The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (40 page)

Bertha turned off the gas burner
under a pot of boiling water and realized the odd noise she’d imagined was
someone knocking at her front door.
Now
who could that be?
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had come to
the door, not counting the time that young sheriff’s deputy had stopped by to
caution her. Well, that was all the fault of those punks whose taunting had
reached the point where they threw rotten eggs at the house and rolls of toilet
paper all over the place. He had promised to catch the kids and warn them, too,
and it must have worked because they hadn’t come back.

She made her way through the
living room and peered out the front window to see a shiny vehicle out front,
one that looked familiar. She opened the door.

“Happy birthday!” Two candles
glowed on top of a small cake, one of them shaped like the number nine and the
other a zero.

Beyond the bright flame she made
out a woman’s face. The chin-length, curly gray hair was familiar along with
the short, stout build.

“I couldn’t let your ninetieth
birthday go by.”

Bertha struggled for a moment.
Finally, she figured out that it was Sarah Williams, her former protégé. She
smiled, more at the fact that she’d been able to recall the name than the idea
that her advanced age should be a reason to celebrate.

Sarah took the smile as an
invitation to enter. When she pulled the screen door open, Bertha stepped
aside, gave a glance around the living room—if she’d known there would be
company she might have dusted the furniture. She spent so little time anywhere
but the kitchen these days.

“Blow out your candles,” Sarah
instructed.

The action took Bertha back to
childhood.
Mamá
always baked her a
cake, and a few times there had even been a store-bought candle on top.

Sarah carried the little cake to
the kitchen, going on about how they should eat a piece of it right now.

“How are you feeling?” Sarah
asked as she accepted a sharp knife from Bertha and began cutting the cake.

“Oh, you know. All right.” People
really didn’t want to hear about an old woman’s aches and pains, even though
she knew Sarah asked out of genuine caring and with an eye toward helping if
she could. Bertha changed the subject. “How is your healing practice doing
these days?”

Sarah took a seat at the table
and Bertha brought two clean forks from the drawer.

“I actually have some new
patients, can you believe it? After years of thinking that the old healing arts
were dying out, I’m finding a lot of these younger ones are looking to herbal
remedies and natural methods. Of course, a lot of them just want to walk into
the health food store and buy up everything and try it all, willy-nilly.”

Bertha nodded and took a bite of
the chocolate cake. Her appetite may have dimmed—she knew by the way her
clothes fit that she’d lost weight—but her love of sweets hadn’t gone away.

“Remember, those of us who
studied with you? It was a small group, but I think I am the only one who is still
practicing. I’ve been thinking of taking on a group of apprentices of my own,
teach the younger ones so the art doesn’t die out. There are two young women
and one man who show an interest in learning.”

“Not like that one who thought I
wanted a red-painted room so I could practice the occult,” Bertha said.

She couldn’t recall his name but
she remembered how he had redone the back bedroom without her permission. That
was in the days when she occasionally took in a student for the room and board
money that helped with expenses.

Sarah rolled her eyes toward the
ceiling. “Oh, yes. Damien, wasn’t it? He never quite understood the whole
thing, did he?”

“Well, I never understood those
things he painted in the room. Next week, I think I shall paint it white again.”

She caught the flash of
skepticism on Sarah’s face.

“I can bring the paint and help
you,” Sarah offered. “The week after next would be a good time, after I get
back from Albuquerque. The grandchildren. I’m staying with them while my son
and his wife go to a conference.”

Bertha nodded. It had probably
been ten years or more that the room had been red. Since her curing days
dwindled away she’d had no real reason to go in there. But it would be nice to
have the walls white again, as they were in the old days when little-girl
Bertha had shared that room with her
abuela
.

“I remember the days when you
used to come to our house to treat my father,” Sarah said, gathering the empty
plates and taking them to the sink.

Monty Williams. The memory leaped
into her head, of the day she’d carried her carved box along on a visit to that
house. Monty Williams claiming to have seen it before, somewhere in Germany.
The same emotion rose in her now, the premonition she’d felt when she realized
there were two of the boxes. It reminded her that since leaving the practice of
healing she’d not had daily contact with the box. She should look for it.

Sarah left, after repeating the
birthday wishes and reassuring Bertha she would be back for another visit.
Bertha closed the door behind her and glanced into the living room. Where had
she left that box?

It used to stay in her dresser
drawer, along with all her bottles of herbs. She walked into the bedroom and
opened the drawer, but everything in it was different. After she stopped practicing,
she remembered now, she had given her herb collection to her students. But she
hadn’t given away the box ... had she?

No, she would never part with the
treasure from Uncle Patricio.

