Mac noted his rapid breathing and high color with alarm. “Homer, lie back. Calm down. You’re going to—”
“Die. That’s the truth, Brat, no escaping it. But I’m not leaving until I have your promise. That you’ll go down there when I’m gone and do what I ask, no matter how crazy you think it is.”
“Homer—”
“Promise me,” he wheezed, hands clutched on the bedspread in a stranglehold. “Promise me, Brat.”
There was no choice. She would give anything in the world to keep him alive for one more hour.
“I promise,” she whispered.
All at once the tension drained from his body, and he slumped boneless against the sheets. “Good. Then I can sleep.”
“Homer—”
“Not the big sleep. Not yet. Got to make sure you make all the necessary arrangements,” he muttered. But his voice was already fading, his lids heavy. He knocked his glasses from his nose and closed his eyes. “Do it soon, Brat. Don’t wait too long. For your own sake.”
There was no answer to his obsession. Not now. Perhaps later, when he’d rested…
“What about dinner?” she asked.
“Not hungry, Brat. Shriveled old men don’t need much.” He opened one eye. “Wouldn’t hurt you to eat more yourself. You’re skin and bones.”
You just noticed? she thought as she pulled the comforter up around him and adjusted the pillows. He was already asleep and snoring unevenly when she retrieved the envelope, abandoned letter and his glasses from the bed.
She almost left the envelope and pendant with Homer’s glasses on the bedside table. But he’d be upset if he woke to find them there, and she’d promised. Shaking her head, Mac absently looped the pendant’s thong over her head and tucked the envelope under her arm as she walked to the kitchen.
No point now in preparing the gourmet microwave dinner she’d planned for herself and Homer. She fixed herself a sandwich instead, straddled a chair at the tilted kitchen table and idly fingered the pendant as she ate.
Guatemala. It seemed worlds away from the cool, musty rooms of the museum, the safe, almost windowless walls and aisles of antiquities, the silence and solitude and certainty of who she was. The reality of a hot, steamy, primitive jungle was something she could only imagine. Off on a quest to end a curse that surely didn’t exist.
Legendary curses had supposedly haunted the robbers of Egyptian tombs. Maybe that extended to Maya tombs as well. Liam and Perry had taken something from a burial chamber, and then Perry had turned inexplicably on his friend and thus sealed his own family’s fate. Payback by the angry spirit-owners of those ancient ruins…
Mac groaned and dropped her head in her hands. She definitely didn’t believe in curses or bad karma. But Homer did. In the end that was all that mattered. She had given her word. If it meant Homer could go in peace, if she could give him one last gift, it would be worth it.
Resignation was already beginning to set in.
If you did this, Peregrine Sinclair, I think I’m going to add to the curse. I’ve never had to go searching for a ghost and ask its forgiveness.
If a man like Liam O’Shea would ever forgive. Pretty funny: two deceased men suddenly had her future in their long-decomposed hands.
Talk about morbid, Mac.
But she knew what she was good at, and it wasn’t going on a quest or doing anything flamboyant or daring that would mark her out from a thousand other average women.
Hell, she wasn’t even much good at being an average woman. Not the way men apparently expected, anyway. She’d just never caught the hang of it, and probably never would.
Without thinking she pulled the old photograph out of the envelope and spread it flat on the table top. I can guess the kind of woman you’d go for, Liam O’Shea. And wondered why such a thought even entered her mind.
Because he’s on the other side of a century, not to mention dead.
If you’re not even a match for a dead guy, you’re hopeless, Mac.
She smiled at her own fancy and started on the dishes. No. Except for Homer’s troubling and unexpected obsession, it wasn’t too likely that some supposed past evil would ever be much of a burden on MacKenzie Sinclair. No more than the slight weight of the pendant hanging around her neck.