David awoke long before dawn Friday morning, compliments of the wind-up alarm clock that seemed to be standard issue for the cabins at Tompkins Fish Camp and the nagging feeling that he shouldn't leave Anne alone too long to deal with all the problems her home had brought her.
He turned up the panel heater in what he suspected was a wasted effort to take the chill off the room, and lit the burner under the old blue coffeepot and its two-day-old brew, knowing that if he hurried he could be in and out of the shower before the thing boiled over. Icy cold well water lost most of its appeal when it came straight from the showerhead, but this morning, he needed the extra kick it would give him to get started.
He glanced out the tiny window in the bathroom. Yep, those idiots in the next cabin were already up, probably chomping at the bit to get back out on the lake. He guessed it took all kinds, but why Pete Tompkins had ever thought, and he'd ever agreed, that he might be the kind who'd actually enjoy sacrificing helpless bait from a boat in a subfreezing windchill, he'd never know.
He emerged from the shower in time to lift the pot off the burner as it stared spewing over and poured himself a cupful of reheated sludge. He needed that extra kick this morning, too.
Gretta Tompkins was just stepping out of her cabin when he drove past. She smiled and waved. His captain's mother was a nice woman, someone who had no bones to pick, no ax to grind, no ox to gore. Just a genuinely good person.
Nice. Not earthshaking. But nice.
Something he hadn't realized he'd needed in his life. Something he hadn't realized had been gone until now.
He'd found the convenience store on Monday, halfway around the lake on the way into town. Straight out of his concept of a step into the past, it offered bare wood floors, a potbellied stove, decent coffee, fresh doughnuts, and usually two or three fishermen and local residents gathered around the stove or live-bait boxes, swapping stories before they started their day. To his surprise, within less than a week, he had become an accepted part of that early morning crowd. He didn't kid himself that anyone was going to spill any deep secrets around him, but the camaraderie was a welcome change, a reminder of early days on the force before even the small talk between officers got dragged down into the cesspool their investigations invariably led to.
That too was nice. Not earthshaking. But nice.
Something else he hadn't realized he'd needed, hadn't realized he'd missed, until he felt the warmth and welcome wrapping itself around him.
Only one car sat outside the store when he arrived. A sheriff's patrol car. David approached warily, but the car was parked, not slewed in, and the lights and radio were dark and silent.
He eased in the front door. Blake Foresman looked up from his propped-back chair beside the stove and lifted his foam coffee cup in welcome.
"Henry's out in the storage shed," the sheriff said. "It's strictly self-service till he gets back."
David felt the tension release him. He hadn't meant to stick around this morning, only grab a cup of coffee to go, but maybe he ought to take advantage of this chance meeting. He nodded and headed toward the coffee counter.
"You're out early," Foresman said when David settled into the chair next to him.
"So are you. Or is it late?"
Foresman grunted, which David interpreted as meaning late. "I'm two men short," he said on a yawn, "and I like to give the men with families as many holidays as possible."
David's respect for this man had been slowly growing since the day of the accident. Now it took a giant leap. He nodded his understanding and appreciation of Foresman's work assignment and took a cautious sip from his cup. The brew was as hot as asphalt in August and as strong as it could be and still be liquid, but it was fresh. "You make the coffee?" he asked the sheriff.
Foresman grinned at him. "I figured I'd need all the help I could get to make it the rest of the shift and thirty miles home. Too strong for you?"
David returned the grin and they sat there in companionable silence for a few minutes before David broached the first subject. "These woods around here are pretty wild. Ever have any trouble with predators?"
"Every now and then a bear gets curious and we have to call the wildlife people in to chase him back to his part of the woods."
"How about cats?"
"A bobcat or two has been reported, usually by a tourist who's had too much to drink and can't tell the difference between a wild animal and something like Gretta Tompkins's twenty-pound yellow tabby."
David thought of his neighbors in the next cabin. Yeah. They'd be likely to do something like that. But he was concerned with something much larger than Gretta's house cat. "How about mountain lions?"
