Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek)

by Karen Harper

  “Just listen. With my broken ribs, it hurts like hell when I breathe, let alone talk. I wedged and nailed the ax head in a wooden case way up in a crotch of my tree where no one can get to it but me—and now maybe never again. But if something happens to me, promise you’ll get a climber to retrieve it and see Amber gets it. I swear, if she’d sell it, she could put all three kids through college. She can just say she found it. Promise me!”

  “You’re going to make it, Todd. You’re going to be in a wheelchair for a while and rehab, but you’ll be tooling around the mill floor in no time. But as for climbing again...”

  “I will. I swear I will. And please promise me—only if I don’t make it—Amber gets the ax head, and you’ll help her sell it on the sly.”

  He gasped—either for air or in pain—and started to cough, moaning. Grant pushed the red button by the side of his bed, and a nurse came running in.

  “He’s been talking too long,” she said, assessing the situation. “He’s not to become overly animated. Now, Todd, I’ve told you to keep calm, or we’ll have to increase the dose of morphine. Then it will be off to dreamland.”

  “Bad dreams. Don’t want that,” Todd muttered as Grant moved back and put his arms around Kate and Amber, who had heard the alarm and come rushing in. He and Kate stepped out into the hall and could hear Amber speaking soothingly to Todd.

  “So much for visiting and comforting him,” Grant whispered.

  “What got him so riled? Worried about his job again?”

  “He’s upset he fell, can’t believe he fell.”

  Kate, still clutching the sheaf of crayoned drawings, leaned against him and stayed silent for once, not one word. Now, he thought, at least he knew where Todd’s relic from the death chamber was, high in the air, higher than the attic where Jason had cut himself on it. And all this had made Grant decide to keep looking for Paul’s eagle pendant, and Brad’s arrowhead, starting under that pile of stones in the woods. Because, despite the fact Kate had missed the clue in Jason’s drawing, all he needed was for her to get on the scent of anything coming out of that mound, most of all the Beastmaster mask in the basement right under the room where she slept.

  * * *

  Grant and Kate were exhausted. They fell asleep on the couch where he’d been holding her, legs and arms entangled as they talked about everything but the mound, which lay dark and silent, outside the window.

  After she’d gone to bed, Grant sat back down, looking out, waiting for her light to go off. A wan shaft of gold threw itself onto the lawn until she finally turned it off. Fighting sleep himself, he sat there for another half hour, then tiptoed to the basement door.

  He quietly closed it behind himself, turned on the light and tiptoed down in his bare feet. How crazy that she’d brought a Beastmaster mask into the house, even one she’d made herself. He hadn’t even wanted to look at it, but he had to grimace at the thought that the two masks could escape their boxes and meet at night in the house—to mate.

  Man, he was losing it. Exhausted. Conflicted. Scared.

  He went through the ritual of getting the box out of the wall, setting aside Kate’s business card. He opened the box, pulled away the tissue paper. The mica chips on the skin gleamed in his flashlight glow; the dried blood on the spiked points of the ancient stag antlers seemed to move in shifting shadows. Maybe after all these years, he should put it back in the death chamber. Put Todd’s back, too, and Brad’s, if it was under that pile of stones. If he could find Paul’s eagle pendant, return that, too. Then he could let Kate excavate the mound, remove the bodies, the precious relics—the burden and curse of the place. But to enter the mound, he’d have to see and be haunted again by the smashed skulls and skeletons all laid out in dreadful death.

  On the other hand, his gut instinct was to get Kate away from here, however much he wanted to keep her. Even if he returned things and let her in the mound, she’d surely ferret out that he’d lied to her, led her on—been in there before.

  He gazed into the eyeless stare of the beast, trying to decide what to do with this, with Kate. He returned the mask to its tomb and hurried back upstairs to bed.

  * * *

  Kate sat up in bed with a start. Peering into the darkness, she strained to listen. Nothing. She heard only the wind outside, the air conditioner as it hummed low.

