Forbidden Ground (10 page)

“Yellow jackets building a nest way up there,” Todd told him. “I might have to smoke them out.” He started to unstrap his Jumar ascenders and stepped out of his harness. “You gotta come up with me, Grant. The view up there makes things look better.”

“Okay. Sometime.”

“You got things on your mind we should talk about besides Paul’s loss?” Todd asked as he meticulously wound his ropes.

“Are you upset with me?”

“Not you.”

“With Brad?”

“For one.”

“Has he been trying to edge you out, saying things? You’re my foreman on the mill floor, and that’s not going to change, at least not for anything I do.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve heard on the wind that you and Paul had a falling-out.”

He shook his head and hoisted his gear over his shoulder. “That’s a good way to say it, ‘a falling-out.’ In Oregon, I saw a guy fall from a redwood. He was doing a monkey hang, screwed up somehow. Since the top of the human body’s heavier than the lower part, if you’re up over fifty feet, in free fall, you’re gonna end up headfirst, skull crushed like that poor dude. Like Paul, right? I mean, you saw him—that way.”

“We’re getting off the question about you and Paul having a falling-out.”

“Yeah, okay. He threatened to sell his Adena eagle piece, and I told him he couldn’t.”

“Sounds familiar. I told someone else the same.”

“Brad again?”

Grant nodded. “So did you go to see Paul the day he died to continue the conversation?”

“Did you or Brad overhear us arguing at the wedding?”

Grant didn’t answer, but took a step ahead of Todd as they walked through the forest back toward his house. He turned and put a hand on Todd’s shoulder. They stopped walking.

“The point is, did you see Paul the day he died?” Grant asked. “If so, you need to talk to Jace Miller. Maybe you can throw light on how Paul was acting that day. Jace is even considering Paul committed suicide.”

“I didn’t see him that day. I was going to but came up here—way up to the top of my big escape tree. Amber and the kids were at her folks’ place. Her dad is still giving the kids cowboy guns and outfits, ones he liked when he was a kid, but they’re not into that.”

It worried Grant that Todd was not looking at him eye to eye but gazing slightly over his shoulder. He seemed to be struggling for words.

“Anyhow,” Todd went on, “I didn’t go with the family, so they can’t back me up on where I was if I really need an alibi.”

“No, that’s enough for me, at least. I believe you. I’d back you up, my friend. It’s just that I can’t get over Paul’s death—can’t believe it was either suicide or an accident the more I think about it.”

Todd exhaled so hard his shoulders slumped. “Me, neither. Then your old tree being cut... I swear I’d kill someone if they touched my special tree. Well, shouldn’t have said it that way. Hey, want to stay for supper? The boys would love it.”

“I’ve got a date, and I guess you know who. I’m going home to clean up, shave, even get out of town. And remember, tomorrow night you, Amber and me for your early birthday celebration. If things work out with Kate tonight, maybe I’ll invite her, too. And I’ll handle Brad. You let me know if he steps over the line, but I just can’t tell him to keep away from the mill right now, the state he’s in. I’d like to find a way to get him back on his feet but I can’t see how. And you—you’ll have that talk with Deputy Miller and tell him Paul was hurting for money—but not that he was thinking about selling an Adena eagle pendant.”

“So, come clean with him, but not clean about what we’ve been hiding for years, right?”

Grant could only nod and hate himself a little more for telling half-truths to people he respected about their secret, forbidden treasures. Now, for him, that included lying to Kate.

* * *

Kate surprised herself by feeling grateful when Carson said he had to get back to Columbus. She was angry with him that he’d mostly ignored her while he’d worked on Brad Mason to get an invitation to visit Mason Mound. Brad had said he—and he’d dared to volunteer Kate, too—would talk to Grant about it, but like his brother, he’d seemed reluctant to agree with Carson’s wishes.