Foresman peered at him, not alarmed, but alert. "They're not unheard of around here, just rare enough to make a sighting real newsworthy. Why? You hearing strange noises around your cabin?"
David shook his head. "Wayne Samuels said he thought he spotted a couple on the hill behind Dr. Locke's house."
"Well," the sheriff said. "Well, now. Samuels, huh? Heard he was up at the doc's for dinner yesterday. He ought to know. Well, hell. That's all I need—a couple of wild animals practically in town."
Was there anything this sheriff—anybody in the whole county for that matter—didn't hear within a day? Somehow David doubted that there was. But Blake Foresman didn't ask about Samuels, and he didn't issue any warnings about him either. That silence almost as good as told him he could trust his instincts and trust the man. But almost wasn't good enough if Annie's safety was at risk.
"Anne thought Margaret was a widow."
"So did Margaret."
David waited, silent, and after a moment Foresman shrugged. "I stood beside her six years ago while she buried what was left of a body the army told her was his. I stood beside her last winter when we dug that body up and gave it back to the army after Wayne showed up on her doorstep one morning more dead than alive."
Damn! Samuels had done hard time all right. He'd done time in hell. "MIA?"
"Nope." Foresman let the legs of his chair drop to the floor. He stood and stretched. "Not even official prisoner of war. He came home, you see. But his brother didn't. His best friend didn't. After a couple of years, he joined up with a bunch to go back in and look for some of those who hadn't made it out. He doesn't have much to do with folks. Won't talk about what happened in those years he was gone. But he'd die for a friend."
Yeah, David thought, he would. He already had.
Which left the next topic. Anne hadn't picked up on it. Or if she had, she hadn't said anything. But Katherine's questions had triggered questions in David. Questions that couldn't be ignored. "What do you know about Lucy Hansom and somebody named Briggs?"
"Lucy?"
"Yeah. She'd have been Anne's great uncle Ralph's daughter."
"Would have been?"
"Or is. Seems she took missing a number of years ago. There might have been a search. Might not have been."
"You've got a need to know?"
David grimaced. "Maybe."
Foresman looked at him. "You have any idea when?"
"Nope."
"I grew up in this county. I've been back for fifteen years. In office for nine. And I don't remember anything about her. I don't suppose you could ask Joe?" When David just looked at him, Blake shrugged. "No. I suppose not." He sighed and crushed his empty cup.
"Give me a couple of days. I've got a room on the third floor of the courthouse bulging with old records. I'll take a look."
"Thanks."
"What the hell are you two doing up at that house, anyway?"
"Just making it livable, Sheriff," David told him while his thoughts jumped from the man in the closet, to Katherine's assumption that they had found Lucy's body, to the eerie and oppressive feeling in the old barn, to the absolutely impractical attraction growing between him and Anne, to the big hole that faced him whenever he thought about his future. "Just making it livable."
David brought doughnuts that morning, and just like the previous morning walked her out onto her front porch and sat with her for a dose of early morning air with their caffeine. But this morning he sat far enough away that they didn't touch. And this morning, although he teased her, even laughed with her as they discussed the day before and their plans for the morning, he looked as though he needed the calming effects of the view of the valley and mountains beyond. He didn't seem agitated so much as troubled, drawn in on himself as though caught in thoughts he didn't much like but couldn't avoid. Like she too often was.
"Want to talk about it?" she asked finally. She wouldn't. But maybe he would. Maybe he needed to.
"About what?"
"About whatever's bothering you this morning?"
"Nope." He stood and tossed the dregs of his coffee into the overgrown flowerbeds fronting the porch. "What I want to do is take a look around outside of the house to satisfy my paranoia and then finish that kitchen ceiling."
The telephone rang as the lights of Allegro were beginning to dot the darkening landscape below the house. The clutter of their day's work still lingered in swept-up piles, and the remains of their leftover turkey dinner still occupied the table. Anne gazed with satisfaction at her new ceiling, and David, who had finally managed to forget to worry about what he was going to do with the rest of his life, gazed at her and wondered how she had managed to draw him out of his dark mood.
