Water To Burn Part 3

"Okay. Ari wanted to talk to Mike about something, so they may not be down for a while."

"Oh, good! We can gossip."

We went into the kitchen. Aunt Eileen put on a yellow calico bib ap.r.o.n, then stood at the counter by the sink to fuss with the food. I sat down in one of the captain's chairs at the round maple table, which she kept covered with a matching round of gla.s.s. She'd already set it for six with the family china, pale blue stoneware with green rims, and blue paper napkins.

"I wanted to tell you," Aunt Eileen said, "that I got a letter from Wally and Rose. They're coming to San Francisco for a visit."

"Cool!" I said. "Are they traveling in their RV?"

"Your aunt can't really travel any other way these days, I gather. Her knees, you know, and now they're talking about a hip replacement, too. Besides, she told me she has a special present for Kathleen."

"Oh, lord! Another d.a.m.n dog."

"Oh, yes. A Russian wolfhound. And it's pregnant."

I could barely visualize hefty Aunt Rose, her equally hefty second husband, and a pregnant wolfhound all crammed into a small RV. Well, small as RVs go, anyway.

"Which reminds me," I said. "Have you heard from Kathleen lately?"

"Yes, she called me a couple of days ago." Aunt Eileen looked into a gla.s.s bowl of tomatoes and frowned. "You know how she is. She talked mostly about her animals, but I got the impression that she and Jack were having problems."

"Oh, no! That marriage means so much to her."

"Yes, it worries me." Aunt Eileen paused to pull a long knife from the butcher's block stand. "We've really got to eat those tomatoes tonight. I'll slice them for the salad. But, about Jack . . . He's involved in a new business venture, and Kathleen doesn't like his partner."

"Ah, I see. What kind of business?"

"Well, it does sound kind of flaky." Aunt Eileen brought out this piece of her childhood slang with a flourish. "It's hunting for Drake's treasure."

"Sir Francis?"

"Him, yes, the pirate or privateer or whatever he was. He's supposed to have had Spanish gold onboard when he landed up at Drake's Bay. This fellow, the one Kathleen doesn't like, has found some old doc.u.ments or something. He thinks Drake might have buried some treasure along the coast somewhere."

"Well, there's only a thousand miles or so of California coast. Good luck!"

"Yes, it sounds like a really crazy idea."

We paused while Aunt Eileen ran the knife through the screeching electric sharpener. Eileen's knowledge of history tended to be more than a little flaky itself. As far as I knew, Drake's treasure had gone safely back to England for queen and country. If he had withheld some of it for himself, as some people thought, why would he have buried it on the other side of the world from his home base?

As for Jack, I wasn't surprised that the idea would appeal to him. His filthy-rich family had left him with no need for a real job. He lived with the constant danger of being bored. Treasure hunting would have sounded exciting as well as potentially profitable.

When the knife was sharp enough to suit her, Aunt Eileen wiped it clean on a checked dish towel, then went on talking while she lined the tomatoes up on a wooden cutting board shaped into the silhouette of a pig.

"Jack met this person through some of his other business contacts," Eileen said. "His name's Caleb something-I'm not sure if Kathleen told me his whole name or if she even knows it."

"Caleb? That's not a name you hear real often."

"Kathleen thinks he's from New England because he sounds like the Kennedys to her, the politician ones, I mean, not our cousins. Anyway, she says he smells funny, and the dogs don't like him. I don't know how much weight to put on that."

"I'd trust it," I said. "Kathleen's sense of smell isn't what you'd call normal."

"Well, that's certainly true. At first Caleb wanted to rent Jack's boat to go out deep-sea fishing."

"Since when does Jack rent out his boat?"

"He hardly needs to with his family's money, no, but I suppose Caleb didn't know that. But they did go fishing, and they became friends, and this other business came up."

"The buried treasure bit sounds all wrong to me."

"Yes, I agree." Eileen began slicing tomatoes with the vicious precision of a pirate. Juice ran on the cutting board.

I felt the odd trembling sensation in my hands that I occasionally get when I've heard something important. It's as if my fingers want to reach out and grab the information physically. Whoever Caleb was, he would bear keeping in mind. I would have asked more, but I heard Uncle Jim's truck come trundling up the steep driveway. In a minute, Jim himself came in, a tall man, not truly fat, but big all over, with gray hair streaked with its original red. He'd slung the jacket of his gray suit over one shoulder. A blue tie dangled out of one trouser pocket.

