The Opal Legacy Part 3

"Do you mean that?" she asked, her voice sharp. "Actually? And why do you want to help me? Do you feel sorry for me, is that your reason? I'm young enough to be your daughter. I am literally young enough to be your daughter. Do you have a daughter? I don't even know; I know nothing about you. Why do you bother with me?"

"Don't, Lesley, please don't. Let me try to speak truly. It's hard, I'm afraid I haven't had much practice. Do I feel sorry for you? I do, some. Wait, let me finish. That's not why I'm here with you. After you drove me to the airport the other day, do you know what I intended to do? Send you a note, a thank-you card. Nothing more. Yet there's something about you, Just what, I don't know. The way you look at me? So serious, so shy. Your hair, your eyes? You have lovely hair and eyes. For whatever reason, I kept thinking about you. When I came back to San Diego I had to call you."

"Forget what I said; I'm on edge. I'm so beholden to you. Probably that's it, I don't like being beholden. If you hadn't called..." Her voice trailed off.

"Beholden. I like the sound of that word."

"My grandmother always said beholden. She was a Scot, she came to this country when she was eighteen. Crossed the ocean by herself. She raised me after my mother and father were killed in a train accident. A trestle over one of the Scottish firths collapsed."

"I never knew my grandparents," he told her. "All the Hollisters died young, or at least the ones I know about did. To answer your other question-I don't have a daughter. I have no children."

"My grandmother lived to be eighty-eight. She taught me to knit, to crochet, to bake, to put up preserves. I was so happy with her. I remember when I was six or seven walking to the store on a summer morning with a note in my hand.

"'Please give Lesley three cakes of yeast and a box of root beer extract,' the note said. I remember the washtubs in the summerhouse filled with root beer, I remember grandmother letting me pull the lever to cap the green bottles. After we finished we stored the root beer in the cellar.

"'It won't be fit to drink till winter,' grandmother always said. Months later we'd be sitting in the kitchen beside the coal stove and there'd be an explosion; I'd go down the stairs to the cellar where I'd find the floor wet and one of the bottles open. The pressure had built up until the cap blew off. That's how I feel now, Jon. Ready to explode."

He slowed the car. International Border-One Mile, Lesley read on a white-and-green road sign. A San Diego policeman motioned them on and they joined a line of cars, edging forward until they came to a uniformed Mexican official who glanced at them before waving their car on.

Mexico! An arch spanned the highway ahead of them while vendors ran beside them holding crockery and colorful paper flowers aloft. They crossed a bridge over a dry river channel and entered downtown Tijuana.

"You'll make it, Lesley," Jon told her. "You won't explode. At least you're able to talk about what happened."

"With you I can talk about it." Yes, she thought with a feeling of sudden surprise, only with you. "Like with my grandmother. I could always confide in her when she was alive."

"You're lucky. I don't have many happy memories of growing up."

"I never think of you as having been young." She stopped. "I could bite my tongue. I don't always think about age, honestly I don't."

"Nothing will change my age. Besides, forty's not old."

"I'm usually not so obtuse. I always try to put myself in the other person's place."

"Ah, you're a Libra all right."

My horoscope, she thought, he's forgotten my horoscope. She felt a pang of disappointment, not so much because she wanted the horoscope itself, but because he hadn't remembered.

"Where did you live when you were a child?" she asked to change the subject. "Did you say it was called Iron Ridge?"

"The Hollisters have always lived at Iron Ridge." He inched the car forward in a long line on a downtown Tijuana street.

"I thought you loved Iron Ridge."

"Not when I was a boy. In fact after I started high school I detested the place, it was so isolated, so far from everything. I couldn't wait to be old enough to leave. Then after I grew older, after I left and then came back, my feeling changed. Even now, though, I'm ambivalent. At times I love Iron Ridge. Other times..." His voice trailed off. "My wife was afraid of Iron Ridge."

"Afraid? Of a house?"

"You've never been there. As it turned out, Mary had reason to be afraid. In the end Iron Ridge killed her."

Jon stopped the car in a fenced parking lot beside a colonnaded building. "Here we are," he told her. "The Jai-Alai Fronton."

