by Unknown
“Run!” Little Wolf cried, and grabbed her hand, although now he was Jericho again.
She clung to him as he dragged her up Widow’s Peak. Flames blistered the ground behind him. Thundering hoofbeats shook the earth. They ran and ran and ran until she thought her lungs were going to explode and her feet would break off at the ankles.
“Please,” she begged. “Please just let me die.”
“We’re meant to be together forever.”
She and Jericho looked into each other’s eyes and time stopped.
Past was present, present past, and her dream world became as real as any other. They stood atop Widow’s Peak Mountain, and below they saw Triangle Mount and the valley consumed by fire. Gone, everything they knew and loved was gone.
He put out his palm and took her hand. She clung to him. He was her lifeline.
But their pursuers were upon them. No escape. Someone fired a shot and a bullet whizzed over their heads so close she could hear the projectile whistle as it cut through the thin air, but clearly designed not to hit them.
His dark eyes were solemn and the wind whipped his black hair behind him. “We can let them take us alive, separate us forever, probably torture me—”
“Or we can go together,” she finished for him. “I am not afraid to die, as long as you are with me.”
“I love you,” he whispered. “I always have and I always will.”
She opened her mouth to tell him she loved him too. Loved him so much, in fact, that she could not make lips form the words, when Great-Great-Uncle August reappeared, holding up a book that looked a lot like the formulary displayed in the Cupid Museum, but it had black binding instead of brown and he had it turned to the page of his Spanish flu remedy.
She frowned. This formula looked slightly different from the one in the formulary at the Cupid Museum, but the strange little doodle at the top of the page was exactly the same.
The doodle of two side-by-side triangles wasn’t there by accident.
The triangle on the right was slightly taller and there was a small dot just below the peak of that triangle. In between the triangles, at the base level was a narrow oval—almost the shape of an almond—and directly above the oval was an arciform that resembled an eyebrow arched over an eye.
At that very same moment, Little Wolf cried, “Jump.”
She felt the ground fall away from beneath her feet. Her heart pumped wildly, not from fear, but from love. She was not afraid to die. Not when he was with her and she knew he loved her more than life itself.
They were in freefall together, arms twined around each other. They were going to die, but she felt such an intense feeling of calm and peace she wondered why she had ever been scared at all.
The ground rushed up to meet them, and just as they hit the hard-packed desert earth …
Zoey awoke with a startling epiphany.
Chapter 21
Decipher: Crack the code; figure out something’s meaning.
AFTER a sleepless night, Jericho got up at dawn with a plan.
He was going to take this one step at a time. First find Catrina and confront her about stealing the medicine bundle. Once he had that squared away and the medicine bundle recouped and in Dr. Sinton’s hands, then he could give his full attention to Zoey.
It was a tough call to make. Everything inside him yearned to straighten things out with Zoey, but he couldn’t do that with these distractions hanging over his head. They were going to need a good long time to talk. And another good long time after that to make love, because he had no doubt in his mind that they could fix this.
What if she doesn’t want to fix it? She’s not returning your calls.
He pushed aside the dark voice. One way or the other, they would straighten it out. If they gave up being lovers, so be it, but he would fight to the death to hang on to their friendship because he valued her more than any other person in his life.
He’d no more than told Junie Mae he didn’t have time for breakfast when his cell phone rang. Hope shoved hard against his chest. He yanked his cell from his pocket. “Zoey?”
“No, it’s me, Lace, I can’t get Zoey to answer my calls or texts this morning. I take it you haven’t seen her either? Did she tell you what I told her last night about the Golden Flame agave?”
“I haven’t heard from her. What’s up?”
Quickly, the botanist gave him the rundown on her findings about the Golden Flame agave.
“It’s a miracle because the botanicals you collected are the only things we have left of the medicine bundle.”
“What do you mean?” She sounded alarmed. “What happened to the artifact?”
“Someone looted it from the camp.”
Lace swore colorfully.
