From the Ashes (19 page)

Jon chuckled. “It’s New York. I believe it.”

“Yeah. So anyway, he just broke everything the Rainbow Room would have held for us into smaller chunks.” Mara smiled, staring misty-eyed off at some point over Jon’s shoulder and six months in the past. “We came here for a romantic dinner in the Rockefeller complex, then to a musical –
Phantom,
of course – and then he took me up to the top of the Empire State Building. Not the main observation deck, but the higher one, the one just below the antenna. It was just the two of us up there for a bit, and we... we danced. No band, no music. Just us, the stars above, and the far-off beat of the city, alive beneath our feet.” She shook her head slowly, her eyes sinking to the table, seeing nothing but the irreclaimable past. “It was... just perfect.”

Jon pressed his lips tightly together, nodding silently while fighting off a rush of emotion. “He was a heck of a guy,” he finally said after a reflective pause. “He and I both were kinda following in our parents’ footsteps. The love of academia coupled with a restless spirit of adventure. But as much as my parents were an influence on us, Michael had an even greater impact on me. I mean, he double majored in history and archaeology at UNC; I did the same at Harvard two years later. He went to GW for his doctorate in history; I went to Oxford. Different places, but very similar interests. He was more into American history, whereas I fell in love with European history and the archaeology of the ancient world. Hence, him being Stateside, and my studying over in the old country.” He paused, broke eye contact, and slowly shook his head, almost mournfully, at the table. “And I left him. He was...”

Across the table, a look of concern crossed Mara’s face, but she remained silent.

“It was stupid jealousy. All my life, all both of our lives, we’d grown up in the shadow of our father, the great archeologist Sir William Rickner. Given, Dad never tried to force history or archeology on us as far as our career choices went, but growing up in that environment, seeing and experiencing the things Michael and I did, it was all but impossible not to fall in love with it. So it was just our fate that we would necessarily begin our own professional careers in the shadow of a giant who also shared our family name. Probably why we both decided on getting our doctoral degrees in history rather than in archaeology, although we were still almost as active in the latter as we had been when we were growing up. And then Michael, being older, begins to make a name for himself.” He sighed and looked at the table for a moment. “Another shadow to live in. First my dad, and then my brother.”

He looked back at Mara, meeting her eyes, wanting her to understand, to somehow absolve him of this guilt he felt and tell him that he wasn’t to blame. Because right now, he sure as heck couldn’t stop blaming himself on his own. “I still loved them both, and nothing would ever change that, but somewhere along the way, Michael got ‘rival’ added to my mental list of relationships we held for each other. And so I refused to attend the same university as him, even going so far as to attend school on a different continent for grad school. It was stupid, I know, but...” Jon furrowed his brow at Mara’s bemused expression. “What?”

“It’s just funny. Not funny, ha-ha; funny, ironic.” Mara smiled almost maternally at Jon. “Michael felt the same way about you. Even though he missed the heck out of you, he kind of wanted to distance himself from you professionally. So he could make his own mark, so to speak.”

Jon was visibly shocked. “But he was older than me. He started his university career before I did.”

“And he was firmly convinced that you were the brighter of the two Rickner sons. He would tell me stories about some of your adventures growing up. About how impressed he always was about your ability to figure things out that no one else seemed to be able to – not even him.”

Jon sat dumbly, staring at Mara with a mixture of relief and disbelief. He wanted to laugh and cry all at once. Instead, he just sat, his face twitching into one emotion, then the next, blinking away tears that wanted to come and swallowing laughter that threatened to pour forth in the middle of the restaurant. Finally, he mustered up the control to ask a question. “Really? Then why didn’t he...”

“Tell you?” Mara picked up the end of the trailed-off question. “He wanted to. But really, how do you broach a subject like that? ‘Hey little bro, just wanted to tell you that you’re smarter than me and that’s why I’m glad we don’t go to the same school’?”

