Artifact (23 page)

Lane drove to the dig. Fast. And to think he thought I had endangered our lives with my driving earlier that night. He wasn’t even attempting to drive on the road. We did pretty well until one of the tires skidded in a puddle of mud so deep I was sure we wouldn’t make it out. Lane knew how to handle a car. We eased out of the hole with only a minor lurch, but the engine stalled.

“We can walk from here,” Lane said.

I found a spot that didn’t look like it would be a precipitous climb down to the alcove. Though clouds had again covered the moon, the rain held off. I turned on my flashlight and we started the descent.

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Lane said from right behind me. “The original path we went down before is better.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. Right before my foot hit a patch of gravel.

The flashlight flew out of my hand as I stuck out my hand to steady my fall, in an attempt to stop the tumble turning into a full-blown slide down the rocky slope. My other foot left the ground. A strong hand grabbed my wrist.

The action prevented me from slipping down the steep hillside, but Lane had taken hold of me with such force that he lost his balance and fell. He fell backwards, but he didn’t plunge down the steep path. His hand remained locked on my wrist, and he grunted as I fell on top of him.

I tried to turn around to face him, leading to another groaning sound.

I turned around carefully. “Your glasses!”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need them.”

“You don’t?”

“I need
something
for my vision. I thought glasses were a nice scholarly touch—ouch—but I have contact lenses in my pocket.”

I tried to stand up, but he held me there.

“Please be careful, okay?” he said. Then without warning he pulled me closer to him in a sweeping motion, and brought my lips to his for an intense moment. He believed me about the urgency of the situation, though. He let me go quickly and stood up.

“I lost the flashlight,” I said.

“I don’t think it matters. Look.”

He was right. The faintest rays of light were already starting to appear on the horizon.

“The sun comes up early here in the summer,” he said.

“We wasted that much time? Come on, we need to hurry. Do you need your contacts in to climb down?”

Lane shook his head, and we moved quickly. As the sun began to peek more strongly over the horizon above the sea and below the layer of clouds, we entered the cave.

Rock debris made it immediately clear that someone had been here since the night before. We made a quick inspection of the cave and determined that whoever it had been wasn’t there now. We were too late.

What would I have done if I had encountered someone? I was fairly certain Rupert had been there digging, but what if I’d been wrong?

I took a closer look around the inside of the cave while Lane was putting in his contacts. The only sign of activity was a gaping hole in the rock directly next to the entrance. With his vision restored, Lane came up to me and more thoroughly inspected the crudely dug hole.

“He didn’t find anything,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“From the way the rock is cut,” he said. “Nothing has previously been carved out as a hiding place. He’d know that if he knew what he was doing. You said he finished a PhD in archaeology? It’s possible something may have been wedged into the natural formation, but he couldn’t have found much.”

I stepped back and looked him over. He was a whole new man without his glasses. He ran his fingers over the rock’s surface.

“What would you have done if we’d found someone here?” I asked.

Lane turned and looked up from the shattered rock face.

“Played it by ear,” he said, shrugging. “That’s all you can do in a situation like this.”

I wandered toward the smaller entrance of the cave as Lane continued to inspect the freshly dug hole. I stepped through the small second opening, out onto the sunlight on the rock. I discovered to my horror that we were wrong about no one else being there. I called out as I rushed forward.

Knox’s body lay askew on the jagged black rocks. His head was bashed in, and blood trickled onto the rock, wet with seawater beneath him.

I ran as far forward as I could without slipping and bashing my own head. I stopped at the edge of the large flat rock, then carefully stepped onto the smaller uneven rocks at the water’s edge, so I could reach Knox. I knelt at his side and felt for a pulse at his neck. If the gash on his head or the vacant expression in his open blue-gray eyes hadn’t been enough, the lack of a pulse gave me the definitive answer that he was dead.

I couldn’t pull my eyes from Knox’s face. His hair was streaked across his forehead, wet with a combination of water from the misty sea air and blood. He looked so familiar, like he should open his eyes at any moment. I don’t know what I had expected—that he would look like a mannequin once his breath had left him? In a way it was even more upsetting than when I had thought Rupert was dead. Even worse was my feeling that I might have been able to prevent this. If I had stayed and talked to Knox, he might not have come out here. He might not be dead.
Why had I acted so rashly?

I didn’t realize I was grasping Knox’s shirt collar until I felt Lane’s hands pulling me back.

“You’ve got blood on you,” he said after he dragged me back onto the stable flat rock.