"How was your day?" Aunt Eileen reached up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.

"Lousy," Jim said with a shrug. "One of the old L Taravals got stuck in the d.a.m.ned tunnel, and we had to run diesel feeder lines. I got it all cleared up okay eventually." He glanced my way and smiled. "Hi, honey. Where are the boys?"

"Upstairs with Ari," I said. "Talking, I guess."

In a few minutes, though, they all came down. Aunt Eileen had finished the salad, and Uncle Jim had just poured himself a juice gla.s.s full of whiskey when I heard them pounding down the back stairs, the ones that led right into the kitchen. Michael and Brian walked in first, a pair of cousins, though they looked enough alike to be brothers, with their dark blue eyes and straight black hair. Brian, however, stood a good head taller.

Ari shook hands with Jim, declined his offer of whiskey, and sat down next to me at the table. He leaned toward me and murmured.

"Interesting information from Mike. Remind me to tell you if I forget."

For dinner that night, Aunt Eileen had cooked her killer pot roast with potatoes and carrots. At least she served it with a salad, something I could eat in quant.i.ty. I did take a slice of meat and some carrots. Ari pointedly slopped the mushroom gravy on both of them before I could protest. I held him off before he added a potato chunk. For some minutes no one spoke, merely ate, led by two voracious teen boys. Eventually, Uncle Jim turned in his chair and waved a fork at me.

"Wanted to ask you," he said. "What about that d.a.m.ned gate to wherever it is?"

"Still no word on what the government wants done to it," I said. "I'm sorry. I've been bugging my contact about it at regular intervals."

"Well, you can tell them this. If they don't do something soon, I'm going to fill that d.a.m.ned room with concrete. That'll put an end to it."

Michael's head jerked up. He stared at Uncle Jim nervously, then tried to cover his slip by reaching for the platter of pot roast.

"Ask me to pa.s.s it to you, dear," Aunt Eileen said.

"Sorry. It's h.e.l.la good, Aunt E."

She smiled and handed him the platter. Ari glanced my way and winked. I took it as meaning that yes, Michael had been slipping through the gate to visit his girl.

"What beats me all to h.e.l.l," Uncle Jim continued, "is why the d.a.m.ned thing had to be right here in my house. Of all the b.u.m luck!"

"No, not luck," I said. "Consider our family, all of it, over the generations. It's perfectly logical that there would be one here. It's not like it was the only one in San Francisco."

Uncle Jim grunted and speared a chunk of potato with his fork. I had the distinct feeling that I'd spoken truer than I knew. Mike was watching me, I realized.

"Mike," I said, "have you read those e-mails I printed out for you, the ones from our expert on the deviant levels?"

"NumbersGrrl, you mean?" Michael wiped his mouth on his crumpled napkin. "Yeah, they helped a lot. I did a little Web surfing, too, trying to find something about worldwalkers, but I only found a couple of fiction books."

"Here's one possibility. Look up a man named John 'Walking' Stewart. Late eighteenth century."

"Okay. Why?"

"He supposedly walked from England to America without bothering with a ship."

Mike blinked at me for a moment, then his mouth framed a silent O.

"He also believed," I went on, "in the transmigration of molecules and atoms from one body to another, but his main trick was covering long distances in short times just by walking."

"Are you having a joke on us?" Ari glared at me.

"No. Guys like Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote about him, so there's evidence. He'd disappear from one location, then turn up thousands of miles away in a year or so, but he always traveled on foot. He claimed that the atoms in your body could dissolve in one place and re-form in another, or something like that."

Uncle Jim leaned forward. "Wait a minute," he said. "This business about the atoms. Is that where Flann O'Brien got the idea about the Irishman and his bicycle?"

"Probably," I said.

"Flann O'Brien?" A bewildered Ari glanced at Aunt Eileen. "Another relative?"

"No, dear," Eileen said. "A novelist, and that's just his pen name, a very strange novelist who wrote a book called The Third Policeman."

"What is it, a murder mystery?"

Since Aunt Eileen had taken a bite of salad, I answered for her. "Sort of, but a comic take on one, and a lot weirder than usual. The narrator has this idea that over the years an Irishman and his bicycle exchange so many atoms that one becomes part of the other."

