He flipped again to the second page. “Yes.” The idyllic town of Groton, Massachusetts, known for its prep schools and early Colonial history, abutted Westford.
“Wow,” she said playfully. “That’s a better gift than I got you.”
He barely heard her. “It must be some kind of mistake. Somebody probably cut and pasted my name off some other real estate transaction I was involved with.”
“Well, then, why do they have your home address?”
He exhaled. “Good question.”
“Are you working on anything in Groton?”
“No, actually. And nothing involving this English company, One Wing Industries, either.”
“Perhaps they have the wrong Cameron Thorne?”
“Maybe. But six acres of property in this area is worth … I don’t know, at least a half million bucks.”
“Just like the lottery ticket,” Amanda said.
Cam looked up at her. “That is a weird coincidence. But it still makes no sense. The guy in Boston wasn’t British—he had a townie accent. And why would he give me property in Groton?” He looked at the signature line. “And this deed was signed back in March.”
“So, like you said, maybe it’s a mistake.”
Cam made a face. “I’ve been doing this a long time. That’s quite a mistake.” He studied the first page again. “It says here the purchase price was one dollar.”
“That seems odd.”
“It’s actually fairly common when you want to gift a property to someone.”
“But why would some company want to gift six acres of land to you?”
He rubbed the towel over his face. “I have absolutely no idea.”
Despite staying up late celebrating his birthday, Cam awoke at six the next morning. He wanted to be at the Registry of Deeds as soon as it opened, so he threw on sweats and running shoes, wrapped his left ankle, put Venus out, and hit the pavement just as the sun rose above the trees on the eastern end of the lake.
There had to be some explanation for the Groton property transfer, but despite an hour-and-a-half of Amanda and he bouncing ideas around they hadn’t come up with anything that made any sense. They had done an Internet search for One Wing Industries but found no connection between the London company and the property in Groton, and definitely nothing that connected the firm to Cam.
Cam ran hard, sweating the rum out of his system. A diabetic since childhood, he was usually more careful about his alcohol intake. As he ran, he wrestled with the twin mysteries of his abduction and the property conveyance. Three-and-a-half miles later, both mysteries still unsolved, he sprinted into the driveway, did some quick stretches, and entered to find Amanda and Astarte seated at the breakfast table of their modest two-bedroom Cape.
“Figure anything out?” Amanda asked.
“Yes. Running faster does not make me smarter. I still have no idea what any of this is about.” He kissed Astarte on the top of her head. “Also, that eating the entire quart of ice cream was a bad idea. Sorry, Astarte, you can have raisins for dessert tonight.”
She grinned up at him. She had been living with them for almost two years, since her uncle died. Without family, the girl had latched first onto Amanda as a mother figure and then grown close to Cam as well; they were thrilled to be formally adopting the bright-eyed ten-year-old immediately after the wedding. “I know you didn’t eat it. I hid it in the freezer in the basement.”
Cam chuckled. “Great. Outsmarted by a fifth-grader.”
He showered, then walked Astarte to the bus stop. She surprised him with a question on the way. “Why do you think Abraham agreed to sacrifice Isaac?”
She must have been learning about this at Sunday school. He sensed an orphan’s vulnerability beneath the inquiry. Stopping, he crouched down to look her directly in the eye. “Honestly, I’ve never understood that story.” And he understood it even less as his love for Astarte had taken root and grown. “No parent would dream of injuring their child. I know both Amanda and I would do anything to protect you.”
She nodded, but he saw doubt in her wide cobalt eyes. “Even if God commanded it?”
“Yes, even if God commanded it. I think the Bible contains lots of stories that are exaggerated or get garbled over time. This is one of them. God would never ask a parent to hurt their own child, and no parent would ever do so even if commanded.” He stood. “But now I think I hear the bus coming. Race you!”
