Tell Me I'm Dreamin' (11 page)

“There you are.” Madame Deane's voice reached her through an open door. “Come here. Right now! I've been waiting for a moment alone with you.”

Nadine wanted to disobey the shrill voice that called to her, but she thought better of it. Catherine had already warned her of madame's moods. She wished someone had warned her about Ulysses.

“Hurry up! Close and lock the door before somebody sees you,” Madame Deane ordered in a conspiratorial tone. “She told me to tell you that you should be thanking us for keeping this safe until you returned. We have kept it hidden for years.” A dangerous, somewhat demented gleam accompanied her irrational claim. “This story is one of the reasons I am in this wheelchair today.” She looked up from the dirty object she held wrapped in her lap. “They thought they could get rid of me, but we were smarter than they were.” A perturbed look descended on madame's wrinkled features. “What is wrong with you
now,
Lenora?”

Nadine looked at the pitiful creature before her, and all of a sudden she felt very tired. “Madame Deane, I am not Lenora.”

“Never mind all that. What is wrong with your arm?”

“You tell me. It's your nephew's fault,” she spat out in exasperation. Then, looking into Madame Deane's glassy eyes: “Oh, what's the use!”

“Pay no attention to Ulysses. He has been moodier than ever since someone broke into the house and stole some of the collection. Before that he never locked the room. Now, you can't get Ulysses to part with that key ring of his. I think he sleeps with it.” An irritating hissing sound passed between her clenched teeth.

“Madame Deane, are you in there?” Catherine called from outside the door. “You know I've warned you about locking these doors, especially so close to your medication time.”

In an exaggerated whisper madame urged Nadine to come forward. “Here, hurry up and take this. And do not show it to anyone! No one, you hear!” Madame Deane seemed unusually strong as she shoved the animal skin into Nadine's hands, then changed her tone for Catherine's benefit. “I was just in here talking to Nadine. I guess she must have locked the door when she came in.” The woman extended her neck outward, reminding Nadine of a vulture.

Nadine took the skin without protest, simply to get away. Then she unlocked the door. A perturbed Catherine stepped inside.

“Miss Nadine,” Catherine's emphasis on the word “miss” accentuated her discontent with Nadine's actions, “if you do not mind me saying so, I do not think it is a good idea for you to lock any of these doors unless it is your own. What would happen if Madame Deane had one of her spells? I could not get in to help you, and I assure you, you would not be able to control her,” she warned with a final snub.

Frustrated, Nadine threw up her hands in surrender. “Yes, ma'am.” She exited to Catherine's announcement of dinner in forty-five minutes, and the distasteful hissing of Madame Deane's snicker behind her.

Entering her own room, Nadine firmly closed the door and locked it. She thought of the things Catherine had told her about Madame Deane while she helped her dress earlier that morning. Nadine looked at the roll of matted skin and hair the eccentric woman had given her, and dropped the unsightly object onto a slat of wood behind the headboard of the bed.

Nadine felt she had taken more than she wanted to take from the occupants of Sovereign. After the events of the day she lumped the entire household into one category. Psychotic. In her opinion, the entire place was full of people with, to put it mildly, extreme personality disorders. She thought if all the islanders were like the people here at Sovereign it would be a very difficult place to live. Nadine placed her forehead in her hands. God, I don't know what to expect next.

“Miss Nadine?”

She exhaled long and hard at the sound of Catherine's voice breaking in on her mental tirade.

“Yes . . .?”

Catherine paused, waiting for Nadine to open the door, but when she didn't she continued. “Just thought I'd let you know Clarence says the roads should be clear by tomorrow.”

“Thank God.”

“Pardon me?”

“Thank you, Catherine,” she replied with as much patience as she, could muster.

Nadine listened as the woman left muttering to herself, the word “rude” being more audible than the rest.

Ulysses stared long and hard at the two empty spaces inside the open case. It was like picking at a festering wound, and his mind raced as he tried to figure out why the carved slabs containing the manuscript had been taken.