A smiling usher wearing a red beret led them to their seats. Below the grandstand the playing floor, separated from the seats by a ceiling-high wire mesh, extended the entire length of the building. On the court, men practiced whipping a ball against the end wall by using curved wicker baskets attached to gloves on their hands.

"What did you mean, Iron Ridge killed her?" Lesley asked in a low voice.

"Mary committed suicide."

Shocked, Lesley glanced at him. Jon's eyes stared down at his hands. He seemed to be in another time, another place. She wanted to reach out to him, but was shy; wanted to comfort him, but did not know how. Jon's words seemed to have built a wall between them.

He drew in a long breath, sighed. He handed her a jai-alai program. "Those are called cestas on their hands," he said in his normal voice.

"Five minutes," the public address announcer warned.

"Would you like to bet?" Jon asked. "There are eight players and you can bet to win, place, or show. I'll stake you."

"I'm not a gambler." She saw him smile knowingly. "Libra again?" she asked.

"Right."

"But I'll bet two dollars on number three to show. I have a hunch three will be lucky tonight."

Jon motioned to the usher. "Two dollars on number three to show," he told him, "and five on number one to win."

"Si, seor." She watched his red beret bob down the steps and in a few minutes he was back with their tickets. After five games Jon handed Lesley her winnings-five dollars and forty cents. He had lost fifteen dollars.

"You were right about number three," he said.

She thought he looked at her speculatively but couldn't be sure. "I was lucky," she said.

"Do you want to window shop?" he asked as they walked from the Fronton.

"I'd love to. Where?"

"This whole area is a series of shops. Come on." He took her arm as they crossed the street, avoiding cars and taxis sprinting from one traffic light to the next. Tourists overflowed the sidewalks while street photographers posed visitors in donkey carts, and hawkers called from the doorways of their shops.

A tiny girl, five or six years old, stared up at Lesley with a mute appeal in her large brown eyes. The girl raised her hand, palm up, offering a pack of chewing gum for sale. Lesley stooped and laid her forty cents in the cardboard box at the girl's feet.

She and Jon wandered between shelves stacked high with leather purses, past racks of brightly colored blouses, trays of onyx bookends, elaborate chess sets, and paintings of sad-eyed waifs. They entered an arcade where shops displayed shoes and belts and perfumes and watches. Lesley breathed in the mingled scents-leather, tacos and burritos from sidewalk stands, and, above all, the feeling, the aroma, of a foreign land.

She stared down at the delicately carved figure of a girl in a long skirt. "Oh, how beautiful. She looks so alone." The carving, about five inches high, was stained a dark brown. Lesley ran her fingertips over the smooth surface of the wood.

"How much? Cuanto?" Jon asked. Lesley hadn't noticed the old man sitting on a high stool in the shadowed interior of the shop. Lifting his eyes from his workbench, the man swung around to face them.

"Diez," he said.

"Ten dollars is fair," Jon murmured to Lesley, "but these shopkeepers expect to bargain. Ocho," he offered.

The woodcarver looked from Lesley to the carving and back to Lesley before he shook his head. "Diez," he said again. Jon shrugged and handed him a ten-dollar bill.

"Thank you," Lesley told him when they were on the sidewalk once more. "I love her already."

They returned to the car and Jon drove away from the downtown area into the hills inland from the city, stopping at last on a narrow street beside a black spiked fence. As they left the car Lesley noticed Jon reach to the back seat and then slide what appeared to be an envelope into his inner jacket pocket. The gate was open and at the far end of an azalea-lined walk she saw a scarred sign above the door to a low white building which read Cafe de los Dos Pajaros.

"Cafe of the Two Birds," Jon translated.

The August evening was warm and they sat on the patio behind the cafe at a circular table whose top was a collage of green and red tiles. A hum of talk came from the indoor dining room but only two other couples sat on the patio. Their waiter, a short, thin man in a black suit, inclined his head to Jon. "Seor Hollister. It's been a long time." He glanced at Lesley, an unasked question in his eyes.

"Too long, Antonio, much too long," Jon said.

He glanced at Lesley. "Do you like margaritas?" he asked. "They're a specialty of the house."

