Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek)

by Karen Harper

  “Yeah, aren’t you? The guy was having financial problems and then with Nadine’s medical treatment on the horizon... What if he sold it to a middleman, a fence, or whoever he consulted, and that guy came back to see if he had more?”

  “Yeah. I know.” Grant knew that Paul wasn’t the only one having financial problems. Brad was desperate to bail out his business, but the conversation just couldn’t go there. He couldn’t get his mind around the idea that Brad would hurt Paul or Todd to get his hands on their artifacts to sell. Brad was his little brother. Surely, he would never deceive him like that? Grant decided he had to make sure Brad’s big arrowhead was where he must have hidden it, under that pile of stones Kate had spotted. The grave of his nonexistent pet dog.

  “Okay, let’s lift the wheel off together,” Brad said as they pulled the flat tire away from the axle. “Speaking of together, you and the professor have a thing going?”

  “No, don’t roll that tire over the side!” Grant told him, grabbing his arm. “I want Jace to check it for bullets.”

  “Even if it matches a shotgun or hunting rifle—even if it matches the one Lacey’s dad has—he might hate your guts, but he wasn’t out of the cabin shooting at anything, including you. Or cutting his own phone lines. I can vouch for that.”

  “And he and Lacey can vouch for you. Speaking of together...” Grant said as he reached for the spare tire. “You and Lacey?”

  “You think she’d stay in Cold Creek for anyone? Though ultimately my goal is to get out of here, too. And I suppose Professor Kate Lockwood wouldn’t be happy living here, either, right?”

  “Right,” Grant admitted, but he wished he could say wrong.

  * * *

  That evening Kate had dinner for Grant pretty well under control, which was a good thing because she felt exhausted, as if she’d run for miles. They’d made it back down the mountain—slowly—in Grant’s beat-up truck.

  The local doctor had come into his office and checked her over. No concussion this time, he said. She’d just blacked out. Then they’d driven directly to see Jace, even though they’d looked as if they’d rolled down the mountain.

  Jace, spending Sunday afternoon at his office, had said he’d send the two bullets from the tire to BCI for ballistics analysis, but that could take a while. He promised he’d also try to retrieve other bullets on-site. But it was a tense exchange between Grant and Jace that had really bothered Kate:

  Grant had told Jace not to waste time interviewing Clemmet Fencer or Brad. They’d just alibi each other—as would the women. “Besides, I believe Brad.”

  “Maybe that’s a bad move,” Jace had said, sounding more uptight than Kate had felt. “Your little brother keeps turning up at the site of crimes, Grant, or at least could have been there. If I hear his name tied to one more thing, I— Listen, I don’t mean to jump the gun here, but are you sure he’s on your side?”

  And he’d said something else that had really shaken her up: “You don’t see a trend here, do you, Grant? I mean, could the shooter have been aiming for your head? After Paul’s skull was crushed, then the E.R. doc kept saying that Todd was the first patient he’d seen who had fallen more than twenty feet who didn’t go headfirst and crush his skull, I mean...”

  “No,” Grant had said and reached out to hold her upper arm as if to steady her. “Kate’s the one who’s hit her head, but she’s all right.”

  Now Kate raked her fingers through her hair, which she’d finally gotten clear of sawdust, leaf litter and dirt. She’d taken a long, hot shower and washed her hair after they’d left Grant’s truck at the local body shop and Jace had driven them home. She jumped when the doorbell rang. Brad wouldn’t ring it, and Grant was taking a shower. Jace back again with something new?

  In her cutoffs and T-shirt, she went to the door and looked out through the peephole. She was surprised to see almost a mirror image of herself—her younger self, anyway—standing on the front porch with a big box in her arms. The woman looked more like she could be her sister than either Tess or Char. She wore skinny jeans and an Ohio State scarlet-and-gray sweatshirt. Oh, must be Carson’s graduate assistant returning her Beastmaster mask, but hadn’t he said she’d come late tomorrow?

