by Gwen Hunter
The sense of peace spread and I relaxed into the cadence of my breath, my heartbeat. Peace seeped down my spine, into my arms and legs, to my fingers and toes. My body softened with the sound of my breath, the feel of cool air moving into me and out, bringing in light, health and peace, taking out darkness, disease and misery.
When I was centered, so calm my skin felt alive and glowing, my muscles liquid, bones soft and pliable, I opened my eyes. Squeezed the bloody bit of gold wire the cops had found in the ally. Wire coated with Davie’s blood. Davie? Davie, I’m here. Davie? I called with my mind, searching for my brother. Davie? Where are you? Davie. Davie. Davie. The cadence of the syllables slowed, matched themselves to my heartbeat. Davie. Davie. Davie…
An ache began in the back of my neck, just as the last time I tried this, but now it was strong, harsh, a stabbing, wrenching pain. Replacing the peace. Bringing with it darkness. Growing.
Nausea roiled through me. My pain lifted and fell with each breath. I hurt. This was my brother.
Davie?
The pain and fear grew. I blinked. I was in the dark. The agony spread, a wildfire in my bones.
Davie?
Brat?
Where are you?
I don’t know, Brat. Something new has happened. Some new component to the problem that I can’t place. They moved me. I’m hurt. He shifted in the dark. Coughed, a long, wretched sound. Pain wrapped around him in tight bands, pain everywhere. I’m not going to make it.
Yes, you are. I found the coordinates. I’m going to find the gold and get you back.
You can’t. They already know the—
Stabbing, blinding needles of light slammed into me. Pain whipped through me. Taking Davie with it.
The vision released me. I fell to the right and skittered across the floor, away from the attacking pain. Blind. I was blind.
My eyes jerked open. Panting, I looked up and was surprised that I could see Evan, his eyes appearing greener than usual, cool in the morning light. At some level, I had feared being blind. Where had that thought come from? Oh, yeah. The light…the light that Davie saw. I laughed, a harsh burst of sound cut off short. I had found Davie.
Euphoria shot up through me, a gusher of fresh water from the bottom of an empty well. Joy, like a heartbeat restored, pounded into me. Aunt Matilda had been right. The old bat had claimed that I could learn to overcome my disgust of the St. Claire gift and use it with delight.
And then the euphoria plunged. I crab-crawled into the corner. Horror-tinged fear roared in, replacing the exhilaration. I struggled to gather my wildly pitching emotions, to calm the passions that came from the scan. I fought to catch my breath.
“Tyler?” I jerked to the sound. Evan. I closed my eyes.
Suddenly I understood. The last time I tried a scan, anger had overtaken me. This time it was euphoria. My St. Claire gift came with strong emotional reactions, most of them having nothing to do with the success or failure of the scan. I had found Davie in my mind, but not in the real world. Once again, the St. Claire gift had offered much and given little. I still didn’t know where Davie was. I laughed, and the sound dripped with despair.
I looked at the clock. Forty-eight hours had passed since the bad guys had threatened Davie’s life. But he was still alive. Something had put off the timetable. Some new element had been added to the equation, but I had no idea what the element was or how to find out.
I rolled to my knees and blew out the candle. Anger replaced the roiling emotions, my own anger, fresh and hot and full of energy. I stood, lifting the candle, still holding the bloody bit of gold wire. I smiled, showing all my teeth to the cop across the room.
“I’m going to all the coordinates on the card. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to touch every single man in this town until I find the one who hurt my brother. Then I’m going to bitch-slap him till his teeth fall out.”
Evan grinned. “Can I watch? I’ve always been partial to catfights.” His face fell. “It didn’t work?”
“It worked. He’s still alive, but he doesn’t know where he is.” I set the candle on the table and shoved it back in place, a rasping sound of wooden legs on the tile. “Tell me again about the voice patterns.”
“Headache?”
I stopped, surprised. “No. Huh. How ’bout that.” Just a panic attack bad enough to make me eat my pillow in fear. I pulled my boots to me and shoved in my feet. “Voice patterns?”