I looked down at the thick red substance on my hands and the sleeves of my coat. “I know.”

“This won’t look good.”

“I know that, too.”

“We can’t go to the police.” He said it matter-of-factly, but his voice wasn’t callous. It could have been the wind, but I thought I detected a slight unsteadiness. I found myself shaking as I looked down at Knox. It wasn’t from the chilled air swirling around us.

“They’d figure it out eventually,” I said. “Since I didn’t do anything.”

“There’s nothing we can do for him now. All it would do is get you tied up while we could be straightening out the last of this mess.”

I sat down on the rock. Lane pulled me back up. “Not here,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

“But—” I began, gesturing toward Knox’s lifeless body.

“High tide is receding now,” he said. “The water won’t have a chance of reaching him for half a day. We’ll come back if no one has found him by then.”

I stared up at him.

“It’s one of those things you learn to pay attention to,” he said. “It came in very handy during one job.”

I snapped out of my stupor with this detailed reminder of Lane’s past. The recurring unsettling thought crept back into my mind. How could anything like that be completely left behind? He had been paying attention to all sorts of details in the past few days.

“We should go,” he said.

“Finding that bastard Rupert would be a start,” I said.

“The police will do that later.”

“What?” I stared up at Lane. “That’s not what I meant. You can’t really think Rupert did this to Knox. Now that I’ve almost figured it out, with the missing pieces we each have, if we found Rupert, the three of us could figure it out together.”

“Who else is there? Your ex had to be the one who was here digging last night. You admitted that. He got rid of us for that very purpose. He must have tried to do the same thing to Knox. That diversion misfired, and now Knox is dead.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“Will you
stop
sticking up for him!” Lane yelled. A vein bulged on the side of his temple. He wasn’t any calmer than I was.

I knelt at the edge of the water and washed the blood off my hands. I felt queasy as the lapping water rinsed the blood away.

“Let’s go,” I said. I started back through the cave. Lane fell in step beside me. I could see him seething, but he didn’t speak.

When we reached the opening of the cave, Lane jogged ahead of me. I saw why as I caught up with him. He had located his glasses. He tucked them into a pocket and we kept walking.

Back at the car I tossed my coat into the trunk with shaking hands. I’d gotten Knox alone, but not in the way I ever intended. I tried to suppress the urge to scream. The urge to cry. The urge to throw up.

“We should go back to the Gregor Estate,” Lane said. “It should be opening soon, so we can get those last answers we need.”

I knew he was right. I had to focus. That was the only way I was going to get through this. I got into the driver’s seat and started the car.

The estate wasn’t open yet. Although the sun was now strong in the sky, it was still quite early. The early morning wind whipped around the car. Lane silently removed his coat and handed it to me.

“Chivalry again?” I asked. “I like this better.” I lifted myself out of my seat and onto his lap, and buried my head on his chest. He wrapped his strong arms around me and held me there. Neither of us spoke. Lane’s long fingers stroked my hair as he held me close. I couldn’t push the vivid image of Knox’s lifeless body from my mind, but I no longer felt like throwing up.

Wheels crunched on the gravel drive. The man from our last visit pulled long legs out of a miniature car. I hopped out of our car.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re not open until—”

“We’re catching a train in a little over an hour,” I said.

He smiled down at me. “You’re the lass from the other day. Found our military history interesting after all then?” He winked and beckoned for us to follow him as he unlocked the double doors.

“Ye’ll still need to pay the admission tariff,” he said.

After paying, Lane followed on my heels as I hurried to the great hall. This time, instead of being drawn to the portrait of Connor Gregor that dominated the room, I went straight to dark-haired Elspeth Gregor.

Young Elspeth couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. The fashionable gown she wore suited her petite frame. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, revealing delicate features slightly resembling those of the man next to her.

“She’s Willoughby Gregor’s daughter,” I said, reading from the panel next to the portrait. “Born in 1840. No mother listed.”

“He was in India at that time,” Lane said.

“A merchant for the East India Company—before European women went over to India.”

“Elspeth’s mother was Indian,” Lane said. “That’s why Fergus and Angus saw a slight resemblance to you when they remembered this portrait.”

“Angus confirmed what I suspected,” I said. “This is the portrait that started the local
bean nighe
legend. Willoughby Gregor fathered a child in India, and brought her home with him when he returned to Britain. She married a local man, and when she died in childbirth, a local legend that she was a
bean nighe
fairy began—probably because of her small and distinctive looks, since it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to die in childbirth back then. She’d have had a slightly different accent, too. Not quite Indian but not quite English or Scottish either. Adding to her mystique with the locals.”