  She looked at the bright red readout on her bedside digital clock. 2:13 a.m. She’d been asleep over an hour. She and Grant had been just like an old married couple tonight, talking, cuddling, kissing, dozing. So natural, no talk of the things that could divide them. Yet tension always twisted between them, desire on a leash, waiting to be loosed. Was that what had wakened her now?

  Other thoughts crowded in, things she’d passed over during the day. Carson had said he’d send a copy of his article on Etruscan tombs, hadn’t he? And that she should read it and take it to heart. Now, what had he meant by that? Was it in the box with the mask, and she’d ignored it?

  And then her young double, Kaitlyn, had mentioned that she’d been researching Etruscan tombs. So wouldn’t it be just like Carson to take his GA’s research to write his own article, citing Kaitlyn’s sources as his own? How often had he done that with Kate’s own work on the Adena when she was with him? But he’d done so much for her—she cared so deeply for him—that she had not protested. If she hadn’t spent so much time pursuing the Celtic-Adena link, would she have had her own career at all?

  She’d been wrong to idolize Carson, and she didn’t want Kaitlyn to do that now. Funny, but she’d felt an instant sisterhood or camaraderie with the girl, but maybe she was just missing Tess and Char. She never used to miss them as much as she did now here in Cold Creek. At least Tess would be back in a few days, and maybe Kate could visit Char out West before she went back to England, if the mound excavation was impossible here. Though Char worked with Navajo children, Kate had always wanted to see the Anasazi Indian burial places out there. She’d heard some pretty strange things about their death rituals.

  She clicked on her bedside light, got up and pulled the box with the mask out from under her bed. She lifted it onto the mattress, pulled off the lid. There was an envelope stuck along the inside of the box. As she reached for it, her fingernails snagged some of the mica chips on the side of the mask. She’d have to glue the chips she’d loosened.

  She closed the box, shoved it back under the bed, wishing she had a better place to keep it. Sitting there, she knew she was putting off reading Carson’s article, and she wasn’t sure why. If there was something in it to take to heart or help with the mound here, she should study it now. Or was it just Carson she was trying to put off? She still wanted to get into Mason Mound and with him at her side.

  She took out the article and opened it. She read Carson’s neat, tight script across the top. Had we world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime...

  She recognized the quotation from a 17th-century poem called “To His Coy Mistress.” And she got the hint. He was upset. He thought she was stalling, that her putting him and the mound off was a crime against knowledge, archaeology, mankind—and him.

  She skimmed the article. It was about two-thousand-year-old Etruscan tombs in Italy being broken into and looted by thieves called tombaroli.

  A couple of blows from a pickax breaks the ceiling into the burial chamber, the roof caves in, and the tomb, crammed with antiquities and even bodies, is ransacked and the precious artifacts sold to illegal dealers and museum curators.

  She’d heard of that, of course, but was Carson suggesting that someone—maybe someone who had marked several local mounds with metal stars—would break into them if they weren’t properly, quickly excavated first? The poem reference and this article implied she was running out of time.

  She gasped as she read that the Italian police often looked the other way as did European and internation
al law enforcement. Places with excellent reputations such as Sotheby’s auction house in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California had been accused of buying antiquities that were looted. And her eyes were drawn to the line with the word mask. A stolen 2,500-year-old theater mask had been found in an art dealer’s briefcase, one maybe close to the age of the Beastmaster cauldron and mask.

  She put Carson’s article in the bedside-table drawer and turned out the light. She lay back down in bed, staring at the dark ceiling, agonizing about what to do, whether to beg Grant, buck Grant, sneak around him to check the entry, whether—

  Something scraped or scratched against her bedroom window. A branch? It was almost like fingernails on a blackboard. Chills shot through her. Had the wind picked up? Squirrels sometimes got on the roof. That could be what she’d heard, but they usually stayed away after dark. The bushes outside were cut low, which pleased her, since it made it easier to see the mound.

