Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “It is,” Dana cut in. “None of the pieces match XRF graphs of modern nine-, fourteen-, or eighteen-karat-gold alloys.”

  Risa nodded without glancing away from the torc. “The technique isn’t up to the standards of what has been published from the Snettisham hoards of the first century b.c. These terminals aren’t even engraved. Maybe the torc wasn’t finished. Maybe it was. We’ll never know. We can only judge what we have in our hands, not what might have been.”

  “But the torc is similar to the Snettisham goods?” Dana pressed.

  “Apparently this torc is made of electrum. So were some of the Snettisham goods. That’s all I’m willing to say at this point.”

  Risa held the torc out and turned it so that the overhead camera would have a clear view. The awkwardness of the object leaped into high relief.

  “This is a single hollow tube of gold shaped—inelegantly—into a small neckring,” Risa said. “As a golden survivor of the centuries, it has both extrinsic and intrinsic value. As an example of the jeweler’s art of Iron Age Britain . . .” She shrugged. “Ordinary. Very ordinary. Any good museum has something like it in storage in the basement, waiting for a scholar to care.”

  Dana’s nod made light shimmer over her short dark hair. The client had doubtless hoped for more, but that was his problem. Her problem was to buy, sell, appraise, and protect the constant stream of cultural artifacts that came through the door of Rarities Unlimited.

  “The other pieces are of similar artistic quality.” Deftly Risa replaced the torc in its nest and picked another piece of jewelry at random. “This penannular brooch—think of it as a broken circle—was used to keep robes, cloaks, and the like from falling off your shoulders. Many such brooches were made of iron or bronze. The Vikings preferred silver, because that’s what they had the most of to work with. The Celtic tradition in earlier times and other places is rich in gold.”

  Niall looked at the brooch. There wasn’t any way to fasten the piece to cloth. There wasn’t even a sharp point to pierce fabric before coming to rest in the rudely formed clasp. “Don’t see how it could hold up anything.”

  “That’s because the pin part of the brooch was broken,” Risa said, replacing it. “The destruction was probably deliberate and happened when the brooch originally was buried or thrown into water.”

  Niall opened his mouth to ask why something should be broken before it was buried or offered to a god. Then he caught Dana’s slicing, impatient look and shut his mouth. There was no need to know. Not for him. It was enough that Risa knew.

  Besides, he could always ask her later.

  “Two of the remaining brooches are similarly broken.” Risa skimmed three pieces with her fingertips. “These small armlets are from a later time, after the Romans began to influence British Celtic styles. They appear to be solid gold.” She picked them up one after another and weighed them in her palm. “Not hollow. Again, the technique is frankly crude. It lacks the polish of the Mediterranean goldsmiths who came with the Romans to Britain. Nor do the pieces have the sheer . . . well, presence that the best of the Celtic goldsmiths gave their work.”

  “Define ‘presence,’ “ Shane said.

  Her first thought was that he should know all about presence. He certainly had more than his share of it. “It isn’t definable. If it’s there, you feel it. If it isn’t . . .” She shrugged.

  He started to ask another question, only to be cut off by his employee.

  “I’ll discuss it with you later if you wish,” Risa said, “but until then, try looking in the mirror.” At Shane’s surprised expression, her chin came up defiantly. “Men. Merde.”

  Dana’s laugh was as smoothly tenor as her voice. “Anything else you want to add for the recorders?”

  Red flared briefly on Risa’s wide-set cheekbones as she remembered that every word and gesture was going into digital storage. “The overall crudeness, simplicity, and fragmentary condition of the pieces make me inclined to say that they aren’t forgeries. They’re just not good enough to generate the kind of interest and money that pay forgers for their skill, time, and materials.”

  “Would you be willing to put a verbal, nonbinding value on the collection if sold as a whole?”

  “Are these being represented as a single trove found at the same place and time?”

  “No,” Dana said.

  “In that case the value is considerably less.”