The set had remained in the collection room for years until two weeks ago when the jade and onyx slabs were stolen. He guessed he was lucky the thieves had not taken the entire case. By sheer coincidence the two stones had been left in the treasure room. The others had been taken to his room where he continued to tediously clean the intricate etchings that covered the bronze case. It was a process that had been going on ever since he found the case half buried in an abandoned cave on the south side of the Sovereign estate. During the cleaning process he had discovered two paper-thin pieces of bronze on the inside of the lid that slid in and out, masking two extremely shallow compartments.

But the secret compartments were not what occupied Ulysses' thoughts. Now, since the theft, only three stone carvings, three pages remained of the Five Pieces of Gaia. The carvings had been in his family's possession for many years, although it was just recently that Ulysses discovered the manuscript pages hidden inside the slabs.

A coin that Ulysses had been given when he was a child playing in the cliff dwellers' caves was the key, literally. He discovered this when he realized the cliff dwellers' symbol etched into the coin matched the size and shape of the medallions carved on the Five Pieces of Gaia. Ulysses placed the coin inside one of the medallions and it fit so perfectly it was hard to remove, so he turned it, and the slab slid apart, revealing the manuscript inside.

This time Ulysses used the coin with intent. Carefully, he opened the rose quartz slab and gazed at the papyrus filled with hieroglyphs. The airtight stone had preserved the paper and ink through time, and he wondered for the hundredth time what the writing meant. Ulysses also wondered if the thieves knew about the manuscript pages hidden inside the stones. He had never noticed the hairline fracture encircling the carvings. Ulysses believed one would almost have to know about the manuscript to find the pages inside the slabs.

He closed the stone and held the rose quartz in his hands. Ulysses traced the smooth pink carving of the Moon Goddess. Her slender outstretched arms held a small sphere high above her head. About her neck hung the one symbol that connected them all. The sign of the cliff dwellers. The ancient cross within an eight-sided star surrounded by a double circle.

As Ulysses traced the gentle lines of the figure, his mind visualized the narrow jaw and smooth skin of the woman, Nadine. Her skin had felt like satin, and he could see the longing mixed with fear in her eyes as he touched her. Eyes that were so full of fear they were almost as green as the jade slab.

His instincts told him Nadine was no more than she professed to be, although he admitted there were times when her actions were contradictory. But there was one message that was constant. Nadine Clayton was a woman whose passions ran deep. So deep that even she was afraid to explore them.

Ulysses' dark eyes stared at the Moon Goddess. But how did she know the Gaia Series was connected with the cliff dwellers when she claimed she had only been on Eros for one day? His brows knitted together. Unless Nadine Clayton was involved with the theft.

Ulysses could not, and would not allow himself to be blinded by the feelings she was able to invoke in him. She could very well be his enemy. A lovely, enticing enemy. The deadliest kind.

He rose, crossing over to the desk that held all of the notes on the family's private collection that his father and grandfather had written through the years. He took out a key and unlocked the drawer; a cracked leather ledger lay inside. He studied the yellow pages filled with a list and description of Sovereign's special treasures. Ulysses thumbed through the book until he came to the page entitled “The Five Pieces of Gaia.” Beneath this his father had written:

Of all the collection, these five slabs house the greatest mystery and history of Eros, the cliff dwellers, and the Deane family. They are my favorites, and they hold a special meaning for you, Ulysses, my son. One that I am on the brink of truly understanding.

Ulysses stared at his father's incomplete message. Peter Deane had not known about the manuscript pages inside the slabs. If he had, Ulysses would have known. But for some reason he still felt the Five Pieces of Gaia were the most important pieces of their entire collection.

Ulysses read his father's words again. The passage created a void that reminded him of the painful loss he felt as a child growing up without his parents.

Looking up, his gaze was drawn to a jade paperweight on top of the desk. Ulysses recalled how he had acquired it from a merchant selling articles to tourists on Barbados, then his thoughts drifted to Nadine again.

Yes, she was different. She was not the average American who had traveled to a foreign country taking in its sights and treasures with greedy apathy. He knew the feelings that stirred within her were real, but that didn't mean they were all good.

