Chapter Four
Linc
Elora looks out of the window, and I frown. Superficially, she’s the same girl I knew back then. Neat, composed, organized. She still looks scholarly and bookish. Her blonde hair is scraped back into a tight bun, carefully sprayed so stray hairs aren’t allowed to escape. Her makeup is carefully applied, and I like the way her lipstick is an attractive pale pink, her lips neatly outlined.
Even though she never took ballet lessons—she would have laughed at the thought, because she wasn’t into any kind of sport or exercise apart from walking—there’s something elegant about the way she moves. She even sits in an elegant way, with a straight spine, legs crossed at the knees but aligned together, as if she’s had lessons in comportment.
She looks like the same girl, but there’s something different about her. Back then she was like a baby animal—a puppy, or a panda cub, a young thing that had never known violence or a harsh word. She was always happy, and nothing dampened her spirits. She was impossible to offend. Her infectious laughter and bubbly manner never failed to lift me. Now, though, there’s an indefinable sadness about her. And the way she hesitated before she came into the apartment, and how she asked me to lock the door… there’s something strange there.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s not fair. You have changed. Of course you have.”
She looks back at me. “Everything changes.”
“That’s true. The Japanese call it ‘ mono no aware .’ A state of awareness of the impermanence of things.”
“As opposed to Unsterblichkeit ?”
I look at the runes on my forearm. “It was my attempt to convince myself that he couldn’t crush my spirit.”
“I don’t think anyone could stop you being you,” she says, and smiles. “So where did you go when you left New Zealand?”
I lower my arm. “Sydney first, to meet the organizers of The Archaeology Group. They had a space on a dig in Saqqara, and I was really into the Egyptians back then. I spent six months there, then did another six months in Israel on the Noah’s Ark mosaic. That got me interested in the Roman Empire, and when a space came up on a dig in Aachen, on a Roman fort built to keep out the barbarians, I transferred there. I spent two years in Germany. Then I went to Norway and took part in a couple of Viking excavations there and in Sweden. I like Scandinavia. Eventually I went to England, though, and fell in love.”
“With whom?” she asks.
I smile. “With the country and its archaeology. There’s so much, from all periods—prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, medieval… It’s amazing. I’ve worked on digs from Hadrian’s Wall, to a castle in Wales, to the Fens in East Anglia, to a plague pit in London. I’ve loved every minute.”
“So you’re a true field archaeologist,” she says. “I’m a little envious, I have to admit. I haven’t taken part in many digs at all.”
“Ah, come on. You’ve always been the one with the brains.”
She blushes then, which is kind of adorable.
I don’t know why I asked her to come up to my room. I knew that Joel wouldn’t tell her I was coming back to New Zealand, and I hadn’t expected to see her at all. But as soon as I did, it brought back all the memories of her, and all the feelings I had for her. I couldn’t have walked away if you’d paid me.
“I have taken a degree,” I tell her. “An online one, because people don’t take you seriously in this business if you haven’t got qualifications. But it is the practical stuff I love.”
“And that’s made you your fortune.”
I chuckle. “I wouldn’t call it a fortune, but yeah, I had a few lucky finds.”
“Hallie seems to think it was more than luck.”
“I suppose I have a knack for spotting things others have missed.”
She nods. “So… where do you live now?”
“I have a flat in London, but I work all over the country.”
She glances at my left hand, and then her gaze returns to my face. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Living with someone?”
I shake my head.
“There’s nobody special in your life?”
There have been girls, through the years. Nowhere near one in every port, but a few who’ve helped me pass the time. I lived with Sophia in Germany for six months. But when I said I was moving on, she made it quite clear that she wanted to stay in her home country, and although I was sad to leave her behind, we parted on good terms.
The truth is that although I do have some friends, I’m a loner, and have been since leaving New Zealand. Whether that has something to do with what happened at Greenfield is anyone’s guess. I just find handling other people’s emotions and opinions too hard and prefer to keep to myself.
“No, nobody special. What about you?” I ask, even though Joel has already confirmed she’s single.
“No,” she says.
“Why not? I thought you would’ve been snapped up by now.”
“I could say the same of you.”
“I’m not interested in settling down yet.”
