The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  Later she would call Sarah and request a poultice for the ache in her leg. But Sarah was going somewhere, wasn’t she? Bertha couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Maybe an idea would come to her once she had finished her coffee.

  Outside, the leaves on the cottonwood were brilliant yellow now. When had that happened? In the big field where her father should be plowing under the old crop, there were tall trees and walls and the roof of a house showed over the wall. That didn’t seem right either.

  She started to fill her old metal coffeepot with water and then remembered something. She must find the wooden box. She abandoned the coffee for the moment and made her way, a few feet at a time, to the red bedroom where she found it. With the box in hand, she carefully took it to her own room and put it back in its rightful place. Then, at once, she needed to rest.

  Somehow, another day passed, and maybe another. She lost track. She thought she should be hungry, but it seemed too much effort to go to the kitchen for food. She pulled the quilts over her thin shoulders and slept.

  The next time she opened her eyes, the room was light. From outside the room came a small sound. Perhaps Sarah had come back. Bertha tried to sit up, but couldn’t manage it; the wooden headboard bumped against the wall. Another small noise from another room—she struggled again but couldn’t seem to speak. All that came out was a low moan.

  She stared toward the door and saw it swing inward slowly. Please, be Sarah. Prayers she barely remembered from her school days came back to her in a rush and she ran through them. Send me the person I need for this moment of my life, she asked.

  The figure was female, but it wasn’t Sarah. This woman was taller, with hair that was not so curly. Around her was an aura of pink and Bertha sensed a person who would be loving, intelligent and compassionate.

  “Come, girl,” she said when she was finally able to clear her throat. “There is something you are meant to have.”

  She gave instructions to find the box, to take it and protect it. The woman questioned but did as she was told.

  Finally, Bertha could go.

  Chapter 13

  Lightning Strikes Again

  Thunder echoed through the streets of Washington, DC, emphasizing the clouds which had built up all day.

  Isobel St. Clair held her umbrella against the light rainfall as she walked the narrow sidewalk along King Street up from Waterfront Park. Her daily break from her desk at The Vongraf Foundation provided a welcome respite from paperwork, but she was still nursing tender muscles from the auto collision in New Mexico two weeks ago, wishing she could walk a bit faster to avoid the downpour that would probably begin any moment now. Perhaps more irritating than her few bruises was the idea that Marcus Fitch and OSM now had information from her files.

  Security at The Vongraf had tightened over the years, comparable now to that of the strictest protocols in place in the corporate world. To their knowledge, nothing had ever been taken from inside the old building which housed their scientific studies. She reproached herself daily for placing too much trust in the hope that Fitch had not known of her trip west. She had called the man evil—perhaps that was too strong. Perhaps not. He had gone to extraordinary lengths, just short of killing her, to steal her research.

  She cut over a block to the north and approached the deceptively simple red-brick building, as always marveling that Vongraf’s founders had chosen the location so well, more than two hundred years ago. Outside, those men would still recognize the place. She slid her keycard past the sensor in the lock—okay, the founders would not know what that device was for. Beyond the white-painted door nothing would be familiar to them.

  In the vestibule she presented her thumb for a fingerprint scan. An electronic buzz activated a sliding door and Isobel stepped into the modern world. Two security guards sat behind a curved teak desk, both men armed, both military special-forces trained.

  “Nice lunch out, Ms. St. Clair?” asked Tom.

  She nodded and passed her identity card through another reader as she chatted with them. Silently, double doors slid apart and she walked into The Vongraf’s state-of-the-art lab. Isobel’s double major in chemistry and business administration had landed her the job, but her minor in history had led her to study the foundation’s past. She knew from old photographs that the layout and size of the lab had not changed much over the centuries. There were long tables running the length of the room back then, cabinets with tiny bottles of chemical compounds along the walls, administrative offices at the back.

  Today, long tables still ran through the room, with beakers and burners in certain spots, chemicals for performing their tests in locked cabinets. Space for a half-dozen scientists and several lab assistants, a Foundation Director, two secretaries, and herself—Assistant Director. As technology advanced, the organization had added electron microscopes, radio carbon dating equipment, DNA testing abilities and more. Isobel knew they would continue to have whatever they needed, thanks to the judicious management of funds by the men who had conceived the idea of devoting their time and resources to the study of the unexplained.

  She hurried to her office with the old metal safe which had been there since the beginning. Of course, now The Vongraf Foundation had a state-of-the-art vault in the basement with security measures that went beyond time locks and multiple keys. This one was here purely because of its history. She usually stashed her lunch and purse in it.

  Stanley Norman, the director, looked up from his desk as she passed his door. Water now streamed down his windows—she had come inside just in time.

  “Isobel? A word?”

  She’d dreaded this, Stan’s first day back in the office since her misadventure in New Mexico. She readied an explanation of the events.

  But his expression conveyed more eagerness than criticism. “My trip to Ireland was productive,” he said, motioning for her to take the chair across from him. “I got a lead on one of the boxes.”