  Kate opened the door, and before she could ask, the girl blurted out a greeting. “Hi, I’m Kaitlyn Blake, Professor Cantrell’s GA. I have your Celtic mask and I tried to copy it exactly for him to use in his Indigenous Native Americans class, but I think you did a great job with it and I’ve read all your Adena-Celtic articles. Very convincing!”

  “Kaitlyn, won’t you step in? I got confused, thought you were coming tomorrow.”

  “I was, but I have to help grade exams then, and I was eager to meet you. Actually, I mean—I hope helping the professor will get me started on my own great career, just like you. I’ve been researching Etruscan tombs but I’d love to get inside an Adena one.”

  Kate’s mind raced. Kaitlyn even had a similar first name and echoed Kate’s primary goal. She took the box from her, put it on the entry-hall table and opened the lid carefully. The Beastmaster mask she’d made so long ago glared up at her despite its empty eye sockets. Its stag antlers she’d worked so hard to find were intact. The mica-chip skin glittered despite the dimness of the hall. As glad as she was to have it back, the thing unsettled her, and she put the lid back on quickly.

  “I know you’re busy,” Kaitlyn said, “but I was just wondering if I could see the Adena mound that Professor Cantrell said is on this property, maybe just the entrance to it, even.”

  Right, Kate thought. Carson must have told her to say that. Or did he? When she was Kaitlyn’s age, she was so eager to make discoveries, to prove things, to take steps to make a name for herself in the well-trodden field of archaeology—just like now.

  “You can see it really well from this picture window back here, but I can’t take you out closer. When I get the chance to excavate it, I’ll remember to ask for you on the dig crew, if you’re available,” Kate said as they stared in silence, almost a mutual reverence, at the mound.

  Kaitlyn sighed and gazed through the glass. Even if this woman had been sent here as Carson’s spy—or if she was a new-tread replacement for the eager ingenue Kate had once been—she understood this girl’s aspirations and ambitions.

  They spoke awhile longer. Kate offered her a glass of iced tea, which she turned down, and then she showed her out. And when Kate returned to the living room with the box in her arms, she gasped to see Grant, leaning in the hallway, arms crossed over his chest, frowning at her. Somehow, instantly, she knew he’d been there for a long time, had seen and heard her with Kaitlyn.

  “She looks like—acts like—your clone, doesn’t she?” he asked, his voice hard.

  “You should have said something. I would have introduced you.” She felt like a kid who had been caught with someone else’s property in her hands.

  “I’ll leave her to Professor Carson Cantrell, who obviously likes auburn-haired, green-eyed beauties as his assistants. Since you told her you’ll have her back on a dig crew and that’s not likely to happen, I’ll probably never get to meet her. But it’s interesting to hear you have plans for a dig here.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I wanted to encourage her. She just brought back the Beastmaster mask I made. Carson had her copy mine so he’d have hers to show his classes.”

  If it was possible, Grant looked even angrier. His square jaw set hard. The furrow between his brows deepened.

  “Would you like to see the mask?” she asked.

  “The drawing you had was bad enough. That nightmare I had, remember? If you have to keep it around here, hide it from me—I mean, just keep it in your room. I don’t see why you needed it here.”

  He strode past her and went into the kitchen, where she heard him slam a cupboard, then pull back his chair and sit down hard. She w
ent into her bedroom and put the box under her bed, then went into the kitchen and started to ladle out the three-cheese macaroni she’d made from scratch because he’d mentioned that he’d loved it as a kid. She put his plate down next to the tossed salad and the zucchini bread, put her own plate down a bit too hard.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” she said, grabbing her fork in her right hand, ready to stab it into the salad.

  How many meals had she seen in her childhood that had started like this between her parents before Dad left them? Hostile silence at the meal, unspoken bad feelings, banging tableware, stomping out. But her father hadn’t loved her mother then, she was sure of that, or he would have broken the dreadful silence, reached out to her.

