Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(46)

Grant realized now that the old pile of rubble was probably where Brad got the stones he’d put back in the woods. He’d told Grant once he was just marking his favorite spot—the place he’d told Kate he’d buried his nonexistent pet. He’d even made up a name for the dog. That well might be where Brad had hidden his Adena arrowhead, so he hadn’t told Kate that Brad was lying about burying a dog there. But now—unbelievable—they were burying his dear friend Paul.

They slid the coffin atop the frame that would lower it into the ground. The funeral director placed an arrangement of foliage and roses on it that read Husband, Friend. Grant scanned the cluster of people again, then gazed at the coffin. He’d have to make up with Brad somehow. Life was too short—too unpredictable—to be arguing with someone close. Even if people couldn’t forget, maybe they could forgive. If he got a chance, he’d try to get Kate to reconcile with her father, too.

*

At the reception following the burial, Kate looked around the crowded Fellowship Hall for Grant. He’d been greeting people, helping Nadine. She wasn’t sure he’d gotten any food from the long buffet table. She hadn’t seen him for a while, surely longer than a men’s-room stop would take. She knew he was depressed. However, he’d put on a good show today, and she was worried about him.

She kept busy helping Amber with her three boys, as Todd, too, was mingling, and Amber’s parents had gone home because her mother had a bad summer cold. Like Grant and Todd, Brad had mixed with others—briefly—but now sat at a table in the corner, talking to several people she didn’t know. At least he was drinking only coffee. Lacey was here, not sitting with Brad but close to him.

“Nadine seems to be holding up okay,” Amber told Kate. “I’d be a basket case if I ever lost Todd.” Amber had brought crayons and paper for her boys. They were eating chocolate-chip cookies and scribbling away at pictures, sometimes proudly showing them to their mother and Kate. The younger boys, Aaron and Andy, were drawing trees with a man way up in them, but the oldest, Jason, had drawn a cowboy with a brimmed hat, two guns—and a big, yellow star on his chest.

“Oh, what’s that star for?” Kate asked him.

“He’s the sheriff. I named him Gabe. It’s a badge like Grandpa gave us, but I can’t find it, none of them.”

“So Grandpa gave you more than one star?”

“Three, ’cause there’s three of us.”

“Oh, Mary Ann, how are you?” Amber said and bounced up from her folding chair to greet a woman who’d approached with a very elderly man. Kate had noticed them at the funeral. “And it’s so nice to see your dad again,” Amber said, in a loud voice, shaking his hand. “Hello, Mr. Custer!”

“A nice turnout,” he said, nodding so hard that his white, shaggy mane bounced. “Sad occasion. I’ve seen many a passing, but that’s what you get when you’re old as the hills. I wanted to see this young lady here,” he said, indicating Kate. “I knew her daddy years ago.”

Kate stood and shook his hand. She still felt guilty over giving her father the cold shoulder when Tess and Char had been so glad to see him.

Amber introduced them all around. “Mr. Custer was a friend of Grant and Brad’s dad, too,” Amber told Kate in the awkward lull when Kate didn’t pursue the comment about her father.

“And, goin’ way back, knew their granddaddy,” the old man said in a loud voice. “We was hunting buddies when the Mason men weren’t working at their sawmill. Got us venison in the woods out back of their house, more’n once.”

“Kate’s a professor and explorer of Adena mounds like we have around here,” Amber told him, also speaking loudly, so Kate took the hint the old man was hard of hearing.

And when he repeated the information about being a hunting buddy of Grant’s grandfather, Kate realized he was forgetful at best, had dementia at worst.

“I’m hoping to get permission to excavate the Mason Mound behind their house,” she told him, raising her voice. “And maybe some others in the area.”

“Mason Mound? Why, the boys’ granddaddy looked into it. Let’s see—must have been in ’39, coupla years before a bunch of us got drafted and sent to the Pacific. I knew men who’d survived Pearl Harbor but was sent on a battleship to Iwo Jima, myself. Lived through that hell, you can live through anything, so I’m almost ninety-two now.”

The elderly man went on, while his daughter tried to shush him. The McCollum boys started to squabble, and Amber had to settle them down. But Kate’s mind had snagged on the fact the old man had said Grant’s grandfather had looked into Mason Mound. Did he mean he’d entered it or just studied about it? It surely must be the latter.

Kate wanted to ask about that. He did seem clear on things the further back he went, and 1939 was pretty far back. But Mary Ann was tugging her dad away. It touched Kate to see how devoted she was to him. It made her feel guilty again about how she had treated her own father. She should have asked Mr. Custer about his memories of her dad. His memories could be jumbled, warped information from an elderly, forgetful man, so she’d just ask Grant—if she could find him.

*

In the deserted sanctuary, Grant knelt next to Paul’s angel carving on the tree trunk. He’d tipped it over and looked at it from all sides, especially the bottom, wondering if there was a place Paul could have secreted a package with his Adena eagle pendant inside. If it was not in this carving, he’d try to check out others. Each crack intrigued him but nothing seemed to outline a hiding place.