Somebody to Love

by Unknown

  “So where is everyone?” Walker waved a hand at the camp behind them.

  “Camp’s closed.”

  “How come?”

  Doling out as little information as he could get away with, he told Walker about the incident with Avery. In a town as small as Cupid, that was bound to get out anyway.

  “How long is the dig closed?”

  “Through the weekend.”

  “So Zoey’s not here?”

  “Do you see her?”

  Walker gave a curt nod. “I’m sorry to hear about the kid who got the ice pick through his foot. Hopefully you won’t have any more delays.”

  Without another word, he turned and got into his Land Rover.

  Jericho readjusted his cowboy hat, cocking it back on his head as he watched dust billow up from the Land Rover’s departing tires, still unsure what that had really been about and why Walker had been in their camp.

  Shaking his head, he walked up the steep grade and into camp. Everything looked to be as they’d left it that morning when they’d taken Avery to the hospital. But the emptiness, the quiet was unnerving. Granted, in the vast expanse of the desert mountain range, silence was nothing out of the ordinary, but after a camp full of chattering students, the sudden hush was startling.

  Overhead a hawk cried, the haunting sound raising the hairs on his forearms. Why did you come back up here? More importantly, why had he left Zoey and come back up here alone?

  Jericho ran a palm over his mouth. Why? Because he did his best thinking in solitude and he had a lot of thinking to do about what was going on between him and Zoey. And given Walker unexpectedly showing up, it turned out to be a good thing he had not brought her with him.

  But he still missed her.

  Think of something else. It’s not like he didn’t have other things to worry over. Like the fact that someone might be trying to sabotage the dig, and based on what Granny Helen had told them today, he might very well be descended from the people who’d created the medicine bundle they’d excavated.

  Speaking of the medicine bundle, he wanted to have another look at it, this time in private.

  Jericho unzipped the flap to the tent he shared with Avery and stepped inside. The air was hot and still. Instant sweat popped up on the nape of his neck. He bent down to reach beneath his cot for the box he’d locked the medicine bundle inside the previous evening.

  But the storage box wasn’t there.

  He straightened, scratched his head. He could have sworn he’d put it under the bed. Where could he have put it? He swept his gaze around the tidy tent. No sign of the box.

  The tightness in his gut that had started when he’d seen the Land Rover intensified, and turned sour. Trying not to panic, he searched the tent. No box.

  He raced from the tent, went through the other tents one after the other, flipping cots, tossing belongings the students had left behind, but the box was nowhere to be found.

  Son of a bitch. Was that the real reason Walker had come up here? To steal the medicine bundle? He had been acting odd.

  But for godsakes, why? Jericho didn’t have an answer, but all the students had left the dig at the same time. Although he supposed any one of them except Zoey, Avery, or Braden could have doubled back for the medicine bundle. Still, the pharmacist was number one on the suspect list.

  Walker was empty-handed when you spotted him.

  Yeah, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t already stowed the box in the Land Rover and once Jericho caught him, had come up with that excuse about his concern over Jericho’s relationship with Zoey.

  Blood pumping hotly through his veins, Jericho stalked back down the hill, headed for his pickup and Cupid. If Walker thought he wasn’t going to confront him over this, he had another think coming.

  IT WAS FIVE o’clock when Zoey reached Triangle Mount. She’d tried several times to call Jericho to tell him about Clarissa, but when she hadn’t been able to get through, she assumed he was on the mountain and decided to drive up.

  But when she got to the camp the place was empty.

  Well, crap.

  Sinking her hands on her hips, she gazed down at the lake. From this vintage point, while she could see a portion of the water, she couldn’t see the mounds. But she knew they were there.

  Lurking.

  Waiting.

  The proof of her ugly family history.

  Zoey gulped. Don’t do it. Leave well enough alone. She should, she could, she would let it lie.

  So why were there sharks in the pit of her stomach? Why was she picking up a shovel from the equipment tent? Why were her legs headed down the flatiron, not to her vehicle, but to the valley floor?

  Turn back. Turn back. You vowed to Jericho you would not return to the mounds.

  Which was worse? Being a woman who stayed on the surface, skimming breezily through life without ever digging deep, or a woman who broke promises?

  You’re being impulsive again. Think this through.

  She had a mile to think about it, a walk across the dry desert dirt, the evening sun burning against the back of her head. Maybe she could blame it on the sun. It had baked her brain. But that was putting blame on something other than herself. She was the one who stuck the spade in the earth, who carefully extracted artifacts, recorded them in a notebook, and bagged them up. She alone.

  While she had learned a lot about archaeology over the course of the last few weeks, there was something she apparently had not learned how to do. Control her impulses. Hadn’t that been the point of joining the dig in the first place? To prove she could stick with something and not go off on tangents?

  But wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? Committing to finding out the truth about Clarissa and Little Wolf. The question was would her newfound stick-to-itiveness prove to be her ultimate downfall?

  AT THE SAME time Zoey was digging up artifacts, Jericho stalked into McCleary Pharmacy ready to breathe fire and roast Walker’s hide on a spit.

