Kind of like she was doing right now.
So she watched the camera jounce around and said nothing until the picture bobbed and she was looking down into a tight, dark crawlspace. “What’s that?”
“That is the hole,” Jonathan said. “It leads to a cave we found what we believe was used for oracular purposes and worship. The entrance is buried under several tons of rock and mud, but we were able to dig down several feet and break in from above.”
“Going in,” Sergio called. There was a minor scuffle, and then the camera stared at the rocky wall as Sergio climbed down on a creaky metal ladder into a narrow, dark tunnel.
“Brave man,” Violet commented. “You must be paying him well.”
“Actually, Sergio is a volunteer from the university,” Jonathan said.
“And he’s willing to jump into a hole like that?”
“Of course. That’s what archaeology is about.” Jonathan grinned at her. “I seem to recall a girl who had ‘carpe diem’ tattooed on her lower back. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“It was long beaten out of me,” Violet said in a disapproving voice. “I’ve had enough adventure for one life.”
“I am at the bottom,” Sergio called, and the picture bobbed again. “Heading into the atrium.” More scuffling, and then in the darkness, a light flared on. “At the site,” Sergio called, and the camera shifted. “Can you see?”
Violet looked over at Jonathan, one eyebrow raised inquiringly.
Jonathan pointed at the computer screen. “Do you see that painting on the wall? You can barely make out a mural, but it’s mostly destroyed.” His finger skimmed the screen. “This is a bull, and this person is a festival dancer here. Quit moving, Sergio.”
“Sorry,” came the tinny voice, and the camera stilled.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Violet said. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Below the mural,” Jonathan said, and his finger pointed at a slightly darker line, “we found two inscripted stone slabs—two stelae. One was hand-sized and one was larger. The larger was written in hieratic, and mentioned a great festival. The second one was in Etruscan and a variant we’d never seen before. It was commemorating something that one of our men interpreted to be a great flood or a disaster with water.”
“Mmm.”
“Atlantis.”
She rolled her eyes. What did he want her to say?
Jonathan continued to watch her. “Your father took the smaller stone to have it carbon-dated and catalogued, and no one has seen it since. Nor has anyone recorded it being taken to a lab for carbon dating.” He turned back to the computer, tapped the screen, and then frowned to himself. “Thank you, Sergio. That is all I needed.”
“Anytime,” Sergio called back, his voice garbled. He said something else, but the connection disrupted and the call went dead.
Jonathan shut his laptop and gave Violet a scrutinizing look. “Well?”
“That was a lovely bedtime story, but what does this have to do with me?”
“Do you know anything about your father stealing artifacts?”
“I barely talked to my father in the last ten years. How would I know anything?” Her lips curled with derision. “You’re the one who was so in love with him. You should be the one to know.”
“I think he stole it because he knew I’d want it.” Jonathan gave her a curious look. “And I think he expects me to come after you and ask questions.”
“Well, if this was part of his master plan, it’s a pitiful one. I want nothing to do with him. Or you, for that matter.”
“Nevertheless, here we are.” Jonathan’s intense gaze made her shiver. “You said you’d help me find my stele and his journals.”
“You didn’t give me much of a choice,” she retorted back.
“He’s not my father,” Jonathan said.
He might as well have been. Violet sure hadn’t been close to Dr. DeWitt. She drummed her fingers. “Let’s just get this over with, all right?”
“Like I said, we’re heading straight to the airport. I don’t want to waste time, either. Every day that passes without that stele, the trail goes colder.”
“I have my passport.” She kept her voice even, and kept her gaze off of him.
He nodded. “All right. Can I ask where we’re going?”
She frowned and looked over at him. “Why are you asking me where we’re going? This is your little trip!”
“You’re the one who’s meant to understand the symbol your father left.” He pulled out a tablet and began tapping on it, then offered the tablet to her. There, scanned in, was a copy of the symbol on one of the letters.
Right. This was all a little game her father had designed to keep her in Jonathan’s eyes so he’d continue to fund Phineas DeWitt’s pet projects even after death. “Yes, I know where that is.”
“Care to share?”
She hesitated. “When I was growing up, I was very into Ancient Roman studies. One of the superstitions the Romans had were curse tablets. They believed that if you wanted to curse someone, you wrote the curse on a tablet and then hid it in a place that no one could find. When I was nine, I wrote a curse on my Etch A Sketch and buried it in the backyard of my childhood home. And because I wanted to find it later, I carved that symbol onto the tree.” She pointed at the symbol on the paper.
He took the tablet back from her and squinted at it. “I thought it was a hieroglyph.”
“It’s a devil.”
He turned the tablet, still staring at it. “Are you sure? There are five limbs and three eyes. Maybe it’s a bug of some kind?”
“I know what I drew,” Violet snapped at him. “And I wasn’t very good at carving, all right?”
