The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 3

by Nora Roberts

  “This is between her and me,” Doug said.

  “That much you got right,” Callie agreed.

  “When we’re finished, if you want to go a round, I’m available.”

  “Assholes through the ages,” Callie grumbled, and solved the problem by stepping between them. “Anybody goes a round, we go a round. Now pick up the mess you made and take a hike.”

  “Those papers are an insult to me, and to my family.”

  “Oh yeah?” Her chin didn’t just come up, it thrusted. And behind her shaded glasses, her eyes went molten. “Well, accusing me of being after your mother’s money was insulting to me.”

  “That’s right, it was.” He glanced down at the scraps of paper. “I’d say we’re even.”

  “No, we’ll be even when I tramp around where you work and cause a stink in front of your associates.”

  “Okay, right now I’m putting in some time at my grandfather’s bookstore. That’s Treasured Pages, on Main Street in town. We’re open six days a week, ten to six.”

  “I’ll work it into my schedule.” She tucked her thumbs in her front pockets, stood hip-shot, using body language as an insult. “Meanwhile, get lost. Or I might just give in to the urge to kick your ass and bury you in the kitchen midden.”

  She smiled when she said it—a big, wide, mean smile. And the dimples winked out.

  “Christ. Jesus Christ.” He stared at her as the ground shifted under his feet.

  His face went so pale, his eyes so dark, she worried he might topple over at her feet. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You probably don’t even know what a kitchen midden is.”

  “You look like my mother. Like my mother with my father’s eyes. You’ve got my father’s eyes, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to do?”

  The baffled rage in his voice, the naked emotion on his face were more than her own temper could hold. It dropped out of her, left her floundering. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of us . . . Jake.”

  “Why don’t you take this into Digger’s trailer?” He laid a hand on her shoulder, ran it down her back and up again. “I’ll finish up here. Go on, Cal.” Jake gave her a nudge. “Unless you want to stand here while everybody on-site laps all this up.”

  “Right. Damn. Come on.”

  Jake bent down to gather up the torn papers. He glanced to his left, where Digger and Bob had stopped work to watch. Jake’s long, cool stare had bright color washing over Bob’s face, and a wide grin spreading over Digger’s.

  They both got busy again.

  Shoulders hunched, Callie stalked toward Digger’s trailer. She didn’t wait to see if Doug followed. His face told her he would, and if he balked, Jake would see to it.

  She swung inside, stepped expertly over, around and through the debris to reach the mini-fridge. “We’ve got beer, water and Gatorade,” she said without turning when she heard the footsteps climb up behind her.

  “Jesus, this is a dump.”

  “Yeah, Digger gave his servants his lifetime off.”

  “Is Digger a person?”

  “That’s yet to be scientifically confirmed. Beer, water, Gatorade.”

  “Beer.”

  She pulled out two, popped tops, then turned to offer one.

  He just stared at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to handle this.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I don’t want you to be here. I don’t want you to exist. That makes me feel like scum, but I don’t want all this pouring down on my family, on me. Not again.”

  The absolute honesty, the sentiment she could completely understand and agree with, had her reevaluating him. Under some circumstances, she realized, she’d probably like him.

  “I don’t much care for it myself. I have a family, too. This is hurting them. Do you want this beer, or not?”

  He took it. “I want my mother to be wrong. She’s been wrong before. Gotten her hopes up, gotten worked up, only to get shot down. But I can’t look at you and believe she’s wrong this time.”

  If she was walking through an emotional minefield, Callie realized, so was he. She’d gotten slapped in the face with a brother. He’d gotten kicked in the balls with a sister.

  “No, I don’t think she’s wrong. We’ll need the tests to confirm, but there’s already enough data for a strong supposition. That’s part of how I make my living, on strong suppositions.”

  “You’re my sister.” Saying it out loud hurt his throat. He tipped back the beer, drank.

