Bestiary (69 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
Joey was in his playpen, happily banging plastic blocks together, while Carter tried to work the end of a ruler into the cast holding his fractured left arm together.
“You want some help with that?” Beth asked.
But Carter shook his head. “It’s best if I learn to do these things for myself,” he said with mock solemnity.
“Anything I can do for you instead?”
Carter laughed. “What? Is Agnes outside?”
Beth nodded, caught.
“So you’re a prisoner until she leaves?”
“Something like that.”
Joey, hearing his father’s laugh, laughed, too, and tossed a red block out of the playpen.
Beth stooped to pick it up, and Carter said, “If you really need something to do, you could help me lace up my hiking boots.”
Beth frowned. “That would be aiding and abetting something that I think is a bad idea.”
“I know that,” Carter said, “but I’ve got to get some exercise. You want me to get fat?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” she said, though secretly she had to admit that she would. She bent down and started lacing up the boots—tightly—so there wouldn’t be any other accidents. She had had all the drama, and all the terror, she ever wanted in her life. She had seen things that would haunt her for the rest of her days. Her hair hadn’t exactly gone gray overnight, but there were definitely a few strands here and there that she had had to touch up.
She could feel Carter looking down at her as she tied the boots, and she knew, without even asking, what he was thinking. Ever since the Fourth, he had looked at her with a depth of affection, and protectiveness, that made everything before it pale in comparison; it was as if she and Joey had been restored to him by some divine providence and he was determined not to take any chances with them ever again.
It was a miracle, she supposed, that he was willing to leave her today to go hiking. Instead of worrying about his recuperation, she should have been encouraging him to go. It was a good sign, really.
“That alright?” she said, pulling the laces snug one more time.
“Perfect,” Carter said, tapping the new boots on the floor. Everything they owned had been lost in the fire. Their clothes, their books, their furniture, their photos . . . along with, most notably for Beth, the secret letter from Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds. When Beth had run home that day from the Getty—which had withstood the walls of flame like the impregnable fortress it was designed to be—she had, tragically, brought it with her.
And now it was gone.
As was, presumably,
The Beasts of Eden,
too. Al-Kalli’s estate had been razed . . . and with him in it, from what Carter had told her.
The Beasts of Eden,
too. Al-Kalli’s estate had been razed . . . and with him in it, from what Carter had told her.
All Beth had now was a collection of files and translations, notes and printouts, all pertaining to a mythical object that no one could see and that she could never again produce. The most beautiful and original illuminated manuscript the world had ever known, by the greatest and most innovative artist of the eleventh century, whose masterpiece would never be seen.
Champ barked, and ran to the door. Beth could hear Del exchanging pleasantries with Agnes Critchley outside.
“David Austin English roses,” he was saying. “They do need their water.”
“Yes, they do,” Agnes trilled back. “They’re thirsty fellows.”
How did Del know anything about roses? Beth was always amazed at the variety of topics Del could expound upon.
She opened the door, and Del—his white hair tied up in a blue rubber band, wearing shorts and a loose Lakers T-shirt—said, “I’m selling magazine subscriptions to work my way through college . . .”
Beth gave him a hug, and Joey squealed. He liked his Uncle Del.
“Anybody here ready for a hike?”
Carter stood up and with his right hand hoisted his backpack onto one shoulder. “Rarin’ to go.”
“You sure it’s okay if I take him away for a few hours?” Del said to Beth.
“Just promise to bring him back in one piece.”
Del shook his head. “He’s not in one piece now—you expect me to fix him?”
Carter threw his plastered arm around Beth’s neck and gave her a tender squeeze. He loved the smell of her hair, the feel of her shoulders, fragile but firm. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll barbecue.”
As he turned to go, he took one look back, and Beth was already bending down to take Joey out of his playpen. “You want to go and see the lovely roses?” she was cooing.
He left the door open—the garden was large and immaculately manicured, not only by Mrs. Critchley, now off in another quarter, but also by a regular crew of Mexican gardeners. Del’s truck was parked on the quiet street outside the gates.
“Where we going?” Carter asked as he tossed his backpack into the cab and climbed in.
“Temescal,” Del said, settling behind the steering wheel.
“Isn’t that completely burned out?”
“Probably. But that’s why I need to go there.”
“Need?”
“Got something to show you.”
Carter couldn’t argue with that. He had shown Del plenty . . . from creatures who had thrived ages before the dinosaurs to the burial site of the La Brea Woman . . . and her long-lost partner.