“You were thinking it was a part-Indian woman who Fergus knew to be a fairy,” Lane said. “That’s why you looked so familiar to him, and why you asked about her name to confirm your theory.”

“When I looked at the timing in history, their actions make perfect sense. With the chaos of the Sepoy Rebellion, the societal rules of the British in India changed. The British Crown didn’t want their men marrying the natives anymore. It was one thing for unorganized merchant sailors to do so, but now they were directly representing the British Crown. Willoughby needed to get his family out. Interracial children were in a bad spot.

“It was the perfect mix for opportunity. A poor British merchant with no ties back at home and no future in India. He could take advantage of the chaos and both save his family and make off with the treasure that you traced to Delhi.”

“But he didn’t save his wife,” Lane said.

“What do you want to bet she told him about the treasure in the first place? The Mughals still had the treasure, Lane. Someone hid the treasure, or at least made very sure it was kept out of the public eye. You said it disappeared not long after 1611. I didn’t put it together at the time, but 1616 was the year Jahangir gave a charter to the East India Company. Someone knew, even then, that a treasure like this needed to be protected.

“But,” I continued, “how could someone get such a treasure out of the country? Even with the bureaucracy less stringent, it wouldn’t be easy.”

“It was his daughter,” Lane cut in. “She could pass as white if she assumed the right dress and mannerisms, and could have dressed up in an appropriately voluminous dress, as was the style. That’s a great way to smuggle jewels.”

Nodding, I continued. “I don’t know what happened to her mother, but it was a time of war. Countless people died. Especially those who took risks, such as removing a treasure. Willoughby Gregor managed to get the treasure and his daughter back to Britain. He needed to come to this bleak region of Scotland to keep his treasure a secret, rather than somewhere like London where people would question his wealth.”

“And because gold is an easy metal to melt down,” Lane said, “he could easily sell as many of the stones and gold as he needed to in order to get set up here, but he’d need to hide the rest somewhere. He didn’t have a fortified castle, so he’d want to hide his treasure somewhere that only he knew about. Like a unique site along the coast, near where he was building his estate.”

“The same type of distinct coastline,” I said, “where people hundreds of years before him thought to put their stone-carved messages as well. So it’s not remarkable that the Pictish stones would be around there, too.”

“Not bad, Jones.”

He paused. “But how did your ex find out about this?”

“As I was starting to explain earlier, Knox….” I faltered. I swallowed and pushed the scene from my mind.

“Knox worked at an auction house in London,” I said, “and that’s the documentation that our trickster used to get you arrested—an appraisal of a necklace with a similar stone—which must be the one in this painting. Sir Gregor had this old family piece of jewelry appraised but didn’t sell it. He didn’t take it to a museum or a scholar, so they wouldn’t have realized its historical significance. You said how obscure it was. But Knox, with all his interest in treasure hunting and his archaeological training, would have spotted the significance.

“What I’m not sure about,” I added, “is how Rupert and Knox put it together with the cave next to the site of this dig Fiona was on. Even if she mentioned the Gregor Estate nearby and they put it together with Sir Gregor, how did they get the bracelet Rupert sent me, but not the rest of the treasure?”

“The dirt,” Lane said. “There was soil in the bracelet when you showed it to me.”

“Soil like on a dig.” I groaned. “That’s why Rupert called it an
artifact
. Not a
treasure
or a
bracelet
, either of which would have made more sense. They must have found it buried like an artifact.”

“In this region,” Lane said, “the weather is strong enough to reshape stone cliffs. So the bracelet wouldn’t necessarily have been found with the rest of the treasure that was buried for safekeeping.”

“This estate would have used up some of the treasure,” I said, looking around at the heavily adorned walls. “But if what we’re speculating about the treasure is true, there was a lot, so he wouldn’t have had to use much of it.”

“Then why doesn’t the family have more than one piece?” Lane asked. “And where is the rest? It’s not in the cave where Knox and your ex were digging. I don’t know why they thought it was there, but there’s nothing buried in that rock face.”

“Knox and Rupert were digging in the wrong place because they didn’t realize it was
Willoughby’s
treasure,” I said. “They were only focused on Connor, the son Willoughby had with his second wife. He’s the one who finished building this estate and left his mark.”