  It made her stomach jitter, and again engaged her sym-pathies as she imagined his was doing a similar dance. “It’s probable that I was your sister.”

  “Can we sit down?”

  “We’ll be risking various forms of infection, but sure.” She dumped books, porn magazines, rocks, empty beer bottles and two excellent sketches of the site off the narrow built-in sofa.

  “I just . . . I just don’t want you to hurt her. That’s all.”

  “Why would I?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, okay.” She took off her sunglasses, rubbed her eyes. “Make me understand.”

  “She’s never gotten over it. I think if you’d died, it would have been easier for her.”

  “A little rough on me, but yeah, I get that.”

  “The uncertainty, the need to believe she was going to find you, every day, and the despair, every day, when she didn’t. It changed her. It changed everything. I lived with her through that.”

  “Yeah.” He’d been three, Callie recalled from the newspaper articles. He’d lived his life with it. “And I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t. It broke my parents apart. In a lot of ways, it just broke them. She built a new life, but she built it on the wreck of the one she had before. I don’t want to see her knocked off again, wrecked again.”

  It made her sick inside, sick and sorry. Yet it was removed from her. Just as the death of the man whose bones she’d unearthed was removed. “I don’t want to hurt her. I can’t feel for her what you feel, but I don’t want to hurt her. She wants her daughter back, and nothing is going to make that happen. I can only give her the knowledge, maybe even the comfort, that I’m alive, that I’m healthy, that I was given a good life with good people.”

  “They stole you from us.”

  Her hands clenched, ready to defend. “No, they didn’t. They didn’t know. And because they’re the kind of people they are, they’re suffering because now they do know.”

  “You know them. I don’t.”

  She nodded now. “Exactly so.”

  He got the point. They didn’t know each other’s family. They didn’t know each other. It seemed they’d reached a point where they would have to. “What about you? How are you feeling about all this?”

  “I’m . . . scared,” she admitted. “I’m scared because it feels like this is an arc of one big cycle, and it’s going to whip around and flatten me. It’s already changed my relationship with my parents. It’s made us careful with each other in a way we shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know how long it’ll take for us to be easy with each other once more, but I do know it’s never going to be quite the same. And that pisses me off.

  “And I’m sorry,” she added, “because your mother didn’t do anything to deserve this. Or your father. Or you.”

  “Or you.” And tossing blame at her, he admitted, had been a way to keep his guilt buried. “What’s your first clear memory?”

  “My first?” She considered, sipped her beer. “Riding on my father’s shoulders. At the beach. Martha’s Vineyard, I’m guessing, because we used to go there nearly every year for two weeks in the summer. Holding on to his hair with my hands and laughing as he danced back and forth in the surf. And I can hear my mother saying, ‘Elliot, be careful.’ But she was laughing, too.”

  “Mine’s waiting in line to see Santa at the Hagerstown Mall. The music, the voices, this big-ass snowman that was kind of freaky. You were sleeping in the stroller.”

&n
bsp; He took another sip of beer, steadied himself because he knew he had to get it out. “You had on this red dress—velvet. I didn’t know it was velvet. It had lace here.” He ran his hands over his chest. “Mom had taken off your cap because it made you fussy. You had this duck-down hair. Really soft, really pale. You were basically bald.”

  She felt something from him now, a connection to that little boy that made her smile at him as she tugged on her messy mane of hair. “I made up for it.”

  “Yeah.” He managed a smile in return as he studied her hair. “I kept thinking about seeing Santa. I had to pee like a racehorse, but I wasn’t getting out of line for anything. I knew just what I wanted. But the closer we got, the weirder it seemed. Big, ugly elves lurking around.”

  “You wonder why people don’t get that elves are scary.”

  “Then it was my turn, and Mom told me to go ahead, go sit on Santa’s lap. Her eyes were wet. I didn’t get that she was feeling sentimental. I thought something was wrong, something bad. I was petrified. The mall Santa . . .He didn’t look like I thought he was supposed to. He was too big. When he picked me up, let out with the old ho ho ho, I freaked. Started screaming, pushing away, fell off his lap and right on my face. Made my nose bleed.