The idea wouldn’t go away,
though. What if someone had taken it? Her heart began to race. She
needed
to find that box, to get it into
the right hands, not necessarily the hands of a
curandera
but to someone who would understand and properly use the
power the box conveyed.

She turned quickly and a sharp
pain shot through her leg. She collapsed against the bed.

The room was cold, the sun low in
the sky when Bertha woke. She pulled the quilt over herself and drew upon her
inner reserves for strength. Her eyes closed once more.

By morning, she felt as if she
could roll over. The pain was persistent and she gasped slightly as she reached
the edge of the bed and lowered her feet to the floor. Gritting her teeth she
used the bedside table for leverage to stand, then the footboard, then the
doorsill as she made her way to the kitchen. Coffee. That would revive her.

Later she would call Sarah and
request a poultice for the ache in her leg. But Sarah was going somewhere,
wasn’t she? Bertha couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Maybe an idea would
come to her once she had finished her coffee.

Outside, the leaves on the
cottonwood were brilliant yellow now. When had that happened? In the big field
where her father should be plowing under the old crop, there were tall trees
and walls and the roof of a house showed over the wall. That didn’t seem right
either.

She started to fill her old metal
coffeepot with water and then remembered something. She must find the wooden
box. She abandoned the coffee for the moment and made her way, a few feet at a
time, to the red bedroom where she found it. With the box in hand, she
carefully took it to her own room and put it back in its rightful place. Then,
at once, she needed to rest.

Somehow, another day passed, and
maybe another. She lost track. She thought she should be hungry, but it seemed
too much effort to go to the kitchen for food. She pulled the quilts over her
thin shoulders and slept.

The next time she opened her
eyes, the room was light. From outside the room came a small sound. Perhaps
Sarah had come back. Bertha tried to sit up, but couldn’t manage it; the wooden
headboard bumped against the wall. Another small noise from another room—she
struggled again but couldn’t seem to speak. All that came out was a low moan.

She stared toward the door and
saw it swing inward slowly. Please, be Sarah. Prayers she barely remembered
from her school days came back to her in a rush and she ran through them. Send
me the person I need for this moment of my life, she asked.

The figure was female, but it
wasn’t Sarah. This woman was taller, with hair that was not so curly. Around
her was an aura of pink and Bertha sensed a person who would be loving,
intelligent and compassionate.

“Come, girl,” she said when she
was finally able to clear her throat. “There is something you are meant to
have.”

She gave instructions to find the
box, to take it and protect it. The woman questioned but did as she was told.

Finally, Bertha could go.

Chapter
13

Lightning
Strikes Again

Thunder echoed through the
streets of Washington, DC, emphasizing the clouds which had built up all day.

Isobel St. Clair held her
umbrella against the light rainfall as she walked the narrow sidewalk along
King Street up from Waterfront Park. Her daily break from her desk at The
Vongraf Foundation provided a welcome respite from paperwork, but she was still
nursing tender muscles from the auto collision in New Mexico two weeks ago,
wishing she could walk a bit faster to avoid the downpour that would probably
begin any moment now. Perhaps more irritating than her few bruises was the idea
that Marcus Fitch and OSM now had information from her files.

Security at The Vongraf had
tightened over the years, comparable now to that of the strictest protocols in
place in the corporate world. To their knowledge, nothing had ever been taken
from inside the old building which housed their scientific studies. She
reproached herself daily for placing too much trust in the hope that Fitch had
not known of her trip west. She had called the man evil—perhaps that was too
strong. Perhaps not. He had gone to extraordinary lengths, just short of
killing her, to steal her research.

She cut over a block to the north
and approached the deceptively simple red-brick building, as always marveling
that Vongraf’s founders had chosen the location so well, more than two hundred
years ago. Outside, those men would still recognize the place. She slid her
keycard past the sensor in the lock—okay, the founders would not know what
that
device was for. Beyond the
white-painted door nothing would be familiar to them.

In the vestibule she presented
her thumb for a fingerprint scan. An electronic buzz activated a sliding door
and Isobel stepped into the modern world. Two security guards sat behind a
curved teak desk, both men armed, both military special-forces trained.

“Nice lunch out, Ms. St. Clair?”
asked Tom.

She nodded and passed her
identity card through another reader as she chatted with them. Silently, double
doors slid apart and she walked into The Vongraf’s state-of-the-art lab.
Isobel’s double major in chemistry and business administration had landed her
the job, but her minor in history had led her to study the foundation’s past.
She knew from old photographs that the layout and size of the lab had not
changed much over the centuries. There were long tables running the length of
the room back then, cabinets with tiny bottles of chemical compounds along the
walls, administrative offices at the back.