  The sound came again, more like a growl or snort this time—just like before in Tess’s garage. Her heart pounding, she got up, went to the window, parted the drapes a few inches and peered out.

  Nothing. Nothing but the night, the lawn, the woodlot beyond and the mound, which always beckoned to her. Again she recalled the stag outside the garage window, the sounds it had made, but maybe she’d been half-asleep and had hallucinated this. There was absolutely nothing out there to make sounds on the window, no animal in the yard.

  Yet the face of the Beastmaster mask under the bed flashed through her mind. Suddenly, she didn’t want it under her bed. Grant didn’t want it in the house, as if it were evil. She had to get it out of this room or she’d never sleep tonight.

  She dragged the box out again, took it down the hall, into the kitchen and clicked on the basement light so she could take it downstairs. Hurrying now, feeling cold to the core, she put it on the Ping-Pong table and scurried back upstairs. In the morning she’d suggest to Grant that he get safety lights that clicked on where there was movement outside, like Mom had put in years ago at their old house after Tess had been taken.

  Trembling, Kate got back into bed and pulled the covers up as if she were a kid afraid of the dark. She left her bedside light on, turned her back to the window and curled up in a fetal position. Yet, despite the fact the curtains were closed, she felt exposed as if the eyeless mask was outside, staring in at her, able to see right through walls, right through the centuries.

  She got up, dragged her bedding to the floor and, with the bed as a buffer between her and the window, made a messy little nest on the carpet to comfort herself. As she lay down again, she pictured the darkness outside.

  As she tried to doze, her thoughts flitted past like bats in the night, sharp ideas like deer antlers, faces wearing masks—Brad and Lacey, Kaitlyn, Carson. Could she really trust anyone?

  Then a vision that shot her straight up, wide awake, in her ravaged covers. Could she trust Grant, smiling and seductive, staring at her from behind his mask?

  20

  As soon as daylight seeped into her room, Kate got off the floor, stretched her sore back and whipped open her curtains. The forest and mound were still in shadow, but looked so normal. Just another June day—Monday. Gabe and Tess would be home in five days. She pictured them sipping wine, sitting on the deck of the riverboat, gazing out at old châteaus and castles along the Loire...man and wife.

  She yanked the curtains closed and hurried to take a shower and get dressed. The house was quiet, so she’d fix breakfast for Grant. And Brad, if he’d come in last night. Today she and Grant were going to Keith Simons’s house for lunch so she could talk to Lee. But before any of that, she was going outside.

  She went out the kitchen door and checked outside her bedroom window where she thought—no, she was sure—she’d heard sounds, scratches, even snorts or grunts last night. Could Brad have come home drunk with Lacey and they were goofing around in the backyard? She doubted it, but that thought made more sense than what was really tormenting her, that the stag she’d seen outside Tess’s garage window had been here, too. Just a deer, she told herself, not someone in a Beastmaster mask—or worse. No, the only ghosts she believed in were ones from a person’s past, like her dad, not the dead-come-to-haunt-you kind.

  Under her bedroom window, she was certain the hosta plants had been trampled like someone had stood close to the house and her window. There was definitely disturbed foliage, and, since it had rained yesterday, she wondered if she’d find footprints in the soil under the bent leaves.

  She pushed the green-and-white-striped leaves of the plants to the side so she could see the ground. Damp soil, vague shapes, but nothing distinct, as if a person’s standing on the large leaves had blurred any prints. But something on the ground glittered. She saw small flakes that looked like pieces of the broken record her mother had kept because it was from Dad’s old Johnny Cash collection, and she was sorry she’d smashed it against the wall when he’d walked out.

  Kate reached down for a handful of soil and looked closer. Mica chips! Thin mica chips just like the ones from the Beastmaster masks! She’d go around to her rental car and get some of her smallest handpick tools and a sieve.

  “Kate!”

