Unexpected Love (White Oak-Mafia #2) (5 page)

“A tree didn’t do this. Maybe an animal has dug itself a nice home into the side of the hill,” Tess suggested.

Steel grinned. “Two-legged kind, I’m thinking.”

“Wouldn’t they make the door a little bigger?” she asked. “Unless they were really small.” She raised her hand two feet off the ground.

He leaned back. “The most complete Paleo-Indian skeleton, the Kennewick Man, is about five feet, eight or nine inches. Unless he was an anomaly, they were tall and slender.” He shined a light into the hole.

“Can you see anything?” she asked. If all those leaves had not hidden the opening, she would be terrified they had located Grumpy’s cave. The bear would not take kindly to visitors.

He pulled back and let her look.

She crept forward, pushing her head inside. “It’s deep…and larger than I thought.” When she pulled out, the radiant smile on his face made her grin, too.

“Without a doubt, there was a village here.” He pointed to the trees on his left side. “Probably had summer huts among those white oaks. A garden over there.” He pointed to where the gooseberry grew. “Tribal circle where we found the rocks.” He then nodded to the hole. “The caves were for storage of food, protection for children if under attack, and shelter in the winter. There’s probably more than one cave, possibly some with slightly larger holes.”

She nodded in agreement. “This would actually be good protection. A single woman with a spear could keep the children safe inside a cave with such a tiny entrance since an enemy warrior would have to crawl on his belly to get in.”

“More than likely they’d toss a burning log inside or hack a wider entrance. However, to do either would mean the men of this tribe were dead.”

Tess grimaced. “As you can see, I’d make a terrible archeologist.”

He gripped her hand. “Why would you think that?”

She didn’t understand why her comment seemed to upset him. “Because I was wrong about how matters would unfold. Honestly, I have no interest in wars and fighting, not historically or in modern times. If the news talks about fighting somewhere, I’ll tune it out.”

Her answer only seemed to confuse him more. She tried to explain herself. “Sounds weird for someone whose family rejoices in the crap on a daily basis, but that’s precisely why I hate it. It never ends. It’s just one senseless death after another. It makes me sick, and it makes the people who participate monsters.”

“Well, before you get any gloomier…” He tilted her face up and out to the river. She smiled at the beautiful view.

“As to your responses, you did far better than any first year student I’ve ever had, so I was greatly impressed.” He stood and held out his hand. “Let’s continue up to the top and you can impress me more.”

***

He admired Tess as she climbed the rising path. She looked a bit like an Indian princess ready for travel with her dark hair pulled into a single braid sliding like a clock pendulum on her backpack.

As if they were mentally connected, she stopped so he could examine an area of the cliff wall with clear tool markings. He took pictures. “Any chance there’s a small ruler tucked in one of these pockets?”

“Not that I know of, but, I’ll lend you my three-hundred-foot measuring tape.’ She patted the black handle of the yellow metal casing holding the massive circle of thin fiberglass tape.

Where had she been hiding that monster?

She pulled out about six inches of tape and pressed it against the stone. He took the picture, then took one of her.

“I’m not keen about having my picture taken. They all seem to end up on Facebook with stupid ass titles like
Iowa’s Mafia Princess
.”

“Well, I promise not to put it on the Internet and, believe me, you look more native Indian than mafia right now.”

She smiled and slid the tape back into a deep side pocket of her backpack.

“May I assume you and Helen carry different tools?”

“We do. Grams can eye a tree and tell you its size, give or take an inch. I prefer to measure. It provides more accuracy and legitimacy to my notes.”

“I agree. But that’s still an impressive talent to be within an inch,” he said.

“It comes in handy, but if I’m building a bridge, I need to be a bit more accurate than that.”

“What else differs?” he asked.

“Well, since my camping fiasco, I carry bear spray. Grams has always carried a gun...but I don’t think it was on the hypothetical chance a bear might wander down from Minnesota.”

“I read a book about your grandfather, Eddie Campinelli. Evidently, Helen had just left the house when a mafia assassin came to kill her husband.”

              ***

Tess stopped and glared at him, mistrust swamping her prior good feelings. “You read it, or someone told you?” she challenged. God, what if her father had finagled one of his goons into the position of her boss? “Did my father hire you?”

Steel tilted his head in response. “I read a book called
The Last years of the Campinelli Crime Family
on the plane over here. Why are you suddenly angry with me?”

The bewilderment in his eyes and his explanation calmed her. Still, she needed to explain her burst of anger. “The author got a great deal wrong,” she grumbled.

“Like what?”

“Well, my grandfather was far worse than presented. According to Grams, he was a mentally deranged serial killer that held his power through terror. There was absolutely nothing he wouldn’t do. He made the movie stuff like the horse head in the bed seem like child’s play.”

“Why would Helen marry someone like that?”

“She didn’t have a say. She was fourteen when she was married to the monster. He’d had four wives before her. They all kept drowning in his pool or falling into tree shredders. Grams was smart as hell and a great strategist. She did what she had to do to survive.” Back then, the Rigettis and Campinellis were joined at the hip until the day my grandfather used Don Rigetti’s only daughter as a shield to escape the feds.”

She sighed and stared at the Mississippi River below.

“You don’t have to talk about this if it upsets you.”

