American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory (49 page)

The atmosphere in the house was
casual and relaxed, a far cry from what it had been just yesterday. In the
ballroom, both plasma screens were on and blaring as Alec and Shane played Xbox
live against alien zombie invaders. It sounded like a warzone.

In spite of the noise, Nash
couldn’t ask for anything better.  He was determined to have a sense of
normalcy around the house as the national news of the Aury treasure heated up.
More news media had showed up outside the house and his office was getting
calls from national news agencies for interviews. Nash wasn’t ready to talk
about everything, not just yet.  He wanted to wait and see what the scientists
had to say.

 Nash had a long talk with Dr.
Whitney the day before, telling the man that until things calmed down, he could
no longer bring a battalion of young people with him to excavate the crypts. 
No one could blame him, of course, and when Dr. Whitney showed up that morning,
it was with two other archaeologists and Dr. Clarke.  Gone were the carloads of
grad students, at least for the time being.  Nash was much more comfortable
with the smaller scale activities.

Nash had, in fact, been working
from home since yesterday and had told his concerned aides that he wasn’t sure
when he would come back to the office given what had happened at his house
yesterday. The attack on Elliot had scared the hell out of him and he was
determined to spend every moment with her, so bloody furious over the thrown
bottle that even now, he was still angry about it.  

Every time he looked at his wife
with the bandage on her collarbone, he got angry all over again. He had no
doubt who did it, but no one had actually taken the time to get a good look at
the car or take down a license plate number. He had sent the Sorrento police
over to The Bottoms yesterday afternoon but they didn’t get anywhere. No
evidence meant no arrest. 

Nash wanted to drive over to the
Loreau plantation and burn the place down, but that wouldn’t solve the problem.
Until he could figure out what to do, he was determined to stick close to home.

He sat down at the kitchen table
opposite Dr. Clarke, watching his wife as she interacted with her daughter.
Elliot was such a lovely creature to watch and every time he was around her,
she had his full attention. As she had since the moment he met her. 

His gaze moved over her delicate
features, the blond hair pulled back into a bouncy ponytail, the loose-fitting
shirt she wore that couldn’t conceal the growing baby bump, and stretchy little
black pants.

As Elliot leaned against the
counter with an ear of corn in her hand, Penelope put her hands on Elliot’s
belly and bent down to kiss it, gigging when she caught Nash watching her.  He
grinned back.

“I do it all the time,” he waved
her off.  “That belly has a lot of lip prints on it and I suspect it’s going to
have a lot more before the baby is born.”

Penelope put her mouth up against
her mother’s stomach. “Hi, Sophie Elizabeth,” she said, her mouth muffled
against Elliot’s shirt. “I love you, baby girl. I can’t wait to meet you.”

Nash smiled broadly as Penelope
talked to the baby, kissing the belly again and again until Elliot finally
pulled her off.  Grinning, Penelope took the corn out of her mother’s hand and
finished shucking it.

 “I still think you guys should
go to New Orleans,” she said. “I mean, why not? What better way to forget about
a bad week?”

Elliot’s happy demeanor faded.
“No way,” she said firmly, moving to the refrigerator and pulling out a Mexican
beer. “I couldn’t relax knowing you guys were here alone.  I mean, what if
something happened? Things are still too crazy to think about going away.”

Nash watched Elliot as she popped
the top off the beer and came over to the table to hand it to him. He took it
gratefully, kissing the hand that gave it to him.

“I’m going to agree with your
mother on this one,” he told Penelope. “Until the situation calms down, no one
is going anywhere, least of all me.”

Elliot leaned against him,
putting her arm around his broad shoulders as he wrapped his free arm around
her waist.

“You’ve got to go back to the
office sometime,” she said softly.

“I can do everything I need to
from here.”

Dr. Clarke, sitting in the middle
of a family discussion, seemed to be a little uncomfortable.  She stood up and
started gathering her things.

