Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(90)
The thrilling moment of discovery she’d always longed for was ruined now. Whether it was the Adena who had passed through here centuries ago, Grant’s grandfather decades ago, four scared boys or just Carson’s lackey today, all she wanted was out. Even her passion to know what lay within was nothing next to her desperation to live.
And here, in this very passage linking life and death, what had sacrificial slaves or prisoners thought they would find within as they made this final journey? Praise? Honor? A glorious afterlife? She knew one thing. Once inside, she had to ignore whatever wonders or horrors she saw and concentrate on finding a way to escape.
She was sweating, but she shook with chills. Her stomach cramped. Dust bit into her nostrils, fierce fear into her heart. She could feel herself breathing harder in the scant, stale oxygen, hemmed in by the big log beams that lined this passageway. Suddenly, it opened into a low, broad space with a beamed ceiling.
She almost stumbled over a pickax Carson’s man must have left inside. “Well,” he said. “He didn’t have my safety lecture in my Archaeology Fieldwork class.”
If she wasn’t ready to cry, she would have laughed. At one time, like an idiot, she would have thought that was clever. Now her moment of triumph in the tomb was going to be a deadly disaster.
As their light beams probed the interior, they gasped in unison at what they saw: two elaborately dressed, intact skeletons with dust-covered weapons and jewelry arrayed around them, guarded by prone corpses with smashed skulls.
Life—the idea of life with Grant—had never seemed sweeter. Now or never, she thought. “Oh, Carson, look there!” she cried. “Another Beastmaster mask!”
She flashed her beam of light directly into his eyes and ducked. The gun went off, echoing, seeming to shake the chamber, though the sound was probably muted outside.
She crawled away from him, waiting for pain, but she had not been hit. Yet. Carson cursed, used his light, then scrambled for his gun instead of her. It had landed on the wooden bench where the two main corpses lay. For a moment, their shifting light beams made it seem as if the dead bodies moved. It wouldn’t do her any good to run out when Carson’s lackey waited there. In that split second, she spotted something better than the needle pick she still held. She grabbed a big ax head near her.
As Carson spun toward her with the gun, she lunged and hit him with the ax head, cutting his neck. With a cry and a curse, he threw her back against a support beam, then raised the gun.
Just like the day she and Grant kissed at the mica seam, a small cascade of dust sifted down on them. Above, something rumbled. Carson, holding his bleeding neck with one hand, looked up for a moment and the cloud of dust turned to a dribble of dirt. She leaped away as he tried to cover his eyes. Dust and dirt in larger chunks cascaded at him. He covered his head and tried to duck.
He shot where she had been. He screamed, trying to clear his eyes as the two beams above them groaned and sagged, then gave way. The earth beneath Kate’s feet seemed to shift. With a huge belch of dust and shudder of earth, the roof of the burial chamber caved in.
Kate threw herself under the corpses’ bench and covered her head. When the rumbling sound finally stopped, she lifted her head and, coughing up dust, opened her eyes. The wan light that had marked the exit was gone, covered by a mound of dirt. She was trapped in utter, solid blackness with the dead.
30
After Jace arrested Keith Simons, Grant insisted that Brad drive him by the house on the way to the Adena Regional Medical Center.
“Her car’s here,” Grant said as they pulled up.
“So—a good sign.”
“Then why didn’t she answer her phone? If she went outside for something, I think she’d take it with her.”
He’d filled Brad in on showing her the mask. Brad admitted he’d moved his arrowhead to his safe-deposit box in the bank. Together, both walking wounded, they got out of the car and walked toward the house.
“Kate!” Grant bellowed inside though it made his head hurt more. At least most of his dizziness had subsided. He didn’t stop to wash the dried blood off his head or change his shirt. He’d been urging Brad to call the town dentist right away and take his tooth in to see if it could be reimplanted. But now nothing mattered but Kate.
He went down to the basement. The light was on. He saw the hiding place was open and the box gone. Had she betrayed him?
“Grant!” Brad shouted down the stairs. “You’ll never believe this. Keith’s brother’s out by the mound. Ned, the one who you said got ticked off and quit the mill.”
As exhausted as he was, Grant ran up the stairs and straight outside. Dusk was edging toward darkness.
Ned saw him coming and shouted. “Hey, I was hired to dig out this mound. She’s with that professor guy,” he added, holding up both hands and backing away. Grant figured he was probably going to grab the shovel behind him for a weapon. The mask box lay just beyond, so had Kate turned traitor?
“He—I mean she,” Ned stammered. “She hired me to dig out the entry. Hey, what happened to your head?”
“Get off my land. Go see if you can raise bail money for another of your lunatic brothers, because Keith’s been arrested.”
“For taking trees?”
That news staggered Grant. Keith and Ned were the tree thieves. But that was secondary to finding out who’d really ordered Ned to dig out the entry to the mound. He didn’t want to enter it ever again, but he had to get Kate and Carson out here, so he hoped he didn’t have to fight Ned, too. He watched the big man glance at the shovel, and then he ran into the trees.