Moving Target (11 page)

A warm breeze curled through the open car windows, bringing with it the faint herbal scent of the desert. The air was silky with sun and warmth. The sky was a radiant blue. The thought of going back and confining himself indoors with the requirements of calligraphy or illumination didn’t appeal to him right now. He needed something more physical to appease his restless mind and body.

He scrolled back over Ellis Weaver’s records, noted her address, and decided to look around. Any place where someone had lived for nearly fifty years had to have some kind of information to offer about that person, some trace, some thing that would yield an insight into the woman who had apparently owned—and concealed—four incredibly intact pages from the Book of the Learned.

Unless the whole thing was a story and Serena was exactly what Warrick had said she was, a woman out to make good money on bad art.

As Erik turned on the engine and pulled out onto Bob Hope Drive, he realized he didn’t want Serena to be a fraud, because that would mean the pages from the Book of the Learned were fraudulent, too.

He could live with the woman being a cheat, but he really wanted those pages to be real.

S
erena knew there was nothing more she could do but watch the erratic breeze stir ashes across her grandmother’s abandoned hearth.

It was hard to be here, to match past memories of warmth and safety with present destruction. The shoulder-high native stone walls were scorched and ruined. The wooden beams and roof that had been high enough to house a big loom beneath were less than charcoal. What had once been a stout wood door was nothing but a gap in the rock walls. The chimney stood alone, a tall memorial to the fire that had consumed everything but stone and the single ancient strip of textile that had miraculously survived.

That fragment haunted and compelled Serena in a way she couldn’t describe. She still wore the cloth draped around her neck and tucked inside her blouse. The textile was quite wonderful—cool when she was warm, warm when she was cool, always kitten-soft and appealing to her skin.

The pages haunted and compelled her in a different way, like her dreams. Each time she studied the leaves they felt deeply familiar. There was a sense of relationship, of belonging, that was both eerie and inescapable. She wondered if it had been like that for her grandmother, if she somehow had been enthralled by the past, unable to move, caught by lives she had never lived yet knew too well to deny.

If I fail and you decide to go after your heritage, remember me when I was your age. Think like the woman I was then.

Even though the temperature was almost eighty, Serena rubbed the gooseflesh that roughened her arms. She didn’t know precisely what her grandmother had meant by that statement—how could she think like someone she had never known as a young woman?—but there was no mistaking the warning that followed.

She just wondered if the warning had to do with madness or sudden death.

Trust no man with your heritage. Your life depends on it.

Shivering, she couldn’t help thinking that the sheriff was wrong, that Lisbeth’s death had been premeditated murder rather than a random violent act. If so, sending out copies to two appraisers who happened to be men was rather like putting raw meat in front of hungry wolves.

Forgery is a dangerous art.

Maybe the pages locked in the storage compartment of her van were extraordinary, elaborate, dangerous lies, lies that had ultimately killed her grandmother. Was the granddaughter now the next in the line of fire? Was that her heritage?

Without realizing it, Serena put her palms against her neck and let the peace of the ancient cloth seep into her. Her rational mind knew she shouldn’t wear the textile, knew that her skin was leaving its traces on the weaving, but she couldn’t bring herself to take it off. She felt naked without it. Vulnerable.

I’m getting as nutty as people thought my grandmother was.

Serena shook herself and forced her thoughts away from danger, murder, madness, death, everything that had haunted her since she had read her grandmother’s note, seen the pages, felt the weaving warm to her touch like something alive. Whatever her heritage might ultimately be, nothing of it survived here in the burned shell of her childhood home.

Abandonment lay like a sooty shadow over everything. Long after the police had left, target shooters had moved in. Someone had tied a piece of crime-scene tape to the charred frame of the pickup truck and used it for shooting practice. The tape had faded to pale yellow and was ragged with wind and bullet holes. Brass cartridges—some tarnished, some bright—dotted the gritty face of the desert. Spent shotgun shells in a rainbow of colors lay scattered like giant confetti around the perimeter of her grandmother’s yard. Obviously the locals had decided that the abandoned cabin was more entertaining for target practice than the place they had been using, which was closer to the graded road.

