Just Fooling Around(45)

Being done with it and everything about it.

He hadn’t regretted the decision. His quest to end the curse had brought him almost as much misery as the curse itself.

Ruefully, he rubbed his thigh and the long, ragged scar that still ached in bad weather even though it had been thirteen years since the April first on which he’d tripped over a piling at a dig site and ripped the hell out of his leg on a steel post that had reinforced the dig’s earthen walls. Other years had brought different manifestations of the curse, ranging from inconveniences to physical horrors, none of which he wanted to repeat.

But a curse was a curse was a curse, and want or no, he and his brother and sisters were stuck with it unless someone could figure out how to lift it.

From the time he was a child, Reg had been the one to claim that challenge. And he’d tried so hard, finding clues in family papers and relics, but nothing that actually panned out to anything concrete.

Anne had helped at first. He’d been an assistant professor at the University of Texas when she was hired as a lecturer in the English department. They’d met on the West Mall one spring day when the seam had ripped on her bookbag. From the first moment he’d seen her, she’d done something to him. If they’d been living centuries prior, he would have said she’d bewitched him, because once he saw her, he couldn’t even see other women. She was all he wanted—to be with her, to work with her, to touch her and have her.

And the most amazing part of his infatuation was that she’d wanted him, too. Their romance had been intense and combustible, their bodies firing even without touch. And when they made love, he was certain that one day they would start a conflagration sufficient to rival the Chicago fire.

He closed his eyes and clenched his fists. He would not miss her.

But he did. Oh, how he did.

He finished off the second Scotch and almost called for another before stopping his finger as it hovered over the call button. No. He was about to step into April 1. He needed to keep his wits about him.

That, of course, had been another thing that he had loved about Anne: her utter acceptance when he’d told her about the curse. She hadn’t told him he was imagining things, hadn’t suggested that he speak to a counselor. She’d simply kissed him and told him that she’d help him break it.

“My family’s from New Orleans, too,” she’d said, when he told her that he believed the historic city was the source of the curse. “Most of them moved away long ago, but I’ve heard enough stories to believe in voodoo and magic and hexes and curses.” She’d taken his hand on a Friday night. “Let’s go this weekend and see what we can dig up about yours.”

They hadn’t been able to dig up much, just vague references to an “angel’s amulet” that one of his eighteenth-century ancestors referred to circumspectly in a journal. From what they could gather, the amulet had been stolen by Timothy Franklin (the most ignoble of the then-ignoble Franklins), and although the value of the thing should have brought the family wealth, instead they suddenly found themselves wallowing in trouble, “which is as the witch had said,” Olivia d’Espry, Timothy’s wife had written in her journal. Olivia and Timothy Franklin were the only Franklins to have children, and Reg could trace his lineage back to them. He was grateful that Olivia preferred to write in her journal rather than do needlework as so many women of that time had done.

But even Olivia’s journal revealed little. A few weeks after acquisition of the amulet, she’d written that one of Timothy’s brothers had sought to dispose of the thing, but soon learned that it had gone missing.

He had hoped that the amulet’s departure would be the end of their bad luck.

It wasn’t.

Anne and Reg had spent the little spare time they could carve out of their teaching schedules to come to New Orleans and plow through whatever records they could locate. But try as they might, they found nothing. Nothing that could lead them to the missing amulet, or even describe it. All they knew was that it had the image of an angel carved upon it—Olivia Franklin had written that it was ironic that an angel could cause such harm.

They hadn’t found the source of the curse or a solution, despite years of looking. The wasted time dragged Reg down, but Anne had squeezed his hand and reminded him that, at least, they’d found each other. And they had. They’d fallen in love.

And that simple fact about broke Reg’s heart.

“That’s silly,” Anne had said, when he’d told her that they couldn’t get married, that even their relationship put her at risk.

“Anne,” he’d said. “I’m standing in a hospital. You’ve got a broken arm, a broken leg and a nasty gash in your hip.” All of which she’d sustained trying to keep him from sliding down into a quarry when the ground beneath them had suddenly given way. On April 1, of course.