The Granite Key, from The Arkana Series, by N.S. Wikarski:
Here’s the set-up:
Forget everything you thought you knew about ancient history. The real facts have been buried… Until now! Imagine yourself a nineteen year old college student. Your life is normal in every way until a bizarre set of events drags you into a hidden world of danger. You are recruited by an underground society questing for artifacts that reconstruct the lost history of the human race. You are being pursued by a fanatical religious cult intent on acquiring a legendary relic before you do. A relic that, in the wrong hands, has the power to destroy the world.In a treasure hunt that spans twelve thousand years of human history and covers every continent, the Arkana series digs deep through the layers of fabricated history to reveal a past we never dreamed we had and a future we never dreamed we could have. A secret society. A fanatical cult. A telepathic girl.All vie to unlock the mysteries of the granite key. The quest leads halfway around the globe to the ruins of a forgotten civilization and a secret it has guarded for millennia. The fate of the world depends on who can get there first.
The Granite Key (The Arkana Series)
Chapter 1 – Night Vision
Cassie felt herself sinking. She tried to drag herself to the surface. “Wake up stupid! It’s just a dream. This can’t be real. Wake up!”
She was standing in the shadows in her sister’s antique shop. It was late. Long past midnight. The room was dimly lit by a green banker’s lamp near the cash register. Sybil was standing in front of the glass showcase with a cell phone in her hand. There was a man standing near the door. A man wearing a Stetson hat and he was pointing a gun at her sister.
“Where’s the key, sugar?” His voice sounded lazy, casual. He had a southern drawl.
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sybil stammered. Her sister put the phone down and started inching her way along the showcase toward the rear storeroom.
The man shrugged. “Don’t make no difference to me but you don’t want me tearin’ up your neat little shop just to find it, now do you?”
“I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sybil’s reply was shrill, unconvincing.
Cassie wanted to rush forward to pull her sister away from the man with the gun. Her feet were glued to the floor. She couldn’t move. She tried to scream a warning. “Get out of here, Sybil. Run!” but all she felt was a rasp in her throat where the words should be.
The man advanced out of the shadows. He was close to six feet tall, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. Cassie knew this had to be a dream because of his strange outfit. Aside from the cowboy hat, he wore a short denim jacket, a string tie around his neck, jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots.
The gun flicked slightly in his hand. “I tell you what. The service in this establishment ain’t very friendly.” He flipped his hat aside and it landed on an oak sideboard. His dark brown hair was combed back in a high wave. “I guess if you don’t want to help me, I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and help myself.” He moved forward toward the glass case.
Sybil darted past him and ran toward the front door. He was faster. He grabbed her by the arm. “Now that’s no way to treat your clientele, honey. Tryin’ to run off and shirk your responsibilities like that.” He twisted her arm behind her back.
Cassie could see Sybil wince in pain. Her sister looked around wildly for some other way out. The man tightened his grip with one hand and pointed the gun to her head with the other. Sybil struggled but he only wrenched her arm harder behind her back until she stopped struggling.
“It seems to me like you can’t hear what I’m sayin’.” The man cocked his head slightly, considering the matter. “Maybe we should go someplace private where I can get through to you better.”
He shoved her toward the door but she twisted out of his grip, running toward the back of the shop. He lunged after her, tackling her. She fell hard against the showcase, head first. Glass shattered and she lay still, face down on the floor.
Cassie could feel a cry of despair rising in her throat but no sound came out. She willed her feet to move. They seemed to twitch slightly but nothing more. All she could do was watch.
The man raised himself to a crouch position. A look of annoyance crossed his face. He reached forward to check Sybil’s pulse and frowned.
He stood back up, shaking bits of broken glass from his jacket. “Well, that ain’t no help at all,” he said in disgust.
In a flash, the scene changed and Cassie was back in her dorm room. She could feel the mattress beneath her. “Wake up, dammit!” she commanded herself. This time when she clawed her way up to the surface of consciousness, her mind obeyed her. She sat up shakily. Her skin felt clammy. She tossed off the covers and sat forward rocking, holding her head.