Invisible fingers clamped icily around his spine and his mouth went dry. Something in her tone told him more bad news was on the way. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s not the half of it. Last night, my lab was broken into. That’s why I called so early in the morning. Someone took the botanicals, Jericho, and they were the only things stolen.”
HER BONES FELT loose inside her skin, as if all the cartilage and ligaments had liquefied, leaving her skeleton floating and detached. The sleepy golden light of early morning that had followed her from the caverns burned off into alert yellow as she neared foundation land.
Would Jericho be there breaking up camp? Would others be there as well? Or if Jericho was there, would they be completely alone?
C’mon, please be there; be there. No, can’t take this. Please do not be there, or if you are there, let other students be there too.
Yeah, okay, flakey Zoey was of two minds about this. What else was new? Both her body and heart ached for him, but her brain was fogged, scared, confused, and guilty. God, was she really ready for this?
The road curved, and up ahead loomed the entrance to Triangle Mount. The fence and gate they’d erected to protect the dig site was gone, pulled up. By Jericho and the crew? By Dr. Sinton or maybe one of Winz-Smith’s employees?
Wow. It was officially over.
Her throat tightened and she blinked rapidly. Okay. Over. Some things just weren’t meant to last. No big deal. Wave good-bye with a smile and move on. New adventures loomed on the horizon. Right?
There was no sign of Jericho’s truck.
She parked and got out of the van; walked to the spot where his pickup had sat the night they made love in it. It seemed eons ago now. She ran her fingers over her lips, remembering the feel of his mouth on hers. The warm earth smelled of him, the salty taste of his skin lay vivid on her tongue. A cawing crow flew overhead. A myriad of footprints, going in both directions, covered the ground.
Loneliness choked her, but she managed to swallow it down. She was glad Jericho wasn’t here, she needed to investigate her suspicions, see if there was any validity to the realization that had hit her in her dream before she shared it.
The heated wind blew a dusting of sand over her hiking boots. She went to the back of her van, settled her pink straw cowgirl hat on her head, and retrieved her backpack loaded with rough terrain necessities—water, snacks, sunscreen, lip balm, utility tool, and a map of the land. She locked the vehicle, put the keys in her pocket, pushed her sunglasses on her nose, and headed for the lake.
By the time she reached the lake, she was in a full body sweat, but as tempting as it might be to jump in for a swim, she refused the allure, although she did pause a moment to rehydrate and eye the mounds that hid the dirty McCleary family secret.
Poor Clarissa. Poor Little Wolf. Her heart wrenched. She imagined the star-crossed pair in the winter, late at night, running hand in hand through the snow, desperate to escape Clarissa’s cruel clan.
In spite of the sun beating down, she shivered.
To her right lay Widow’s Peak looming above the mounds. The mountain did not slope steadily upward as the adjacent, but much shorter flatiron, of Triangle Mount, but consisted of jagged ridges and sharp ravin
es that staggered unevenly up to the bald pinnacle. She thought about how frightening it would have been to scale the rocks, slick with ice and snow, in the pitch black. Even now it was daunting.
Because August McCleary had dedicated the land as a private nature preserve back in the early 1900s, no one but family ever came up here, and even precious few of them. Now she understood why. It wasn’t conservation reasons that had led Great-Great-Uncle August to turn this land into a preserve, but rather concealment of the family’s ugly sins.
How many of her family members knew about what had been done to Clarissa and Little Wolf and the Keepers of the Flame? Did her cousin Walker know? Had her grandfather Raymond? She hated to believe that of either of them, but clearly Great-Great-Uncle August had known what Zachariah McCleary had done, and surely he hadn’t gone to his grave keeping the dark secret.
Zoey consulted the map, and then looked up at the top of Widow’s Peak. There was no footpath up this mountain. The southernmost route seemed the easiest, but the spot where she was headed was nearer to the north side. Once upon a time, the easy route would have been a no-brainer, but the last few weeks had taught her the value of hard work. The most arduous path held the most reward. Why had it taken her so long to figure out that easy does was not always the best way to go?