Ari stared at me. "A novelist," he said eventually. "No wonder I don't read fiction."

Uncle Jim's face turned pink from suppressed laughter. He made a great show of cutting his ma.s.sive chunk of pot roast into tidy slices. Michael pushed back his chair and stood up.

"I'm going to write this down, okay?" he said to Aunt Eileen. "I'll be right back. Walking Stewart and then the writer guy."

"The book's in your uncle's den," Aunt Eileen said. "Remind me later, and I'll dig it out for you."

"I will, Aunt E. Thanks. Seriously."

Michael hurried up the staircase to the upper floor and his bedroom. Aunt Eileen watched him go with a slight smile.

"Anything to get them to read," she murmured in my direction.

"That 'them' means me as well as the boys," Uncle Jim said. "But I got to admit, I enjoyed that Third Policeman book, even if O'Brien was a Unionist." He glanced at Ari. "I'm betting you know what that means, working for the outfit you do and all."

"Oh, yes," Ari said. "Interpol does keep an eye on some aspects of the Irish situation."

I felt a sudden nag of premonitory fear. Aunt Eileen raised an eyebrow and lowered it again-quickly.

"There are some potatoes left," she said. "Brian, Ari, what about finishing them up?"

"Thank you, but I've had more than enough," Ari said. "Everything was very good."

Brian grabbed the serving spoon and loaded potatoes onto his plate. Gravy followed in profusion.

"Basketball practice again today?" I said to him.

"Yeah, it makes you kind of hungry." Brian's voice became solicitous as he continued, "Nola, you sure you don't want that last potato? And there's some beef left."

"What is this?" I managed a smile. "A conspiracy to make me eat?"

"More of a unified effort, dear," Aunt Eileen said.

I debated. If submitting to a lecture on my supposed eating disorder would keep the conversation away from the family secrets, Irish Politics Division, the annoyance would be worth it.

"I really do eat more than you all think I do." I allowed a slight surly tone to creep into my voice. "It's not like I'm starving to death."

"No," Ari said. "You just look like you are."

"Good point." Uncle Jim waved his fork in Ari's general direction. "You tell her."

"He does," I snapped. "Constantly."

Aunt Eileen gave Ari a beaming smile of approval. "This all started when Nola was a teenager," she began.

"Well, hey," I broke in before she could make the inevitable segue to my father's disappearance, an event that everyone in my family blamed for every single thing that ever went wrong ever after. "I was such a fat kid."

"No, you weren't," Uncle Jim said.

"He's right," Aunt Eileen said. "You were a perfectly normal size for your age. It's your wretched mother who started in on you because you weren't really thin, just normal."

"Ah," Ari murmured. "The dragon."

Brian suppressed a chortle and dropped his fork onto the floor. I welcomed the distraction. Unfortunately, it didn't last.

"I should get out a photo alb.u.m," Aunt Eileen said to Ari. "And show you Nola's high school pictures."

"Please don't." The sound of my voice shocked me: a small desperate plea that threatened tears. I grabbed my water gla.s.s and drank. Everyone stared at me.

"All right, dear, I won't." Aunt Eileen stood up. "Everyone who's done hand me their plates. Nola, would you get the gla.s.s dessert plates down from the cupboard? You're taller than me, and I can't quite reach them."

Dessert turned out to be one of Eileen's irresistibles, as I called her fancy desserts, a chocolate cream pie in this case. Mike came back downstairs just as we were serving. He'd always had a good nose for chocolate in any shape or form. I took a slender slice to quell talk of my supposed disorder.

When everyone had finished dessert, the boys cleared the table under Uncle Jim's direction, not that they needed it, and began to load the dishwasher. Ari retrieved his sport coat from the back of the chair and brought something out of an inner pocket.

"That lining's torn," Aunt Eileen said. "I can fix it for you while you're here."

"Would you?" Ari said. "Thank you." He handed her an oblong white box. "I picked this up for you."

I don't think I've ever seen such a successful gift. As soon as Aunt Eileen realized that the rosary came direct from the Holy Land, she oohed and aahed and grinned until everyone had to smile with her. Ari relaxed. He even let Uncle Jim pour him a splash of whiskey and soda. I was oddly conscious of that gun he carried, especially when Aunt Eileen began mending his jacket for him. It set him apart, although no one but me knew about it.