High Tide Read online

“And you get to sell clothes and accessories for every new character she plays.”

  “Someone in this world has to make money exchange hands,” she said more sharply than she intended.

  “Was she ever a philanthropist?”

  “As a matter of fact, she was,” Fiona snapped; then suddenly she laughed, and her anger and her fear left her. When she’d first realized that she had a real treasure map in her possession, her fear had made her unable to speak. Then Ace had been his usual pain-in-the-neck self, blaming her for not thinking of the map sooner, not understanding a word she said, but now his joke seemed to release the pentup emotion inside her.

  Turning, she smiled at him. “Actually, that was one of our more successful launchings. A very rich old man hired Kimberly to give away his millions so his greedy relatives wouldn’t benefit by his death. We improved the lives of lots of people with the money we gave away that year.”

  “And this year?”

  “This year Kimberly had to learn about maps so she could become a cartographer. Seems there are some places in the Montana mountains that no one has explored, and the president—”

  “Right,” Ace said, cutting her off. “So what did you do with the maps your father made for you?”

  “Lined her trunk. You see, accessories are available with each persona. When she went undercover in England in an old house as a Victorian parlor maid—”

  “Very old house,” Ace murmured.

  “It was a tourist place. Kimberly has only time-traveled once. Anyway, that year Victorian clothes and household gadgets were available, as well as a book about Victorian life.”

  “So a cartographer would have a trunk.”

  “A trunk filled with instruments and textbooks.”

  “And the lining of this trunk is a map.”

  “The art director and I made a collage of my father’s maps; then he had them printed into wrapping paper. We used the paper to line the trunks that came with Cartographer Kimberly.”

  “So all we have to do is buy a trunk and open it up to see the map, is that right?”

  Fiona turned away to look at the trees for a moment before looking back at him. There was a white bird sitting on a branch, and she was tempted to ask Ace what kind of bird it was. Anything to delay telling him the truth. Taking a deep breath, she turned back to look at him. “Not quite. There are twenty-one maps that cover a piece of paper about ten feet by fifteen feet. My father’s maps were large and detailed, so even when we reduced them, they were still big.”

  For a moment Ace just looked at her, trying to figure out what she was saying. “How big is the lining of each trunk?”

  “Oh, about …” She held up her fingers as though measuring distance. “I’d say about four inches square.”

  Ace swallowed. “In other words we’re going to have to buy hundreds of these trunks to be able to piece the whole thing together so we can find the one map that we need.”

  “I think it may be more like thousands, because you could buy half a dozen trunks and they could all be cut from the same square foot of the master sheet. In fact, that’s likely if you buy them all in one area. And, too, the trunks come with Cartographer Kimberly.”

  “You have to buy the doll to get the trunk?”

  “The objective is the doll, not the trunk,” she snapped, refusing to hear any disparagement of Kimberly.

  “Maybe I could hire someone to break into Davidson Toys and steal—”

  “You have no idea what the security is in a toy manufacturer, do you? Do you have any idea what my people are offered to reveal who Kimberly is to be next? They …” She trailed off as she realized that she was no longer involved with Kimberly.

  Ace’s head came up. “Girls,” he said, then stood. “Little girls buy them, don’t they?”

  “By the millions.”

  “If we could get lots of little girls to buy lots of doll trunks, then steam off the linings and fax them to us—”

  “And offer a reward for any new puzzle piece that we don’t have—”

  “As a reward, how about dibs on Olivia the Bird Girl?”

  “Octavia the naturalist,” Fiona answered instantly. “But if we go public to reach lots of little girls, say on the Internet, how do we keep the police from picking up on this?”

  “Easy. We don’t use real children, we use relatives.”

  Fiona gave him a blank look. “Relatives? You’d have to have hundreds, and they’d have to live all over the U.S., and who’s going to pay for all those dolls?”

  “Relatives,” Ace said; then he grabbed her hand and started pulling her toward the car.

  And “relatives” was the only word she could get out of him until they were on the drive back to the Blue Orchid. He said, “It was a killdeer.”

  “What was?”

  “The bird you were looking at.”

  “Oh? I wasn’t aware that I was looking at any of your boring old birds.” When she looked at him, he was smiling in such a way that she smacked him on the arm.

  “Oh!” he said in mock pain, rubbing his arm. “You really are the most violent woman. I bet Jeremy is black-and-blue.”

  That was a sobering thought, and Fiona realized that she hadn’t thought of Jeremy in days. Instead, her life had become this man. Although much about this man remained a mystery, in a way she knew more about Ace Montgomery than she ever had known about Jeremy. For all that she and Jeremy had been to bed together hundreds of times, she had never lived with him. She knew more about what Ace ate, what he liked to wear, what he thought about, than she had ever known about Jeremy.

  “I think I’ll call him when we get back,” she murmured.

  “Right after we get the map,” Ace said quickly. “Then you’ll have something to tell him.”

  “Good idea,” she said too quickly. “After we get the map.”

  “Three?!” Ace said into the phone. “Why you conniving little demon. Who taught you to do business?”

  Turning, he put his hand over the phone and said to Fiona, “Every doll, dress, shoe, hat, whatever, that comes out for one year she wants in triplicate. And she has a list of friends who want the first doll.”

  “You are bargaining with something we don’t have and will probably never get,” Fiona said nervously. “And what kind of family do you have if nine-year-olds can negotiate contracts?”

  “Mmmm,” was all Ace would answer to her question before he turned back to the phone. “How do I know you can deliver the goods? I have a fax machine sitting right here, and nothing has come through it yet.” He listened for a moment.

  “Yeah, well, maybe we can talk more when I see some maps.

  “Mmhmm,” he said into the phone. “No way. Miss Burkenhalter does that and she does it alone, got me? Now get out there and buy! I want faxes within an hour.”

  Fiona was sitting beside him on the couch, her eyes wide. She couldn’t believe he was talking to a child. When he put the phone down, she said, “What did she want?”

  “To be on the board of directors of the new doll company. She wants a say in the planning of the new doll. Is there anything to eat?”

  “Come on and I’ll make you a sandwich.” Once in the kitchen Ace sat on the opposite side of the island while Fiona got bread, mustard, roast beef, tomatoes, and lettuce out of the refrigerator. “How can you talk about giving away a doll that doesn’t exist and probably never will?” she asked. “Even if we did get out of this mess, where would we get the money?”

  “We’d have to think of something,” Ace said, looking across the granite countertop to the sandwich she was making. “Mayo too, if you don’t mind, and—”

  He broke off when the phone on the kitchen desk rang. They instantly looked at each other in a quick moment of fear. Only Ace’s cousin Michael Taggert knew the number, but they had talked to him just minutes ago.

  Ace snatched up the phone, then waited in silence for a moment. “Yeah, yeah, she’s here,” he said gruffly.

  Puzzled, Fiona