Her grandfather snorted eloquently. “You should have seen yourself when you were small, before your mother became ill. What a hellion you were. Into every scrape, up every tree. Lauren never let your hair grow because it was always full of twigs and gum and God 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 way—”
“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 eyes—Sinclair eyes—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 damned psychologist. Should have done more instead of spending so much time at Berkeley…”
He was wandering. It happened sometimes—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 me—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 Maya—”
“The past,” he countered hoarsely. “Can we ever really escape it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it really is a curse…” Once again his voice had changed, gone strange and distant with all the passion leached out of it. “Bad karma. Maybe that’s the right word for it. The downside of wanting to conquer the world…”
“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 damn 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 connection… 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 years—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.