A pale flash of movement caught the corner of Serena’s eye. She turned toward the dirt track that led to the ruins. Barely a mile away, a light-colored SUV kicked grit and dust into the air.

Instantly she knew the vehicle was headed right for her. There was no other place it could be going. The twin ruts dead-ended at her grandmother’s isolated house.

Trust no man. Your life depends on it.

Without stopping to consider, Serena yanked her keys from her pocket and hit the remote-lock button for her van. Then she turned and sprinted away on a faint trail that went up the steep slope just behind the cabin.

For all their height and bold name, the Joshua trees offered no hiding places for someone her size. Neither did anything else. The brittle shrubs that grew out of the unforgiving earth were little more than waist-high. Their stingy, stunted leaves offered no real chance of concealment.

She didn’t even give the plants a second look. She knew exactly where she was going, just as she knew there were two ways to get there. The shorter way was more difficult, because it involved climbing down the steepest part of a broken cliff. She had learned the hard way that it was easier to climb up rather than down. She had much less control in a descent.

Serena took the long way to her hiding place. Boulders bigger than a man poked out of the loose, rocky soil. She dodged around them and cut back into a narrow ravine. The farther into the ravine she ran, the steeper the trail got. Finally it ended in a fractured, jumbled granite cliff. Three quarters of the way up the uneven wall there was a shallow cave. As a child, she often had gone up there to sit, look out over the empty land, and dream of patterns she would weave on her grandmother’s loom.

Exposure had softened the rough edges of the ragged stone wall until the outer surface crumbled and came apart at a touch. Decomposed granite, or DG as the natives called it, was tricky in dry weather and treacherous in rain. If it had been wet, she wouldn’t have tried the cliff at all. Even as dry as it was, she still slipped and nearly went down several times before she pulled herself close to the lip of the hidden cave.

The old broomstick she had left jammed among the rocks was still there, weathered silver and hard as stone. She grabbed the stick, poked it into the overhang, and waited. No furious rattling sound came from the gloom at the back of the cave. She poked again just to be sure; rattlesnakes loved the little cave as much as she did, which was why she had stashed a broomstick nearby after she discovered the cave as a girl.

When she was sure she was safe, she pulled herself over the lip of the hidden cave. Wedging herself out of sight was harder now than it had been when she was eight or even twelve. Despite her slender appearance, there was a lot of her to conceal. The cave had been a skinny child’s hiding place, not one designed for a woman five feet seven inches tall in her bare feet.

Lying on her side, she brought her knees up to her chin and hugged her legs back against her body until only the scuffed toes of her shoes poked out. As for the rest, her dusty jeans and dark-blue denim shirt blended right into the shadows.

Breathing hard, she looked down at the cabin just in time to see a man get out of a dusty silver Mercedes SUV. He glanced around, then called something that could have been her name.

She didn’t answer.

He called again.

This time Serena was sure it was her name. It didn’t make her feel any more like answering. As she hadn’t told anyone that she was coming here, she had to assume that she had been followed.

It wasn’t a comforting thought.

Silent, motionless, she watched while the man walked slowly around the house, zigzagging as though he was looking for something in particular. She had time to notice that he was a rather tall man, certainly too big for comfort. He also moved too easily, casually vaulting a wall here and leaping down an embankment there, landing lightly, and searching, always searching, the ground.

Whatever he was looking for, it didn’t take him long to find. He went back to his SUV, took out some rough country shoes, pulled them on, and started up the faint trail that led to the cave. Very quickly he vanished into a crease in the land.

Serena waited, almost afraid to breathe. If he was following her trail, in about a minute he would appear in the open spot before the ravine.

