Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(92)
When Jace and Brad came up to stare at her, she pulled the oxygen mask off. “Jace, Carson Cantrell’s inside. Buried under beams and soil. He had a gun. He opened the mound and forced me in.”
Jace turned away, yelling to the others that there was another person inside.
“Grant,” she said weakly. “Is the mask okay?”
He smiled through his tears and took her soil-caked hand. His head was bandaged. He had blood all over his shirt, and she was filthy, but crazy joy surged through her. She was alive and Grant was, too.
“The mask is safe,” he said. “And I’m giving it to whatever woman agrees to live here and marry me—and dig this mound out the right way. Now, put that oxygen mask back on your face.”
“Okay, but no more lies or masks. I’m going to marry the man I love, even if he only owns an anthill and won’t let me near it.”
He squeezed her hand and kissed her gently before he put the mask back on her face.
*
Two days later at 9:00 p.m., Kate and Grant waited for Tess and Gabe to arrive at the Columbus airport. People who had deplaned streamed past them. They watched a happy reunion between a soldier dressed in desert fatigues and his family. Kate blinked back tears at their joy and her own. She’d called her father and talked to him for two hours. He’d said she and Grant should visit in autumn. As soon as the mound was cleared as a crime scene, she was going to lead a team to excavate it. On Monday, she had to testify in a hearing in Columbus about Carson’s death. They’d recovered his body—crushed under tons of wood and soil in the mound—and some stolen and black-market antiquities in his house. But right now, she felt nothing but relief.
When the story of Carson’s crimes had hit the local and national media, Char had called from out West, worried about Kate, asking if she should come back and take care of her. Char, the bleeding heart. Kate had thanked her but had assured her she had someone to take care of her now.
“Wow!” Char had exploded. “Maybe I’d better get my bod back to good old scenic Cold Creek. Seems to me like a hot spot for finding mates! No way I’m going to marry a man out here. Wish I could stop them from drinking and roughing up their wives and kids.”
Kate and Grant held hands, watching for the newlyweds, since the arrival board said their plane had landed. A cluster of people came at them, and then Tess and Gabe appeared, beaming.
“Hey, you two, thanks for being here,” Gabe cried as Kate and Tess hugged and the men shook hands. “And you two were holding hands and you have that look—right, Tess?”
“I’ll say they do,” Tess said, grinning and rolling her eyes. “I’d recognize it anywhere now. But wait till we tell you guys about our trip. It was so fabulous and romant— What? What? Did something besides you two getting closer happen while we were gone? Oh, Grant, you have stitches on the side of your head.”
“Are you okay?” Gabe asked. “What happened? Is everything all right in good old Cold Creek?”
Kate and Grant had decided not to spring the news of Paul’s death and Todd’s accident on the newlyweds first thing. But where to start? All she could think of now was, no matter what terrible things had happened, she and Grant had a great, new beginning.
*
Author Note
Kate’s story is book two in the Cold Creek trilogy. Tess, the youngest sister, was featured in the first book; Kate, the eldest, in this novel; and Charlene, the middle sister, will appear in the third book. (You have heard all the things about middle children acting out, haven’t you?) The three women have very different personalities, yet they share the excitement of finding their lifelong mates—and the curse of danger until a happy ending.
I’m not certain, after writing more than fifty novels since 1982, why I didn’t use the fascinating Adena people before this book, because signs of their lives are all around where I live in Columbus, Ohio, and points south to the Ohio River. Some five thousand mounds and earthworks attributed to them are in these dramatic sites, some quite small on private land, some long ago pillaged or excavated, some untouched.
Highbanks Park, a short distance north of Columbus where my husband and I sometimes go for picnics, has several Adena mounds. Like some others, they have been worn away and rebuilt. The Adena pipe—which became Ohio’s official state artifact in May 2013—is in the Ohio Historical Museum in Columbus, and the Adena Mansion, a historic site, is just a short drive away near Chillicothe.
Thanks again to our friends Dr. Roy and Mary Ann Manning for their tour of the Chillicothe area and for answering questions. I did, however, create the village of Cold Creek, based on places in southeastern Ohio on the edge of Appalachia. I did my undergraduate work in a college in that area with its dramatic foothills, mountain, quarries and creeks.
The Beastmaster Cauldron actually exists with its depiction of the antlered Beastmaster surrounded by animals over whom he holds sway. He is depicted on the so-called Gundestrup Cauldron, a photo of which can be found online. A lot of information about the Adena and their cult of death can be found at www.adena.com and numerous other sites. Where they came from and where they went after being such an advanced society for that time is the subject of much argument and conjecture, as in this story. Beastmaster masks, like the one from Mason Mound, have not been found in the New World, but it is surmised to be a Celtic shaman mask.