The trip to the site where Daryl’s remains were found took exactly one hour and we traveled the same road we’d come down when we went to check out the site where Beverly had crashed her car.
In fact, we parked very near the tree she’d hit, which was still scarred with the evidence of the crash and the talon marks of the demon. “Why doesn’t this feel like just a coincidence?” I said when we got out of the car.
Heath pulled out two of the spikes from the loops in his belt. “The demon must like this area,” he said, motioning for me to get my spikes out too.
I did and we set off on foot through the scrub and mostly bare earth. This wasn’t quite the desert, but it was certainly close.
I could see the foothills weren’t too far away, but the going was a little rough, that is, until Heath found some three-wheeler tracks.
“Who do you think made these?” I asked as he and I bent low to inspect them.
“I don’t know,” Heath said, and I could tell he was a little bothered by them.
“One of your younger cousins coming out here for a little joyride, maybe?” I asked.
Heath stood up and wiped his hands together to get the dust off. “Maybe. There were two ATVs along here,” he said. “One following the other.”
The tracks headed right for the foothills and as we walked along them, ever closer to the red dot on the screen of Heath’s iPhone, I gave up my theory that the ATV tracks belonged to someone from the tribe.
Especially when Heath pointed to yet a third set that had intersected the pair of tracks we were navigating almost exactly at the point where the satellite pinpointed the location where Daryl’s remains had been found.
There wasn’t much to this intersection except for a confusion of tire tracks and some wooden stakes planted in the ground with orange tags on them to mark the site for the coroner.
The energy around all this was bad, though. As in BAD.
“Something very violent happened here,” I said, holding my arms out to really feel the area around the wooden stakes.
Heath nodded. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. Then his eyes drifted to the tracks again, which carried on toward the foothills. “I want to see where they were coming from, Em.”
“Lead the way,” I told him, and we began walking again.
It didn’t take long; the foothills were only about two hundred yards away from where Daryl had died, and when we got to the base of the steep slope in front of us, it was clear that Daryl and his companion had either stopped here and hiked up or stopped here to rest for a while, because the ATVs had sunk into the loose dirt, which clearly indicated that they’d been parked there for a period of time.
“Do you think they went up there?” I asked, squinting toward the top of the hill.
Heath approached the slope. “I do,” he said, already starting up.
I didn’t question him, but tucked in right behind as we hoofed it up the slope.
About three-quarters of the way to the top, Heath suddenly stopped and pointed to the ground. In front of him was a long metal rod with a wooden handle. “What’s that?” I asked.
Heath moved over to it and picked it up, anger clouding his features. “They were after our burial grounds,” he said, showing me the rod like I might understand what he meant.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Heath, what is that thing?”
He came back down the slope a few feet to me and punched the rod into the earth. “It’s how these bastards locate a grave,” he explained. “They jam this into the ground and if they feel it give way, they start digging.”
I eyed the rod closely. It was covered in dirt midway up the shaft. “Looks like they found something.”
Heath looked up the slope again. “Sons of bitches,” he muttered.
I surveyed our location, a bit confused. “But these aren’t your burial grounds, right? Why would they bring that out here?”
Heath suddenly pointed to the ridge at the top of the slope. “There!” he said. “See that, Em?”
I squinted to where he was pointing, spotting a set of five caves along the ridge. I then eyed my watch. It was going on four p.m. “How long would it take to get up there?”
“Half hour.”
“When does the sun set again?”
“Around six thirty.”
I squeezed Heath’s hand. I knew he really wanted to see what was at the top of that ridge, but once we got up there, we’d have precious little time to check it out if we didn’t want to get caught out here after sunset. Then again, the demon was on the loose and there was another night ahead where it could terrorize one of Heath’s relatives. I made up my mind quickly, because we didn’t have another minute to spare. “Race you to the top,” I said, and let go of his hand to sprint up several yards of the slope.
