The Inquisitor's Key (Body Farm 7)

We were standing, Miranda and I, in front of the Hotel La Mirande, an elegant little jewel box tucked into the dead-end street behind the Palace of the Popes. I’d stumbled upon La Mirande only forty-five minutes before, shortly after I’d stumbled upon the slightly bruised, very irate Frenchwoman.

I had never stayed in a place this fancy, and surely never would — the rooms started at eight hundred dollars a night — but how could I pass up a chance to take Miranda to a swanky restaurant that bore her name? Besides, Stefan was occupied procuring the motion detector and alarm for the treasure chamber. A quiet dinner seemed like a good chance to catch up with Miranda — and to learn more about her prior history with this pretentious pedant who might soon be the world’s most famous archaeologist.

I pulled a glossy brochure from my pocket. “Here, this gives a little background about your establishment.”

She took a look and laughed. “Ooh, architectural erotica — my favorite kind. Listen: ‘This timeless refuge offers a dreamy, relaxing, and authentic experience in a refined, eighteenth-century décor…. Behind its stunning façade, La Mirande exudes the sweet way of life of yesteryear.” She surveyed the exterior, an elegant neoclassical composition in butter-colored stone, its windows capped with gargoyles and angels, gods and goddesses, sunbursts and swirls of cake frosting in stone. “Stunning façade indeed,” she concurred. “The façade,” she added, “is from the seventeen hundreds, but parts of the building date back to the early thirteen hundreds, when a cardinal — a nephew of Pope Clement the Fifth — built his palace on the site.” She was enjoying this, and that pleased me. “Come on, let’s go inside and show them what chic cosmopolites we are.”

If the hotel’s exterior was quietly elegant, its interior was almost intoxicating in its richness. Crystal chandeliers and sconces glittered everywhere; paintings and statues and flowers filled the spaces, set against backdrops of gilded wallpape

r, brocaded drapes, rich paneling, sumptuous sofas and chairs. An interior courtyard was set with candlelit dining tables; so was a lush outdoor garden that offered spectacular views of the floodlit walls of the Palace of the Popes. Miranda flitted from space to space, statue to statue, ruffle to flourish, her face beaming. “This place is so excellent,” she exclaimed. “You could probably pay my assistantship for a year for what dinner’s gonna cost, but wowzer, Dr. B, how gorgeous.” She laughed, a fountain of delight. “I know money can’t buy happiness, but damn, it sure can open doors to places that make me smile.”

We ate in one such place, a linen-draped, candlelit table in a corner of the hotel’s garden. Fairy lights twinkled in the trees around us; above us soared the graceful windows of the papal chapel, flanked by a pair of massive towers.

We were midway through dinner — duck breast for me, “line-caught sea bass” for her — before I worked up the nerve to go on my own fishing expedition and angle for details about Stefan. When I wasn’t busy bristling at his pretentiousness, I had realized, I was fretting about something else. I’d seen the way he looked at her, heard the way she spoke to him. They shared a familiarity that went beyond collegiality; a familiarity that might be, or might have once been, intimacy. It’s none of my business, I scolded myself, but that didn’t stop me from casting the lure. “Stefan’s quite a character,” I said casually. “Remind me how you know him?”

She didn’t exactly take the bait — her gimlet look told me she knew she was being cross-examined — but she answered the question anyway. “Remember when I did the dig in Guatemala, the summer after my first year of graduate school?” I nodded. “He was a crew leader. I worked under him.”

I raised my eyebrows at the phrase “worked under him.” I expected her to roll her eyes at that and fire back one of her signature smart-ass retorts. Instead, she turned crimson and looked down at her fish, swimming in butter and seaweed sauce. “Sorry, Miranda. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was joking, or meant to be. I think. I hope.”

She looked up, slightly defiant but also vulnerable. “It’s okay. I had it coming, after the way I’ve let Stefan be a jerk to you. I did get involved with him in Guatemala, and I shouldn’t have. I was a kid, and he was my boss. And he was married, though he said that didn’t really matter, because the French don’t mind infidelity—‘We approve of extramarital affairs,’ he said. Exact quote. He approved, turns out, but his wife didn’t.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because she came to Guatemala. A birthday surprise. A big surprise. When she found me in his tent, she came at me with fingernails and teeth.”

“Ah. That would imply a certain level of disapproval.”

“She took the next flight home and promptly divorced him.” She took a deep draw from her glass of red wine. “I’m also embarrassed that I still feel awkward about it. It’s been five years. It shouldn’t still bother me.”

“Says who?”

“Myself. My inner critic. My friends who have hookups and don’t think twice about it, who act as if sharing a bed with somebody’s no different from sharing a taxi or a park bench. I’ve just never been able to be that nonchalant about the whole sex thing.” She spun the stem of the glass between her fingers; the wine swirled up the sides, then sheeted back down. “I feel guilty about Stefan’s marriage, too. If not for me, he might still be married.”

“Maybe. But maybe miserably married. As it is, he seems like a fairly happy guy. Pompous, but happy.” She smiled. “Anyhow, if she hadn’t caught him with you, she’d have caught him with someone else, don’t you think?”

“Oh, probably. Much as I’d like to believe I’m something special, I probably wasn’t Stefan’s only…extracurricular activity.”

“Sounds like he had his sales pitch down pretty well. ‘Ah, chérie, I am ze Frenchman. I must, how you say, cherchez la femme. Non? Oui!’” She laughed at the parody, and I felt doubly glad — glad to make her laugh, and glad to do it by skewering Stefan. “But you know what, Miranda?” I caught and held her eyes; she looked back skittishly. “Even if Stefan’s a womanizing jerk, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the other thing. You are something special. You’re lovely, you’re smart, you’re strong and brave and spirited. You’re amazing.”