“Speech patterns, actually. They say two different people gave the two messages. One was a woman. But that doesn’t tell us much.”
“Not yet, it doesn’t. It will when we find them.” I stood and looked through the windows into the rooftop garden, the sun so bright on the snow it hurt my eyes. The weather had broken, the temps in the sixties, fleecy clouds in a bright blue sky. Jane was being worked to exhaustion shoveling melting snow from the roof. Isaac thought physical activity would ease her nightmares. He was going to make certain that Jane wore herself out, first clearing the snow away, then taking up karate at his do jang, then doing schoolwork. He promised to keep her active, her mind and body occupied all day.
I should have been working my buns off in the shop preparing the spring line. Instead I was taking the card covered with stupid numbers that meant nothing to me, the card from Davie’s boxed papers, the fancy card of thick, rich paper, covered with weird-looking numbers that my friends thought might be coordinates, and I was heading into the hills. How freaking dumb can I be?
“We should go through Davie’s house first.”
I paused and looked at Evan.
“The local boys went through it, but they didn’t find much physical evidence of anything,” he said.
“You think we can find something they missed?” I asked, thinking of Davie’s house and the likelihood that no one would ever get anything from it. And that meant no one at all. Even me.
“Don’t you?”
I tied my boot laces with quick looping motions. I grabbed a lightweight coat and a walking stick and nodded to Evan. “What the heck. Let’s go to Davie’s. Then I’m heading into the hills. You don’t have to tag along. You’re a city boy. A hike in these hills will wear you out.”
“I’ll live.”
I could tell he was amused that a little bitty woman thought she might have more stamina than he. I considered feeling sorry for him, then I just shrugged and picked up car keys and sunglasses. “Suit yourself.”
Quinn wasn’t at home when we got there, I could see that even as I punched in the code at the gate. Not random numbers chosen by Davie, not someone’s birth date, or a code that made a pattern on the security-code plate, but a mathematical sequence containing one error. Davie’s idea of a joke. I punched in the prime numbers, and the error, up through 13–1,2,3,4,5,7,11,13. I never knew why Davie thought it so funny. My brother had a weird sense of humor.
I parked my little Geo Tracker in front of the unprepossessing-looking house. It was situated on a bald knoll, bald not because Davie had cut down tress—heaven forbid—but because the knoll was solid granite. I opened the heavy front door, ignoring the squeal of the alarm warning, and punched a second sequence into the security panel, more prime numbers and a different error.
The inside of the house was far different from the outside, barely seeming to allow for the known laws of physics. Outside, the house looked like a small brick-and-stone dollhouse, arched windows, arched entry, four chimneys, peaked roof-line with lots of sharp angles. Inside, one realized that only the expanded foyer with the black baby-grand piano, the library, a guest suite, and a wet bar were on the entry floor. Most of the entry level was a huge deck overlooking the bottom floor. All living space was on the lower floor, with the ceiling opening up three stories overhead and the public area of the living space laid out to view.
The back wall of the house was windows, revealing an extraordinary panorama of a cleft in the hills, with a narrow stream, a waterfall, tall trees and massive tumbled rocks. The view opened up and d
own, and no matter how many times I came, I was always struck by how Davie had made the mountains his own, bringing them inside without damaging the environment or habitats.
Through the windows, a lone hawk was poised in the top of a dead tree, searching the ground, the limbs, the rocks for his dinner.
“Holy…” Evan’s voice trailed off.
I looked at him. “I thought you had been here. With the cops when they did the search.”
“At night. I missed all this.” He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked out. “All I saw was black windows and cops everywhere.”
“Where do we start?”
“David’s office. Local LEOs took his PCs and laptop, his Mac. Your brother had some serious hardware. But he also had some files that looked unrelated to finding him. The cops couldn’t think of a legitimate reason to take them. Well, not with me standing there, watching.” He flashed a quick grin. “Had I not been there, I’m sure they would have found justification for taking whatever they wanted.”