  “Mom picked me up, holding me, rocking me. I knew everything was going to be all right then. Mom had me and she wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Then she started screaming, and I looked down. You were gone.”

  He took a long drink. “I don’t remember after that. It’s all jumbled up. But that memory’s as clear as yesterday.”

  Three years old, she thought again. Terrified, she imagined. Traumatized, and obviously riddled with guilt.

  So she handled him the way she’d want to be handled. She took another sip of beer, leaned back. “So, you still scared of fat men in red suits?”

  He let out a short, explosive laugh. And his shoulders relaxed. “Oh yeah.”

  It was after midnight when Dolan moved to the edge of the trees and looked on the site that he’d carefully plotted out into building lots. Antietam Creek Project, he thought. His legacy to his community.

  Good, solid, affordable houses. Homes for young families, for families who wanted rural living with modern conveniences. Quiet, picturesque, historic and aesthetic—and fifteen minutes to the interstate.

  He’d paid good money for that land. Good enough that the interest on the loan was going to wipe out a year of profit if he didn’t get back on schedule and plant the damn things.

  He was going to lose the contracts he already had if the delay ran over the sixty days. Which meant refunding two hefty deposits.

  It wasn’t right, he thought. It wasn’t right for people who had no business here telling him how to run Dolan and Sons. Telling him what he could and couldn’t do with land he owned.

  Damn Historical and Preservation Societies had already cost him more time and money than any reasonable man could afford. But he’d played by the rules, right down the line. Paid the lawyers, spoken at town meetings, given interviews.

  He’d done it all by the book.

  It was time to close the book.

  For all he knew, for all anyone really knew, Lana Campbell and her tree huggers had arranged this whole fiasco just to pressure him to sell them the land at a loss.

  For all he knew these damn hippie scientists were playing along, making a bunch of bones into some big fucking deal.

  People couldn’t live on bones. They needed houses. And he was going to build them.

  He’d gotten the idea when that smart-ass Graystone had been in his office, trying to throw his weight around. Big scientific and historical impact, his butt. Let’s see what the press had to say when it heard some of that big impact were deer bones and ham bones and beef bones.

  He always kept a nice supply in his garage freezer for his dogs.

  With satisfaction, he looked down at the garbage bag he’d carted from the car he’d parked a quarter mile away. He’d show Graystone a thing or two.

  And that bitch Dunbrook, too.

  The way she’d come to the job site, swaggering around, blasting at him in front of his men. Brought the damn county sheriff down on him. Having to answer questions had humiliated him a second time. He was a goddamn pillar of the community, not some asshole teenager with a can of spray paint.

  He wasn’t going to let that go. No, sir.

  She wanted to accuse him of vandalism, well, by God, he’d oblige her.

  They wanted to play dirty, he thought, he’d show them how to play dirty. Every mother’s son of them would be laughed out of town, and he’d be back in business.

  People needed to live now, he told himself as he hauled up the bag. They needed to raise their children and pay their bills, they needed to hang their curtains and plant their gardens. And, by God, they needed a house to live in. Today.

  They didn’t need to worry about how some monkey-man lived six thousand years ago. All that was just horseshit.

  He had men depending on him for work, and those men had families depending on them to bring home the bacon. He was doing this for his community, Dolan thought righteously as he crept out of the woods.

  He could see the silhouette of the trailer sitting across the field. One of those dickwads was in there, but the lights were off. Probably stoned on pot and sleeping like a baby.

  “Good riddance,” he muttered and shone his little penlight over the mounds and trenches. He didn’t know one hole from the other, and had convinced himself that nobody else did either.

  He had to believe it, with the bank breathing down his neck, with the extra crews he’d hired coming by to see when work would start up again, with his wife worrying every day and every night about the money he’d already sunk into the development.

