Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [74]
I put the window up.
“Thanks.”
I watch out the window as the driver navigates Cumberland Street, heading toward the Cahill Expressway and the Sydney Opera House. Traffic is thick and our slow progress gives me a chance to absorb the people and the atmosphere. A man on a unicycle passes us, going the opposite direction down a sidewalk that slopes several scary degrees in a direction I would not think someone on a single-wheeled conveyance would attempt.
“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Espy says.
“Then you’re not looking in the right places.”
She doesn’t respond. Under the circumstances, casual conversation seems forced. Both of us are still reeling over Al’s death, made more difficult by it happening so soon after the murders in Lalibela—although Espy was a godsend during the first few hours after it happened. She kept me from disengaging, kept me in the here and now. She kept me from placing the blame for Al’s death on my own shoulders. Now her own emotional reserves lowered, she needs time to think these things through and in her own way.
“Where are we meeting your friend?” Espy asks.
“The beach.”
Our destination is Station Beach, northeast of Sydney. I’d wanted to meet at her hotel—the Observatory, a five star in the Rocks District—but Angie was insistent that, if I was going to crash her vacation, I would have to work around her schedule. When she got my call from Ethiopia, she wouldn’t believe me when I told her I was paying her a visit. I had to put Espy on the phone to prove to her it wasn’t a joke meant to ruin the tail end of her vacation. When I got my phone back, all Angie wanted to talk about was the woman traveling with me.
Seeking out Angie penciled its own way into our plans when I discovered that my Reese Industries credit card had been canceled. The ATM in the airport swallowed it and wouldn’t let go. I could deal with that. What really threw a wrench in the works was when the nice young man at the airline ticket counter gave me an apologetic smile and proceeded to cut my personal credit card in half. Had Espy not had a card of her own, and sufficient available credit, I don’t know what we would have done.
Espy accused me of another bad debt, and my track record has not left me in a good spot from which to defend myself. But although it’s true I have occasionally allowed a debt to remain unpaid, I have never played anything but nice with Visa. This has to be Reese’s doing. Or Manheim’s. I know Reese has the connections to turn off a poor archaeologist’s credit spigot. I have to assume Manheim does, too.
So I’m hitting Angie up for money. She doesn’t know that yet. I left the reason for our visit a mystery so that she wouldn’t go into hiding.
But I’m irritated that I had to revert to my old phone to reach her. I called half a dozen times with the new phone and couldn’t get through, and her voice mailbox was full. The only thing I could think to do was to call with my old phone and hope she recognized the number, which she did. Now if anyone has been eavesdropping on my calls, they know my short-term itinerary.
As our driver takes the taxi up the 14, I see signs for Palm Beach and the city’s congestion gives way to green and sand and the bluest water in the world. According to the driver, Station Beach is on the opposite side of Barrenjoey Head from Palm Beach. It’s quiet and the water of Pittswater Bay is calm enough to keep surfers and their like away. It’s warmer in the car now, so I lower the window. Espy doesn’t complain. Like me, I think she’s coming out of her mild funk. It’s too pretty here to hold on to anything negative. We ride in silence the rest of the way until the driver pulls into a small parking area, beyond which I can make out the pristine white sand and lapping surf. I give some thought to asking the driver to stay to take us back, but then change my mind. There’s only one other car in the lot and I’ll bet it belongs to Angie. I’m hoping to talk my way into a ride to a car-rental agency.
I’d been wondering how easy it would be to locate