She had heard him correctly, but her brain refused to process the information. “Ye—no.” She breathed in and out, grateful that her physical functions seemed to be operating normally. “Uh… you never did… tell me your name.”
“Remiss of me. But if you know Perry—”
“I don’t. I mean—”
“—you must know my name is Liam O’Shea.”
Mac sat very still. Of course his name was Liam O’Shea. He recognized the photograph. He knew about her great-great-grandfather. He came from San Francisco. It all made perfect sense.
Who could have set this up? She didn’t have any friends or relatives capable, financially or otherwise, of such an elaborate scheme; Homer was dead, she wasn’t close to her uncles, and Jason was too lost in his research to call her more than once a year. No one at the museum would have bothered. Even if they’d known the story behind the photograph…
No one would have bothered. No one cared enough or knew enough. But there were only two other explanations she could think of. The most likely one was that she’d managed to hit her head on the wall in that tunnel and was in the middle of some sort of delusion or dream.
Yes. There’d been that feeling of nausea and disorientation right before the wall had disappeared and she’d lost the pendant. She’d never felt anything quite like it before—as if the ground were vanishing beneath her feet. Maybe that had been the last real thing she’d felt before she’d lost consciousness, and the rest was a concoction of all the elements that had been in her mind when the accident had happened.
She pinched herself. That didn’t work; she felt it and didn’t wake up. This was definitely a new level of dream. Or delirium. Maybe she was even dying. Odd how the idea didn’t trouble her.
Maybe because she couldn’t quite believe it. But the third possibility…
Her giggle turned into a cough. There is no such thing, Mac. Except in your own possibly delirious mind.
“Miss MacKenzie!”
She grinned at him. That drunken sense of unreality had come over her again. She braced her hands on her knees to keep from swaying. “I’m… fine. Just…
let me get this straight. You say your name is Liam O’Shea, and this is Tikal. Correct?”
He regarded her as a jaguar might a particularly succulent deer. “Yes.”
“And, uh… what year is this?”
Liam-who-claimed-to-be-the-real-thing smiled. “I’ll wager you know well enough, Miss MacKenzie. The date is the fourteenth of August, and the year is 1884.”
Chapter Four
They say miracles are past.
—William Shakespeare
THE WOMAN WAS evidently an actress of considerable talent. Or she was quite mad.
“1884?” she repeated, her low voice hoarse. “Did you say—eighteen eighty-four? But that’s not possible.”
Liam regarded her stunned expression with suspicious bemusement. Simple insanity did fit hand in glove with the rest of her: thin, wiry, distinctly peculiar with her cap of short hair and bold dark eyes, sharp-tongued, dressed top to toe in men’s clothing of an odd cut, and carrying a newfangled electric lantern the likes of which he had never seen in all his travels. And alone here in the jungle, first claiming she’d been with a full party of explorers and then insisting that no man had brought her.
And then there was her odd manner of speech, her absurd assertions of hotels in the jungle and omnibuses from Flores, her reaction to Tikal—as if she’d expected to see something entirely different, though she claimed to know the ruins.
Yes, one could almost be convinced that she was in a state of mental disturbance—if not for the photograph she had so carelessly allowed him to see. The one taken here in these very ruins four years ago.
“What did you expect, Miss MacKenzie?” he asked. “Maybe you have been in the jungle too long.”
Her dark brows drew down, and her gaze grew unfocused. “Okay, Mac,” she muttered. “Time to wake up. This isn’t happening.”
Was this act a way of protecting herself, avoiding his questions because she’d revealed too much? Liam couldn’t forget the shock he’d felt when he’d seen her with the photograph. Until that moment she’d been only an unforeseen burden to dispose of in the nearest safe place, some eccentric suffragist amateur explorer who’d been lost or deliberately abandoned, left for him to save.