“Nor his crown. Only a small iron box about this big”—he showed me with his hands—“and inscribed in a mix of languages. Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Our guide translated the Turkish bit.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a warning. It said that the contents of the box were not to be disturbed and that death would follow those who ignored it, and there was a bit of dark poetry about rivers of blood—which was all I needed to hear. Even Pandora wouldn’t have opened this thing. I wanted to leave it be and get out of there. But Fox had that sparkle in his eye. You know the one.”
I did. My father’s love of treasure and exploration was intense. He lived for the thrill of discovery. Loved it more than anything. More than me, I sometimes thought. “Naturally, he couldn’t resist opening the box,” I said, toeing off my Mary Janes and kicking them across the cabin floor.
“Naturally.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The lid fell apart when he pried at the rust. It was all for naught. Completely empty.”
“Empty?” I said, frowning. “No rivers of blood?”
“Don’t sound so disappointed that we didn’t die on the spot.”
“A girl can dream....”
He snorted a soft laugh before sneaking a look at my face, as if he needed visual confirmation that I wasn’t serious.
“Pandora’s box was a bust,” I said. “Then what happened?”
“We headed back down the mountain and returned to Tokat. Fox was in a black mood, due to not finding anything in the cave and to the fact that it seemed two men were following us and we didn’t know why, but we had to take the long way around the town to shake them off our tail. And when we returned to the fleabag hotel we’d been staying at before the climb up the mountain, the hotel manager discreetly told us that someone had been inquiring as to our whereabouts.”
“The plot thickens.”
“On top of that two people had left Fox messages, urgently requesting to meet with him.”
“Who were they?”
“The first one was a cleric at a mosque. We met him right before we left for the mountain. Nice enough fellow. Fox left after dark to meet up with him and didn’t come back until midnight. By that time I was already half asleep and in no mood for a late-night chat, so he told me we’d talk in the morning about a new game plan for the ring.”
“Did you?”
“No. When I woke up late the next morning, he was rushing out the door to meet with someone else. Didn’t say who. Just told me to run into town and see if I could charter a small plane because we were leaving that afternoon to fetch you in Istanbul. Or he was. I was going back to Belfast.”
“I see,” I said coolly. So my suspicions were right: he’d had no intention of seeing me on this trip. I filed that in the back of my mind, curbing the hurt and resentment that threatened to rise, and prompted him to continue.
“Right, yes, so... I got dressed and left the hotel. At first nothing was wrong. I walked. Ate. Asked around, trying to find anyone with a plane—crop duster, whatever. Came up empty, so I tracked down the only car rental in town—which reminds me... Is Pooka still at Foxwood? Or did he sell it? He wouldn’t tell me.”
Pooka was Huck’s car, a convertible with white-wall tires, which he’d Frankensteined together from several junked automobiles; Huck had built the engine himself. Lots of memories in that stupid old car. Our first kiss. Plenty of fights. Midnight rides to a secluded spot near the river.
The night after he left, I slept in the back seat, crying into the patched-up leather until Father found me.
“It’s still in the garage,” I said.
A small bolt of joy crossed his face. “Yeah?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, where was I?” he said, smiling briefly, as if that piece of information about Pooka was inconsequential. But was it?
“Right, well, as I was saying, I rented the car in Tokat, and that’s when I started seeing people in the shadows. The same people from the mountain were following me.”
“You don’t mean the men who broke into my room, do you?”
He nodded. “Them and some other mate. He wasn’t wearing black vestments like the rest of them, but that’s about all I could tell you. Maybe he was their leader, or maybe he was someone else entirely. He kept his distance, so I barely got a look at him.” Huck shook his head, dismissive, and crossed his arms. Shadows filled the deep hollows below proud, high cheekbones and accentuated the sharp line of his jaw. “This is going to sound daft, but I thought...”