On impulse she grabbed her cell phone and started to call her sister. “It was just a nightmare, stupid! What are you going to do? Wake her up in the middle of the night to tell her you had a bad dream?” She snapped the phone shut and tossed it on the nightstand.
Gradually her breathing slowed and she lay back down. Curling herself into a fetal position, she drew the covers up to her chin. “It wasn’t real. It was just a bad dream… Just a bad dream… Just a bad dream…” She chanted the words like a mantra for several minutes until she started to dose off.
Then the phone rang.
Chapter 2 – A Wake
At about three o’clock in the morning far outside the city, four people were staring bleakly at one other around a kitchen table. It was an old style oak table in an old style country kitchen. The kind with tin ceiling tiles and tall glass cupboards above the sink. A single yellow nightlight glowed from the wall.
At one end of the table sat an elderly woman in a terrycloth robe and slippers. Despite the late hour, she had managed to roll her white hair into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. She sighed heavily. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe it. Sybil’s dead.” The abrupt comment came from a blond man in his mid-twenties at the opposite end of the table. He sat slouched despondently in his chair, arms crossed, his legs sprawled out in front of him. “She called me and she sounded scared. She thought somebody was trying to break into the shop. Then the line went dead. I got there as fast as I could but the cops beat me to it.” He exhaled tiredly. “It’s my fault.”
“How do you figure?” The question came from a middle-aged woman with bushy red hair sitting to his left. There were distinct frown lines around her mouth. She took a long drag on an unfiltered cigarette.
The blond man glanced up. “If I’d just gotten there five minutes sooner maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Maybe she’d still be alive.”
“Did she give you a physical description of her attacker?” The question came from a young man in his early-twenties seated to the right. He spoke with a British accent.
“Nope,” said the blond man succinctly. “For the past week or so she told me she had the feeling somebody was following her but she never knew who it was.”
“I think we all know who was responsible.” The elderly woman rose stiffly out of her chair. She walked over to sink, filled a kettle and put it on the stove to boil.
The other three stared at one another in shock. Anger flashed in the middle-aged woman’s eyes. “Those bastards! What do they want from us now?”
“Take it easy, Maddie,” soothed the blond man. “We don’t know for sure it was them.”
The woman called Maddie snapped back at him, “Then who else?” She ground out her cigarette and immediately lit a new one. “What the hell was she working on? Didn’t she tell you anything about it, Griffin?” Her sharp eyes focused on the Brit.
“No, nothing,” the young man whispered with regret. He rubbed his forehead distractedly. “Maybe if she had I could have helped her, or better yet, persuaded her to stop.”
The elderly woman shuffled toward the cupboard over the sink. “There’s still the matter of her sister,” she observed quietly. “Poor child, as if she hasn’t lost enough already. This is too cruel.”
“Does she know anything?” The blond man at the far end of the table sat forward in his chair.
The woman at the sink turned around to glance at him mildly. “Do you think you could find that out for us, Erik?”
Erik sat up at straighter, alert now. “What exactly do you have in mind, Faye?”
The kettle rumbled to a boil. The old woman rummaged around in the cupboard for cups and saucers. “I think you should follow her at a discrete distance. Keep out of sight but let us know immediately if anything unusual occurs.”
She went over to the stove to switch off the heat. “Griffin, it might prove useful to know what Sybil’s latest recovery was.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed readily. “Anything I can do to help.”
Faye was now spooning loose tea into a porcelain pot. She paused to consider. “What could they possibly want of ours? What, to them, would be worth killing for?”
Chapter 3 – Prayer Meeting
In the silent hour just before dawn, Abraham Metcalf was standing in his study, scrutinizing the spine of a volume of sermons on his bookshelf. Actually, his study was more the size of a public library and his home more the size of a medieval castle. It had to be. He was the head of a very large extended family. Despite the barest glimmer of light in the east, Metcalf was expecting a visitor. Fully dressed in a black suit, he cut an impressive figure. A mane of white hair swept back from his forehead, trimmed just long enough to reach the top of his collar. A white moustache and beard shaped into a precise goatee. Despite his seventy years, he possessed a muscular build and ramrod straight posture. His eyes were a frosty shade of blue. They bore a fierce expression under bristling white eyebrows suggesting very little escaped his notice or gained his approval.
