look around one of the Van Hoon gold mines this morning, and I thought you might like to ride along.”

His hair was gold, his eyes were gold, his skin was gold. She was dreaming. “What makes you think I want to see a gold mine?” she asked when he didn’t dissolve into thin air.

“What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one?” he countered.

“So what makes you think I want to see a gold mine with you?” she amended. What was he trying to pull? She preferred him less friendly, less pleasantly playful, less the Christopher she remembered. She was vulnerable, and he was clever enough to see that.

“What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one with me?” he said. “So what do you say? You’re not crazy, are you?”

“I’d be crazy if I did go with you,” she said, determined not to be persuaded. He was up to no good.

“You make it damned hard for a man to apologize, Janet,” he said, shaking his head.

Surely, he understood why this was so impossible. “That’s what you’re doing, is it?” she asked. “Apologizing?”

“I behaved abominably last night,” he said. “I was hoping the flowers and tapes would say that for me, but I’m willing to eat more humble pie.”

“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Why?” he echoed. “Because I finally remembered who you remind me of.” She didn’t ask. She couldn’t. He answered anyway. “A girl I once knew,” he said. His bright smile dimmed. “A funny thing: her name was Janet, too.” Janet was charged with emotions. There were memories of her alive within him. “But enough of that Janet!” he said, erasing the warm sensuousness of her discovery. “She was a child. You’re a woman. She was unable to reason as an adult. Your job demands adult objectivity. You wouldn’t peddle distortion just because it raises your television ratings, would you?”

Christopher’s images of Janet Kelley were anything but pleasant, tainted by all that came after. Even if she had been a child at the time, he hadn’t forgiven her for thinking and reasoning as a child.

“You’re telling me your family hasn’t exploited the land and the wildlife?” Janet demanded, drawing her robe more tightly around her. There was something about this man that physically affected her, something far more noticeable now that she was a woman.

“It’s the nature of things to change,” he said “You told me that at the house. Nothing is static. Not Africa. Not its wildlife. Not its people. Many have prospered from Van Hoon mines. I guarantee fair wages and decent working conditions. And why condemn me for animals slaughtered in my grandfather’s and father’s times? Their generations lived the grand illusion of unending natural resources.”

“That doesn’t excuse their excesses!” she said, vehemently. His rationalizations of innocence wouldn’t defuse her outrage.

“I shouldn’t be expected to make excuses for people over whom I had no control,” Christopher said. Janet wasn’t responsible for circumstances over which she had no control, either. Her father had forced her to leave Africa, Lionspride, and Christopher. A thirteen-year-old girl doesn’t disobey a father loved for a lifetime. It was only now, sixteen years later, that she could say she had loved Christopher, maybe as much as she had loved her father. “I’m asking you to take the time to get to know me a 1ittle better,” Christopher said. “Is that too much to ask a woman who can bad-mouth me to a few million people at one shot?”

“And by getting to know you, I’ll come to love you, I suppose?” Janet asked with sarcasm in her voice. She hurried on. Joking about her feelings for Christopher made her uneasy. “In one afternoon, you’ll convince me that a line of despots ended when your father died, you springing on the scene as pure as newly fallen snow.”

“I’m Christopher Van Hoon, remember—not a saint,” he said, a wry smile playing at the corners of his sensuous mouth. “I’m not faultless. It would be wrong, though, to paint my picture blacker than it is. If a man isn’t patted on the back a few times in his life, encouraged for his attempts to make amends—no matter how feeble those attempts might appear—he’ll think further effort hardly worth the effort.”

“I can’t believe you’re concerned about what I might or might not say about the Van Hoon family on television,” Janet said. He had shown his contempt for her and her position by engineering that embarrassing scene at Lionspride.

“I’m not concerned,” he admitted, and Janet flushed with anger. Suspecting her ineffectiveness was one thing. Having it confirmed was another. “Actually you’re a surrogate,” he said.

“For whom? For what?”

“For that other Janet who never gave me the chance to defend myself,” he said, filling her with the guilt she had tried to deny.

“You seem extremely confident of your powers of persuasion” Janet said, stung by the accusation in his voice. He was condemning a virtual child for not allowing herself to be persuaded by letters still unopened and ribbon-tied. A young girl’s grief allowed no separation of grain from chaff, of son from father. By the time she could forgive the boy for being a Van Hoon, he was a boy no longer. He was head of Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the only Van Hoon she had left to hate; a hate she had struggled to overcome, to no avail.

