Holdin' On for a Hero (99 page)

Osgood looked at her in shock. “Good Lord, woman, have you gone round the bend?”

“Not in the least, “Louise interrupted. “ I might be old but I’m not blind. I see the way she looks at Maxwell when she thinks no one is watching. She’s tender on that boy.”

“Good Lord, Louise!”

“Good Lord is right, because the boy’s just as taken with her.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Is it now?”

“But of course it is! You know as well as I do that Maxwell isn’t capable of—of those kinds of feelings.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. In fact, since that girl’s been here, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve not misjudged the boy on several fronts. Maybe he’s more aware than we give him credit for.”

“Enough, enough! I don’t want to hear it. You’re mistaken. I can’t hear any more of this.”

Louise watched him go, and then reclaimed her seat. Maybe Osgood was right and it was just the idle fantasy of an old woman, wishful thinking that perhaps Maxwell could be a little more aware than they knew. But she’d seen the look in Maxwell’s eyes on more than one occasion when Nikki had entered the room, and she’d seen the looks that passed between them. She might be old, but not so old she had forgotten what that look meant.

She only hoped that if her suspicions were right, Nikki would be careful. Affection and attention were not things that had been abundant in Maxwell’s life. To have it for a short time only to lose it when Nikki’s job ended and her attention moved on to more interesting things, might do Maxwell far more harm than good.

She would speak with Nikki about it at her first opportunity.

* * * * *

“Nik! Hey! Nikki!”

Nikki stopped and turned toward the voice. Ben jogged across the parking lot. “Hey, stranger!”

Shifting her papers and books into one arm, she used the other to give him a hug. “I was just headed for your place.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“Actually, I wanted to ask a favor.”

“Thesis?” He indicated the things in her arm.

“Not exactly.”

Ben pried a paper loose, looked at it, then at her. “’Not exactly’ is right. What gives?”

“Just some independent research.”

“On post traumatic stress disorder and Gulf War syndrome? This for you or your new project at the Weston estate?”

“He’s not a project!” Nikki quickly turned to unlock her car. She put everything in the seat before turning to look at Ben again.

He was regarding her with a knowing expression. “How about a cup of coffee? Or better yet a drink?”

“Coffee. Wanda’s?”

“Where else?” Ben grinned. “Meet you there in ten minutes.”

As Ben jogged off, Nikki got in her car. She thought about how to ask Ben for the favor without saying too much about Max. Why was she so hesitant to discuss Max with Ben? Ben was her closest friend. He knew more about her than anyone.

Until now,
a voice inside reminded her.
Max knows things even Ben doesn’t. Like about your foster father.

Nikki closed her inner ear to the voice, despite knowing it was right. She’d revealed far more to Max than she’d intended. While he didn’t know everything about her, he knew things that no one else did.

Maybe it would be good for her to talk to Ben. Sometimes a sounding board helped put things into perspective and at the moment she really didn’t feel she had a very good handle on being objective. Try as she might to remind herself, warn herself and even stop herself, her feelings for Max were growing. Too fast.

Yes, it would be good to talk to someone. Even if she couldn’t summon the courage to discuss Max, she could get Ben’s take on the meeting with Mark Robinson—another dilemma she was trying to deal with. With a change in attitude, she started the car.

Ben was waiting in his normal booth when she arrived. Two cups of coffee sat on the table.

“So, what gives?” Ben asked as she sat down.

“I don’t know where to start.”

“How about the beginning?”

She took a sip of the coffee and propped one elbow on the table, resting her chin on the heel of her hand. Hesitantly at first, then gaining in momentum, she poured out everything that had happened since she had first met Gaspar and had gone to see the Westons, leaving out only the part about what had happened the previous evening when she’d conducted some preliminary tests with Max. She also left out the favor she wanted from him.

By the time she finished they’d gone through an entire pot of coffee, two club sandwiches, and a slice of pie with ice-cream.

Ben whistled and leaned forward to take her hands. “Nik, you know I don’t like being a killjoy, and you know I love you for your big heart, but this time I really think you’re in way over your head. I mean, the way I see it, you’ve got a couple of major problems. One, you took off on some…quest for the Holy Grail—”

“The Blue Stones of Atlantis.”

“Yeah, whatever. My point is you take on this quest with only some story from some guy to go on.’

“He’s not just some guy! Don’t you recognize the name? Come on, Ben, I know you took medieval literature.”

Ben shook his head and Nikki cocked her head to one side as she said, “Parisfal?’”

Ben’s facial features all moved upward, from the preliminary rise of his eyebrows to the smile that came to his lips. “Oh yeah, yeah, I remember. The Grail stories. So?”

Nikki shook her head. “And you call yourself Mr. Logic. Okay, walk this road with me for a second. Centuries ago writers used what they read from writers and historians who had come before them. They then based their own new stories on the myths and legends that were the result of tales that’d been passed down. Now bear in mind that for centuries, many of which were centuries of oral tradition, there were no records. So from the original telling of the deed or event, it’s logical to assume that the stories the medieval writers read were widely divergent from the original. Can you agree with me thus far?”

“Provisionally, yes.”

Nikki couldn’t help but smile at Ben’s answer. He always left himself room to maneuver, change tactics, or position. She supposed that was what made him so brilliant. He never left himself in a position where there was no way out. She’d often wished she could siphon off some of that particular talent for herself.

“Okay.” She pushed herself back toward the topic on the table. “But even though the tales the medieval writers wrote are vastly different from the original tale, there always remains common elements.”

“Well, I’m not exactly an expert on this particular subject, so I’d have to rely on your judgment in that.”