She saw him in much less than a minute. His long legs devoured the ground at a frightening pace. His eyes searched the granite wall as though he sensed she was hiding in one of the dark pockets scattered across the crumbling face of the cliff.

Instantly she began planning her escape route. If he attempted the tricky climb up to the cave, she would scramble up to the top of the wall and then over and into the next ravine, which led to the back of the cabin. It was the short way down. She would be in her car and gone before he was halfway up the wall.

“Serena? Are you all right?”

When she didn’t answer, he started up the broken cliff as though it was a walk in the park. His speed and coordination scared the hell out of her.

The cave had become a trap.

She shot out of the darkness and lunged at the crumbling wall that stood between her and a safe route back to the cabin. She was only a few feet from the top of the wall when a piece of rotten granite crumbled under her foot. Suddenly she was skidding, falling, turning. She threw her arms out wide, trying to catch something that would stop her fall.

Powerful hands clamped around one flailing wrist. Then she slammed up against the wall with enough force to knock her breath out. Even so, she would have kept on sliding if it hadn’t been for something at her back, wedging her against the rocks.

That something was a man. A big one.

“I hope the pages are in a safer place than you are,” he said in a rough, deep, impatient tone.

Serena froze, wondering if she was hearing the voice of her grandmother’s murderer.

And her own.

A
re you all right?” Erik asked the woman whose back was to him as he pressed her into the cliff.

Serena made a stifled sound that could have meant anything.

“When you didn’t answer my call,” he said, “I thought you might have wandered off and gotten hurt. DG can be a real bastard to climb.”

With a wild shudder, air returned to Serena’s lungs. She breathed hard and deep until she trusted herself to say, “Who are you?”

“Erik North.”

“The manuscript appraiser?”

“Yes.”

Thank God.
He wasn’t a stranger. Not exactly. Which meant that she was probably safe.

Probably.

Relief turned her bones to sand. She took a broken breath and sagged against the rock face without even noticing its rough surface.

Erik felt the difference in her, as though strings had snapped and she could barely hold herself upright. He tightened his grip and leaned into her, holding her upright with his own body.

She went rigid and would have fallen all over again if it hadn’t been for the hard length of the man pinning her to the rocks.

“Easy, Serena. I’ve got you.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” she asked through locked teeth.

He laughed. The puffs of air disturbed some of her soft, flyaway hair at the side of her face. He was so close that he could admire the burning shades of red and gold in her loose braid, sense her heat, feel each breath she took. He could all but taste her. If he wanted to do that, all he had to do was nose aside the unusual, quite beautiful, scarf she was wearing loosely around her neck.

The thought of doing just that appealed to him. He didn’t know which would be softer, the scarf or the luminous skin. He did know that he was going to find out. Soon.

Wryly Erik was glad that Serena wasn’t a mind reader; she would have been clawing away at the cliff again, trying to escape him. His climbing skills were up to the chase, but he wasn’t sure hers were. As he had pointed out, DG was treacherous stuff to climb on, especially if you were in a hurry.

“Can you stand, or did you turn your ankle?” he asked.

Odd sensations had rippled over her when his laughter stirred against her skin. At some elemental level, that laugh was familiar to her. That voice was familiar to her. Like the pages. Like the fabric that had slipped up her neck as though to protect her face from the cliff.

She knew this man.

The certainty was as shocking as feeling her footing give way had been a few moments before.

“Are you sure you’re Erik North?” she asked hoarsely.

“Positive.”

She didn’t know how to say that he didn’t fit her idea of an appraiser of medieval illuminated manuscripts and she didn’t want to say anything as stupid as Don’t I know you from somewhere? So she asked the question that had been bothering her since she first saw him. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to figure out if you can walk or if I’ll have to carry you.”

“You can’t. I’m too big.”

Laughter stirred against her neck again. The scarf lifted on a bit of breeze and floated back to brush over Erik’s lips. Smiling, he nuzzled the soft, clingy cloth in return.