The phone rang a second time, a sharp summons full of its own importance, refusing to be ignored. Anne stiffened, her smile faded, and the animation drained from her face, but she made no move to answer the phone, made no move to quiet the intrusion.
"Are you expecting a call?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"Do you suppose it's an emergency?"
"God, I hope not," she whispered.
He stood when she didn't, walked to the counter, picked up the telephone, and brought it back to the table as it rang still another time. He set it beside her. "Is something wrong, Annie?"
"No. Of course not."
Then why don't you want to answer the telephone? What the hell's going on here, anyway? "You want me to answer that?"
She looked like she wanted him to. Hell, she looked as though she wanted him to tell whoever was on the other end of that line she wasn't there, couldn't be reached, couldn't help if she were. But of course she didn't tell him that—not his Annie.
His Annie? But before he could do more than question that thought, she gave him the cheeky grin he had seen many times and which he only now began to suspect she used when she was hiding something from someone, maybe even herself, and reached for the telephone. "What?" she asked. "And finish ruining your reputation? I don't think so."
She snatched up the receiver before the ring could shriek again. "Hello?"
She frowned slightly as she listened, but her tension seemed to ease some. She held the receiver toward him. "Too late," she said. "You're already ruined. It's for you."
Now David frowned. Who knew he was here? He coughed out a laugh. Only about half the county. But he spoke cautiously. "Huerra."
"Huerra, how in the hell did you manage to wind up in the middle of one my investigations when you're supposed to be in a boat in the middle of Lake Allegro drowning worms."
"Captain?" Pete Tompkins? Calling him here? Why? "What investigation?"
He heard Pete sigh. "I was going to call, hat in hand, and ask you to break your vacation long enough to introduce yourself to the local sheriff and then ask a couple of questions there in Allegro. But when I call, my mother tells me you are with the person I need you to question, and before I can dial again, the lab turns up your name written on a notepad we've taken in evidence. So maybe I'll just ask you. What did you have going with Jack Townley?"
"Oh—" He caught himself before the obscenity erupted from his mouth. Dragging the cord up and over Anne, he sat heavily in his chair and glanced around the room that only moments before had seemed so peaceful. "What happened?"
"God knows," Tompkins told him. "At least I hope he does, because sure as hell no one else does. The housekeeper said he was looking for a package in the mail, which came about ten this morning. He took it into his study and later made a series of phone calls. Just after noon, she heard him scream, found the door locked and called 911, but was so frightened she ran outside and was halfway down the block when the first officers arrived."
"Townley is dead?" Of course he was. Pete Tompkins worked homicide. Not burglary. Not robbery.
"Oh, yes. Oh, hell yes."
Dead. And not neatly. Not with that tone in the captain's voice. "How?"
"At first glance it looks like some sort of animal attack, but the windows were closed—not locked, but closed—and I don't think any animal is going to stop to shut a window, so I'm afraid we've got some sort of Freddy Krueger copycat loose in the city."
He felt Anne's eyes on him and glanced up. She couldn't possibly have heard Pete's words, but the color had blanched from her face. "Do you have a motive?"
"His safe was open, so robbery, maybe. That's what I wanted you to find out. The package was from a Dr. A. Locke. From what my mother said, I take it that was Dr. A. Locke who answered the telephone."
"Yeah."
"And you've been with her all day?"
"Yeah."
"Any idea what was in the package?"
"Yeah."
"Jesus, Huerra, are you going to tell me what it was or are you going to make me drag it out of you one word at a time?"
David shook his head, but the action didn't clear away the fog of questions he felt building. "It was a shell artifact," he said. "Engraved. About four inches in diameter. Is it missing?"
He heard the shuffle of papers. "I don't see anything like that on this list, or in the pictures. Is it valuable?"
"It could be. That's what we wanted Jack to tell us." He glanced at Anne again, but he knew what had to be done, even without her consent. "We took a tracing. I'll see that you get a copy. I don't suppose you found any notes?"
"Only the sheet of paper with your name on it, a list of telephone numbers we're in the process of checking, and one other word that looks like spiral, spires, spirit, with a question mark?"
