Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(48)

She called the Custer number. Yes! Mary Ann lived in her parents’ home not far from here, and Kate was welcome to come over. “I meant to ask your father more about my father yesterday and didn’t get a chance,” she told Mary Ann. Kate had to admit to herself that if Grant was bending the truth, he wasn’t the only one. Yet she would be sure to make what she’d said true—she would ask Sam about her own father, too. Maybe it would be a first step to understanding not only Sam, but also her dad, at last.

*

Grant had spoken to Nadine about Paul’s carvings after the funeral. She’d told him to come by, and she’d give him first choice on the ones she was selling. She also told him Jace Miller said she could collect the one that had killed Paul.

“How about I stop by the police station and bring that back to you?” he’d asked her, so here he was, rolling the Adena carving up Nadine’s driveway in a wheelbarrow. When he’d loaded it on his truck, he’d carefully looked it over for a hiding place.

“Thanks so much, Grant,” Nadine said as she opened the garage door for him to roll the trunk into Paul’s workshop. Grant noticed the chaos had been straightened; order restored; things rearranged. Of all the places over the years Grant would picture his longtime friend, it would be here or up in the lost tree house, cut down just as prematurely as Paul had been.

“You know Kate wants to buy this,” he reminded her as he carefully tipped the wheelbarrow and slid the tree trunk to the floor where she indicated, among the others.

“She said she’d stop by soon, but I suppose she’ll need you to haul it. I’ll be glad to get it out of here,” she admitted, throwing a canvas work apron over it. He saw her shudder. “That squat, strange Adena shaman he carved always gave me the creeps anyway, like he was guarding something with a curse on it. It’s almost like it came to life and struck Paul down.”

Grant felt a chill slither up his spine, too. That was all he needed—Nadine as well as Kate obsessing that the ancient Adena could come to life and haunt humans who disturbed their resting places. In a way, that was what had killed his grandma Ada.

“Grant,” Nadine rushed on, turning toward him before he could find something comforting to say. “Paul’s death had to be either an accident or—or worse. As soon as Gabe gets back from his honeymoon, I’m going to talk to him about making a full investigation. I can’t stand being here alone at night anymore, so my sister’s coming to stay for a while—to help me get over...over Paul’s loss.”

“That’s a good idea, Nadine. I’m sure she’ll be a big help.”

Grant recalled Jace had told him Nadine refused to use the word murder, but that she thought that was what it was. And she’d been doubly upset, he’d said, when Jace checked with her sister and the gas-station attendant in town to be sure the time frame she’d given him for her whereabouts the day of the murder matched what she’d said, so that she could be ruled out of being a person of interest.

A person of interest. Nadine was that to him partly because she was battling an illness and needed support and money, partly because she might have an idea about where Paul would hide something priceless. Grant figured Paul hadn’t told Nadine about the eagle pendant or she wouldn’t be hurting for money—unless she’d promised to keep her husband’s secret, keep his precious boyhood find hidden.

“Everything all right with Paul’s will?” Grant asked. “Do you need any help with moving stuff out or cleaning the house before you sell it?”

“You Mason men are so supportive,” she said. “I’ll let you both know when I’m ready to take you up on it, because Brad’s insisted he’ll help me go through Paul’s things.”

*

“Your daddy was sure a handsome man, good salesman, too,” Sam Custer told Kate as she sat with him in the old farmhouse his family had lived in for years. Mary Ann still referred to this front room as the parlor. “Like all of us, he done some wrong in his days, but at heart he was a good man—a man’s man.”

Kate nodded, though she disagreed with most of that. Her father had not acted like a good man. He was a woman’s man, and not just one woman. She listened attentively to Sam’s renditions of times Dad stopped by to see him.

“Course, I understand what a tragedy it was when he left you girls. He hated hisself for that part of it, but it always takes two to tango—two to break up a marriage, too.”

She bit down the instinct to come to her mother’s defense; maybe there were things she didn’t know. Besides, she wanted to get on the subject that had really brought her here, before Sam went off on another World War II tangent.

“I found it interesting that you recalled Grant’s grandfather looking into the mound behind their house—your old hunting grounds,” she said when she finally got a word in, remembering to talk loudly. “But did you mean he just looked into information on the Adena or did he manage to actually look inside the mound?”

“Oh, sure, that’s it. Don’t think many knew. Cleared hisself out a real narrow passage in, so he said. Had to move stones, dirt, coupla fallen beams—solid, old wood, oak, he thought. Took him years to clear away the debris from that, saw the pile of it more’n once when we was after deer over there. Whatever he seen in that mound scairt him bad. You know, I swear deer was thick as mayflies round their woodlot sometimes. Shot me a big buck there right after the war, twelve pointer. Venison’s a far cry from what we ate in Crations during the war, you know....”