  There was something about these wooden boxes, but she didn’t quite know what. The Vongraf certainly had many other phenomena come through their doors—everything from UFO sightings, to animals purported to have ESP, to craters in the earth where no one had witnessed a meteor crash. Sometimes they were called upon to look at electronic devices, such as the data recorders from airplanes, that registered unexplainable results—the Bermuda Triangle effect, as they had dubbed those. With such a variety of projects to investigate, what was it about these old wooden boxes which they had now carbon dated to the thirteenth century? What made every scientist on staff, all the way to the director himself, want to see and touch and feel those ancient artifacts?

  Isobel could only guess that the reason was because these were among the very few so-called magical items that they had been able to verify. Over ninety percent of the items they studied either had reasonable scientific explanations for the exhibited behavior or they were proven to be outright frauds. To demonstrate an item’s supernatural powers and to be able to reliably replicate it—those were their success stories.

  “We had traced one box to a man named Terrance O’Shaughnessy in Galway,” Stan said.

  She nodded.

  “He was a very old man who passed away about a year ago. His niece inherited the box, along with his other property. She lives in the US, and in fact …” He paused for effect. “She’s the woman you went to see—Samantha Sweet.”

  Isobel felt her excitement rise. “The box in New Mexico is what I wanted to report to you. Its powers are real. I witnessed it. The wood glows when Samantha touches it, her hands become warm … she achieves a touch, I suppose it could legitimately be called a healing touch. She demonstrated it to me.”

  Stan Norman seemed puzzled.

  “I took pictures,” she insisted. “Unless Samantha Sweet has two of them, the one in Ireland has to be a second box.”

  He gave her a direct stare. “It can’t be the same box. The one I went to investigate is still there somewhere, in Ireland.”

  No
w it was Isobel’s turn to stare. “Verified, I hope?”

  He sighed. “I didn’t see it. I talked with an attorney, the man who handled Terrance O’Shaughnessy’s estate. He knew of it, he said Samantha Sweet took it with her but that it vanished from her rental car before she came back to the US.”

  “Samantha didn’t mention this to me.” Isobel felt a little put out. “The box she showed me came from an old woman in Taos named Bertha Martinez, a woman known from her earliest years as a healer. It’s been in New Mexico at least since the 1920s.”

  Stan ran his hands across the smooth surface of his desk. “We’ve verified two boxes then. And even though we can’t put our hands on the second one just yet it’s definitely of interest that this same woman, Ms. Sweet, has handled both of them.”

  Isobel made a mental note to contact Samantha Sweet again and ask about her contact with the Irish box. She looked at Stan once more. “You know there are rumors of a third. The stories have been around for ages. In one of my history texts there is a sketch of a man in clerical clothing in Rome holding a box exactly like these others.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? OSM?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. We suspect close ties to the Church and, yes, the Roman connection could suggest that. But we just don’t know, do we?”

  “But it makes so much sense. The Church, especially during the Middle Ages was known for hiding and suppressing anything that contradicted their teachings.”

  “Middle Ages?” she scoffed. “How about the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, kept under lock and key for more than fifty years before anyone from the outside got to study them.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “But these? Carved boxes that have special properties—how could those go against Church teachings? It’s not as if they do anything to contradict the Bible. I just don’t see the connection.”

  “We don’t know, yet. But I wouldn’t rule out anything. We’re scientists—open minds?”

  “Absolutely. After all, Bertha Martinez grew up in a heavily Catholic town and was known as the local curandera. Certainly, no one persecuted her for the abilities she derived from the box.”

  “We can’t rule out greed and profit either. Maybe OSM really does stand for Office of Serious Money,” he joked.

  Everything in Washington had an abbreviation that twisted its real meaning into something cute and pronounceable. Isobel knew OSM had been around for a long time and she knew that somehow their goals and that of The Vongraf Foundation were at odds, but the other group operated under a cloak of absolute secrecy. She had documented several historical instances of OSM’s involvement during the Spanish Inquisition and, later, the enslavement of those in the New World who would not change their beliefs. Maybe ‘evil’ was an accurate term.

  * * *

  A side street off Dupont Circle, a nondescript granite building that blended in with all the other plain-ish, gray-ish ones in the nation’s capital, its only identification a small brass plaque near the opaque front door with three simple letters—OSM.

  Marcus Fitch gave a nervous glance toward the leaden sky, approached the door, entered a five-digit code on the keypad and went inside. His recent trip to New Mexico had been a disappointment and today he would have to explain to the board of directors his failure to obtain the carved box. He had braced himself with two cups of strong coffee; it might not be enough. Elias was already here, he noticed as he stepped off the elevator and slunk past the director’s spacious corner office.

  It was inevitable that he and Elias Swift would clash. The eldest of the directors wanted everything done the traditional way. He refused to use the initials OSM when speaking of the organization but rattled out the whole original Latin version, Officii Studendi potest Mystici, every time. Marcus found the old man tiresome. The old man found him young and brash and was jealous of his quick movements and confidence.

