Canton's Protection
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Diana Palmer
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Chapter One
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
A pair of green eyes glared at the twelve-year-old boy by the window who intoned the trite words in a ghostly voice.
He shrugged. “Well, everybody starts a murder mystery that way, Janie,” Kurt Curtis told his older sister with a grin.
Janine ran restless fingers through her short black hair, muttering at the few words on her computer screen. “I don’t,” she murmured absently. “That’s why I sell so many of them.”
“Diane Woody,” he intoned, “bestselling authoress of the famous Diane Woody Mystery series.” He scowled. “Why do you use your pen name for your main character’s name? Isn’t that redundant?”
“It was the publisher’s idea. Could you ask questions later?” she mumbled. “I’m stuck for a line.”
“I just gave you one,” he reminded her, grinning wider. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, so different from her in coloring that most people thought he was someone else’s brother. He was, however, the image of their maternal grandfather. Recessive genes will out, their archaeologist parents were fond of saying.
Their parents were on a new dig, which was why Janine was in Cancñaun working, with Kurt driving her nuts. Dan and Joan Curtis, both professors at Indiana University, were in the Yucatñaan on a dig. There had been several other archaeologists on the team, most of whom had to return to take classes. Since this was a newly discovered, and apparently untouched, Mayan site, the Curtises had taken a temporary leave of absence from their teaching positions to pursue it. It wasn’t feasible to take Kurt, who was just getting over a bad case of tonsillitis, into the jungles. Neither could they leave him in the exclusive boarding school he attended.
So they’d taken him out of his boarding school for two months—with the proviso that Janine tutor him at home. They’d rented this nice beach house for Janine, where she could meet her publisher’s deadline and take care of her little brother. He was well now, but she had him for the duration, which could easily mean another month, and she had to juggle his homebound school assignments with her obligations. The dig was going extremely well, Professor Curtis had said in his last E-mail message through the computer satellite hookup at their camp, and promised to be a site of international importance.
Janine supposed it would be. The benefit of it all was that they had this gorgeous little villa in Cancñaun overlooking the beach. Janine could write and hear the roar of the ocean outside. It gave her inspiration, usually. When Kurt wasn’t trying to “help” her, that was.
She was just slightly nervous, though, because it was September and the tail end of hurricane season, and this had been a year for hurricanes. One prognosticator called it the year of the killer winds. Poetic. And frightening. So far there hadn’t been too much to worry them here. She prayed there wouldn’t be any more hurricanes. After all, it was almost October.
“Did you notice the new people next door?” Kurt asked. “There’s a tall, sour-looking man and a girl about my age. He’s never home and she sits on their deck just staring at the ocean.”
“You know I don’t have time for neighbors,” she murmured as she stared at the screen.
“Don’t you ever stop and smell the flowers?” he asked with disgust. “You’ll be an old maid if you keep this up.”
“I’ll be a rich old maid,” she replied absently as she scrolled the pages up the screen. “Besides, there’s Quentin.”
“Quentin Hobard,” he muttered, throwing up his hands. “Good Lord, Janie, he teaches ancient history!”
She glared at him. “He teaches medieval history, primarily the Renaissance period. If you’d listen to him once in a while, you might discover that he knows a lot about it.”
“Like I can’t wait to revisit the Spanish Inquisition,” he scoffed.
“It wasn’t as horrible as those old movies suggest,” she said, sitting up to give him her undivided attention.
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Monty Python,’” he drawled, naming his favorite classic television show. He got up and struck a pose. “Nobody escapes the Spanish Inquisition!”
She threw up her hands. “You can’t learn history from a British comedy show!”
“Sure you can.” He leaned forward, grinning. “Want to know the real story of the knights? They used coconut shells for horses—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said, and covered her ears. “Let me work or we’re both going to starve.”
“Not hardly,” he said with confidence. “There’s always royalties.”
“Twelve, and you’re an investment counselor.”