  Zoey’s cousin was behind the counter waiting on a woman sitting in a motorized scooter. “Make sure to take these with food,” he said, slipping a bottle of pills into a white paper bag and stapling it shut along with a product information sheet.

  “Be with you in just a minute.” Walker smiled at him.

  Jericho curled his hands into fists while he waited for the woman in the scooter to motor away. When she’d gone, he stepped up and planted both fists on the counter. “Where is it?”

  Walker stared at Jericho’s clenched fist, looked up, blinked. “Where is what?”

  “Don’t play dumb.”

  “I can’t answer that question when I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The medicine bundle. Give it back right now and I won’t tell anyone you pilfered it.”

  “What medicine bundle?”

  “In the locked box under the cot in my tent. That’s the real reason you were up at the camp. Not to warn me off deepening my relationship with Zoey.”

  The blank expression on Walker’s face said it all. The man had no idea what he was talking about.

  Doubt doused the good head of steam he’d worked up on the drive into Cupid and he pushed back from the counter.

  Walker’s caterpillar eyebrows crawled up on his forehead. “You found a medicine bundle at your dig site and someone stole it from you? How did that happen?”

  Jericho glanced around to see people in line behind him. “Forget I said anything and please keep this under your hat.”

  “Do you think Zoey might have—”

  “No!”

  “She is impulsive. Maybe she wanted to—”

  “No.”

  “Not realizing that—”

  “Zoey did not take the bundle,” Jericho said through gritted teeth.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was with her all morning.

  “As nothing more than a friend?”

  So they were back to that? “Zoey is not a thief.”

  “I�
��m sure she was just borrowing it.”

  “Zoey did not take it and I can’t believe you think so badly of her.”

  “And I can’t believe a man who is nothing more than her friend is looking at me like he wants to punch my face in.”

  “She didn’t do it,” he said flatly, and strode from the store.

  Once out on the street, he stood on the corner for a long moment, not certain what to do or where to go next.

  Dammit. If Walker had not taken the medicine bundle, then who in the hell had?

  TWO HOURS AFTER excavating the artifacts a second time and unable to calm down, Zoey paced in her bedroom at the B&B. She’d sneaked in the back way to avoid everyone, although Pearl, the Cupid’s Rest cook, had caught her, but she’d bribed the cantankerous older woman into secrecy with a twenty-dollar bill. She wasn’t trying to be sneaky; she just didn’t want Natalie grilling her about why she was at home and not at the dig site. If her sister started prodding, Zoey feared she’d spill the beans about everything. Keeping her mouth shut had never been one of her strong suits.

  Using the tools of the trade and the techniques that Jericho had taught her, she cleared off her dressing table and painstakingly processed the artifacts—broken crockery, the metal tip of a knife blade, the sole of a dried-up boot, small animal bones, and what had originally looked like a half-dollar-sized item encrusted with so much dirt she hadn’t been able to recognize it until she’d washed away the grime.

  The minute she’d removed the item from the basin of water, she’d known her discovery was going to cause a major shit storm in the community. For there, on her desk, was the terrible confirmation she’d prayed not to find.

  An old metal button emblazoned with the McCleary family crest.

  The horrible realization washed over her again in ugly waves. Granny Helen’s fairy tale wasn’t simply a fanciful story. Clarissa had existed. Little Wolf had been real, and the twin mounds were remnants of the settlement the McClearys had burned out to hide the traces of their crimes.

  And Lace’s hypothesis that the Golden Flame agave had not only existed but possessed powerful healing properties was looking more and more like a sure thing. She didn’t know how, but she was certain that the potion Zachariah McCleary and his clan had stolen from the Keepers of the Flame in the early 1800s was the same active ingredient that her great-great-uncle August had used in his formula to cure the Spanish flu in 1918.

  It was too much. She could not wrap her head around this.

  The smell of the evening meal drifted upstairs to her, but she wasn’t hungry. In fact, she wondered if she’d ever be able to eat again, knowing what she now knew. Seeing her suspicions confirmed turned her world upside down.

  She, Zoey McCleary, was descended from those terrible ancestors who’d stolen the healing medicine and chased Clarissa and Little Wolf up the mountain to their deaths over greed, pettiness, and bigotry.

  And Jericho, the man she loved with all her heart and soul, very well could be descended from Little Wolf’s clan. What would he say when he knew about the poisonous blood that flowed through her veins?

  Hey, ancient history. He’s not going to hold your ancestry against you. There’s a bigger question here. What’s he going to say about you digging up those mounds when you promised you would not go back there?

  She placed one hand to her roiling stomach, the other to her mouth. It was all she could do not to throw up.

  How could she ever tell him the truth? He would be so disappointed in her.

  A brackish taste filled her mouth. Why oh why had she dug these damnable things back up again?

  She flopped down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, and then burst out laughing at the irony of her situation. Just a few shorts weeks ago she’d made a vow to stick with the field school, to prove she could dig down deep and find something substantial inside her, and she’d done just that.

  Only to have it blow up in her face.

  If she came out with the truth, then her sister, Natalie, who put so much stock in the family bloodline, would be shattered.

  Omigosh!

