'Like I'll live. Barely.' He rubbed a hand across his face. 'They gave me something to blunt the withdrawal effects, but it can't mask all of them. I'm still twitching a bit. And I feel as if I'm going to throw up, but other than that I'm just dandy.'
'You gave us quite a scare.'
'Your friend, Stonebraker, was in early this morning. He said that he was on his way downtown to talk to the police. He told me what had happened. I guess I owe you my life.'
'Do you remember anything?'
Morgan's face twisted in frustration. 'Just bits and pieces. The doctor said a few hours of partial amnesia is a common side effect of dirty-ice. I seem to recall leaving a message on your answering machine. Something about a letter from Theo, wasn't it?'
'You said you'd received a message from him.'
'Oh, yeah. I think I remember part of it. Some wild tale about being hypnotized by his syn-psych therapist.'
'I've seen a copy of the letter. Theo claimed that a shrink named Dr. Quentin Austen forced him to steal an alien relic. He also said that Austen needed an ice-prism to control the thing. He wanted to warn you and me because we were the only other strong ice-prisms he knew.'
Morgan sighed. 'Poor, crazy Theo.'
'It looks as though his therapist was even crazier. Dr. Austen must have believed that the relic really did have some power or he would never have sent those two men to your houseboat to find Theo's letter.'
'Power?'
Orchid gave Morgan a quick rundown of events. When she was finished, he stared at her in amazement.
'So Austen killed Theo and another guy and then jumped off a ferry?'
'So they say. Rafe is checking into the details now, but apparently Austen had a history of mental problems.'
'What a pair he and Theo made, huh? The crazy treating the eccentric.'
'And now they're both dead,' Orchid concluded. 'And the firm of Adams and Stonebraker is going to find the missing relic.'
'Adams and Stonebraker?'
'She means Stonebraker and Adams,' Rafe said from the doorway.
Orchid turned. 'There you are. How did it go with the cops?'
Rafe shrugged as he walked into the room. 'They think it's pretty open and shut. Crazed syn-psych shrink manipulates equally nutty patient. Arranges to have a valuable artifact stolen and then tries to cover up crime by killing people. Eventually goes completely bonkers from stress of committing murder and kills self. Valuable relic missing.'
'Hmm.' Orchid eyed him thoughtfully.
'Precisely my conclusion,' Rafe murmured. He looked at Morgan. 'I'm told you're going to be discharged today.'
'Right.'
'I want you to do me a favor.'
'What's that?'
'Get lost for a week. Take a trip to the Western Islands. Pretend you just won a contest.'
Morgan gaped. 'The Western Islands?'
'All expenses paid by the firm of Stonebraker and Adams,' Rafe said.
'You're lucky,' Orchid said. 'Second prize was two weeks in the Western Islands.'
Both men stared at her.
She blushed. 'Sorry. My great-great grandmother told me that one when I was very little. She said it was an old Earth joke.'
Orchid gave Rafe a long look as she got into the leer. 'What's wrong? Why are you still worried about Morgan?'
'I don't know,' he admitted. 'But something doesn't feel right about this case yet. It's not just the fact that the relic is still missing, either.'
'Are the police satisfied?'
'Yes. The important part of the case, the murder of Mr. Amazing and the probable murder of Theo Willis, has been solved. That's all they care about.'
'Don't they have any interest in the relic?'
'They assume that it disappeared into the underground collector's market. They'll keep an eye out for it, but it's not a big priority for them.'
'So what's our next move?'
'I'm not sure yet, but we've still got a client. I talked to Brizo. He definitely wants us to find the relic.' Rafe glanced at her as he drove out of the hospital parking lot. 'In the meantime, we've also got a date to attend your cousin's wedding. It's tomorrow afternoon in Northville, right?'
Orchid groaned. 'To tell you the truth, I'd almost forgotten about that.'
'I haven't,' he said a little too smoothly. 'I owe you. I always pay my debts. Stonebraker tradition.'
Orchid wondered why she was suddenly overcome with the old hunted feeling. 'Rafe, I won't lie to my family. I won't introduce you as an agency date.'
'Of course not. At this point I'm just a regular date. The kind of guy you go away with for the weekend.'
Her face burned. 'But I don't go away for weekends with guys.'
'Until you met me.' There was a wealth of satisfaction in his voice.
Chapter 16
It was a typical meta-zen-syn wedding, Rafe discovered. The bride wore yellow. The groom wore blue. The majority of the guests wore white. Seated next to Orchid in a pew near her parents, he felt extremely conspicuous in his dark suit and tie.
He had been aware of the meta-zen-syn tradition of wearing white but he just could not see himself in a white suit. He was luckier than the groom, he thought. After the ceremony both the bride and the groom would change into green, the color that resulted when blue and yellow were combined.
The change of attire was symbolic of the power of synergy.
Meta-zen-syn was a philosophy, not a religion, but here in Northville many of its symbols had been grafted on to the far more ancient religious portion of the wedding ceremony.
Rafe was amused to see that Orchid did have some white in her wardrobe, after all. The dress she wore today was a breezy thing that fluttered and drifted with every movement. It was very meta-zen-syn, he thought as he studied it out of the corner of his eye. It somehow managed to reveal and conceal at the same time. Very modest by any standard, it nevertheless managed to make him salivate.
This was no time to turn primitive, he reminded himself. He was trying to make a good impression here in Northville.
When the vows had been exchanged, Veronica and her groom vanished into separate antechambers. The congregation meditated in silence while everyone waited for the couple to change into the formal green clothes that symbolized the synergistic result of the chromatic union of blue and yellow.
Synergistic principles were symbolized everywhere in Northville, Rafe noticed.
On the way into the austere little chapel he had seen North's three basic tenets carved in stone on the outside wall. Not that he and everyone else on St. Helens did not already know them by heart, he thought. Every schoolchild learned them in kindergarten.
North's Three Principles, after all, were the philosophical bedrock upon which any understanding of scientific and natural phenomena on St. Helens depended. It was the discovery and acceptance of that intellectual framework that had enabled the first generation colonists to survive. The principles were paradoxically both simple and profound.
