“Excuse me, but I was under the impression that you were very concerned about your privacy,” she said.
“You mean you heard that I’m reclusive? Secretive?”
“Among other things. Are you telling me that’s not the truth?”
“I’m telling you that I want to have dinner with you. I’ll put up with the gossip and the speculation in order to do so. All I want from you is an answer. Yes, or no?”
It was not the most gallant or gracious invitation she’d ever had, but at least he was not trying to manipulate her this time, she thought. He was simply asking her out on a date. Sort of.
Having to make a request, knowing he had no way to enforce the answer he wanted, was no doubt a completely foreign experience for Nick Chastain. She almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
A dinner date with him would not be wise, she told herself. It would alarm her family, worry her friends at Psynergy, Inc., and quite possibly draw unwanted attention from the tabloids.
But a few sparks of the invisible, beguiling energy that had sizzled between them a moment ago still snapped in the air around her. She had waited all of her adult life to feel that delicious kind of energy, she thought.
And Nick had asked, not threatened or manipulated.
“Yes,” she said. “I would like to have dinner with you.”
“I called it the Lost Expedition.” Newton DeForest cradled the trailing end of a green vine in one heavily gloved hand and clipped it with a pair of gardening shears. “Bartholomew Chastain had made two earlier expeditions to map the islands of the Western Seas. Both had been extremely successful. The teams found deposits of previously unknown ores and minerals. They brought back specimens of a vast array of new plant and animal life. But Chastain’s last expedition simply vanished in the jungles of some uncharted island.”
“But why aren’t there any official records of the expedition?” Zinnia watched uneasily as crimson liquid seeped from the cut vine. The severed plant looked as if it were bleeding.
Leo’s information had been correct in one respect, she thought. Newton DeForest was definitely strange. He had invited her into his garden while they talked and she had readily agreed. She loved plants and longed for the day when she could afford to buy a house with space for a garden.
But nothing in DeForest’s garden looked quite right to her. There was a grotesque quality to the foliage. Leaves appeared oddly shaped. The colors of the occasional blooms did not look wholesome. Vines were twisted in an unnatural fashion.
The extensively planted grounds of the DeForest estate existed in a perpetual gloom created by a thick canopy of broad leaves and gnarled vines. Once Zinnia got past the trellised gate, she found herself enveloped in an artificial twilight.
Within a few steps she realized that she was disoriented. That bothered her more than the wrongness of the shapes and colors of the foliage. Her sense of direction was usually fairly reliable. She knew that she was not far from the main house but she could no longer see the aging, tumbledown stone structure. She was not certain how to get back to it. She had already lost sight of the trellised garden gate.
She was surrounded by walls of dense dark green. They towered several feet overhead. Corridors formed of seemingly impenetrable masses of leaves twisted their way into the interior of the estate. She stood with Newton in a narrow crooked passageway formed by thick creeping vines. There was a carpet of luminous green moss underfoot. It gave off a faint eerie sheen.
Nothing was normal in this garden, she decided. And that included the gardener.
Newton seemed pleasant enough, even if he was distinctly odd. She wished that he had thought to offer her a cup of coff-tea. She could have used it. What with all the excitement in Curtain Park during the night, she had completely forgotten about her appointment with Professor DeForest until she had awakened an hour ago. In her rush to make the meeting on time she had missed breakfast, coff-tea, and the morning paper—all the little rituals that got the day started.
Newton was a plump, jovial, red-cheeked elf of a man with a neatly trimmed beard and a comfortable paunch. He wore a leather gardener’s apron festooned with tool and implement pockets over his plaid shirt and denim trousers. Tiny round glasses perched on his nose. A cap covered his balding head.
He was obviously enamored of his subject, the legendary Third Chastain Expedition. From the way in which he was holding forth, Zinnia suspected that Newton missed the captive audience he had once enjoyed in the classroom. She did not mind his chattiness in the least. She was prepared to listen.
The journal was now safely in Nick’s hands, but Morris Fenwick’s killer was still at large. If she stuck to her suspicion that Morris had not been murdered for dope money, then the journal was the only other lead she had. She needed to know more about the Third Expedition.
“Ah, yes. Why aren’t there any official records of the Lost Expedition?” Newton gave her a sly approving glance as he clipped another vine. “Your question is an excellent one, indeed. I spent years looking for documents and papers that would prove my theories.”
Zinnia watched, fascinated, as more blood-red juice dripped from the cut vine. “Did you find any hard evidence?”
“Nothing that satisfied the naysayers and the scoffers.” Newton sighed as he surveyed an ugly purple flower. “There was some early paperwork indicating that a Third Chastain Expedition had been planned at one time. But official records state that it was never carried out because Chastain wandered off into the jungle and killed himself a few days before the team was scheduled to depart.”
“But you believe that the expedition did take place?”
“Oh, yes.” Newton said. “I’m quite sure of it. Twenty years ago I managed to find a couple of old jelly-ice miners who happened to be in Serendipity the week the team gathered there. They remembered the five men of the Chastain Expedition.”
“Serendipity?”
