Alice At Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

moment, when I touched the man, and the child.
    Then I was real.
    Alice, who are you? Where are you?
    Griffin had very few lucid moments, and most were devoted to her. Some parts of him were ruptured, some parts were broken, some parts were merely bruised or torn. All would heal. But in spirit he was shattered. Hell of a way to end a career , he thought when the fear crawled through him. Only thirty-nine years old and finished .
    He lay in a room in a private Spanish clinic available only to the rich and well connected, which included treasure-hunting scions of the merchant-shipping Randolphs of Savannah, Georgia, USA. His right leg was encased in a cast from knee to ankle, and his left arm from elbow to wrist. He was covered in bandages over sutured wounds. His veins were fitted with IV’s, his chest with electrodes, his nose with an oxygen tube. He was a tall, strong man, but the bizarre accident had ruined him. He drifted on a slow tide of medication, and when he could think, he sweated.
    I can’t go back under the water. I can’t do it anymore. I’m seeing things. I’m losing my mind.
    Few people realized he lived with such fear of the deep that he shook and vomited every time he made a major dive. His infinitely loyal crew insisted he wasn’t afraid, only suffering from a slate of very odd food allergies. He came out of the water ravenous and consumed whole bottles of pure vegetable oil. For meals he ate pounds of salted fish and had been known to scoop live oysters from the water, crack them with any blunt object handy, and suck them straight from the shell. He drank heavily but was never seen drunk, he gave his money away as often as he kept it, and he had no known home address other than an old cottage along an isolated stretch of the Georgia coast, near the town of Bellemeade.
    He had always been a loner and circumspect about certain odd traits in himself, things that had only seemed more isolating to a rich southern boy growing up without parents. He hated the water but was the finest swimmer. He was a man of strange diets and quiet passions breaking women’s hearts without any cruel intentions, repulsed by how easy it was to lure people to him. He had a talent for finding things beneath the water, a vaguely disreputable ability to pry treasures from the wrecks of the world’s most forgotten ships. But he was always, always terrified of the water he commanded so easily.
    Sometimes, he sang silently as he went down.
    And the ocean sang back.
    There had been no gold waiting for him in the wreckage of the Excalibur , no hidden jewels or other artifacts. Relatives of its long, lost crew had hired Griffin. Would he search the wreckage for the men’s personal belongings and remnants of their skeletons? It was a morbid, dangerous job, diving into a treacherous hulk edged with jagged metal, its innards a labyrinth of hallways and claustrophobic cabins. Every ordinary deep-sea salvage company had turned the families down or had demanded a huge fee.
    Griffin took the job for nothing. He was famous as much for his quirky sense of honor as for his notorious luck in locating priceless artifacts beneath the waters of the world. Among the network of other reputable treasure hunters—those who didn’t simply loot sites, but brought along archaeologists and historians to study them—it was gossiped that his successes came from inside information, thanks to his family connections. The Randolphs of Savannah were one of the oldest cargo-shipping clans in America.
    Now he lay in bed, dreaming in fluid fantasies that might be nightmares. This was not the first time he’d imagined women rescuing him from deep water.
    In the midst of a storm, thirty-four years in the past, far beneath the surface of the cold Atlantic off the coast of Georgia, he saw the Bonavendier sisters, Lilith, Mara, and Pearl. They were his mother’s relatives, distant cousins, notorious and strange. Their hair floated in long curtains behind him. He was