Heath kept pace with me and we didn’t speak as we pushed our way up the hill. Huffing and puffing, we made it in twenty minutes, which gave us a little more wiggle room.
Still breathing hard, we began to inspect the caves. There were six of them—only five were visible from the slope—and what was interesting was that I could see right away that the second one had been enlarged by human hands. There were chisel marks in the rock on the cave’s ceiling and I pointed those out to Heath. “The Anasazi Indians used to inhabit these lands, didn’t they?” I asked, remembering the literature from a pamphlet in our hotel room.
“Yeah,” Heath said. “But I didn’t know there was a settlement up here. I wonder if my uncles know about this place.”
Heath and I left that cave and entered the third, which was barren and cold. The fourth cave along the row was the one where we hit pay dirt. “There!” I said, rushing forward to pick up another rod identical to the one Heath found on the slope and still carried. I held it up so he could see, and he made a grim face. “That confirms it,” he said. “There were definitely two of them up here, looking for graves.”
I walked into the cave and came up short. My sixth sense was on high alert with the demon lurking around, so when I walked into the cave and felt it buzzing and nearly crackling with energy, it was a moment before I could even process it. “Whoa!” I said, looking over my shoulder at Heath. “Honey, come in and feel this!”
Heath eyed me curiously but came into the cave, and I smiled when he too came up short. “Whoa, is right,” he said, turning in a circle with his arms outstretched. “There is some pretty amazing energy here.”
“It feels almost like a vortex, doesn’t it?” I was referring to the energy of certain geographic locations known to contain extra-high quantities of electromagnetic currents.
“I think you’re right,” Heath said. “It does feel like a vortex, but not a big one.”
“It’s still pretty powerful, though,” I said, feeling a tingling sensation all along my limbs. I’d need to watch myself in here, because it was easy to lose track of time and one’s surroundings within a vortex.
And then something odd caught my eye. In particular, something peculiar about the ground. Instead of being mostly packed earth like in the other caves, it appeared to be layered with loose rock and dirt and also littered with pockmarks. I placed the rod into one of those small depressions and it fit perfectly. “Hey, look at this!” I said to Heath.
He came forward and surveyed the cave floor, then pointed to a three-by-three section of dirt that had clearly been disturbed. “Looks like our grave robbers found what they were looking for,” he said, walking over to inspect it.
I took a step to follow after him, but I felt a tug in my solar plexus that pulled me up short. Something felt off. I moved in the direction of the tug, letting the rod tap the ground as I walked, and at the back of the cave, the resistance against the tip gave a little and it sank into the earth a good three inches.
The sensation of being pulled intensified for one quick instant; then it vanished and I knew I was standing over something very important. “Heath?”
“Yeah?” he said, without looking up.
>
“I think I found something.”
This time he did lift his chin, and the expression on my face must have been enough to convince him to come over. I held still, with the rod still sunk into the ground, because I wanted him to see it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. But when I tapped the ground right here, the rod sank in a couple of inches.”
Heath poked his own rod over the ground. It bounced up off the hard surface several times, except when it got to within about six inches of my rod, and then it too sank into the earth. Heath got down on both knees and used a rock to scratch at the loose dirt. I got down too and helped him, and before long we could see a two-by-two-foot hole had been previously dug out of the hard-packed earth and inside that hole was something man-made. “What is it?” I asked, staring at the top of the thing, which had an odd shape.
“It’s a clay pot,” Heath said.
I felt a chill down my spine. “The vessel?” I asked. Heath continued to scrub away the loose dirt with his hands. “Em,” he said as he worked.
“Yes?”
“Get out Gilley’s sweatshirt and put it on.”
I hesitated only a second before I pulled out all my magnetic spikes and laid them out in a semicircle around Heath; then I dug Gil’s sweatshirt out of Heath’s backpack and put it on.
