The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries)
Read The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) Online
Authors: N. S. Wikarski
*
*
*
THE GRANITE KEY
by
N. S. Wikarski
The Granite Key
Book One Of Seven – The Arkana Mystery Series
Copyright © 2011 by N. S. Wikarski
Second Edition 2013
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
* * *
Until the lions have their own historians,
tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
--
African Proverb
Chapter 4 - Sisters And Other Strangers
Chapter 5 - Corvette and Model-T
Chapter 8 - Digesting The Information
Chapter 9 - Lost In Translation
Chapter 10 - Photographic Memories
Chapter 15 - Paranormal Antiquity
Chapter 16 - Troublesome Relations
Chapter 18 - The World According to Maddie
Chapter 20 - Underground Intelligence
Chapter 21 - Mothers Of Invention
Chapter 22 - Damnation Motivation
Chapter 24 – The Object Of My Rejection
Chapter 29 - Hunt For The Bones
Chapter 35 - Wining And Mining
Chapter 36 - A Plot In The Country
Chapter 39 - Decoding The Past
Chapter 43 - In The Name Of The Father
Cassie felt herself sinking. She tried to drag herself to the surface. “Wake up stupid! It’s just a dream. This can’t be real. Wake up!”
She was standing in the shadows in her sister’s antique shop. It was late. Long past midnight. The room was dimly lit by a green banker’s lamp near the cash register. Sybil was standing in front of the glass showcase with a cell phone in her hand. There was a man standing near the door. A man wearing a Stetson hat and he was pointing a gun at her sister.
“Where’s the key, sugar?” His voice sounded lazy, casual. He had a southern drawl.
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sybil stammered. Her sister put the phone down and started inching her way along the showcase toward the rear storeroom.
The man shrugged. “Don’t make no difference to me but you don’t want me tearin’ up your neat little shop just to find it, now do you?”
“I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sybil’s reply was shrill, unconvincing.
Cassie wanted to rush forward to pull her sister away from the man with the gun. Her feet were glued to the floor. She couldn’t move. She tried to scream a warning. “Get out of here, Sybil. Run!” but all she felt was a rasp in her throat where the words should be.
The man advanced out of the shadows. He was close to six feet tall, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. Cassie knew this had to be a dream because of his strange outfit. Aside from the cowboy hat, he wore a short denim jacket, a string tie around his neck, jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots.
The gun flicked slightly in his hand. “I tell you what. The service in this establishment ain’t very friendly.” He flipped his hat aside and it landed on an oak sideboard. His dark brown hair was combed back in a high wave. “I guess if you don’t want to help me, I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and help myself.”
He moved forward toward the glass case.
Sybil darted past him and ran toward the front door. He was faster. He grabbed her by the arm. “Now that’s no way to treat your clientele, honey. Tryin’ to run off and shirk your responsibilities like that.” He twisted her arm behind her back.
Cassie could see Sybil wince in pain. Her sister looked around wildly for some other way out. The man tightened his grip with one hand and pointed the gun to her head with the other. Sybil struggled but he only wrenched her arm harder behind her back until she stopped struggling.
“It seems to me like you can’t hear what I’m sayin’.” The man cocked his head slightly, considering the matter. “Maybe we should go someplace private where I can get through to you better.”
He shoved her toward the door but she twisted out of his grip, running toward the back of the shop. He lunged after her, tackling her. She fell hard against the showcase, head first. Glass shattered and she lay still, face down on the floor.
Cassie could feel a cry of despair rising in her throat but no sound came out. She willed her feet to move. They seemed to twitch slightly but nothing more. All she could do was watch.
The man raised himself to a crouch position. A look of annoyance crossed his face. He reached forward to check Sybil’s pulse and frowned.
He stood back up, shaking bits of broken glass from his jacket. “Well, that ain’t no help at all,” he said in disgust.
In a flash, the scene changed and Cassie was back in her dorm room. She could feel the mattress beneath her. “Wake up, dammit!” she commanded herself. This time when she clawed her way up to the surface of consciousness, her mind obeyed her. She sat up shakily. Her skin felt clammy. She tossed off the covers and sat forward rocking, holding her head.
On impulse she grabbed her cell phone and started to call her sister. “It was just a nightmare, stupid! What are you going to do? Wake her up in the middle of the night to tell her you had a bad dream?” She snapped the phone shut and tossed it on the nightstand.
Gradually her breathing slowed and she lay back down. Curling herself into a fetal position, she drew the covers up to her chin. “It wasn’t real.
It was just a bad dream… Just a bad dream... Just a bad dream...” She chanted the words like a mantra for several minutes until she started to dose off.
Then the phone rang.
Chapter 2
– A Wake
At about three o’clock in the morning far outside the city, four people were staring bleakly at one other around a kitchen table. It was an old style oak table in an old style country kitchen. The kind with tin ceiling tiles and tall glass cupboards above the sink. A single yellow nightlight glowed from the wall.
At one end of the table sat an elderly woman in a terrycloth robe and slippers. Despite the late hour, she had managed to roll her white hair into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. She sighed heavily. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe it. Sybil’s dead.” The abrupt comment came from a blond man in his mid-twenties at the opposite end of the table. He sat slouched despondently in his chair, arms crossed, his legs sprawled out in front of him. “She called me and she sounded scared. She thought somebody was trying to break into the shop. Then the line went dead. I got there as fast as I could but the cops beat me to it.” He exhaled tiredly. “It’s my fault.”
“How do you figure?” The question came from a middle-aged woman with bushy red hair sitting to his left. There were distinct frown lines around her mouth. She took a long drag on an unfiltered cigarette.
The blond man glanced up. “If I’d just gotten there five minutes sooner maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Maybe she’d still be alive.”
“Did she give you a physical description of her attacker?” The question came from a young man in his early-twenties seated to the right. He spoke with a British accent.
“Nope,” said the blond man succinctly. “For the past week or so she told me she had the feeling somebody was following her but she never knew who it was.”
“I think we all know who was responsible.” The elderly woman rose stiffly out of her chair. She walked over to sink, filled a kettle and put it on the stove to boil.
The other three stared at one another in shock. Anger flashed in the middle-aged woman’s eyes. “Those bastards! What do they want from us now?”
“Take it easy, Maddie,” soothed the blond man. “We don’t know for sure it was them.”
The woman called Maddie snapped back at him, “Then who else?” She ground out her cigarette and immediately lit a new one. “What the hell was she working on? Didn’t she tell you anything about it,
Griffin
?” Her sharp eyes focused on the Brit.
“No, nothing,” the young man whispered with regret. He rubbed his forehead distractedly. “Maybe if she had I could have helped her, or better yet, persuaded her to stop.”
The elderly woman shuffled toward the cupboard over the sink. “There’s still the matter of her sister,” she observed quietly. “Poor child, as if she hasn’t lost enough already. This is too cruel.”
“Does she know anything?” The blond man at the far end of the table sat forward in his chair.
The woman at the sink turned around to glance at him mildly. “Do you think you could find that out for us, Erik?”
Erik sat up at straighter, alert now. “What exactly do you have in mind, Faye?”
The kettle rumbled to a boil. The old woman rummaged around in the cupboard for cups and saucers. “I think you should follow her at a discrete distance. Keep out of sight but let us know immediately if anything unusual occurs.”
She went over to the stove to switch off the heat. “
Griffin
, it might prove useful to know what Sybil’s latest recovery was.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed readily. “Anything I can do to help.”
Faye was now spooning loose tea into a porcelain pot.
She paused to consider. “What could they possibly want of ours? What, to them, would be worth killing for?”