Davie had decorated in shades of charcoal, taupe, forest-green, black, cloud-gray and moss, colors taken from the view outside, with lots of natural stone, bronze and old wood. The wood had been scavenged from existing local buildings that had fallen into ruin, treated and worked into the design of the house. Even the floors, which were local oak, hickory and pine, had been taken from barns Davie had purchased, torn down by hand, and transported to the knoll.
The office was on the bottom floor, in a nook off the master suite. His bedroom was understated, a king-size bed with wool and silk linens, the headboard crafted from found articles: two carved chair backs, two narrow columns, a peaked door frame from a barn and a carving of a swan, his long neck reaching back to ruffle his feathers, wings outspread. Things that wouldn’t have gone together until Davie had made them fit. The floor was bare wood, even in winter when a rug would have warmed the room.
A black leather recliner and a bronze antique swan-shaped lamp he had rewired were the only other furniture. Everything else was in the huge walk-in closet. In the office nook, it was a different matter. The floor was covered with a silk rug in a swan pattern, the black swan rising from gray water in a rush of froth. The walls were faced with shelving and desktops purchased when the local pharmacy closed, and on them perched every conceivable form of electronic equipment, or spaces where they had been. The monitors, scanners, printers and the oversize plasma-screen TV were still there, but had all been moved around. There was red fingerprint powder on everything, papers were scattered, a faint buzz of white noise came from an antique radio left on, the dial between the stations.
I punched it off. Silence closed in. Davie would really hate this clutter when he got back. I sighed. Evan was watching me. “What?” I asked.
“You don’t seem that upset at the mess. Or at the fact that the cops took all his data.” Evan propped a hip on the nearest desk.
I shrugged. “No cop will ever get the data on the units they took.”
“Something about that tone sounds insulting.” Evan looked amused, as if he found my comment patently ludicrous. To him, cops could do anything that needed to be done. Super-heroes in ugly shoes and dress blues.
“Everything is encrypted by a program he created himself. Even with really state-of-the-art equipment and software, they have no chance at all. And if they try to take the hard drive out and slave it to another unit, it’ll send a spike and fry itself and whatever other units it can get to.”
Now he looked interested. “They can do that? Computer programmers?”
“Davie can. He’s a computer savant. He regularly uploads all his data into a node where a wireless transmitter sends it to another FTP location he created just for that purpose. His files bounce from node to node before they reach his home base. Wherever that is. He works on the Web itself, in a virtual world all his own. And, no, I have no idea what the password is or where his FTP location is. So the loss of his data is unimportant, and the loss of the hardware means he has an excuse to upgrade. But he’ll really hate this mess.”
“Yeah. I kinda get the impression that David is anal about his space and privacy.”
I repressed a second sigh. “Paper files would probably be there,” I pointed to a wood unit once used in a lawyer’s office. “But Davie would never leave anything important in his house in a format that could be taken from him.”
“I’ll start here, then,” Evan said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“I’ll go through the closets and the library. But it’s a waste of time.”
We spent the next two hours going through all Davie’s files, papers and books. We found nothing. Not a blessed thing. I was feeling gracious when we drove off, and didn’t bother to say “told you so.” But I knew we could both hear the words hanging in the air. Subtle, I can’t do.
Evan Bartlock was breathing heavily behind me on the trail. I paused to let him catch up and consulted the little GPS device that hung from my belt loop on a strap. We had stopped at a backpackers’ general store on the way out of town and purchased the hideously expensive gadget, taking time as well to outfit the city cop for the mountains.
Evan was now the proud owner of hiking boots, thick socks, new long underwear for later, a backpack, a walking stick and a down vest. He refused to buy the lined jeans and the flannel shirts I recommended, but as long as the weather stayed above freezing, that wasn’t a problem.
Evan sat on a handy rock outcrop and once again unlaced his left boot. As the boot hit the earth, the cop grunted in pain, which made me grin. A grin I was careful to hide. Blisters were rising on his ankles and toes, and across the balls of his feet, the water blisters and raw welts which new hiking boots would create in a heartbeat, until the stiff leather shaped to an owner’s feet. I simply handed him a slim packet of Band-Aids to use as needed. So far in the past hour, he’d pulled off his boots twice and applied antibiotic gel and the bandages.
