Orphan of Creation (20 page)

She knew, even as she made her plans and took her precautions, how paranoid, how close to insane it was. But she felt
good
as she walked toward him in this public spot, felt in control, safe, shielded from whatever he might throw at her. She forced herself to remember everything Aunt Jo had said. It helped.

He saw her and walked a step or two toward her. She stopped a good five feet away from him, backed up a step when he moved toward her. “Hello, Mike,” she said, smiling. “Nice to see you.” The weird thing was, she
did
feel good about seeing him. It was almost as if she were winning a skirmish this time. She had enough guards up to feel safe. She could relax behind her sturdy defenses.

“I missed you over Christmas,” he said. “You never came over. I tried to call, but the answering machine was always on.”

She laughed for no reason she understood exactly. Already he was needling her. “I was very busy. Just got finished writing a big paper. Besides, it was only Momma and me, a very quiet Christmas with just the two of us.”

“But you could have come over, or called.”

“Michael, we’re separated, not really married anymore. I’m not in charge of how you spend your holidays. Come on, let’s walk.” She stepped wide around him and started north along the towpath, taking long strides, forcing him to hurry if he wanted to walk alongside her.

“But you came today,” he pointed out as he stepped into pace alongside her.

“Because I wanted to,” she said. “Not because of any duty, not because
you
wanted me to.”

He was silent for a long minute. “What was the paper? About that skull you found in Mississippi?”

“That’s right.” She looked up along the towpath, watching a cyclist a long way off, wheeling toward them. He came closer and rushed past a moment or two later.

“Aren’t you going to tell me about it?”

She stopped and turned to face him. “Michael, you only know about it in the first place because you went snooping through my papers and then made
me
feel guilty about it. It’s all very delicate, sensitive stuff and I’m not supposed to talk about it just yet—and I don’t see where you’ve shown yourself to be a reliable confidant.”

“What you’re saying is, you don’t trust me,” he said petulantly.

“Have you given me any reason to?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. I won’t go snooping anymore,” he said in a hard voice. “But I wish you’d tell me what you’ve been doing.”

She happened to glance over at him just then, and it was almost her undoing. The firm voice was at odds with his expression. He looked so helpless, so put-upon, it was all she could do not to reach out, touch him, tell him it was all right. She caught herself and realized he had done it again, made himself the aggrieved party, made her feel she should apologize, given her the power to make him feel better—all in a sentence or two. Undoubtedly, he didn’t even realize he had done it, it was all reflex. That wasn’t the sort of skill you learned overnight. It took years of practice to get that unthinkingly
good
at it. Could he ever hope to get over it? Why would he ever want to? It worked so well for him.

Michael spoke, breaking into the silence of her reverie. “But that’s all right,” he said, pardoning her imagined offenses against her. “I just wanted to see you again. I want to be with you.”

She wanted, on reflex, to
say yes, of course, let’s try again, let’s have dinner
. She could feel her hand moving toward him, felt it reach half the distance to take his hand. Just in time, she stopped herself. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, finally started over and got the words out of her mouth. “It’s too late for that,” she said. “I’ll be leaving again, very soon.”

And she marveled at how good it felt to say those words. As if she had finally won a victory, was finally in charge of something.

But there was an ache in her heart, too. She looked Mike in the eye again. Running away, abandoning the man she loved, giving up, choosing loneliness. It was a strange sort of victory when you lost so much.

Chapter Thirteen

Pete Ardley shifted uncertainly in the hard, wobbly wooden chair. It was the sort of chair that is always relinquished to the hallway at a college, kicked out of the classroom for being too rickety. He looked at the clock and sighed. The long, echoing silence of the corridor he was sitting in magnified the sound and made him feel even more uncomfortable. He looked at the clock again, knowing full well he had checked the time 30 seconds before. Quarter to eleven. He had been waiting here for three quarters of hour now. The reason for most of the delay could be seen posted right on the office door, hung on the glass part of the door with yellowish scotch tape. Professor Volsky had class from 9:30 to 10:30 on Monday mornings. Her secretary had muffed it when she had made the ten o’clock appointment.

Just then the bright, precise
clip clop, clip clop
of wooden-heeled shoes on a hard floor started in at the end of the hall, and a lean, brisk looking white woman of about fifty turned the corner. She noticed him at once and smiled as she hurried toward him. She was a cheerful looking person, with grey hair piled up in tight, neat curls on her head. She was dressed in a plain blouse and skirt and flat shoes that looked more comfortable than stylish.

Pete stood up and took her hand. “Professor Volsky? I’m Pete Ardley, Gowrie
Gazette
.”

“Yes, Mr. Ardley, of course. My apologies over the mix-up. They changed the schedule during the Christmas break and I’m afraid I only discovered my class and your appointment conflicted when I was already in class this morning. Please come in,” she said as she worked the key in the lock, pushed open the door to her minuscule office and gestured Pete into a chair. It was a small bright, airy room, stuffed full of books and papers. Pete looked out the high window onto the wide lawns of Ole Miss.

