Moving Target (46 page)

“What is it?” Serena asked.

“The floor. I’m surprised she didn’t lay wood.” He stood up. “Much easier than stone.”

“That kind of wood cost money. Besides, even if she could have afforded wood, she didn’t want it. She was really, really careful about fire. All right. She was paranoid.” Serena shrugged. “The loom was as far away from the little hearth as it could be and still be inside the walls. The baking oven was outside, and everything she could make of stone was made of stone. One of the worst scoldings I ever got in my life was when I started playing with burning twigs from the hearth as though they were Fourth of July sparklers. She doused them—and me—with a bucket of water and yelled at me for being thoughtless: ‘
Don’t you know how easily old threads and papers burn?
’ “

“Threads?”

“Her weaving materials. She called everything thread, not yarn.”

He looked around the small living space. If there had ever been shelves on the walls, they were gone. Not even holes were left. “Did she have a lot of papers?”

“Just my old school stuff. She used it to start fires.”

“Family photos?”

“None that she showed me.”

“And no books.”

“Not that I remember. Unless you count my schoolbooks and the old telephone books in the outhouse.”

“I thought you didn’t have a telephone.”

She smiled slightly. “We didn’t. She got them from somewhere. Cheaper than toilet paper.”

He blinked, then laughed. “Amazing woman, your grandmother. So you both slept in this one room, ate here, worked here, everything. This room was your grandmother’s life.”

“Pretty much. I walked to the bus stop for school, unless she was going into town to sell weavings or rabbit pelts or buy beans or flour.”

He nodded, but he was thinking about something else. Patterns. The pattern of a frightened woman who had one thing she valued so much she had spent her life hiding herself—and it.

“It’s here,” he said simply.

“What?”

“The Book of the Learned must be hidden here. It’s the only thing that fits her pattern.”

“Then it’s lost,” Serena said. “We’re standing in its ashes.”

“She feared fire because she was worried about protecting the Book of the Learned. She would have prepared for it.”

Serena looked through the burned-out doorway. “She cooked outside. Maybe she hid it somewhere out there, away from any fire.”

Erik glanced beyond the lantern light to the wide, dark sweep of desert. He thought of the woman who had had enough strength and determination to build her house with her own hands from native stone, and to live in what she had built for almost a half-century. Such a woman would have been able to walk out over the land and go anywhere she pleased, taking the Book of the Learned with her.

And hiding it.

“If she prepared well enough,” he said, “the book isn’t lost. But it’s a hell of a long way from being found.”

Saying nothing, Serena studied the cabin through half-closed eyes, trying to remember it exactly as it once was. She went and stood where her pallet had been. Nothing was left but her memories. And stone.

G’mom had chosen her building material well.

“Take the lantern,” Serena said absently.

Erik stepped to her side and lifted the lantern’s wire grip from her hand.

“Now go where the loom was,” she said. “No. More to the right. More. She didn’t like having fire too close to her work. Yes. Right there.”

Ignoring the ashes and dirt, Serena sat where she had once slept. Eyes almost closed, she remembered where the loom had been, how it had looked by lantern light when she awakened and her grandmother was weaving, weaving, graceful as flame, enduring as the land itself. She had lacked tenderness, but she had always been there when Serena awakened in the night.

Always.

Wrapped and warmed by covers her grandmother wove, Serena had been quiet as the night, lying half awake, eyes almost closed. She had loved to watch through the rainbow haze of her own lowered eyelashes while her grandmother worked. Usually she fell asleep that way.

But sometimes, especially in the first year after her mother died, sleep didn’t come or came only raggedly, and the child awoke. She soon learned to be quiet, not to disturb the woman who was now her only security.

Sometimes such stillness was rewarded by a special dream, a dream of wondrous beauty, of hammered gold and colorful gems molten with reflected light, time and the lantern pulsing softly while glorious pages turned, rich with feeling and memory . . .

“
You’re awake, girl. Don’t try to fool me. I know.
”

Silence and a child’s unnaturally still body.