“Me neither. But then I’m not approaching thirty at a rate of knots.” She gives me a mischievous grin.
“Touché,” I say wryly. I guess there’s no reason she should be looking to settle down at her age. “So… what have you been up to?”
“Nothing as exciting as you. I’ve been studying, mostly. School, then an honors degree at Vic. Now I’m doing a Masters.”
“What in?”
“Archaeological Practice, specializing in Osteology.”
I lift an eyebrow.
“Bones, Linc. Not boners.”
That makes me laugh, and she smiles in response.
“It was tough to choose a topic,” she says. “I’m interested in so many different subjects. But I like skeletons. They fascinate me.”
“I bet you’re fun to have at parties.”
“I’m great at Halloween. I tell all the kids about excarnation and scare them witless.” She stares at me then. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot you’d just been to your dad’s funeral.”
“It’s okay. They didn’t lay him out and let the wolves strip his bones. More’s the pity.”
“Oh God, don’t make me laugh. It’s not funny.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t laugh…” I give a big sigh.
A frown flickers on her brow. “I’m kinda surprised you came back to New Zealand.”
“I’m killing two birds with one plane flight. I was invited to speak at the ANZAS conference.” The Australian and New Zealand Archaeology Society is the biggest in the southern hemisphere.
“The one being held on a cruise?” she asks, eyes wide.
“Yeah. It starts in Brisbane, calls at Sydney, then Auckland, and all the way around to the west coast of New Zealand before heading back to Australia. They want me to speak on the first of Feb and said if I didn’t want to come for the whole cruise, I could join them in Christchurch the day before. And then I found out about Dad, so I thought I’d go to the funeral while I was here.”
“That makes sense.”
We sip our coffee. Outside, I can hear faint sounds of the city—traffic, a siren in the distance, the hoot of a car horn—but in here it’s quiet.
“What do you have planned for the next few days?” she asks.
“Nothing, actually. I thought I might catch up with Joel and Fraser while I was here.”
“I don’t understand why they didn’t tell me you were coming. We were all so close as kids. They should have known I’d want to see you.”
“Did you? Want to see me?”
Her brow furrows. “Of course.” Her face flushes, but with anger rather than embarrassment, and she leans forward and puts her cup on the coffee table. “How can you ask that? I wasn’t the one who walked away.”
“I hardly walked away,” I reply, amused.
She’s breathing fast. “What do you mean?” she demands.
“That night, when I kissed you. What did you think happened?”
“Dad sent me to my room,” she says. “It was late, so I went to bed. When I woke next morning, Dad said you’d left the night before, just packed up your things and walked out.”
Anger pools in my stomach. “You’re kidding me?”
She shakes her head. “I thought you’d text me or email me. But I never heard anything. So I assumed you didn’t want to hear from me.”
Oh, holy fuck. I hadn’t realized. She honestly doesn’t know. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the gut. “Lora…” I say, “I didn’t just walk out. Your father took me away.”
She stares at me. “What?”
“That night, when you went to your room. He went ballistic.”
“Yeah, I know that. Fraser and Joel told me.”
“Well, he made me pack my things. Then he drove me to another deacon in Kaikoura and left me there. A few days later, he told me he’d found a place for me with TAG18 in Egypt. He paid for a flight to Sydney, and his friend took me to Christchurch airport.”
Her jaw drops. “You’re kidding me.”
I shake my head. “On the journey to Kaikoura, your dad told me I’d abused his friendship by touching his daughter, and said he’d never forgive me for it. He said if I ever contacted you again, if I came within a mile of you without his permission, if I called you or messaged you in any way, he’d call the police and have me banged up for being a pedophile.”
She goes scarlet. “I was fourteen! I wasn’t prepubescent! It was an innocent kiss—why does everyone talk as if it was something sordid?”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Lora. I wasn’t stupid, I knew you were only fourteen, and I had no intention of doing anything untoward, but I didn’t see anything wrong with a kiss. We were close, and it seemed like a natural transition for me at the time to move from friends to something deeper.”
She blinks, clearly shocked.