"Spiro," David said on a slow exhalation.
"What does it mean?"
"Not what," David explained. "Where. It's the provenance. We just found out last night that Dr. Locke's great uncle was an antiquities dealer who had some dealings with the excavations at Spiro in the thirties. But keep that as quiet as you can. If your perp would kill for one shell, he might decide to come see if she has more."
"And does she?"
Anne had sunk back in her chair, her face chalk white, her eyes closed as slowly she dragged her head from side to side, denying—denying what?
"I guarantee you," he said, making a quick decision that might well damn him, "that shell was one of a kind."
"Let's hope so," Pete said. "Let's hope so."
Carefully David placed the receiver in the cradle and leaned back in his chair.
"Your friend is dead," Anne said, at last opening her eyes, revealing an anguish all out of proportion with learning of the death of a stranger.
He nodded.
"And someone stole the gorget?"
Again he nodded.
"Who?" she asked. "Who knew?"
"Good question, Doc," he said. The words and the cynicism just slipped out, and once released, hung in the air between them. "Who did know?"
She recoiled from the unspoken accusation he had been unable to check.
"Ah, hell, Annie," he said. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."
"Didn't you?" she asked softly. "On some level don't you wonder who I told about the packages? Did I open them up and show Margaret? Did I boast about the treasure we'd found? Did I make sure Joe found out so I could gloat about it?"
He couldn't answer her, because he did wonder. All of the above. And he didn't want to doubt her, but for the moment, yes, he did.
She pushed back from the table and stood. She walked to the back door and tested the lock and then crossed the room.
"Where are you going?" Stupid question, Huerra, he told himself. He knew where she was going. But instead of the acerbic reply he expected from her in light of what he'd just said, she simply shook her head. "Someone has to check on him."
Well, hell. She was right, of course. But hearing her refer to that pile of bones and grave goods as him, as she always did, he realized, sent a chill down his back remarkably like the one he had felt the first time he saw her house.
He stood, scraping his chair back. "Wait a minute. You don't need to go up there by yourself."
She paused but didn't turn and didn't speak when he caught up with her in the hallway. "Did you hear anything last night?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"See anything? Did anything unusual happen after I left?"
"No," she said.
And that was all that either of them said until they reached the closet. David stepped in first and looked around, and all his alarms went off. "Someone's been in here. Those boxes have been moved."
She followed him into the closet, knelt to examine the boxes he indicated and sighed. "I was in here, David."
"You—"
"Just hush," she said. "I started to check on him last night after you left. I came this far and then realized I didn't want to go in there with him. Not alone."
It was her house. It was her closet. It was her damned treasure. And if she wanted to check on it every fifteen minutes, it was her damned right to do so. So why did he have to work so hard to remember that? Why was he so reluctant now to go in, either with her or alone?
He turned away from the questions and mild rebuke he saw in her eyes, pushed the boxes away, and lifted the panel from the opening.
The light from the sitting room didn't penetrate the bends and curves of the passageway enough to do more than cast the glow of the opening across the dark room. David stepped through and more by memory than by sight located the pull cord for the ceiling fixture. He yanked on it, and the glare of the bare bulb flooded the room.
The warrior lay on his litter, surrounded by his grave goods. His copper armor gleamed softly, giving the appearance of a statue, or perhaps a sleeping man, until the stark whiteness of the bones visible beneath the armor, beneath the profusion of shells and pipes and pearls and pots destroyed that image. He appeared unchanged, undisturbed since he had been placed there, only God knew how many years before, except for the slight depression where Anne had removed the right femur—and except for one shell gorget that lay alone in the space on the cedar pole near where David had knelt two days before. He'd been careful then not to disturb anything more than absolutely necessary; he'd been careful to replace everything he'd removed. He'd left nothing on the pole or outside the confines of the litter.
David glanced at Anne. Her house, he reminded himself again. Her closet. Her treasure. Her lie? There was no reason she shouldn't have come in here if she wanted. There was also no reason she shouldn't have admitted a closer examination of what could make her an extremely wealthy woman. But she obviously thought there was. And there was no reason for him to feel as though she had betrayed him in some way much more elemental than simply hiding an innocent curiosity from him. But he did.
