Old Wounds (45 page)

46.

T
HE
E
GG OF THE
P
HOENIX

Sunday, October 30

For the third
time in a half hour, Elizabeth went to look at the kitchen clock. She glanced at Phillip, comfortably ensconced on the sofa, a second cup of coffee in one hand,
Glory Road
in the other, serenely oblivious to her unease.

Only ten after eight—too early to be calling. Laurel, whose bartending job kept her up till the very wee hours on Saturday nights, generally slept quite late on Sunday mornings, and presumably, so would Rosemary. If Rosemary had stayed with Laurel. On the other hand…

When she and Phillip had returned yesterday from their search of the so-called cave, the blinking light on the answering machine had announced a message.

“Mum,” Rosemary’s quiet voice had said, “I’ll be staying in Asheville tonight. See you tomorrow, probably after lunch.”

Stop fretting. Either she’s with Laurel or she’s with Jared. She’s a big girl, Elizabeth.

“Worried about your daughter?” Phillip was looking at her over the pages of his book.

“No…well, a little. I wish I knew if she was at Laurel’s or…”

With a sigh she dropped onto the sofa beside him. “Really, I just wanted to tell her about the bone we found and ask her if she ever went to the cave after Maythorn disappeared.”

He put the book down. “She’ll be back after lunch and we’ll ask her then. We’ll show her the stone with the hole and see if it means anything to her. And then I’ll take the bone to Mac. It looks like a human finger bone to me, but I could be wrong. Mac’ll send it off to the ME, and if it is human, they’ll do DNA testing. It’ll all take a while, but eventually they ought to be able to establish if the bone is Maythorn’s.”

Phillip read on, thoroughly enjoying the swash-buckling fantasy. Now Oscar the Hero was trading rhymes and swordplay with Cyrano de Bergerac, guardian of the Egg of the Phoenix. Now he was crawling through endless tunnels in search of the egg.
Pretty corny, but fun to read. I remember Sam telling me about this book. He kind of identified with the hero—Oscar was a “military advisor” in Southeast Asia, which turned into the Vietnam War.

The egg that holds the knowledge. In search of the egg. Where would you look for an egg? Phillip blinked, put the book down, and went into the kitchen, where Elizabeth was filling a jug with water to take down to the chickens.

“I wonder…” He saw her amused look as his hand moved toward his head, and he stopped himself from making the habitual gesture. “This is probably pretty wild, but I was thinking…”

“You can see there’s not much of anywhere to hide things in
here.
”

They were both crowded into the little building. A rectangular box, of about nine feet by five feet, the chicken house’s bare, uninsulated board walls and hay-strewn floor were unpromising. One red hen eyed them warily from a nest box, while the others milled about the metal garbage can where the laying pellets were kept.

“I clean it out every spring and I’ve certainly never seen anything hidden down here.” Elizabeth reached into the can and tossed several handfuls of feed out onto the bare ground of the chicken yard. With a flurry of feathers, the chickens raced to gobble up the pellets. The red hen, with an agitated squawk, abandoned the nest box and half jumped, half flew between them and out the door.

“Idiot biddy! In such a hurry she broke a couple of eggs.” Elizabeth reached into the nest box and retrieved the eggs, throwing the broken ones out the door. Quickly abandoning the laying pellets, the hens hurried to suck up the bright yellow yolks, pecking and jostling one another aside.

“Cannibals,” Elizabeth muttered. “You should see them with chicken bones. It’s a regular feeding frenzy.”

Phillip was making a careful examination of the interior of the little structure. “Sam built this, right?”

“Yep, pretty soon after we got the house done. Rosie used it for a clubhouse for a while—till I got chickens. It was really cute—she kept books in the nest boxes and had cushions on the floor—oh, yuck, the hay in this nest’s all covered with egg. If you’d move outside a minute, I’ll clean it out.”

Elizabeth fetched the old hoe that hung outside the chicken house and used it to scrape out the slimy hay. “There’s a loose bale of hay just under the barn shed over there. Would you bring me about a quarter of it? I’ll go on and clean out all four nest boxes and put in clean hay.”

She was pulling the old litter out of the last nest box when Phillip returned with an armful of fresh hay. He stepped into the house and began to pile the sweet-smelling dried grass into the first box. “There we go, ladies, clean sheets for your boudoirs—”

He stopped and dropped the rest of the hay to the floor. “Look at this, Elizabeth. Why is this third nest shallower than the others?”

Without waiting for an answer, he felt for the bottom of the nest box. “Outside, the bottom’s the same as the others, but inside…” He reached for his pocketknife. Moving with a contained impatience, he inserted the blade at the edge of the false bottom and lifted.

The small flat aluminum box was filthy with dust and powdery dried chicken droppings that had sifted through the cracks around the edge of the false bottom. Phillip gave her a grin of wild glee and reached for the little tin.

“I believe we’ve got it—Sam’s Egg of the Phoenix!”

It was all there—the fading snapshots documenting the horror of that long-ago afternoon and the videotaped deposition. Phillip had played just enough of it to make sure that it was still functional. She had watched as Sam’s face, nervous and unhappy, filled the screen, but after the first few sentences, she had left the room.