  He walked quietly toward one of the squares, glancing at the trailer, then at the trees, when he thought he heard a rustling.

  The sudden screech of an owl had him dropping the bag, then laughing at himself. Imagine, an old hand like him being spooked in the dark. Why, he’d hunted the woods around here since he was a boy.

  Not these woods, of course, he thought with another nervous glance at the deep shadows in the silent trees. Most tended to steer clear of the woods at Simon’s Hole. Not that he believed in ghosts. But there were plenty of places to hunt, to camp, to walk, besides a place that made the hair stand up on a man’s neck at night.

  It would be good when the development was done, he told himself as he kept a wary eye on the woods and picked up his bag of bones. Good to have people mowing their lawns and kids playing in the yards. Cookouts and card games, dinner on the stove and the evening news on the TV.

  Life, he thought, and swiped at the sweat beading over his top lip as those shadows seemed to sway, to gather, to move closer.

  His hand trembled as he reached in the bag, closed his hand over a cool, damp bone.

  But he didn’t want to go down into the hole. It was like a grave, he realized. What kind of people spent their time in holes digging for bones like ghouls?

  He’d get one of the shovels, that’s what he’d do. He’d get one of the shovels and bury the bones around the holes and the piles of dirt. That was just as good.

  He heard the sounds again—a plop in the water, a shifting of brush. This time he whirled, shining his narrow beam toward the trees, toward the pond where a young boy named Simon had drowned before Dolan was born.

  “Who’s out there?” His voice was low, shaky, and the beam bobbled as it zigzagged through the dark. “You got no right to be creeping around out here. This is my land. I’ve got a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  He wanted a shovel now, as much for a weapon as for a tool. He darted toward a tarp, caught the toe of his shoe in one of the line ropes. He went down hard, skinning the heels of his hands as he threw them out to break his fall. The penlight went flying.

  He cursed himself, shoved to his knees. Nobody there, he told himself. Of course there was nobody out there
at goddamn one in the morning. Just being a fool, jumping at shadows.

  But when the shadow fell across him, he didn’t have time to scream. The bright pain from the blow to the back of his head lasted seconds only.

  When his body was dragged to the pond, rolled into the dark water, Dolan was as dead as Simon.

  PART II

  The Dig

  Why seek ye the living among the dead?

  LUKE 24:5

  * * *

  Eleven

  Digger was soaking wet and smoking the Marlboro he’d bummed from one of the sheriff’s deputies in great, sucking drags.

  He’d ditched cigarettes two years, three months and twenty-four days before. But finding a dead body when he’d gone out to relieve his bladder in the misty dawn had seemed like the perfect reason to start again.

  “I just jumped right in. Didn’t think, just went. Had him half up on the bank there before I saw how his skull was crushed. No point in mouth-to-mouth. Ha. No point in it then.”

  “You did what you could.” Callie put an arm around his skinny shoulders. “You should go get some dry clothes.”

  “They said they’d have to talk to me again.” His hair hung in tangled wet ropes around his face. The hand that brought the cigarette to his mouth shook. “Never did like talking to cops.”

  “Who does?”

  “Searching my trailer.”

  She winced as she glanced over her shoulder to the grimy trailer. “You got any pot in there? Anything that’s going to get you in trouble?”

  “No. I gave up grass, mostly, about the same time I quit tobacco.” He managed a wan smile at the Marlboro he’d smoked almost to the filter. “Maybe I’ll pick both habits back up again. Jesus, Cal, the fuckers think maybe I did it.” The thought of it rattled around in his belly like greasy dice.

  “They just have to check things out. But if you’re really worried, we’ll call a lawyer. I can call Lana Campbell.”

  He puffed, shook his head. “No, let them look. Let them go on and look. Nothing in there has anything to do with this. If I was going to kill somebody, I’d be better at it. Didn’t even know the son of a bitch. Didn’t even know him.”