by Seren Goode
We watched Cambridge’s face as he glanced at the necklace. There was a flicker of emotion on his face, a widening of his eyes. It had only lasted a second before it was covered up. But I saw it. Then, with a patronizing air and an exasperated sigh, he put his hand on my shoulder and another on Jaxon’s head and tousled his spiky hair. We froze, and Jaxon’s cheeks flushed. The grip was loose, but the intent to patronize could not be missed.
“Well, young lady, I’d be happy to look at it for you.” I held my breath, waiting to see if Jaxon would keep it together, or if he was going to go ape-shit at being manhandled. Plastering a huge fake smile on his face, Jaxon ground his teeth until I could hear his molars crashing together. My smile was more of a grimace, but I slipped off the torc and handed it over. Fortunately, Cambridge was so busy pretending nonchalance and fronting a casual interest he didn’t notice, but I had seen the gleam in his eye the minute he touched the jewelry.
Cambridge turned his back on us and went over to his desk. He pulled out a cloth and a pair of gloves. Spreading the cloth out on the desk, he gently lay the necklace on top. He put on the gloves and pulled the swivel lamp over. After several minutes of examining the stone, he turned off the light and stood up.
“Sorry, dear, it’s just your garden variety jasper.” His gloves snapped as he removed them and threw them in the trash. “It’s found all over the western coast of the United States. It’s a nice piece, and the setting is attractive, but I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.” He chuckled.
“Told you.” Shim’s shoulders tensed, and he turned to look at a picture on the wall. The twins were staring at their shoes, and it looked like Skylar might have bitten his tongue.
I tried to look disappointed and faked a laugh as I responded to Cambridge. “It sure does look like one of those pallasite meteorites you showed us. Are you sure it’s not valuable? Have you ever seen anything like it before?”
“Well, sure, I’ve seen lots of jasper before. It frequently gets mistaken for meteorites.” He gave a sympathetic nod. “If it makes you feel better, I can hold on to it for a few days and show a colleague.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay, I don’t want to put you out.” I said. Cambridge had been shuffling us towards the door, essentially ending our appointment. “Professor, can I have my necklace back?”
“Hum?”
“The necklace, I’d like it back.” I indicated the jewelry that was still on his desk as he was shoving us out the door.
Cambridge’s smile was brittle. He went back to the desk and gently picked up the piece of metal, his fingers lingering on the stone. When he turned back to us, his big smile was back in place. He handed over the necklace, wished us well, and closed the door behind us.
We were on our way out of the department when Cambridge, slightly out of breath, caught up with us again. “I forgot to ask, are you going on a campus tour next?” At our nod, he seemed to relax, puffed out a breath, and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent. Where are you and your folks staying while you are in town? Hope you are getting to see a few of the sites.”
Shim was evasive. “It sure is a great town. We are staying out in the suburbs with friends who have been showing us around.” At his inquiring look, we declined to add any information and said our goodbyes as we hurried down the hall.
Cambridge trailed behind us until just outside a classroom door where he was overrun by a group of undergraduate students waiting to see him.
We were silent as we left the the School of Earth Sciences and walked briskly up the sidewalk. Jaxon started to say something, and Shim made a shushing sound. We walked for several more minutes until we cleared the building. Going off the path, we walked for a while before we lost sight of campus buildings. Squeezing between two trees, we finally stopped in the center of a cleared space.
“Damn it,” Jaxon burst out. “That was some next level bullshit the bastard was spewing. I knew it. I just knew it.”
“He was lying,” Shim concurred.
Skylar nodded.
Breeze shook her head. “Are you sure? Maybe he has never seen it before or just forgot what the stone looked like.”
“He remembers something. Did you see his face? He played it off, but he recognized the stone.” I was pacing back and forth in the clearing. The slippery needles crunched under my shoes, releasing the earthy scent of pine.
Shim hit right at the center of it. “But why? Why lie to us?”
“Jaxon, you said Cambridge worked with the one that died, Carl Stringham. Did he live near here?”
