Chapter XV: Magnum, P.I., on Estrogen

Stephanie listened carefully to all Therese had to say about the conversation from the 'ransom' call. This seemed to be another Internet research question and they were hours away from a computer. She sat down on one of the beams that held up the large stone tablets to still her nerves. She had skipped breakfast, having been too sleepy to eat, and was now regretting it as her stomach curled in on itself from anxiety. Therese sat down beside her and began furiously scribbling on the small notepad Stephanie had produced. She seemed to have her equanimity about her and hardly seemed to be shaken.

"You miss it, don't you?"

"Miss what?" Therese asked without missing a beat in her notes.

"This," Stephanie indicated, pointing at the notepad. "You really enjoyed your job before I came along, didn't you?"

"You hardly had anything to do with it," the blonde replied, drawing arrows across the small square of paper. "Evan wasn't happy with my job and I probably would have quit soon anyhow. But, yeah, I miss the adrenaline rush, this tension. I feed off of adrenaline. Sex and food, don't need'em when I'm on assignment. I think I may have found my calling." Therese laughed, glancing up at the brunette. "I'm Magnum, P.I. See, not only do I get to be a bodyguard and carry a gun, I get to do this too," she explained, holding up the notepad where she had been categorizing all the information they needed. Therese stared at the categories for a few minutes and sighed. "I'm not smart enough, never mind. When the girls are old enough, maybe I'll try some more escort assignments. Besides, for now," she said, finally focusing on Stephanie, "I've got what I hope is a wonderful husband and two beautiful little girls."

"What you hope is a wonderful husband?" the VP asked with raised eyebrows.

"Has it occurred to you that maybe the guys are leaving us and this is their way of skipping the country? This is some wild goose chase to make us think they were kidnapped?"

"I don't know what you haven't been telling me but my marriage is just fine," Stephanie replied defensively.

"It's always the wife that's the last to find out."

"Is there something you're not telling me?" Stephanie voice had risen in anger.

Therese noticed the stares they were getting from newly arrived tourists and she replied, "This is not the place to have this discussion."

The blonde rose and began the trek back down the hill, dying to get the dressjacket off in the July heat that felt no different than Georgia. She carefully shrugged out of the jacket and pulled the holster off where no one could see. When the gravel rustled behind her, she turned to Stephanie, her face one of pity and sympathy. "Do you doubt your marriage that much?" the brunette softly asked.

Therese tried to say 'no' but she couldn't. "I…it's…" she dropped her hands to her sides, at a loss for words.

Stephanie nodded her head in the direction of the knoll that looked out over the lake and was shaded with trees. "You wanna talk?" When she didn't reply, Stephanie changed her question. "Maybe you should talk."

"There's not much to say. I doubt myself as a wife and as a mother."

"No, there's a lot there. You're not gonna figure out the next location until we can get on-line. Let's sit and talk before we find lunch."

Therese sucked on her teeth before closing the car door and headed for the grass. Stephanie had no idea what she was going to say. She worked very much on the philosophy of 'suck it up' and 'life's not fair.' Because of working in wrestling, she had steeled herself to all the complaints she heard day in and day out. If she gave in to one, she had to give in to them all. But this was one of her best friends and she wouldn't dare say something like to her. However, she had little experience dispensing advice and wisdom. It hardly mattered as Therese began right away as Stephanie sat down beside her.

"I feel like I'm losing Kevin. I hardly get to spend time with him now. Just as we get settled into bed and we get, you know, going, someone's got a nightmare. I smell like gross baby all the time. I don't blame him if he doesn't want to spend time with me. He's always focused on the girls and that's fine because he's got so little time to spend with them but I can't help but be selfish and want some time alone with him. Is that really selfish? It's not like he works a 9 to 5 job." Stephanie shook her head in response but Therese was already going on. "I severely doubt myself as a mother. The whole breast-feeding thing—I thought I was okay with it but maybe my body's doing things that my mind's thinking. I've really enjoyed myself too much without the girls. I actually have two arms again instead of just one from carrying Lily and two legs instead of three with Dinah hanging on me. I drop them off at Sharon's and Joe's and just sigh, delighted to be alone and everything quiet. I would do anything to go back to my job before I left New York. There's this little thing inside of me that makes me want to keeping do this and not find Kevin. Am I that bad of a person or a mother?"

When Therese stopped, she stared off over the lake. Stephanie thought that the other woman didn't seem to need an answer right away because she needed time to reply. She was once a very selfish person but Therese didn't seem to be saying more than what was right for any wife and mother to feel. She and Shawn had talked often about how their relationship would change when they had a baby and this is exactly some of their concerns. However, they considered it definitely worth the while. Yet, Stephanie was beginning to doubt herself as a woman. She couldn't very well even reply to Therese when she wasn't sure of herself, created to fulfill one function according to male chauvinists, and she couldn't even do that! If she doubted herself as a woman, she couldn't offer more than some sympathy for someone doubting herself as a wife and mother.

"Well, at least you've had kids," Stephanie sighed and Therese's head jerked up. The brunette began to pour out all her worries and doubts.

"Why didn't you tell me you were trying?" Therese asked, rubbing a soothing hand over the woman's arm.

"Because I didn't want to include any more people in our disappointment."

"When did I become 'people'?" she asked, mocking Stephanie's statement to her just a few short days ago.