Professor Volsky maneuvered into the tight corner between her desk and the window, set her papers down on the desk, poured water from a pitcher into a tiny coffee maker perched on the windowsill, spooned coffee into the grounds basket, opened the top of the window just a crack, scooted her desk chair out and sat down—all in a smooth, graceful flow of movement that made it seem she wasn’t hurrying at all. “Now, then, what can an anthropology professor do for a newspaper reporter?”

Pete pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase. “I’d like you to take a look at some pictures.”

She pulled her glasses out of her purse and perched them on her nose. “Pictures of what?” she asked.

“That’s what I’d like you to tell me,” Pete said, handing the folder to her. Now he was sharing the secret, on the first step of the journey that would get the story—if there was any story—out. He watched with sweaty palms and butterflies in his stomach as she opened the folder. She took one look at the first photo, closed the folder, and looked up sharply. “Where did these come from, Mr. Ardley?”

“Please, Professor, I’d prefer not to say at the moment. I’d like you to look at the pictures—look at the objective evidence, you might say, and interpret
that
without any word of explanation from me. I don’t want to cloud the issue. Afterward I’ll be happy to tell you everything I know.”

“Indeed,” she said. “I must say you ask a great deal of a person, but I see your point. Obviously, however, they can’t be what they seem to be.” She reopened the folder and slowly looked over each picture, her face expressionless.

A tendril of cool air looped into the room, wandering down from the open top of the window. Pete felt his nose begin to itch, and found himself resisting the urge to scratch it, as if he were back in grammar school and was being made to stay after class with a strict teacher. Pointlessly embarrassed, he reached up furtively and rubbed it for the briefest possible moment. The coffee maker giggled and burbled, and a thin stream of coffee flowed down into the carafe. Professor Volsky pulled a magnifying glass out of her desk drawer and examined the photos more carefully. Pete became aware of the loud ticking of a clock, somewhere in the shelves over his left shoulder.

The coffee maker finished its work, and a little puff of steam rose up from it with a chuffing noise. The professor looked up distractedly and said, “Help yourself to coffee, Mr. Ardley.”

Now Pete found himself in a new quandary. Obviously, he should pour coffee for his hostess as well, but how did she take it? Dare he interrupt her concentration and ask? He had forgotten the way a teacher, any teacher, put the fear of God into him. Forget it. Best not to pour for her at all.

She stood up abruptly, turned around, pulled a book down from the shelf, and sat back down with it. Pete poured his coffee into a styrofoam cup, sat back down in his chair, and tried to drink it without slurping as the professor flipped through the book, comparing the photos against its illustrations.

Finally, she closed the book and the folder. She stared at Pete for a long while before she stood up and got her own coffee. She sat back down and stared at him again, hard.

Pete cleared his throat nervously. “Well?”

“It would
appear
,” Professor Volsky said carefully, “that those are photographs, taken surreptitiously through a window, of a collection of superbly preserved nonhuman hominid, probably australopithecine, remains. There is also a series that would appear to be of the moment of discovery of one of the skulls. The skulls are
so
superbly preserved that I am tempted to say that either you are the intended victim of someone else’s hoax, or else I am the victim of yours.” Her voice was cautious and precise.

Pete started to speak, but thought better of it.

“Adding to the unlikelihood of the photographs being real are various details—the house and the cars in the background of the outdoor shots are clearly not only American, but I’d venture to say they are local. One of the cars appears to have Mississippi plates, for example, and the young black man is wearing a Mississippi State warm-up jacket. Since the photos are apparently local, and since you are a reporter for a small-town Mississippi newspaper, I assume that you took these photos. That would tend to make believe that you are the hoaxer.

“The one thing, the one detail in any of these photos that makes them at all believable is this,” she said, pulling one of the long-range exterior shots out of the stack. She leaned across the desk and pointed to the older man in the photo. He was grinning broadly as he held the strange skull in his hands. “
That
is Dr. Jeffery Grossington, of the Smithsonian Institution’s anthropology department. I cannot believe he would be a willing party to any fraud. If he weren’t in that photo, you’d be out in hallway right now, with these ridiculous photos thrown in your face. But, with Grossington involved . . .” Her voice trailed off for a minute, and she seemed to realize the significance of what she was saying. She spoke again, with a sudden eagerness, a new excitement in her voice. “I’ve kept my side of the bargain. Now you keep yours. Tell me about these photos—tell me about those skulls!”

<>

The 747 jetliner eased to a final halt in the middle of the endless, sun-baked tarmac and pulled up short with a slight jerk. Livingston peered out of his hazy plexiglas window at the tiny slice of Africa he could see rippling through the heat-addled air. The jet engines sighed to a halt, and that helped a little, but even so, the air would not stay altogether still. The sun beat down on the asphalt and concrete, set up rippling towers of air that seemed to turn the world into a congealing, gelatinous fluid that wobbled and bounced at every touch. The control tower twisted and bent over, and the baggage cart and mobile stairs transmuted into a thousand incredible shapes as they rolled toward the plane.

