Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(62)
“A freak accident? I’d give you a hug or a high five but later, when you’re better.”
“Don’t try to cheer me up. I’m not a patient man, Grant. Not a good patient in general. For the family’s sake, I’m grateful to still be here.” He spoke slowly, taking shallow breaths and almost whispering. Grant leaned closer to hear. It obviously hurt even to talk.
“Listen, we’ll help with the boys,” Grant tried to reassure him. “Kate’s amazingly good with them. They sent you some drawings that Kate’s showing Amber. Jason drew your fall—but with an ax head cutting your arm with lots of blood, so he’s mixed that up somehow. He drew it big, Todd, too big to be a normal ax head or a pioneer or historic Indian one a kid would find.”
Todd screwed his eyes shut, then opened them. “So, you recognized it after all this time? He found it last winter where I had it squirreled away in the attic. Somehow, he managed to cut himself on it. There was a lot of blood, and I had to assure him he wouldn’t die before we got him stitched up. I told Amber I’d found it in the woods, that it was Cherokee or Shawnee, and she never questioned it. Did Kate recognize it in the drawing as Adena?”
“No, thank God.”
“She still has no idea you—we’ve—been in the mound?”
“Look, I didn’t mean to get into all this. You need your rest and—”
“I need to talk, Grant! To figure out how I could have fallen. It’s all I’ve been able to think about—that and worrying about the family without me. I swear my harness must have been cut and not by me!”
“Calm down. You heard that Jace cleared Brad—”
“Yeah, I know. Gotta admit he didn’t know what the heck he was doing, and I mostly took him up thinking that would get you to climb with me sometime. I was keeping an eye on him before we went up—then can’t recall the climb itself at all. But just in case something goes wrong with another operation to set my bones or something—Grant, pretend I’m grabbing your hand right now, and we’re making a life-or-death promise. I’m going to tell you where the Adena ax head is, just in case someone wants to kill me.”
“That might be true of Paul’s case, but you had an accid—”
“Just listen. With my broken ribs, it hurts like hell when I breathe, let alone talk. I wedged and nailed the ax head in a wooden case way up in a crotch of my tree where no one can get to it but me—and now maybe never again. But if something happens to me, promise you’ll get a climber to retrieve it and see Amber gets it. I swear, if she’d sell it, she could put all three kids through college. She can just say she found it. Promise me!”
“You’re going to make it, Todd. You’re going to be in a wheelchair for a while and rehab, but you’ll be tooling around the mill floor in no time. But as for climbing again...”
“I will. I swear I will. And please promise me—only if I don’t make it—Amber gets the ax head, and you’ll help her sell it on the sly.”
He gasped—either for air or in pain—and started to cough, moaning. Grant pushed the red button by the side of his bed, and a nurse came running in.
“He’s been talking too long,” she said, assessing the situation. “He’s not to become overly animated. Now, Todd, I’ve told you to keep calm, or we’ll have to increase the dose of morphine. Then it will be off to dreamland.”
“Bad dreams. Don’t want that,” Todd muttered as Grant moved back and put his arms around Kate and Amber, who had heard the alarm and come rushing in. He and Kate stepped out into the hall and could hear Amber speaking soothingly to Todd.
“So much for visiting and comforting him,” Grant whispered.
“What got him so riled? Worried about his job again?”
“He’s upset he fell, can’t believe he fell.”
Kate, still clutching the sheaf of crayoned drawings, leaned against him and stayed silent for once, not one word. Now, he thought, at least he knew where Todd’s relic from the death chamber was, high in the air, higher than the attic where Jason had cut himself on it. And all this had made Grant decide to keep looking for Paul’s eagle pendant, and Brad’s arrowhead, starting under that pile of stones in the woods. Because, despite the fact Kate had missed the clue in Jason’s drawing, all he needed was for her to get on the scent of anything coming out of that mound, most of all the Beastmaster mask in the basement right under the room where she slept.
*
Grant and Kate were exhausted. They fell asleep on the couch where he’d been holding her, legs and arms entangled as they talked about everything but the mound, which lay dark and silent, outside the window.
After she’d gone to bed, Grant sat back down, looking out, waiting for her light to go off. A wan shaft of gold threw itself onto the lawn until she finally turned it off. Fighting sleep himself, he sat there for another half hour, then tiptoed to the basement door.
He quietly closed it behind himself, turned on the light and tiptoed down in his bare feet. How crazy that she’d brought a Beastmaster mask into the house, even one she’d made herself. He hadn’t even wanted to look at it, but he had to grimace at the thought that the two masks could escape their boxes and meet at night in the house—to mate.
Man, he was losing it. Exhausted. Conflicted. Scared.