"Krinard, Susan - Twice A Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Krinard Susan)

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 connectionЕ 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 yearsЧlike 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.
God only knew what Homer had hidden away. A mausoleum, he'd called the house, but he didn't really believe it. He loved this place and everything in it. It was a museum, filled with the artifacts Homer and past Sinclairs had collected. Most of it should be in a real museum, and would be once Homer was goneЕ
She cut off that line of thought and inelegantly wiped dusty hands on her old T-shirt. The box was no different from countless othersЧexcept for the simple, faded label on top. "Sinclair" was all it said. Homer grunted and folded back the dog-eared flaps.
"Ah." He lifted out a wrapped, squarish bundle and set it carefully down beside him on the bed. "I was sure it was in here."
Mac leaned her elbows on her knees. "So what is it?"
"A piece of family history. And perhaps something more perilous." Homer's fingers trembled a little as he unwrapped the top layers of yellowed newspaper to reveal still more layers of ancient tissue. Within were two smaller packages, one a small box and the other a flat envelope.
Homer's reverence for the past was in every careful motion as he peeled the brittle tape from the envelope and opened the top. Carefully he slid out the contents and spread them on the comforter.
A handwritten sheet on old-looking stationery. Newspaper clippings, even more yellowed than the paper they'd been wrapped in. And a photograph, creased at the corner and fragile with age.
Homer turned the photograph toward her and leaned back. "There," he said. "Take a look."
Mac looked. The photograph was of two men, and it was undoubtedly an antique. The men wore clothing that was of a noticeably nineteenth-century cut; one of them even wore a bowler hat set at a jaunty angle.
She picked up the photograph by its edges. The background had an exotic cast to it, and she recognized the setting: ruins. Maya ruins, to be exact. One of the two menЧthe one with the bowler, dark hair, and a neat mustacheЧwas dressed like a Victorian gentleman on a pleasant stroll into the wilderness. He was smiling.
Mac studied his face with a little shock of realization.
"You recognize him, don't you?"
"He's a Sinclair," Mac murmured.
"Who?" Homer almost grimaced.
"Meet your great-greatgrandfather, Peregrine Wallace Sinclair."
Peregrine Sinclair. Of course. "I think you mentioned him once before, when I was a kid. The one who was the youngest son of an English viscount, came to San FranciscoЧ"
"And, in spite of his look of great propriety, was one of the Sinclair adventurers," Homer finished. "Note the background."
"Maya jungle," she said. "Lowlands, I'd say." She scratched her chin. "Tikal?"
"Right. Perry was down in the Petщn in 1880, after Stephens and Catherwood but before Maudslay took his famous photographs. When the jungle was still a pretty dangerous place." He tapped his finger on the edge of the photo. "Notice the family resemblance?"
She couldn't help but notice. Peregrine Sinclair had the dark hair and eyes, the height, the regular but unremarkable features. And he was lean. All the Sinclairs were lean. On a man it could look quite elegantЧas it did in the photos she'd seen of her father, or on Homer before he'd had the accident, or even Jason.
On a woman it streamlined chest and hips and turned intoЧMac. Just plain, wiry Mac, who used to be mistaken for a boy.
"Hard not to see it," she quipped.
"Because you're a true Sinclair, just as he was. The same blood beats in your veins, Brat. Even Perry's wife, your great-great-grandmother Caroline, was a Sinclair in everything but blood. She was a reformer against the slave-girl trade in San Francisco and went on to become one of the country's leading suffragettes."
"Good for her. Did they screen her for the proper adventurous spirit before they let her join the family?"
Homer frowned over his glasses, but Mac deliberately turned her attention to the other man in the photo.
He was different from her great-great-grandfather, though at first the differences seemed subtle. Maybe an inch or two taller, a little stronger of build, with a stance that hinted at a greater weight of muscle under his clothes.
The clothes themselves suggested someone less concerned with sartorial dignity than Perry. The man's dirt-scuffed, khaki-colored trousers were tucked into battered boots, and his shirt was rolled up to his forearms and open to mid-chest. His legs were planted apart and his hands rested on his hips in a stance faintly hinting of challenge.
But it was his face that arrested her. A hard face, lacking the subtle refinement of Perry's. Square jaw nicked with a dimple in the chin, high slanted cheekbones, mouth cocked in a twist that indicated a sort of cynical patience. His eyes, under dark straight brows, were pale. Gray, she guessed. His hair was possibly a lightish brown, windblown and just long enough to brush his collar. All things considered, he looked exactly like what he was.
A man from another age. A more romantic age, when a thousand frontiers had yet to be explored. An age when an adventurer would fit right in. And this guy was the perfect specimen. He exuded machismo. It was there in every line of his body.
Funny how that powerful sense of him could transmit itself through an old photo across all these years, when the subject himself was ashes.
"Liam Ignatius O'Shea," Homer supplied.
Mac started as if the man in the photograph had spoken. She shifted in the chair and put the photo down. "Should I know him?"
"Interesting fellow, isn't he? He's quite a story in himself." Homer settled back, folding his hands across his ribs. "Liam O'Shea was Perry's friend and, for a time, his partner in adventure. The two men couldn't have been more different. O'Shea was a self-made man in the true nineteenth-century sense of the word. His family were prosperous landowners in Ireland until they were driven from their farm. They came to New York with almost nothing, and O'Shea lost his mother when he was still a boy. Worked his way across the country with the railroads and right out of poverty to become one of the richest men in San Francisco. They called him 'Lucky Liam.' "
Mac gave Homer a lopsided smile. "I see you can't wait to tell me all about him, and he's not even a Sinclair."
"I've been saving the best for last." But there was a grim sarcasm in Homer's voice. He glanced at the small box he'd left untouched on the comforter. "Go ahead. Open it."
Mac didn't betray the eagerness that had taken unexpected hold of herЧjust as Homer had undoubtedly intended. Without haste she pried the lid off the box and pushed aside the tissue wrappings.
The ancient chip of rectangular stone inside was evidently part of some larger whole. Three edges were smoothly finished, bordered by decorative symbols; the finely carved glyphs on the stone's gray surface ended abruptly at a clean break on the fourth side. The piece itself was less than two inches across. A small hole had been drilled near the top, and a cracked leather thong was still threaded through it.
A pendant. Mac lifted the piece out and let the thong dangle over her hand.
"Maya," she said, recognizing the glyphs. Maya, like the setting of the photograph. Almost unwillingly she looked at the photo again, her eyes drawn to Liam O'Shea and his timeless charisma.
"Take a closer look," Homer urged.
She saw what she'd missed the first time. Both Liam and her great-great-grandfather were wearing something around their necksЧsmall chips of gray stone on dark, narrow thongs. Perry's rested neatly against his clothing; Liam's was displayed in the impressive vee of bare chest exposed by the open neck of his shirt. No detail was visible, but Mac was ready to bet the pendants matched the one she held in her hand.
"They found those in ruins near Tikal, back in 1880," Homer said.
Mac stroked the raised symbols on the stone. "Then this was Perry's."