A cold wind whipped across the snow, blowing along the ground up the western slope of the mountain. Melted snow trickled, a melodic sound like bells made of wood and silver. Overhead, a hawk called in warning, a sustained skreak, skreak, skreak, skreak. On his tail, a blue jay flew. Their shadows crossed over us and moved up the mountain, following the wind.
Leafless branches streaked the snow-covered earth with shadow, and black patches of bare ground spotted the earth. Everywhere, water flowed and soaked into the dirt. The smell of wood smoke came now and again on the crisp cold air. The world snapped and cracked and trickled. I loved the smells and the sights and the feel of the air. Like spring.
I tried to will some of this warmth into my brother. I wanted to believe that he felt something. Some radiant expectation that I would find him. Some bit of hope.
When Evan picked up his boot to pull it back on, I moved on up the slope to its crest, pulling myself along with my five-foot-long walking stick when the vertical rise was too sharp for my hands and feet alone. Minutes later, he caught up with me, saying nothing, leaning hard on his own stick with each step. Up ahead, I spotted a surveyor’s property marker, an iron stob with a yellow plastic flag on top. I crawled over a boulder and around a tree to the iron. This was the western boundary of the property. I consulted the card and the GPS device. They matched.
I pulled my binoculars to me and looked south across the line of the mountain, following yellow flags tied to branches, to wooden stakes in the ground. I had figured out that the iron markers were permanent, the ones that would appear on a map or a property plat, and the wooden markers were temporary, where the surveyor had to make an adjustment or take another reading. By following the flags, I could pretty well deduce the shape of the parcel of land.
Because there was little chance that a surveyor had found the gold or that the gold was on a property line, I could eliminate the boundaries of each piece of land and concentrate on GPS coordinates in the middle. Once I figured out where the outer lines of the property were, then I could deduce if any of the coordinat
es were at a midpoint.
About an hour into our search, and just after the first application of bandages to his ankles, Evan had suggested that the county office could tell us where each coordinate was and had called them for help. But the county was still inputting GPS coordinates into the new computer system and they couldn’t help us. Not until next year. So it was footwork and deduction.
With the binoculars, I followed the line of sight as far as the yellow markers went, then I pivoted and followed the distant line back down a ridge toward a ravine. My best guess was that all of the coordinates matched a boundary marker. “Okay. Let’s head back,” I said. “These are a no-go.” I dropped the field glasses on their thong around my neck and turned back. Evan was draped across a branch, letting it hold his weight. His head was hanging down, wet hair slicked to his forehead. A bottle of water was in one hand, but it looked like he might be too tired to lift it. “You okay?”
He raised his head. His face was flushed and he was breathing through his mouth with an effort. “I run ten miles three times a week. I play full-court basketball with the boys every Saturday. I work out at the gym two times a week. I’m in pretty good shape. But you aren’t even breathing hard. What are you? A superwoman?”
I shrugged. “I hike once or twice a year. Four-wheel-drive vehicles use a lot of gas, so I walk a lot instead of taking the Tracker. I don’t exercise much. But then, I’m used to the altitude.” I grinned at him. “Maybe you’re just old.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate that. How old are you?”
“What? You didn’t do your research? Or are you just trying to keep us in one place for a while longer so you can catch your breath?”
“Twenty-eight. Red and green. Five feet even. The records left out cruel and competitive and has a great rack.” He said it to see if he could get a rise out of me. That, and to hold me in one place arguing or defending myself while he rested.
Fat chance. I laughed and started back down the trail blazed by the surveyors. Evan pushed up from the branch and stood straight. Eventually he followed. At some point, Evan even got a second wind and was able to keep up with me, though he never got back enough breath to engage in conversation. But I didn’t think his feet would heal for weeks. Over the course of the day he used two full packets of Band-Aids and developed a two-footed limp.
