Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(30)
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.