George Two Feathers, master carpenter and carver, had been hard at work building display stands for an exhibition of Pacific Rim artifacts and weapons in the Halberg Museum.
In a casual conversation with one of the curators, George had mentioned the greenstone mere the family owned. The mere’s bloody history and the belief that an ancestral spirit lived inside it had intrigued the curator and her grandfather had been persuaded to loan it as part of the display.
It had been a curiosity when the mere had looked suffused with blood where everyone could see, and it earned a couple of inches in the local newspaper. The day George Two Feathers fell off scaffolding and broke his neck, the mere became front-page news.
That was how the mere came to the notice of Paul Savage.
The museum was high on the philanthropist’s list of charitable donations, topped only by places like the San Francisco opera house and the Savage Art Gallery, which his great-grandfather had endowed in the thirties. He was old money and never let anyone forget it. And the words borderline Mafia were never spoken aloud. At least, not to his face. Which meant her refusal to sell him the mere could make life downright hazardous. And now that she’d had time to think it over, Savage could be connected to the man who’d hijacked her case.
As Ngaire touched the greenstone, she felt it pulse with life. Then again, it might simply be the rush of blood through her veins. She shrugged off the eerie feeling of icy fingers counting the notches in her spine. Soon you’ll think you hear spooky music, she chided herself. It was one thing to believe the greenstone could become darkened with blood, another to imbue it with a heartbeat.
The original leather thong was still looped through the hole carved in the handle. Slipping her hand through the narrow strip, Ngaire lifted the paddle-shaped artifact above the desk from its resting place on the silken shawl and repeated its name. “Te Ruahiki.” She named the warrior chieftain, the Rangatira, whose spirit was said to have entered the mere on his death.
For a deadly weapon, the greenstone mere had a deceptive beauty, its sharp polished edges pale and almost see-through. It was as if all the light in the room had been sucked into the translucent green jade to produce an otherworldly glow. As if it knew that after all its years away from Aotearoa, New Zealand, it had come home.
And the theme tune from Jaws would start playing any second now. Get a grip, girl.
She saw Bennett’s jaw drop as if that would prevent him blinking his surprise. “A greenstone mere.”
“And not any ordinary one,” Manu Pomare said reverently as he got to his feet. “That’s inanga greenstone. Look at the hours of work in it, and the intricate carving on the handle. I’ve never seen another like it.”
As if fascinated, he reached out to touch, his gaze sliding from the mere to Ngaire as she swung it away from his hand.
His voice firmed. “How on earth did this come into your possession? There’s been a ban on exporting Maori artifacts for more than twenty years. The only ones to leave the country have either been stolen or smuggled out.”
“Whoa! Back up there. I’m no thief! No smuggler, either, unless you count bringing Te Ruahiki back home where it belongs. I do have letters of provenance, also one from William Ruawai, the chief of my grandmother’s subtribe.
“She was the last of her family and living in Auckland during the war when she met my grandfather, a GI, and part of the American contingent in New Zealand. After they married, naturally she took Te Ruahiki with her to the States. That would have been 1946, long before the law came into force.”
Bennett and the female officer crowded the desk. Ngaire’s shoulder ached from holding out the mere, but she hoped the sight would do more to further her cause than laying it down. “Can you understand why I wanted to reveal it in private? William warned me that some people will do anything to get their hands on it.”
Paul Savage included. The man had become obsessed with owning the Te Ruahiki. Obsessed, it seemed, with being forewarned of his death. She remembered the gleam in his eyes the last time he’d made her an offer, thinking she’d never refuse such a large sum.
He’d been wrong.
Wrapping the mere inside the silk scarf once again, she eyed the others in the room one by one. “Apart from William Ruawai, there are only four people in New Zealand who know what I’m carrying, and they’re all in this room.”
Thirty minutes had passed since Ngaire had been led away. Thirty minutes of talking and persuading them she wasn’t running a black-market scam, until finally a call to William Ruawai in the South Island had secured the release of herself and the mere.
Thirty minutes, time enough for all the other passengers on her flight to be in Auckland by now. No, she was wrong. One still remained.
A rush of overwhelming tiredness had replaced the excitement she’d felt on her arrival at Auckland. There was much more to the mere’s return to the land of her ancestors than she could have explained and still hoped to be believed.
Maybe one person in that cold gray office would have believed her life depended on the trip she would make to the South Island. Yeah, for all his modern haircut and clothes, Manu Pomare would fit right into a painting of a Maori warrior. All that was missing was the moko, the face tattoo.
He would know about breaking a tapu, and the curse it could bring down on a family. But would he believe that if her quest wasn’t successful then she only had six more weeks to live?
Ngaire didn’t know whether to be pleased or worried as she saw Kel approach. Her first reaction had been a slight lifting of her spirits at the sight of a face she knew, followed by the lead-weighted anxiety of wondering if Paul Savage had sent Kel to follow her. Yet, slow starter or not, he had tackled the thief.
A laugh, half hysterical, half foolish, forced its way through lips dry from talking her way out of a tense situation. It had made her see spooks where there couldn’t possibly be any.
It was hardly logical to blame Kel for her problems, yet she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that everything in her world had been working perfectly until she’d laid eyes on him.
She turned her face away, pretending she hadn’t noticed him, hadn’t noticed the supple grace of his stride, or that he looked remarkably fit and cheerful for someone who’d sat in the same cramped seats as herself for more than six hours.
Weakening, she let her eyes draw back to him. Darn, he was still coming her way. The air left her lungs in one short, sharp huff. Disapproval, or a way of releasing the tingling feeling inside her? She couldn’t make up her mind.
Kel was an outstandingly attractive guy. Some woman’s dream man. “Handsome is as handsome does.” The thought produced a picture of him hesitating as her case disappeared, rather than his sexy smile. Why couldn’t she shake the feeling he had let her down even before they met?
The glint in his eye told her she would have to be rude to get rid of him. But she couldn’t very well say “Beat it! I need time to get my mind round the assumption that one of my ancestors is alive and well, if only in spirit, and I’m carrying him inside my case.”
The feeling of having a stopwatch running down the seconds of her life wasn’t quite as new. She’d learned to live with it, which might qualify as an oxymoron when what had really happened was that she’d discovered she’d likely die with it.
“So, Ngaire, we meet again,” he said, stopping less than three feet away, not quite invading her space but hovering on the outskirts.
Again, his crooked smile tugged at a memory, a bittersweet one that hinted at the refrain, long ago and far away. She refused to let it affect her. Refused to let hope surface where there was nothing to sustain it, except tiredness and a feeling of being alone and vulnerable. So she answered, “What I’m wondering is, why? I thought you’d have taken off ages ago. Were there no shuttles into the city?”
“It was a question of having to check in with my travel agent. All my arrangements were