Page 53 of Seduction Under the Southern Stars

She laughs. “I don’t know if we have time to do all of those.”

“Aw.”

She thinks about it. “The Space Place does night-time tours. So we could go to Weta in the morning, take a drive to Stonehenge in the afternoon, and then do the planetarium at night.”

“Fantastic. Let’s do it. Unless you have something better planned.”

“No.” She retrieves the last forkful of brownie and dips it in the cream. “I’d only have been drawing bird bones.” She holds the fork out to me. “You want some?”

I lean forward to close my lips around the brownie, but at the last minute she turns it and eats it herself. “Gotta be quicker than that when there’s brownie around,” she teases.

“I don’t know about me, but you’re a regular Anne Bonny,” I complain, leaning back.

She grins at the mention of the famous female pirate. “Yo ho ho. So what are you up to after this? Heading back to your apartment?”

“Not sure. What are you doing?”

“I normally work until five on a Saturday. Afterward Zoe sometimes persuades me to go out for a drink. She’s away, though. Apparently doing wicked things with Joel, if you guessed right. I’m going to have words with her about that when she gets back.”

He chuckles. “Can I come back to the museum with you? You can take me around. Show me the exhibits.”

“You really want to spend time with a nerdy bookworm looking around dusty exhibits on a sunny summer afternoon?” she asks, amused.

“I do as it happens. Sounds exactly like my kind of thing.”

“Okay,” she says happily, and finishes off her coffee. “Come on, then. You want to walk back along the waterfront? It’s only about fifteen minutes, and it’s a nice day.”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

So the two of us head out, and we walk back to the museum along the Commonwealth Walkway. It’s a beautiful day, but windy, the brisk breeze whipping the sea into white horses and tugging strands of hair from Elora’s neat bun. We pass the area where she found me sitting yesterday, after I came back from the funeral, and continue on up to the museum.

For the next couple of hours, she gives me a tour of the exhibits. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s knowledgeable about all the artifacts, because she’s always been able to retain information at an impressive level, but I am surprised at how good she is at communicating it, considering she’s so quiet and shy. Or am I? I remember the stories she used to tell as a young girl, and realize that’s all she’s doing now, turning the dull and dry details of names and dates into vivid stories about people and their adventures.

“This is a sampler made by ten-year-old Anabella Lyttle in 1850,” she says as we stand in front of it. “It’s the oldest sampler verified as being worked in New Zealand. Apparently she could play the piano, sew, speak French and Italian, and sing like a nightingale. She must have been a precocious little brat.”

I chuckle. “You’re very good at this.”

“It’s a practiced art. I’ve been giving tours of the museum for a few months now.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize.”

“Fraser roped me in. One of his attendants had gone sick and he didn’t have anyone to fill in, so he asked me. I quite enjoyed it, and some of the visitors left nice comments about me on the questionnaire, which was kind. Fraser said I ought to go into teaching, but that’s a step too far. I don’t want to deal with people every day.” She gives a wry smile.

“You enjoy working in conservation?” I ask as we walk back along the corridor toward the central foyer.

“Oh, I don’t just do conservation. All the archaeologists here mix and match a bit. I help out with exhibits, and I sometimes meet with field archaeologists to discuss showing their finds. Fraser’s pretty good at encouraging us to try different things.”

“Do you see much of Joel?”

“Less now I don’t live at their place. He still shares a flat with Fraser when he comes back here, but he’s away a lot on excavations.”

“But you’re happy?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Content, I guess.”

“I’ve looked you up on social media,” I admit. “But your profiles are private, so I wasn’t able to see any photos of you.”

“I’m not on it much,” she admits. “I use the Internet as a library, and that’s about it. I have no interest in seeing what people I went to school with are doing now. Or looking at celebrities, or reading about news that will depress me. I know I’m sensitive to negative influences and I prefer to focus on things that make me happy. Like archaeology, history, nature, yoga, that kind of thing.”

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