“That was the jumping-off point. The last outpost of civilization, you might say. It was just a small mining camp located on one of the outer islands. It was later abandoned by the company. The jungle grew back very quickly. There’s nothing left there today. I made a trip out to the Western Islands several years ago to take a look for myself.”
“What happened to your two witnesses? Why didn’t they ever come forward?”
“Another good question.” Newton prodded the closed petals of a sickly yellow flower with the tip of his shears. The bloom opened with a snap to reveal a nest of sharp spines at the center. “The answer is that by the time I was ready to publish my work, they were both dead.”
“Killed, do you mean?”
Newton looked sly. “Oh, the authorities claimed the deaths were not mysterious. One man was an alcoholic. He wound up facedown in a gutter in Founders’ Square. The other had a drug problem. He was killed by another addict whom he apparently tried to rob. Utter nonsense.”
“What do you think happened to them?”
“The were killed by the aliens.” Newton gave her a knowing look. “Not directly, of course. The creatures most likely placed some poor dupe under mind control and then ordered him to get rid of the witnesses.”
Zinnia winced. “I see.” She thought about asking Newton why the aliens hadn’t had him killed, too, since he was the one who was onto their nefarious scheme, but she refrained. He might not want to continue talking to her if she confronted him with too much logic. “There must have been other people who recalled the expedition.”
“I managed to find a few others who recalled that it had been planned, but as far as they know, it was canceled at the last minute because of Chastain’s suicide. Everyone I talked to who was involved, from the university officials to the folks who lived in the islands, believes the expedition never left Serendipity.”
“What about the families of the five men who formed the expedition team? They must have been a bit suspicious when their relatives failed to return.”
“Chastain was writte
n off as a suicide by his family. The other four men had no close relatives. No one noticed that they had simply disappeared.”
Zinnia frowned. “Isn’t that a little strange?”
“Not really. Chastain handpicked his teams, himself. His first requirement was that every individual be experienced in jungle survival. That limited his pool of potential candidates to the usual assortment of loners, bastards, and riffraff who tend to wind up in the islands and who are willing to sign on for expedition work. Not many would take that sort of job, in those days.”
“Why not? It sounds rather exciting.”
Newton chuckled. “Not nearly as exciting as prospecting for jelly-ice. After all, a man can get rich if he locates a deposit of ice. Expedition work, on the other hand, is a salaried job. Anything valuable that is discovered becomes the property of whoever has funded the venture.”
“In this case that would have been the University of New Portland, right?”
“Correct. And, as I said, their records show they canceled the expedition after Chastain disappeared.”
“Hmm.” Zinnia bent closer to a severed vine to examine the red juice that dripped from it.
“No, no, Miss Spring, you don’t want to touch that little blood-creeper.” Newton batted her hand away with a playful pat. “Not until the wound has sealed.”
Zinnia glanced at him. “Wound?”
“Figure of speech.” Newton’s merry eyes danced behind his round spectacles. “As you can see, the vine appears to bleed when it’s cut. The liquid is rather toxic. Leaves a nasty burn.”
“Oh.” Zinnia quickly shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she followed Newton down another green passageway. “So, you’re convinced that the expedition team was abducted by aliens?”
“It’s the only reasonable explanation for the disappearance of those five men together with all of the records that would have proven that the team left on schedule,” Newton said. “I admit that my work has caught the attention of one or two kooks over the years, thanks to the tabloids. Some of the fools have come up with their own theories, but they’re all nonsense.”
“What are some of the other theories?”
“Several years ago one of the tabloids published a fanciful piece which claimed that the last Chastain expedition had discovered a treasure of some kind. Perhaps a huge deposit of fire crystal. The author suggested that the five members of the team had made a pact to conceal the location of the crystal and then faked their own disappearance.”
“So that they wouldn’t have to turn the discovery over to the university officials?”
“Yes.” Newton chuckled. “Ridiculous theory, of course. If those five men had been secretly mining a vast quantity of fire crystal all these years, someone would have noticed. Fire crystal is so rare that if a lot of it suddenly came on the market, it would cause quite a stir.”
“True.” Zinnia could not argue that point. “Still, the idea that the team found a treasure worth hiding is intriguing.”
“Bah. Five men could not have kept such a secret for long.” Newton waved his shears at her. “Those men were abducted by aliens, Miss Spring. And then those same aliens plotted to remove all traces of the Third Expedition so that no one would figure out what had happened.”
“It seems a little unlikely,” Zinnia suggested as gently as possible.
“Not unlikely at all. Don’t forget, we have proof that aliens have visited this planet in the past.”
“You’re talking about the relics Lucas Trent found.”
“Indeed,” Newton said.
“But the experts say they’re extremely ancient. Whoever left them behind has been gone for a thousand years or more.”
“That doesn’t mean they didn’t come back thirty-five years ago to kidnap Chastain and his men.”
“But why would they choose those five people?” Zinnia asked.
“We may never know the answer to that, my dear. They are aliens, after all. Who can tell how their minds work?” Newton frowned. “You may want to stand back from that snap-tongue.”
“Snap-tongue?” Zinnia glanced down at a large, fleshy, throat-shaped leaf.
