Through the Looking Glass (19 page)

"Like the Bermuda Triangle," Maggie offered judiciously.

"But that was ships and planes," the chief protested, then looked at the ceiling—or some heavenly spot beyond—and muttered, "She keeps pulling me in, and I don't want to go."

Farley, washing down a bite of doughnut with his coffee, said, "Maggie, will you testify at my trial?"

"I imagine I’ll have to. Why?"

Looking pleased, he said, "No reason."

Gideon laughed despite himself, imagining the state a jury would be in after Maggie got through with them.

She looked up at him with a gleam of laughter in her eyes. "Well," she murmured for his ears only, "it was an accident, after all. And the bonds will get back where they belong."

Before Gideon could respond, the chief hung up the phone and said to the room at large, "None of this is our jurisdiction, and I don't know why we're—
Well
, never mind. This is what we're going to do. Mr. Hughes, the California police want your statement most of all because you identified the bonds and because you can place the Scot—I mean the perpetrator—in San Francisco at that company when they were stolen. So Greg is going to take you into one of the other rooms and get your statement, which you will then read and sign.

"I"—he gulped visibly—"will get Miss Durant's statement out here. After that, if you two can produce identification with a permanent address, you're free to go. Kevin, will you please put the Scot into a cell before he wanders out into the street? And read him the Miranda."

"What's the charge, Chief?" the young officer asked, still somewhat bewildered.

"He stole two point three million in bonds. Look it up, dammit."

"Doesn't anybody want my confession?" Farley asked in an aggrieved tone, getting into the spirit of things.

"You're going to be here awhile," the chief snapped. "Well get it later."

Farley went meekly off toward the cells, his coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other, one arm being rather gingerly held by young Kevin— who seemed as puzzled by the kilt as anything else.

Gideon obediently followed Officer Greg into a small room in the back, and the last thing he heard before the door was closed was a piteous request from the beleaguered chief as he addressed Maggie.

"All right, Miss Durant—and can we please keep Bull Run out of it this time?"

The taking of Gideon's statement turned out to be a long process. Officer Greg was a painstaking man who wanted
every i
dotted and every t crossed, and since the sequence of events was confusing to begin with, it took some time to straighten everything out. By the time Gideon read and signed his statement and emerged from the small room, a glance at his watch showed him he'd been in there nearly two hours.

Only the chief was out in front, sitting at a desk and staring at a cassette tape lying in the middle of the blotter.

"Where's Maggie, Chief?" Gideon asked as he approached the desk.

"You know," the chief said absently, "I've met just two truly unique people in my life. The first was a friend of my grandfather's. He was something.
Charm spilling out over his ears, and he could talk the hind leg off a donkey.
Never said much about
himself
, though. I didn't know till after he died that he was a war hero. At his funeral there were people from six states, four foreign countries—and the President."

After a moment Gideon said, thinking that he knew what the answer would be, "Who's the other person?"

"Her.
Never met anybody like her.
She's... sort of fascinating, isn't she?"

"She is that," Gideon said.

The chiefs abstracted air
vanished,
and he scowled at Gideon fiercely. "None of you told me you had a tape. Why the hell not? It all makes perfect sense if you listen to the tape."

"Sorry. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it, Chief, Where's Maggie?"

"Gone."

Gideon stared at him. "Gone? Gone where?"

The chief sighed. "Colonel Sanders showed up and said he was taking her home. To tell you the truth I couldn't think of a damned reason why I should try to stop him. She left her address with us. Oh, and"—He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a folded note—"this for you."

The note was quite simple, and unsigned. In her curiously elegant script Maggie had written: / think you should bring Leo along, don't you?

"Well, now that we have seen each other,"

said
the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me,

I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

Two days later, Gideon pulled his rental car into a curving driveway before a large house in an elegant old section of Richmond, Virginia. The house was imposing, to say the least, built of weathered gray stone that looked as if it might date from colonial days and sitting in the midst of perfectly manicured acreage that sloped back, eventually, to the James River.

"Wooo," Leo commented in an awed tone.

"Ill say," Gideon responded.

They stood there at the bottom of the flagged steps for a moment, the man and the cat, both just looking, and then Gideon led the way up to the massive front door and plied the gleaming brass knocker firmly.

The door opened almost immediately, revealing a severe-looking elderly man dressed in the formal and Old World attire of a butler. He didn't look surprised. He didn't look as if he'd ever been surprised by anything at all. "Good evening, Mr. Hughes," he said politely with a slight half-bow.

"Miss Durant is expecting you. Come in, please." He stepped back, opening the door wider, and didn't even blink when the large and rather unusual-looking cat came in as well.

Gideon had changed quite a bit during the last week.
So much so that his strongest emotion as he stood in the refined foyer was sheer amusement.
The gleaming chandelier above his head, the polished floor, curving staircase,
huge
paintings of people dressed in silk, satins, and stiff lace—all of it spoke of a family with a line so far back it had helped to repel redcoats as well as Damn Yankees.

No wonder Maggie had so many colorful stories to tell, he thought wryly. Her family had probably landed here when there was nothing more than wilderness and savages.

"What kept you?"

He looked up, watching as she came down the curving staircase toward him. As an entrance, it was rather magnificent. The chameleon was wearing exquisite and dignified colors now. Her silvery hair wound about her head in a regal coronet, diamonds graced her throat and ears, a green silk dress wrapped her slender body in alluring yet sophisticated style, and matching pumps added both height and poise to her petite form.

She fit into this setting with absolute perfection, and Gideon thought that any woman who could belong both here and in a ragtag carnival in the middle of a Kansas field could indeed make herself at home wherever she chose.