“I didn’t understand why he was so furious,” I continue. “Now… I suppose I can sort of see why, but back then I was incredibly upset and angry. I was a complete mess when I got to the airport, and for weeks afterward. But I respected him, and so I kept away. And I’m guessing he told Joel and Fraser to keep up the ruse, to make it easier for you to move on.”
“To make it easier for him, you mean.” Her eyes blaze. “So I wouldn’t be upset with him.” Tears spring into her eyes then. “All these years… I thought you left me and didn’t look back.”
“I did nothing but look back, for a long time.” I touch my neck ruefully. “This was my first tattoo. Angel wings refer to someone you’ve lost. And I missed you… and Joel and Fraser, and all the other kids at the school. It was my home for four years. I was devastated to be sent away.”
She presses her fingers to her lips. “After everything you’d been through,” she whispers. “How could he do that to you?”
“He thought of me like a son, and you were his only daughter. He trusted me to treat you like a sibling. He thought I was trying to corrupt you.”
“I should have been so lucky.”
That makes me laugh. She gives me a sulky glare. “Sorry,” I say. “But that was quite funny.”
“Were you?” she asks.
“Was I what?”
“Trying to corrupt me? Were you just trying to get in my knickers? You were eighteen, after all. You were more experienced than me.”
“Er, no, I wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was a virgin until I got to Cairo. It happened to be the day after my nineteenth birthday.”
Her eyebrows rise. “You’re kidding me? You were the archetypal bad boy. You can’t tell me you didn’t sleep with a single girl at Greenfield.”
“There wasn’t time or opportunity. Atticus kept us busy. Lessons in the week were intense, and then there were extra-curricular sports and clubs. My weekends were filled with tramping and mountain climbing and kayaking and rugby. I spent nearly all my evenings with your family, watching National Treasure and Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone , or lying with you under the table reading The Encyclopedia of Ancient Archaeology.”
Her lips curve up. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever known who reads encyclopedias from beginning to end. Apart from Ursula Andress in Dr. No .”
She gives a short laugh. Then she surveys me curiously. “So you really hadn’t had a girlfriend?”
“No. You were my first kiss.”
She gives me such a beautiful smile that it makes my heart ache. “And you were mine,” she says, her smile fading. “How sad.”
“It’s incredibly fucking sad. In another universe, and all that.”
She nods. Then her expression turns a mixture of mischievous and envious. “So who was your first? You said you were nineteen.”
“Yeah. One of the other volunteers on the Cairo dig was a girl called Mona. She was a couple of years older than me, and she’d been on several excavations already, so they put me with her so she could show me the ropes.”
“Ropes? Into S&M, was she?”
I grin at her spiky tone. She’s jealous. Aw. “She was very sweet with the boy who was completely clueless.”
“And since then? Has there been anyone serious?”
I think of a couple of the girls I’ve been with, and Sophia, who I was very fond of. It was a lot of fun at the time, and we shared a space together for a while out of a joint need for comfort and security. But she would be the first to admit we weren’t serious about each other.
“No, not really.” I tip my head to the side. “So who was your first? Did you wait until uni? Please tell me he wasn’t some Phys Ed student with a neck bigger than his head.”
She doesn’t laugh, though. She looks down at her hands and says, “I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay.”
“Of course. Sorry.” I think of her reluctance to come into the room, and I wonder who hurt her, and how badly.
She clears her throat. Then she brightens and says, “I’ve had an idea. I’m going to have a dinner party tonight.”
“Oh?”
“To celebrate your return, and to cheer you up because you’ve had a shit day. I’ll get Fraser and Joel to come, and Hallie and her partner, Ian, and Zoe. It’ll be fun.”
“Are you like Bridget Jones? Should I expect blue soup and marmalade for dessert?”
She giggles, which is such a lovely sound it makes me smile. “No, I can cook. I share an apartment with Zoe. She’ll help me out. Let me just make sure everyone’s free.” She pulls out her phone, and I watch her compose a text.
Halfway through, she stops and looks up at me. “Oh, I suppose I should ask you first if you want to come.”
I meet her eyes. “I shouldn’t.”
We study each other for a moment.
“Do you mean because of my father?” she asks.
“Yes. He made me promise never to go near you again.”