“I learned all I know from you. I’m precocious on account of the fact that I’m the youngest child of scientists.”
“You’d be precocious if you were the youngest child of Neanderthals.”
“Did you know that the h in Neanderthals is silent and unpronounced? It was written wrong. It’s a German word,” he continued.
She held up a hand and her glare grew. “I don’t need lessons in pronunciation. I need peace and quiet!”
“Okay, I get the message! I’ll go out and fish for sea serpents.”
She didn’t even glance his way. “Great. If you catch one, yell. I’ll take photos.”
“It would serve you right if I did.”
“Yes. With your luck, if you caught one, it would eat you, and I’d spend the rest of my life on this beach with a lantern like Heathcliff roaming the moors.”
“Wrong storyline. I’m your brother, not your girlfriend.”
“Picky, picky.”
He made a face and opened the sliding glass door.
“Close it!” she yelled. “You’re letting the cold air out!”
“God forbid!” he gasped. He turned back toward her with bright eyes. “Hey, I just had an idea. Want to know how we could start global cooling? We could have everybody turn on their air conditioners and open all their doors and windows…”
She threw a legal pad in his general direction. Not being slow on the uptake, he quickly closed the sliding door and walked down the steps of the deck onto the sugar-white sand on the beach.
He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked toward the house next door, where a skinny young girl sat on the deck, wearing cutoffs with a tank top and an Atlanta Braves hat turned backward. Her bare feet were propped on the rail and she looked out of sorts.
“Hey!” he called.
She glared at him.
“Want to go fishing for sea serpents?” he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted. She smiled, and her whole face changed. She jumped up and bounced down the steps toward him. She was blond and blue-eyed with a fair complexion.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Ever seen anyone catch a sea serpent around here?”
“Not since we got off the plane,” she said.
“Great!” He grinned at her, making his freckles stand out.
“Great?”
“If nobody’s caught it, it’s still out there!” he whispered, gesturing toward the ocean. “Just think of the residuals from it. We could sell it to one of the grocery store tabloids and clean up!”
Her eyes brightened. “What a neat idea.”
“Sure it is.” He sighed. “If only I knew how to make one.”
“A mop,” she ventured. “A dead fish. Parts of some organ meat. A few feathers. A garden hose, some shears and some gray paint.”
A kindred soul. He was in heaven. “You’re a genius!”
She grinned back. “My dad really is a genius. He taught me everything I know.” She sighed. “But if we create a hoax, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. So I guess I’ll pass, but…”
He made a face. “I know what you mean. I’d never live it down. My parents would send me to military school.”
“Would they, really?”
“They threaten me with it every time I get into trouble. I don’t mind boarding school, but I hate uniforms!”
“Me, too, unless they’re baseball uniforms. This year is it, this is the third time, this is the charm. This time,” she assured him, “the Braves are going to go all the way!”
He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “Well, we’ll see.”
“You a Braves fan?” she asked.
He hadn’t ever cared much for baseball, but it seemed important to her. “Sure,” he said.
She chuckled. “My name is Karie.”
“I’m Kurt.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
They walked along the beach for a minute or two. He stopped and looked back up the deserted stretch of land. “Know where to find a mop?” he asked after a minute.
Blissfully unaware that her young brother had just doubled his potential for disaster, Janine filled her computer screen with what she hoped was going to be the bare bones of a new mystery. Some books almost wrote themselves. Others were on a par with pulling teeth. This looked like one of those. Her mind was tired. It wanted to shape clouds into white horses and ocean waves into pirate ships.
“What I need,” she said with a sigh, “is a good dose of fantasy.”
Sadly there wasn’t anything on television that she wanted to watch. Most of it, she couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.
