Blood, Ash, and Bone (13 page)

I poured a glass of water from the bedside carafe. “I forgot to tell you Rico called. He discovered some suspicious material on the dead guy in Florida.”

“How suspicious?”

I filled him in, including the part when I went all good citizen and called Garrity with the info.

“And another thing,” I said. “Boone and Reynolds both told me that the Klan may be involved in the case.”

“How?”

“Reynolds implied they’re big behind-the-scenes Confederate collectors. Boone was less specific what they might be up to, but he said to start with the Expo. So I guess that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning.”

Trey frowned. He had an appointment with Marisa and Reynolds to scout alternate locations for the tournament. I could see the worry in his eyes suddenly sharpen.

“It’s ridiculously safe,” I assured him. “Cops and private security in spades. I’m meeting Dee Lynn there for the vendor’s lunch, and she’s like a mother hen sometimes.”

“Are you ready?”

“Sure. I don’t know what I’ll find out, but I have a tote bag full of research to prime the pump.”

He shook his head. “I mean, are you ready for the sale?”

“Oh.” I did a quick calculation. “I guess so. It doesn’t start until Saturday. Between then I have the business meeting on Thursday and the reenactment on Friday. But yeah, I’m ready.”

“Good.”

He was almost asleep, hanging out in that fuzzy realm between wakefulness and dozing. I lay down beside him. “Trey?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you just give me the code? Why’d you make me pry it out of you number by number?”

He yawned. “I don’t know. It seemed…I can’t think of the word.”

“Fun?”

“No.” He slipped me a sideways look. “Not that it wasn’t. But that’s not the reason.”

I stretched against him. Just when I thought I knew the rules, the rules shifted. Oh, there were always rules, dense as jungle undergrowth. And I could machete my way right through them. But I was also learning that I could ease around them. That for every rule, there was a loophole. For every obstacle, there was a way around it. Exactly like…

“Sparring,” I said.

“What?”

I propped up on my elbow. “Making me get those codes from you. It was sparring.”

“How?”

“Not dominating, not surrendering. Give and take the whole way. Which is why it’s got the same kick.”

He didn’t argue. His heart was still thumping faster than its normal sub-sixty beats per minute, his skin still warm from the blood rush. The collision of chemicals, as irresistible as physics.

I sat up all the way. “Is that why you’ve been backing down in sparring? The kick?”

“Which kick?”

“Not a literal kick, the hormonal one.” The realization came like the crack of dawn. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re not just afraid of hurting me—you’re afraid of liking it.”

Trey froze. I watched the gears of his brain turn and mesh as the understanding caught. Adrenalin, testosterone, neuronal circuits crossing and crisscrossing. Arousal was arousal, after all, no matter what followed it.

He stared at the ceiling. “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Just…can’t.”

“Can’t talk about it, think about it, what?”

He exhaled and shook his head.

“Trey—”

“Please, Tai.” He rolled his head to the side and looked at me. “Not now. Please.”

Please. The most intimate word in his vocabulary. Of course he’d held onto those secret numbers, sharing them with me one at a time—they were a vulnerability. And even though he’d trusted me with them eventually, it was only after we’d hit that middle ground, the surprising and unsteady territory of give and take. And I knew he’d trust me with this new weirdness we’d tapped. Eventually.

I rested my head against his chest. He flinched at my touch, but I moved his hand to my hip and stretched under the covers, all of me against all of him, skin to skin.

“Not going anywhere,” I said. “Get used to it.”

He let out the breath he was holding and closed his eyes. This was how we’d make it work, breach and then fortification, break down and build up. One strange and shaky step at a time.

Chapter Eighteen

I’d noticed something was wrong the second I pulled into the parking lot at the Convention Center. Instead of vendors moving their wares inside, a knot of people clustered around the front entrance. Two Savannah Metro police department cruisers parked catty-corner, practically on the sidewalk, blue lights flashing. Almost a dozen cops worked the crowd, holding back the main swell while people screamed obscenities.

Not at the cops. At the man on the sidewalk, clutching pamphlets. The man wearing the triple tau t-shirt, the three-pronged symbol of the Ku Klux Klan.

