Different Dreams (19 page)

W
hy the glum expression?” Cam
asked.

They'd made polite chitchat for a few miles as they headed northeast toward Austin and the anniversary party for Malou's parents. But for the last twenty miles a heavy silence had fallen between Cam and Malou. She sat beside him, lovely in an emerald green sundress that plunged to a provocative V in the front, a bow-tied package resting primly on her knees, but her thoughts were miles away.

Malou glanced over, wishing that she could trust what she saw with her own eyes, for the sight was innocence personified. Cam looked and smelled fresh from a shower. His unruly hair was still shiny wet and combed over his forehead like a choirboy's. His firm jaw gleamed from the smooth scrape of a razor. The tie knotted at his neck was a touching concession to the occasion. All in
all, he might have been a boy dressed by his mother for a birthday party. Except that everything boyishly appealing about Cameron Landell was counterweighted by his undeniable maleness, by the aura of raw masculinity that pervaded his every look and gesture.

Why the glum expression?
Malou repeated his words, testing them. Did he already know the answer to that question? Had he, in fact, been the cause of the unhappiness that was writ so large across her face? She watched him closely as she answered his question.

“One of the monkeys, Kojiwa, was poisoned. He's still very sick.” Cam's features took on a look of worried concern. Malou watched and wondered. Had the expression been waiting there all the time, rehearsed and ready to be hauled out the instant she told him her “news”? Perhaps Cam had even specially selected the old monkey and marked him for death as a particularly insidious way of demoralizing her, of making her want to abandon her fight to keep the troop together. Together on Cam's valuable land. No, she protested, she was letting Ernie's paranoia get the best of her. Even if he'd had such a foul intent, Cam couldn't have told one monkey from another if his life depended on it.

“Kojiwa. I've heard you mention that name before. Isn't he one of your favorites? The original leader of the troop or something like that?”

“Yes.” So he did remember Kojiwa and the special
place he held in her heart. And even if Cam couldn't pick the old-timer out of the troop, Jorge probably could.

Cam's hand, warm and comforting, covered Malou's. “I know how much these guys mean to you, sweetheart. If you don't feel up to being around a mass of people, we could call your parents and cancel. Have a quiet dinner somewhere.”

After the unrelieved stress of the last few days, the long nights spent nursing Kojiwa, the strained days of feeling like an enemy collaborator before Ernie's silent scorn, Malou was almost undone by Cam's gentle concern. Tears leaped spontaneously to her eyes and pooled there as she looked up at him. She wanted nothing more at that moment than to do exactly what he'd suggested, to escape to some tranquil little restaurant. To share a few glasses of wine and a simple meal with the man beside her, then to let him take her to bed and exorcise all the suspicion that was festering within her. Looking at him, and feeling the powerful pull of a thousand conflicting emotions, her misery only increased.

“No,” she finally answered, drawing herself up and forcing back the tears. “My parents will be expecting us.”

Cam patted her hand, then turned back to the road.

In Austin, they pulled off the interstate to wind their way through the campus of the University of Texas. Malou's spirits rose slightly as they passed through the narrow streets shaded by giant magnolias, with their waxy
green leaves and huge white blossoms. She pointed out the anthropology department, where she'd spent the most important years of her life. Cam slowed down as Malou translated the Latin inscription chiseled into the limestone above the entryway.

“Know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She spoke from memory, her eyes not on the chiseled words but on Cam. What
was
the truth? Would she ever find it if she kept losing herself every time he came near her? And, even if she did finally identify it, could the truth ever set her free from the desire for the man beside her that even now, even as she considered his possible guilt, coiled within her, aching to be unloosed?

Cam drove on, following her directions. They led to a prestigious neighborhood in West Austin. He found a spot on her parents' street, and he took her arm as they strolled up to the house she'd lived in from the age of ten on. Azaleas were in full bloom, crowding in on either side of the curving walkway leading up to the stately, Greek-columned house.