  Tears sprang to her eyes as Grant reached across the table, loosened her fingers from her fork. He held her hand, silent for a while. Even if their meal was getting cold, she knew something important was coming. He was probably going to ask her to leave. To go back to Tess’s house, get far away from his mound and stay away. He was going to desert her.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, his deep voice catching. “It’s just so much has happened lately that I’m a mess, and I don’t mean to take it out on you. The meal looks great. Comfort food—and your company—is exactly what I need to keep myself sane going through all this.”

  Passion and trust and messed-up parents and danger aside, that was, Kate knew, the exact moment when she realized that Grant really did care for her. And that she loved him.

  19

  After dinner, Kate and Grant drove to Columbus to visit Todd and Amber at the hospital. They’d thought about taking Jason, but Amber said Todd looked pretty bad, and they’d better wait on that.

  They drove along the Olentangy River, which ran through the sprawling Ohio State campus near the cluster of large hospital buildings. “This area must be really familiar to you after the years you spent here,” Grant said. “I thought about going to OSU, but opted for the smaller Ohio U.”

  “A lot of good times here, a lot of hard work, dreams and hopes,” she said as her gaze drifted from the distant, huge football stadium to the tall main library building.

  “Was Carson Cantrell your favorite prof?”

  “I must admit he was. Still is, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “He’s been my mentor, my sounding board and champion for years. I owe him a lot. He believed in me from the first and opened doors for me.”

  “And now that must be the case with him and—what’s her name?—Kate Blake?”

  “Kaitlyn, but I get your point. I’m not an idiot, Grant.”

  “Far from it. The fact she resembles you—and seems so, well, bright and ambitious—could just be a coincidence.”

  “The thing is, I understand her, can’t dislike her. She’s more like me than Tess or Char in looks, head and heart.”

  He drove toward the hospital. “So you don’t think she’s a setup. A participating or even an innocent go-between for you and Carson, reporting in to him, someone on his side.”

  She turned in her seat belt to face him full on. “Grant, I’m on Carson’s side. We both agree that archaeological discovery is an important endeavor for all mankind. You’ve heard if we don’t learn from the past, we’re condemned to repeat it. I believe that.”

  He frowned. The car interior dimmed as he turned into the parking garage, where he stopped and punched the button to take a timed ticket and make the gate lift. She thought he’d say she should forget plans for the mound again, but he didn’t. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to talk to Todd alone for a little while tonight.”

  “Of course. I’ll show the pictures the boys drew for him to Amber, and she can show them to Todd if she thinks it’s a good thing to do. Jason’s was pretty awful. He may need some counseling to get over seeing his father fall. He’s imagined it in a different way. He drew the injured figure on the ground with his arm cut from some sort of handleless ax head with blood all over. I didn’t even see any blood on Todd. I hope Jason hasn’t been allowed to watch one of those ax-murder or slasher movies.”

  As they drove upward through the spiraling levels of the garage, Grant looked stunned. She could almost hear the cogs of his mind clicking, and it surely wasn’t just over finding a parking spot in this crowded place.

  “Grant?”

  “Yeah, I’ll talk to Jason tomorrow. I didn’t see that drawing, only the scribbles from the younger two. Show it to me in the lobby before we go up to his room, okay?”

  Once they were inside the hospital, Kate pulled the drawing out of her big purse and extended it to him. “Strange, huh?” she prompted when he just stared at it, silent and frowning. She couldn’t believe it, but this big, solid man’s hands were shaking. He almost rattled the paper before he thrust it back at her.

  “Yeah, weird, but pretty good art,” he said.

  “Especially the detail on that oversize ax head. Definitely looks like an Indian one, but he’s drawn it so large. Wherever he got this idea, it made an impression on him.”

  “Maybe we have a fledgling artist who will pick up where Paul left off someday.”

  “The ax is probably something his grandfather showed him, along with those sheriff’s badges that went missing. Maybe he thought it was an arrowhead. Back to cowboys and Indians. That sort of artifact’s been found in our area at home, only much smaller.”

