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And there was nothing. No building, or sign of life in the present or the past. She scanned the area again, knowing that she could happily spend days here combing every single inch of the craggy outcrop...but the sight of absolutelynothingshook her.
Mateo remembered his father being like this sometimes. The extent of focused frustration almost a physical thing. He checked his watch, aware of the time ticking away, knowing that Evie would be feeling it too, so he chose his words carefully.
‘What was Isabella like?’
Evie frowned up at him.
‘You’ve studied her, youknowher. Would she have been obvious about whatever it was she may have hidden here? Would she have placed it behind another clue?’ he asked, unaware of when he had slipped from disbelief to belief that Isabella and Loriella were the same person. ‘What wouldyouhave done?’ he asked.
‘Well, I wouldn’t leave anything exactly where the coordinates pointed.’
Mateo smiled at the indignance in her tone. ‘Okay. But therearecoordinates and theydidlead us here,’ he observed. He considered Evie, who had begun to merge with Isabella in his mind. ‘But you’d want to make it harder than that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not harder. I’d want to make sure that whoever found it was the right person.’
‘The right person being...?’
‘Friend, not foe. And friends, they know you. They’d...knowher.’
‘And what would they know about her?’ Mateo gently nudged.
‘That she was Iondorran.’
‘So, we’re looking for something Iondorran.’
‘Or something that would mean something to someone from Iondorra,’ Evie concluded, her eyes once again flashing with the spark of excitement that was swiftly becoming dangerously addictive to Mateo.
She stood up from the rock and made her way back out into the sun towards the summit the coordinates had led to. Standing at the edge of the island, the sea stretched out before her, eyes closed, she looked like the captain of a ship, the wind pulling at her hair and a determination on her features he’d only seen on the deserted beach the night before.
He felt the breath she took calm him as much as her and didn’t even question when she had become so known to him. And even if that thought yanked on his pulse, pulled at his heartbeat, he gave them both this moment.
Evie began slowly, as if working inch by inch, methodically scanning the land around them from one side of the island to the other. She didn’t use binoculars, or her GPS tracker, she just looked with her own eyes, as Isabella once would have done. She worried her lip with her teeth, a habit Mateo wasn’t sure she was even aware of, but he wanted to reassure her that she was on the right track. That she would find what she needed because he knew that she would, even if he couldn’t explain it.
And when she found it, he saw it in her eyes. In the curve of her lip, in the crackle on the air between them—it was almost like magic.
‘Do you know,’ she asked, taking a step towards a point a little to his right, ‘that clematis flowers—the national symbol of Iondorra—symbolise two things?’
‘No,’ he replied, standing up to follow her.
‘They represent both the beauty of ingenuity and the trait of artifice. Both of which are needed for the plant’s clever ability to climb around impossible-to-reach places.’
She led them back into the shade provided by the thick chaos of rich green foliage, broken up by bursts of bright white and brilliant purple flowers, clustered around thick, heavy vines.
‘The other thing about the clematis is that it is most definitely not native to Indonesia.’
She reached out to thread her fingers through the fragrant vines clinging to the rock behind it and he realised that she was looking for something. No, not for something.Atsomething.
‘Can you get your father’s notebook?’ she asked him, without sparing him a glance, as she began more forcefully moving the ancient strands of Iondorra’s national plant.
‘Of course.’ Mateo reached into the bag she had left by the rock and withdrew the notebook.
She pulled out a loose leaf of parchment, the paper older, thinner and darker than the lined notepaper. He frowned, unfamiliar with it, coming to stand to look over her shoulder as she spread out the old folds creased into the paper. It looked like a rubbing, charcoal shades marking out an outline in light and dark.
‘What is it?’
‘I always thought it was an old doodle, but...’
Evie held the rubbing over the detail she’d uncovered in the stone beneath the clematis vines. It matched perfectly. All along, this had been tucked away in the Professor’s notebook. She’d never asked him about it and he’d never mentioned where it had come from, but Evie traced the marks carved into the stone, surprisingly smooth given the type of rocks they’d encountered so far on the island.
