Twice A Hero Part 1

TWICE A HERO.

By Susan Krinard.

In memory of my beloved Granddad, Hubert Earl Smith and with special thanks to Ellie Johnson, Esther Reese, Casey Mickle, and Callie Goble for their help with the details.

Part One

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of s.p.a.cea"out of Time.

a"Edgar Allan Poe

Chapter One.

What's past is prologue.

a"William Shakespeare.

San Francisco, 1997.

"YOU COME FROM a long line of adventurers, MacKenzie Sinclair. d.a.m.n it, Brat, I'll haunt you from my grave if you break the family tradition."

Homer Sinclair, his face flushed with pa.s.sion, subsided back among the pillows. A vein in his forehead throbbed, and his left hand shook; MacKenzie leaned over the bed, stroking his flyaway white hair.

"Come on, Homer. Melodrama doesn't suit you."

"Don't you patronize me," he said, glaring at her. He could still manage a certain ferocity with that stare, even though his withered body had long ago lost its strength. "I'm dead serious, and I'm not going to see you grow old buried in books and moldy pottery, convincing yourself that's all there is to life."

MacKenzie stilled her hand on his forehead. "How many times do we have to go through this?"

"As many times as it takes to get it through that thick skull of yours," he snapped. His gla.s.ses slid down his nose; Mac set them carefully back in place, and he batted at her fingers. "I'm not going to have your martyrdom on my consciencea""

"Martyrdom?" Mac unhooked her legs from the chair she'd been straddling and pushed to her feet. "That's a low blow, Homer, and you know it."

"Maybe that's just what you need!"

She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her loose jeans. No sense in letting him make her angry now; after six years she knew how to handle the brilliant and temperamental man in the bed. "Funny you should mention martyrdom. Of course it doesn't make any difference that your academic career got derailed when you were stuck with your widowed daughter-in-law and her two kidsa""

"Should I have turned you all out in the street?"

"a"and that you raised me and Jason after Mom died, got us an educationa""

"An education that'll be wasted on you, Brat, unless you get your nose out of books and make yourself face the real world!"

Mac clamped her lips together and didn't let Homer see that he'd scored a direct hit. I ought to have humored him, she thought. But they'd never been anything but honest with each other.

"You want a philosophical discussion on what's real?" she asked wryly. She rested her foot on the chair and blew her bangs from her eyes. "Do you mind if we eat first? This could take all night."

Homer gave a wheezing chuckle. "I should have known I couldn't rattle you, Brat." His chuckle became a cough; he waved off Mac's concern with an irritable flap of his hand. "All right. No more low blows. Come here and sit down."

Something in his tone made her obey without question, as she'd done as a child before she'd lost her awe of him. The high color in his face had drained away, leaving his skin nearly translucent. Fragile, like delicate gla.s.s. And that close to shattering.

"I don't have much time left," he said.

The usual protest almost escaped her; a small dishonesty, but one she clung to with stubborn determination.

"You know it, Brat," he said, almost gently. "Your bullheaded denial isn't going to alter the facts." His hand felt for hers; thin fingers tightened with surprising strength. Their hands were much alike, blunt-nailed and st.u.r.dy. Or so Homer's had been, once.

"I'm ready to take off on the big adventure, if you'll forgive the tired clich," he continued. "This old body wants to rest. But I need a.s.surance from you that you're not going to let yourself wither away into an old intellectual prune, holed up with dusty books and artifacts in this house or in the museum because your mother and I robbed you of all the years you should have spent running wild and learning about life."

Mac suppressed a sigh. Homer was like a terrier chasing a rat when he was fixed on his subject. "Running wild isn't what it used to be in your day, Homer. I don't think I was ever cut out for it."

Her grandfather snorted eloquently. "You should have seen yourself when you were small, before your mother became ill. What a h.e.l.lion you were. Into every sc.r.a.pe, up every tree. Lauren never let your hair grow because it was always full of twigs and gum and G.o.d knows what else."

Mac ran her hand through her cropped hair. "Don't remind me."

"You need reminding. You were as rough-and-tumble as any boy. More than Jason ever was. You had the neighborhood bully on the run when you were six, and he was two years older." He grinned. "Never made a lick of difference that you were the first girl to be born in our family for seven generations. You were a Sinclair in every waya""

"Like Dad?" she said softly.

He sobered, but his fingers kept their tenacious grip on hers. "Jake was so much like you." Homer's dark eyesa"Sinclair eyesa"grew hazy with memory. "He was wild, all right. But he had that stubborn streak of responsibility, same as you. A feeling that things were bigger than himself, that what he wanted didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. He was sure it was his duty to go to Vietnam."