  “My client is aware of that.”

  “At this point, and assuming that the provenance is very good, I don’t see more than seventy-five to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the whole lot. There’s little in these pieces to lure a major museum. If you find a jewelry collector whose interest lies exclusively in Celtic gold work, you might get more money.” Her vivid, dark blue gaze pinned Shane. “Collectors are an unpredictable lot. They pay whatever it’s worth to them.”

  Shane’s smile was all hard, gleaming teeth.

  Niall coughed as he closed the case, exchanged it for the other spun-aluminum box and returned to the group at the table. The new box was half the size of the first. He opened the lid and turned the case toward Risa.

  She sensed the stillness that came over Shane. She glanced at him and saw nothing different in his expression.

  Yet she knew he had decided to buy the piece even before he heard his own expert’s opinion of it.

  Merde.

  She really hated when that happened.

  At least this was an artifact she would be proud to have in the Golden Fleece’s collection of gold objects. Always assuming the artifact wasn’t a fraud or had the kind of cobbled-together provenance that screamed of blood and theft. If the provenance was suspect, she and her boss would be in for some yelling matches. Her idea of solid provenance was too rigid, according to Shane. A lot of auction houses would agree with him.

  Risa’s childhood and youth were so spotted she required the cleanest of artifacts. Shane’s background was of the driven-snow variety, which made him more tolerant.

  He had never been caught red-handed with something he didn’t legally own.

  She shoved aside the unhappy memories of her childhood as an Arkansas orphan and concentrated on the artifact in front of her. There was an integrity to the piece that transcended whatever guilty or greedy souls might have owned it in the past.

  “Visual only, or may I handle this?” she asked.

  “Same as the other lot,” Dana said.

  Risa smiled even as she shook her head slowly. “No, this is very different from the other lot. This has presence.”

  Shane gave her a sideways look.

  She ignored him and concentrated on the torc. To her relief the object felt only of cool gold and weight, none of the disturbing power that she sometimes felt with an artifact—and never more unnervingly than she had in Wales, amid standing stones, even though no artifacts had been there. But she didn’t like thinking about that and the currents of awareness that sometimes reached out to her, telling her she was different.

  With a long breath she forced herself to concentrate on the here and now rather than a lost childhood and an eerie oak grove in Wales.

  The torc’s circle was divided into three equal arcs. The outer curve of each arc was decorated by a spoked wheel balanced on the center of the arc. Each wheel was itself divided into thirds by three equally spaced gold knobs.

  “Classic three-part design,” Risa said. “The Celts loved their trinity long before Christian times.” Carefully she lifted the torc from its nest. “From the weight, it’s solid. Whether this is pure gold or sheet gold wrapped over iron, I can’t tell visually. If it’s a wrap, it’s a thick one. I see nothing but gold.”

  Dana spoke softly into the microphone buttoned to her collar. “Research?”

  “Iron core,” said the ceiling grille. “Verified by Rarities.”

  “Excellent.” Risa all but purred.

  “Wouldn’t it be more valuable as pure gold?” Niall asked.

  “A
s metals go, pure gold is very soft,” she said absently. “You can shape it any way you want without much trouble, but it gets out of shape just as easily. Worse, it might not stop a surprise sword blow from the back, which was probably the original reason torcs were worn. The fact that this is gold wrapped around iron makes it more likely that the torc was a badge of royalty or very high status that was actually worn by a woman or a pencil-necked man. Beautiful. Just beautiful.” With sensitive fingertips she traced the whole of the circle. “Mmm. Yes. Here it is. And here.”

  Shane watched her fingertips and thought of her tongue. Irritably he pulled his mind back to the gold object instead of his increasing, damned inconvenient lust for his curator.

  Risa looked at Dana. “I will assume a mortise-and-tenon joint at each end of this arc.”

  “English, please,” Shane said.

  The edge to his voice made Risa’s eyes narrow. “Think of it as innie meets outie.”