He bent to examine the gorget.
"No way," he whispered, kneeling, taking the gorget in his hand. Feeling again the slash of betrayal.
"What is it?" she asked from the foot of the litter. "We didn't leave anything there, did we?"
So innocent. David's fingers closed around the gorget. He forced himself to release them, to remember his strength and the fragility of the ornament. But it was there—damn! For a moment he had almost allowed himself to hope there were two identical gorgets. But there wouldn't be, not both bearing the small, peculiar nick he had noticed Wednesday.
"David?" she said again in the soft voice she always used in this room. "What's wrong?"
"What's wrong," he said, exerting the same tenuous control over his voice as he did the hand that gripped the gorget, "is that this is the shell we picked out to send to Jack Townley."
"No," she said. She knelt beside him and reached for the shell. He continued to hold it, but turned it so the light reflected from its engraved surface.
"Oh." The word came out on a soft hiss of breath and Anne sank onto her heels. She looked up at David, her eyes wide and questioning. Either she was truly surprised or they still taught advanced acting in med school. "We—How? When?" She shook her head again. "No. It can't be."
He pushed to his feet and looked down at her. He heard the chill in his voice, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot he could do about that. Too often in interrogations he'd been forced into the role of "bad cop" because at some point it became impossible for him to disguise his disgust at the ease with which the slime he was interrogating slipped into the role of innocent victim, when the true victim was on a slab in the morgue. Lying did that to him, too. Especially unnecessary lying from someone he'd begun to believe he could trust.
"We have the tracings," he said. "Let's go take a look."
Anne was as silent returning downstairs as she had been coming up them. This time, David made no effort to break that silence.
She'd carefully folded the tissue paper and placed it out of sight—she'd said because of the visitors to the house—in what had to be the safest, or the place the least likely to raise questions about why she had a series of pre-Columbian tracings—with her copper, where she already had a tackle box full of similar designs.
Thursday morning he'd watched, smiling, while she'd stashed the tackle box in a stack of boxes and cartons in the room adjoining the kitchen. "Poe," she'd said grinning. "Wasn't he the one who said the best place to hide something was in plain view?"
Now he watched as she prowled through the stack of boxes looking for the right tackle box, and smiling was the last thing he felt like doing. Damn! Was it too much to ask that finally in his long, lonely, miserable life he could have someone he could trust?
Whoa! Where had that come from?
David walked to the table and reached for the chair he had abandoned only minutes before, but he didn't sit; he gripped the back of it, one-handed. Unlike the gorget, which he still held cautiously in his right hand, the chair wouldn't break. Maybe. He had someone to trust, he told himself as he felt the bite of wood against his palm and fingers. His brother. And his brother's family. And in the past he'd had the support and, yes, love, of his overworked parents. And, damn it, he wasn't that old; his life hadn't been that long. And if he'd been alone, it had been by choice. His choice. So why was he standing here moaning because Anne Locke had so obviously and needlessly lied to him?
Because he wanted Annie. He wanted to trust her. He wanted to love her. He wanted her in his life now, this weekend, the rest of the month he was to spend here, the rest of his life.
"Son of a bitch."
When the hell had that happened?
Anne swiveled around from where she was digging through boxes. "What?"
David shook his head. Then he sat. And pushed the plates and platters and bowls containing the remains of their dinner toward the other side of the table. And set the gorget on the table in front of him, next to the telephone that they had left there when they went upstairs. And forced himself to think about lies and betrayal. "Have you found them yet?"
"Yes."
He heard the less than gentle click as Anne closed a metal box, the soft fumbling sounds as she rose from her crouch on the floor, and then her steps. She stopped beside him. "Here they are," she said.
Any hope that he might be mistaken died when he placed the gorget on the tissue next to his initialed tracing, but still he turned it over and compared the reverse, and set it on the tracing to compare the nick.
"It's the same, isn't it?" she asked. "But how? How can that be?"