Jaxon nodded. “Yeah, just off campus.”
My senses were all screaming at me something was wrong. Some previously dormant threat had been triggered, but I couldn’t see what it was. There were times when you reflect back and think, If I hadn’t turned that corner, made that discovery, would the lack of knowledge in my life have made any difference? Would we look back to this day and question whether or not we should have turned the corner?
I said, “I think we need to check out Stringham’s house.”
Chapter 23
Stringham's House
There was nothing here. We had spent the last couple hours searching the two-story Victorian house and hadn’t found anything connected to our parents or the stone. Frustration was high, and patience was running out. The twins were tired. Shim was still methodically searching each room, and Jaxon was flat out pissed.
Breaking into the home had been easy. The search wasn’t. After nearly fifty years of scientific exploration and study, Stringham’s house was like a museum. Every inch of the walls were either covered with large glass-front antique cases full of rocks and mineral samples or floor to ceiling bookcases loaded with books. We had focused the search in Stringham’s study. In addition to eight shelves full of personal journals with small, cramped writing, it had twelve full-sized filing cabinets and four multi-drawer flat files. Thick rugs, overstuffed leather chairs, and antique-looking end tables filled the interior rooms.
“What are we missing?” I muttered as I walked by Shim back into the entryway. Spinning in a circle, I looked at every room leading off the entry. “Stop a second,” I called out. Wearily, everyone looked up at me.
“What?” Jaxon complained.
“What are we missing?”
“We have checked everything.” Jaxon slammed the door of the cabinet he had been searching. The glass panel made a loud crack, and a thin line raced up from the edge of the glass. “Damn it.” The wall received a frustrated kick.
“Watch it, Jax!” Shim warned. He sank into a leather chair and looked over at me. “Not knowing what we are looking for doesn’t help. It could be buried deep in these notebooks; we don’t have time to read through them all.”
“Not to mention it might not even be in this room.” Skylar slid to the floor and sat crossed legged.
“If it was something secret, would he hide it here? Other people must have gone through here since he died—they might have taken ‘it’ with them.” Breeze crooked her fingers on either side of her head.
Scanning the shelves, Shim sounded very thoughtful when he agreed, “There are years and years’ worth of work piled up in here…wait a minute. Wait, that’s it. Year.” He pulled a couple of notebooks off the shelf, flipping them to the front covers. “These are all dated…but they aren’t in order. What was the date our parents visited?”
“The photo was dated July 1995, so some time around then.” It wasn’t much, but at least it was something to go on. I was relieved. “I’ll help Shim look for the notebook. You guys start at the attic and work your way down to the basement again.” The twins and Jaxon groaned at having to retrace their steps for the third time. Climbing the short library ladder, I ignored them and started pulling down volumes from a different shelf.
It seemed like an eternity but was probably only thirty minutes before Shim spoke.
“Got it.” Balanced with one foot on a shelf and the other on the desk, Shim had pulled down a softbound journal from the middle of the top shelf. The date was etched in pencil on the cover: January 1995 – March 1996.
“We’ve got something too.” The other three burst back into the room. “Sky found it.” Breeze was so excited, she started bouncing from foot to foot. “Well, we almost found something.”
“It’s the windows; one is missing.” Shim and I exchanged a puzzled looked.
“Huh, what?”
“From the front of the house, you can see a roundish stained-glass window between the second and third floors. I remember seeing it and thinking it was a really small window for a room, but from the inside, there aren’t any windows that size. I think there is a hidden room.”
“That’s incredible!” I said.
“And another damn thing to find.” Jaxon plopped down onto the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. Pulling the lid off a crystal candy dish on the table, he sorted through and took a peppermint.
“Hey, that’s a dead dude’s candy,” Shim protested.
“Yeah, and he ain’t gonna need it since he is—you know, dead.”
