Skull Duggery by Aaron Elkins Page A

sighed, settled back, blew some more on her coffee, and sipped thoughtfully at it.
    “Well, I can understand why your dad doesn’t like to talk about it,” Gideon said. “Sorry I opened a can of worms.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Annie said. “It’s just something we don’t mention in front of him. I’m not even sure Pop knows I know the story. What they told me at the time was that my mother had to go to the hospital, and then they just dropped the subject. Pop himself just could never bring it up again, and I knew better than to ask questions. He even put away his pictures of her. I found them when I was about ten, in a crate near where he keeps the horse feed. She was so beautiful. I kept a photo of her standing with Pop, with me in her arms, and put the others back. I don’t think he’s opened that crate even once.”
    “It’s too bad he never remarried,” Julie said.
    “Remarried? Hell, he never even had a girlfriend. Well, a couple of times a year he travels for a week or so on horse business, so who knows, maybe there’s some old flame out there, but I can tell you he never brought one back home. Or made out with any of the guests, either. And you should see the way some of the female guests come on to him. They don’t know I’m his daughter, of course, so they talk about him in front of me.” She grimaced. “It’s disgusting.”
    She leaned forward. “Let me tell you something about my father. He is the most loyal, honest, decent man you will ever meet. What he seems like is exactly what he is like. After Mom took off, he figured his job was to raise me, and that’s just what he did.” She paused for a wry smile. “But I inherited my mother’s genes, I guess-in everything but looks, dammit-because at nineteen I ran off with that miserable shmuck Billy Nicholson, idiot that I was. Why? Because he looked like Robert Redford. And then when I came crawling back here with my tail between my legs? Pop took me in without a word of reproof and got me set up in this job, for which I am eternally grateful. That was eight years ago, and there’s still never been a word of reproof, not a single word. Never even an I told you so, which he had every right to say. That man is something else, let me tell you. My hero.”
    The somewhat awkward silence that followed this soul-baring was broken by Dorotea, who called loudly from the doorway in Spanish that their breakfast was on the buffet table, and in they filed.
    “If this is a ‘late breakfast snack,’ ” Gideon said, “I can hardly wait to see what an actual breakfast looks like.”
    On the table in front of them were the promised quesadillas-seven of them, not the expected three-freshly made tortillas covered with cheese and chiles, folded into half moons, and arranged in a semicircle. But there was also cubed melon and papaya, a bowl of yogurt, biscuits, jam, a pitcher of pink, frothy juice that, on inquiry, turned out to be ginger-spiked hibiscus juice-and, of course, more of the wonderful coffee. The three of them loaded up (“Well, since there are extra quesadillas, I guess I’ll have a couple, after all,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t want them to go to waste.”) and took their food back out to the terrace. The sun had climbed higher by now, and although it wasn’t unpleasantly hot, Gideon put up the umbrella to give them some protection from the glare.
    Gideon and Julie, who hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before, were ravenous and the food was marvelous, and for a few minutes their only conversation had to do with how wonderful it was, much of it expressed in appreciative grunts and murmurs of one syllable. Annie took a proprietary pride in Dorotea’s skills, explaining that what made the tortillas so exceptional was not only that they had been made that morning with fresh masa -hand-ground corn flour-but that real, old-fashioned lard had gone into it “by the handful.” This did nothing to take the edge off their