Jon chuckled softly. “Yeah, good point. But even still... Gosh, we were both so stupid. I mean, we weren’t even focusing in the same field of history. We could have been an asset to each other, and instead we just wasted the precious time that we had. If only I’d known...” He drifted off, trying to control his breathing, the tightness building in his chest. Then he shook his head abruptly and looked up at Mara. “Sorry, I’m rambling here. Maybe it’s cathartic or something. What?”

Mara had put down her fork and stared out at the street.

“What?” Jon repeated, afraid he’d somehow offended her by monopolizing the conversation.

“I...” She slowly turned her head back toward Jon. “I miss him. It’s still hitting me how very much I miss him. I don’t know what I’m gonna do without him.”

“Hey, hey, hey, don’t worry about that right now.” He reached across the table and took her hand, which she didn’t pull away. It was time to switch roles, from consoled to consoler. Mara’s pain was every bit as real and fresh as Jon’s was. “I know, Mara. I miss him like anything. And I know you do too. He’s left an empty spot in both of our lives, but we can’t let that keep us from living. We’ve gotta keep on living all the more now that he’s gone. It’s what he would’ve wanted. You know that.”

“Yeah.” Mara sniffed as she wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her wrist. “Yeah, I do. It’s... it’s just hard.”

“Of course it is, Mara. But, at the risk of sounding cliché, anything worth doing usually is.” Jon almost couldn’t believe that, just seconds earlier, he was the one struggling through and she was the one encouraging him. But then, that was the way of emotions sometimes. Especially when you have to help someone else through the pain as well.

She picked up her fork and began to absently poke at her half-eaten crab cake. Her eyes, so recently sad and mournful, began to grow dark with something approaching anger. “Why weren’t you there for him?” She didn’t look up, but a strange coldness had crept into her voice.

Jon blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Why weren’t you there for him? Why’d you have to run off to England for graduate school? Why’d you... abandon him?”

“Mara,
we just
had this talk.” Was this new wave of sorrow she was experiencing messing with her memory? Or was her pain suddenly making her less sympathetic to what they were talking about? After all, Jon wasn’t the one who had just been killed.

She shook her head at the crab cake, her voice still soft and filled with quiet tension. “He’d still be alive if you had been here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you hadn’t left, if you had been there for him, he would have backed down. He would have realized the danger in what he was doing. He wouldn’t be dead.”

Jon was stunned into silence. Then he broke out of his shock and responded, trying to keep his voice low despite the emotions raging within him. “Holy crap. Are you seriously trying to blame me for Michael’s death?”

“Well,” she said, her gaze still lingering on the table, “I mean, if you had been here... You’ve both done this sort of thing before. You knew the dangers. You could have talked him down.”

Jon felt his face growing hot, fighting to not explode at Mara here in the restaurant. After all they’d just talked about. After all she knew about Michael, Jon, and the nature of their relationship.
The audacity. The sheer freaking audacity.

“If you think Michael would have backed down from this,” he said through clenched teeth, “you didn’t really know Michael at all. He never would have backed down from a good mystery. He never would have forsaken a quest for truth, especially one where people were dying. He would have given everything he had to stop whatever injustice, whatever deceit, he had found.” Not to mention the fact that Jon would have been infinitely more likely to join in with Michael in his quest than try to talk him out of it.

“Yeah, the old Michael perhaps.” Mara’s eyes had left the table and were now meeting Jon’s, a surprising glint of anger-tinged confusion behind the welling tears. “But Michael wasn’t just living for himself anymore. He was about to be a husband. And in a few years, a father. The head of his own family. Not a stupid teenager running around chasing legends. A grown-up who people depended on.”

Jon laughed humorlessly. “You women. Thinking you can change a man’s basic personality when you rope him into marriage.”

“We
women?”
Mara’s voice went up and her face flushed. She scrunched up her face as the tears began to trace their paths down her cheeks. ‘You pigheaded idiot.”

Jon hated himself and hated this situation, knowing full well that they were both emotionally frazzled, and that Mara needed a friend right now, not an adversary. But for some reason, he couldn’t stop himself from defending the Michael he knew and loved. “Fine, maybe not fair to the whole sex, but
you, you’re
incredible. What Michael got killed doing was nothing less than his most fundamental passion. And if you didn’t understand that about him, if you wanted to change him, change that passion that made him my best friend and exploring buddy, then you didn’t understand him
at all.”