After Carson left, Grant phoned and invited her to go to a restaurant in Chillicothe, and that not only suited but excited her, too. She was tired of tragedy, tree or human, tired of looking at her computer screen, and, though she hadn’t told Grant, she’d tripped coming down from retrieving the star at Cold Creek Mound. Trying to protect the star, she’d taken some bruises she could mostly hide under her clothes. If any appeared on skin that would show, she’d cover them with makeup.

She took a hot bath and changed clothes, then decided she’d hide both her laptop and the metal star out in the garage amid Tess and Gabe’s random things stored there. After all, Paul’s house had been ransacked, maybe broken into, and she didn’t want that worry while she was away, nor did she want to cart them along on a date.

She couldn’t get it out of her head that, since Paul might have been carving that Adena figure when he died, it was like some kind of curse. Some Adena found in tombs had died from crushed skulls, and there lay that carving of the Adena pipe shaman figure right on top of Paul’s head.

It was just dusk, not dark yet, so she didn’t take a flashlight. As long as she was going out to the garage, she also took the measuring wheel she’d used to measure mound circumference. She didn’t bother trying to lift the old, broken garage door. How many times had Dad come out here to work on things or just to sulk when he and Mom were having marital problems? Sensing the tension between them or hearing them argue, her ten-year-old self had watched out her bedroom window until Dad turned off the single swinging bulb in the garage, one that no longer worked. Balancing the dish towel with the metal star on top of her laptop, with the measuring wheel in the other hand, she lifted the unlocked padlock from the hasp and went in the side door of the garage.

It was a jumble in here, but Gabe said he’d clean it out. Mingled smells of dust, paint and junk assailed her as well as the smell of gasoline from the lawn mower Gabe used to keep the grass cut. He’d hired a kid down the road to take care of that when they were away.

Kate sneezed as she carefully put her laptop and the wrapped star on top of some books in a box, then replaced the lid. She leaned the measuring wheel in a corner. The two windows were so dirty that it was a lot darker in here than it was outside. Once she went back out, she’d lock the padlock on the door to be sure everything was safe. She knew the key was in the house, so she’d retrieve everything in the morning and work on her laptop again. She was making a diagram of a virtual mound, laying it out on the screen to estimate the size of upper and lower vaults in proportion to the size she had measured for Mason Mound. She had a theory the mound might have only one room for the burial vault, but she wasn’t sure.

She looked at her watch, which was hard to read in the dim light.

Wanting to be ready when Grant came, she hurried to the door. She turned the dusty, loose knob and pushed at the door. It moved slightly, rattled, but didn’t open.

She pushed again, harder. Her sore muscles from her fall ached, but she put her shoulder against the door and shoved. She couldn’t see how the lock could have slipped closed. She would be a dirty mess if she had to go out a window. Would these old windows even open? She could just see having to break out the glass and get cut crawling out.

She went to the window facing away from the house because it had less junk in front of it. It overlooked the cornfield where Tess had been kidnapped, but the corn wasn’t even a foot high now. The window was so dirty she could barely see out.

And then she heard something strange. A growl? A snort? Shuffling? Something sharp scraped along the glass.

She gasped as something brushed close by the window.

She jumped away and hit her head on an old metal lawn chair hanging on the wall. She saw bright colors. She stepped forward and grabbed on to the windowsill so she wouldn’t fall, but she still went to her knees.

Had she imagined the thing outside? She was hallucinating from hitting her head, that was it. No, she’d seen the thing, heard those sounds before she’d hit her head.

It came again, the nightmare. A creature was peering in the window—black face, empty eyes—and antlers, sharp, long antlers with red points. She was face-to-face with it through the dirty glass....

Kate’s shrill scream hurt her own ears.

10

G
rant raised his hand to knock on Kate’s door.
Was that a scream?
It sounded as if it came from around the back of the house. It was nearly dark. He didn’t see anyone. Her rental car was parked in the driveway and looked empty.

“Kate,” he called. “You out here?”

He heard pounding. He sprinted into the backyard. Someone hammering in the garage? “Kate!”

“Here! In here!”

