Читать книгу Forbidden Ground - Карен Харпер - Страница 11

5

“Oh,” Kate blurted out. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Bright Star. And Lee!” she cried when she saw her cousin standing behind Bright Star with two other men. “So good to see you since you couldn’t come to the wedding.”

Lee nodded, but he didn’t smile or step forward until Kate went past Monson to extend her hand. She was tempted to give Lee a hug, but who knew what punishment this leader of the pack doled out when someone disobeyed his rules. She could not fathom that Lee and spunky Grace had been taken in by this man. And to have their two kids reared in that repressive atmosphere was tragic.

Lee took her hand, shook it and quickly released it. “We hardly expected to find you here,” he said. “We came to buy some wood for an addition at the Hear Ye home.”

Home. That word stunned Kate. At least Lee and Grace had a home. And, really, she didn’t.

Todd spoke up. “We have salesmen who can show you around, depending on what you need, Mr. Monson. We deliver and can even put you in touch with architects or builders if you want.”

“Oh, we’ll do all that ourselves,” Monson said. “Brother Lee and others are very skilled at all that. Quite a family we have, talented and diverse for all our needs.”

Kate knew she should keep her mouth shut, but this man really riled her. “Lee is from the Lockwood family, also talented and diverse before he changed his life so radically,” she said.

“It seems to me,” Monson replied in his calm, quiet, infuriating voice, “that your two sisters follow life paths to help the living, whereas you seem to be fixated on the dead. The pagan dead. Don’t think we are so primitive that we cannot research people. I know a bit about you and your pursuits.”

“You like to seem all-knowing, all-wise, don’t you?” she challenged, despite the fact Todd kept clearing his throat and had edged his shoulder between the two of them. “To keep an eye on people, don’t you?”

“His eye is on the sparrow, and mine also,” Monson intoned. With a nod he moved away down the aisle of wood, with the others following like robots. Lee did not look back.

“Sorry about that, if I lost you a sale,” she told Todd. Unlike Grant, whom she had to look up to, Todd was just her height, so she looked at him eye to eye. He seemed very fit, strong but agile, a serious man with bright eyes and a beard to balance his shaved head.

“We’re the only lumber mill for miles around,” he said with a shrug. “I know he’s weird, but, in a way, we all are.”

“Yes, we all have our eccentricities. But no one stands up to him as if it’s forbidden, and I can’t help disliking him. He’s been reading up on my work, which makes me wonder why.”

They strolled toward the front of the mill, occasionally avoiding forklifts moving huge pallets of lumber. “I guess you’ve heard they call me Tarzan around here?” Todd asked with a grin.

“Tarzan? Of the apes? Not because you oversee all these strong men who—”

“Not that. In my spare time I climb trees. I mean way up, sometimes swinging from branch to branch on mountain-climbing ropes. Started that in the days I cut down trees, before Grant took over from his dad and hired me as foreman. There’s nothing like a view from a tall tree.”

“So you’re in mourning for his bird’s-eye maple, too.”

“And on the lookout for who did it.”

“Then consider my feelings toward Guru Monson this way. He’s cut down four of my family members. But I’d love to see you climb someday. Did you ever take Grant up with you?”

“Naw, not his thing, though he loved the tree house.”

“Did I hear my name?” Grant said, appearing around a pickup truck in the parking lot with his car keys in hand. “I put out the word that everyone’s to watch for anyone selling bird’s-eye maple. You can’t pass that off as something else.”

“Someone may just try to hide the tree for a while until things cool down,” Kate said.

“Hard to hide something that big uncut,” Todd said.

“But another good suggestion,” Grant said, taking her elbow to steer her toward his car. “Nothing like a beautiful woman who’s also bright. Todd, I’m going to hire her as a consultant,” he called back to his friend.

“Better pay her good,” Todd said with a grin and a wave as he headed back into the mill.

Grant guided her into his car and closed the door. When he got in the driver’s side, he turned to face her. “I’ll think of some way to repay you.”

She almost said that a real close-up look at Mason Mound in daytime would be a start, but for once, she didn’t push that. He’d been reluctant before, so she had to be careful what she said. “Dinner uptown will do,” she said. “I’m buying.”

“Dinner, yes, you buying, no. This is small-town Ohio, Professor Lockwood, not the ivied halls of higher learning or London, England. And tomorrow afternoon I will drive you to Paul Kettering’s art studio so you can talk to him about ordering your special project.”

They pulled out of the mill parking lot, just as a huge, loaded lumber truck pulled in. Grant waved to the driver. They immediately passed another car, which honked its horn.

“That’s Brad,” he said, sounding surprised and craning his neck. “In a Porsche, no less, when his company just went belly-up.”

“Do you want to go back to the mill?” she asked. “For the truck or to talk to Brad?”

“No, Todd can handle it. Brad made himself useful on Friday when Todd was away, so I don’t think they’ll clash. They’ve been friends for years, though Todd doesn’t know that Brad had the gall to ask for his job. But getting back to us...”

He turned down another road toward town. Getting back to us, she thought. There’s an “us”?

“What do you have in mind for Paul to carve?” Grant asked.

