Heart of Fire Read Free Page A

need it."
    She shrugged and took out her wallet, opening it so he could see that she was giving him every bill she had. Fifty-seven bucks. She would never see it again, but she didn't expect to. She gave him the money and said, "Where are the boxes?"
    "Back there. In the other bedroom."
    The second bedroom was a junk room, without any hint of ever having seen a bed. Rick used it for storage and, evidently, as a convenient place for tossing anything that got in his way, including dirty clothes. The boxes were stacked in a corner; she fought her way over to them and began clearing out a space so she would have room to unpack them.
    "What're you looking for?" Rick asked. She heard the suspicion in his voice and knew he hadn't quite believed her before.
    "Nothing. I just want to read them. Why don't you bring in a couple of chairs and go through them with me?"
    "No, thanks," he said, giving her a "get real" look. "I'd rather sip a cold one and watch the tube."
    "Okay," she said, reaching for the first of the boxes; there were five of them, water-stained and fittingly coated with dust since most of the things the professor had loved had been dusty. She sat down on the floor and began tearing off the brown masking tape that had been used to seal them shut.
    A lot of the material was research books, which she arranged around her according to subject. Some of the books, she noted with interest, were rare editions, which she handled with appreciative care.
    There were notes about various digs, articles he had thought interesting and saved, maps and charts of varying ages, and several spiral notebooks in which he'd recorded his own ideas. These she opened with a smile tugging at her lips, for in the cramped handwriting she found again the essence of her father. He had had such enthusiasm for his work, such a boundless joy in reconstructing lost civilizations. He had never tried to rein in his imagination but had let it flow, trusting that it would take him toward the truth, which to him had always been much more fantastic than the most clever of lies.
    His zest for his work had led him to try to track down several legends, and he had accorded each one a chapter in his notebooks. Jillian remembered the many evenings she had spent as a child, sitting enthralled at his feet or in his lap while he spun his wondrous tales for her entertainment. She hadn't grown up on fairy tales, though in a way perhaps she had, but her fairy tales had been of ancient civilizations and treasures, mysteriously vanished… Had they ever really existed, or were they exactly that, tales grounded only in man's imagination? For her father, even the faintest glimmer of possibility that they could be true had been irresistible; he had had to track down the smallest of threads, if only to satisfy his own curiosity.
    She skimmed the notebooks, her eyes dreamy as she remembered the tales he had told her associated with each legend, but she noted that he had discounted most of the legends as myth, with no factual basis. Some few legends he had decided were at least possible, though further research was needed and the truth would probably never be known. She became furious all over again; how could anyone dismiss him as a crackpot, when the evidence was right here that he had weighed the facts very carefully and wasn't influenced by the glamour or mythic proportions of his targets. But all anyone had ever talked about was his Anzar theory, his spectacular failure, and how his pursuit of it had cost him his life.
    The Anzar. She hadn't thought about the legend for a long time, because it had caused his death. He had been so excited about it. The last time she had seen him, that morning before he left to travel to the Amazon in pursuit of the Anzar legend, he had been so exuberant, so enthusiastic. She had been a thin, awkward thirteen-year-old girl, almost fourteen, sulky at being left behind, pouting because he would be gone during her birthday, but he had hugged and