While Shim and Jaxon argued the etiquette for eating dead people’s food, Breeze and Skylar were pacing, murmuring to each other. “Must be something here.” “Maybe a fake panel.” “The walls don’t make sense.” Skylar stared at the main staircase, then, with a rush, ran up all the way up the stairs to the top floor and back again. He repeated the journey. By the time he made his third trip up and back, stopping to hop on each stair, he was out of breath, and we were all standing, wide-eyed, at the bottom waiting for him.
“I think it’s time for an intervention,” Jaxon muttered out of the side of his mouth, only half joking.
“Ohhhhh, I get it.” And there went the other twin racing up the stairs. The rest of us stood stunned at the bottom.
When the twins didn’t come down from their last trip, we went up to them. They were on the landing of the third floor, running their hands over every inch of the banister and up and down the walls. Breeze was pushing on the railing, using the light sconce on the wall next to the stairs for balance, when we all heard the loud click. The twins jumped off the steps.
Someone gasped, and there were a couple of “Holy Sources” uttered, as the steps rose into the air.
Without a gold pan, we had found the mother lode.
In the gap under the main steps was an opening with a narrow set of stairs down that led to a spacious L-shaped room. It was more of an archive than a workspace. Faint light trickled in through an octagon shaped stained-glass window covered in dust. Everything else in the room, with the exception of a pair of very old cabinets, was relatively clear of dust, neat and tidy. Shim reached over and turned on the light switch. Several accent lights set in the ceiling came on. Like the downstairs rooms, the walls were lined with filing cabinets and the shelves were full of journals and artifacts. Unlike the downstairs, most of the items on the shelves were, well, odd. There were pieces of clothing in sealed bags, like crime scene evidence, biohazard stickers across the front of fire-safe lock boxes, locked glass and steel cases with what looked like artifacts crafted of clay, bronze, and maybe silver, and row after row of red leather-bound journals.
I flipped open a journal that read: June - August 1994. “Hey, I saw this one downstairs. There must be a duplicate set of journals. I wonder if one matches the dates of our parent’s visit.” I continued to search the journals.
The filing cabinets were all locked. Shim examined the locks to see if there was any way to pick the lock on them while Breeze and Skylar disappeared around the corner of the room.
“Wow…you guys have to see this.” Jaxon was trying to jimmy open the lock on a glass front cabinet with a letter opener. The lock finally broke, and he flipped open the case. He reached inside and lifted out a bronze necklace that had been lying on a cushion. The center of the beaten gold medallion was set with a small cabochon, a weathered reddish-green stone with dull silver threads at its center. It was less than half the size of our stones and strung on a sturdy cord with modern gold beads.
Skylar pushed back his jacket sleeve, and he and Jaxon compared the rock in the medallion to Arie’s cuff. It matched.
“That’s…how is that possible?” Jaxon asked.
“Shhh…” Shim whispered, his head tilted, and we all heard the sound of a car door slamming. “Someone is here.” Shim shut off the light in the ceiling. In the faint glow from the octagon window, we stared at each other until we heard the house’s front door opening.
Great Source! We left our bags in the study downstairs. Whoever it was would see the bags, and we couldn’t leave without them.
“Quiet.” My voice was barely a whisper as I spoke to the others.
“Get ready to run,” Shim added when he saw me put my mother’s necklace back on and hide it under my shirt.
The twins headed up the secret stairs, and Jaxon followed, sliding the ancient-looking bronze necklace with the gold medallion into his back pocket. Silently, Shim and I pulled journals off the shelf, urgently flipped to the cover page, then discarded them until we found the one with the right date. Shim slid it into the back waistband of his jeans.
As we emerged from the hidden room, I heard a voice I recognized as Cambridge’s carry up the stairs. The man was talking on the phone to someone. My chest seized as Shim stepped out of the room and leaned over the banister to hear better. Closing the hidden passage door, I quietly followed him.