“We have the Constitutional right to be here!” he yelled. “We are a legal political entity, and we have the right to share our message!”

Two uniformed policemen protected him from the surging edges of the crowd, a kaleidoscope of rage and volatility. He was pure white-bread, this Klansman—thinning brown hair, close-set eyes, pale freckled skin. And he was enjoying the hatred. It justified every vile thought in his head.

I heard the squawk of a police radio right behind me, and then a voice from my past. “Oh no. Not you. Like I haven’t had a rough enough morning.”

I whirled around. A short dark cop with biceps the size of pork loins stared at me, a wry grin at the corner of his mouth. His muscles strained the black uniform, and a sergeant’s badge glimmered on his chest.

I squinted at him. “Kendrick? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Tai. How you been?”

To our left, the Klansman held his arms in the air. “We support the rights of all people to peaceably assemble! Equal rights for everyone, special rights for none!”

I jerked a thumb in his direction. “Seriously, Kendrick? Y’all just gonna let him spew all over the steps?”

“He’s not the one I’m worried about, it’s the people he’s pissing off.”

Kendrick was as wide and brown as the delta of a river. He hadn’t grown an inch taller since high school—his nickname on the football team had been Fireplug—but the body under the uniform was hard, like a flint-napped arrowhead. He’d sported a crew cut then too, only now it revealed a man’s skull, with muscle at the neck.

“Heard you were running a gun shop up in Atlanta,” he said.

“You heard right.”

“Back for the Expo, huh?”

“Right again.”

The officers bum-rushed the Klansman into the convention center, the sleek glass doors closing behind them, leaving the protestors to churn in their anger with no clear target anymore.

“So what’s going on here?” I said.

Kendrick sighed. “The Klan applied for a booth permit. They were denied. The organizer said they didn’t get the paperwork in on time. The KKK says that’s a lie and that they’re being discriminated against, and now the ACLU is involved. So this is my morning.”

Mine too. I remembered Boone’s warning about stirring things up. Damn. The Klan was one big anthill.

I looked back at my car. “So when will those of us nonracists who
do
have a valid permit get to set up?”

He poked his chin toward the back. “This way.”

***

I found Dee Lynn in her usual spot, right inside the entrance, the first and last vendor the customers would see. She’d rented two tables and had them covered with old bullets, buttons, coins, the smaller detritus of her trade illuminated in the high fluorescent overheads. Behind her, an eight-foot-tall triptych displayed poster-sized portraits of her at work—Dee Lynn underwater in SCUBA gear, Dee Lynn standing erect at the wheel of her boat. When she saw me, she put down her barbecue plate and stood.

“Lord, what a mess. Fucking Klan. Come here and hug my neck.”

She’d changed little, still tall and wiry, still sporting the salt-cured tan that came from hours of exposure to ocean wind and the merciless coastal sun. The skin around her eyes was the soft white of well-milked tea, however, her ever-present sunglasses shoved on top of a baseball-capped head. Gray now liberally streaked her black hair, which she kept pony-tailed in a kinky rope as thick as my wrist.

She threw herself around me before I could move. She was the twin sister of my Aunt Dotty, who had been married to my Uncle Dexter. Dotty had been gone for five years, but this was Dee Lynn’s first event without Dexter at the table next to hers.

Her eyes were bright. “Dex would be so proud to see you here. Where’s your stuff?”

“Still in the car. I’m waiting for the crazy to die down.”

“It’s not. They’ll have to give ’em a booth. Not giving them one is giving them a soapbox, and that’s more dangerous.” She shoved a folding chair at the back of my knees. “So sit for a minute. Catch me up.”

I sat. And we talked. This was the way with Southern business folk of a certain age, as if the whole world were a wide front porch. This approach was fast disappearing, thanks to generations like mine, with our earbuds in place, eyes on our phones, thumbs constantly texting. Eventually, though—and it’s a fine art to be able to tell when this moment is—talk always shifts to the commercial.

“It’s a tough market.” Dee Lynn picked up her sandwich again. “The finder’s game is overrun with people who don’t know what they’re doing—digging on protected land, desecrating burials, leaving trash all over the place. On the upside, I’m getting more calls from people who want to search right. There’s still a lot of good finds out there if you know where to look.”