Besides, the real villain was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals, a corporate profiteer. The hiring of her father all those years ago and the commissioning of his feasibility study for the Lackland Animal Preserve had been a cover for company machinations. Because of the attention drawn to the study, gold exploration could be conducted without arousing the suspicion of the competition or her father. When gold was found, Jack Kelley and the Lackland Animal Preserve project were dumped by the wayside, having served their purposes.

Her father hadn’t survived that betrayal. He had been deeply committed to the preservation of African wildlife. His study had shown a locale excellently suited to that purpose. Sixteen years after he had submitted his paperwork to that effect, there were no animals in the area he had mapped out for Lackland. There were three deep holes in the ground, their openings surrounded by smoke-belching buildings that converted tons of crushed rock into ounces of shiny gold. Trains chugged where antelope once roamed. Winders, trucks, conveyer belts, drills and explosives bled sounds to a veldt that once knew only the sounds of animals, the wind, the rain.

The impetus behind that perverted metamorphosis of the African landscape hadn’t died with Vincent Van Hoon, any more than it had died with Petre Van Hoon. Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals remained a nefarious entity, guiding human actions from behind the scenes. Christopher Van Hoon, as sole heir to his father and grandfather, was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the personification of that evil, and Janet could fight it only through him. If she was his surrogate, he was hers.

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes to decide whether you’re here to do a hatchet job or to do things fairly,” he said, tossing the unclaimed bouquet onto a nearby chair. The discarded roses bruised their golden petals on the chafing upholstery. “I’ll wait in the lobby.”

The door closed behind him. She glanced at the travel clock on the bedside table. She needed to know how long she had. She picked up the roses, cradling their long stems in her arms, smelling their sweet fragrance. Bob had never bought her flowers. Bob was practical. Why spend money on something so transitory? Better a toaster or a tape deck. Now Bob was dead, his life as transitory as cut roses.

Time was passing, seconds turning into minutes. She needed more time.

There was no vase for the flowers. If she left them, they would wilt before the maid found them. The roses seemed important. Concern for them kept her from thinking about Christopher waiting in the lobby.

She went into the bathroom and filled the sink, propping the ends of the stems in the water. Too many things died in Africa. Flowers. Animals. Dreams. Expectations. Love.

“Damn!” she said, bracing herself against the edge of the sink. She was as conscious of the ticking in the other room as tourists were of Big Ben’s chimes at noontime.

Less than fifteen minutes—that was what sixteen years of memories came down to. She could let the clock tick away the final ending, or she could hope for a miracle in a world devoid of miracles. She could hope to reclaim the unclaimable, even if Christopher offered no real solution. He wasn’t waiting to tell her everything was all right, the sixteen years forgotten. He was playing games—not because he saw her as a threat but because she was a woman. Success with any woman offered him consolation for an ego bruised sixteen years before when Janet had been unable to succumb.

She wanted to be fair. She wanted more. Too late. Sixteen years too late. Fifteen minutes too late.

Her robe was off before she reached the closet. She didn’t look at the clock, fearing what it showed.

She dressed quickly, choosing a brown pullover. She had no trouble with the button and zipper on the matching slacks. The strap on her left shoe was less obliging. She softly cursed it into submission.

She grabbed her purse, finding her comb in it by the time she reached the hallway. She shared the elevator with two men who eyed her appreciatively as she put her hair into some semblance of order. There was no time for makeup.

She asked one of the men for the time; she’d left her wristwatch in her room. The man’s watch was an expensive Piaget. No chance of the wrong time. A Piaget only lost one second every two years, according to the ads.

She was beyond the fifteen-minute deadline. She had made the right decision too late. There would have been plenty of time if only she had started dressing the minute he left. Sixteen years and fifteen minutes to end like this, before any new beginnings.

He was waiting, his muscular body leaning against a pillar facing the elevator. He smiled, walking toward her. “I knew you’d come,” he said confidently. Her anger flushed her cheeks. She shouldn’t have come running. She should have denied him his obvious satisfaction. “Not because I’m personally so irresistible,” he added quickly, intuitively sensing her second thoughts. “I merely knew you had a sense of fair play.”

“I thought you’d be gone,” she commented with feigned coolness.