Twenty minutes later Cam was in his SUV on the way to Lowell to visit the county Registry of Deeds, the mystery of why Abraham had obeyed God’s odious command pushed to the back of his mind. An old mill town, Lowell sat on the banks of the Merrimack River; the river flowed due south from the mountains of New Hampshire before fish-hooking near Lowell back to the northeast and dumping into the Atlantic. Cam’s route through Chelmsford and into Lowell tracked the river and he let his mind wander, trying to imagine the waterway as it existed in its pre-industrial state. If European explorers had traveled to New England before Columbus, as Cam and Amanda believed and as Cam had written about in his recently-published Across the Pond book, chances were they had used the Merrimack as their highway.
He parked on the street and entered between the massive pillars of a grand, but tired, gray sandstone building. Cam hoped to find the history of the Groton property—how and when had One Wing Industries acquired it?
Working backwards, pulling books from the shelves of the cavernous, dust-filled hall, he learned that One Wing Industries, Inc. had acquired the property less than a year earlier, in October, purportedly for $1.2 million, from an entity known as Middlesex Semiconductor. Middlesex Semiconductor, in turn, had acquired the property in 1989 from a man named Fletcher, whose family had owned the property for generations. He examined the deed from Middlesex Semiconductor to One Wing Industries and compared it to the deed transferring the property to him—it was an identical conveyance, entailing the same six acres off of Main Street. So what had happened in the past year to change the parcel’s value from over a million to a single dollar? Or was this just some kind of mistake?
He tried another tack and searched the records for any mortgage that might have been placed on the property. If the property had a value of $1.2 million, but also had an outstanding mortgage of, say, $1.1 million, and the mortgage was in default, then that might explain why an owner would walk away. Or, in this case, give the property away. But, again, he found nothing. One Wing owned the property free and clear. Or, to be more precise, he owned the property free and clear.
Running out of ideas, Cam did a search for other properties One Wing might own in the county. Nothing. Squinting, he examined the name of the notary public who notarized the signature of the One Wing corporate officer who signed the deed—nobody he knew. Exhaling, he sat back and eyed the stacks of plastic-covered land records lining the shelves of the high-ceilinged room. Sunlight filtered through the high windows, illuminating the dust particles floating above him. It was as if One Wing Industries were as illusory as the dancing dust.
He phoned Amanda.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“Yes. But none of it good,” he said, summarizing his work. “I’m going to drive out and check out the property. Want me to swing by and pick you up?”
“Sure.”
Twenty minutes later Cam turned off of Main Street and onto a narrow paved driveway just west of Groton’s downtown area.
Fifty feet up the drive a chained gate blocked their path; in fact, the entire parcel appeared to be enclosed by a high chain-link fence.
Cam rattled the gate. “Locked.”
Amanda eyed the fence, the ex-gymnast in her sizing it up. “I could climb it, but I don’t fancy the barbed wire on top.”
“You know what, there was a hardware store a half-mile back. And we own the property, so we can do whatever we want.”
“Good point. I’ll wait here. I want to walk around and investigate.”
Fifteen minutes later Cam returned with a p
air of bolt-cutters. Amanda had been joined by a Groton policeman.
“Cam, can you show Officer Greely a copy of the deed, please?”
The officer squinted and examined the document. “And you are Cameron Thorne?”
“Yes.”
“You wrote that book, Across the Pond, right?”
Cam smiled. “It depends on whether you liked it or not.”
Officer Greely chuckled. “Loved it. I’m big into history, especially the Templars.” The book had documented how many of the early American explorers had ties to the outlawed Knights Templar. The policeman jotted a few notes in a small pad.
Cam asked, “Any idea why the property is fenced off?”
“Been that way for years. When I was a kid we used to play back in the woods. There’s a brook that runs through that had some good trout. Also there’s some kind of stone structure up there.” He smiled. “Some of the kids—not me, of course—used to go drinking there. Then they built some kind of factory or something.” He gestured. “And the fence.”
The officer looked to be about Cam’s age, which meant he had been a young teenager just before the property was sold to Middlesex Semiconductors in 1989. “What kind of stone structure?” Cam asked.