“No, if you’re reading shit about my family, you should at least know the truth. The man who entered Grams’ house two days later had come to kill her, not Eddie.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way things are done. An eye for an eye. This man had lost his wife because of the monster, so he’d come to take Eddie’s wife in exchange.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No, he wasn’t born into the family, so he still had some sense of morality. Grams was seven months pregnant. When he failed to shoot her right off, she told him her husband was in the shower and she’d be going for a walk. She left, and when she came back, the monster was finally dead.”

“Wow!”

His shock made her realize what she’d done, how she’d just betrayed her Grams. She rushed to him. “You can’t tell anyone that story. If my father or brothers were to hear it, they would kill Grams without hesitation. In their sick demented minds, the death of the monster was the downfall of the family.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “I only wish it had been.”

***

Pain and sorrow pulsed from Tess’s body. Pushing aside his better judgment, Steel wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. “I will take the story to my grave,” he whispered.

As she pushed to escape his embrace, something he never recalled a woman doing before, he released her and focused on her face, trying to understand her. “Thank you for telling me.”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have. It was stupid to do. Call it a moment of weakness.”

“Or a moment of trust?” he challenged. “You
can
trust me, you know.”

She snorted and continued uphill at a pace just short of a jog.

Before they reached the top, he was out of breath, but since she wasn’t, he tried his hardest to hide it.

With the top of the hill in sight, he didn’t need a guide. He veered right to a large bump in the soil and took a picture. Tess walked on, either not noticing he’d stopped or wanting some privacy.

He sighed. Tess wasn’t as perfect as he’d thought. She had a ton of baggage, which prevented her from trusting men. Not surprising, given the men she grew up with. Still, she shouldn’t be painting every man alive with the same brush. Unfortunately, her distrust would more than likely never change.

Thankfully, she’d shown him this flaw in time. Nothing had happened yet. He could withdraw emotionally, treat her as a talented employee and nothing more, and she’d never know he’d once been headed in a different direction. One that he’d already promised Tom he wouldn’t go.

He pulled the small shovel from his pocket and carefully removed a section of the top soil. What he really needed were brushes. He removed his pack and checked. Evidently, Helen had never needed to paint something.

He recalled Tess talking about building a bridge. Maybe she carried brushes to stain the bridge.

He grabbed his backpack and carried it in one hand as he continued on the trail. He found her on a pinnacle with two small six-foot mounds, one in the shape of a bear and the other as a bird.

She sat between them, eating her lunch. Her pain made him ashamed of his prior thoughts. Tess didn’t need him to leave her alone, to write her off. She needed him to show her a man could be better than the other men she had known in her life.

***

Tess said nothing when Dr. Castile sat down beside her. What could she say?  She’d made a huge mistake telling him Gram’s secret. Why she’d done that, she had no idea. But she couldn’t take it back. She’d just have to go forward and never trust him again.

“Any chance there’s still some left for me?” he asked softly.

For a moment she thought he meant “trust” until she noticed his focus was on her sandwich. She pointed to her backpack. “Reach in. It’s on top. You might want to eat fast. If Grumpy is in the area, he’ll insist you give it to him.”

He frowned. “Do you regularly give him your food?”

Of course, now he thinks I’m an idiot. Who else but an idiot would tell things that could get someone else killed?
“No. I normally spray Grumpy with the bear repellent, but if I do, it will force us to leave at once or we’ll be wandering about blind as a bat with swollen red eyes.”

He reached in her backpack and pulled out a metal lunch box. “Haven’t seen one of these for a while.”

“It’s actually handy. If cooking over a fireplace, you can put the fish inside with some water and steam cook it until it’s fully done. My favorite part is half the fish doesn’t fall off into the fire.”

He studied it a bit longer. “All metal, even the handle. If you had a bit of oil, you could even fry an egg.”

“Or roast acorns.”

He pulled out the water container, also stainless steel. “And sterilize river water.” After taking a deep drink, he opened his sandwich and stared at an inch of lean roast beef between two thick slices of fresh whole grain bread.

To Tess’s amazement, he devoured the sandwich in five bites.

She breathed out. Men were an entirely different species.

He pushed himself up and walked to the bear mound. “These are much smaller, yet far better defined than the Effigy Mounds.”

She nodded in agreement. “These two also seem to have an understructure of rock.”

He climbed a tall rock and stared down at them from above. “You’re right. I can see smaller rocks curve like ribs…and leg bones.” His gaze centered on a large rock peeking through the shallow soil like the skull of the bear. “These are significantly different.”

“Want to hear my recently revived theory?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Since they cut half this hill away to make room for their village, the Indians didn’t have the room to make giant earth mounds. To please the Gods with the smaller mounds, they took the time to build a more lifelike bear and bird.”

“Good theory. Certainly works with what I’m looking at.” He then sighed. “Another possibility is that these two are more recent mimics of the Effigy Mounds.”

Tess’s mouth fell open. Did he really just accuse her and Grams of perpetuating archeological fraud?

Upon noticing her anger, he defended his position. “As an archeologist, I have to consider the possibility these have been built in the last two hundred years, if for no other reason than to prove it wrong because anything different is immediately suspect.”

She returned to staring out across the river. Logically, she knew his comments made sense, but emotionally, she burned from his unstated implication. “Grams found these mounds the first year she came here, and while you might not find her word reliable, I certainly do.”

His hands settled on her arms, and she jumped from the unexpected contact. “I’m not saying either of you perpetuated this fraud. As you stated before, the existence of these mounds actually endangered your trees since it would have allowed the state to claim public domain of your land.”

“Then what are you saying?”