"We're pathetic."

"I know," Therese replied, putting an arm around Stephanie and pulling her close.

"You still think our guys ran off together without us?"

"Not really but it doesn't mean I didn't think about it on more than one occasion because it all fit together so well."

"You know, they probably turned each other gay. Come on, look at them. Who wouldn't want them, man or woman?"

Therese couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of her own statement and Stephanie's facetious reply. After a few minutes of silence, the blonde said, "You are going to love being a mother, especially if you love my rugrats. They're a mess but they're mine."

"See," Stephanie suddenly replied, "You're not a bad mother. You just said in so many words how much you love them."

Therese smiled at her and patted her knee. "Let's quit wallowing in self-pity and find our guys. If they really ran off, we need to at least track'em down and make'em pay."

"Well, I'm all for that," Stephanie replied with a giggle.

The two women rose and climbed the steep hill once again, hoping to find something that they might have missed but there was nothing evident in the reliefs they could not read. Both of them stuck on the quasi-riddle, they headed out in the rickety rental car to the next café they could find before making the long drive back to the hotel.

"Dylan's still at work," Therese stated, clapping her phone shut after a call to Jamie Levenson. "So, if he's in on it, he is definitely not here."

"Have you thought that maybe this guy could have come over, done his business, whatever that is, called you and then been on a plane back home. We know two people are involved, he could have left dodo number two here with Kevin and Shawn."

"Or Kevin and Shawn are back home with both dodos and we have to jump through all these hoops until one sends us back there. If they're home somewhere, why are we over here?"

"Psychological games, wasting more of our money, I don't know," Stephanie replied and Therese made a sound in the back of her throat that was somewhere between disgusted and frustrated. "Alright, let's go over it again."

"Something there represents evil in the Old Testament and we have to think of the splendor or glory of what represented evil in the New Testament." Both were thought in silence until Therese let out an exasperated sigh. "I went to a Catholic high school," she suddenly announced. "You'd think I'd know this."

"Did you really? How can we be friends for six years and I not know that?"

"Probably because I didn't volunteer it," Therese bluntly replied.

"Maybe this guy knows only you and knows that you went to a Catholic high school. Maybe that's why all the clues are religious ones. This is his hint at who he is," Steph explained.

"Why would he want me to know?"

"We're gonna know who they are eventually even though none of this makes sense."

"Okay, okay, back on track," Therese replied and pulled open the drawers of all the dressers in the room. "Too much to hope for a Gideon's Bible."

Stephanie chuckled. "I always put a phonebook on top of them if I had, um, company. It just didn't feel right."

"That huge statue of Baal had to mean something," Therese said, lightly tapping her lips with her finger and intentionally ignoring Stephanie's statement about company. "That's like the centerpiece of the ruins. It's been too long but I remember Baal was the god of the prophets that Elijah opposed."

"Elijah—wasn't he like the uberprophet of the Old Testament?"

"Yeah."

"Ooo, that's good," Stephanie quickly replied as if she was on the right track. "Then what prophet would be his New Testament counterpart?"

"Paul was kinda called a prophet. He had a whole pantheon of gods to deal with," Therese replied, tapping her lips harder.

"Where?"

"Well, everywhere but I guess the pantheon was mainly Greek and Roman."

"Didn't he travel to Rome?"

"That's where he supposedly died. But he had a major sermon targeting the Greeks about their idolatry—you know, the pantheon. Tradition has him giving the sermon before the Parthenon," Therese explained and scribbled notes of their conversation so far.

"The Parthenon!" Stephanie shouted. "How much more glorious can you get? The statue of Athena in the Parthenon was made of gold and massive. The place is huge. When you think of Greece, what do you think of?"

"The Olympics?" Therese slowly replied, not having a clue where the VP was going.

"The 2004 Olympics—what did they always focus on?"

"The Parthenon," Therese replied resignedly, feeling stupid for not catching on sooner.

"We're going to Athens, baby," Stephanie excitedly stated.

Being out in the middle of nowhere, the two women couldn't get a flight into Athens until the next day. Once again, being out in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing to do. Therese guiltily spent time on the phone with Dinah and talking to Sharon about Lily. When Kevin's aunt asked about him wanting to talk to his daughter, Therese waved her off by claiming he was taking a nap. She had no response for what Sharon had to say next. "You tell him to listen good. Tell him I said that he may be having problems with you but he better not ignore his girls because of it."

"Um…okay…" Therese drawled in reply. This part of the charade was going too far. Hopefully she wouldn't have to stave Sharon off for much longer and then, if she knew her like she thought, she would be forgiven for leading her on.

Stephanie herself was on the phone but with her mother. Both Linda and Shane were under the impression that she and Shawn were staying in San Antonio because Shawn had the flu—in July—and she was taking care of him. She ordered her family, especially Stephen—Shane and Marissa's now five-year-old son, not to visit because the doctor said they might catch it. Of course, her mother was upset that Stephanie was putting her own self in a position to come down with the flu as well but her daughter quickly reminded her that Linda always put herself in that same situation to take care of her and Shane and their father before he became so unfaithful. Stephanie had only talked to Shane once and he said he would stay updated through Linda to keep from waking Shawn up by calling. WWE headquarters was also fed this lie, even though there was only one person besides the board to which she had to answer. Lies were coming so fast and easy now.

TBC…