Meanwhile, he’d managed to remove enough of the dirt around the pot to pull it carefully free of its enclosure. Wiping away the dust on the outside, he gasped when the exterior design appeared. “What the . . . ?” he said.
“What is it?” I peered at the clay pot, which was fairly large and looked kind of heavy. The outside was tinted all in black, but on the side a white feather was etched into the clay.
Before Heath could answer me, however, I realized I’d seen that pot before. Sam had shown it to me in Molly’s house the day Heath’s aunt had been killed. “That’s the missing urn that holds your family’s ashes!”
Heath stared at the artifact as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “Everyone thought my mom took this,” he said. “And it’s been here all along.”
“So someone took it, hid it here, and framed your mom?”
“Looks that way.”
“Well,” I reasoned, “at least now you can prove that it wasn’t her.”
But Heath shook his head. “Em, if I show up with this, the tribe’s just gonna accuse me of trying to cover up my mom’s crime. They’ll say that she’s had it all this time and only now that my uncle Milton has died did she feel guilty enough to bring it out in the open again.”
“So . . . ,” I began, not knowing where he was going with that line of reasoning. “You’re not going to give it back to the tribe?”
Heath lifted the pot carefully onto his lap and wiped at the dirt some more. “I didn’t say that,” he told me. “I just need to think about how to show up with it. And I don’t think I should do that right now. I mean, while we’re dealing with this demon, it’s just going to look too suspicious.”
“Are you gonna tell your mom at least?”
Heath sighed. “No,” he said softly. “It’ll only upset her to know that someone took it and hid it here, letting her take all the blame. I’ll wait until after we’ve dealt with the black hawk. Then she and I can have a sit-down and figure out how to explain its sudden appearance to the tribe.”
“Okay,” I said, wanting to fully support his decision, but knowing I’d do it differently.
“We better leave,” Heath said, nervously looking at the dwindling light from outside.
“You carrying that thing down?” I asked, motioning to the urn in his lap.
He nodded, grunting as he got up with it. It was clearly heavy. I eyed him skeptically and he said, “I’ll be careful.”
I got up too and turned to the exit when my vision sort of clouded over and I heard a buzzing sound in both ears.
The feeling was so intense and so swift that I nearly fell over onto my side, and I had to sink back down to the ground again.
“Em?” I heard Heath say, but his voice sounded like he was calling me from far away.
I fought the light-headed and dizzy feeling coming over me and tried to get to my feet again, but my limbs turned to jelly and I plopped right onto my butt.
“M. J.?” Heath said again, his tone more insistent. “Babe, are you okay?”
I opened my mouth to tell him that something was happening to me, but no sound came out. Instead, the air around me seemed to shimmer and all of a sudden the cave brightened, like the sun was shining into it instead of where I knew it was setting on the other side of the hill. Against the wall where the slightly raised mound of dirt had been, I saw two figures with short shovels, digging at the earth and moving it to the side, their movements quick and excited. When I focused on the figures, I could see that they were both men, in their early-to-mid thirties. One was slim and short—scrawny even. The other was about four inches taller and built to move the dirt aside at a much faster pace.
They didn’t talk, but I could hear their shovels striking the earth and then the shorter man waved his hand and stopped digging. In unison they both tossed their shovels aside and the short one knelt eagerly and said, “You got something, Wyatt?”
“Yeah!” said his companion. “Right there! See it, D.?”
D. bent and wiped at something below my sight line. “Ho-ho!” he said triumphantly, reaching into the hole with both hands to wiggle something back and forth.
“Easy!” Wyatt yelled. “Don’t break it!”
“I got, I got it,” D. told him, and a moment later he pulled out a clay pot so similar to the one Heath and I had just brought up that at first I thought it was the same one. But then when the stranger wiped away the dirt to reveal the surface of the artifact, I happened to catch a glimpse of the white marking on the side, which clearly showed a white wolf’s paw crushing down on the faint outline of a black feather, and I knew deep in my bones these two had just pulled up the vessel that contained the spirit of the black hawk, and I then knew that “D.” was Daryl West.
