Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(63)
He went through the ritual of getting the box out of the wall, setting aside Kate’s business card. He opened the box, pulled away the tissue paper. The mica chips on the skin gleamed in his flashlight glow; the dried blood on the spiked points of the ancient stag antlers seemed to move in shifting shadows. Maybe after all these years, he should put it back in the death chamber. Put Todd’s back, too, and Brad’s, if it was under that pile of stones. If he could find Paul’s eagle pendant, return that, too. Then he could let Kate excavate the mound, remove the bodies, the precious relics—the burden and curse of the place. But to enter the mound, he’d have to see and be haunted again by the smashed skulls and skeletons all laid out in dreadful death.
On the other hand, his gut instinct was to get Kate away from here, however much he wanted to keep her. Even if he returned things and let her in the mound, she’d surely ferret out that he’d lied to her, led her on—been in there before.
He gazed into the eyeless stare of the beast, trying to decide what to do with this, with Kate. He returned the mask to its tomb and hurried back upstairs to bed.
*
Kate sat up in bed with a start. Peering into the darkness, she strained to listen. Nothing. She heard only the wind outside, the air conditioner as it hummed low.
She looked at the bright red readout on her bedside digital clock. 2:13 a.m. She’d been asleep over an hour. She and Grant had been just like an old married couple tonight, talking, cuddling, kissing, dozing. So natural, no talk of the things that could divide them. Yet tension always twisted between them, desire on a leash, waiting to be loosed. Was that what had wakened her now?
Other thoughts crowded in, things she’d passed over during the day. Carson had said he’d send a copy of his article on Etruscan tombs, hadn’t he? And that she should read it and take it to heart. Now, what had he meant by that? Was it in the box with the mask, and she’d ignored it?
And then her young double, Kaitlyn, had mentioned that she’d been researching Etruscan tombs. So wouldn’t it be just like Carson to take his GA’s research to write his own article, citing Kaitlyn’s sources as his own? How often had he done that with Kate’s own work on the Adena when she was with him? But he’d done so much for her—she cared so deeply for him—that she had not protested. If she hadn’t spent so much time pursuing the Celtic-Adena link, would she have had her own career at all?
She’d been wrong to idolize Carson, and she didn’t want Kaitlyn to do that now. Funny, but she’d felt an instant sisterhood or camaraderie with the girl, but maybe she was just missing Tess and Char. She never used to miss them as much as she did now here in Cold Creek. At least Tess would be back in a few days, and maybe Kate could visit Char out West before she went back to England, if the mound excavation was impossible here. Though Char worked with Navajo children, Kate had always wanted to see the Anasazi Indian burial places out there. She’d heard some pretty strange things about their death rituals.
She clicked on her bedside light, got up and pulled the box with the mask out from under her bed. She lifted it onto the mattress, pulled off the lid. There was an envelope stuck along the inside of the box. As she reached for it, her fingernails snagged some of the mica chips on the side of the mask. She’d have to glue the chips she’d loosened.
She closed the box, shoved it back under the bed, wishing she had a better place to keep it. Sitting there, she knew she was putting off reading Carson’s article, and she wasn’t sure why. If there was something in it to take to heart or help with the mound here, she should study it now. Or was it just Carson she was trying to put off? She still wanted to get into Mason Mound and with him at her side.
She took out the article and opened it. She read Carson’s neat, tight script across the top. Had we world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime...
She recognized the quotation from a 17th-century poem called “To His Coy Mistress.” And she got the hint. He was upset. He thought she was stalling, that her putting him and the mound off was a crime against knowledge, archaeology, mankind—and him.
She skimmed the article. It was about two-thousand-year-old Etruscan tombs in Italy being broken into and looted by thieves called tombaroli.
A couple of blows from a pickax breaks the ceiling into the burial chamber, the roof caves in, and the tomb, crammed with antiquities and even bodies, is ransacked and the precious artifacts sold to illegal dealers and museum curators.
She’d heard of that, of course, but was Carson suggesting that someone—maybe someone who had marked several local mounds with metal stars—would break into them if they weren’t properly, quickly excavated first? The poem reference and this article implied she was running out of time.
She gasped as she read that the Italian police often looked the other way as did European and international law enforcement. Places with excellent reputations such as Sotheby’s auction house in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California had been accused of buying antiquities that were looted. And her eyes were drawn to the line with the word mask. A stolen 2,500-year-old theater mask had been found in an art dealer’s briefcase, one maybe close to the age of the Beastmaster cauldron and mask.
She put Carson’s article in the bedside-table drawer and turned out the light. She lay back down in bed, staring at the dark ceiling, agonizing about what to do, whether to beg Grant, buck Grant, sneak around him to check the entry, whether—