A lethal legacy, p.13
A Lethal Legacy, page 13
Margie nodded. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll just tell Evie that breakfast was great... Oh, well, I don’t see her now. Will you tell her for me?” she asked.
And she stood, smiled weakly and left the room.
“Maybe you should go after her,” Finn told Elayne.
“I’ve tried, Finn!” Elayne said.
“I’ll go,” Kieran volunteered. She rose and hurried after Margie. She caught up with her on the second floor—and made a point of noting which room she was heading to.
“Margie, is there anything any of us can do?” Kieran asked her.
“That’s kind of you. I—I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m going to try to go back to bed for a while. Be a more social person tonight.”
“You don’t have to be social.”
“No, but... I have to learn to start living again, right?”
“At your own pace,” Kieran said.
Margie thanked her again, then turned and went into her room.
Kieran started to head back down the stairs, but then paused, not at all sure why.
Instead of going down the stairs, she went up. The door to the room she and Craig were using was slightly ajar.
She walked to the door and pressed it inward.
Evie was standing by the bed—plumping the pillows.
“Ah, hello, dear. Breakfast okay?” she asked.
“Breakfast was great, thank you,” Kieran said. “Evie, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but Craig and I like our privacy. We don’t need our room cleaned.”
“Oh...well, I’m sorry. I just run a very tight ship,” Evie said. “I like things clean and neat.”
“Craig and I are clean and neat,” Kieran said.
“I didn’t mean to imply...well, all right, then. I’ll leave you all to your own devices.”
Evie left the room. Kieran watched her go.
She couldn’t help the way she felt about the woman.
Had Evie been in the room the day before when Kieran had been in the shower, hoping maybe that Kieran had left her clothing outside and that there might have been something in her pockets?
Her handbag and computer and other belongings were also in the room.
Or had she just imagined that her door had opened and closed?
She needed to talk to Craig; she didn’t want to haul a computer and everything else with her every time they left the room. There had to be a way to lock the door when they were gone.
Kieran heard humming from Danny’s room. She went out to the hall then peeked in. A young woman was busy making Danny’s bed.
“Hello!” the maid said cheerfully. “May I help you—you need something?”
Kieran smiled. Danny was a slob—but he was careful to give anything of importance to Craig. It was fine if his room was being cleaned. For the best, really.
“No, no, thank you,” Kieran said.
“De nada!”
With a wave, Kieran left her, hurrying downstairs. She was glad she wasn’t trying to sneak around; she had worn boots for their day of cave exploration and she thought that she’d be able to hear herself coming from a mile away.
* * *
“Trowels—definitely,” Bracken Silverheels said.
Mike, Bracken and Craig were out by the storage shed with Finn, supplying themselves for the day’s work. High-powered flashlights, rope, hooks and trowels. Bracken had brought harnesses and other climbing gear.
“I should go with you,” Finn said. “I should...but there’s so much going on here. And, honestly, I can’t seem to bring myself to want to become involved with...whatever happened.”
“Frank was your friend. Let us do the work,” Craig told him.
“Maybe the island is cursed,” Finn said.
“To me, most of the time, something being ‘cursed’ has to do with people doing very bad things,” Bracken said.
“It’s just that so many bad things seem to have happened here. Sad, isn’t it? I can’t even be surprised if you find more bodies. Or bones. I guess bones aren’t really a body anymore. Remains,” Finn said.
Victor Eider, who had been carrying out large buckets of chemicals for the pool set them down, then waved and walked over.
“Do you need help? I’m another able-bodied man, if you do,” Victor offered.
“I think we’re good for now,” Craig said. “Thanks for the offer. But I know Finn wants to get moving on finishing up the resort.”
“Whatever you want, Finn,” Victor said cheerfully.
His voice was easy.
Still, he meant for them to know that he worked for Finn Douglas—and not any of them. And, if Finn had wanted it, he’d be there whether they needed him or not.
Finn seemed oblivious. “Thanks, Victor,” he said. “I guess I do want to keep moving forward. Here. At the house.”
“I’ll get back to it, then,” Victor said. With another jaunty wave, Victor went back to work.
“I’ll get Kieran,” Danny said.
He went back into the house while Craig and Bracken sorted the supplies.
Craig, slipping loops of rope over his shoulder, saw Victor Eider out of the corner of his eye.
Victor had gone back to his buckets at the edge of the pool. He was hunched down, seeming to fiddle with a tool. But his eyes were up on Craig. Watching.
Bracken laid the map down on the dirt floor of the cave entrance while Danny held the light right over it.