And die, Mac added silently, saving his platoon from ambush. That was where his adventuring had taken him. He'd never even seen his daughter.

"Your mother wasn't right after Jake died," Homer muttered. "I was never a d.a.m.ned psychologist. Should have done more instead of spending so much time at Berkeleya"

He was wandering. It happened sometimesa"more and more often lately. Mac stroked the loose skin on the back of his hand.

"And then this," Homer said. He pulled his hand away from hers and slapped his sunken chest. "You're stuck waiting hand and foot on me, chained to this mausoleum of a house, thinking you owe it to me." He closed his eyes. "Such a waste."

Mac clasped her hands together between her knees and sucked in a deep breath. "Homer," she pleaded. "Stop this."

He shook his head. She saw the moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes, spilling into the sunken hollows beneath.

Tears. In all her life, Mac had seen him weep only once before. She swallowed and recaptured his hand. "You call it a waste? Without you Jason wouldn't have become the scientist he is. Look what he's already done in cancer research. And mea"you gave me more than just reality, Homer. You gave me the world. You gave me a hundred worlds. Ancient Greece and Rome, the empires of China, the Renaissance, the Mayaa""

"The past," he countered hoa.r.s.ely. "Can we ever really escape it?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Sometimes I wonder if it really is a cursea" Once again his voice had changed, gone strange and distant with all the pa.s.sion leached out of it. "Bad karma. Maybe that's the right word for it. The downside of wanting to conquer the worlda"

"Homer, what are you talking about?"

His gaze sharpened. "Crazy old man, huh? Maybe I am. Or maybe things just get clearer."

"You might try making it clearer to me."

He chuckled without humor. "Did you ever wonder, Brat, why the Sinclairs, grand adventurers all, have had such blasted bad luck?"

This was a new train of thought, and not one that Mac liked. "I still don't get you."

"Oh, it doesn't go back very far, really. Only a few generations. But it's left its mark. My father lost in the Himalayas, me in this blasted bed wasting away, Jake and your mother. Maybe you're not so wrong to hide." He tried to sit up, shoving at the pillows with his back and elbows. "But d.a.m.n it, Brat, maybe you're the one to end this thing."

He was almost incoherent, and Mac struggled to hide her concern. "What 'thing,' Homer?"

He didn't seem to hear. "Yes. A connectiona I know I'm right." His expression hardened into resolve. "That box I had you get down yesterday. Put it up here. There's something I want you to see."

With a dubious glance Mac complied, retrieving the bulging cardboard box from the floor beside the bed.

The box had been shoved in the back of a closet no one had been into in yearsa"like so much else of the ancient Victorian with its dusty artifacts and closed-up rooms. Mac had never found time for anything but cursory cleaning when she got home from the museum each day, and she and Homer certainly didn't have the money for outside help.

G.o.d only knew what Homer had hidden away. A mausoleum, he'd called the house, but he didn't really believe it. He loved this place and everything in it. It was a museum, filled with the artifacts Homer and past Sinclairs had collected. Most of it should be in a real museum, and would be once Homer was gonea She cut off that line of thought and inelegantly wiped dusty hands on her old T-s.h.i.+rt. The box was no different from countless othersa"except for the simple, faded label on top. "Sinclair" was all it said. Homer grunted and folded back the dog-eared flaps.

"Ah." He lifted out a wrapped, squarish bundle and set it carefully down beside him on the bed. "I was sure it was in here."

Mac leaned her elbows on her knees. "So what is it?"

"A piece of family history. And perhaps something more perilous." Homer's fingers trembled a little as he unwrapped the top layers of yellowed newspaper to reveal still more layers of ancient tissue. Within were two smaller packages, one a small box and the other a flat envelope.

Homer's reverence for the past was in every careful motion as he peeled the brittle tape from the envelope and opened the top. Carefully he slid out the contents and spread them on the comforter.

A handwritten sheet on old-looking stationery. Newspaper clippings, even more yellowed than the paper they'd been wrapped in. And a photograph, creased at the corner and fragile with age.

Homer turned the photograph toward her and leaned back. "There," he said. "Take a look."

Mac looked. The photograph was of two men, and it was undoubtedly an antique. The men wore clothing that was of a noticeably nineteenth-century cut; one of them even wore a bowler hat set at a jaunty angle.

She picked up the photograph by its edges. The background had an exotic cast to it, and she recognized the setting: ruins. Maya ruins, to be exact. One of the two mena"the one with the bowler, dark hair, and a neat mustachea"was dressed like a Victorian gentleman on a pleasant stroll into the wilderness. He was smiling.