  She could tell his smile was forced as he took her elbow, and they started toward the bank of elevators. “A Shawnee Indian relic probably,” he said and punched the elevator button hard. “And I like the way you said in our area at home.”

  “I did, didn’t I? But I’m glad you’re going to talk to Jason because there’s a lot of fear in that drawing. Out West, Char has the Navajo kids draw to get them over violent domestic situations where their parents drink and fight. And Tess said she drew some pretty strange stuff after her captivity when she was getting some counseling.”

  She stopped talking as others got in the elevator with them. Funny, she thought, how modern life put strangers so close together in small spaces, as if they were intimate. Everyone stopped talking and didn’t really look at each other as the elevator went up. Kate said a little prayer that, since she and Grant were getting closer every day, he would continue to open up more, but it always seemed he was holding something back.

  * * *

  They both hugged Amber, and she gave them a progress report on Todd. “He’s awake and alert, but still, like he told me, not out of the woods,” she explained, “and I think he meant saying it that way as a joke. But he’s angry, mostly at himself.”

  Amber and Kate went down the hall to the waiting room. Amber had said Grant should go on in to Todd’s room. Grant shuffled over to the elevated bed framed by monitors and racks with dangling IV tubes.

  Todd was staring at the ceiling as if he could see something there. His narrow-eyed gaze darted to Grant. “Yo, best bud and boss.”

  “You bet I’m still your boss, and I need you back as soon as you can get around at all.”

  There was a chair next to the bed, but Grant stood, leaning over so he could see his friend, who lay flat on his back. Both legs were in casts. One arm was in traction, the other in a cast, elbow to wrist with his black-and-blue fingers sticking out. He was bare-chested, his ribs wrapped with tape. His bruises were every hue from black to pale green, and scratches crisscrossed his bare skin, including his face. Grant tried not to let his dismay register on his own face.

  Todd looked up at him through swollen, purplish eyelids. “I can’t believe I fell. I never fall.”

  “A freak accident? I’d give you a hug or a high five but later, when you’re better.”

  “Don’t try to cheer me up. I’m not a patient man, Grant. Not a good patient in general. For the family’s sake, I’m grateful to still be
here.” He spoke slowly, taking shallow breaths and almost whispering. Grant leaned closer to hear. It obviously hurt even to talk.

  “Listen, we’ll help with the boys,” Grant tried to reassure him. “Kate’s amazingly good with them. They sent you some drawings that Kate’s showing Amber. Jason drew your fall—but with an ax head cutting your arm with lots of blood, so he’s mixed that up somehow. He drew it big, Todd, too big to be a normal ax head or a pioneer or historic Indian one a kid would find.”

  Todd screwed his eyes shut, then opened them. “So, you recognized it after all this time? He found it last winter where I had it squirreled away in the attic. Somehow, he managed to cut himself on it. There was a lot of blood, and I had to assure him he wouldn’t die before we got him stitched up. I told Amber I’d found it in the woods, that it was Cherokee or Shawnee, and she never questioned it. Did Kate recognize it in the drawing as Adena?”

  “No, thank God.”

  “She still has no idea you—we’ve—been in the mound?”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to get into all this. You need your rest and—”

  “I need to talk, Grant! To figure out how I could have fallen. It’s all I’ve been able to think about—that and worrying about the family without me. I swear my harness must have been cut and not by me!”

  “Calm down. You heard that Jace cleared Brad—”

  “Yeah, I know. Gotta admit he didn’t know what the heck he was doing, and I mostly took him up thinking that would get you to climb with me sometime. I was keeping an eye on him before we went up—then can’t recall the climb itself at all. But just in case something goes wrong with another operation to set my bones or something—Grant, pretend I’m grabbing your hand right now, and we’re making a life-or-death promise. I’m going to tell you where the Adena ax head is, just in case someone wants to kill me.”

  “That might be true of Paul’s case, but you had an accid—”