"I'll try one. I've always wanted to."

When, a few minutes later, Antonio placed the gla.s.s in front of her she found the rim coated with a white granular substance. "Why, it's salt," she said.

"The drink itself is made with tequila and lime."

She sipped the cold liquid. "I like it."

Jon reached into his pocket and brought out a rolled paper held by a blue ribbon tied in a bow. He laid the scroll on the tiles next to her hand.

"You thought I'd forgotten," he said. When she undid the bow and unrolled the paper she found her name at the top of the scroll together with the date and place of her birth. Under this heading was a diagram-two circles, one within the other, divided by spokes into twelve segments like the dial of a clock. Inside the circles she saw numbers, lines, triangles, and the signs of the zodiac.

"You made my horoscope," she said.

"I had help. From Serge Richter in Hollywood."

"Serge Richter. I'm impressed."

"He trusts me to erect a horoscope but I'm afraid he scoffs at my interpretations. Simplistic, he calls them. I showed him your horoscope last week, the day after I got back to L.A. I didn't understand his reaction. I still don't. He studied the horoscope as he always does, then he frowned.

"'Do you know her well, this Lesley Campbell?' he asked me. I told him I'd only met you the day before 'I'll need time to do research,' he said, 'Can you come back in a few days?' He'd never done that before. Of course I could go back again and I did."

"What troubled him?"

"I don't know. When I saw him yesterday he had cast your horoscope, yet I felt he was holding back, not telling me everything he saw. It was just an impression I had, but a strong one."

The waiter had approached without Lesley's knowledge and now stood at Jon's shoulder. "Seor Hollister," he said. "There is a telephone call for you."

Jon, looking surprised, excused himself and went into the cafe. While he was gone Lesley examined the diagram more closely. Aquarius was ascendant, the sun was in Leo, the moon in Taurus. Neptune, Saturn, and Mercury cl.u.s.tered in Libra.

Impatient to have Jon explain the meaning of the horoscope, she glanced toward the dining room just as the waiter pushed through the door. Glimpsing Jon at the far side of the dining room talking to a shorter man wearing black-framed gla.s.ses, Lesley half rose from her chair, then sat down again as the door swung shut. There's something familiar about that man, she thought. But what?

Again the door opened. This time Lesley was ready and examined the stranger. His left eye seemed partially closed, as in a perpetual wink, and Lesley thought she saw a scar angling from the outer corner of his eye toward his ear. The door swung shut.

She had seen the man before, she was sure. But where? Again the dining room door opened and Jon came back to sit across from her. "Sorry," he said. "A business call." He seemed distracted and ill at ease.

She began to ask a question about the stranger when Jon started to explain the horoscope. "Serge claims Taurus is the most propitious location for the moon. He said the horoscope shows you're loyal, slow to fall in love, but when you do you love forever. You have a desire for security yet you change your place of residence often. Mars being in Scorpio is an indication you have intuitive powers. Venus in Scorpio shows a deep need for love, though you refuse to subst.i.tute s.e.x for love."

"You're an Aries?" she asked.

"Yes. I was born on March 29." He ran his finger across the diagram from Libra to Aries. "My sign is opposite yours so we complement each other, you and I. Serge even mentioned me. He said you shouldn't be afraid for me, that he saw no danger. Not afraid of me, for me."

"I shouldn't be afraid for you," she repeated.

"I can't make head or tail of what he meant. When I came away from Serge's office I felt frustrated, like an interpreter who understands all the individual words that have been spoken but not the messages themselves."

"My mind's in a whirl," Lesley said. They finished their drinks and while Jon paid the bill she walked to the low vine-covered wall bordering the patio. She followed a path into a garden. Was Serge Richter aware of her second sight? she wondered. Lesley looked above her at stars and, at the sky's zenith, the half-moon. Beyond the blinking lights of the city she saw a bank of fog far out to sea. The fog. The man who had sat in the car in the parking lot the night she was attacked in her apartment. Was he the same one who she had seen talking to Jon in the cafe? No, she was imagining things.