“Okay, fine. So let’s say you take my word for it and go from there. What’s most striking in every tale ever written about certain objects, people, or events is that if you take away the names and the geography, make everything very depersonalized, you see a definite pattern that’s woven through all of the myths and legends.”

“Which is?”

Nikki suddenly wondered if she had been the one leading the conversation or if she had somehow managed to fall into a skillfully laid trap. She couldn’t count the number of times she and Ben had come to this point. And every time the outcome was the same. Despite what she thought was the truth, because she had no proof, she couldn’t disregard the possibility that she was wrong and until she knew for sure, she had no position to defend.

This, in a strange way, was the sum of her life thus far. Never in her life had she had anything she could put her trust or faith in. Every time she did, she left herself wide open to having life kick her in the gut and leave her groaning and gasping in a shattered world.

A memory played through her mind, of coming home from school and finding her mother lying on the bed, a syringe still in her hand and her eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, with a smile on her face like she was seeing the most beautiful thing imaginable.

Nikki had never forgotten her mother’s face. Nor had she ever forgotten the revelation that sight gave her at only nine years old. Her mother had been happy to die. She’d wanted to go away and never come back. She’d wanted it more than she wanted to be a wife or a mother.

Now she could reason and justify what her mother had done, and perhaps even sympathize. But the little girl inside her still felt that her mother hadn’t considered her important enough to live for. And when you’re nine, if you can’t trust in your mother’s love, what’s left?

“Hey.” Ben reached over and nudged her.

“Sorry.” She shook the memories away.

“Back in that dark place you can’t share?”

She looked at him with a mixture of gratitude and guilt. She knew he tried to understand when she chose not to share with him. That was why she loved him. But she also knew that he was disappointed that she couldn’t trust him enough to share her burden. She shared that disappointment. It’d be a most marvelous thing to trust someone that much, but she’d yet to find that someone she could truly and completely believe in.

Nikki nodded and took his hand. “Sorry. Now, if I can find my way back to what we were talking about…”

“You were about to divulge the great secret to me—the definite pattern that’s woven through all of the myths and legends.”

“Oh yeah, that.” She shook her head, chuckled uncomfortably, cleared her throat, and fell silent.

“All right.” He let her off the hook. “Enough said. Except of course the point I was originally trying to make which is, despite who this Gaspar is—and by the way you still haven’t told me squat about him—only his fifteen times great grandfather or whatever. But despite what he said, you don’t have anything that’d lead you to believe he could be telling the truth. Come on, you’re a scholar. You know that just like in science and math there are steps to be followed. You can’t jump from point A to Z without something in between.”

“I agree. No really, you’re one hundred percent right. It was lunacy to believe him. And even if he was right, how the hell would I ever find it? You think someone as rich as this Weston guy would just leave it lying around? No way. So, yes, you’re right, you’re right. It was a dumb move. But I took it and here I am, so now I’ve got to figure out what the heck to do!”

Ben leaned his head back and blew out his breath long and slow. “And there we have the crux of the problem, don’t we? First you let this de Troyes put a bee in your bonnet over some mythological artifact, and then out of the blue Professor Bernard wants to see you and asks if you’ve spoken with de Troyes. Upon which the two of you get chased all over the city and he ends up doing the complete unexpected and offing himself. And now this Robinson guy claims Bernard and de Troyes are part of some group that’s responsible for killing people, and you have what?”

“A mess,” she groaned.

“Not just a mess, but what sounds like a potentially dangerous mess with a lot of conflicting stories. And…” He held up his hand as she opened her mouth. “Not to mention the second element in the twofold problem I see. This thing isn’t about some artifact, or even a fat bank account. It’s about the guy. Maxwell. Something about him does you in a way no one else ever has and it’s driving you nuts because you have no idea how to handle it. First of all, you’ve never been there before and secondly, when you finally do reach the point you have, it’s with some guy who’s not playing with a full deck.”

“That’s unfair.” Nikki knew which battle to choose. She fought for Max, which diverted attention from her. “You can’t make that kind of judgment.”

“Okay, maybe this Max guy is smarter than everyone realizes, but still—all the shit he’s done to you? I don’t know how to put it in a nice way, but it seems to me he’s a twenty-megahertz machine in a terabyte game.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“And the reason?”

Nikki looked down at their clasped hands on the table, trying to find the right words to make him understand something she was not sure she did herself. She looked up at Ben. “Remember when Jimmi first moved in next to Catherine and me?”

Ben laughed. “Yeah, she really went off, didn’t she?”

“To say the least. She got one look at his dreads and was sure we were being invaded by either Jamaican drug runners or voodoo “head shrinkers” as she put it.”

Ben’s smile faded. “Her paranoia just about got all of us—well, me and Tony, anyway. But not you.”

“That’s not important. My point is, Cat just saw what was on the outside—his appearance and the fact that he didn’t dress or act like the rest of us and she made a judgment on only that. It’s the same with Max. Everyone treats him a certain way because they’ve been told to. Everyone on the staff’s terrified of him except the butler Osgood and his wife Louise and they treat him like he’s got the IQ of a turtle.”

“And you don’t think they’re right.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay, but can I ask why?”

She smiled at him. “The same reason I knew I was right about Jimmi, or about you. I see it in his eyes.”

Ben studied her face for a moment then gave her hands a squeeze. “How can I argue with that?”

“I’m hoping you can’t.”

“Okay, I won’t. I know you see things not all of us do, Nik, but I’m still concerned. See, I remember how things were with Jimmi, and me, and Tony and Tom and even Bill. But this time it’s different. You’re different.”