Running Back (New York Leopards 2)
Chapter One
Three archaeology p
rofessors sat before me, frowns on their faces as they decided whether or not to give me the most important grant of my life. Hidden behind my back, my forefinger beat steadily against my hand.
The woman on the left looked up, eyes sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Why Ireland? I see you’ve done your most recent fieldwork in Latin America.”
The male professor beat me to the punch. He leaned closer to his colleague, but not so close that I couldn’t overhear him. “She studied under Jeremy Anderson.”
All three professors eyed me with interest, and I struggled to keep my smile in place. Fake smiles usually came easily to me; I’d been doing them ever since my mother first toddled me out to charm her friends. But with the stakes so high, everything about me shook. I tried to minimize the damage as I spoke. “While I did study with Professor Anderson, this proposal is based off my own research about the most likely site for an Iron Age harbor.”
She nodded, and then looked at the others.
If they granted me this money, I would be the best behaved grad student in the world. I wouldn’t write snarky comments in my field diary and I would map units correctly and I would be a better daughter and I would, I don’t know, contribute to charity and recycle more.
The woman turned back to me. Her smile looked genuine, but she could be the kind of person who thought happy faces softened bad news. “We’ve decided to fund your proposal.”
The clenched fingers around my chest unfurled, releasing my heart so it could beat wildly. My lungs flailed with the increased oxygen. I took a startled gasp, and giddiness rushed through me, starting in my heart but quickly pumping through my arms and legs until every extremity tingled with relief and delight. It swirled in my stomach, brushed the back of my neck, and settled behind my eyes, bright and heavy and gleaming. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
This time when I smiled, it was real.
* * *
Ireland.
I danced all the way down Broadway. New York in May was always beautiful, if heavily perfumed by sewers and smoke, but now the warm stone buildings near Columbia University were extra lovely, and my green-tinted vision turned it into the Emerald City. In Ireland, it would be past 10:00 p.m., so I shot off an email from my phone instead of calling Jeremy.
My best friend worked in a sports bar one long block away. I skipped past men hosing down the sidewalks and mothers picking up tiny children in navy uniforms. White flowers bloomed heavily on the trees that lined the street, and petals tumbled off in the light breeze. I dodged past the angry Laundromat woman and the same four men who sat on the stoop of 402 and harassed students every afternoon, and then I reached Amsterdam and Cam’s bar.
A heavy curtain draped over the entrance, keeping the air-conditioning trapped inside. I pushed past it and nodded at Charlie, the middle-aged doorman who nominally checked IDs. He took in my beaming face and grinned. “Take it it went well?”
I laughed.
Inside, two-thirds of the patrons turned. Behind the bar, Cam poured a shot of preparatory vodka and placed it beside a foil-wrapped bottle of champagne, apprehension clear on her face.
I sent a cheek-splitting grin clear across the room. “I’m going to Ireland!”
“Congratulations!” my friends cried in rapid succession. Hands thumped my back, arms encircled me. Someone slapped my butt and another kissed my cheek. The champagne popped and frothed.
It took twenty minutes of laughing and gesticulating as I regaled the other grad students with my tale, exaggerating the good bits, minimizing the paralyzing worry. I made my way over to Cam. She shook her head, the light from overhead lanterns sliding across her shiny black hair. Pride suffused her entire face. “Look at you. I knew you could do it.”
“Thanks.” I came around to the swinging entrance and hugged her. “Oh God, Cam, I’m so happy.”
“Me too.” She squeezed me tight. “You deserve it. You’re going to prove them all wrong. You’re going to find Ivernis.”
Two hours and a keg of celebratory Guinness later, my phone vibrated. When I saw the caller, I grinned widely and hitched myself up on the bar. “It’s Jeremy!”
Cam shook her head as she muddled together a mojito. “You are a hot mess. Don’t answer.”
I stuck out my tongue. “I have to answer.”
“That’s a bad life choice.”
Deliberately turning my back, I raised the cell to one ear and covered the other with my free hand. “Hey! Jeremy! How are you?” I maneuvered out of the bar, grinning and waving at my friends as I squeezed past and through the doors. Outside, a breeze cooled the air considerably. “Sorry, what was that? I didn’t catch it.” Almost bursting with pride, I prepared for more congratulations.
His steady tenor came clear from three thousand miles away. “I said, Patrick O’Connor is dead.”
When I was six years old, my father left on a two-week business trip, and I asked every night when he’d be home. And even though Mom kept giving me the same answer, I kept asking, because it didn’t make sense, and it didn’t stay in my head.
This didn’t make sense.
Patrick O’Connor? It had taken me three months to persuade the crotchety old Irish man to grant permission to dig on his land. Three months of pleading and proposals and gradually increasing the amount of money we’d give him. He couldn’t be dead. “How dead?”
“Natalie.”
On the other side of Amsterdam, people spilled out of bars. A young couple laughed. The girl leaned forward and sparked her cigarette off the guy’s lighter. The ember burned dully in the growing dark.