“A chamber built into the side of the hill. You know, like a farmer’s root cellar.”
Amanda and Cam exchanged glances. They had been studying stone chambers as possible evidence of pre-Columbian exploration, and Cam had written a short chapter on them in his book as something that invited further study. It was the first hint at some kind of connection between the land and Cam, though admittedly a flimsy one. Maybe someone who read Across the Pond wanted them to study, and even own, the chamber. But then why not just call him up and ask him to take a look?
Cam turned back to the policeman and held up the bolt-cutters. “Unless you have a problem with it, we’re going in.”
The officer shrugged and turned to walk to his car. “Knock yourself out. It’s your land.” He stopped at his car door. “But you might want to lock it back up. There must have been some reason the owner didn’t want people rummaging around back there.”
As the policeman drove away, Cam snapped the padlock and Amanda pushed open the hinged chain-link gate. Cam drove forward toward a frost-heaved parking lot set back from the street. Beyond the lot lay a cement slab the size of three or four tennis courts, the foundation for what once had been some kind of building. “Looks like a decent-sized operation,” Cam said. “Maybe 25,000 square feet of space, assuming only one story.” He turned and studied the parking lot. “And the lot is big enough for fifty, maybe sixty cars.”
“And they made semiconductors?” Amanda asked.
“They did, until for some reason they stopped.” He looked around. “And then they apparently knocked the building down.”
The land sloped up from the street and, as the cop said, a stream ran down the side of the parcel. “Let’s head up the hill and see what’s in the woods back there,” Cam said. “I’d like to see that chamber.”
The rear of the property, beyond the parking lot and building slab, was overgrown; Cam pushed aside the branches and thorns as mosquitoes buzzed around them. They crested the hill and continued down the back, northern side, slipping on last fall’s wet leaves. At the bottom of the slope a chain link fence delineated the rear boundary of the parcel.
“Here’s the chamber,” Amanda called. He turned; she was facing back up the incline toward the crest, pointing. “You can see the opening in the side of the hill, next to that oak tree. We walked right by it; it’s only visible from below.”
Cam scrambled up toward the squat opening. “Look at the roof lintel,” he said as he approached. “That’s a big stone. Whoever built this meant business.”
“And whoever built it was either really short or they didn’t intend to use it for storage of any kind.” The roof was only a few feet tall and the opening perhaps two feet wide. “I don’t think you could get a wheelbarrow through. And if you were going to carry something, you’d have to do so bent completely over.”
They stopped just outside the opening.
Stone Chamber Opening
“I’m guessing the tree grew up around this,” Cam said. “So the chamber’s got to be at least fifty or sixty years old.”
“I would imagine much older.” She took a step forward and directed her cell phone light toward the opening. “Let’s go inside.”
Cam touched her elbow. “Wait. Some animal might be holed up in there.” He found a small stone and side-armed it into the chamber; it echoed as it hit the back wall. They waited a few seconds but nothing scurried out. Amanda ducked in, her phone illuminating a narrow stone passageway strewn with debris on the dirt floor.
Cam again focused on the roof slabs. “More huge stones across the roof,” he said. “They must weigh tons.” He followed Amanda; the passageway ran deep into the hillside, perhaps fifteen feet. “And you’re right, no way could you get a wheelbarrow through here.”
Stone Chamber Passageway
At the end of the passageway Amanda gasped.
Cam froze. “You okay?”
“Yes, fine. I just wasn’t expecting this.” She illuminated a domed inner chamber with a massive slab capping the roof. “We have these beehive chambers all over the British Isles,” she breathed.
Stone Chamber Domed Ceiling
“The Druids built them, right?” he asked, knowing that would make them over a thousand years old.
She nodded, entranced.
Cam, too, stared at the intricate stonework of the circular inner chamber, measuring approximately ten feet in every direction. He exhaled and smiled. “A beehive is a good description.” Or an igloo.
