Sam briefly recounted the last few days, ending with their recovery of the bell. Selma sighed. “I wish I could say positively you haven’t wasted your time.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“We got the first shipment from Morton’s museum yesterday. In with the miscellanea we found what looks like a journal of sorts—Blaylock’s journal, to be exact.”
“That’s good news,” Remi said, then added tentatively, “Right?”
“It would be,” Selma replied, “if not for the fact that I’m pretty sure Winston Lloyd Blaylock, the Mbogo of Bagamoyo, was certifiably insane.”
CHAPTER 22
GOLDFISH POINT,
LA JOLLA , CALIFORNIA
EXHAUSTED AND WANTING TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING WHEN they got home, Sam and Remi spent the majority of the flights home sleeping and eating and generally trying to keep their minds off Selma’s proclamation regarding Winston Blaylock. Their chief researcher wasn’t prone to hyperbole, so they took seriously her suspicion which, if true, cast a pall on their efforts to recover the Shenandoah’s bell. Of course, while the bell was of significant historical value regardless, the cryptic inscription on the bell’s inner surface and Blaylock’s obsession with the ship (either under the guise of the Ophelia, the Shenandoah, or the El Majidi) had suggested to them a deeper mystery—one that had apparently prompted Itzli Rivera and perhaps someone in the Mexican government to murder nine tourists.
AS PROMISED, PETE JEFFCOAT and Wendy Corden were waiting for them in the baggage claim area. Pete took their carry-ons. “You look tired.”
“You should have seen us eighteen hours and a couple dozen time zones ago,” Sam replied.
“What happened to you?” Wendy asked, gesturing to Sam’s swollen cheekbone and his taped finger. While the latter was now properly bandaged with medical tape, the cut on his cheekbone was crusty with Super Glue—a remedy Ed Mitchell swore was better than stitches.
“I burned a casserole, and Remi got mad,” Sam said. He got a light punch on the arm from his wife in return.
Remi said to Wendy, “Boys being boys, that’s what happened.”
“We’re glad you’re home,” Pete said. “Selma’s been pulling her hair out. Don’t tell her I told you.”
The baggage carousel started turning, and Pete wandered off to collect Sam and Remi’s luggage.
Sam asked Wendy, “Any word on the bell?”
“It’s en route. Should be halfway across the Atlantic by now. With luck, we’ll have it the day after tomorrow.”
“Care to give us a hint why Selma thinks Blaylock is a fruitcake?”
Wendy shook her head. “She’s been up for almost three days straight trying to piece this together. I’m going to let her explain.”
SAM AND REMI’S HOME and base of operations was a four-story, twelve-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style home with an open floor plan, vaulted maple-beamed ceilings, and windows and skylights enough that they bought their Windex in ten-gallon buckets.
The upper floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite, and below this, one flight down, were four guest suites, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen/great room that jutted over the cliff. On the second floor was a gymnasium containing both aerobic and circuit training exercise equipment, a steam room, a HydroWorx endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand square feet of hardwood floor space for Remi to practice her fencing and Sam his judo.
The ground floor sported two thousand square feet of office space for Sam and Remi and an adjoining workspace for Selma, complete with three Mac Pro workstations coupled with thirty-inch cinema displays, and a pair of wall-mounted thirty-two-inch LCD televisions. On the east wall was Selma’s pride and joy, a fourteen-foot, five-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium filled with a rainbow-hued assortment of fish whose scientific names she knew by heart.
Selma’s other love, tea, she approached with equal passion; an entire cabinet of the workroom was devoted to her stock, which included a rare Phoobsering-Osmanthus Darjeeling hybrid that Sam and Remi suspected was the source of her seemingly boundless energy.
In appearance, Selma Wondrash was eclectic in the extreme: She wore a modified 1960s bob, horn-rimmed glasses, complete with a neck chain, and a default uniform of khaki pants, sneakers, and a tie-dyed T-shirt.
As far as Sam and Remi were concerned, Selma could be as strange as she wished. There was no one better at logistics, research, and resource scrounging.
Sam and Remi walked into the workspace to find Selma leaning over the tank, writing something on a clipboard. She turned, saw them, held up a finger, then finished writing and set aside the clipboard. “My Centropyge loricula is looking sickly,” she said, then translated: “flame angelfish.”
“That’s one of my favorites,” Remi said.
Selma nodded solemnly. “So, welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Fargo.”
Sam and Remi had long ago given up trying to convince Selma to call them by their first names.