Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(54)
Even more sobering than that, if an outsider knew the four of them had stolen priceless artifacts from the ancient dead, Grant feared he might be next on someone’s hit list.
17
“Hi, darling,” Carson said the moment Kate answered her phone. “I got your message and sent a grad assistant over to the library archives to comb old records for any mention of Mason Mound, but no go.”
Disappointed, she exhaled hard. It seemed so long ago she’d been his grad assistant, doing his bidding. At least now, he was doing hers—or was it still the other way around?
It was Sunday afternoon, and she’d been changing clothes after church when Carson called. Wearing only her bra and panties, she paced in the bedroom as Carson went on and on about his ideas for a speech he’d been asked to give in California. Now and then, she interjected with pleasantries but her thoughts were elsewhere.
Only she and Grant were in the house, and he’d said he was going to fix them a quick lunch. Brad had attended church, sitting in the back with Lacey and her parents, then had driven off somewhere with her. She’d even picked him up at the house and honked for him to come out like some teenager.
When Carson called, Kate had been staring at the photo of Grant’s grandparents, Hiram and Ada Mason, wishing she could crawl into that picture and go back in time to talk to them. Poor Ada. Kate really empathized with her seeing visions. Her memory of the Beastmaster she thought she’d seen out that smeared garage window was still vivid. Sometimes in the middle of the night, it came at her like flashbacks lit by a flickering strobe. Like Ada, Kate felt haunted.
She cleared her throat and told Carson her search-the-archives idea was just another stab in the dark. “It’s how I feel I’m operating around here. I’d love to have a crew tackling the Mason Mound entrance right now.”
“Kate, for heaven’s sake, you’re living with the man who owns and controls it. When he’s not around, walk out there, check it out. Especially if it was entered in the last century, and you found the side facing an old water source, you can figure out where the entrance is. Even a little excavation could tell you if it’s a horizontal entry shaft, which will make things much easier for us. Meanwhile, if someone made a solo entrance years ago and covered it up, you could, too. If it was dug out once, another entry should be a piece of cake.”
“Carson, no way! Grant trusts me. He’s helped me, taken me in.”
“Evidently, taken you in in more ways than one. We’re talking the universal knowledge and preservation of human experience here.”
He began to talk about his work again, saying he’d send her a copy of an article he’d published about Etruscan tombs in Italy, that she should read it and “take it to heart.”
She sighed as her thoughts drifted again. Carson...Italy...everything but Grant and Cold Creek seemed so far away. She was pretty sure the Mason Mound entry lay behind those hawthorn bushes, which looked either old or ill. They seemed to be dying, so she wouldn’t feel too bad about cutting them back some. Since she hadn’t noted any others of those spiny trees in the area, could Hiram Mason have planted them there, either to assure poor Ada the mound was sealed—or to make sure no one else entered it after he did? But if she cut her way through them, or asked to dig them out, Grant could tell her to keep away for sure.
Either he was just plain ignorant of the fact his grandfather had entered the mound—and he was not an ignorant man—or he was lying to her, trying anything to keep her from getting into what must be a burial chamber. But she’d been so certain he cared for her. Was that just an act to sway and control her? And was it only because he’d promised his father or grandfather that the dead should stay dead, or was he hiding something else?
“So what are your plans today?” Carson finally asked something that brought her back to reality.
“We just got back from church. With Paul Kettering’s funeral this week, I feel like I’ve been living there.”
“Church again. Really? Am I talking to the cosmopolitan, world-traveler, hard-driving, work-on-Sunday Professor Kathryn Lockwood?”
That annoyed her. In the church service, Pastor Snell had led a lovely prayer for Todd’s full recovery, which they now knew would take months, maybe longer with casts, a wheelchair, pain and rehab, but at least he was alive and his brain hadn’t been damaged. And Kate felt good that she’d helped Amber by calling a friend who lived near campus in Columbus and would let Amber stay with her while Todd was hospitalized nearby so she didn’t have to drive back and forth or pay for a place to live there. More of Todd and Amber’s relatives had come in to help with the boys, though Kate was surprised to find herself missing Jason, Aaron and Andy. But if she tried to explain that to Carson—or even to herself...
Carson’s words cut through her agonizing. “Look, back to business. I’d love to have you excavating that mound, too, but it will happen one way or the other.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ll find the right senator to get a bill passed to allow the betterment of human knowledge over private-property rights—something to bring pressure to bear on Grant Mason. The Adenas have slept there for centuries, so they can wait for us a little while longer, but I’m relying on you to get us in ASAP. Get Grant to let you at least do a solo entry, if not with all the crew and equipment. Toward that goal, how’s it going?”