"What happened, Doc?" he asked without turning to look at where she stood near his shoulder, giving every appearance of being as engrossed in the comparison as he. "Didn't you trust me enough to let this out of your control long enough to have it identified?"
"What!"
He trailed his fingers along the edge of the gorget when what he wanted to do was swivel in his chair, grab Annie by the shoulders and shake her until she admitted her deception until she—until she what? Until she wrapped her arms around him and begged his forgiveness? It wasn't going to happen. Not in this lifetime. But if it did—just for the sake of speculation—what would he do?
He buried his face in his hands, raked at his eyes and his forehead, at the alien thoughts that had crept from some unknown well in his psyche. Pete was right. He had lost it. He sighed and then he did look at her.
"Except that sometime in the last two days it has been cleaned, this gorget is identical to the one we brought down Wednesday and packaged to send to Jack Townley. I can only think of two ways it could be here. Either sometime between noon and now someone sneaked into a house where we were both working, found the entry to the closet room, and returned an artifact worth thousands of dollars, and just as quietly left without either of us hearing a thing. Or . . ."
Her expression had gone all tight and closed, and her eyes, usually alive with humor, if not laughter, had narrowed and darkened. "Or what?" she asked.
"Or it never went to Texas."
She shook her head. "Of course it went. We wrapped it together. You carried it out to the car for me. I took it to town."
"That's right. You took it to town." And Bobby Preston had chosen that day to try to fly. David snatched that memory and held onto it. God. Maybe she hadn't lied. "And Margaret mailed it for you. What did she mail, Annie?"
She shook her head. "No. No, I'm not going to do this. Margaret is my friend."
"A friend who was in the house yesterday."
"And your friend, David? I'm sorry he's dead. Oh, God, I'm sorry he's dead. But did he get an empty box in the mail and not say anything? And how did he know to write the word Spiro by your name? No. There's an answer somewhere."
"Where?"
She reached across him and picked up the tracing, leaving the gorget on the table. "Upstairs."
He picked up the gorget to follow, but she stopped him with a sharp look at his hand. "Leave it," she said. "That way we won't have any doubt when we find another, or several others, that look just like it."
He'd turned off the light in the room when they'd brought the gorget downstairs, but neither of them had stopped, or even thought, to close the panel. Now he stepped through it and began reaching for the light cord. The sound was softer than a whisper, barely audible over the sound of Anne's steps as she followed him into the room, of the combined sounds of their breathing as she, too, heard whatever it was. Anne lifted her hand to his arm, touching him for the first time since the telephone call that had started this search, and together they listened. A padding, back and forth, of something soft-footed but heavy, across the room, between the burial and the closet wall. And then a soft, guttural utterance—not spoken word but conveying some unknown message. Annie's fingers gripped his arm with an almost painful tightness at the faint but unmistakable sound of bones and copper and shells settling into place.
David thrust her behind him and yanked on the light cord.
The room was empty. No one and nothing greeted his quick visual inspection of the confined area. Nothing but the blank windows, intact over their backing of unfinished siding; the wallpaper, dingy in the shadows but still covering the walls in an unbroken pink floral pattern, except for the exposed studs and back side of the sheetrock of the unfinished closet wall; the ceiling, with nothing visible there but the bare lightbulb suspended from a tarnished metal plate and decades worth of cobwebs. No one but the warrior on his cedar litter, still in place, still surrounded by his earthly treasures. David spun around, searching behind him, but he knew there was only one way out of the room, the way that he and Annie had blocked.
Once again, Annie clutched his arm. He pulled her to his side and held her there. He didn't have to ask if she'd heard the noises. Her always fair complexion had gone even paler, as pale as when he had been talking with Pete about the murder, and her eyes, which minutes ago had seemed dark and lifeless, now held expression, but he wasn't sure that terror was an improvement. She drew in a deep breath, then another, as though by regulating her breathing, she could regulate her heartbeat, now racing in cadence with his. Not a bad idea, he thought, and tried it himself. It worked, finally, marginally.