“I’ve never known a woman who could get ready for anything in fifteen minutes,” he said. “You must have set some kind of record as it was.”

“My being here doesn’t mean I’m making any promises,” Janet said. Too many promises were regretted later.

“I’ll get the Van Hoons,” she’d promised her father. He hadn’t heard. He was dead. It was a promise nevertheless. Now she was consorting with the enemy.

“My car is outside,” he said, his fingers on her elbow. Fire ran the length of her arm. He did that with his slightest touch.

Because it was early, the hotel lobby was almost deserted. Shops, theaters and restaurants that would soon pull a crowd into the Carleton Complex were closed and awaiting proprietors. Beyond the revolving door, the city stirred. There was a vital pulse to Johannesburg that existed night and day. That activity had begun on a deserted piece of wasteland less than one hundred years before, conjured by the discovery of gold, still the main reason for Johannesburg’s existence.

Gold raised a city where there should never have been one. Perched on one of the highest ridges of the South African plateau, seventeen hundred meters above sea level, it had no water that wasn’t pumped in from the Vaal over sixty kilometers away. Its petrol and diesel came all the way from Durban, 720 kilometers to the southeast, where tankers from the Persian Gulf fed an insatiable pipeline.

Johannesburg had a population of nearly a million and a half people. It was nearly twice the size of Durban and Cape Town, South Africa’s other big cities, and three times the size of Pretoria, the republic’s administrative capital.

Christopher was driving a Mercedes sports car. He opened the door on the passenger side for Janet and went around to the other side to slide in beside her.

“Relax,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white, his hair as golden as the metal dug beneath the city. “I’m really not a dentist out to yank your molars. I’m here to show you a good time.”

There was no denying that Janet was tense. She was debating whether she had been right in coming. There was something about being with Christopher now that muted the unhappiness of the past sixteen years. With his handsome face and muscular body so near, Janet could forget her father and her husband. She knew it was unhealthy to escape reality by recalling the past. She was with Christopher Van Hoon not because they were children, enjoying each other’s company, but because they were adults engaged in adult games.

She settled back in her seat, caressed by the luxurious softness of expensive leather. The leather smells became more erotic when mingled with the scent of Christopher’s distinctive after-shave. The car was moving toward the maze of great mounds, evidence of three thousand million tons of rock pulverized in the search for gold. But these mine tailings were less the unsightly boils on the landscape they had once been. Years of experimentation and large outlays of cash had resulted in the discovery of ways of getting hybrid vegetation to root in the unsavory mixture of silica and cyanide. The dumps looked more and more like low-lying foothills: the Johannesburg Downs. A standard joke on the stock exchange was that the mining companies took all the ups, leaving the city the Downs. The still un-vegetated segments caught the early-morning sunshine, telegraphing flashes of gold.

The same sunlight caught in Christopher’s hair, held captive in silky strands glowing with luminescence. Janet wanted to comb her fingers through that mating of hair and celestial fire. Electricity built inside her without the touching.

“The Cassandras have been prophesying an end to the gold for years,” Christopher said, steering the car along a highway that sliced one man-made dune into mirrored halves. “As far back as 1911, the mines were supposedly about to give up their last. New discoveries, however, combined with advanced technology and periodic increases in the selling price of gold, now project the life of the mines into the year 2030.”

“There used to be wildlife wandering here in vast herds,” Janet said. “Where do you suppose they are now?”

“Mining companies in Johannesburg employ over four hundred and fifty thousand men,” Christopher answered; his reply automatic. He was programmed for his response. “Without the profits from the mines, this country would be very poor indeed, attempting to eke an existence from the export of agricultural products at the mercy of periodic droughts and severe crop failures.”

“Yes, well, I imagine there is a rationalization for everything, isn’t there?” Janet said, refusing to be impressed. She knew the arguments for industrial development versus maintenance of an ecological status quo. Christopher wasn’t the only one who considered corporate profits more desirable than environmental preservation. Unfortunately, there were too many like him. If they weren’t the majority, they were still in positions of power that gave them the edge.

“I suppose it all depends on one’s priorities,” Christopher said smugly. “Some people seem more concerned about the welfare of four-legged animals than the welfare of their own two-legged species.”

“Some people find the four-legged varieties far less able to take care of themselves,” Janet said. “I don’t see animals lobbying for their grazing land while greedy businessmen divvy up the pot.”