She turned the set off. The one misery of this trip was missing her favorite weekly science fiction series. Not that she didn’t like all the characters on it; she did. But her favorite was an arrogant, sometimes very devious alien commander. The bad guy. She seemed to be spending all her productive time lately sighing over him instead of doing the work that she got paid to do. That was one reason she’d agreed to come to Cancñaun with her parents and Kurt, to get away from the make-believe man who was ruining her writing career.
“Enough of this!” she muttered to herself. “Good heavens, you’d think I was back in grammar school, idolizing teachers!”
She got up and paced the room. She ate some cookies. She typed a little into the computer. Eventually the sun started going down and she noticed that she was short one twelve-year-old boy.
She looked at her watch. Surely he hadn’t gotten the time confused? It was earlier here than in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kurt lived with their parents. Had he mistaken the time, perhaps forgotten to reset his watch? Janine frowned, hoping that she hadn’t forgotten to set her own. It would be an hour behind Kurt’s, because her apartment in Chicago was in a different time zone from Kurt and her parents’ in Indiana.
He was in a foreign country and he didn’t speak any more Spanish than she did. Their parents’ facility for languages had escaped them, for the most part. Janine spoke German with some fluency, but not much Spanish. And while English was widely spoken here in the hotels and tourist spots, on the street it was a different story. Many of the local people in Cancñaun still spoke Mayan and considered Spanish, not English, a second language.
She turned off her computer—it was useless trying to work when she was worried, anyway—and went out to the beach. She found the distinctive tread of Kurt’s sneakers and followed them in the damp sand where the tide hadn’t yet reached. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was up. There were dark clouds all around. She never forgot the danger of hurricanes here, and even if it was late September, that didn’t mean a hurricane was no longer a possibility.
She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, because she was walking west across the beach, stopping when Kurt’s sneakers were joined by another, smaller pair, with no discernible tread. She knelt down, scowling as she studied the track. She’d worked as a private eye for a couple of years, but any novice would figure out that these were the footprints of a girl, she thought. The girl Kurt had mentioned, perhaps, the one who lived next door. In fact, she was almost in front of that beach house now.
The roar of the waves had muffled the sound of approaching footsteps. One minute, she was staring down at the tracks. The next, she was looking at a large and highly polished pair of black dress shoes. Tapered neatly around them were the hem of expensive slacks. The legs seemed to go up forever. Far above them, glaring down at her, were pale blue eyes under a jutting brow in a long, lean face. The lips were thin. The top one was long and narrow, the lower one had only a hint of fullness. The cheekbones were high and the nose was long and straight. The hairline was just slightly receding around straight brown hair.
Two enormous lean hands were balled into fists, resting on the hips of the newcomer.
“May I ask what you’re doing on my beach?” he asked in a voice like raspy velvet.
She stood up, a little clumsy. How odd, that a total stranger should make her knees weak.
“I’m tracking my…” she began.
“Tracking?” he scoffed, as if he thought she were lying. His blue eyes narrowed. He looked oddly dangerous, as if he never smiled, as if he could move like lightning and would at the least provocation.
Her heart was racing. “His name is Kurt and he’s only twelve,” she said. “He’s redheaded and so high.” She made a mark in the air with her flat hand.
“That one,” he murmured coolly. “Yes, I’ve seen him prowling around. Where’s my daughter?”
Her eyebrows rose. “You have a daughter? Imagine that! Is she carved out of stone, too?”
His firm, square chin lifted and he looked even more threatening. “She’s missing. I told her not to leave the house.”
“If she’s with Kurt, she’s perfectly safe,” she began, about to mention that he’d been stranded once in the middle of Paris by their forgetful parents, and had found his way home to their hotel on the west bank. Not only had he maneuvered around a foreign city, but he’d also sold some of the science fiction cards he always carried with him to earn cab fare, and he’d arrived with twenty dollars in his pocket. Kurt was resourceful.
But long before she could manage any of that, the man moved a step closer and cocked his head. “Do you know where they are?”