“Still the same old Linc. Gotta do the Right Thing.”
I give her a wry smile. “Yeah, all right. I’d love to come.”
“Cool, okay.” She looks back at her phone and continues to type.
I’m a grown man now, and there’s no reason I have to do what Atticus Bell tells me anymore. But as I watch her, I can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt deep inside. He’s the closest thing I have to a real father, and I flourished under his care for the time I was there. He was affectionate with me, and supportive, and although I never fully subscribed to his religious beliefs, he didn’t push them on the kids in his care. He did instill a moral code, and a set of principles I’ve lived by ever since. I respected him a lot and would have done anything to undo the loss of his faith in me. So being with Elora now seems like a betrayal of my promise.
But as I watch her text, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth while she concentrates, I can’t help but think about the way her blonde hair used to bounce around her shoulders in untidy waves. Or how soft her mouth was when I kissed her that day.
I want to kiss you , I told her as we stood under the oak tree by the barn. Will you let me?
She nodded, and I slid a hand into her silky hair and watched her cheeks flush as I lowered my lips to hers.
Jesus, I didn’t even use my tongue. I pressed my lips against hers once, twice, then a longer third time, the whole thing taking less than ten seconds.
I regretted losing Atticus’s trust, the friendship of his sons, and the comfort and safety of the school. But I never regretted kissing Elora.
“Stop staring at me,” she says without looking up. “You’re making me nervous.”
I chuckle. “I’m just admiring the view.”
She gives me a reproachful look. “I’m twenty-four now. That kind of chat-up line doesn’t work on me anymore.”
“It’s not a line. It’s the truth. You’re very easy on the eyes.”
She scoffs, lowering her phone. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Just because I have tattoos, it doesn’t mean I’m a manwhore.”
“Yeah, yeah. I bet you’ve got shares in Tinder.”
“Fucking hell, I’d never use online dating. I can’t think of anything more soul destroying. I’m not into meaningless sex. I like to be wined and dined before I’m taken to bed.”
She giggles at that and looks at her phone. “Zoe says yes. And Joel and Fraser are both free. Well, even if Hallie can’t make it, we’ll still do it.” She looks up then. “So… I suppose I should ask you about the Bell Ring.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll email Graham Tucker and ask him to send me the name and address of his colleague—the one with the friend who said he’d bought the ring.”
“Okay.” She gets to her feet. “I’d better get going.”
I’m disappointed, which surprises me. I stand, too, and walk with her to the door. “What’s your phone number?” she asks.
“I bought a cheap one with a Kiwi SIM.” I look up the number, as I haven’t memorized it yet. I read it out to her, and she texts me how to get to her apartment.
“Seven o’clock,” she says, pocketing her phone. “Don’t be late.”
“Yes, Mum.”
She pokes her tongue out at me, looking very much like the ten-year-old Elora I remember so well. All she needs are pigtails.
I open the door, and she moves into the doorway, then turns back to face me and hesitates. “Did you really get the angel wings for us?” She stares up at me. “Don’t lie to me, Linc.”
I look into her dark-blue eyes, thinking how beautiful she is. “A hundred percent yes.”
She swallows hard. “I missed you so much when you left. I cried for days and moped for weeks.”
My brows draw together. “Getting on that plane was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” I reach out and take the strand of hair that has had the audacity to escape from her bun and tuck it behind her ear. “I’m sorry I made you cry.” I bring my hand forward to cup her cheek. “Did I do the right thing, telling you? I hope I haven’t caused a problem between you and your dad.”
“You did the right thing.” She lowers her gaze to my tee and swallows. Then, surprising me, she moves forward and slides her arms around my waist. “Are you going to be okay?” she whispers.
I don’t know yet. I need to think about what I’ve found out today, and what kind of impact it’s going to have on me going forward.
But I just say, “Yeah. I’m always all right.”
She gives me a quick, hard hug.
Then she moves back, flashes me a smile, and says, “See you at seven,” before walking away.
I lean on the door jamb and watch her as she presses the button. She doesn’t know I’m watching, and I see her press her fingers to her lips, clearly emotional. I wait for the carriage to arrive and watch her enter it, and the doors close. Then I go back into my room.