  She sat back up again. When word got out about how August McCleary had cured the flu it very well could sink Cousin Walker’s movie deal. August couldn’t be lauded as a heroic healer if his medicine had come at the expense of Native Americans’ lives. Had Walker known the truth all along and helped cover up history? How many McClearys knew the dirty family secret?

  Walker had to know. Tabitha said he’d done extensive family genealogy while researching his book. Still, this was subterranean stuff. She wouldn’t have known anything about it if not for Granny Helen’s story. Maybe Walker really didn’t have a clue. She hoped he didn’t know.

  Which left her with a huge dilemma. Go public and cause a major kerfuffle for her hometown and family, or keep the awful secret.

  It was too much pressure. She couldn’t harm her family, but neither could she, in good conscience, continue with the dig when she knew the truth. It would be impossible for her to work side by side with Jericho and not tell him what she’d discovered. And he was such a straight arrow, if he knew what she’d done, he’d insist on telling Dr. Sinton.

  Well, you could do what you always do when the going gets tough. Give up.

  The solution felt comfortable. Just walk away. She could blow off her promise to herself and break the pact she’d made with her cousin. Yes, Walker would cut off her trust, but all right, she could accept that if it protected the people she loved.

  Her family would tease her for dropping out and Natalie would be disappointed. Oh well, at least she would know the real reason she quit wasn’t due to a lack of stick-to-itiveness. In fact, if she’d stuck to it a little less, she would never have put two and two together, dug up those artifacts, and figured any of this out.

  There was another, more positive reason to quit. A big reason that tipped everything in favor of letting dead relatives lie and dark secrets stay buried.

  Jericho.

  If she quit the dig she could finally be with him, consummate their combustive attraction, and become his lover. But of course that meant she could never tell him why she’d quit. He could never know that she’d gone behind his back and excavated the mounds a second time.

  Do it. Just do it. Make it happen. Don’t look back. It’s the best solution. Never mind that you’ll look like a flake. It’s what everyone expects of you anyway. Go ahead and prove them right. People love to be right.

  Taking a deep breath, Zoey reached for her laptop computer and started writing an official letter to Dr. Sinton telling him that she was resigning from the field school.

  Chapter 17

  Diffusion: The transmission of ideas or materials from culture to culture, or from one area to another.

  UNSEEINGLY, Jericho poked the campfire. Only the snap and crackle of burning logs punctuated the eerie silence. The moon grinned down at him, a wide clown mouth, orange and fat. His mind was deeply troubled. After he returned to the camp following his conversation with Walker, he’d fully examined the ladder Avery had fallen down, and he had not been mistaken, the rungs had been filed down.

  Not only that but four students had texted or called to quit the dig school. With Braden and Avery out of the picture, that left only nine on the team. Add to that the missing medicine bundle and he felt like a monumental failure. His first job and the students were fleeing as if they were in Exodus.

  Someone had not only sabotaged their camp, but looted their archaeological find. The only things that remained from the medicine bundle were the botanicals Lace had taken with her.

  Who could have done this and why? While there was a security guard posted at the entrance to foundation land, and they’d put up a fence at the bottom of Triangle Mount, there were many places where someone could enter the property. For the life of him, he could not cipher out who had the means, motive, and opportunity to stir mischief. His greatest hope was that it was a student pulling a prank on him, but he knew in
his heart that was not the case.

  He reached to grab another beer from the cooler beside him—hey, might as well get stinking drunk, huh—when he heard rustling in the bushes. Probably nothing more nefarious than an armadillo, but wild animals that could harm a man filled these mountains—javelinas, bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions. He picked up the stick he’d been using to poke the fire and got to his feet.

  Somewhere down mountain a twig broke in the darkness. Had one of his students returned early? Relief rushed through him at the idea, and it was only then that he realized how tense he was.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  More rustling.

  He stood up. “Hello?”

  His words echoed back at him in the still darkness—hello, hello, hello.

  Could it be the man in black that Catrina had seen the previous night? Someone had filed down the rungs on that ladder and it most certainly was not a ghost. His muscles coiled tight.

  “Identify yourself,” he commanded, cocking the stick like it was a baseball bat.

  Someone stepped from the shadows. “Jericho, it’s me.”

  At the sound of her dear voice, a helpless grin broke across his face. “Zoe-Eyes, what are you doing here?”

  “I had to see you. I couldn’t bear the thought of you up here by yourself.”

  “Why did you walk up in the dark?”

  “I have a flashlight. I just turned it off when I got close so I could surprise you.” She stepped into the light from the campfire, her normally ebullient face somber.

  He covered the ground between them. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

  “Who says anything is wrong?” She laughed, but it was an uneasy sound, and she did not meet his gaze.

  He cupped her chin in his palm, tilted her head up, and forced her to look at him. The wistful expression in her eyes hit with the impact of a freight train. “I know my best friend.”

  “You should talk. You’ve got that moody-broody look on your face that you get when things aren’t going according to plan. What’s up?”

  He noticed how she neatly sidestepped his question with one of her own, but he let it go—for now. He pulled a palm down his face. “Someone stole the medicine bundle.”