“
You ever speak of this, to anybody, and I’ll drive out of here and leave you alone. You’ll be as dead to me as your mother.
”

A stifled whimper, no more. Then silence.

“You forget this. You forget all of it!”

Silence.

Then later, much later, the grating of stone over stone in the darkness.

And in the morning, a dream no one talked about.

Ever.

Serena let out a ragged breath. She was surprised to feel tears running hot over her cheeks, dropping cold onto her hands. That, too, was like childhood.

“I saw the Book of the Learned,” she said, looking up.

Erik’s eyes were a gold as rich as the cover of the book had been, but they were alive, watching her with all the warmth her childhood had lacked.

“Yes,” he said. “You told me.”

“I mean, I really saw it.”

“Yes. You described what you were seeing of your childhood as it came back to you.” And she had said it in a child’s voice that tore at his heart.

She saw that he believed her and sighed. “You were right. The Book of the Learned is here.”

He nodded, more concerned about her than anything, even the book. “Are you okay?”

Her smile wavered, but it was real. “Yes. Sometimes remembering is painful, that’s all.”

“Painful.” He almost smiled. “Oh, yes. It’s all of that. May I move the lantern now?”

“What? Oh. Yes. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Remembering is a kind of thinking. A very special kind.” He took several steps toward the north corner of the cabin. “Was the loom right up against the wall?”

“No. It was a reverse-weave loom, so G’mom had to leave space to check the design.”

He gave her a blank look.

“The back of the weaving was toward the weaver,” Serena explained, “so to see the design, she had to walk around to the other side, which faced the wall. She hung a mirror on the wall to check it through the warp threads, but the best way was to check it face-to-face.”

“Why did she weave that way?”

“Do you really want a lecture on the reasons for—”

“No,” he cut in hastily. “I’ll take your word for it. So the loom was about three or four feet out from the wall?”

“Closer to three feet. The braces on the loom stuck out about two feet on both sides of the frame. She wouldn’t have needed much more room than that. She kept the loom out of the way as much as possible. The cabin is small and G’mom wasn’t a big woman, for all her self-sufficiency. She was maybe five feet three and really lean, as if life and the desert had sweated out all her softness.”

“So the braces kept the loom frame about two feet from the wall. Could she step over the braces?”

“Easily.”

He sat on his heels and stared at the floor that would have been behind the loom before it burned. After a few moments he brushed aside small piles of charred wood and ashes. In the side light, a stone bobbin looked like a palm-sized, reclining ghost. Absently he picked up the bobbin and rolled it on his left palm while he moved the lantern around with his right. There were other ashes, other bobbins. He dropped the one he had and with the side of his hand swept everything away from the wall, to the place where the heavy loom would have stood.

“How wide was the whole loom?” he asked.

“Six feet, at most, including the frame. There were rollers at the top and bottom to take up woven fabric and let out more warp threads for weaving.”

Though he nodded, she doubted if he was really listening. She got up and walked over to him. Standing out of his light, she watched his eyes probe the wall and floor as though he could see through them. She had an odd certainty that he was using a lot more than ordinary vision to study the stones.

Pattern master.

She ignored the unwanted murmur in her own mind. “What are you looking for?”

“An opening,” he said without looking up.

“Into stone?”

“The wall isn’t thick enough, even at the bottom, to protect the book from damage by fire. It has to be the floor.”

She dropped down on her knees and began sweeping burned debris off the stone with both hands. Bobbins rattled and grated, rolling in eccentric circles on the rough stone floor with an unhappy noise that made her bite her lip.

Like bones disturbed in a crypt.

“Go away,” she muttered.

Erik looked up in surprise.

“Not you,” she explained. “The other Serena.”

“Oh. Her. Tell her to take the other Erik with her.”

Her head snapped up. “You, too?” Then, quickly, “Of course. Damn. Is he as handsome as you?”

“Is she as beautiful?”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“I’m not handsome.”