“If y’all don’t mind, I’ll give
you some room to talk,” she said.

“Where are you going?” Elliot
wanted to know. “You can stay here. We don’t mind.”

Dr. Clarke forced a smile. “No
trouble, Ms. Aury. I’ll go to my car and give you some privacy.”

“Wait,” Nash waved at the woman.
“Go into the library. You can use my desk. I don’t want that journal out of the
house.”

Dr. Clarke understood and she
moved her materials into Nash’s luxurious man-cave study. Elliot looked down at
her husband.

“If she goes in there, where are
you going to work today?”

He looked up at her, hugging her
against him. “I’m taking the day off,” he announced. “I’ve put in fifteen hour
days for the past two months, so I’m taking the rest of the week off to spend
time with my family.”

Pleased, Elliot kissed him,
tasting beer on his lips. Penelope, seeing that her mother and Nash were
deteriorating into sweet kisses and soft whispers, found her way into the ballroom
where Wolfgang happily greeted her. She lay down on the couch and made the boys
turn over at least one television so she could watch regular programming. The
dog jumped up next to her, laying its big head on her belly.

Back in the kitchen, Elliot was
now sitting on Nash’s lap with his hand on her belly.  The baby was moving
around and he could feel it, grins of delight with every kick. Elliot was
talking about a fancy bassinet she had seen, trying to convince Nash that they
needed to spend fifteen hundred dollars on it. He thought a cardboard box
beside their bed would do just as well, listening to her groans of protest. As
he laughed at her displeasure and swooped in to nuzzle her neck, he could hear
Shane calling to him.

“Dad!” the boy was yelling. “The
weather channel has issued an alert!”

Nash still has his face in
Elliot’s sweet-smelling neck. “What does it say?”

There was no immediate reply.
Then, Beck appeared. “It says that thunderstorms and possible tornado watches
are heading over from Houston. At least we know we have a basement now if a
tornado comes.”

Nash nodded. “When?”

“They said some time tonight.”

Nash thought on that, looking up
at Elliot to say something and realizing she looked apprehensive. He squeezed
her gently.

“What’s wrong, darlin’?”

She looked at him and tried to
smile, but it turned into a quirky little expression and he laughed at her.

“Give me earthquakes and
wildfires,” she said. “I don’t like tornados or wild weather.”

He squeezed her.  “That’s what we
have here in Louisiana. You’re going to have to get used to it.”

She made a funny face again,
shaking her head and exaggeratingly chattering her teeth as if terrified. He
chuckled again and stood up, setting her carefully on her feet.

“If rain is coming, then we’d
better make sure the archaeologists know,” he said. “I’m not sure what they have
to do in order to protect whatever they’re working on, but that big trench in
the back yard isn’t going to do well unless they buckle it down.”

Elliot followed him into the
dining room. “They usually seal it up with tarps.”

Nash knew that. He went down into
the crypt where Dr. Whitney and the other archaeologists were beginning to
bring Paul-Michel out of his marble coffin.  They had a portable plastic table
set up, covered in a clean white sheet, and they were beginning to lay the
bones out on it like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Elliot had followed Nash down
into the crypt.  It was the first time she had seen Paul-Michel’s remains and
she made a face of distaste at her first glimpse.

“Wow,” she said, putting her
fingers to her nose at the smell. “He’s really a mess, isn’t he?”

Dr. Whitney was piecing together
some vertebra.  “He is,” he agreed. “I’m wondering if we’re going to find the
other three in this condition.”

On another table, another
archaeologist was carefully laying out the pieces of treasure and jewelry they
had been able to remove.  He had a cleansing station set up and Elliot could
see that he had already cleaned about half of the emerald necklace they found
in Paul-Michel’s crypt. 

Fascinated, Elliot leaned over
the table to take a look at the seventeenth-century pirate’s booty coming to
life. The archaeologist noticed her interest.