Right. North route it was. This was going to take hours, so she might as well get on it. She ate a handful of walnuts and dried cherries, drank some more water, and took off.
At noon, she stopped halfway up the mountain for another break. She opened her backpack and took out a different map. When she’d first seen it, she hadn’t realized it was actually a map. It had only been upon awakening after her troubled dreams the night before that she’d realized Great-Great-Uncle August’s doodle had not been a doodle at all, but a map. Relying on memory, she’d copied the doodle as she recalled it from August’s formulary.
Two side-by-side triangles, the one on the right slightly taller than the one on the left. The smaller one was Triangle Mount, the larger one Widow’s Peak. The narrow oval was the lake. She could see it clearly from where she now stood looking back down in the valley below, and the lake looked just like a blue almond. And from this vantage point, the two mounds of the old McCleary settlement blended together in a sod arciform curved above the lake like an eyebrow.
The only remaining mystery on the doodle map? What did the dot on Widow’s Peak represent? Zoey had a pretty darn good idea what it was. Which was the reason she was up here in the first place.
She ate a PowerBar, wiped melted chocolate on the seat of her pants, and climbed higher. The terrain grew rockier, and several times she slipped and was forced to grab for whatever handhold she could find to keep her upright. Working on Triangle Mount for the past couple of weeks had acclimated her to the higher altitude, so she wasn’t short of breath, but she was getting a workout.
By two o’clock she was nearing the peak. At one point, she thought she’d heard someone following her, but it turned out to be a clueless armadillo waddling through the brush behind her. The mesquites had given way to aspen and madrones. From her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of something through a clot of madrones. She stopped, backtracked a few feet, and took another look.
It was a cabin.
Hmm. No one had ever told her about a cabin on Widow’s Peak Mountain. Then again, no one had ever told her about a McCleary settlement either. What if the dot on the map represented this cabin instead of what she thought it represented? Well, that was a new wrinkle. She took out the doodle map. Yep. The cabin was just about in the location of the dot. She changed directions, stopping her ascent to take a lateral path through the madrones.
A jackrabbit leaped up in front of her. Startled, Zoey gasped, plastered a hand over her chest, and felt her heart gallop. “Jeez Louise, calm the hell down,” she growled under her breath.
She picked her way along the ridge. The cabin was constructed on a narrow plateau and she had to pick her way over a tangle of thorny undergrowth to reach it. Brambles tugged at her clothing, clutch at her skin. One thorn cut a long scratch across the back of her hand, brought blood. “Ouch!”
A cloud passed over the sun, temporarily darkening the afternoon and casting the cabin in deep shadows. A blue jay screeched from one of the madrones, just as her face made contact with a spider. She pawed the sticky web from her cheek and spat it from her lips as her pulse did a series of wind sprints.
The cabin was made of untreated cedar, the logs gray and weathered. Stepping stones led up to the door and some of them were littered with raccoon scat. Who would build a cabin way up here on such a precarious slab of rock? Come out the door, take a wrong turn, and you’d be off the side of a cliff.
Cautiously, she proceeded to the door that was held closed by four horizontal wooden blocks nailed into the door frame. She had to stand up on tiptoes to reach the first block and turn it vertically. She slipped off her backpack to make the endeavor easier. The block was stiff and reluctant to give. She had to jump up and smack with the heel of her palm several times before the wood yielded. The next three blocks were equally stubborn, the wood swollen over the years to hold fast the door. Who would have thought four blocks of wood could be more secure than a padlock?
Finally, she had all four blocks of wood turned vertically and she pulled at the rusty wooden handle. It refused to budge. Frustrated, she planted one foot on the left door frame, the other on the right, and yanked with all her might.
The door blasted open, flinging Zoey onto her back on one of the stepping stones and landing her right on top of the raccoon poop.