“All right, I’m going to say that the first people making use of this island did so because it offered a natural profusion of caves,” Bracken said. “Then, throughout history, different areas have been dug through and shored up. This tunnel that we’re in, for one. I’m going to have to see more, but I believe, at some point, someone joined it—here, at this odd juncture of webs—with natural caves on the other side. Without heavy equipment—the kind we use today on coal digs and the like—it would have been laborious and taken some time. But if—as suggested in many theories—Norse traders were using the island as a far south trading post, they might well have created the passages. Or pirates, centuries later. Then again, who knows? Where did you find the bracteate?” he asked Kieran. She appreciated his straightforward manner, and how he seemed comfortable in the cave.
She showed him where she had been digging the day before, in a little niche in the cave just behind the rock where the bones had been.
“Interesting,” he said. “Someone could keep digging. I have a feeling, though, that whatever else might have been found here has already been taken. Your bracteate might have been dropped, forgotten or gone undiscovered by whoever had the candy wrapper.”
“They could find DNA on the candy wrapper, right? Or fingerprints?” Danny asked hopefully.
“Maybe. Or the diggers might have been wearing gloves,” Bracken said.
“And the thing about DNA is that you have to have comparisons,” Craig said. “Then again,” he added softly, “if anyone in the house is involved, it will be easy enough to get hold of some DNA.”
“I’ll look here,” Danny said. “We brought the trowels today, right?”
“Yes, we brought the trowels,” Bracken said. “Listen to the ground as well. Tap it—you can hear a difference between hollow ground and solid rock beneath you.”
“I’ll stay with Danny—no splitting up, okay?” Mike asked.
“Onward, then,” Bracken said. The tunnel was a broad expanse—a natural cave, Bracken assured them—and their lights shone on the ground before them as they walked.
They paused for Craig to show Bracken the hole they had gone through before—one that had led them to a tunnel that had simply gone on to sheer wall.
“There should be more entrances here,” Bracken said. “This one map Danny discovered...it shows a man-made tunnel, one that may have led off from the area you were in before. But whatever you find, let me go ahead...to make sure that we’re not facing any kind of cave-in.”
Kieran watched as Bracken tapped on the walls of the cave. “Listen,” he said. “Hear that? Solid. It will be different if there’s space behind what you see.”
They kept moving forward, pausing now and then to check the walls. Where the light didn’t hit, it was solid black around them.
Kieran heard a scampering and paused, swallowing.
“Rat,” Bracken said. “You all right?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve known a few rats in my day,” she assured him.
“I didn’t mean people,” Bracken said lightly.
“I didn’t either—though I have known people who might have been considered rats,” she replied. “I have boots on—the real kind won’t be running over my feet or anything.”
“Watch where you put your hands as well,” Bracken warned.
He had just spoken when she leaned against the wall and it suddenly seemed to come to life with a flapping of wings.
Somehow, she kept from screaming.
“Bats,” Craig said. “I guess we could come across a lot of them down here.”
The bats had taken off in a flurry. Once they were gone, the cave tunnel seemed to be silent again.
Craig paused as they walked along.
“Bracken, what do you make of this?” he asked.
Kieran followed Bracken over to where Craig stood, his lantern high as he frowned, studying the wall.
There were some kind of markings gouged into the stone.
“They don’t look like Indigenous petroglyphs,” she said. And then she murmured, “Runic? Is it an ancient Norse inscription of some kind?”
“I don’t think so,” Bracken said.
“I think it means something,” Craig murmured. “Maybe it’s some kind of notation of place? A map, or...”
“I wish I knew. I really don’t. And it’s not like I’m all that familiar with ancient Norse,” Bracken said. “I was in Italy once, certain that I’d made a great discovery. It was an ancient Roman stone with writing, but it basically said, ‘Park horse here.’”
“But this really could mean something,” Kieran said.
“Of course.”
“I’ll send it in,” Craig said, handing his light over to Bracken. He pulled out his phone and began to take a series of pictures.
Kieran kept studying the lines cut into the stone.
Suddenly, she gasped.
“What?” Craig and Bracken said in unison.
“If you rearranged the lines a little bit...”
“I’m not seeing what you’re talking about,” Craig told her.
“Think of printing—in English!” she said. “That line—part of an A. Then a dash, and another slanted line. A shorter line and a strange curly symbol. Then three slanted lines. And then...then, I’m not sure, but if you look at the beginning, it could be the word Alien.”
Both men were silent, studying the lines again.
“It could say Alien,” Bracken said.
“Or, we could be looking for the words alien or aliens, because of what we believe Frank Landon was trying to write,” Craig said. “Sorry, devil’s advocate here—we can’t really be sure. And if that is the word alien, what the hell does the rest say?”
“We could stare at this a really long time,” Bracken said.
“Or keep moving,” Craig agreed. “I say I send this in to the office and see what they can come up with—we have linguists who can figure out just about anything. And code breakers, if it’s some kind of a code.” He turned back to his phone, loading pictures of the wall carving to send into headquarters as soon as they were aboveground.
“Aliens,” Bracken murmured as they moved along. Their steps were slow; they checked the wall, the floor, everything around them. “What did you make of Mr. Harding, Kieran?”
