by Nora Roberts
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this way, but Digger and I are madly in love and running off to Bora Bora. Unless you’ve got a better offer.”
“I could probably swing a weekend at the Holiday Inn.”
“Sold. Where are you?”
“On my way to the airport. I’ve got a line on Carlyle’s secretary, so I’m heading to Charlotte to check it out. With the connections, it’s going to take me all damn day to get there. I wanted to let you know where I’d be. Got a pad and pencil?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Right.” He gave her the hotel he’d booked. “Pass that on to my family, will you?”
“ASAP.”
“Anything going on I should know about?”
“I’m going to be able to move back into my office in a week. Two at the most. I’m pretty excited.”
“No more leads on the arson?”
“They know how, but not who. Same goes, to date, for the trailer. We miss you around here.”
“That’s nice to know. I’ll call once I check into the hotel. When I get back, I’m taking Digger’s place.”
“Oh, really?”
“He’s out, I’m in. Nonnegotiable.”
“A challenging phrase to a lawyer. Come back soon and we’ll talk about it.”
She was still smiling when she hung up. Then immediately picked up the phone again to put the plan that had formed in her mind into action.
Time for a break, chief.”
With her face all but in the dirt, Callie gently blew soil away from a small stone protrusion. “I’ve got something here.”
Rosie cocked an eyebrow. “You’ve got something every day with your nice pile of bones. Makes the rest of us look like slackers.”
“This is stone.”
“It’s not going anywhere. It’s lunch break.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Rosie sat to open Callie’s tea jug. “Thing’s still full. Want a lecture on dehydration?”
“I’ve been drinking the water. I don’t think this is a tool, Rosie. Or a weapon.”
“Sounds like a job for a geologist.” Since she’d poured out tea already, Rosie drank it before hopping down to take a look. “Definitely been worked.” She ran a thumb over the smoothed edge Callie had uncovered. “Considerably. It looks like the rhyolite. Typical of what we’ve been finding.”
“It feels different.”
“It does.” Rosie sat back on her heels as Callie worked with brush and probe. “Want pictures?”
Callie grunted. “Don’t bother Dory. Just grab the camera. There’s a nub here. Doesn’t feel natural.”
She continued to work while Rosie retrieved one of the cameras. “Another group of people just drove up. This place has been a regular Disneyland ride all morning. Ease back, you’re casting a shadow.”
Callie waited until Rosie took the shots, then shifted to her trowel, carefully explored the earth. “I can feel the edges of it. It’s too small for a hand ax, too big for a spear point. Wrong shape for either anyway.”
She brushed at the loosened dirt, went back to probing.
“You want half this sandwich?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m drinking your tea. I’m not going back for my Gatorade.” With the sandwich and drink, she sat down again, watched the stone shape grow. “You know what that looks like to me?”
“I know what it’s starting to look like to me.” Excitement was beginning to skip down her spine as she worked, but her hands remained steady and sure. “Christ, Rosie. It’s a day for art.”
“It’s a goddamn cow. A goddamn stone cow.”
Callie grinned down at the fat body, the facial details carved into stone. “A dust catcher. What will our anthro have to say about man’s ancient need for tchotchkes? Is this sweet or what?”
“Majorly sweet.” Rosie rubbed her eyes as her vision blurred. “Whew! Too much sun. You want more pictures?”
“Yeah, let’s use the trowel for scale.” She picked up the camera herself, framed the shots. She was reaching for her clipboard when she noticed Rosie hadn’t moved.
“Hey, you okay?”
“Little woozy. Weird. I think I’d better . . .” But she stumbled, nearly pitched over when she got to her feet. Even as Callie reached out, Rosie collapsed forward against her.
“Rosie? Jesus. Hey! Somebody give me a hand.” She braced herself, held the weight while people ran over.
“What is it?” Leo boosted himself into the hole. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. She fainted. Let’s get her out of here. She’s out cold,” she told Jake when he swung down with them.
“Let me have her.” He shifted Rosie into his arms. “Dig, Matt.”
He held her up, free-lifting a hundred and thirty pounds of dead weight. The team and visitors gathered in, hands reaching, then laying her on the ground.
“Everybody move back. I’m a nurse.” A woman pushed through. “What happened?”
“She said she was feeling dizzy, then she just fainted.”
“Any medical conditions?” the woman asked as she checked Rosie’s pulse.
“No, nothing I know of. Rosie’s healthy as a horse.”
With one hand still monitoring the pulse, the nurse lifted one of Rosie’s eyelids to check her pupils. “Call an ambulance.”
Callie burst through the doors of the emergency room right behind the gurney. The only thing she was sure of now was that Rosie hadn’t simply fainted.
“What is it? What’s wrong with her?”
The nurse who’d ridden in the ambulance from the site grabbed Callie’s arm. “Let them find out. We need to give the attending as much information as possible.”
“Rosie—Rose Jordan. Ah, she’s thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five. She doesn’t have any allergies or conditions that I know of. She was fine. Fine one minute and unconscious the next. Why hasn’t she come to?”
“Did she take any drugs or medications?”
“No, no. I told you she’s not sick. And she doesn’t take drugs.”