When she began unwrapping her arms from around him and pulling away, he realized she had been holding him as tightly as he had held her. He didn't want to break that bond. There was safety there, and comfort, and, strangely, a belonging. Eventually, the feeling of belonging was what forced him to release her. How could he feel that for someone who only minutes before he had thoroughly and completely distrusted? How could he distrust someone who made him feel so—so at home, so welcome? So wanted?
"Annie?"
She jerked the rest of the way out of his arms and stood rubbing her hands over her forearms. "I'm all right," she said tightly. But she wasn't. Any fool could see that she had gone all brittle and fragile. "I'm all right," she repeated as she thrust her chin up a notch.
"That's good," he said, giving her this lie. "I'm sure as hell glad one of us is."
She looked wildly about the room before glancing down at the warrior and taking a half step toward him. She stood there in silence for a moment, and David wondered what thoughts raced through her as she fought the tears that glistened in her expressive eyes. He took a step toward her and the sound on the old pine floor echoed through the room. Anne twisted around to look at him, stopping him even as he recognized his need to touch her. "I'm all right," she said, turning back to the burial and dropping to her knees beside it and raking through the shells. "I am."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm doing what we came up her to do. I'm looking for some more of those damned gorgets that look like the one we—I—sent to Texas. The one that got somebody killed."
"Annie, don't."
She turned at his softly spoken words and looked up at him. Her face twisted but the tears didn't escape. "I have to," she said, sinking back on her heels. "Don't you see. I have to."
"You sent it," he told her. "I believe you." And he did. At last. Too late? "It's all right. I believe you." He made another wary search of the room. Nothing. But damn it, something had been here. "Let's get out of here now. Let's go downstairs and talk about what just happened."
"No. Nothing happened. The wind blew or the house settled or we had an earthquake—"
"Annie." He dropped his hands onto her shoulders and tightened them until Anne sagged back against him. "Whatever it was, it has an explanation. Let's shut this room up and go—somewhere, anywhere, out of here—and try to figure it out."
Numbly, she nodded. He bent to help her to her feet. That was a switch. Since the day they'd met, she'd been the strong one, probably still was if he were completely truthful, because those sounds had affected him at a bone-deep level that went way beyond fear. But for now, it felt good to be doing for her, even if it were no more than getting her out of this room. What didn't feel good at all was knowing that anything could drain the enthusiasm from this vibrant woman the way whatever had made those sounds had. The way his suspicions had.
He felt her shudder and begin to rise, but she hesitated and looked once more toward the burial. She sucked in a shallow breath, shook her head, and reached toward the copper plates that had covered the skeleton's right thigh.
The armor that only minutes before had lain in a slight depression where the bone had once been. The armor that now lay level with that of the other leg.
The armor that once again covered a gleaming white bone.
David tightened his hands on Anne's shoulders, instinctively drawing her back from the body.
"This was here earlier, wasn't it?" she asked in a small voice. "Tell me it was. Tell me no one could have come into the house in the last few minutes and replaced it. Tell me!"
"It wasn't here, Annie." God, all the strength of his voice was gone, too. "I remember noticing the way the copper was displaced because it wasn't here."
"This isn't happening."
He knelt beside her and cautiously lifted the edge of the upper copper plate covering the femur. "This bone had been cleaned. Not much. Maybe just dusted. Like the gorget."
"It's Joe," she said. "Somehow. Some way. He's wired the house. He intercepted the shipments. But why? Damn it! Why?"
"Annie."
She jerked beneath his hands.
"No one has been in the house with us today. We can search, we will search, but there weren't any wires in the attic yesterday."
"Then what—How—It can't . . ."
He lifted her to her feet and turned her away from the body, toward him. She didn't help, but she didn't resist, either. "I don't know," he told her. "But I sure as hell want to find out. You were right, you know. Jack Townley didn't make those notes and those telephone calls because he got an empty box from us."
She lifted her face to his as the memory of what had happened to Jack Townley, of what had brought them to the room, slammed into her. She lifted her hand to her mouth and swayed. "Karen," she whispered. "Oh, my God. Karen."