Soon Phillip had come looking for her. She was sitting on the bench at the foot of her bed, staring out the big windows. He sat beside her and took her hand.

“I’ve talked to Del. He’s flying in tonight to pick up the tape and the photos. I’ll meet him at the airport and hand them over personally.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the palm. “Sweetheart, are you okay?”

She turned toward him. “I am. It was sad seeing Sam on that tape. But I was just thinking that, with your help, he’s finished what he meant to do. The end of his chapter. I’m ready to turn the page now and find the end of Rosie’s too.”

47.

O
NE
M
ORE
D
AY

Sunday, October 30

Two masks.

One proudly displayed, smooth and painted, fashioned from a large gourd. The other, half hidden under an old towel, crudely formed from an abandoned hornet’s nest—an amorphous mass of gray, papery material; ragged holes forming two empty, staring eyes and a small mouth, perpetually open in a soundless scream.

Rosemary awakened with a jolt, still seeing the images that had dominated that last incoherent dream.
She showed me the gourd one, but she didn’t tell me who it was supposed to be. And I only saw the other one by accident, before she covered it back up and pretended it wasn’t anything.

She got out of bed quietly and began to dress.

“Rosie, where are you going?”

Jared rolled over and favored her with a lazy smile.

Phillip and Elizabeth were eating lunch and listening to the rebroadcast of
Prairie Home Companion
when the ring of the telephone chimed in with the Powdermilk Biscuit theme.

“That’s probably her now.” Elizabeth pushed back her chair and darted to the study. She emerged almost immediately and handed the telephone to Phillip. “For you. The sheriff.”

“Mac?…Sorry, I must have turned my cell off…. I was going to call you…. There’s an interesting development….”

Elizabeth listened as she finished her soup, but her mind was preoccupied.
As soon as he gets off the phone, I’m calling Laurel. She and Rosemary are probably up by now and just sitting around yacking.

Phillip was telling the sheriff about their discovery, explaining the location of the hiding place and their speculations about the single bone. “It could be human—but I’m no expert…. After all this time, uncovered bones could certainly have been dispersed by animals…but we may be jumping to conclusions…. I’ll bring it in this afternoon. And I’ve got some other good news—but I’m forgetting, you called me. What’s up?”

Uh, oh, it looks like there’s something wrong.
Elizabeth felt a sudden uneasiness as she saw Phillip stand and begin to pace, phone to his ear.

“You’re kidding me!…Mac, what the—what’s going on here?…Okay…right…right. Okay, I’ll be there in…” He looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes.”

He set the telephone on the table and looked at her with an inscrutable expression.

“What? Phillip, what is it?”

He shook his head. “They’ve been excavating more of the basement over there at Mullmore, looking for Maythorn. This morning they found more remains.”

She stood and picked up her empty bowl. A dull ache established itself in her heart. “So Moon killed them both—Tamra, if it was Tamra, and Maythorn. So the bone we found must be from an animal.”

He shook his head again. “No, maybe not. Mac says the second skeleton’s an adult—probably a woman. He’s thinking if the first skeleton is Tamra, this might be her mother—Bib’s wife. They’re bringing Bib in for questioning.”

Elizabeth slammed down the phone in frustration. Laurel wasn’t answering her cell, nor Rosemary hers.
She said she’d be back after lunch. What time is it, anyway?

James’s shrill bark caught her attention and she hurried to the front porch. Rosemary was hiking up the road, accompanied by Ursa and Molly.

Instant relief flooded her and she went inside to do the dishes with as nonchalant an air as she could assume.

“Mum? I’m back. I passed Phillip on the bridge—I thought he was staying here.”

“Hey, sweetie.” Elizabeth hugged her daughter, a little harder and longer than usual. “He had to go into Ransom. I’ll tell you about it.”

Rosemary held the flat stone in one hand, then brought it to her eye and peered through the little hole at her mother.
Just Mum, thank goodness. Yesterday, today, and always.

“This was definitely Maythorn’s. She called it the Looker Stone. It was something Granny Thorn gave her and it was very precious to her. She kept it with her most of the time. There was a leather pouch for it, but sometimes she stuck her finger through the hole and carried it that way.”

Mother and daughter were both silent, staring at the little stone as if willing it to divulge its story. At last Rosemary spoke.

“I’m staying over one more day. I’ve called my department head and made arrangements about tomorrow’s class. Jared and I are going back to Mullmore tomorrow afternoon to look for Maythorn’s notebooks.”

She met her mother’s surprised stare. “He couldn’t do it today; he needed to go see his dad and talk over the plans for his defense.”

Her mother didn’t speak but reached out and took the Looker Stone. She turned it around and around, studying it with apparent fascination.

Rosemary watched her mother.
She’s worried about something, but I know her, she’ll bite her tongue rather than interfere if she thinks it’s not her business.

“Mum, Jared’s sure that Moon didn’t kill anyone. I want to help him. We’re hoping there’ll be at least a hint in the notebooks about who Maythorn was afraid of—who the booger she talked about was.”

When her mother remained silent, Rosemary reached for her hand. “What’s the big deal, Mum? It’s just one more day.”