She thought about the question. “He believes what he says—I think.”
“You’re a psychologist, right?”
“Yes, and I believe it helps me sometimes, but...people can hide their true selves pretty efficiently, when they choose. He’s a bright man—once I wrote to him, he apparently investigated me.”
“And there is information about you online?”
“I’ve been involved in a few things that have happened in the city,” Kieran said dryly. “And, of course, Craig is a federal agent, so...”
“Sometimes, too much information might be public knowledge,” Bracken said. “So, Jay Harding is resourceful. And he believes aliens visited the earth in ancient times.”
“I think that many educated people are open to the possibility. Because we’re just discovering our own galaxy and the fact that the universe stretches far beyond what we know...” Kieran shrugged and let her voice trail. She was busy tapping on the stone wall of the cave.
She had barely finished speaking when something in the wall gave. She wasn’t sure what she did, or how she managed to make it happen.
She’d hit the wall at shoulder height—what happened was down by her feet. Suddenly her footing was gone.
She screamed, sliding down, down...and farther down. It was as if she had hit a slide. Rocks and dust rained all around her.
“Kieran!”
She heard Craig call her name in alarm. She hit bottom.
She was stunned and terrified herself, but she couldn’t let him know that.
“I’m fine, I’m fine! I just came down some kind of a...shaft,” she shouted.
Her flashlight had fallen some distance from her. It was shining on more cave wall. She scrambled into a crawling position, making sure she was all right.
She really was fine—her fall had been at such an angle that she didn’t even think that she’d gotten a bruise.
“We’re coming down. Damn, but that hole is little!” Craig called. “How the hell...”
“It was probably bigger. Time has played a number on it,” Bracken said. “Craig, if you can’t get down, I can dig a bigger opening and set a spike so that we can create a rope pulley—we will be wanting to get back up.”
Crawling to her flashlight, Kieran listened to the two men talking.
She could hear the shuffling at the strange little opening as the two of them worked together.
She found her flashlight and grabbed it, sitting back—just as a large beetle went scurrying away from her.
She shone her flashlight around her.
What she had come down was a rock chute—almost sheer, and at an angle.
Craig was trying to fit through the opening up above.
She cast her flashlight around.
Wall. Cave wall.
She turned.
And a scream froze in her throat.
She was staring at a corpse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“KIERAN?”
Craig found her silence frightening.
He slid down the shaft—and found himself sitting next to Kieran.
Staring at the sight illuminated by her flashlight.
The corpse wasn’t new.
Nor was it very old.
He couldn’t tell much by staring at what remained of the flesh on the face, part of it dried out by time, as if the cavern had brought about mummification. But there were creatures in the cave—the eyes had been chewed out and some of the flesh had been consumed.
Like the bones above, it looked as if she had been seated—just leaned up against the wall. In this case, remnants of a cotton blouse remained, along with strips of denim here and there, covering bone and dried-out flesh.
“My God!” Kieran breathed at last.
“Hey!” Bracken called from above. “What the hell did you find?”
“Not what,” Craig told him. “Who.”
“More bones?” Bracken shouted down.
“Um, a little more than bones.”
Craig slipped an arm around Kieran. “You’re all right.”
She nodded. “Craig...she’s not...she wasn’t recently killed, but...she wasn’t a pirate, or a Viking, or...she’s not that old! I mean, hasn’t been here that long...”
He took a breath and swore softly. “What the hell has been going on around here?” he muttered. He pushed himself to his feet and looked up at Bracken, who was lying flat by the opening above.
“Call Egan,” he said wearily. “I don’t know how long she’s been here. A while. Probably years, but I have no idea how many. A medical examiner is going to have to give an estimate.”
“I’m sending down the rope,” Bracken said.
Kieran was still just staring at the corpse as a coil of brightly colored nylon cord came tumbling down to them.
“Hey,” Craig said softly.
She shivered, rising. “She looks like a mockery of...of life. And death,” Kieran said softly.
“I’m getting you out of here,” he said.
That seemed to wake her. “I’m assuming we both have to get out of here. This woman... I suppose she could have just come down here and been...stuck? Or...”
“Are you ready to go?” Craig asked Kieran.
“Craig... Can you imagine? She might have fallen down here! She might have screamed and screamed for help, and no one came!”
“We don’t know anything yet.”
“No. I was so stunned, I haven’t had a good look. Did she have a flashlight? Is there a purse, a handbag, a backpack, anything?”
Kieran wasn’t taking the rope; she was shining her flashlight around the cave. But no matter where her light bit through the darkness, there was nothing.
It was a small cell beneath the main floor of the cave.
And there was a dead woman decaying, and nothing else.
“Kieran, we’ll get a team out. If there is anything to be found, they’ll find it.”
She accepted the rope at last, looping the solid lasso that Bracken had tied over her head and fixing it under her arms.