“No, but I’m sure…”
“You may let your son run loose like a delinquent, but my daughter knows better,” he said contemptuously. His eyes ran over her working attire with something less than admiration. She had on torn, raveled cutoffs that came almost to her knee. With them she was wearing old, worn-out sandals and a torn shirt that didn’t even hint at the lovely curves beneath it. Her short hair was windblown. She wasn’t even wearing makeup. She could imagine how she looked. What had he said—her son?
“Now, just wait a minute here,” she began.
“Where’s your husband?” he demanded.
Her eyes blazed. “I’m not married!”
Those eyebrows were really expressive now.
She flushed. “My private life is none of your business,” she said haughtily. His assumptions, added to his obvious contempt, made her furious. An idea flashed into her mind and, inwardly, she chuckled. She struck a pose, prepared to live right down to his image of her. “But just for the record,” she added in purring tones, “my son was born in a commune. I’m not really sure who his father is, of course…”
The expression on his face was unforgettable. She wished with all her heart for a camera, so that she could relive the moment again and again.
“A commune? Is that where you learned to track?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, no.” She searched for other outlandish things to tell him. He was obviously anxious to learn any dreadful aspect of her past. “I learned that from a Frenchman that I lived with up in the northern stretches of Canada. He taught me how to track and make coats from the fur of animals.” She smiled helpfully. “I can shoot, too.”
“Wonderful news for the ammunition industry, no doubt,” he said with a mocking smile.
She put her own hands on her hips and glared back. It was a long way up, although she was medium height. “It’s getting dark.”
“Better track fast, hadn’t you?” he added. He lifted a hand and motioned to a man coming down toward the beach. “¿Sabe donde estñaan?” he shot at the man in fluent Spanish.
“No, lo siento, señtnor. ¡Nadie los han visto!” the smaller man called back.
“Llame a la policñaia.”
“Sñai, señtnor!”
Police sounded the same in any language and her pulse jumped. “You said police. You’re going to call the police?” she groaned. That was all she needed, to have to explain to a police officer that she’d forgotten the time and let her little brother get lost.
“You speak Spanish?” he asked with some disbelief.
“No, but police sounds the same in most languages, I guess.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
She sighed. “No, I guess not. It’s just that…”
“Dad!”
They both whirled as Karie and Kurt came running along the beach with an armload of souvenirs between them, wearing sombreros.
“Gosh, Dad, I’m sorry, we forgot the time!” Karie warbled to her father. “We went to the mercado in town and bought all this neat stuff. Look at my hat! It’s called a sombrero, and I got it for a dollar!”
“Yeah, and look what I got, S—mmmmffg.” Kurt’s “Sis” was cut off in midstream by Janine’s hand across his mouth.
She grinned at him. “That’s fine, son,” she emphasized, her eyes daring him to contradict her. “You know, you shouldn’t really scare your poor old mother this way,” she added, in case he hadn’t gotten the point.
Kurt was intrigued. Obviously his big sister wanted this rather formidable-looking man to think he was her son. Okay. He could go along with a gag. Just in case, he stared at Karie until she got the idea, too, and nodded to let him know that she understood.
“I’m sorry…Mom,” Kurt added with an apologetic smile. “But Karie and I were having so much fun, we just forgot the time. And then when we tried to get back, neither of us knew any Spanish, so we couldn’t call a cab. We had to find someone who spoke English to get us a cab.”
“All the cabdrivers speak enough English to get by,” Karie’s father said coldly.
“We didn’t know that, Dad,” Karie defended. “This is my friend Kurt. He lives next door.”
Karie’s dad didn’t seem very impressed with Kurt, either. He stared at his daughter. “I have to stop Josñae before he gets the police out here on a wild-goose chase. And then we have to leave,” he told her. “We’re having dinner with the Elligers and their daughter.”
“Oh, gosh, not them again,” she groaned. “Missy wants to marry you.”
“Karie,” he said warningly.
