Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek) Page 5

  “Money talks. I think Nadine’s been on him to expand his horizons. Welcome to my daily world,” he added as they went inside through a big double door.

  Kate didn’t want to let on to Grant that she’d overheard his friends arguing about money earlier today. Paul had threatened to do something she couldn’t catch, and Todd had threatened him if he did.

  “This mill is huge!” she shouted over the noise of several massive machines devouring tree trunks that came out the other side either stripped of bark or sawed into planks.

  “Let’s go on up to my office,” he shouted back. “It’s mostly soundproof, and we can see the cutting line from there, so I can point things out. It’s the scaler and debarker making all the noise. We’d need industrial earmuffs like the men are wearing to stay here long. Come on.”

  They climbed metal stairs to Grant’s glassed-in office high above the cutting floor. It helped when he closed the door, shutting them into his lofty observation site.

  “I’ve been making a list,” he told her. “Mill owners in a tristate area to call Monday morning to be on the lookout for a big buy in bird’s-eye maple.”

  “Your tree.”

  “Right. I’ve been really vocal about stopping the local band of tree thieves and, I’m thinking, they probably decided to show me they can get me back—come in right on private property and do damage. Then they’ll leave the area to sell the wood, so I can’t trace it to them.”

  “Could it possibly be someone who has a more personal vendetta in mind—someone who is not that tree thief gang but someone using them as a cover to steal that tree? That way, they figure they won’t get blamed.”

  He sank into his chair opposite where she’d perched across the corner of his huge wooden desk.

  “You’ve been reading too many mysteries or something. I don’t take you for a soap-opera fan. No, I don’t think that a someone-close-to-me, personal-revenge or vendetta theory’s in play here.”

  “It’s just that I’ve learned to think that way because the world of academia can be cutthroat. In scholarly pursuits, people who have worked together for years might steal research or ideas. It’s human nature over the ages. But yes, I guess I do have a suspicious mind.”

  “You don’t mean it could be Brad?”

  “I don’t mean anyone in particular. But he sure knows the area, and he seems to be upset with you—and he wasn’t home when it happened.”

  “But I know he was at the mill, not that he doesn’t know rogue cutters who could have done it for him. Okay, so he is upset with me, mostly because I’m not demoting Todd McCollum to let Brad be mill foreman. Or coughing up big bucks like when I backed him once before.” A frown creased his brow. “Then there’s Green Tree and my ex.”

  “You said that group is like Greenpeace, so you meant they’re willing to use strong measures if someone’s anti-green or polluting the environment? But then, they would never cut down a tree.”

  “At our logging sites, we plant two trees for every one we harvest, and Lacey knows that, so that’s a stretch. I have made some enemies in the Ohio Statehouse and U.S. Congress, pushing for certain laws. But that’s far out, too. Someone had to know how to get in through my back lot, cut that massive tree and get out fast and clean.”

  “So, no personal enemies?”

  “I still think it’s that timber gang. But—you know—there was a case out West when I lived in the lumber camps in my twenties. A massive golden spruce of great age and size, venerated by a local Indian tribe, was cut down by an idiot who supposedly loved trees, but wanted to make a statement about others cutting trees. He wanted publicity, to have a voice in a trial if he was caught. Is that crazy or what? The culprit had delusions of grandeur and was on a mission.”

  Kate shook her head. Being on a mission—she was like that with her theory that the European Celts might have sailed to this continent and became the progenitors of the mysterious, brilliant Adena. If only she could link some of the Adena burial artifacts to Celtic culture. Oh, yeah, she understood someone doing crazy things who was passionate about his or her mission in life.

  “I do have a great, happy story about a big tree to tell you,” she said, leaning toward him. He looked so downcast she wanted to reach out to him, and she’d better do it with words before she went over to hug him. He looked at her intently.

  “Tell me. I could use that.”

  “Last autumn I visited Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England. It’s much smaller than in the days of Robin Hood, only a little over one acre now instead of the thirty miles by ten miles it was in the old days. But it has a tree called the Major Oak, which is supposedly between 800 and 1000 years old. I think they said it weighs about twenty-three tons and has a trunk circumference of thirty-three feet. I could not believe how much ground its spreading branches covered. And according to legend, the tree was Robin Hood’s main hideout while he robbed from the rich to give to the poor. That part about it being his hideout reminded me of the tree house you and Brad used to share in your special tree.”

  He nodded, his gaze distant, instead of on her. “So maybe someone sees taking that tree of mine as robbing from the rich to give to the poor. You know, growing up, Brad and I, Gabe, Todd and Paul used to play there all the time.” He looked at her again. “You’ve helped me, Kate. You’ve made me face up to the harsh reality about people’s possible motives, but it lifts my spirits just to know that there’s a Major Oak out there for every bird’s-eye maple or golden spruce some bastard cuts down.”

  They went back down to the mill floor. Todd had come back after the wedding to work for a couple of hours. Grant asked him to show her around while he talked to some of his workers about keeping their ears to the ground for any word of someone selling bird’s-eye maple. As she and Todd went outside amid the mountains of stacked wood waiting to be cut, they turned a corner and ran right into Bright Star Monson.

  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, a
nd 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 th
at 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.”