In the same chiding tone she had used, he said, "I had to go back to the camp for Leo, you know. And naturally everybody wanted to know what was going on, so I had to explain. One thing led to another. In your world, it usually does. I told them we'd stop by to visit on our way to San Francisco."

"Oh, good.
Gideon, this is Luther. Luther, will you see to Gideon's luggage, please?"

"Yes, Miss Maggie," the butler said, bowing slightly in acknowledgment to Gideon. "And shall I take the cat into the kitchen?"

"Yes, you shall. Hello, Leo."

"Wooo."

"Go with Luther, now, and mind your manners. They'll feed you in the kitchen." She watched the cat obediently follow the butler from the room, then took Gideon's arm companionably and guided him into a very gracious living room. "Since you've been in transit," she said, "I couldn't very well send you flowers, but the menu for tonight is very romantic, and we can go to the theater of your choice afterward."

"My preferred methods of courtship?" he asked politely, remembering what he had told her.

"Well, I thought it was only fair. Since you temporarily abandoned your job and preferred lifestyle —and with such good grace—the least I can do is to show you a little gracious living in return."

Gideon pulled her into his arms in front of a massive fireplace, above which hung a large portrait of a dark young man with laughing dark eyes dressed in the fashion of the 1890s. Ignoring the onlooker, Gideon kissed her thoroughly. "Hello," he murmured when he could.

"Hello," she answered blissfully. "Uncle Cyrus is alerting the family."

"Why didn't I get to meet him in Kansas?" Gideon demanded, detouring willingly. "Just because you wanted me to chase you halfway across the country so you could flaunt all this elegance in my face?"

"No, because he was in a hurry.
He said something was starting up in Florida and he had to check on progress. He sent me home in the jet. But now he's busy disrupting airline schedules so everyone can get here quickly."

Gideon didn't even blink. "Is your mother here?"

"No, she spends most of her time in New York whenever I take a summer—um—job. She has a business there.
Cosmetics.
Elise Durant?"

That did surprise him. "Good Lord, she's one of the top three names in cosmetics."

"That's Mother."

"And your father was
... ?"

"A college professor."

After a moment of considering the information, Gideon found a comfortable chair, sat down, and pulled Maggie into his lap. "I have to hear more about your family if I'm going to be facing them soon," he decided. "Do we have time before dinner to go over a few particulars?"

"Of course.
What do you want to know?"

"Let's stick with immediate family for the time being. I gather you have no bothers or sisters?"

"No. How about you? I don't know very much about your family."

Gideon grinned at her. "My family is simple. Two parents, who are going to adore you once they recover from the shock, and a younger sister who falls in love once a month. I have a few aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered about, but the family isn't an especially close one."

"That's a shame," Maggie said, then added thoughtfully, "maybe we should do something about changing that."

"Maybe we should. In fact, Mom says the same, so you two can put your heads together and work on it.
Now, how about grandparents?"

"Daddy's parents are still alive.
Very much so.
They live on a ranch in Montana. And their parents live in Charleston, so I have great-grandparents. After that, it gets a little fuzzy, and I'm not sure."

"I'm not surprised." Gideon thought about it. "Who's side of the family does
this house belong
to?" he asked curiously.

"Daddy's.
It's sort of complicated. This is what I suppose you'd call the family seat. Uncle Cyrus says he kept it because it had so much room, and everybody could visit. If it belongs to any one person, I suppose it's he, but I don't really know. By the time Daddy got married, Uncle Cyrus and Aunt Julia were traveling a lot, so we stayed here. This is where I grew up."

"Are you going to mind living in San Francisco?"

"Of course not."

"Are you sure, honey? If all your roots are here—"

She leaned over and kissed him. "My roots are anywhere I plant them, you know that. Besides, some of my ancestors probably ran around with water buckets back when San Francisco was burning down once a week."

Gideon thought about that,
then
said, "Do you have a family tree down on paper?"

"If one exists, I've never seen it. I know most of the stories going all the way back to the Revolution, but the connections between people are a little vague. I think Uncle Cyrus wants it that way."

"Why?"

With a gleam of amusement in her eyes Maggie said, "
that's
him above the fireplace."

Gideon took another look at the painting, at the handsome, dark young man with laughing eyes. "Isn't that the style of the eighteen nineties he's wearing?"

"Uh-huh."

"But that would mean he was..."

"Yes. Interesting, isn't it? For all I know, he might be my great-great-grandfather."

Gideon stopped trying to do arithmetic in his head; he decided he didn't want to find a total. In a firm voice he said, "If there's one thing you've taught me, sweetheart, it's that there should always be room for possibilities."

Since Gideon was feeling a bit travel-worn and wanted to shower and change before dinner, Maggie showed him to the room where his bags had been unpacked and then left
him
to it, saying she had to make certain all was going well in the kitchen.

He knew at a glance that the room was hers. This was Maggie from the heavily laden shelves holding books on every conceivable subject from fiction to textbooks to the beautiful old rolltop desk in the sitting area that concealed a very modern computer. The huge, four-poster bed certainly looked more than satisfactory, and the bathroom had been modernized with comfort in mind.

He showered and dressed in more formal clothing to match Maggie's elegance, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time how much he was going to enjoy being married to her. He'd never be bored, that was for sure.

Like this, for instance.
This house, this side of her.
She had very deliberately given herself a head start out of Kansas, wanting to change her colors so that he could see her in a setting totally opposite to the one he'd known her in. He was glad she had, because he was thoroughly enjoying the contrast.

But it didn't really matter. Her varied colors no longer shook him off balance; he saw and understood all the shades of her, appreciating the parts, because he could see the whole.

It was an enchanting whole.

Smiling to himself, Gideon left the bedroom and went downstairs, encountering his love in the foyer where she was looking at a package that had just been delivered.