While Cam removed debris from the chamber floor, Amanda paced off the chamber’s dimensions, took some pictures and began to sketch the structure. Twenty minutes later she handed him her schematics. “Overhead and side views,” she said. “When I was a young lass, I wanted to be an architect.”
Chamber Drawings
“Nice, thanks,” Cam said. He stared at the drawings, then at the chamber walls and ceiling. “Do you think this was ceremonial?”
“Yes. Often these beehive chambers were oriented so that the summer solstice sunrise or sunset ran down the chamber’s passageway and illuminated the inner sanctum. It would only happen once a year. It was done to mark the longest day of the year, as part of their ceremony venerating the sun.”
Cam oriented himself. “So the opening would need to face due east or due west.”
“Actually, a bit north of east-west since we are north of the equator. On the summer solstice the sun rises on the northeast horizon and sets in the northwest.”
Cam nodded. “Of course.” Crouching, they walked through the passageway and exited the chamber. Cam pictured a map of Groton in his head as he looked toward the horizon. “Main Street runs northwest so that means….” He grinned. “This chamber opens to the northwest.”
“About thirty-three degrees north of due west,” Amanda said, examining the compass on her phone. She took his arm. “And remember that quartz stone on the back wall? I bet the sunlight on the solstice hits that quartz and makes it glow.”
He exhaled slowly. Was it really possible this had been built by explorers from the British Isles back in the Dark Ages? Perhaps ancient, sun-worshiping Druids?
Together they stared at the chamber. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Well, I know where I plan to be on the summer solstice.”
Chapter 2
Friday, finally. Bartol let his mind wander. It was the only way to keep from going crazy from the monotony—eight hours every day, week after week, sanding and rolling and edging, the sharp smell of paint filling his nostrils so bad that even his dinner tasted like frigging latex. But if he wanted to live off the grid, getting paid in cash was his only choice.
And, to be fair, he had played hooky on Monday.
Today he stood on a ladder atop a modest
saltbox colonial—of course, ‘modest’ in Weston still meant over a million bucks, prices crazy from all the foreigners moving to Boston. He didn’t know who owned this house and he didn’t care. He was content to be high on the ladder, alone with his thoughts.
The Charles River glimmered in the distance over the tree tops. On the far side of the river stood an incongruously-placed stone tower. Bartol had researched the tower: Built in the late 1800s by a wealthy industrialist, the tower marked what the industrialist imagined to be the medieval settlement of Norumbega, as described in Norse legend. Nobody took the tower seriously anymore. Nobody, that is, except Bartol.
Norumbega Tower, Weston, MA
Bartol studied the tower as he painted, wondering if the site did indeed mark a thousand-year-old settlement established by his Viking forbearers. The exact location might be off, but Bartol didn’t doubt that the Norse settled in North America. Not that it mattered to most people—today’s politically-correct, liberal elite purposefully downplayed the amazing achievements of Europeans over the past centuries. Well, people would care when the barbaric Arabs overran Europe, wiped out Judeo-Christian culture and set their eyes on America. Then they would be glad for soldiers like Bartol, trained and ready to defend his country.
A co-worker, Sully, interrupted his thoughts. “Hey, Bartol, you want a sandwich?”
“No thanks. I brought my lunch.” He always made his own meals, avoiding the processed foods that poisoned the body. He was a soldier, his body his most important weapon.
Sully continued to look up at him. For some reason it bothered him that Bartol chose not to eat with him and the rest of the crew. “So is Bartol your first name or your last name?”
“It’s my only name.”
Sully was a bear, the alpha man of the crew, outweighing Bartol by fifty pounds. He couldn’t let Bartol have the last word. “Well, it rhymes with asshole.”
Bartol turned slowly, looked down and fixed his gray-blue eyes on Sully. “Yeah, I suppose it does.” He was willing to come down the ladder if Sully pushed it, but he was past the point in his life where he needed to prove anything to anybody.
The Isaac Question: Templars and the Secret of the Old Testament (Templars in America Series Book 5) Page 3