She sighed. “Oh, all right. Kurt, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure thing, Karie.”
“Maybe we can find that garden hose,” she added in a conspiratorial tone.
He brightened. “Great idea!”
“What the hell do you want with a hose?” Karie’s father asked as they walked back up the beach, totally ignoring the two people he’d just left.
“Whew!” Kurt huffed. “Gosh, he’s scary!”
“No, he isn’t,” Janine said irritably. “He’s just pompous and irritating! And he thinks he’s an emperor or something. I told him we lived in a commune and you’re my son and I don’t know who your father is. Don’t you tell him any differently,” she added when he tried to speak. “I want to live down to his image of me!”
He chuckled. “Boy, are you mad,” he said. “You don’t have fights with anybody.”
“Wait,” she promised, glaring after the man.
“He reminds me of somebody,” he said.
“Probably the devil,” she muttered. “I hear he’s got blue eyes. Somebody wrote a song about it a few years ago.”
“No,” he mumbled, still thinking. “Didn’t he seem familiar to you?”
“Yes, he did,” she admitted. “I don’t know why. I’ve never seen him before.”
“Are you kidding? You don’t know who he is? Haven’t you recognized him? He’s famous enough as he is. But just think, Janie, think if he had gray makeup on.”
“He could pass for a sand crab,” she muttered absently.
“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “Listen, they call this guy Mr. Software. Good grief, don’t you ever read the newspapers or watch the news?”
“No. It depresses me,” she said, glowering.
He sighed. “Mr. Software just lost everything. For the past year, he’s been involved in a lawsuit to prevent a merger that would have saved his empire. He just lost the suit, and a fortune with it. Now he can’t merge his software company with a major computer chain. He’s down here avoiding the media so he can get himself back together before he starts over again. He’s already promised his stockholders that he’ll recoup every penny he lost. I bet he will, too. He’s a tiger.”
She scowled. “He, who?”
“Him. Canton Rourke,” he emphasized. “Third generation American, grandson of Irish immigrants. His mother was Spanish, can’t you tell it in his bearing? He made billions designing and selling computer programs, and now he’s moving into computer production. The company he was trying to acquire made the computer you use. And the software word processing program you use was one he designed himself.”
“That’s Canton Rourke?” she asked, turning to stare at the already dim figure in the distance. “I thought he was much older than that.”
“He’s old enough, I guess. He’s divorced. Karie said her mother ran for the hills when it looked like he was going to risk everything in that merger attempt. She likes jewelry and real estate and high living. She found herself another rich man and remarried within a month of the divorce becoming final. She moved to Greece. Just as well, probably. Her parents were never together, anyway. He was always working on a program and her mother was at some party, living it up. What a mismatch!”
“I guess so.” She shook her head. “He didn’t look like a billionaire.”
“He isn’t, now. All he has is his savings, from what they say on TV, and that’s not a whole lot.”
“That sort of man will make it all back,” she said thoughtfully. “Workaholics make money because they love to work. Most of them don’t care much about the money, though. That’s just how they keep score.”
His eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t guessed why he looks familiar.”
She turned and scowled at him. “You said something about gray makeup?”
“Sure. Think,” he added impatiently. “Those eyes. That deep, smooth voice. Where do you hear them every fourth or fifth week?”
“On the news?”
He chuckled. “Only if they had aliens doing it.”
His rambling was beginning to make sense. Every fourth or fifth week, there was a guest star on her favorite science fiction show. Her heartbeat increased alarmingly. Her breath caught in her throat. She put a hand there, to make sure she was still breathing.
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. She smiled nervously. “No, he doesn’t look like him!”
“He most certainly does,” Kurt said confidently. “Same height, build, eyes, bone structure, even the same deep sort of voice.” He nodded contemplatively. “What a coincidence, huh? We came here to Mexico to get you away from the television so you could write without being distracted by your favorite villain. And his doppelgñuanger turns up here on the beach!”