“Just wait over there. Somebody will be out to talk to you as soon as they can.”
Jake strode in behind her. “What did they say?”
“They’re not telling me anything. They took her back there somewhere. They’re asking me a bunch of questions, but they’re not telling me anything.”
“Call your father.”
“What?”
“He’s a doctor. They’ll tell him things they might not tell us.”
“God, I should’ve thought of that myself. I can’t think,” she added as she pulled out her phone. She stepped outside with it, breathed slow and steady as she called her father’s cell phone.
“He’s coming,” she told Jake. “He’s coming right away.” She reached down, gripped his hand when she saw the nurse come back.
“Let’s sit down.”
“My God. Oh my God.”
“They’re working on her. You need to help us. You need to tell me what kind of drugs she took. The sooner they know that, the quicker they can treat her.”
“She didn’t take any drugs. She doesn’t take drugs. I’ve known her for years and I’ve never seen her so much as puff on a joint. She’s clean. Jake?”
“She doesn’t use,” he confirmed. “I was working ten feet away from her most of the morning. She never left the area until lunch break. Then she went directly over to Callie’s sector.”
“She didn’t take anything. She ate a half a sandwich, drank a couple glasses of iced tea. I was excavating. She took pictures for me. Then she said something about having too much sun, feeling woozy.” She leaned forward, gripped the nurse’s wrist.
“Look at me. Listen to me. If she took something, I’d tell you. She’s one of my closest friends. Tell me her condition.”
“They’re working on her. Her symptoms indicate a drug overdose.”
“That’s not possible.” Callie looked at Jake. “It’s jus
t not possible. It has to be some mistake. Some sort of . . .” When her stomach pitched, she reached out blindly for Jake. “It was my tea. She drank my tea.”
“Was there something in the tea?” the nurse demanded.
“I didn’t put anything in it. But . . .”
“Somebody else might have,” Jake finished. He yanked out his own phone. “I’m calling the police.”
She sat outside on the curb with her head on her knees. She’d had to escape the smells of sickness and injury, the sounds of voices and phones. The sight of the orange plastic chairs in the waiting area. The stifling box that held so much pain and fear.
She didn’t look up when her father sat beside her. She sensed him, the scent, the movement, and simply leaned her body into his.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“No. No, honey. They’ve stabilized her. She’s very weak, but she’s stable.”
“She’s going to be all right?”
“She’s young, she’s strong and healthy. Getting her treatment quickly was key. She ingested a dangerous dosage of Seconal.”
“Seconal? Could it have killed her?”
“Possibly. Not likely, but possibly.”
“It had to be in the tea. It’s the only logical answer.”
“I want you to come home with us, Callie.”
“I can’t.” She pushed to her feet. “Don’t ask me.”
“Why?” Angry now, he rose, hurried after her, grabbed her arm. “This isn’t worth your life. It could be you in there. You’re ten pounds lighter than your friend. Maybe fifteen. You could have ingested that tea. Could have been working alone, slipped into a coma without anyone noticing. The dosage she took could have killed you.”
“You’ve answered your own question. I’ve already started it, Dad. It can’t be stopped. I wouldn’t be any safer in Philadelphia. Not now. We’ve uncovered too many layers, and they can’t be buried again. I won’t be safe until all of it’s uncovered. I’m afraid now that none of us will.”
“Let the police handle it.”
“I’m not going to get in their way, I promise you. Hewitt’s calling in the FBI, and I’m all for it. But I’m not standing still either. Whoever’s doing this is going to find out I’m not a victim.” She watched Jake step out, met his eyes. “And I don’t quit.”
It was nearly dusk when she stood with Jake on the now deserted site. “Leo’s going to want to shut it down. At least temporarily.”
“And we’re going to talk him out of it,” Callie said. “We’re going to keep this going. And when Rosie’s back on her feet, she’ll go right back to work.”
“You may be able to talk Leo into it, but how many people are you going to convince to stay on the dig?”
“If it’s down to you and me, it’s down to you and me.”
“And Digger.”
“Yeah, and Digger,” she agreed. “I’m not going to be chased away. I’m not going to let whoever’s responsible pick the time and place to come after me. Not again.”
She looked pale and drawn in the softening light, he thought. Honed down to worry and determination. And remembered how she’d looked in the moonlight when she’d risen over him in bed. The way her face had glowed with laughter and arousal. There’d been freedom there, for both of them, to simply be.
And while they’d given themselves to each other, while they’d steeped themselves in each other, someone—close—had been planning to hurt her.
“It was one of our own team.” He said it flatly, the anger dug too deep to show.
“The site was crawling with people today. Towners, media, college classes.” Then she sighed. “Yeah, it was one of ours. I had the damn jug on the counter with the lid off. I’ve gone back over it. Leo came in with the present. I took it over to the table to open it. Back to the counter. We were all around somewhere. Everybody knows that’s my jug, and most days I work solo, at least through to lunch break. That’s my pattern. Whoever did it knows my pattern.”
“You didn’t go for the tea this morning.”
