More Than Paradise Part 14

Why? She wasn't normally like this. Something about Ash pushed her b.u.t.tons. Yet again the memory of their kiss troubled her. She hadn't felt like herself since then. She'd been on edge. p.r.i.c.kly. Restive. And * 125 *

endlessly xated on images of Ash in bed with her, of them having s.e.x. It was like a sickness. All she wanted was to stop feeling this way.

She'd been so exhausted by the end of the Kokoda trek, her fantasies had nally lost their immediacy and she could see an end to her strange xation with the woman she'd thought was a man.

Then Ash had walked back into her life and ruined everything.

That was why she'd been so angry back at the hanger. She had just been congratulating herself on getting a grip when her nemesis returned to destroy her peace of mind.

Charlotte sighed. "It's not unreasonable," she conceded in answer to Ash's question. "Please accept my apologies. I am truly sorry about your sister."

"We can make this easy or hard," Ash said. "I did exactly what you asked of me earlier, but it doesn't seem to be working for you. Is there something else I can do that would help?"

Kiss me again, right now. Charlotte shook her head emphatically.

"No. Nothing."

"Okay. So are we good?"

"Yes." It didn't sound very convincing. Charlotte tried again.

"We're ne."

She felt so stiff, Ash thought. And her voice was as brittle as gla.s.s.

She let her arms drop, indicating that Charlotte was free to move back to her cot. Charlotte stayed where she was. Ash drew a deep breath. She could tell Charlotte was holding hers.

"I'm sorry I manhandled you," she said, and meant it.

She seldom lost her temper. It usually didn't pay off. Her approach was to watch and listen, and to roll with the punches unless there was no choice but to take action. In which case, she made her move swiftly and effectively.

She had planned to say a couple of things to Charlotte before lights out, such as: What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you? Or that timeless reproach: Grow up. As it turned out, she was ready to throttle her over the camp bed, but the comments about s.e.xually transmitted diseases and lack of responsibility had been the nal straw. Ash could not believe she had nally made it to the tent, hanging out for some desperately needed sleep, and instead had some uptight prude telling her how to live her life.

Ms. Holier-Than-Thou was now hunkered against her chest like she was afraid to move, her tension palpable. Apparently she hadn't * 126 *

noticed that she was no longer being held against her wishes. Ash wondered what to say. You can go to bed now. Too parental?

She gave Charlotte's shoulder a friendly squeeze, hoping she would read this as an invitation to do them both a favor and quietly relinquish Ash's lap. Instead she inched as if she'd been struck and her whole body stiffened. s.h.i.+t. Ash wondered if she'd inadvertently probed an injury. The att.i.tudinal biologist had hiked the Kokoda. It was possible she'd suffered some physical damage but was toughing it out because she didn't want to slow the expedition down. Ash wondered if she should speak to Miles, off the record. It wouldn't do any harm to rest up an extra day in Kwerba. She could do with the time out herself.

Maybe she could chopper the real zealots up to the dry lake bed, their landing zone on the western slopes of the Fojas, tomorrow. They could get settled and start catching beetles or whatever, and she would ferry the rest of them up the following day. Not a bad idea. Of course, Miles would never wear it. The guy was completely single-minded.

"I don't know about you, but I'm ready to catch some z's," Ash said.

Charlotte lifted her head and twisted slightly, leaning away to stare up at Ash. "Let's start fresh," she said with bedroom huskiness.

Ash wasn't sure what starting fresh meant in this context but she was too tired to ask for clari cation. Some people made their interactions with others way too complicated. That wasn't her style. All she wanted right now was for her head to hit that micro-pillow.

"Works for me," she said, which seemed to go over okay.

Whispering an ardent thank-you, Charlotte moved away a little more, her hands glancing past Ash's thighs as she groped for the oor to orient herself. Ash resisted an urge to guide her.

"Everything okay?" she asked when she heard the creak of the cot frame.

"Yes, I'm ne. I'm sorry about...earlier."

Ash stretched out on her own pad. "It's done. No need to apologize any more. And don't lie awake thinking about it." That was the problem with brainy chicks. They took everything too seriously.

"I won't," Charlotte said. "Good night, Ash."

Ash said good night and stared into the pitch-black void of the low tent ceiling. Under normal circ.u.mstances, she might have been tempted to take Charlotte to bed regardless of the austere comforts of their lodgings. Charlotte's fast-crumbling resistance to being held, and * 127 *

her hesitance in moving away once she was freed, had been at odds with her protests. Ash could read an opportunity between those lines.

Yet that innocent shoulder squeeze had evoked an instinctive and emphatic don't hurt me response, and Ash never ignored those. Women often sent mixed signals and she was adept at second-guessing what they really wanted. But certain body language was crystal clear and she knew it well enough to recognize it instantly. She wondered who had stolen Charlotte's trust away through violence. A parent? A lover?