  Niall snickered.

  Risa turned back to Dana. “That kind of joint was known and used in the Iron Age. It would allow one arc in this torc to be removed so that the remaining two-thirds of the ring could slip—or be pushed—around the neck. Then the arc would be replaced, the torc squeezed shut at the joints, and God help whoever wanted to take it off.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable,” Shane said.

  “Status usually is.”

  He gave Risa an amused, approving look. Her combination of pragmatism and razor intelligence interested him as much as anything else about her, including her lush body.

  And that worried him. Affairs weren’t based on intelligence and pragmatism. They were fast, greedy, and hot. Anything where intelligence crept in was a relationship.

  Bad idea.

  He wasn’t any good at relationships. The only ones he had were with family, and they could best be described as mutual combat in his father’s case, mutual sadness in his mother’s case, and mutual frustration all around.

  If only you would try, you and your father could get along. Just try, Shane. Try. Please. For me.

  His mother’s often-repeated plea echoed like an unhappy ghost through Shane’s memories. He ignored it with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Not even for his mother would he put up with his father’s corrosive arrogance. End of argument. End of family life.

  Beginning of Shane’s true education.

  There was nothing like being broke on the streets to teach a man all the things he hadn’t learned while getting a master’s degree in business at Stanford University.

  “As for age,” Risa continued, running her fingertips lightly along the cool, ancient gold, “I know of at least one torc that is similar in execution and style to this. It came from Marne, France, and dates back to the fourth century b.c.”

  “Provisional estimate of worth?” Dana asked.

  “With good—very good—provenance, I would start asking at three hundred thousand dollars and hope to make considerably more. Up to five hundred thousand. Maybe even higher. Depends on whether it’s a public auction, which tends to drive up prices just by the competitive nature of collectors, or a private sale to an interested individual.”

  “Is it for sale?” Shane asked bluntly.

  “Yes.” Dana said.

  “May I?” he said, but he was already holding out his hand in silent demand.

  Risa gave him the torc.

  For a moment he simply closed his eyes and absorbed the weight, texture, and feel of the ancient jewelry. He couldn’t have said why he approached collecting gold artifacts this way; he knew only that he always had. No matter how spectacular a piece might appear, if it didn’t feel right, he didn’t buy it.

  When his eyes opened they were the clear, bottomless green of imperial jade. And he was looking at Risa, into her.

  The hair at the nape of her neck prickled. She turned away from him so quickly she nearly stumbled. “Tell your client that, subject to verification of provenance, he has an offer of three hundred—”

  “Four,” Shane interrupted curtly.

  “Four hundred thousand dollars,” she said between her teeth. “If he is uneasy that I would be both appraiser and acquirer, Tannahill Inc. will pay for a neutral appraisal.”

  “Right,” Dana said. Mentally she toted up the commission to Rarities and smiled. “He won’t kick. He requested you by name.”

  “Probably because he wanted Shane’s attention,” Risa said with faint bitterness. On her own she wasn’t well known enough to attract artifacts of the quality Shane was holding now.

  “Doubtless,” Dana agreed. “Anyone with a fine gold artifact to sell anywhere in the world has heard of Shane Tannahill and the Golden Fleece.”

  “It certainly makes my life interesting,” Risa muttered.

  “Buying all that lovely stuff, eh?” Niall asked.

  “No. Dealing with all the ‘lovely stuff’ that elbows its way out of the world’s sewers holding gold in both fists.”

  Chapter 3

  Sedona

  Halloween night

  The book in Virgil’s lap was heavy, scholarly, and filled with beautiful drawings and color photos of Celtic art. He didn’t need to look at the pages to know what was there. They filled his memory. The book was just one of many he had collected to educate himself about the nature of the gold artifacts that were packed in three World War II ammunition boxes under his bed. All of his past addresses were neatly stenciled on each box, a ritual recitation of all the places he had fled.