A few days before, on the pretext of going to the Page Museum for a teleconference, Carter and Del had met with James Running Horse, the leader of the NAGPRA protestors. They had wanted the remains of the La Brea Woman and Man to be buried in a spot sacred to Native Americans, and Carter felt he had been led, by means that were still a mystery, to a fitting resolution. He’d started by showing Running Horse the broken mano stone that had been discovered in 1915, when the bones of the La Brea Woman had been excavated.
“It’s a mano, used for manual chores like—”
“I know what it is,” Running Horse had said, witheringly.
Carter let that pass. “But look at the striations on it, and the way that it has been broken in half.”
“So?” Running Horse replied. “Lots of these are found broken.”
“Not like this,” Carter said. “Not against the natural cleavage plane, and not defaced like this. This was done deliberately, as punishment or retribution.”
Running Horse said, “The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act is not about manos or arrowheads or pottery shards. It’s about bones, Dr. Cox. Human bones.”
“So it is.”
“So show me where you have stashed the bones of my ancestors, and I will take them and put them where they belong.”
“They’re already there,” Carter said.
“Where?” he shot back skeptically.
“I’ll show you.”
Del turned and walked across the closed lobby of the Page Museum—Carter, not wanting to start up any further ruckus with Gunderson about what he was planning, had picked a time when the museum was officially closed—and into the atrium garden.
It was a beautiful afternoon, late in the day, and birds were twittering in the branches of the gnarled gingko tree. The garden, open to the blue sky above, was cradled within the glass walls of the museum, and today, more than ever before, Carter felt what a magical place it was. Small and tranquil, traversed by a single quiet footpath, its running stream inhabited by nesting turtles and glittering orange koi . . . it was as close to the primeval landscape of the region as any of present-day Los Angeles was likely to get. It was like stepping back into a tiny patch of the Pleistocene epoch, and as Carter led Running Horse toward the waterfall at the back, he hoped that some of that feeling was rubbing off on him, too.
“Very nice,” Running Horse said, “but I’ve been in here before.”
Carter wasn’t sure the magic had worked yet. He paused beside the burbling waterfall, and let Running Horse soak up the peace and the harmony of the place. Del hung respectfully back, like a funeral director.
“I want you to do something for me,” Carter said.
Running Horse didn’t look amenable. His dark eyes were obdurate and his chin was set.
“I want you to take that stone, the one right there, from the center of the waterfall.”
Running Horse looked at the waterfall splashing down a short rock face and into a small elevated pool. “Why?”
“Because I want you to see something.”
Running Horse stepped off the pathway and onto the grassy earth. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, and he stopped to roll up the sleeve before leaning close to the little fall and retrieving the glistening rock.
When he turned back, Carter was holding out the mano the La Brea Woman had been found with. “Now compare them,” Carter said. “Put them together.” It had come as a sudden revelation to Carter—and he hoped it would have the same effect on Running Horse.
Running Horse took the woman’s mano and joined the two together between his hands—the pieces fit perfectly.
“And look at the defacing marks,” Carter said.
Running Horse lifted the stones and studied them more closely. He could see that the slashes and cuts neatly meshed.
But he still didn’t understand what all of this was leading to.
“The bones of the La Brea Woman were brought here, and buried here,” Carter said, “by some means I do not begin to understand.”
Running Horse remained silent.
“And that stone was placed there, in the waterfall, as a marker. A tombstone.”
Running Horse waited still.
“We—that’s Del and I—have buried the bones of the La Brea Man beside them,” Carter explained. “We believe that these two people were together in life, and that they were killed, perhaps because of some transgression, together at the end. The stones prove it.”
“Here?” Running Horse finally said, in a voice still fumbling toward comprehension.
Carter gestured at a spot of freshly smoothed earth, away from the path, in the shade of a tree.
“This is where they lived,” Carter said, “and this is where they died.” Carter gestured at the lush foliage and babbling brook. “This is a world they would know, even today.”
Running Horse stood silent, contemplating all that he had just been told. Carter and Del moved away to allow him some time to commune with his thoughts, and when he turned toward them again, he said simply, “Then let it be.” He replaced the broken mano in the waterfall, and nestled beside it the other half. Under his breath, he chanted some words, unrecognizable to Carter, then bent down and touched the recently turned earth with the flat palm of his hand.
When he stood up, he didn’t offer to shake hands with Carter, or speak any words of reconciliation, but he didn’t challenge him or argue anymore either. He walked out of the atrium garden, letting the glass door close slowly behind him, and Carter had neither seen nor heard anything from him since . . .
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