A young man sporting a crew cut tapped lightly on the door. “A visitor to see you, Father.”
“Send him in.”
A man wearing a Stetson hat advanced into the study. Metcalf turned to face him. “Hats off indoors, Mr. Hunt,” he instructed curtly.
His visitor smiled lazily and doffed his hat. “Now that’s right kindly of you to remind me, sir. My momma, God rest her, would pitch a fit if she saw me forget my manners like that.”
Metcalf sat down behind his massive oak desk. He did not invite his visitor to be seated. He studied Hunt in silence for several seconds. The younger man did not flinch under his gaze but stood grinning, his stance relaxed.
“I don’t see the key in your hands, Mr. Hunt.” Metcalf observed.
“No need to stand on proper names now, is there? How about you call me Leroy and I’ll call you Abe?”
“You may call me Father Abraham if you wish,” Metcalf offered stiffly.
“Sorry, sir, but you ain’t my daddy. Don’t rightly know who he was, come to think on it.”
Metcalf’s face remained impassive. “I don’t see the key, Mr. Hunt.”
Leroy Hunt shrugged off the implied rebuke. “Well, sir, it was like this. I encountered a bit of trouble in obtainin’ said object.”
Metcalf had picked up a letter opener and was examining it intently. “Define trouble,” he commanded.
Hunt selected one of the chairs in front of Metcalf’s desk and sat down. “That gal you set me to followin’ had herself an unfortunate accident. We got into a tussle and she fell and bumped her head and well, sir, she’s dead.”
“Dead!” Metcalf echoed in disbelief.
“That’s right, sir. Not to rise again til Judgment Day.”
“Dead,” Metcalf repeated somewhat less emphatically.
“Yup, dead,” Leroy concurred, smoothing the wave in his hair.
The older man considered the problem in silence for several moments before he spoke again. “You did manage to search the shop at least?”
“That I did, sir. I spent about a half hour diggin’ around before somebody called the cops. I had to high tail it when I heard them sirens but I was through lookin’ anyhow. That key you set such store by, well sir, it wasn’t to be found.”
Metcalf stood up and towered over Hunt. “I’m most disappointed in your report, Mr. Hunt.”
Leroy chuckled. “I guess, if I was you and I wanted that key so bad, I’d be a bit down in the mouth too, sir.”
“I hardly think this occasion calls for levity, Mr. Hunt.” Metcalf’s eyebrows bristled in disapproval.
Hunt looked up at him appraisingly. “I don’t expect there’s much in your life, sir, that you’d think would be a fit occasion for levity.” Before Metcalf could supply a retort, he continued. “Now don’t you go worryin’ yerself to pieces over this. I still ain’t done. Gal’s got a sister, don’t she? How bout I follow her around for a bit. Maybe see what’s what?”
Metcalf relaxed his scowl by a hairsbreadth. “Yes, that would seem to be the proper course of action to take at this juncture.”
Leroy stood up and gave a mock salute. “You got it, chief.” He retrieved his hat and turned toward the door.
“Before you go, Mr. Hunt…”
“Sir?”
“Let us say a prayer together.”
A flicker of anger crossed Leroy’s face. “Like I said, I ain’t one of yours.”
Metcalf was already on his knees behind his desk, hands folded. “Yes, I know. That’s why I’ve entrusted you with a matter like this. A matter that requires divine assistance to complete. You will pray with me now.”
Wordlessly, Hunt returned to the opposite side of the desk, knelt, folded his hands, and screwed his eyes shut as if in anticipation of a bad tasting medicine.
Metcalf addressed his remarks to the chandelier overhead. “Oh Lord, guide this man’s hand that it may do your bidding. Let him smite down those who oppose your will. Let the wicked be put to shame that the Blessed Nephilim may inherit the earth. Amen!”
