Renegade Man (4 page)

He flicked her a
sideways glance. Her chin, as square as her grandfather’s, was tilted
haughtily. She looked almost as if she were in high school again, with her hair
caught back in a ponytail that way. Her jean- clad figure was better than any
teenager’s. Full- bodied. Had she gone ahead and had Chap’s child?

“You’re folding
your shirt wrong,” she snapped without even looking at him.

“Well, Ms.
Randall, I wasn’t planning on wearing it to a military ball.” He tossed the
flannel shirt on top of a pile of white sweat socks.

She ignored his
emphasis on “Ms.” and asked, “Didn’t your wife ever make you help out at home?”
She still wasn’t looking at him as her hands rapidly matched up socks and
stuffed them together some way or another.

“No wife. The
ship’s laundry did my clothes.”

“You’re supposed
to fold your towels in triplicate. Why not?”

He tossed the
doubled towel on top of his shirt. “Why not what?”

“Why no wife?”

“I was in too
many ports to ever settle down.”

The silence grew
oppressive.

“You have a
husband?”

“He’s dead.”

Dead silence
followed.

After a moment
he grunted and said, “Look, let’s call a truce until the BLM comes to some kind
of a decision, okay?”

She looked at
him askance. “A truce. Not a surrender. That’s my land out there for the
summer.”

“For the
moment.”

She narrowed her
eyes at him. They were heavily lashed, making it difficult for him to read them
easily. Then she sighed and said, “All right, a truce—for the moment. What were
you doing in all those ports?”

“Oh, salvaging ships,
underwater welding, things like that.” That didn’t even begin to cover it, he
thought. Just the training had been so grueling that more than half the SEAL
candidates had dropped out.

She smiled, and
despite the brittle look in her eyes, it was an astonishingly lovely smile. He
had forgotten its charm. She hadn’t smiled that often, but when she had... “I
imagine there was much more to your job as a SEAL than ‘things like that.’ ”

“How’d you know
I was a member of the SEAL team?”

“After you filed
at the courthouse today, I came in about fifteen minutes behind you. It was
easy enough to read your previous occupation on the petition. SEALs?
Sea-Air-Land team? The navy’s special- warfare divers, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He
caught a glimpse of a pair of lacy panties as she quickly and neatly folded
them. “We do demolitions,” he said, his mind on the provocative picture that
had suddenly filled his mind. “Hydro graphic reconnaissance, disarming
explosives, submarine rescues—jobs along that line.”

“Sounds top
secret.”

“A lot of it
was.”

“Espionage?”

She was
well-informed, he realized. His job, toward the last, had taken him all over
the globe and involved him in the internal affairs of several shaky
governments. His life had often depended on his being closemouthed. It was
something he seemed incapable of being at the moment. He hedged. “If that means
listening to the gossip you hear around foreign ports, I suppose you could
classify some of my work as espionage.”

“Then you must
know some foreign languages.”

“The SEALs send
you to school for that.”

“Sort of like
getting a G.E.D.? Well, which ones did you learn?”

“I’m fluent in
Farsi and get by in Spanish. I never mastered German or French.”

“You’ve come a
long way from the town ne’er-do- well, haven’t you?” There was no barb in her
voice.

“Not really.” He
cast her a hard look. “I quit the job you got me lumberjacking—to pursue a
dream.”

A
self-deprecating smile tugged at her lips. “I suppose I’m following my own
dream.”

“And what dream
is that?”

She shrugged her
shoulders. “Finding evidence of a prehistoric man that predates the Folsom Man.
To that end, I’ve been going to college on and off for the last fifteen years.”

After all these
years, he was curious to know more about the girl who had been his first love.
He supposed he should hate her. For a while he had spent his nights doing just
that. “You get a degree in archaeology?”

“No,
anthropology. At the University of Houston. I’m what’s called a
paleoanthropologist—I study people who lived before recorded history.” Apparently
she felt as if she had sounded a little pretentious, because she smiled
apologetically and added, “I studied foreign languages, too. And I was also
abysmal at French.” The way her lips curved brought back blurred memories, as
did the lingering scent of some tantalizing perfume. “I did better at Hindi,
though,” she went on. “On-site training. Ever heard of the Earthwatch
organization?”

He shook his
head. “Nope, don’t believe so.”

“It finances
people who want to work on a particular research project, and in return they
offer Earthwatch an opportunity to send someone to work in the field as a
research assistant. One summer I helped an anthropologist excavate a site in
India. That’s when I realized I wanted to get a degree in anthropology.”

“You must have
done pretty well for yourself to be working on a project of your own now.”

Her face became
expressionless, and she began shoving her folded clothing into a plastic
laundry basket. “You might say I survived.”

So it was true,
then. She had taken the money old man Kingsley bought her off with. Still, he
had to give her credit. She had spunk. She always had. She had ignored public
opinion and gone her own way in Silver City.

Without even
looking at him again, she picked up the basket, turned and called back over her
shoulder, “See you around. Maybe.”

“Ritz.”

She stopped and
looked back at him. A wariness crept into her eyes. “Yes?”

“Have you asked
about Chap since you’ve been back?”

He watched her
jaws tighten. She shook her head, and her ponytail, glowing like gold, swished
against her neck.

“He left the
week after you did, and no one knows where he went. He’s never come back.”

Something
ominous darkened her eyes, or maybe, he thought, it was as if a light went out
in them temporarily. At that moment, he regretted telling her. What was he
trying to do? Even old scores? He had gotten over her. He might not have
settled down, but it wasn’t because he’d been saving himself for his first
love. Nevertheless, at that moment he felt like the biggest rat in the world.