  But no more. He finally understood that he couldn’t outrun the unthinkable.

  He had chosen the spirit-infused Southwest for his last stand. He had hoped that putting the boxes of gold in the center of the three leaning stones he had found at the base of the nearby cliff would somehow . . . return the gold.

  And free him.

  When that plan had failed, he stuck the boxes under his bed and read books in hope of finding knowledge that would allow him to control whatever lived in the gold. That hadn’t worked either, but hope was as persistent as breath. And as necessary.

  He had kept on reading and hoping to find the key that would set him free from the curse of Druid gold.

  Once he had even tried to go back to the Welsh autumn, to the place where he had dug out the treasure more than half a century ago. Gold, sacred gold, three times three times three artifacts that were the core of Druid rituals—rituals where life ended and began again, where kings waited while Druids spoke to gods, where the very course of the sun and moon were assured. Beltane in May, when the time of warmth and hope returned to the land, and Samhain in November when the time of cold and desperation began once more.

  Samhain, when what was real and what wasn’t flowed together and created an eerie whole.

  It had been Samhain when he returned to Wales to find again the nine hills, six oak trees, three leaning stones, one tiny spring. He hadn’t taken a metal detector that second time. He wasn’t after gold. He was after absolution.

  He hadn’t found it, nor the black spring in the center of the stones. The very place that he had discovered so easily in time of war eluded him in peace.

  Defeated, still cursed, he had fled back to America. Here he remained, older and no wiser for all the books he had read. Nowhere in those books had he discovered anything to equal the twenty-seven objects he had found in the Druid grove. Nowhere in any of the modern fancies about white-robed Druids had he found anything to equal the power of the ancients whose minds had held the entire reality of a culture. Druids who cured the sick or made the healthy ill. Druids who talked with gods and held power greater than kings. Druids who knew no difference between themselves and a river or an oak or a stag; everything all of one piece, seamless, sacred.

  And all that power was summed up and contained in the ritual artifacts he had stolen.

  He was doomed.

  Setting the book aside, he stared uneasily at the heavy gold torc whose circle of twisted gold chains gleamed coldly in the moonlight pouring thr
ough his open window. There was enough light to read by if you had young eyes, but not enough to bring out the red color in the huge rock faces that loomed just beyond his run-down little house.

  Tourists paid big bucks to be hauled over the rugged land in pink jeeps or dusty open vans. He had never understood why. The sun was just as pretty lots of other places. The sky was just as blue. Yet visitors came here to Sedona to stand cheek by jowl with other visitors and shuffle along crowded vortex trails that already had been beaten hard by thousands of aging New Agers.

  Virgil had even tried walking the vortex trails himself, back when he thought he could bleed off some of the bad luck that had hounded him since he went AWOL for a two-day trip to Wales. But no matter how many vortex sites he went to, no matter how hard he tried to open himself to that other reality, he always came back down the trail with the same old reality he had hauled up it in the first place.

  In time he had discovered channeling. A one-hour session cost more than a trip to a fancy cathouse, but he hadn’t had much use for whores after he turned seventy-six. Besides, using a channel was a lot easier than clawing his way alone to the most remote and powerful vortex sites—the ones that weren’t listed in the flashy four-color pamphlets that sold for ten bucks apiece and weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Using a channel was a lot easier on him than touching the damned gold itself and hearing hell beckoning in his own screams.

  The clock’s hands stuttered and snapped together like the ends ofa fan.

  Midnight. Halloween.

  Samhain, when all boundaries blurred.

  It had to be now.

  After two tries he forced himself to grab the torc. His skin rippled violently as it tried to crawl away from the cold gold. He was certain he heard thunder way far off, hell and gone to Wales, lightning pouring through his clenched hand, searing, burning, destroying . . .

  The sound of his own screams shook Virgil out of whatever he had fallen into. Hell, as near as he could tell. He had seen it, touched it, and was terrified he would spend eternity with it.