“No. The water jug was handier. Rosie—” She broke off, confused when he turned around and walked away. When he just stood at the edge of her sector, staring down, she walked over, put a tentative hand on his back.
He whirled, grabbed her and held so tight she expected her rib cage to shatter. “Hey. Whoa. You’re shaking.”
“Shut up.” His voice was muffled against her hair, then against her mouth. “Just shut up.”
“Okay, now I’m shaking. I think I need to sit down.”
“No. Just hold on, damnit.”
“I am.” She locked a hand around her own wrist. “I’m starting to think maybe you do love me.”
“You could’ve passed out down there. Who knows how long it might’ve been before one of us noticed?”
“I didn’t. It didn’t happen. And Rosie’s in the hospital because of it.”
“We’re going to take the team apart. One by one. We not only keep the project going, we keep the team intact until we find the one responsible.”
“How do we keep the team intact?”
“We’re going to lie. We’ll use the mummy’s-curse angle. Start the rumor. Some local rednecks want to pay us back for screwing up the development, and they’ve been sabotaging the project. We make them believe we believe it, convince them we have to stick together.”
“Rah-rah?”
“Partly, and partly for science, partly for personal safety. Everybody’s one big happy family. While whoever’s done this thinks we’re off on that angle, we narrow the field.”
“We can eliminate Bob. He was on the team before I knew about the Cullens.”
Jake shook his head. No chances now. “We can put him on a secondary list. We don’t eliminate anyone until we have absolute proof. This time, we’re working on the guilty-until-proven-innocent theme.” He brushed the back of his knuckles over her cheek. “Nobody tries to poison my wife.”
“Ex-wife. We need to bring Leo in on this.”
“We’ll have a closed-door meeting back at the house. Make it very obvious and official.”
Leo argued, blustered, cursed and eventually caved in to the twin-pronged assault.
“The police or the state are bound to shut us down in any case.”
“Until they do, we stick.”
He stared at Callie. “You really think you can convince the team, one of whom you believe is a murderer, to continue to dig?”
“Watch me.”
He took off his glasses, squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to go along with you, with both of you. But there are conditions.”
“I don’t like conditions. You?” she asked Jake.
“Hate them.”
“You’ll live with these, or I’m going out there and telling those kids to go home. Kids,” he repeated.
“Okay, okay,” Callie grumbled.
“The conditions are that I’m calling in a couple more men. Men I know and trust. They’ll be fully informed of the situation. They’ll work, but their main purpose will be to watch and to form impressions. It’ll take me a day or two to set it up.”
“That’s agreeable.” Callie nodded.
“I also want to speak with the authorities about the possibility of having a police officer join the team. Undercover.”
“Come on, Leo.”
“Those are the terms.” Leo got to his feet. “Agreed?”
They agreed, and called the rest of the team in for a kitchen-table meeting. Callie passed out beer while Leo started things off with a booster speech.
“But the police wouldn’t tell us anything.” Jittery, Frannie looked at face after face, never lighting on one for more than a finger snap. “They just asked a lot of questions. Like one of us made Rosie sick on purpose.”
“We think somebody did.” At Callie’s statement, there was absolute silence. “We put a lot of people out of work,” she continued. “And some of those people are pretty steamed about it. The
y don’t understand what we’re doing here. More, they don’t give a shit. Somebody set a fire in Lana Campbell’s office. Why?” She waited a beat and, as Frannie had, watched faces. “Because she’s the Preservation Society’s lawyer and largely responsible for us being here. Somebody torched Digger’s trailer, blew the hell out of some of our equipment, some of our records.”
“Bill’s dead,” Bob said quietly.
“Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t.” Jake studied his beer and was aware of every movement, every breath around him. “Could be one of the people we’ve pissed off hurt him, hurt him more than they meant to. But that upped the odds. And it added to the disturb-the-graves-and-face-the-curse deal laymen like to spook each other with. Bad shit happens, they can start gossiping that the project’s cursed.”
“Maybe it is.” Dory pressed her lips together. “I know how that sounds, but bad shit is happening. It keeps happening. Now Rosie . . .”
“Spirits don’t dump barbiturates in jugs of iced tea.” Callie folded her arms. “People do. And that means we’re going to have to keep the dig clear of all outsiders. No more tours, no more outdoor classrooms, no more visitors past the fence line. We stick together. We take care of each other, watch out for each other. That’s what teams do.”
“We’ve got important work to do,” Jake stated. “We’re going to show these local assholes we won’t be run off. The project depends on every one of us. So . . .”
Jake stretched a hand out over the table.
Callie laid hers on his. One by one, others put their hands out until everyone was connected.
Callie skimmed faces once more. And knew she held hands with a murderer.
Twenty-seven
The call from the front desk announcing the delivery of a package from Lana Campbell interrupted Doug as he was plotting out his approach. He didn’t know why Lana would send him a package, or why the hell a bellman couldn’t bring it up, but he pulled on a pair of shoes, grabbed his room key and went down to retrieve it.
And there she was. Absolutely perfect, every gorgeous hair in place. He knew he was grinning like an idiot as he strode across the small lobby, lifted Lana right off her feet and caught that pretty mouth with his.