The
garage.
She must have hurt herself, maybe fell or twisted an ankle. He ran closer. She was pounding on the inside of the door, not the big door but the small side one. He saw an unlocked padlock had somehow slipped into the hasp on the door.

“Kate? Just a sec. The padlock slipped down when you pounded on the door but it’s not locked.”

The lock looked old but lifted free. To his surprise, she yanked the door inward and threw herself into his arms and held tight. Her hair was a mess, her slacks had dirty knees and she had tears on her face—Kate crying? He couldn’t believe it.

He clasped her to him. “What happened? You locked yourself inside?”

“Someone else did it. Come around the back with me.”

“Did you see someone? They’re still out back?”

“I saw someone—some
thing.
Oh, my head,” she said as she dragged him around the back of the garage facing the huge cornfield. “I hit it on a metal chair. Got dizzy, saw colors.”

“I’ll run you into the Regional Med center.”

She turned back to him and gripped his upper arm so hard it hurt. “Grant, it was someone in a mask!”

“What do you mean? If you hit your head—”

“No, I absolutely saw it, heard it. Footsteps, a snort. It was a deer-head mask with antlers like the Beastmaster.”

Oh, yeah,
he thought, she’d hit her head for sure. But the image of his own Adena mask flashed through his brain. “Kate, listen to me,” he insisted, reaching out to steady her, trying to sound calm when his heart was pounding. “There
are
deer around here—stags, too. If there was one hanging around this building, the animal could have rubbed against the door, jolted the shackle of the lock into place. I see deer out in back of my house all the time. As for the sounds, it’s windy, so who knows what’s rattling outside?”

“No, it was a person in a stag mask,” she insisted as they stopped in front of the back garage window. “It could not have been an animal, not the way it stared at me—face-to-face with its eyes kind of hidden or sunken in.” She bent to look down at the ground. “Oh, no. Just grass here, no footprints.”

“Or deer prints.”

“But its nose brushed the window—the mask, too.” She bent close to the dirty pane of glass, but he saw her wobble. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her back to lean against him. “See!” she insisted, trying to tug him closer to the window. The streak across the dirty pane was almost impossible to discern in the dark. Night was sliding down from the hills and creeping across the fields, and her Adena-obsessed imagination had played a trick on her.

“It’s getting too dark to see, but that streak could have been made by anything,” he said. “Come on. We’re stopping by the med-center E.R. so they can have a look at your head.”

She turned in his arms to face him. “You have to
believe
me. I hadn’t hit my head when I saw it.”

“What I do believe is that, if it was a person, you can’t stay here tonight. If someone was spying on you, tried to trap you or scare you, it’s a good thing I showed up. Who knows what might have happened next with you locked in there? Come on. Let’s get your things, and you can stay at my place tonight, even longer if necessary. Brad can easily move out of the guest suite to his old room. We can tell Deputy Miller about what you saw tomorrow if you want.”

“I’d better get my laptop and the star. I was going to leave them in the garage, but they’re not safe now. I wasn’t scared to be here alone before, but I feel—threatened. If someone wants to scare me away, maybe it’s Bright Star. Maybe he had someone watching the mounds and knows I took his stars. Or, if Carson stopped and talked to him when he left—”

“Carson Cantrell was here?” he demanded, following her into the dark garage. “I have no doubt he’s familiar with this so-called Beastmaster mask, but why would he want to scare you?”

“It can’t be him, but yes, he was here this afternoon. I just meant he could have visited Bright Star and got him even more upset at me. Carson took one of the stars to get the blood analyzed in a lab. We ran into Brad uptown at the English pub. Over here, I know right where I left my laptop and the other star,” she told him, feeling her way along. “It wasn’t dark when I put them here. And let’s really padlock the place this time. I’ll take the key from the kitchen when I get my things.”

Grant took the laptop from her, then kept an arm around her waist as they went out. He put the lock in place and clicked it closed.