I scooched my chair closer and dropped my voice. “Speaking of.”

Her ears perked up. “What? You got the trail on something?”

I told her the story. She listened, wide-eyed. All around us the other vendors continued setting up, laughing and back-smacking in a genial hubbub, their voices echoing in the gymnasium-sized room. The man across from me, bearded and overall-clad, specialized in mid-nineteenth century medical equipment. His display case of glass eyes unsettled me even more than the bone saws gracing the ivory tablecloth.

When I was finished, Dee Lynn gave me a look that could have curdled milk. “Did you say Audrina Harrington?”

I sighed. “I did.”

“You working for her?”

“No.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” Dee Lynn made a noise of disgust. “Ignorant high-minded bitch. Doesn’t even appreciate what she has. She’s a thief, that’s what she is, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

I didn’t try. Dee Lynn was hardly alone in her condemnation, which I shared. Somewhat.

“Unfortunately, Audrina’s not the only one after that Bible. Rumor has it the Klan’s looking for it too.”

Dee Lynn’s eyes hardened. “Where’d you get that rumor?”

“Lots of places.”

“Including you-know-who, I bet.”

I made a face. “Don’t start. He’s been rehabilitated, you know. Good honest businessman now.”

“Right. Boone’s gonna be working some angle as long as he lives. And then his boys are gonna inherit that angle and run it as long as they live.”

“Which is why I need him. I tried to stay on the uncomplicated side of the line, but what with Hope stalking me, Winston being all shifty, the old man dying, and now the Klan—”

“What old man?”

“Oh. That.” So I told her that story

Her eyes went even wider. “Shit.”

“What?”

She pointed across the room. “See that woman?”

“The little gray-haired one surrounded by the bike gang?”

“That’s Emmy Simmons. She and her husband Bob run a trinket shop. T-shirts, flags, you know.”

I knew. Every backroad highway in Georgia featured at least one such shop. Heavy on cheap tourist goods emblazoned with the Confederate Battle Flag, light on actual artifacts.

“Who are the guys in bike leathers?”

“One’s their son—the big one in the vest—and the rest are his crew. The important part is who isn’t there—Bob.”

“Why isn’t he there?”

“He’s missing.”

I closed my eyes against the news. “What happened?”

“Went out last night and never came back. Emmy says he’d gotten real excited about an old treasure map he’d found in a box of books some customer brought in.”

“Treasure like in pirates?”

“Treasure like in lost Confederate gold.”

“Oh jeez.”

Ever since 1865, every treasure hunter’s dreams were plated with Confederate gold. That was when five wagons full of coins and bars went missing between Virginia and South Carolina, supposedly buried on the grounds of an old plantation to avoid Union confiscation. When neither the plantation nor its occupants would give up the gold’s location—not even under torture—treasure hunters began searching other areas: cemeteries, lake beds, shipwrecks, family farms, submerged islands. A couple of gold coins turned up now and then, but the mother lode remained a mystery.

That cache wasn’t the only missing treasure out there either. When General Sherman marched his way to the sea, many citizens buried their valuables, only to lose track of their location in the burning and pillaging, some dying with that knowledge. According to treasure hunters, a dragon’s horde of loot nestled in the red clay and sand of Georgia’s landscape.

“Seriously?” I said.

Dee Lynn nodded. “Emmy’s freaked out, but I didn’t think too much of it. You know how treasure fever is—you start digging and you don’t stop. But now you’re telling me your story, and there’s a dead guy at the beginning of it, so…”

She shrugged and forked up a mouthful of slaw. She had a point. Gold made people do stupid things, vicious things, completely out of character things.

“Emmy saw the map?”

“She says so. She said it looked genuine.”

“It’s easy to make something look genuine. Does she know much about old manuscripts?”

“I doubt it. That’s not their trade.”

I looked over at the booth. The woman sat surrounded by a circle of burly young men. She was slight, with blue-gray hair cut in a pageboy that suited her elfin features. She was pale, though, and very thin under a denim dress a size too large.

“You think she’d talk to me?”

Dee Lynn shrugged. “You can try. But don’t mention that Bible, especially not around those boys.”