“Pretty neat, eh?” the older man
with glasses smiled at her. “These emeralds are first rate, probably mined in
Brazil, as that was along the pirate’s coastal travel routes. The big one
anchoring the necklace has to be at least thirty carats.  There’s at least six
others that I can see, maybe more. This necklace has to weigh a few pounds.
How’d you like that hanging around your neck?”

Elliot grinned. “With emeralds that
big, I’d make the sacrifice.”

The archaeologist showed her a
couple of other things they had brought out, including a gold broach with a fat
ruby on it and an exquisite dagger with the blade intact and still sharp. There
was also a pair of earbobs, intact and found together, with a giant pearl and
ruby hanging off of a long, single strand of solid gold. 

They were magnificent and Elliot
peered closely over the man’s shoulder as he cleaned them up so he could show
them to her.  Using specially formulated jewelry cleaner and a soft bristle
toothbrush, he was able to shine up the dark gold and lustrous pearl to a high
sheen. When he was finished polishing them, he held up one so Elliot could get
a closer look.

“A queen must have worn this,” he
told her. “Look at the size of that pearl.”

Elliot pointed to the clasp of
the earring. “Are they made for pierced ears?”

The archaeologist nodded. “They
really didn’t have such things as clip-on earrings back then, especially for
pieces like this. They’re so heavy, they’d pull the clip right off. Do you want
to try it on?”

Elliot nodded eagerly, like an
excited little kid, and the archaeologist put the earrings carefully in her
ears. They were huge and heavy, but absolutely beautiful. By the time Nash
finished discussing the incoming weather to Dr. Whitney and turned for his
wife, he could see the archaeologist taking pictures of Elliot’s ears with the
enormous earrings attached to them. He walked up on the pair.

“Hey, what’s this?” he demanded
lightly. “Where’d you get those?”

Elliot was thrilled with the
earrings. “Dr. Bedford put them on,” she tilted her head back so Nash could see
the earrings. “Look at these things; aren’t they beautiful? I wonder who they
used to belong to before your ancestor stole them – maybe a princess or
duchess. Or maybe a prostitute!”

He grinned at her, passing a
glance at the scientist. “You shouldn’t have done this,” he told the man.
“You’ll never get them back now. It’s going to take both of us to get them off
of her.”

The archaeologist chuckled.
“Well, technically, they belong to you,” he pointed out. “If she wants to keep
them, that’s really your decision.”

Nash hadn’t thought of it that
way but realized the man was right. Everything in this house, treasure
included, belong to him to do with as he pleased. He looked at Elliot, seeing
such a deliriously hopeful expression on her face that he immediately started
to relent.

“Are you serious?” he asked
softly. “You really want to keep two hundred year old earrings?”

Her hopeful expression fell and
he caved like an idiot.  He didn’t even say anything about the fact that they
were part of the blood money cache. He didn’t get that far.

 “Okay, okay,” he said quickly,
putting his arm around her and kissing her forehead. “They’re yours.  Merry Christmas.”

Elliot giggled gleefully, hugging
him enthusiastically and thanking him repeatedly before running over to Dr.
Whitney to show him her treasure. The old archaeologist just grinned as Elliot
rushed up the stairs, happy as a lark.  He shook his head at Nash.

“You’ve got your hands full with
that one,” he said. “What do I tell her if she comes back down here scavenging
for more jewelry?”

Nash grinned as he began to
follow his wife up the stairs. “Give her what she wants,” he said. “She’s
earned it.”

Dr. Whitney snorted and turned
back for his bones.  As Nash entered the dining room upstairs, he could hear
Elliot in the library, no doubt showing Dr. Clarke her gorgeous booty.  Nash
grinned as he followed her voice, glad to hear her so excited about something.
She’d been so miserable over the past two months with her pregnancy that he was
pleased to see her so happy.  Just as he entered the library, she suddenly
scooted past him.

“I have to show Penny!” she said.