“Damn it, Dawes, your men were supposed to track them…I don’t give a shit about Helios’ creed, this supersedes everything…listen to me: THEY HAVE A KEYSTONE. Do you understand what that means…Positive. It’s an exact match to ours… I’m there trying to find it…No, I don’t know where they got theirs from. They lied about buying it in some antique store…” He muttered something I could barely hear—“Teenagers …awash in dopamine…reckless” —before he was back shouting into the phone, “Yes, I think they are connected to the original set—somehow.” The conversation was muffled, and it hard to catch what was said next. Then the voice came back loud and clear. “…it takes, whoever you have to kill, find them…Yes, I’ll join you in Gypsum Friday. Has Smith found anything in the diary? What?…lazy, incompetence…she’s had it for weeks.” There was a muffled curse, then the tone of his voice changed to a shout. “They are here—at the house—send people now!”
Something slammed against a hard surface, splintering and shattering into pieces that hit the floor, then there was the fast tread of footsteps on the stairs.
“We’ve got to rush him,” Shim whispered, “grab our bags and head out the back. Ready?”
The twin’s faces were white but resolute. Jaxon’s teeth were pulled back into a mean grin, like bowling people was his favorite game and he was ready to roll. I nodded. Shim darted ahead to take the lead down the stairs.
In a crouched run, Shim plowed a path and the rest of us followed. I saw him reach Sid Cambridge first.
“What the hell—” the man exclaimed.
Cambridge fumbled with something behind his back, and Shim added an extra shove as he pushed past him, causing the man to lose his footing. Something metal dropped. “He’s got a gun,” Shim shouted just as I saw the black metal object bouncing down the stairs, hitting each with a thud. Jaxon gave a head butt to the professor as he passed, then kicked the gun. It skittered down the next set of stairs and slid across the wood floor of the landing. The twins hurtled past without stopping. I brought up the rear. As I passed Cambridge, he caught my arm, and before I could block him, he wrenched me forward.
“Where do you think you are going?” With a cruel look and a sharp twist, he cranked my arm behind my back. I screamed in pain.
I was trapped precariously dangling at the edge of the step held there by my arm, my
face twisting as sharp stabs of agony shot through my shoulder socket. Cambridge shoved me forward after the others, following them down the stairs, his eyes frantically searching for the gun.
“Keep going,” Shim urged the others. As he turned to help me, he kicked the gun down the next flight of stairs.
A growl of rage shook from Cambridge, spittle from his mouth flying over my shoulder. But in spite of the pain, the minute my feet were on the ground, I took advantage of his distraction chasing the gun and, using Waters’ self-defense training, stomped down hard on his instep. Howling in pain, he released my arm. I slammed my head back into his face, hearing an unpleasant crunch as it made contact. I rammed the elbow of my good arm into his stomach and pushed myself away from his body.
At the base of the stairs, Shim was waiting for me. I weaved toward him, and he grabbed my good arm, guiding me down the last set of stairs. In the library, Shim snatched both our bags off the floor without stopping. We shot out the back door. As our feet pounded across the lawn, the cover of trees looked miles away but was probably only a couple dozen yards. The others were at the tree line waiting for us and took off as soon as we reached them.
“A couple of cars just pulled up in front of the house,” Jaxon relayed, looping back to sprint behind us.
I grimaced in pain with each step. I wouldn’t be able to keep up for long.
“Jax, when is the next bus?” Shim asked. Jaxon had written the schedule on his arm that morning. But it wasn’t needed as we saw the bus at the shelter.
“Now,” Jaxon said, his voice grim. It looked miles away. Could I make it?
“If we catch that bus before they see us, maybe we can lose them. Jax, hold it for us. Go!”
We increased our pace, but Jaxon shot ahead. As it was, the bus had already pulled away and was trying to merge into traffic. Jaxon raced past the twins and across the street, between two cars, and over the hood of another. He jumped up and banged on the window of the bus as it tried to fill in a gap in traffic. The driver slammed on the brakes and opened the side doors to yell at him to get off. The twins jumped on board. Arguing with the driver, they held the doors open while Jaxon got on and joined the argument, delaying the departure long enough for Shim to help me wobble on board. The twins immediately paid the fair and urged the man to go. We took seats in the back while the angry driver continued to shout at us in the rear view mirror, but the bus was moving, and eventually, he turned his attention back to his route.