The last thing he needed was Kate in his guest suite, but at least she’d be across the living room from where he slept. And he didn’t really want Brad next door to him again with his late-night comings and goings. What a temptation Kate would be—and her room would overlook the mound site he knew she was aching to visit again, even to enter. Could she have made up this crazy story so that he would ask her to stay with him? Worse, if she had actually seen a Beastmaster mask on someone, could it have been his? And if he took her home with him, he’d be taking her right into the house where he had it hidden in the basement—if it was still there.

All those possibilities upset him, but it worried him most that she might be telling the truth. But he could not have Kate in danger, so he’d have to endanger himself.

* * *

That night, Kate felt really awkward at Grant’s house, not only because she still felt so shaken, but also because she was so attracted to him. At least Brad hadn’t made a fuss when Grant had called him to explain. Brad had only requested to move his own things, which he had, and Kate had insisted on changing the sheets and towels herself since their cleaning lady wouldn’t be here for a few days. Carson would probably be pleased but would order her not to get too involved. And that was much easier said than done.

She was agonizing over her relationship with Grant but also with Carson. She couldn’t fathom that the illustrious, fastidious Professor Cantrell would spy on her, then creep around a run-down garage. But he did have a copy of the Beastmaster mask—a mock-up she herself had made. She’d posted a picture of it on her website and left it in his safekeeping when she went to England. She should have asked for the mask back, but with Tess’s wedding and all, she just hadn’t. Besides, Carson was all brains and business. She could not imagine one reason he’d lock her in and try to scare her. She’d bet on Bright Star first—that he researched her website, saw the image of the mask she’d made, then sneaked around to terrify her, make her want to leave the area. Maybe she was too obsessed, working too hard on this. Maybe she had seen a buck and just panicked. No way was she going to tell Carson about seeing anything weird outside a window.

Then, of course, there was Brad, but where would he get such a mask? Brad had told Grant he’d be “gallivanting till all hours,” so at least she didn’t have to put up with him, though he would have been a sort of chaperone.

Physically, at least, she was feeling better, except for a headache that wouldn’t go away. She did not have a concussion, though the E.R. doctor had suggested she not go to sleep for several hours. She and Grant had managed to have a good laugh when she read him the doctor’s only diagnosis, that she’d had “a contusion that made her see stars.”

“I’ve been seeing stars lately, all right,” she told Grant as they sat in matching overstuffed leather chairs in his living room, looking out into the darkness of the forest toward the mound. “Stars with blood on the points and antlers with red on them, too. I’m sure of it.” With her paper napkin, she wiped sauce off her mouth from the pizza they’d brought back instead of going to the restaurant as Grant had planned.

“I can tell you’re exhausted,” he said. “You’ve really been through it lately, but I’m here to keep you awake for a while, then insist you get a good night’s sleep. Kate, about that vision of the mask through that cloudy, dirty window into the dusk—”

“Not a vision. I saw it.”

“Okay, okay. You saw a Celtic mask you are dying to match to some Adena artifact. You have to admit you’re obsessed with things Celtic and Adena. I’ll bet you dream of them, and a dream’s a step away from a vision.”

She frowned but nodded as they both looked out the window. They could see each other’s reflections there. A moonless night, it was so dark outside and barely lit in here that the glass once again acted like a huge, black mirror. Still, in the spot where his maple had been murdered—like Grant, she thought of it that way now—she could glimpse pinpoints of silver stars in the heavens.

“Want me to close the drapes?” he asked. “Are you nervous because someone might have been watching you through that garage window, and now we’re sitting here? I used to feel this was private, but since the tree theft...”

“You don’t have to pull the drapes. I like being close to the mound. I just wish I had X-ray vision like Superman—or woman—to see what’s inside it.”

He cleared his throat. “So
do
you ever dream Adena?”

“Not lately, but I’ve dreamed about both the Celts and the Adena. Both were tall, powerful people. Their skeletons attest to that. This may sound crazy, but sometimes my subconscious puts my father’s face on a shaman or warrior in my dreams—or nightmares.”

“So, in your dreams, they don’t wear masks? But the Adena disappeared from this area almost as quickly as your father disappeared from your young life—both tragic mysteries to you, right? So maybe that’s the link.”