Ash got angry just thinking about it. There was never an excuse.

Any time she heard that a colleague or one of her workers in Madang was. .h.i.tting their wife or child, she did something to stop it. She knew a thing or two about bullies. She'd spent her rst eighteen years living with one. Cartwright Evans had not beaten her or Emma severely, although he routinely terri ed both of them with the possibility. But they knew what their mother's black eyes and stiff posture meant.

Ash could never understand why there was no divorce. As soon as she'd found out that parents sometimes separated and children lived with one or the other, she'd begged her mother to leave and take them with her. But Denise Evans was an old-fas.h.i.+oned woman who believed marriage was for good or bad. With the bene t of hindsight, Ash had concluded her mother was afraid Cartwright would hunt them down and kill her children. She was simply trying to protect them. Remaining in the marriage was the only way she thought she could.

Ash had been Cartwright's favorite, and that had created a wedge between her and Emma, despite Ash's efforts to support her younger sister. Emma lacked con dence and she'd never been able to stand up for herself against their father. When they were kids Ash used to push her to be more outgoing and to do the things that could win his approval. But Cartwright was capricious and cunning. He would reward one sibling and punish the other for the same thing, and Ash was always the one on the winning side of that equation.

Ironically, in the end, it was timid, obedient Emma who had tried to save their mother's life in the horri c attack that claimed it. Incredibly, after his arrest, Cartwright had seemed to expect Ash to take his side. It was as if he thought she regarded her mother and sister with the same contempt he did. He actually believed she was just like him.

Ash had never come to terms with that. She wanted to prove him wrong, yet she could not deny there were similarities. Cartwright was a charismatic bad boy with a dangerous charm women couldn't resist.

* 128 *

Ash knew she had inherited something of that from him, and, like him, she exploited it. She also shared his tall blond good looks and the recklessness that could add up to courage in a disciplined individual, but in him had manifested as callous self-indulgence. Cartwright Evans was a narcissist. He did as he pleased and didn't care how others were affected.

His wife had gotten in his way and he'd made her pay for it. Emma had tried to stop him, and she'd paid, too. Cartwright had attacked their mother with a baseball bat and when Emma tried to drag him off, he turned on her and chased her through the upstairs level of the house, nally clubbing her over the head at the landing. Emma had fallen down the stairs, unconscious. He left her for dead and returned to the master bedroom to nish off his wife, who had managed to call 911 by then. It had all come out at the trial, experts painting the full picture with photos of blood splatter and bodily injuries.

Cartwright's defense attorney had made a case that two African American men had broken into the house in a robbery that got violent and that he'd come home when the attack was in progress. Ash had testi ed against him, providing a history of his behavior that helped convict him. If she could, she would have killed him with her bare hands. Even that urge made her anxious sometimes. She was always aware of her genes, of a nascent Cartwright ticking like a time bomb inside her.

She'd gone to a shrink about it once, years ago, seeking some kind of rea.s.surance that she would not turn into her father. The shrink had insisted on talking about irrelevant stuff like her lack of committed relations.h.i.+ps, which was nothing more than a side effect of her working life. She wanted to read all kinds of signi cance into her love 'em and leave 'em pattern, instead of seeing it for what it was, a practical necessity. Ash had nothing to offer a woman who wanted a cozy domestic existence, and she didn't want to lead anyone to hope otherwise.

The shrink had said, Conscience makes cowards of us all. Her theory was that Ash felt responsible for what had happened to her family and she was afraid to start a new family of her own in case she f.u.c.ked that up by behaving like her father. Ash could see where she was coming from, but she was wrong. Her biggest concern, if the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree, was that she would do something rash on an a.s.signment, kill someone for no good reason and thereby cross * 129 *

that line in the sand she fought to preserve. She wanted to be able to live with herself, to retain some sense of honor.

That's what Emma had given her. A sense of honor, of being a good person. She let her mind drift to their last good day together at the Grove. Emma had laboriously baked banana bread and they watched a movie, then went out shopping for new clothes. In stores the clerks always made a fuss of her. She was pet.i.te and looked much younger than she was, with her pixie face and axen hair in bunches. When she was in a good mood, she was so sweet and lovable no one would believe she was also capable of stabbing a nurse and had to be supervised at all times.

Some days were better than others, and this was one of the best.

Emma was sunny and affectionate and had asked Ash questions about Madang like she could actually imagine she might live there one day.

When it came time for her to leave, Emma had kissed her good-bye and said, as she always did, "Can I come with you?"

Ash said, "Soon." And for once she'd really believed it.

Medicine made constant advances. Ash had been sure that if she could keep Emma well long enough, a new treatment would emerge that would deliver real results. With Emma's gradual but marked improvement, it nally seemed possible that she could live outside of an inst.i.tution.