  Outside these walls no one knew what was truly done here. Anyone on the street would assume the acronym stood for Office of … anything—the beauty of maintaining their largest office here in modern DC. There were hundreds of little bureaus and divisions of the government that no one fully understood, not to mention the nearly equal number of lobbyists, special interest groups and law firms that supported the entire structure. Even Beltway insiders couldn’t keep track of it all, how could the voters in Little Nowhere have a clue? Marcus liked things that way, thrived on the busyness of it all.

  Elias Swift walked past Marcus’s cubicle. “Conference room, five minutes,” the old man reminded.

  Marcus had his list of excuses ready. He could handle this.

  Swift stood at the head of the long conference table, refusing to sit until all the other men were present. With his longish white hair, the old man fancied himself in the position of Jesus and the others as his disciples, Marcus thought. It was no coincidence that the Board had always consisted of a President and twelve members. And although the organization’s membership now contained a mix of religious, political and business leaders, no woman had ever, in more than five hundred years, served in a place of importance here or in any of the OSM branches throughout the world. Marcus sighed audibly. The rituals all seemed moot—stupid traditions that had no meaning when their real purpose was to attain power.

  His thoughts drifted back to the little town in New Mexico where he’d so recently traveled. There, a fifty-something woman possessed one of the carved boxes. He knew it as surely as he was sitting here, although he’d not actually seen the piece.

  Isobel St. Clair from The Vongraf Foundation had been there, her presence proof of the rival organization’s interest. She’d met with this woman at a coffee place in Taos—Marcus had watched as St. Clair left a funeral service, greeted the woman and then sat at an outdoor table speaking in low tones. Marcus had not been able to get close enough, even with his listening device, to hear them, but through binoculars he saw some sort of paper and an old photograph pass between them.

  He had followed St. Clair to her hotel and watched the following morning as she went to the woman’s residence, a ranch house out in the country. Isolation was normally good in this situation, but a law enforcement man had also been there. Marcus had hoped St. Clair took the box with her but when he’d rammed her car, running her off the road, then searched, all he got were copies of the documents—no artifact.

  At the head of the table, Elias Swift cleared his throat.

  “We are coming to the end times,” he said. “The world is wholly out of control, with wars on many fronts, starvation and disease wracking the poorest nations, the wealthy and powerful taking more and more for themselves. And why? Because the Church has lost its influence with the people. They have lost their moral code and, therefore, have lost their way.”

  Beyond the panoramic windows, lightning cracked horizontally through the sky, punctuating his words. Uneasy glances traveled around the table.

  Swift let his dark-eyed gaze fall on each man before continuing. “Our worldwide organization was formed with the goal of maintaining the influence of the Church. We cast nonbelievers out of Spain, we sent many priests throughout the New World to convert the heathen tribes, we laid out our set of rules for the masses. And now—that influence is in jeopardy, is being lost daily.”

  Heads nodded around the table. Marcus held his tongue. Influence? Power—that’s what this was all about. They’d lost their power because they were obsolete. Power and influence were now the purview of the up-and-comers of his own generation.

  “Goodness and evil are not ancient concepts,” Elias said, as if he’d read Marcus’s mind just now. “But we need to bring the ancient powers together in order to focus the energy toward our goals.”

  He let another few beats go by.

  “We all know that the powers of heaven can be assisted by a certain earthly source of supernatural energy. Call it magic, or call it mysticism as our founders did. Whatever the original source, we now know that a great deal o
f it comes forth through a trio of artifacts. Through the centuries our members have witnessed enough events and have followed the stories of many who have come in contact with these three carved wooden boxes.

  “We know that one box performs acts of goodness; the woodcarver named this one Virtu. Its powers for good are well documented. One box, interestingly, has powers from the dark side; the carver called it Facinor. This one we have secured in a vault within the Vatican catacombs, in a place where it cannot reach the hands of those who would use it for harm.”

  To keep Facinor out of the hands of others … or to keep it within the hands of themselves? Marcus stared at the old man.

  “Manichee, the third box appears to represent a middle path—it takes on the character of its holder, intensifying that person’s own tendencies. In the hands of a good person it performs miracles in the same manner as the one called Virtu; in the hands of a man of evil intent, this powerful artifact gives that person the power to carry through with the devil’s ways.”

  One of the other members, a leader in international business, spoke up. “Yes, yes. We know this. Our question now is what do we do about them?”

  “For centuries we have tried to bring all three boxes to one place. To secure them, as we have secured hundreds of artifacts, including the box Facinor, in a location where they will not fall into the wrong hands, for to experience the power of all three boxes at once would be akin to a meeting with God.” His voice grew quietly intense at that last statement.

  Several stunned faces stared back at Elias; others studied their hands in their laps. The room went quiet until one man found his voice. “I was under the impression that OSM had secured all three boxes long ago. Now we learn two of them are not under our control? And where are the two missing boxes now?”

  Elias glanced toward Marcus. “I believe we have a report on one of them?”

  Marcus straightened in his seat and began speaking, taking care to show no weakness in front of the more experienced men. He told of the trip west and the close encounter.