  She gasped and jumped to her feet. “Oh, Grant. I just... I heard noises out here last night and wanted to look for prints. But look, look!” she cried as she showed him three small chips of the black mica on her dirty palm. “Proof someone was out here with a Beastmaster mask, since it has a mica covering! I heard scratching and snorting and—”

  He held up his hands as if trying to stop traffic. “Kate, sweetheart, this whole area has mica chips in the soil, and there’s a vein of it a little ways back in the woods. Besides, they put mica in potting soil and a bunch of other things. A garden store from Chillicothe once asked if they could dig out the mica back there, and I said no.”

  “Of course you said no digging,” she retorted, instantly angry with him again—and at herself for being so foolish.

  He looked almost smug, but she’d fix that. Her old competitive drive took over. “Mica in this area and in the woodlot near the mound? That’s great! So the Adena in this area could easily have used that mica to adorn their clothing or masks. I can’t wait to see that vein, if you’ll show me. You might know about potting soil, but I’m telling you the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Aztecs—and Adena—valued mica. So, you’ve given me another great piece of evidence that something important is in that mound. But can you explain how beat down these hosta plants are?”

  He frowned at her, at the foliage. “Beat down by yesterday’s rain, maybe, or the guy who washed the outside windows a week or so ago. Kate, I know this sounds like the same old song, but wildlife, especially deer, eat a lot of the plants here. They could have stood there grazing.”

  “Well, they haven’t eaten these recently. They looked stepped on not chewed up.”

  “Look, I’ve got to get into work early since Brad’s going to start covering for Todd, and I need to explain that to the staff. I had coffee, so I’ll just grab toast and juice, but I’ll be back about eleven to pick you up to go to Keith’s so you can talk to Lee.”

  Still clutching the mica chips in her hand, she tried to keep up with his long strides. “Grant, I’m sorry I seem so paranoid. And I appreciate your taking the time for this lunch when I know you’re extra busy at work. I’ll go in to help with breakfast. Does Brad need something, too?”

  “He never came home last night. I thought he’d be trying to toe the line since he’s going to manage the mill. I just—with two of my friends hurt—I just hope he’s all right. If he’s not stone-cold sober, I’ll put Keith in as foreman, despite what I promised Brad. And, Kate,” he said, turning back to her. “Please don’t go looking for the seam of mica yourself. It’s hidden by overgrowth. And don’t get too excited about the mica c
onnection. You’re clutching at straws.”

  “Sometimes, I think that’s all I have, and here this fantastic mound is, sitting within view...and reach.”

  “I want to be out of here in ten minutes,” he said, opening the back door for her then following her in.

  She muttered under her breath as she washed the mica chips and her hands, then got the juice out of the fridge. The mound might be in physical reach, but it seemed so far away—sometimes as far away as Grant.

  * * *

  On the way to Keith Simons’s house, Kate hit Grant with another surprise. “Oh, by the way,” she told him, “I put the box with my mask in the basement. It’s better down there than under my bed—humidity, dust and all.”

  He turned to her as they drove up the road on Black Mountain. “Where in the basement?” he snapped much louder and harsher than he’d intended.

  “Just on the Ping-Pong table. I can move it, if that’s a problem.”

  You are a problem was his first thought, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. She frustrated and infuriated him, even as he was trying to be her host and protector. She was a woman who could cause him all sorts of trouble—hurt Todd and Brad, too. Man, she ticked him off yet he was tempted to just grab her, kiss her, put his hands all over her and...

  “No problem,” he muttered. “I was just surprised. I’m on edge after having to tell everyone about Todd and explain Brad taking over today....”

  “So he did show up?”

  He was grateful that she went for his change of subject. Again, he could picture those Beastmaster masks—her phony one and his authentic one—getting together down in the dark...breeding more masks, more trouble. Damn, he was getting as off base as she sounded sometimes with her fears about Adena demons peering in windows. But considering what had happened to Paul, when there were no prints to suggest a home invasion, and then Todd, of all people, falling from a tree...

  “Was Brad sober?” Kate asked, yanking him back to reality.