Jon came to stand beside her. From the cafe she heard shouts of laughter and applause, then a guitar played and the laughter quieted and the night was still. A man sang, his voice clear and melancholy, and though she didn't understand the words she sensed their sadness. Her throat tightened.

"Will you take me with you when you go?" Jon asked when the music ended.

"Take you with me? Where?"

"To your island. Not every trip, but once in a while."

"Perhaps you have an island too."

"Yes, I do. Maybe we all do, somewhere. In our dreams."

She looked up at him, his eyes soft in the moonlight. When he kissed her she leaned to him, secure and protected in his arms. Yes, she whispered to herself, I'll take you with me, whenever you want to go.

Chapter Five.

For Lesley, September was a singular month. A month of long, quiet mornings; of exhausting yet stimulating work at the hospital; a month of love and joy and despair.

She would get up early and fix her breakfast-orange juice, toast sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, and coffee-then read the morning paper while she ate. Later she would drive to one of the beaches, to Ocean Beach, or La Jolla Sh.o.r.es, or Mission, or Pacific, once as far as the Silver Strand near Coronado. La Jolla was her favorite place. There she could sit on the curving sweep of sand and look inland past the palms to the red-roofed houses perched on the hills or turn to gaze across the sea knowing that far beyond the horizon lay the myriad islands of the Pacific.

Schools reopened in September, vacations ended, and the summer visitors left San Diego to return home to become their winter selves once more. The beach was no longer crowded. Gulls swooped above the sand, a pelican plummeted into the sea in search of fish. Every day Lesley watched an old man in shorts and a floppy white hat walk his dog, tossing sticks into the waves for the terrier to retrieve. At times the old man stopped to stare far out to sea where the waves built before they surged homeward and where a lone s.h.i.+p plowed northward. Then the dog, which had run ahead, loped back and barked until the old man, with a start, turned from the sea to walk along the sh.o.r.e with the dog again.

On this day, the first of her two days off, Lesley tried to read but the sun's glare on the pages tired her eyes. She laid the book facedown on her towel and walked along the water's edge, relis.h.i.+ng the feel of the damp sand on her bare feet. Water swirled toward her, receded, came back higher than before, retreated, and then a wave, at first seeming no greater than the others, pushed cold foaming water around her ankles and she s.h.i.+vered. Strands of kelp, abuzz with flies, lay on the sand and she thought of Jon Hollister and the day they had met, and she relived the drive from the university to the airport when he had first told her of Iron Ridge.

For days following their trip to Mexico, Lesley's sleep had been restless and often she wakened in the night feeling doubt and desire. She wanted to be with Jon, to see him, and she found their time together too short, over too soon. She wanted to touch him, to rest her hand gently on his cheek; she wanted to feel the strength of his arms around her. She loved to lie beside him on the gra.s.s in Balboa Park gazing up at the interlaced branches of the trees as he told her, in his slow and resonant voice, of his mother and father, of his days at school, and of Iron Ridge.

At other times she would turn from him, pull back without explanation, afraid without knowing why, hesitant and unsure, and she would let her phone ring when she knew the call was from him, eager to answer but refusing, as though to test herself. I'm afraid for him, she thought, and she was, despite her horoscope, despite the continued peaceful pa.s.sing of the days and weeks. Yet that reason was an excuse, she realized, though she knew a fear, overwhelming at times, a fear that slithered into her mind from some subterranean self, a buried, unacknowledged self. She dreaded being revealed to another, to this man who was a stranger from another time, another place. For if she loved him, if she permitted herself to love him, she knew she could conceal no part of herself, no facet, however small, from him.

She didn't tell Jon of the opal. Nor of the closing of her mind, the seeing beyond. She almost did, on two separate occasions, once when she admired his turquoise ring, again when they stopped before a jeweler's window, fascinated by a display of birthstones. Yet both times she remained silent.

Craig had called and they had gone to a movie. She liked Craig; something about his burnt-out enthusiasms appealed to her, made her want to try to rekindle them. He respected her, perhaps too much so, for he often seemed to be in awe of her. Yet just when Lesley's mind told her that she might, with time, come to care for Craig, her heart murmured Jon, and, after hearing that one word, Craig was forgotten.