His lips twitched in amusement. “So, who did you curse?”
“My father. He’d left my mother again and she was depressed.” He’d left her mother a lot in those days.
“What did you curse him with?”
This time, Violet’s mouth curled in a wry smile, remembering her childhood anger. “I believe I demanded that his peepee fall off.”
“I have an incredible urge to cross my legs and slide farther away from you.”
“You’re lucky there’s not an Etch A Sketch handy.”
He laughed, his smile so utterly brilliant that it lit up his entire face. In that moment, he wasn’t Billionaire Jonathan Lyons, daredevil and mogul. He was just nineteen-year-old Jonathan who’d made her heart flutter.
Like it was fluttering right now.
She took a big gulp of the coffee and turned to stare out the window, not caring that her mouth burned on the heat of the drink. The last thing she wanted was to get cozy with Jonathan again. “At any rate,” she said, turning her voice back to that cool diffidence, “we need to head to Alamagordo, New Mexico.”
“Is that where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
“Is the Etch A Sketch still there?”
“No. My mother made me dig it up and then told my father about it when he returned a few months later. He didn’t care. In fact, I seem to recall that he corrected me on my curse and said that the Romans would have never marked such a spot, as it defeated the purpose of the curse.”
“So he turned it into a lesson?”
“It isn’t a lesson if you’re already aware of the facts.”
“So you marked it on purpose? Did you want him to find it?”
She had. She’d wanted her father to realize how furious and hurt she was that he’d left, and that Mommy spent all day in bed, crying and nursing a bottle of rum. She’d had no outlet for her anger, so she’d carved that symbol angrily into the tree, hoping that her father would return home the next day and ask about the symbol. What’s this, Violet? And then she could show him.
But he hadn’t returned home until months later, and he’d never noticed the tree. It had been her mother, giddy with excitement that her husband was home and paying a bit of attention to her, who had brought up Violet’s curse. Isn’t that precious of our Violet?
That was pretty much how her entire childhood had gone. Her father would leave. Her mother would drink. Violet would rage. Her father would return. Her mother would smother him with affection. Then he would leave again. All through this, Violet built resentment for her brilliant, flawed father.
“Violet?” Jonathan asked in a low voice. “You okay?”
“Alamagordo,” she said flatly. “I agreed to be your guide, not your entertainment.”
He sighed with resignation, and she felt a bit like an ass**le.
THREE
Violet was rather alarmed to see that the limo didn’t head to Detroit Metro Airport, but instead went to a smaller airfield. “Where are we going?”
He gave her that cocky look that made her nerves grate. “The airport.”
She gritted her teeth. “What airport is this?”
“A private one.”
Clearly. She peered out the window at the small hangar. “We’re not taking a commercial flight?” She’d been hoping for a multitude of passengers and some in-flight magazines to distract her from her company.
“Since we’re just heading to New Mexico, I figured I’d fly us there.”
Fear made her eyes widen. “What? We’re not going to have a real pilot?”
He turned that intense, cocky look on her. “I am a real pilot, Violet. I fly my planes all the time.”
“Yes, but . . .” She trailed off. It seemed rather impolite to say I don’t want to leave my life in your hands. But what choice did she have? She could refuse and turn around and leave . . . and then everyone in the school district would resent her.
Yeah, like that was a choice. Violet sighed. “If you crash, I’m going to be furious.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
She gave him a sharp look to see if he was joking, but . . . he didn’t seem to be. With a sigh, she continued to stare out the window and bit back any comments or concerns she had about taking a small plane.
A half hour later, when she saw the actual plane itself, Violet gave a moan of distress. “You’re kidding me, right? It’s so small.”
“Not that small. This is one of the bigger in its class,” Jonathan said, staring up at it with what looked like affection. “Socata TBM 850. Turboprop. We’ll have enough fuel to make it to New Mexico without having to stop and refuel.”
Violet stared at it, then at Jonathan. “And you’re the pilot.”
“I’m the pilot.”
She shook her head as he pulled out the tiny staircase for her to get on board. The plane was red and white, and she counted three windows going down the body. As she climbed on, she couldn’t suppress another moan of horror. The interior was about the size of her hatchback, all beige leather, and seemed barely big enough for the bucket seats inside. “I can’t believe we’re flying in this thing.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Jonathan said. “Just get in already.”
Reluctantly, she did so, heading for one of the back seats.
“In the front,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to need company to keep me awake while I fly.”
“I hope you’re joking,” she snapped. When he only winked at her, she sighed and headed to the front, squeezing into the passenger seat. She wasn’t relieved to see the massive control panel at the front or the twin sets of steering-wheel thingies. It only made her more upset. What if Jonathan couldn’t fly and she had to take over? They’d die for sure; she had no idea how to fly a plane.