Barbara nudged him in the ribs and grinned at him. “Welcome,” she said, “to darkest Africa.”

Livingston grinned right back at her, and reached up to rub his arm where she had nudged him. The inoculations against twelve kinds of God-knows-what were still a collection of sore spots. Three weeks ago he had never even had a passport, never been any further from Mississippi than a hotel room for an away football game—and now he was in
Africa
! Passports, visas, inoculations, customs, duty-free shops, the shifting time zones and jet lag, all the tedious minutiae of travelling to foreign parts were new to him, almost as great an adventure as the goal of the journey itself.

He blinked hard and tried to make his head stay on straight. The wild sixteen-hour layover in Paris where Barbara and Rupert had taken him to every nightspot they could think of still left a residue of hangover, but even that was almost something new and special.

Seventy-two hours ago he had been hugging his mother and father goodbye in Jackson, and now he was hung over, disoriented, jet-lagged, queasy from the last of the inoculations—and in
Africa
.

The cabin door sighed open in the front of the aircraft, and the bright light of an equatorial sun poured into the plane, the steamingly humid air sloshing in behind, chasing out the cool, sanitary, lifeless air of the jetliner. The moist, sultry air, full of the tang of the tropical sea and the ripening life of the great inland forests, was almost intoxicating after the sterility of airports and airplane food and airplane air. Almost immediately, he could feel sweat springing up on his face. The heat of Africa. Livingston couldn’t wait to get out in it, escape from the over-orderly, impersonally perfect world of modern travel and out under the sun of his native land.

—Or what
might
be his native land, anyway. Livingston had gotten full of romantic ideas about Africa and homecomings and discovering his past once it was certain they were really going to Africa, but he had no idea—and no real way of finding out—where
his
people had come from. What tribe, what land, what country had been carved out of the territory his ancestors had trod—all of it would be forever unknown and unknowable, a heritage lost in the slave raids and the forced marches and the torments of the Middle Passage and the long generations of servitude.

His people might have lived over the next hill, or two thousand miles from here. But none of that mattered. He was
home
. The stewardess went through her spiel about overhead luggage racks in French and then in English. Livingston pulled out his carry-on bag and lined up behind Rupert and Barbara as they shuffled down the narrow aisle toward the door.

The full force of the equatorial sun and heat was a shock when Livingston stepped out onto the platform of the mobile stairs. He had to pause for a moment and blink his eyes into adjustment with the
brightness
of it all. He stood there and looked around him as he dug his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, vaguely disappointed to see nothing more than an modest-sized airport-shaped airport, not much more than the little field at Natchez, near Gowrie. He wondered what he had been expecting. Lions and zebra wandering around on the runway?

Once inside the chaos of the customs building, a big quonset hut attached to one end of the main terminal building, he felt a little better. Hundreds of people in African and Western dress were swarming this way and that, mobbing the baggage carts and shouting in languages he didn’t understand. Maybe it wasn’t exactly exotic, but at least it was different. He retrieved his bag and got in line for passport control, slowly becoming aware of the sweat that was gradually adhering his light cotton shirt to his skin.

The small band of customs inspectors phlegmatically ignored the shouting, the pushing, the masses of people, and calmly went through each passport and visa, each piece of luggage. Livingston got through in fairly good order, quickly followed by Barbara—but then it was Rupert’s turn.

Rupert, it appeared, was the quintessential over-packer. Very few of the things that bulged from his backpack and carry-on bag were clothes, however. Cameras, lenses, his portable computer, a two-way radio set, batteries, binoculars, a machete, pens, notebooks, a rock hammer, a lead-lined bag full of film—endless gadgets, each packed carefully away. Inevitably, the customs inspector’s suspicions were aroused by all the mysterious bits of hardware.

Instantly, Rupert and the inspector were engaged in a spirited shouting match in French—and to Livingston’s monolingual ears, it was soon clear that Rupert’s French was communicated more by shouting and gestures than clear syntax. It struck even a neophyte traveler like Livingston that it was a mistake to antagonize a customs inspector. Sure enough, the inspector insisted that each item be unpacked and thoroughly examined.

The shouting continued, along with a great deal of passport waving and general commotion. Finally, the inspector had had enough and rather firmly escorted Rupert through a door into some sort of office.

Barbara, seeing what was happening from the other side of the barrier, moaned out loud. “Hell’s bells, Rupert’s going to be there all day.” She dragged her duffel bag over to a bench along the side wall and sat down. “Might as well settle in for the long haul, Liv. It looks like we could be here a while.”

Livingston looked longingly toward the far end of the quonset hut and the swinging doors that were the entrance to the terminal proper. He sighed, dropped his duffel bag, and sat down on it next to his cousin. Every time anyone was cleared through customs, he or she would hurry through those doors, and Livingston would get a glimpse of hustle and bustle, brightly-clothed people carrying huge loads on their heads, cab drivers shouting for passengers, people selling all sorts of things. A whole new country, a whole
continent
just outside that pair of swinging doors, and he had to sit here while Rupert Maxwell unpacked his luggage.