Today, long tables still ran
through the room, with beakers and burners in certain spots, chemicals for
performing their tests in locked cabinets. Space for a half-dozen scientists
and several lab assistants, a Foundation Director, two secretaries, and
herself—Assistant Director. As technology advanced, the organization had added
electron microscopes, radio carbon dating equipment, DNA testing abilities and
more. Isobel knew they would continue to have whatever they needed, thanks to
the judicious management of funds by the men who had conceived the idea of
devoting their time and resources to the study of the unexplained.

She hurried to her office with
the old metal safe which had been there since the beginning. Of course, now The
Vongraf Foundation had a state-of-the-art vault in the basement with security
measures that went beyond time locks and multiple keys. This one was here
purely because of its history. She usually stashed her lunch and purse in it.

Stanley Norman, the director,
looked up from his desk as she passed his door. Water now streamed down his
windows—she had come inside just in time.

“Isobel? A word?”

She’d dreaded this, Stan’s first
day back in the office since her misadventure in New Mexico. She readied an
explanation of the events.

But his expression conveyed more
eagerness than criticism. “My trip to Ireland was productive,” he said,
motioning for her to take the chair across from him. “I got a lead on one of
the boxes.”

There was something about these
wooden boxes, but she didn’t quite know what. The Vongraf certainly had many
other phenomena come through their doors—everything from UFO sightings, to
animals purported to have ESP, to craters in the earth where no one had
witnessed a meteor crash. Sometimes they were called upon to look at electronic
devices, such as the data recorders from airplanes, that registered
unexplainable results—the Bermuda Triangle effect, as they had dubbed those.
With such a variety of projects to investigate, what was it about these old
wooden boxes which they had now carbon dated to the thirteenth century? What
made every scientist on staff, all the way to the director himself, want to see
and touch and feel those ancient artifacts?

Isobel could only guess that the
reason was because these were among the very few so-called magical items that
they had been able to verify. Over ninety percent of the items they studied
either had reasonable scientific explanations for the exhibited behavior or
they were proven to be outright frauds. To demonstrate an item’s supernatural
powers and to be able to reliably replicate it—those were their success
stories.

“We had traced one box to a man
named Terrance O’Shaughnessy in Galway,” Stan said.

She nodded.

“He was a very old man who passed
away about a year ago. His niece inherited the box, along with his other
property. She lives in the US, and in fact …” He paused for effect. “She’s the
woman you went to see—Samantha Sweet.”

Isobel felt her excitement rise.
“The box in New Mexico is what I wanted to report to you. Its powers are real.
I witnessed it. The wood glows when Samantha touches it, her hands become warm
… she achieves a touch, I suppose it could legitimately be called a healing
touch. She demonstrated it to me.”

Stan Norman seemed puzzled.

“I took pictures,” she insisted.
“Unless Samantha Sweet has two of them, the one in Ireland has to be a second
box.”

He gave her a direct stare. “It
can’t be the same box. The one I went to investigate is still there somewhere,
in Ireland.”

Now it was Isobel’s turn to
stare. “Verified, I hope?”

He sighed. “I didn’t see it. I
talked with an attorney, the man who handled Terrance O’Shaughnessy’s estate.
He knew of it, he said Samantha Sweet took it with her but that it vanished
from her rental car before she came back to the US.”

“Samantha didn’t mention this to
me.” Isobel felt a little put out. “The box she showed me came from an old
woman in Taos named Bertha Martinez, a woman known from her earliest years as a
healer. It’s been in New Mexico at least since the 1920s.”

Stan ran his hands across the
smooth surface of his desk. “We’ve verified two boxes then. And even though we
can’t put our hands on the second one just yet it’s definitely of interest that
this same woman, Ms. Sweet, has handled both of them.”

Isobel made a mental note to contact
Samantha Sweet again and ask about her contact with the Irish box. She looked
at Stan once more. “You know there are rumors of a third. The stories have been
around for ages. In one of my history texts there is a sketch of a man in
clerical clothing in Rome holding a box exactly like these others.”

“Are you thinking what I’m
thinking? OSM?”

She shook her head. “I don’t
know. We suspect close ties to the Church and, yes, the Roman connection could
suggest that. But we just don’t know, do we?”

“But it makes so much sense. The
Church, especially during the Middle Ages was known for hiding and suppressing
anything that contradicted their teachings.”

“Middle Ages?” she scoffed. “How
about the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, kept under lock and key for more than fifty
years before anyone from the outside got to study them.”

“My point exactly.”

“But these? Carved boxes that
have special properties—how could those go against Church teachings? It’s not
as if they do anything to contradict the Bible. I just don’t see the
connection.”

“We don’t know, yet. But I
wouldn’t rule out anything. We’re scientists—open minds?”

