‘Because if Olivia really is my grandmother, that means my own mom lied to me — and my dad — about her my whole life. And they had such a huge fight that they never spoke to each other again. It was so bad that my mom told me she was dead rather than try to repair the relationship.’ She looked towards her daughter’s bedroom. ‘I don’t ever want that to happen with me and Macy.’
‘Well, one day she’s going to be a teenage girl,’ said Eddie. ‘Then she’ll hate you no matter what.’
‘Gee, thanks!’ But the wisecrack had disarmed her. ‘So when did you become an expert on the thought processes of teenage girls?’
‘I’ve got an older sister, remember? Lizzie and my mum used to argue all the time.’ He picked up one of the manila folders. ‘So what’re you going to do with this lot?’
‘Read it.’
‘You really think your mum wrote all this?’
‘If it’s a forgery, then somebody’s gone to an insane amount of trouble. There must be two hundred pages here.’ She pulled out a sheet at random. ‘It’s definitely her handwriting.’
‘Two hundred pages? She really was as bad as you.’ He tugged off the tie he had grudgingly worn for the premiere. ‘I’m going to bed. You coming?’
‘Sounds like a good idea.’ She put the folders on her desk, pausing to peruse the loose page. ‘I’ll be right in.’
He paused at the door. ‘No you won’t.’
‘Hmm?’
‘You’re going to start reading it right now, aren’t you? I can tell.’
She hurriedly put the page down. ‘No, I wasn’t, I…’
He chuckled. ‘It’s okay. I know what you’re like — but considering what that stuff is, I don’t blame you. If someone gave me a bunch of letters from my mum, I’d want to read ’em straight away too.’
‘Thanks, honey,’ she said with a smile. ‘Are you the most understanding husband in the world, or what?’
‘I’m the sexiest, definitely.’
‘Uh-huh.’ They both laughed. ‘I’ll see you in a little while, then. Thanks.’
‘Don’t stay up too late. Night, love.’
‘Goodnight.’ They blew each other kisses, and Eddie left her with her mother’s work.
Nina stared down at the folders. Where to begin?
At the beginning, she decided with a smile. She found what appeared to be the oldest pages, and started to read.
5
‘Please don’t tell me you were up all night,’ Eddie said as he padded into the lounge.
Nina was at her desk, picking through her mother’s notes. ‘I wasn’t, don’t worry. You were asleep when I came to bed. I didn’t get much sleep, though — I kept thinking about what I’d read, so I got up first thing and carried on working.’
‘It’s work now, is it?’ He peered over her shoulder. ‘So what’ve you found?’
‘That there are other explorers in my family,’ she said, unable to contain her enthusiasm. ‘My great-great-something-grandfather, Tobias Barrington Garde, visited India and Nepal in the 1840s.’ She rifled through the pages to find a particular passage. ‘Some Buddhist monks showed him an artefact that described Talonor’s expedition!’
‘What, so your ancestor from a couple of centuries back found something from Atlantis?’ Scepticism was clear in his voice. ‘That’s a bit of a coincidence. Are you sure this lot isn’t fake?’
‘More than ever,’ she said, indicating a box of her parents’ work she had brought in for comparison. ‘It’s definitely her writing. I don’t believe in destiny, but it might explain why I’ve always been so obsessed with Atlantis, just like my mom and dad; it’s woven into our family history.’
‘If your mum knew about Talonor, why didn’t she tell your dad?’
‘I… don’t know,’ Nina had to admit. ‘I can’t think of any reason why she would have kept quiet about it. If my father had known about Talonor’s expedition, it might have led him to the Himalayas much sooner.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘And they might both still be alive.’
Eddie put a comforting arm across her shoulders. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah. Thanks. But,’ she continued, pushing the unhappy thought aside, ‘whatever her reasons, the fact is that she did know about Talonor. And what he was doing. There was more to it than just exploration, or conquest — he was specifically looking for something. And Tobias found it. He called it the Midas Cave.’
‘Midas?’ said Eddie, surprised. ‘As in turning stuff into gold?’
‘It seems that way.’
‘Thought that was a Greek myth, nothing to do with Atlantis?’
‘It is. The story goes that King Midas was granted a wish by the god Dionysus for helping rescue his mentor Silenus, and he wished for everything he touched to turn to gold. Which backfired badly, as wishes usually do; whenever he tried to eat anything, it became twenty-four-carat inedibility, and as for when he hugged his daughter, well…’
Eddie looked towards Macy’s room. ‘Note to self: don’t make stupid wishes.’
Nina smiled. ‘But from what I’ve read so far, the Greek myth of King Midas might have originally come from Atlantis — they share a common pantheon of gods, so other legends could have been adapted by the ancient Greeks as well. In this case, though, Midas isn’t a king. He’s an Atlantean prince, and Talonor’s friend and companion on the expedition. The cave was named after him.’
‘Why? Is it full of gold?’
‘I don’t know. My mother didn’t say anything about its contents. But whatever it was, it was important enough that the monks kept its location a secret.’ She found a set of pages she had marked with a Post-it note. ‘According to this, when the monks took Tobias and his companions to see the cave, the journey lasted three days, and they travelled most of the way in windowless sedan chairs to stop them from seeing the route. Once they arrived, Tobias was so amazed by whatever he saw that every time they stopped on the way back, he secretly took navigational readings, based on the bearings and inclination of the surrounding mountains, to try to re-create the path they took.’
Eddie nodded. ‘Smart man.’
‘Not smart enough. He never did find the cave again. But that didn’t stop my mom from trying.’ Nina unfolded a creased and yellowing map. The dense concentrations of contour lines immediately revealed it as a mountainous region. ‘Western Nepal,’ she said. ‘See how she marked all the peaks?’
Her husband took a closer look. Starbursts of lines, most in pencil but some more decisively inked, were connected to numerous summits. ‘I see what she’s done,’ he said. ‘Trying to match the bearings Great-Great-Grandad Toby made to the real mountains.’
‘Yeah,’ Nina replied. She ran a fingertip along a zigzagging line of red ink. ‘She thought this was the most likely route.’
There were other, less decisively marked, paths on the map. ‘Doesn’t look like the only option, though,’ Eddie noted.
‘No. I guess if he was taking the readings in a rush, they wouldn’t be totally accurate. And the map itself dates from the 1940s, so probably isn’t that precise either — certainly not compared to what we have now.’
‘I take it your mum didn’t find the cave.’
Nina shook her head. ‘She thought that this,’ she gestured at a particular region, ‘was the right area, but couldn’t pin it down any further.’
He checked the map’s scale. ‘Lot of ground to cover.’
‘I know. Mom did think she’d narrowed it down at one point, but there’s an old monastery near the end of her route. Tobias didn’t mention any signs of civilisation, so it couldn’t be the right place.’
‘But you said he couldn’t see where he was.’