He smelled of lime-scented after-shave. His dimples were deeper than she remembered.
On some mysterious cue, a black man appeared to collect the empty glasses, carrying them away on a silver tray. “What you’ve come for is this way,” Christopher said, guiding her toward the open French doors, disappointing her when he didn’t take her arm. The others followed in their wake.
The trophy room was immense. It was larger than Janet’s childhood memories of it and filled with wall-to-wall animal heads and skins. The latter were also scattered on the hardwood floor and used as upholstery for the overstuffed furniture. The room smelled sensuously decadent, of time-worn leather. Over the mantel of a large walk-in fireplace was a sunburst of guns. Those weapons had killed the animals on display.
Janet shuddered. She always had when entering this room. Christopher, standing close by, sensed her reaction. His questioning gold eyes turned on her. She enjoyed a second shiver that had nothing to do with the first.
“Someone must be walking on my grave,” she said, wishing for a better cliché.
She was rescued by Jill Marlow, who was anxious to start whatever makeup Christopher needed for the cameras.
Janet’s husband had told her there were so few blond heroes in the early days of the movies because they didn’t film well. Heavy makeup had solved the bleached-out problem for women but had never worked as well for light-complexioned men.
Christopher, though, didn’t have to worry. Modern technology had improved camera, tape, and processing. The Robert Redfords of the world no longer took back seats to their dark-complexioned competition. In. fact, Christopher would come off too well on camera.
He was so tanned anyway, and too handsome, too clean-cut, too… well… appealing. He was the stereotypical Dutchman, and his robust attractiveness would work against what Janet had in mind. She needed an unattractive slob of a man with a two-day growth of beard, sweaty clothes, dirty fingernails and no finesse. She needed someone as thoroughly obnoxious as Vincent Van Hoon had been.
Not only was Christopher all wrong, but so was the setting. It was too genteel. The animal trophies were too sterile. A television audience, jaded by blood-and-guts violence, needed to see a downed beast in the wild bellowing out its death throes before the viewer would get her point.
“I think Mr. Van Hoon looks fine,” Janet said to Jill, who was running a makeup brush over Christopher’s tanned cheeks and strong neck, paying too much attention to the smooth run of muscled chest revealed by his open shirt collar.
“Yes, he does look fine, doesn’t he?” Jill answered with schoolgirl gushiness that Janet found irritating.
The cameras were ready, and Janet turned toward an antler-bracketed mirror that commandeered a place on one trophy-littered wall. Reflected were her wide-set black eyes, pert nose and Cupid’s-bow mouth, all framed by a mane of thick black hair. If there were traces of a thirteen-year-old girl in her face, there were none in her full-blown breasts, narrow waist and long legs. It was best leaving the memory of her childhood in the same grave as her father. Nothing good would come of resurrecting it. Oh, but if only she could turn back the clock.
The taping didn’t begin well. She couldn’t relax, and it showed. There was no hiding from the camera. She got curious looks from Tim, Roger, and Jill. Christopher looked at her in a funny way, too.
She shouldn’t have come. Why had she? Her reasons for being in Africa needn’t have brought her to Johannesburg, to this house, to this man, to these memories.
“And this?” she asked Christopher, commanding her mind not to wander. She pointed to a skin stretched on the wall. It was a reddish brown pelt with irregular, dark-brown striping.
“A quagga,” Christopher informed her.
“And that one?” she asked. She pointed toward the mounted head of an antelope with long stout horns that swept back from its forehead in a saber-like curve.
“Blaubok—a bluebuck,” Christopher said, providing the translation. At the same time, a glimmer of suspicion registered in his gold eyes.
She was going about it all wrong. She was obvious in her singling out the extinct animals. She should ask about the wildebeest or the North American elk, those takes edited out later.
“You know, Janet,” he said on cue, “they’re extinct now—the quagga and the bluebuck, but it wasn’t all that long ago that they roamed this very spot on which we’re standing. There were thousands of quagga as late as the late the nineteenth century. My great-grandfather hunted them, but I can’t. No one can. We can’t even see them, except as bits and pieces scattered around museums and trophy rooms.”
Yes, the quaggas were gone, and so were the bluebucks—as were the young girl and the young man who had stood on this very spot so many years ago.
“My response to the loss of those animals is a feeling of deep regret,” Christopher continued. Janet listened for sincerity. She wanted to believe him, but he was saying it because she had tipped her hand. “Not only do I regret their demise,” Christopher said, “but I regret that more effort by my family wasn’t channeled into saving them.”
He was saying the right words. There had been a time when she had known whether he was telling the truth or lying. Now she didn’t know—not for sure.
“However, I’ve been doing my own small part by restricting my hunting to camera safaris,” he said. “Possibly that’s too little too late, but it’s taken this long for the Van Hoons to shake off outdated family tradition.”
The camera safari was a good touch. She would check on it. If it were true, she would give him good marks for trying. She couldn’t go easy, though, on a family whose quest for corporate profits had wrecked the chances of more than one poor beast for survival—as well as killing her father.
“Thank you, Christopher Van Hoon,” she said.
Within seconds, Tim and Roger were packing up the lights and equipment. Janet turned to Christopher and smiled nervously.
“Would it be possible to speak with you privately for a few minutes, Janet?” Christopher asked. During the taping he had called her by her first name, too. She liked the sound of it on his lips. It had been a long time.
“Privately?” she asked. He would confront her with his suspicions, no doubt.
“It’ll only take a moment,” he assured her persuasively.
“I really…,” she began, wanting but not wanting to be alone with him.
“Please,” he said. He put his hand on her elbow and delivered the shock of his touch. The sensation was more disturbing than his previous handshake.
The ever-present servant opened the door to the next room for them. Janet took a deep breath. She couldn’t lie to Christopher if he pressed her for the truth, not even if it came out who she was and why she was there.
“I thought you might have supper with me,” he said. It was the last thing she had expected. It was out of context. “I thought I’d be more persuasive in here, out of the hubbub,” he explained as they entered the room.
“Supper?” Janet echoed, confused.
“I thought we should have more time together—to talk,” he said. He leaned against the back of a wing chair and folded his arms. His muscled chest thrust forward, molded by the cloth of his shirt. “We do have things to discuss, don’t we, Janet?” he said.
There was a way he might have spoken her name to tell her their talk would be of old times, of shared and happy memories, but he didn’t speak it that way.
He was a man who had discovered a plot and was out to deal with the enemy. So, all his fine talk about camera safaris was pure garbage. He was his father’s son after all.
“Thank you for asking, but I have a lot to do at the hotel this evening,”