Ulysses ran a searching finger over the round edges of the jade rose petals as he told himself he could not afford to feel anything else for this woman. He had learned the hard way. He knew forming emotional attachments of any kind brought nothing but pain and sadness. In the long run you would try to protect those you love, like his mother tried to protect him. But it would be to no avail because you would still lose them, and as his father had proven by his suicide, the pain of that loss was worse than death.

“I cannot allow myself to ever become involved in that way. Never!” His raspy voice rang out amongst the lifeless faces that watched him. Ulysses realized that his outburst before his deaf audience resembled that of the woman he had made up his mind to keep at arm's length, Nadine. Clayton.

Chapter
9

Nadine recognized the distinct taste of fish and coconut as she bit into one of several codfish balls Catherine had placed before her. It was a taste she had not become accustomed to, and she would have done anything for some fried chicken and spaghetti. Her eyes kept straying to the empty place setting at the head of the table where Ulysses usually sat.

It was difficult for Nadine to accept that the poised creature, albeit still dressed in her usual chiton and olive headband, was the same person she had seen no more than an hour earlier.

“I must say I am thankful that my evening dose of medication does not put me to sleep like the earlier ration. It simply would not do for me to miss supper,” Madame Deane commented, then glanced at Ulysses' vacant chair. “It is so unlike him to be absent from supper. This is the time when we usually go over household matters, and talk about other things that need to be taken care of. Catherine says he has locked himself upstairs inside the collection room again.” Her dark eyes clouded over with concern.

Nadine studied her hostess, her hazel eyes suspicious, curious. It just did not make sense. None at all. There was no medicine in the world that could change a person like Madame Deane's medication changed her.

The older woman seemed oblivious to Nadine's silence. “Sometimes I wish there was a pill Ulysses could take to get rid of the anger and hurt I know he still harbors about his parents. They died so long ago. As a matter of fact, next weekend it will be twenty-five years that they've been gone. If that's not enough time for a person to purge themselves of such damaging feelings . . .” Her gaze sought Nadine's compliance. “I am not saying he should not miss them, but you would think a child of seven would have grown up and left a bit of the pain behind. But some of the islanders,” she looked down, “well, they just would not let him forget. People can be so cruel, you know.”

Nadine had wondered about Ulysses' parents. She was surprised to find out they had died when he was so young.

“I know just how cruel people can be,” she admitted. “But it seems when things happen to you when you are a child,” Nadine sought the right words, “so innocent and trusting, they stay with you somehow. Like an impression in wet clay, it hardens.” She looked at Madame Deane who was listening intently, as if she were searching for an answer.

Nadine continued. “I only saw my mother a few times when I was growing up. There were pictures of her and my father that kept them alive for me. For a while I
chose
to believe they were dead.” She looked directly at her hostess. “But then I accepted the truth, and the hurt was different, because I realized they were alive but they didn't want me with them. They had
chosen
to leave me with Grandma Rose. My grandmother tried to make me feel better by saying they didn't have the means to provide for me. But from time to time the pictures of different cities would arrive. They were always accompanied by a short note, describing the places where they were working. My mother would be dressed in extravagant clothes, posing glamorously outside of places with names like Dixie's Dollhouse and Lacy's Girls.”

Nadine looked at Madame Deane, embarrassed over revealing so much about her past, but as with Ulysses the pain of her childhood was still real. She would not lie to protect her parents' dignity. They had not cared enough to protect hers.

“Did your parents ever come to visit you?” Madame Deane asked.

“No. But after a while I grew accustomed to it,” Nadine added quickly. “And for a short period of time I felt rather special. I thought it was wonderful to have parents who were able to travel all around, and I would boast to my playmates about it,” she continued, almost as if she were talking to herself. “Then I began to hear the rumors. ‘Nadine Clayton's mother and father actually have a working relationship. That's why she can't live with them. The things they are involved in aren't fit for a young girl to see, and that's why Auntie Rose had to keep her. With the way things are, there is no way to really tell if Slim is really the girl's father. After all, who else in the Clayton line has those strange hazel eyes,' they would say.” Nadine became silent.