There was an uneasy silence. Her every moment with Christopher was a battle. Perversely, she had hoped for something more.

“Look,” he said finally, his thoughts parallel to hers, “surely we’re not going to be the only two people on this lovely day who refuse to enjoy ourselves, are we? Couldn’t we try for a truce? It’s unlikely we’re going to resolve, in one day of bickering, any profit-versus-ecology questions that have been around longer than either of us.”

“Then what’s the purpose of this little outing?” Janet asked.

“I want you to know there are members of the opposition who are charming human beings and not the ogres you, and many of your cohorts, seem to think,” he said, flashing a wide smile that invited seduction.

“Is that what you think you are?” Janet asked, wanting to believe but refusing to do so. “A charming human being?”

“Oh yes,” Christopher said, ignoring her sarcasm. “As you shall soon see if you give me half the chance.”

“A preacher pontificating his own virtues must surely do so to a congregation of one!” Janet said, wishing Christopher’s charm was more the natural variety of his youth than the calculated efforts of a shrewd businessman out to win converts.

“Touché!” Christopher said with a laugh so infectious Janet couldn’t help smiling. She shouldn’t have smiled; it gave him the proverbial inch that would encourage him to go for the mile. “There,” he said; “isn’t that better?”

It was better. It was some of what she wanted; it was what she feared, too.

“I didn’t mean to sound pompous,” she said. He was right. There would be no miraculous conversions in their short time together. She knew that when she came down the elevator to meet him in the lobby. That was never her real purpose. She wanted a piece of her past. She was willing to settle for one day of renewal, here and now. Offered the chance of that day, she would be a fool to refuse it.

“We won’t mention it again,” he said, sounding too triumphant.

She didn’t like losing ground. “Tell me about this girl who I remind you of,” she said.

“I thought we were going to have fun?” he demanded, his golden eyes shooting condemning daggers.

“How can you have fun when I remind you of someone you’d rather forget?” Janet replied, hurt by his change of mood, even though she had anticipated it. She feared giving in to inner needs that could weaken her resolve.

“There are good memories as well as the bad,” he said. She shouldn’t have pried for that admission. Despite her heartache, it was easier thinking he remembered only the bad. “Nothing is ever truly black or white,” he said, turning his face toward her, unreadable. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that it is. Relationships are painted in grays.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “For some reason, I feel compelled to be on the offensive.”

“We do seem to be having our problems, don’t we?” he said, the humor back in his voice. She was glad for the return of lightness; it was contagious. “So, I will apologize, too,” he said, “and bring us back to square one. After all, why shouldn’t you be curious? Who knows, it may do me a world of good to talk about it.”

Janet didn’t want him to talk about it. She didn’t want to open that can of worms, appalled that she had been the one to provide the instrument. He would paint her the villain of the piece. It would be easy to do. She had never answered his letters, never even read them, fearful that they held the magic to seduce her from her father. Janet couldn’t join in her father’s betrayal, and only Christopher had had the power to make her do so. She had hated her father for taking her from Africa and from Lionspride—from Christopher. The hate had been there, as well as the love, when his heart attack killed him. And she felt guilty, prepared to compensate for her feelings of disloyalty.

“I knew her when we were children,” Christopher said, making Janet uneasy. How could she stop him? His memories weren’t hers, and time distorted things. The reality of her dreams might be inaccurate. “She hated to see animals killed,” he said. “She liked sliding down the banister at Lionspride. You see the similarities?”

“I like her already,” Janet said, nervously glancing from the car window. Mine tailings stretched to either side of the highway. She and Christopher were driving the Golden Arc of the great South African gold fields. Millions of years ago, heat, cold and storms scoured debris from gold-bearing mountains into a great inland sea that was now the Transvaal Highveldt and the Orange Free State.

“She was very likable…” Christopher said.

“But?” Janet prodded. Pure curiosity made her want to hear the rest.

“But she was a child,” he said. Maybe he understood after all. “I wasn’t more than a child myself.”

“First love?” she suggested. She was torturing herself, making things worse. She was hoping he would recognize her as that thirteen-year-old girl.

“Actually, I fared far better in my teens than most,” he said, steering toward an end to that line of conversation. He was laughing it off. It wasn’t special; it was only a phase of adolescence that everyone went through. Children grew up. Things that seemed world shattering were recognized later as mere childish exaggerations.