“Whoa!” West exclaimed, holding it up so his partner could have a look. “This is gonna fetch us some serious cash, dude!” He then handed it to Wyatt, who seemed to take stock of the pot’s weight. “It’s heavier than it looks,” he said.
“It feels like something’s inside,” Daryl told him, climbing out of the hole and reaching for the vessel again.
“Should we take out the plug and see what’s inside?” Wyatt asked, pointing to the narrow opening, which had a clay stopper in it, held in place by what looked like layers of thin leather strips.
“Naw,” said Daryl, holding the vessel away from Wyatt protectively. “It’s worth more if we don’t mess with it. We can show it to the professor and he can tell us what’s in it. Hell, he might even put a bid on it!”
Wyatt’s attention was suddenly pulled back to the hole his partner had just climbed out of. “Hey, D.!” he said, pointing to it. “See that?”
Daryl looked. “It’s a skeleton!” he said, nearly whooping with excitement. “Aw, man! Dude, we hit the jackpot here!”
“Should we dig it up now?” Wyatt asked.
“Naw,” said Daryl. “Let’s get down the slope with this jug and come back later. It’s gettin’ pretty light out and we don’t want no one to see us.”
In the next moment I felt a firm squeeze to my shoulders. “M. J.!” Heath shouted so loud that I flinched. And just like that, the lighting inside the cave changed back to dusk and I found myself staring into Heath’s very worried face.
“Daryl had a partner named Wyatt,” I blurted out.
Heath didn’t let go of my shoulders, but he did dip his chin and mutter a “Thank God,” before looking me in the eye again. “Where’d you go, babe?”
I shook my head. “Into another imprint,” I told him, pushing off the ground to my feet, but I was still really wobbly and had to steady myself against Heath. “It must be the vortex that cause
d it, but that’s not the important part. Honey, I saw Daryl and Wyatt! They were here digging, just like we suspected, and they found the vessel. It looked exactly like that one,” I told him, pointing to the one in his arms, “except that the design on the side was different. It showed a wolf’s paw crushing a black feather.”
“Sounds like the symbol Hummingbird painted on the side of the vessel that was supposed to trap the black hawk,” Heath said.
I nodded. “The hole also held a skeleton. I’m guessing they were the remains of White Wolf.”
Heath’s lips pressed together, his anger barely held in check. “Did they dig him up too?” he asked, looking at the raised mound of earth near the back of the cave.
“No,” I told him. “At least, not on that visit. The imprint ended before I could see if there was a time when they might’ve come back.”
Heath moved over to the loose dirt of the grave. “We’ll have to hope they didn’t come back,” he said softly. Then he looked at the top of the clay pot cradled in the crook of his arm and asked, “Did they open the vessel?”
I shook my head. “No, and that’s what’s so weird. Wyatt wanted to, but Daryl said that it was worth more if they didn’t. They also mentioned taking it to a professor.”
“Professor?” Heath repeated. “Professor who?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. You pulled me out before I could get much else.”
Heath’s expression became chagrined. “Sorry,” he said. “You were just staring off into space for so long that I started to get worried.”
I realized then that the light inside the cave was quickly fading. “What time is it?” I asked, and before Heath could even answer, I was staring at my watch. “We’ve gotta go!”
“You okay to walk?” he asked me.
“I’ll be fine as soon as I get away from this vortex,” I said, taking a few unsteady steps, refusing to stay here a minute longer.
I followed Heath out of the cave and we started down the steep slope. I was a little weak and tired and wondered if it was my experience in the cave mixed with a heavy dose of jet lag that was making me stumble and head clumsily down the side of the hill. We were just about at the bottom when Heath called out, “Careful!” to me as I slipped rather inelegantly and nearly went down on my butt.
Ghoul Interrupted: A Ghost Hunter Mystery Page 21