“Absolutely. After all, Bertha
Martinez grew up in a heavily Catholic town and was known as the local
curandera
. Certainly, no one persecuted
her for the abilities she derived from the box.”

“We can’t rule out greed and
profit either. Maybe OSM really does stand for Office of Serious Money,” he
joked.

Everything in Washington had an
abbreviation that twisted its real meaning into something cute and pronounceable.
Isobel knew OSM had been around for a long time and she knew that somehow their
goals and that of The Vongraf Foundation were at odds, but the other group
operated under a cloak of absolute secrecy. She had documented several
historical instances of OSM’s involvement during the Spanish Inquisition and,
later, the enslavement of those in the New World who would not change their
beliefs. Maybe ‘evil’ was an accurate term.

*
* *

A side street off Dupont Circle,
a nondescript granite building that blended in with all the other plain-ish,
gray-ish ones in the nation’s capital, its only identification a small brass
plaque near the opaque front door with three simple letters—OSM.

Marcus Fitch gave a nervous
glance toward the leaden sky, approached the door, entered a five-digit code on
the keypad and went inside. His recent trip to New Mexico had been a
disappointment and today he would have to explain to the board of directors his
failure to obtain the carved box. He had braced himself with two cups of strong
coffee; it might not be enough. Elias was already here, he noticed as he
stepped off the elevator and slunk past the director’s spacious corner office.

It was inevitable that he and
Elias Swift would clash. The eldest of the directors wanted everything done the
traditional way. He refused to use the initials OSM when speaking of the
organization but rattled out the whole original Latin version,
Officii
Studendi
potest
Mystici
, every time.
Marcus found the old man tiresome. The old man found him young and brash and
was jealous of his quick movements and confidence.

Outside these walls no one knew
what was truly done here. Anyone on the street would assume the acronym stood
for Office of … anything—the beauty of maintaining their largest office here in
modern DC. There were hundreds of little bureaus and divisions of the
government that no one fully understood, not to mention the nearly equal number
of lobbyists, special interest groups and law firms that supported the entire
structure. Even Beltway insiders couldn’t keep track of it all, how could the
voters in Little Nowhere have a clue? Marcus liked things that way, thrived on
the busyness of it all.

Elias Swift walked past Marcus’s
cubicle. “Conference room, five minutes,” the old man reminded.

Marcus had his list of excuses
ready. He could handle this.

Swift stood at the head of the
long conference table, refusing to sit until all the other men were present.
With his longish white hair, the old man fancied himself in the position of
Jesus and the others as his disciples, Marcus thought. It was no coincidence
that the Board had always consisted of a President and twelve members. And
although the organization’s membership now contained a mix of religious,
political and business leaders, no woman had ever, in more than five hundred
years, served in a place of importance here or in any of the OSM branches
throughout the world. Marcus sighed audibly. The rituals all seemed moot—stupid
traditions that had no meaning when their real purpose was to attain power.

His thoughts drifted back to the
little town in New Mexico where he’d so recently traveled. There, a
fifty-something woman possessed one of the carved boxes. He knew it as surely
as he was sitting here, although he’d not actually seen the piece.

Isobel St. Clair from The Vongraf
Foundation had been there, her presence proof of the rival organization’s
interest. She’d met with this woman at a coffee place in Taos—Marcus had
watched as St. Clair left a funeral service, greeted the woman and then sat at
an outdoor table speaking in low tones. Marcus had not been able to get close
enough, even with his listening device, to hear them, but through binoculars he
saw some sort of paper and an old photograph pass between them.

He had followed St. Clair to her
hotel and watched the following morning as she went to the woman’s residence, a
ranch house out in the country. Isolation was normally good in this situation,
but a law enforcement man had also been there. Marcus had hoped St. Clair took
the box with her but when he’d rammed her car, running her off the road, then
searched, all he got were copies of the documents—no artifact.

At the head of the table, Elias
Swift cleared his throat.

“We are coming to the end times,”
he said. “The world is wholly out of control, with wars on many fronts,
starvation and disease wracking the poorest nations, the wealthy and powerful
taking more and more for themselves. And why? Because the Church has lost its
influence with the people. They have lost their moral code and, therefore, have
lost their way.”

Beyond the panoramic windows,
lightning cracked horizontally through the sky, punctuating his words. Uneasy
glances traveled around the table.

Swift let his dark-eyed gaze fall
on each man before continuing. “Our worldwide organization was formed with the
goal of maintaining the influence of the Church. We cast nonbelievers out of
Spain, we sent many priests throughout the New World to convert the heathen
tribes, we laid out our set of rules for the masses. And now—that influence is
in jeopardy, is being lost daily.”