She opened her mouth, sighed, and swept strands of hair away from her face. “All in who’s doing the looking, is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” He ran the back of his fingers down her cheek, leaving a trail of soot. “Beautiful.”

She rolled her eyes. And then she smiled almost shyly.

He tugged at her scarf, savoring the special feel of the cloth. Without warning he planted a lingering kiss on the neck he had revealed, and then went back to staring at the stone floor as if he had never stopped.

Ashes and dirt had darkened any scrape marks that might have been left by use, but nothing could erase the faint outline where stone had worn against stone each time the hole was opened or closed. There was a reddish stone set off-center in the faint rectangle. It was part of the pattern that was woven through the floor itself.

And it looked loose.

“Gotcha,” he said softly. “Take the lantern again.”

She grabbed the wire and moved back a little to give him more room.

Delicately he probed around the edges of the reddish stone, which was the size of his fist. It wobbled very slightly. He pressed harder on that spot. The rock tilted up and came loose. He picked it up and set it aside.

The top of a steel eyebolt that was more than an inch wide at the eye gleamed slightly against the greater darkness in the small opening. He knelt and gripped the ring.

“She would have had a tool for leverage, probably a fire poker, but I think I can . . .” His shoulders bunched as he heaved upward on the heavy ring.

“Let me help.”

“No room.” He grunted, shifted his weight, and pulled again.

With the grating reluctance of something that hasn’t been shifted in a long time, the lid of stone pulled free.

Both of them stared down into the opening. It was as long as his forearm and almost as wide, too deep to see the bottom. He reached for the lantern just as she shifted it and stared in.

Empty.

Disappointment speared through her. Then she saw that the darkness wasn’t even.

There was something at the bottom of the hole.

She lowered the lantern until both of them could see the bundle of black cloth.

“Go ahead,” he said, reaching for the lantern. “It’s yours. Get it.”

She set the lantern down. “There’s room for both.”

Together, breathless with hope, adrenaline roaring in their ears, they reached into the hole with one hand apiece and eased the surprisingly heavy bag into the light. Reverently they set it on the stone floor.

After a moment Serena picked apart the bow on the rawhide tie and unlaced the handwoven sack. As the cloth fell to the floor, she drew in a sharp breath, pleasure and disbelief together.

Covered in beaten gold, incised with two intertwined initials, studded with polished gemstones, the Book of the Learned shimmered like a dream in the lantern light.

“Well, ain’t that pretty.”

Erik and Serena whirled to face the voice.

Wallace was standing in the doorway of the cabin. The blue steel of the gun in his bandaged hand gleamed as coldly as his smile.

He was still smiling when he shot Erik. “That’s for the cliff, asshole.”

T
he impact of the bullet spun Erik around and dumped him on his back across the Book of the Learned while pain spread in blinding waves up from his right side. Serena threw herself over him, both protecting him and searching frantically for the wound.

“Gun,” Erik muttered against her ear.

She lifted her head and stared at him. Glazed with pain, his eyes bored into hers, willing her to remember what he had told her once before. She shoved one hand beneath him and held her other over the wound on his side.

“Get away from him,” Wallace said harshly.

Serena ignored him and continued groping frantically beneath Erik. The butt of the gun bumped coldly against her fingers.

“You silly bitch! Get away or I’ll shoot right through you!” Wallace yelled.

A shot caromed off the stones. Grit peppered Serena’s face. “Don’t be stupid!” she yelled without looking up. “If you shoot through either one of us you’ll ruin the book and all you’ll have to show for your time is two bodies and a handful of shit!”

Wallace had expected anything but the rough edge of Serena’s tongue. Adrenaline hummed through him, giving him the erection that only violence could. If he killed her now, he would be stuck beating off. Fucking a corpse just wasn’t as good as having a live one, willing or unwilling.

He took a long stride to the right and immediately felt better. He could see Erik’s hands. They were slack, empty. His own bandaged right hand ached from the kick of the gun, but it had worked well enough to put a man down and keep him there.

“Okay, bitch. Show me your hands.”