She turned toward him in her big armchair and tucked her legs up under her. He sat so much closer to her than it seemed in the window reflection, so maybe that huge piece of glass distorted things—and maybe that garage glass window had, too. “I never thought of that,” she whispered. “Yes—very possible I’d make that subconscious connection. And very astute of you.”

“But not like Dr. Carson Cantrell, right?”

“In a different way. People are specialists in their own areas, their own lives. But did I catch a hint of your judging Carson as some sort of intellectual egghead snob when you haven’t even met him?”

“Touché.”

“My mother always used to pronounce that as
touchy.
We’re all products of our past, aren’t we? Oh, that reminds me that I wanted to ask you about your grandmother. You seemed so close to your grandfather—that’s a photo of them in the room I have, right? The one in the handsome wooden frame that looks like it was taken in the 1960s or ’70s?”

“Yeah, that’s Hiram and Ada. I never knew her. She died young, about six years before I was born, so she...she was never talked about much.”

“How young was she?”

“Mid-fifties, I think. That used to sound pretty old to me, but not anymore.”

“She looks kind of starry-eyed, maybe nervous or distracted.”

His head snapped around, and he stared at her. “She did have—a nervous disposition, as they used to say. I guess they didn’t like to talk about it, so I didn’t know much about her, but lots about Grandpa.”

“Well, she was very pretty. She must remind me of someone I once knew, I guess. I didn’t mean to pry. Grant, listen, if I’m any kind of problem here, I can stay at Tess and Gabe’s new place until they get back.”

“I was in there early this morning to see how things were coming with the final details. The place smells like paint. You wouldn’t like it—it might make your headache worse, so you’re stuck with me.”

“You’ve been so generous and kind.” She reached out her hand to him, and he took it. His hand felt so big and strong holding hers. Their fingers entwined. “I appreciate it and want you to know I’m not crazy enough to believe that the Celtic or Adena dead came back to scare me tonight. But that means it was someone wanting me to believe that, someone who hates me or wants me to leave this area. Someone who knows enough about the Adena, he—or she—knew to make and use that mask.”

“Then he or she doesn’t know you very well. Courageous, curious and calm Kate.”

“Not very calm today and tonight. I’m betting it was Bright Star, because I stood up to him. I want to tell Deputy Miller about the stars and the mask. It—it wouldn’t be your ex-wife, would it? I mean, I did walk into the mill with you, but then, where would she ever get a mask like that even if she does want to run me off?”

“Lacey? No way. If that was a Beastmaster mask, its appearance was too well planned and sophisticated. The only masks she’d care about were ones for a glitzy costume Halloween party. Besides, she’s long done with me and has a guy crazy about her—at least that’s how I read it. But as for Bright Star again—yeah, let’s talk to Jace first thing tomorrow, and we can also find out how the investigation into Paul’s death is going. I told Nadine that, when the coroner releases his body, I want to pay for whatever the staff donations at the mill don’t cover for the funeral and burial.”

“I’ll contribute in another way. I’m going to see if Nadine will sell me that tree trunk with the Adena pipe effigy, and I’ll pay her well for it. Surely she doesn’t want the piece that smashed his skull. I just wish I could have asked him to put a Celtic shaman or Beastmaster mask on it, linking the two cultures, which I intend to do.”

They held hands, their arms stretched between their chairs. She had an almost overwhelming urge to snuggle up to him in his chair, but she wasn’t ready for where that might lead.

* * *

The next morning, Grant and Kate grabbed breakfast in town, then kept an early appointment at the sheriff’s office.

“So, how are you getting along?” Grant asked Jace as they sat in his office.

“You mean, how are the investigations on the timber thieves and Paul’s death? Frustrating, to say the least. I’ll have a lot to report to the sheriff when he gets back.”

There was an edge to Jace’s voice. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, but Grant himself hadn’t slept well, either, with Kate so close. “I’m sure you’re doing all you can. You’ve had a lot piled on you fast.”