She shifted slightly toward him. He seemed far away across the console in the big car. “Since he likes to do mythical beings, it will be perfect,” she told him. “There are several Celtic creatures from their artwork I’m trying to link to the Adena culture to prove a splinter group of Celts became the Adena.”

“No kidding? So they had the know-how to sail to the New World?”

“They did. The creatures are mostly shaman animal heads, maybe used in burial rites. My favorite is an antlered animal, similar to a deer, but with a very frightening face, and— What?” she cried as Grant swerved the car. “Was an animal on the road? I didn’t see anything.”

“No. It’s okay. I—I didn’t, either,” he said, but his hands began to tremble before he gripped the wheel tighter. “It’s just—when you said ‘deer,’ I remembered I almost hit one that darted out here not long ago. Muscle memory to swerve, I guess.”

She didn’t know Grant Mason very well, but she was pretty sure he was lying.

* * *

That night, Grant could not get Kate Lockwood out of his head—her or that mythical beast he could picture all too well. The wedding had been great, he’d talked to a lot of folks, but that woman kept clinging to his thoughts. Though there was nothing but yard and thick forest out behind his house, he kept his bedroom curtains drawn as he changed into his jeans and T-shirt with his company slogan—Mason Lumber The Perfect Cut For You. Was Kate the perfectly cut woman for him? No, he told himself. She was damned dangerous. Letting her get closer could bring down everything he’d worked for—and worked to hide—all these years.

He flopped back on his big bed, fingers linked under his head, and waited until it was pitch-black outside before he opened the curtains again. He couldn’t stand that bare patch of sky where the tree had been, but you might know a full moon was sitting right above the break in the leafy canopy where the branches used to cradle the tree house. More than anything, that tree had been a monument to his deceased parents and the grandfather he had loved.

Brad had never quite seen it that way, but sometimes Grant thought Brad didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. Not if he could even mention selling his part of their secret bargain on the black market or anywhere else. It had been only a boyhood oath that had bound the four of them, but they’d cut their fingers and mingled blood, so hadn’t that meant something? Not to Brad, evidently. At least he wasn’t home tonight, probably uptown drinking, or picking up a hottie from the upscale Lake Azure area.

Suddenly, he had to see the artifact he always thought of as simply the mask to make sure it was safe. He didn’t like to look at it, because it often triggered nightmares of what they’d done, what they’d vowed to hide.

He got up, stuck his feet in his flip-flops and padded out into the dark house, through the big living room, into the kitchen, where he opened the door to the basement.

He’d enjoyed remodeling most of the lower space with oak paneling, thinking he’d have kids someday who could play down here in bad weather. But, of course, he’d planned they’d play in the tree house, too, when it was nice outside. Times changed. Circumstances changed, sometimes for the best, but lately for the worst. Brad’s failure had rattled Grant, and he knew Paul Kettering wasn’t really making a living lately, either. Paul’s wife, Nadine, had been pushing him to sell more art, change his “vision,” as Paul always called it, and now that Nadine had medical needs, he was afraid Paul would do something as desperate as Brad might. He’d like to help both of them out, but he was cutting profits close at the mill and had a big staff there to keep employed. And Kate ordering a carving wouldn’t solve Paul’s financial problems.

He clicked on the basement light and, closing the door behind him at the top of the stairs, in case Brad came back, went down the steps. The basement had a Ping-Pong table, a pool table and a dartboard—all hardly ever used anymore except at the yearly party for employees, which always ended up outside around the fire pit anyway.

His pulse picked up as he went over to the hutch that held his and Brad’s high-school sports trophies and his college soccer ones. He slid the piece of furniture out of the way. He carefully lifted the five oak panels that he’d left unattached from the wall behind. Taking the flashlight and old ice hook from the cabinet, he knelt and examined the lowest row of cement blocks the panels usually hid. He stuck the ice hook in the crack around three loose blocks and slowly slid them out.

He put his face to the floor to peer into the niche he’d made there years ago before he went west to the lumber camps. The three-foot square, black metal box was still there, dusty, lonely but for spiders, which skittered away. Grant slid it out and brushed it off.

The key was in a small magnetic box on the bottom of the furnace, so he felt for that, getting his arm dusty to the elbow. He went back into the game room and turned the key in the lock of the box. Holding his breath as if something would spring at him, he lifted the lid and looked down at the crumpled tissue paper inside.

It rustled as he unwrapped the mask. It stared up at him with blank eye sockets through which some ancient man—a shaman, as Kate had said—must have gazed. The fierce face was made from some sort of glazed leather studded with thin mica chips that made it glitter in the light. It still had a few of its terrible teeth—probably from some predator like a wolf. And from its skull base—Grant was pretty sure that was human—were attached with stone pins the antlers of a centuries-old, long-dead stag. Reddish-brown coloring of some kind still clung faintly to the bony points, just like the memories of finding it among the crushed skulls clung to him.

* * *

“I appreciate your arranging this,” Kate told Grant Sunday afternoon as he drove them in his black pickup truck along the rising, twisting trail to Paul’s home and art studio.

