Forbidden Ground (19 page)

“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

A
fter 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—”

“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.