She turned and
walked out the door, and all he could think of was that old Roy Orbison tune,
“Crying.” He told himself that was ridiculous, but it didn’t stop the thoughts
that were running through his mind.

Chapter 3

O
n her first dig,
in Guatemala, all the undergraduates had been enthusiastic for the first few
weeks, but the artifacts had been few, the weather hot and the conditions
filthy. Soon the fever had begun to cool until, by the end of the third month,
only the most determined had still been at it. Rita-lou had been one of those
die-hards.

She had despised
being dirty, had despised going days without a decent bath. It had been too
close to the conditions she had grown up with. Still, something inside her had
thrilled at going back in time, at tracing the footprints of her cultural
heritage, at having a front row seat in their discovey. Maybe, she thought,
anthropology was an escape for people like herself. She had certainly enjoyed
finding the remains of men who had once walked the earth. When you ate and slept
and worked together, sweating under the torrid sun, a camaraderie developed
between you. She had learned to appreciate people she would never have thought
of associating with prior to that first dig.

Camaraderie was
certainly something she wouldn’t find on this dig. The nearest human being was
a quarter of a mile away, and that was too close. If Jonah Jones thought he
could thwart her, he didn’t know her very well. Robert had always said she had
the tenacity of a bulldog.

Her husband had
been both her friend and her lover, and he hadn’t been the least bit bothered
that she wanted to keep her maiden name after their marriage. She didn’t retain
her maiden name so much as a matter of feminine rights as from a desire for
Silver City to remember her well when she achieved the success she sought.

Robert had been
proud of her. He had never known her as “that wild Randall girl” and couldn’t
have cared less about her past. She had missed him terribly in the three years
since his death, but not enough ever to marry again. She was content with her
life as it was. She had Magnum, and she had Trace. And she had her excavation.
That was enough.

No, not quite.
She had something to prove to the good people of Silver City.

She scratched
Magnum behind the ears, and the dog’s intelligent, shiny black eyes glanced up
at her quizzically. “Just letting you know I care, fella.”

In response, the
Lab’s tail beat against the nearest balk, the long wall of earth between two
excavated five-foot squares.

Armed with
mosquito repellent and suntan lotion, she strolled over to the far side of the
excavation, where she had started work on another square. Back to work. By
autumn she hoped to have stripped down the site layer by layer. On the map she
had laid out, she had imagined mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and long-horned
bison roaming the site. She had until fall to establish that Renegade Man had
also roamed there.

Delicately
handling her trowel, she began scraping the dirt into a plastic scoop that had
once been a gallon laundry-detergent bottle. No double-scraping for her. A
single stroke brought the dirt off the surface cleanly. Her professor had once
told her that the mark of a professional was the ability to dig a perfectly
square hole without ever stopping to smooth the sides.

She was keeping
her eyes open for the glitter of chopped flint, quartz or chalcedony, but what
she was really looking for were those telltale pebbles that were out of place
geologically, water-rolled stones in a field without stones. More often than
not she found old rabbit droppings, and once she even unearthed a scorpion that
flagged its tail warningly.

At one point she
came across a thorn fish hook, but a close look through her jeweler’s glass
proved it to be relatively recent Amerind. Probably a precursor of the Mimbres
or Warm Spring Apaches. The tribe’s warrior-chieftain had been Mangas
Coloradas, who, after surrendering, had been treacherously killed at nearby
Fort McLane.

The Silver City
area was filled with treachery, she thought. Then she grimaced at her
childishness and filed the fish hook away in one of the lunch sacks marked with
a coded acquisition number: grid 3 south, 4 east. Later, when it was too dark
to dig, she would number and enter her finds in a register.

Something about
the isolation of her site, especially when contrasted with her memories of the
close- knit conditions she had worked in before, put her in a pensive,
soul-searching mood. The plaintive call of a mourning dove in a ponderosa pine
close to the creek rendered her mood even more morose. Ever since her last trip
into town two days before, when Jonah had bluntly told her that Chap had left
Silver City a week after she had, never to return, she had felt a despondency
that had been hard to shake.

She wasn’t quite
certain what she had expected from a confrontation with Chap. Maybe she had
just wanted to see his expression when they came face-to- face. Remorse? Shame?
Indifference? Or still love, after all these years? But she had certainly
expected to see him again.

Chap! Chap, love
of my youth! Why didn’t you have the courage to stand up to your father? Why,
if you were going to leave, didn’t you leave with me?

She could only
guess at the answer to the last question. He had been running, running away
from himself.

 She could
almost hate Jonah Jones for telling her about Chap. And then there was his
refusal to recognize her right to explore the land despite his mining claim.
Really, the man was exasperating. And overbearing. She didn’t remember him
being that way, but then, she didn’t remember that much about him— hadn’t even
thought about him in a long time.

After Chap first
kissed her in the Kingsley conservatory that fateful summer, she had known that
there could be no one else in her life.

She hadn’t
wanted to hurt Jonah, a skinny, gangling kid with a slightly crooked front
tooth and rough, heavy, straw-colored hair that would never lie down. And those
restless green eyes.

Like her, he had
been from the wrong side of the tracks, and he’d been almost as poor as she
was. They had just sort of drifted together, from grade school to junior high
to high school. He had always been a dreamer. She could remember him telling
her that when he was riding fence once in a sandstorm, he imagined it was the
continual shower of saltwater spray that caked his face. And another time, when
he scaled trees as a lumberjack, he told her how he often imagined they were
masts of ships. Even then he’d had a yearning for the sea.