“Sure. He’ll appreciate the sketch you’ve made of the two masks.”

“I think they were chieftain or shaman masks. Did I use the word masks before to describe them?”

“I don’t remember. Your drawing just suggested masks, that’s all.”

“Those two ancient effigies are key to my thesis and what I’d like carved on a tree trunk for my office or home, when I finally settle down in one spot. The antlered one is Celtic, and, of course, the one you’ve no doubt seen before is the effigy face from the famous Adena pipe found in a mound near Chillicothe. I’d love to link either the Celtic mask to the Adena or vice versa. You’ve seen the Adena pipe figure before?”

“Right. You know, the only deer-antler information that’s made the news lately has to do with banned deer-antler spray some athletes have been using as a performance-enhancing drug. Pro golfers and football players. Like I said, it’s forbidden, so they can get fined and suspended for using it.”

“No kidding? I’ll have to remember that. I read a paper recently that the Celts and Druids probably believed there was some magic power in deer antlers. It makes sense they would think so—power in the pointed weapons of a swift, virile animal.”

But Kate thought that Grant was as good as Tess at shifting subjects. He’d seemed really nervous when he saw her sketch of the Beastmaster, and here they were, talking about American sports.

“Wow, this is a long way up here,” she observed as they made yet another turn on the narrow, two-lane road with no berms.

“That’s why we’re in my truck instead of my car. Believe it or not, there’s another back way up the other side of the mountain, too. It isn’t really a mountain but just one of the largest Appalachian foothills. There’s a Boy Scout camp up higher than where the Ketterings live.”

“Well, when the snow falls or it’s icy, they must just become hermits.”

He pulled into a gravel parking area before an A-frame building that reminded Kate of a château. “Built with wood from the mill,” Grant said. “Hardwood outside, knotty pine inside. He’s here—that’s his pickup, but Nadine’s four wheel is gone. He said she had to go into Chillicothe for a doctor’s appointment, so she spent last night with her sister who lives there.”

“Maybe it’s just as well she’s not here,” Kate said as she got out before Grant could come around to open the door for her. “I have a feeling she’s really nervous about his art being able to support them. I’m willing to pay his price and even advertise for him, but nervous people make me nervous in turn.”

She glanced sideways at Grant’s profile. He didn’t pause or flinch at that. She must be reading too much into his behavior. He was still just shaken by the loss of his special tree.

Grant led the way up the flagstone path. “He said to come in the side door. Then we’ll go down to his work area. He’s very protective of his shop,” he said.

“How did he start to carve such unique things?”

“You’ll have to ask him. I’d say God-given talent inspired by life experiences—a great reader, that guy. Even loved fairy tales, which most boys don’t.”

Grant rang the bell, then knocked. When he knocked again harder, the door swung open. “He must have left it open for us. Yo! Paul!” he called out. “We’re here!”

But once inside, they gasped in unison. The kitchen was a mess, drawers pulled out and dumped, cupboards standing open.

“Something’s wrong,” Grant whispered. “Stay here.”

But she went right behind him into the living room, which had also been tossed. “Thieves?” she whispered, her heart pounding.

“Go back outside, lock yourself in the truck and call 911,” he told her. “I don’t want you with me if I corner someone. No—wait. Cells don’t work up here, so we’ll have to use Paul’s landline. Where is he?”

Kate saw no phone in the kitchen—unless it was buried under the mess. They shuffled through piles of clothing, books and a sewing basket tipped upside down outside the kitchen. Of course, Grant knew where he was going. She followed him down a hall to peek into a bedroom. It was also a mess.

When Grant found the phone on the floor in the bedroom, its cord had been severed. The mattress was cut up, too, and the pillows slashed.

“The intruder had a knife,” Grant whispered.

“What if Paul went crazy? A domestic argument, then...”

“Shh. Stow your imagination for now.”

They looked in the bathroom, also chaotic. Grant shoved her behind him as he yanked the shower curtain back and glanced in the tub. Kate picked up a large can of hair spray from the counter and held it up like a weapon.

“Don’t leave prints,” he warned.

“I don’t have my pepper spray.”

He just shook his head. She stayed tight behind him as they retraced their steps, back through the living room, then to a hall and out into an area Kate was expecting would be a garage. But the carved door suggested it was Paul’s studio.

They went in, and Grant turned on the track lighting. It was, she thought, as she stepped in behind him, like walking into an enchanted forest, maybe one a wicked witch had put under a curse. Tree trunks, some uncarved, some carved, stood along the walls, their fairy or ogre faces peering at them. One writhed with dragons, another with beautifully carved human skulls that looked so real Kate recoiled.

She saw three large, round, rotating platforms like large potter’s wheels where he evidently carved his work. One held a tree trunk from which emerged what appeared to be Norwegian trolls with huge noses.

One wheel was empty and tipped and—

“Grant, here! He’s here!” she cried and clapped her palms over her mouth to keep from screaming. Feeling sick, she stood frozen, staring wide-eyed at Paul Kettering, obviously dead, with blood on the floor and his skull smashed by his own big tree-trunk carving of the Adena pipe effigy.