Chapter 4 -Sisters And Other Strangers
Cassie was sitting cross-legged on the living room rug in her sister’s apartment. There were stacks of paper piled around her. Boxes of magazines and scattered articles of clothing littered the couch. Tears were running down her cheeks. She didn’t bother to brush them away. She had been crying for days now. Maybe it had been a week. She couldn’t remember. It started right after the phone call came. The police were at Sybil’s shop. They needed her to identify a body. But she already knew who it would be. The dream had been a 3-D Technicolor preview of the real thing.
She felt as if she was still inside her nightmare when she arrived at the antique store. The green banker’s lamp was on. Her sister lay sprawled across the floor face down exactly where Cassie had seen her fall. Only now there were photographers and police swarming like flies over her sister’s remains.
Rhonda, her sister’s business partner, was there too. White-faced and shaking, she came up to hug Cassie. The two clung to each other for several moments, too much in shock to speak.
The detective who questioned her sounded like he was standing in an echo chamber. His voice was distorted, coming at her from a distance. “What was Sybil doing in the shop alone at such a late hour? Was anything of value missing from the shop? Did she have any enemies?”
Cassie gave the same answer every time. “I don’t know.”
Even now she marveled at how little she knew about anything her sister was doing or why. “What were you involved in, Sybil?” Cassie didn’t know much about antiques but she did know that a lucrative black market trade existed. Had Sybil been doing something shady? Smuggling artifacts into the country illegally? Again she didn’t know.
The only thing she did know for certain was that a man in a Stetson hat wanted a key and her sister was dead because of him and she’d dreamed the whole thing while it was happening. But she didn’t think that was the sort of information the detective was looking for. He probably wouldn’t believe her. She didn’t believe it herself. She wasn’t given to weird, paranormal experiences. In all her life she’d never been accused of having so much as a hunch about anything. She was a rational person, more or less.
Her mind skipped forward to the present. She was sorting through a box of old bills and papers. The easy stuff. She couldn’t bring herself to sort through the clothes yet. She had tried earlier that day but it had been a mistake. She’d realized that the minute she pulled open a drawer of sweaters. There was lavender sachet inside. Her sister had always smelled like lavender. It was a comforting, familiar scent. Someone once told her that people remember the way things smell long after they’ve forgotten how they look or taste or sound. That the sense of smell is primal. Like blood, like family, like death. She shoved the drawer closed and left the bedroom in tears. She doubted she would ever smell lavender again without crying. It was safer to sort through the papers. They didn’t smell like lavender. They didn’t smell like anything at all.
She blew her nose and tossed the used tissue onto the pile that was accumulating on the floor. How many boxes had she gone through? Like the number of days she’d spent crying, she’d lost count of that too. It had all become a blur. Even the funeral. That mother of all ordeals. The service had been small and quiet because they hadn’t been living in Chicago long and there was no family. Aside from Rhonda, there was nobody who could be called a friend either. Sybil had been Cassie’s only anchor to this place and now the girl felt like a boat drifting with the current. When other people lost a sister, there was always somebody else to fill the void. Cassie doubted if anybody could understand what her particular brand of loneliness felt like. The word “orphan” didn’t begin to cover it. She broke down and started to sob.
“Enough!” she commanded herself sternly. She looked up at the ceiling to blink back the tears. For a few minutes she focused on nothing but breathing. Just breathe and don’t think. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Finally she calmed down enough to focus on the matter at hand. She reached for another box of papers. It looked like a bunch of old charge card receipts. Why Sybil had kept this junk was beyond her. She dumped the box upside down on the coffee table. As the pile of papers spewed out, something hard fell on top of them.
Cassie cocked her head sideways, examining the object. Strange looking thing. It was shaped like a ruler. About a foot long and about two inches wide, only it had five sides. Solid in the middle but five-sided. What would you call a shape like that? A polygon? She looked at the surface of the ruler lengthwise. There were strange markings inscribed in the stone. Some looked like long hash marks and some looked like pictograms. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics only they weren’t Egyptian. She’d seen enough of those in museums to recognize them. Along the sharp edge that divided the ruler into five sides, were more hash marks and loops.