Mac studied his face with a little shock of realization.

"You recognize him, don't you?"

"He's a Sinclair," Mac murmured.

"Who?" Homer almost grimaced.

"Meet your great-greatgrandfather, Peregrine Wallace Sinclair."

Peregrine Sinclair. Of course. "I think you mentioned him once before, when I was a kid. The one who was the youngest son of an English viscount, came to San Franciscoa""

"And, in spite of his look of great propriety, was one of the Sinclair adventurers," Homer finished. "Note the background."

"Maya jungle," she said. "Lowlands, I'd say." She scratched her chin. "Tikal?"

"Right. Perry was down in the Petn in 1880, after Stephens and Catherwood but before Maudslay took his famous photographs. When the jungle was still a pretty dangerous place." He tapped his finger on the edge of the photo. "Notice the family resemblance?"

She couldn't help but notice. Peregrine Sinclair had the dark hair and eyes, the height, the regular but unremarkable features. And he was lean. All the Sinclairs were lean. On a man it could look quite eleganta"as it did in the photos she'd seen of her father, or on Homer before he'd had the accident, or even Jason.

On a woman it streamlined chest and hips and turned intoa"Mac. Just plain, wiry Mac, who used to be mistaken for a boy.

"Hard not to see it," she quipped.

"Because you're a true Sinclair, just as he was. The same blood beats in your veins, Brat. Even Perry's wife, your great-great-grandmother Caroline, was a Sinclair in everything but blood. She was a reformer against the slave-girl trade in San Francisco and went on to become one of the country's leading suffragettes."

"Good for her. Did they screen her for the proper adventurous spirit before they let her join the family?"

Homer frowned over his gla.s.ses, but Mac deliberately turned her attention to the other man in the photo.

He was different from her great-great-grandfather, though at first the differences seemed subtle. Maybe an inch or two taller, a little stronger of build, with a stance that hinted at a greater weight of muscle under his clothes.

The clothes themselves suggested someone less concerned with sartorial dignity than Perry. The man's dirt-scuffed, khaki-colored trousers were tucked into battered boots, and his s.h.i.+rt was rolled up to his forearms and open to mid-chest. His legs were planted apart and his hands rested on his hips in a stance faintly hinting of challenge.

But it was his face that arrested her. A hard face, lacking the subtle refinement of Perry's. Square jaw nicked with a dimple in the chin, high slanted cheekbones, mouth c.o.c.ked in a twist that indicated a sort of cynical patience. His eyes, under dark straight brows, were pale. Gray, she guessed. His hair was possibly a lightish brown, windblown and just long enough to brush his collar. All things considered, he looked exactly like what he was.

A man from another age. A more romantic age, when a thousand frontiers had yet to be explored. An age when an adventurer would fit right in. And this guy was the perfect specimen. He exuded machismo. It was there in every line of his body.

Funny how that powerful sense of him could transmit itself through an old photo across all these years, when the subject himself was ashes.

"Liam Ignatius O'Shea," Homer supplied.

Mac started as if the man in the photograph had spoken. She s.h.i.+fted in the chair and put the photo down. "Should I know him?"

"Interesting fellow, isn't he? He's quite a story in himself." Homer settled back, folding his hands across his ribs. "Liam O'Shea was Perry's friend and, for a time, his partner in adventure. The two men couldn't have been more different. O'Shea was a self-made man in the true nineteenth-century sense of the word. His family were prosperous landowners in Ireland until they were driven from their farm. They came to New York with almost nothing, and O'Shea lost his mother when he was still a boy. Worked his way across the country with the railroads and right out of poverty to become one of the richest men in San Francisco. They called him 'Lucky Liam.' "

Mac gave Homer a lopsided smile. "I see you can't wait to tell me all about him, and he's not even a Sinclair."

"I've been saving the best for last." But there was a grim sarcasm in Homer's voice. He glanced at the small box he'd left untouched on the comforter. "Go ahead. Open it."

Mac didn't betray the eagerness that had taken unexpected hold of hera"just as Homer had undoubtedly intended. Without haste she pried the lid off the box and pushed aside the tissue wrappings.

The ancient chip of rectangular stone inside was evidently part of some larger whole. Three edges were smoothly finished, bordered by decorative symbols; the finely carved glyphs on the stone's gray surface ended abruptly at a clean break on the fourth side. The piece itself was less than two inches across. A small hole had been drilled near the top, and a cracked leather thong was still threaded through it.

A pendant. Mac lifted the piece out and let the thong dangle over her hand.