“Not too shabby,” Cam whispered in her ear, breaking the tension that had built within Malou.

She smiled up at him, grateful that this house and its owners didn't exercise the same kind of power over him that they did over her.

A swirl of guests had clotted near the main entryway. She recognized a number of her father's colleagues from
the university, most of them in casual Mexican guayabera shirts and beards. The women wore styles a couple of years out-of-date that proclaimed how little interest they had in things as frivolous as fashion. Spotted among them were the winners of major awards her father honored in public and envied in private. She'd grown up sharing his belief that while his work was every bit as good as theirs, it simply wasn't as “showy,” which is why he never won the awards he deserved.

White-gloved and jacketed waiters circulated among the guests, passing trays of champagne in tall flutes. “Waiters,” Malou whispered in amazement to Cam. “Looks like they're pulling out all the stops for this little do.” Her parents rarely went in for such ostentatious displays.

To one side of the crowd was a chamber music group playing the kind of refined, ethereal music that set the tone for a gathering such as this. Through the crush, Malou caught a glimpse of her father. He was studying her and Cam with a cool, detached eye. A scientist's eye, she'd always told herself when, even when she was a young girl he'd turned that analytical gaze on her. She'd never been able to escape feeling as if she were just another one of her father's experiments. And not a terribly successful one at that. Her father made no effort to break away from the guests surrounding him. He let his daughter come to him. Malou's hand tightened on Cam's.

“That's my father watching us,” she whispered to him. He covered her clenched hand with his.

“I thought I felt the hot glare of the paternal eye. Quite a distinguished-looking gent.”

And he was. Arthur Sanders had, even as a young man, looked precisely like what he now was, a university physics professor. His hair, which had gone prematurely silver, contributed to the impression he gave of a man with his mind on matters far too abstract for the ordinary mortal.

Professor Sanders held out a hand as Malou approached him. She presented hers and he clasped it with a practiced warmth.

“Father, I'd like you to meet a friend of mine, Cameron Landell. Cam, my father, Professor Arthur Sanders.”

Professor Sanders pressed Cam's hand with the same precise degree of warmth. “Cameron, I'm pleased to meet you.”

“And I you, Arthur.” Malou was sure she'd only imagined it, but conversation seemed to suddenly die around them and the chamber group to falter. Malou had never heard another living soul except her mother call her father anything other than Professor, and usually Doctor, Sanders. He never invited anyone to call him Arthur, and there were few, none within Malou's hearing, who had ever presumed to take the liberty. No one who didn't know her father as well as she did
would ever have guessed that Cam's presumption had offended him. But Malou saw the slight quirk in his eyebrow that signaled his slow-burning ire, and she knew that Cam had incited it.

“Malou's told me a great deal about you,” Cam continued cordially, oblivious to his violation of university protocol. In his world no man was his superior, and when someone used his first name, Cam took it as an open invitation for him to use that man's first name in return.

“Odd,” the professor commented with his trademark abstraction, “Malou hasn't mentioned you to us.”

“You remember, Daddy,” Malou cut in, trying to head her father off before he got started. “The cell reception at the station is almost nonexistent. I haven't spoken to you at all for some time.”

“Ah, that's right,” Sanders said, having already gotten his dig in at the upstart. “Last I heard from you, your whole project was going on the block. Some developer had bilked Stallings out of the title to his ranch and was planning to auction off the monkeys to the highest bidder.”

“That's not exactly what I told you, Daddy,” Malou said coolly, knowing full well that her father remembered precisely what she'd told him about the situation at Los Monos
and
that Cam was the bilking developer.

“What's your line, Landell?” her father asked. Watching him jockey for position as blatantly as any macaque,
trying to dominate Cam now by using his last name with no title, would have amused Malou if the scene had involved any other two men.

“Development.” Cam cut his answer off short.