She raised her wineglass in my direction. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, smiling…but the smile looked wistful. When she set down the glass, her fingers lingered on the stem, and I felt a powerful urge to reach across the table and squeeze her hand. But would the gesture be one of friendship and empathy, or something more complicated, something more like Stefan’s overtures? I hesitated, and while I did, she let go of the glass and took her hand off the table.

I retreated to safer, more neutral ground. “Before the year you went to Guatemala, how’d you spend your summers? Other trips abroad?”

“Are you kidding? I worked my butt off. I had summer jobs from the time I was twelve. Babysitting. Mowing yards. I taught swimming a couple years. Spent three summers as a lifeguard.”

“City pool? Country club?”

“Nah, the real deal. Daytona.”

“Daytona Beach? Lifeguarding on the ocean?” She nodded. “Ever save a life?”

She smiled briefly. “Yeah. I did. I saved a life.” She looked away, somewhere into the past, then looked at me again. “But I lost one, too.” I waited, very still, hoping she’d go on. “My second summer, there was a girl — eleven, maybe twelve; she still had a kid body, and still had a kid’s innocence and exuberance. It hadn’t gotten complicated for her yet, the way things get for girls when they hit puberty, you know? Anyhow, she was bodysurfing on this gorgeous, gorgeous day.” I felt a rush of dread for the girl. “The waves were perfect — sweet little breakers, three, maybe four feet. That girl was having such a great time, just flinging herself into those waves with total abandon, riding them all the way in. She’d stagger up out of the foam with a suit full of sand and this huge, dazed grin on her face. Made me happy just to watch her. Then along comes this big-ass wave, twice the size of the others she’s been riding.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“I can still see it so clearly. The top of the wave is just starting to curl when it gets to her. The wave lifts her up, and up — this twig of a girl, halfway up a mountain of water — and then it comes crashing down. I mean, that wave just explodes with her inside it.”

“God, how awful.”

“I see her tumbling, flipping end over end, then she smashes into the sand headfirst, like a post being pounded by a pile driver. When I got to her she was facedown, underwater, being pulled out by the undertow. I was sure she was dead, or worse — paralyzed, a quad.” I felt nearly sick just hearing about it. “But she wasn’t. Amazingly, she wasn’t. Her forehead looked like somebody’d taken a cheese grater to it, but once I got the water out of her lungs, she came to and she was okay. Coughing and crying, but okay.” In the candlelight, diamonds sparkled at the corners of Miranda’s eyes and then rolled down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her napkin, then blew her nose into it with a trumpeting honk. Then she laughed. “Miranda Lovelady: You can dress her up, but you can’t take her out.”

I felt as if I’d just ridden a roller coaster. “Wow. How come you never told me that story before?”

“We’ve never talked swimming before.”

“So that was, what, ten years or so ago?” She nodded. “Whatever happened to the girl? Have you stayed in touch with her?”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t. Didn’t know how. As soon as she came to, her parents yanked me off her, scooped her up, and skedaddled — straight to the ER, probably. Never asked my name or even said thank you. Too freaked out to be polite, I guess.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m still the one who saved her. Funny — I like to imagine I’m that girl’s hero; that she thinks of me as some sort of guardian angel watching over her. God knows, girls need all the watching over they can get.” She said it sadly, and I wondered i

f Miranda wished she’d gotten more watching over and guarding.

“You’re my hero, Miranda. You make me proud.”

“Thanks, Dr. B. Sometimes I make me proud, too. I did the right thing that time.” She looked away again. “Not so much the next time. The next summer. It was a guy that time — an adult. He got into a rip current, got carried out. By the time I saw him, he was out past the surf line. He didn’t know what to do, and he panicked; he was flailing, struggling to get back toward shore. Wrong thing to do. You can’t beat a rip current head-on; can’t outswim it. You’ve got to turn ninety degrees, swim parallel to the shore, till the current lets you go.” She paused, took a breath, then another. “His mistake was, he tried to fight it. My mistake was, I hesitated.” She shook her head, still angry at herself. “He was a big guy — taller than you, and stocky; I’d noticed him when he waded in — and when he got into trouble I hesitated, just sat there, because I was afraid he’d overpower me, take me down with him. Finally I grabbed a torpedo float and started swimming, but by then it was too late. He went under when I was halfway there; washed up two days later and a mile south, minus his eyes and his lips and his fingers and toes.” She drained her wineglass. “That’s still on my shame list, written in indelible ink. Thing is, I’m not sure I could’ve gotten to him in time even if I’d dived right in. But I’ll never know. Because at the crucial moment, I hesitated. God, I’ve wished a million times for a do-over, you know?”

“I do,” I said. “I’ve got a few of those, too. Who doesn’t? But from where I sit, Miranda, I see you do the right thing all the time, again and again.” I made her look at me. “Once upon a time, when I was wishing hard for a do-over, someone older and wiser told me that life’s a river. It’s not Daytona Beach, where the same water keeps washing up on the same damn spot again and again; it’s a fast-flowing river. That guy’s death? That happened way upstream, Miranda. Trying to swim back to that spot is like swimming against a rip current. Remember that girl you saved. You’ve spent all these years being her guardian angel. Let her return the favor. I bet she’d loan you some of that innocence and exuberance if you asked.”