"Don't forget me," Emma had called as she walked away.

Ash could still see her at that window, waving, holding the teddy bear she never let go of. Ash had the bear in her backpack, wrapped in a clean cloth. It still smelled of her sister. Tears stung her eyes and she rolled onto her side, facing away from Charlotte, her face muf ed against her pillow.

Everything she did, the way she had built her life over the past ten years, the risks and everyday hazards she took for granted, had only made sense because of Emma. Now that she'd gone, Ash's life seemed pointless.

She had never felt more alone.

* 130 *

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Predictably, Miles didn't go for the idea of taking an extra day in Kwerba. He could see the promised land and was chomping at the bit. Ash tried to make an argument about cloud cover and the brief burn-off period when she could hope to put down safely on the lake bed. However, Miles wasn't hearing anything but mermaids singing.

He looked twitchy just thinking about the possibility that they might not be able to start taping bird calls at ve a.m. the next morning and asked what the big deal was. The ight was only a half hour.

So, as soon as the swirling mist seemed to be lifting, the Nagle team organized the eld party, who had ipped coins to see who went in rst. Crates of food and water would be dropped last because they could be pushed over the side without having to put the helicopter down on the soft sphagnum bog. Each landing was risky and they would need to get the Huey in the air again before its gear sank too far.

"Once we touch down, you'll have about three minutes to get out,"

Ash told her pa.s.sengers. "So jump and run. Stay down. You don't want to get decapitated before you see your bow-wow bird."

"That's bower bird," Miles said like Ash had just disrespected the president or something.

Charlotte pointed to a stack of boxes, cages, and b.u.t.ter y nets.

"Can I get my things?"

"No. People rst. We'll drop all the supplies and equipment in last."

"But what if you can't make it in again today? We'll be stuck up there with nothing."

Ash shrugged and gave Miles a pointed look.

* 131 *

With the con dence of a man who had never own a helicopter in the New Guinea highlands, he said, "Don't worry. If it looks like conditions are deteriorating, we'll change our plan. You'll have everything you need. I personally guarantee it."

Ash almost laughed at Charlotte's expression. Even she wasn't kidding herself about the risks they were facing, but Miles was already climbing aboard the Huey, a man with a mission. He waved for the rest of the rst group to follow.

Ash said, "Looks like we're moving out."

Charlotte mumbled something under her breath and picked up the bag Ash knew carried her microscope. "I'm not leaving this."

She was in ne form this morning, Ash re ected, all business but still sounding so seductive everyone fell into dorkish wonder whenever she opened her mouth. Over breakfast Ash had noticed Billy Bob Woodc.o.c.k eyeballing her lasciviously. She wanted to smack him in the mouth but refrained. There would always be one guy who saw a sole civilian female as an invitation to help himself. She hoped his training had taught him enough to keep zipped up.

Just in case, she wandered over to him and said, "You're working, Woodc.o.c.k. Remember that."

"Got it, Major. No handling the merchandise."

Ash disliked him already. She said, "Dr. Lascelles is the client's representative. I'm talking about our paycheck. Understood?"

That got his attention. "Yes, ma'am. Point taken."

Ash moved the conversation on immediately. She didn't want anyone thinking she had a personal interest. Money was the stakes everyone in the game understood. "You'll be going in with the second lift, Corporal. I'm counting on you to keep order in the meantime.

Don't let any of these civilians run off by themselves chasing zoo specimens."

"I'm on it, ma'am."

He had seemed mindful of the mild reprimand ever since, keeping his eyes off Charlotte and his hands on the supplies. Ash cast a quick look his way as the last of the party climbed aboard. He was making wisecracks with one of the few macho scientists, an Australian not unlike Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.

Klaus moved to Ash's side. "Think he can keep it in his pants?"

Pleased she wasn't the only one who'd noticed the signs, Ash said, "If he doesn't I'll cut it off for him."

* 132 *

"You interested yourself?" Klaus had made her for a d.y.k.e about three seconds after they'd met.

Ash said dryly, "I'm interested in getting paid."

"You could do worse."

"That's a fact," Ash conceded.

Her colleague wasn't letting it go. "I think she likes you."

"She's a long way from home. Women like her end up with people who won't embarra.s.s them at dinner parties."

Klaus lapsed into silence. They both knew what she was saying. Being honest about how they made a living was a guaranteed conversation stopper in polite circles. Once the novelty wore off, respectable women got fed up with hanging out with a social liability.

"I think they're waiting for us," Ash said.

She and Klaus shook hands, as they always did before a ight. The deal was if they ever had to ditch, this would serve as the respectful good-bye they wouldn't get time for. They'd known each other ever since Ash started running arms for Tubby Nagle, and she trusted Klaus.

He was the nearest thing she had to a real friend in PNG.