“You're not
that
Cameron Landell, are you?” Her father feigned ignorance. “The San Antonio developer who's paving over one of the few breeding grounds left to the beleaguered golden-cheeked warbler, cutting down all those junipers they use to nest in?”

“Guilty as charged,” Cam answered,
his
eyebrow beginning now to quirk just the slightest bit. With an offhanded glance, he looked about and asked casually, “I wonder how many junipers had to be cut down when this neighborhood was built.”

Malou didn't give her father the chance to answer, and since Cam showed no inclination to come to his own defense, she did it for him. “Hadn't you heard, Daddy? Cam's going to leave a big greenbelt running through the project in the prime nesting area.”

“Yes,” Cam put in. “That should help with my PR profile and maybe even increase property values.”

Malou winced. Cam was taking a perverse delight in placing himself in the worst light possible.

“I suppose that, in your business,” her father pontificated, “PR and property values are paramount concerns.”

“The only concerns, Arthur,” Cam said with a needling
grin. Before Professor Sanders could begin lecturing on the topic, Malou's mother drifted over to them.

“Mary Louise, darling,” she called out, as if she were greeting an acquaintance at the faculty club. “I'm so pleased you could make it.” She kissed the air around Malou's ears, her fingers lightly grazing her daughter's forearms.

“Happy anniversary, Mother,” Malou said to her mother, who seemed only to grow more handsome as the years passed. She was as stately and as refined as everything around her. But what Malou had always admired was that her mother had never let her looks or her house be her world. She'd achieved a position for herself nearly as prominent as the one her husband occupied so proudly.

“Thank you, dear,” she said automatically, animation sparking her voice only when she moved on to the next topic. “Has your father told you my good news?”

“We really hadn't had time,” Malou replied awkwardly, not daring to glance at either Cam or her father.

“My study has been funded. The Arthritis Foundation is going to pay for me to study that new anti-inflammatory I was telling you about a few months back.”

“Oh, Mother, that's wonderful!” Malou looked now at Cam to see if he was as impressed as she with her mother's achievement, but his expression was unreadable. Her father's wasn't, though; he was beaming with pride.
Malou was grateful for the happy note that had been introduced. Her parents were never better than when they were working together like this, both excited about the other's work.

“I just had an idea,” her father blurted out. “I'll have my secretary run off some flyers tomorrow asking for volunteers for the study and have her post them around the campus.”

“That would be most helpful,” Malou's mother said to her husband as he took a small notebook out of his vest pocket and penciled in a reminder to himself. Though it didn't diminish Malou's pride in her parents, she noticed a strange formality between them. She couldn't imagine them ever taking a “school vacation” day, as she and Cam had, to feed each other dewberries and make love in a sun-warmed field.

“Mother,” Malou said to capture her mother's attention, which had already wandered to the other guests milling about. “I'd like you to meet a . . .” She stumbled for the right word. “Friend of mine, Cameron Landell.”

“Happy thirtieth, Mrs. Sanders,” Cam said, taking her hand in his.

“Yes, thank you, Cameron.”

Had that touch of condescension always been there in her mother's voice, Malou wondered, or were both her parents just now bringing it out especially for Cam?

“Do you work with Malou at the station?” her mother asked.

“No, I . . .”

But her mother had already turned from Cam and was asking Malou, “How is Ernie coming on his myopia study? He was explaining his research design to me last time we were out, and it sounded fascinating. I'd think he'd collect some very interesting data.”

“Uh, I really don't know, Mother. We haven't spoken about it lately.”

“Haven't spoken about his research?” Mrs. Sanders echoed incredulously, trying to imagine the circumstances under which such a silence could occur. She returned her attention to Cam. “What did you do your graduate work in?” The question was as natural to her as asking where someone worked.

“Creative financing,” Cam quipped.

The joke was lost on Mrs. Sanders. “Oh,” she replied blankly. “And where did you get your undergraduate degree?”