Eeew!
Thank God it was dried up. She wrestled out of her T-shirt and tossed it over the porch rail. Good thing she always kept a change of clothes in her backpack. She shimmied out of her jeans and tossed it alongside the T-shirt, dug a fresh T-shirt and cargo shorts from her backpack, and put them on.
There now. She dusted her palms together. Where was she?
The cabin door yawned open. Inside it was dim and musty, dust motes dancing like flakes in an upended snow globe on a tiny shaft of light slanting in through a single grimy window.
Tentatively, she stepped over the threshold. The boards creaked ominously beneath her hiking boots. There were several holes in the boards gnawed out by one sort of critter or another throughout the years. It was one small room with a lopsided table sitting in the middle of the floor and one bottomless chair.
That was it.
Blinking, Zoe turned in a circle just in case she was missing something. Well, hell, this was not what she had been expecting to find.
When she’d awakened that morning, her insight had seemed so crystal clear that she hadn’t doubted her supposition for a moment, but now, standing here in the midst of a rotted-out cabin, she felt both sheepish and silly. When she’d realized that the doodle was a map, she’d really thought she was on to something. So much for her puzzle-solving skills. Honestly, she’d believed the dot on August McCleary’s doodle map represented the location of the yellow flame agave.
Color my face red. Good thing she hadn’t told anyone else what she’d suspected.
Now what?
Get yourself back down the mountain before it gets dark, dumbass.
Right. She turned to go, but as she did, she stepped onto one of the holey boards and her boot went right through the floor.
AFTER LEAVING TRIANGLE Mount, Jericho went to Lace’s lab. The cops were there taking her statement and dusting for fingerprints. Since he was already there, Jericho went ahead and told the police officers about the medicine bundle that had been looted from the dig site. That turned into a rigmarole that involved an icy Skype call with Dr. Sinton and took much longer than Jericho anticipated. When the officers asked him whom he suspected could have taken the medicine bundle, he hesitated. He had no proof Catrina had taken it, and all the fingerprints lifted from Lace’s lab belonged to either her, Pierce, her assistant, or other close family members, including Z
oey.
“So any of the students could have stolen the artifact,” the police officer said.
“Actually, anyone at all could have done so. When we took Avery to the hospital, everyone left the dig site,” Jericho admitted. “In retrospect, it was very stupid of me to leave the artifact unattended, but I was so worried about Avery and Braden that it slipped my mind. It was a confusing morning.”
“Even Miss McCleary could have taken it,” Dr. Sinton said over the computer. “In fact, she quit the dig that same day.”
“As did four other students,” Jericho reminded him. “Zoey did not take the artifact.”
“How can you be so certain?” asked the lead police officer. “We did find her fingerprints in the lab.”
“Zoey didn’t take the artifact,” Lace backed him up. “She would never do something like that.”
“The jury is still out on that,” Dr. Sinton said.
It took Jericho another two hours to finally track down Catrina, and he found her quite by accident as she was slipping out the back entrance of the Cupid Museum. He slammed on the brakes, did a U-turn, and went after her.
Catrina’s eyes widened and she looked like she was about to take off at a dead sprint, but she was dragging a wheeled suitcase and carrying a shoulder bag. Indecision warred on her face and he could see her mental gears clicking on whether to abandon her possessions for a shot at freedom or not.
Jericho stopped in the middle of the street, and bulleted from his pickup. “Don’t move!”
The young woman clutched the wide strap of her shoulder bag with both hands, and froze.
“Hold it right there,” he said, striding toward her. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
Catrina’s eyes widened. She dropped her bag, spun on her heels, and took off at a dead sprint.
“Seriously?” he called. “You’re really going to make me run in cowboy boots?”
USING HER BARE hands, and getting a painful splinter underneath her fingernail in the process, Zoey pried up the rotten boards trapping her foot. She pulled her foot free and that’s when she saw a brown glass bottle stoppered with a cork.