A tense silence descended upon the table, the murmurs of conversation and clinks of dinnerware from neighboring tables unnoticed as Jon and Mara’s eyes bored holes into each other.

Finally, it was Mara who broke, starting to sob as she lowered her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I...” She clenched her jaw. “Dammit!” she said as her fist hit the table, sending silverware flying and wine sloshing. This drew some stares, but the pair remained oblivious to their surroundings. The very fact that she’d broken from her normally conservative abstention from cursing spoke volumes to the level of her emotional turmoil. Her right hand grabbed her cross pendant and began rubbing its well-worn silver surface. “This is too freaking hard. I... Why did he have to be so brash and adventurous? Why did he have to be a hero? Why couldn’t... I loved him for his standards, for his adventurous spirit, for everything that got him killed. But when we were getting engaged, moving toward married life together... Why now? Why couldn’t he just stop before it was too late?”

Jon let her vent, each word, each moment he wasn’t locking eyes and horns with her another notch his anger lessened. When she lapsed into silence, he waited, then spoke.

“I’m sorry, too. I... You’re right. I wish I could have been there for Michael. I’d give anything to turn back the clock, but I still stand by what I said: nothing I said or did would have changed Michael’s determination to see this through. Just like nothing you or anyone else say or do will stop me from finishing what he started.”

Mara wiped the tears from her eyes with a thumb. Thankfully, she tended to wear minimal eye makeup, so didn’t she have mascara trails drawn down her cheeks. She sniffed and half-nodded, half-bobbed her head in agreement.

Jon looked at her thoughtfully. “Why are you here, Mara?”

“Because Michael didn’t tell me enough to get me killed, too,” she said automatically, looking upward as she tried to stave off another wave of tears.

“No, no, why are you
here?
New York? If you hate this ‘chasing legends’ nonsense, then why aren’t you back in D.C.? Or with your family in Oregon? Why are you
here?”

“Because I have to be.”

“Why?” Jon pressed.

“Because I have to find out what happened to Michael.
Why
I don’t have a fiancé anymore.
Why
the love of my life is dead. That’s why.”

“And exactly how far are you prepared to go in order to do that?”

She met his gaze with a steely determination he had yet to see from her. “As far as I have to.”

“Even putting your own life on the line?”

Mara paused, not a good sign in Jon’s opinion. Either she was committed to this or she wasn’t. Either she would be an asset to finishing Michael’s research and to bringing his killers to justice, or she would be a hindrance. And her hesitation didn’t portend the kind of determination and nerve that Jon knew would be necessary to see this through.

“Yes,” she finally said. “Even putting my own life on the line. Michael cared enough about exposing this secret to risk his life. I care enough about him to risk mine.”

’You’re sure? This is real, Mara. Real bullets, real death.”

“I found his body. Believe me, I
know
how real this is.”

“Fine.” Jon’s mind was far from at ease, but he decided to let the issue rest for now. He was tired. They were both grieving. He had to focus on the task at hand. That presented enough to worry about on its own.

Ted returned with their entrées. As they dined, they swapped half-hearted stories about Michael, reminiscing about the good-old-days that would never be again – Jon and Michael discovering a new temple complex buried in the jungles of Indonesia; Mara and Michael spending a romantic weekend getaway at the beautiful Biltmore Estate in the mountains of North Carolina; Michael’s foibles – like loudly cracking his neck at inappropriate times, and snoring; and his strengths – his intelligence, his wit, his compassion. Sad though the situation was, the conversation was strangely healing, and Jon found himself more grateful than ever that he was blessed with a partner in all of this – both for the mourning of Michael and for what would come next.

“So what’s our game plan?” Mara finally asked during a lull in the reminiscences.

“Well, we’re working off of what Michael was doing, right? Finishing what he started, following in his footsteps, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess the next step is what
his
would have been,” Jon said, feeling purpose returning to him. “Talk to Catherine Smith.”