“A clever little plant, if I do say so. It can take off a finger or two if you aren’t careful. Watch this.” Newton plucked a small plastic bag from his pocket and opened it to remove a strip of raw meat. He tossed the meat toward the snap-tongue plant.
When the tidbit sailed past the leaf, a long, fleshy, tongue-like extension unfurled. It snagged the passing meal and bundled it swiftly downward into the sticky fibrous heart of the plant.
Zinnia grimaced as the meat vanished down a green gullet. “I see what you mean.”
“The key to making it through my maze without any little accidents is to not touch anything,” Newton said happily.
Zinnia halted abruptly. “We’re in a maze?”
“Indeed. Hadn’t you realized that yet?” Newton chuckled indulgently. “A matrix-talent friend designed it for me. It’s constructed in such a way that anyone who enters it is funneled directly to the center. Once there, the visitor won’t find his way out unless he knows the key.”
Zinnia glanced warily around. “Which you do know, I trust?”
“Indeed, indeed. It’s my maze, after all.” Newton tapped a seemingly impenetrable wall of leaves. “Come along. Let’s see some action.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was speaking to my naughty little spike-trap here,” Newton explained. “Usually it’s a bit more active at this time of day but I suppose the slight frost this morning has slowed it down somewhat.”
“Slowed it down?” Zinnia took a step back.
“I’ll demonstrate.” Newton touched the tip of his gardening shears to the impassive green wall one more time. “If I can wake it up, that is. Ah, there we go. About time, sleepy-head.”
Zinnia heard a soft, sibilant rustling. In the next instant a mass of long sharp thorns burst forth through the green leaves. She realized that any creature unlucky enough to have brushed up against the wall of green would have been impaled.
“Interesting.” She swallowed heavily.
“I’ve been working on this hybrid for some years now.” Newton looked pleased with himself. “In its natural habitat a spike-trap is rather small. The thorns can only pin insects or small birds. But my experiments have produced this version which could easily fell a medium-sized rabbit-mouse.”
Zinnia eyed the massed thorns. “And do serious damage to anything larger.”
“Indeed, indeed.” Newton beamed. “As I said, the trick to enjoying my garden is to avoid touching anything unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Zinnia made certain that she was standing in the very center of the green passageway. “Have you ever heard any rumors about Chastain’s last expedition journal?”
“Journal?” Newton paused reflectively. “There must have been one, of course. After all, Chastain kept a journal for the first two expeditions. He was very meticulous in such matters. But the journal for the Third was no doubt lost when the aliens snatched him.”
Zinnia had a feeling that Nick would not appreciate her informing Demented DeForest that the journal of the Third Expedition had turned up recently. She was reluctant to admit it, but it was obvious that she was wasting her time with the professor.
“You’ve been very helpful, sir. Thank you for answering my questions. I really should be on my way now.”
“Oh, you mustn’t leave before you’ve seen the heart of my maze, my dear. It’s a very special place, if I do say so, myself.”
“What’s at the center?” she asked uneasily.
“My water plant grotto, of course.” Newton chortled as he ambled off down a dark green passage. “Come along, my dear. I’ll show it to you. I’m very proud of my aquatic specimens.”
Zinnia’s palms suddenly felt damp. She dried them on her jeans. “I don’t have a lot of time, Professor.”
?
??Oh, you’ll have time for this, my dear.” Newton disappeared around a corner. “I love to show off my grotto. Besides, you can’t get back to the house without me.”
“Professor DeForest, wait—”
“This way, Miss Spring.” Newton’s voice grew fainter.
Zinnia looked back the way she had come and realized she was completely lost. She could not identify which of the twisting corridors of green foliage had brought her to her present position. There was no choice but to follow Newton.
“Professor DeForest, I really can’t stay long,” she said in what she hoped was a firm voice.
“I understand, my dear.” His voice grew fainter.
Zinnia took one last glance over her shoulder. It was hopeless. She would never be able to find her way out without Newton.
“Hold on, Professor, I’m coming. I can’t wait to see your grotto.”
She hurried around a corner and nearly collided with Newton.
“Ah, there you are.” His eyes crinkled with cheery pleasure. “This way.” He turned and trundled down another path. “Remember, don’t touch anything.”
“Believe me, I won’t.” Zinnia followed reluctantly. “How do you find your way through this maze?”
“Quite simple, my dear.” He glanced back at her with his twinkling blue eyes. “I know my garden. Be careful of that Curtain plant. You wouldn’t want to be standing too near when it closes.”
Zinnia edged around a heavy, drooping cascade of leaves. She thought she heard water bubbling somewhere in the distance. An unpleasant smell of rotting vegetation wafted past her nose.
“Here we are, my dear,” Newton said as he turned one last corner. “Lovely, isn’t it? I spend so many enjoyable hours sitting on that stone bench over there.”
Zinnia walked cautiously around the corner and saw a rocky grotto covered in slimy green moss. A pool of dark water swirled around the opening of a stony cavern and disappeared into the black interior.
Large evil-looking plants hunkered around the perimeter of the pool like so many hungry predators waiting for prey. Zinnia supposed that, given the general theme of the garden, that was not an overly imaginative image.