Cassie made no move to pick up the stone ruler. She dismissed it as something from the shop that Sybil had decided to keep. Her sister did that all the time. She’d come across another “treasure” that she just had to have for her own. The apartment was full of things she couldn’t seem to part with. African masks on the walls. A rare Chinese vase in a niche by the door. Fragments of Greek friezes. It begged the question of where the money came from for Sybil’s expensive private collection. Cassie frowned and regarded the stone ruler again for a few moments. Maybe she’d ask Rhonda about it when she saw her next.
Her eyes swept the room. The papers and the clothes and the antiques and the artwork. So much more stuff to get through. Suddenly she felt very tired and a bit overwhelmed. Nobody else to do it but her. She sighed.
Without bothering to clean up the tissues on the carpet, she got up, grabbed her purse and left the apartment. She wanted to head back to her dorm room for a long, long nap. She could come back tomorrow. Everything would still be waiting for her. More memories to pop out of a drawer or jump off a shelf to remind her that she was alone in the world. It would keep. She’d cried enough for this day.
Chapter 5 – Corvette And Model-T
A dozen hours after Cassie fell into a restless doze, dawn broke over a suburb on the far outskirts of the metro area. It was a hamlet that had once been rural and still retained a few of its American gothic homesteads. Daylight crept toward the oldest of these original structures–a two-story farmhouse standing on an acre of green land. It was surrounded by one hundred and twenty acres of tract housing but had so far managed to resist being engulfed by the neighborhood. A high wooden fence surrounded the backyard which encompassed both a flower and a vegetable garden. The front lawn was wide and deep enough to accommodate massive shade trees that had been old long before the first cornfield was plowed.
Light advanced across the lawn to the house itself which was concrete stucco painted a shade of cornflower blue. A cupola in the middle of the roof had attracted a flock of burbling pigeons who hoped to warm themselves in the early sun’s rays. When an elderly woman emerged onto the Victorian gingerbread porch, the pigeons flapped off. Broom in hand, she immediately set about sweeping the front steps. An apple tree growing close to her porch was shedding its blossoms. It appeared as if her stairs were covered in bits of pinkish white confetti. She swept briskly, if absentmindedly. It was clear that she was lost in thought. She didn’t register that someone was coming up her front walk until he stood directly in front of her.
“Faye?” the young man asked tentatively.
“Oh, Erik, you gave me a start.” Her hand flew involuntarily to her heart. Then she smiled and motioned him towards the house. “Please do come in.”
He preceded her through the door.
“Why don’t we sit in here.” She directed him to the front parlor. In anyone else’s house it would have been called the living room but Faye was different. She radiated a sense of having skipped back in time. She was wearing a cotton housedress — the kind that was spattered with giant flowers in garish colors. It was topped with a green cardigan whose front pocket sagged from the weight of an oversized handkerchief. Her white hair was molded into a smooth bun at the back of her head. She might have been in her eighties or she might have been one hundred and ten. It was hard to tell. Faye had always been ancient. But her eyes were very bright, cornflower blue like her house, and they missed nothing.
The young man who visited her couldn’t have provided a starker contrast. If people were automobiles, he would have been a Corvette to Faye’s Model-T. He had a lean, muscular frame. Not extremely tall but not short either. His dark blonde hair was shaggy and perpetually in need of a barber. Maybe it was an image that Erik wanted to project. He was so good-looking that he didn’t have to worry about how his hair was cut. In his mid-twenties with elvish green eyes and a cleft in his chin, he was the stuff of which movie idols are made. Whether he was consciously vain was open to question. He liked to pretend he didn’t notice how women reacted to him. He believed he had a mission in life.
Erik removed his suede jacket and tossed it on the couch. His car keys landed on top of the coat.
Faye gestured for him to sit down. “Can I get you a cup of tea, dear?”
She was about to shuffle off to the kitchen but her guest stopped her. “No thanks, Faye, I’m fine.”
The elderly woman settled herself into a plum armchair opposite him. It had a doily perched on the headrest. The kind that was once known as an antimacassar. The chair itself might have dated from the time when men still used Macassar oil to dress their hair and the doily kept them from soiling the furniture. Faye probably expected that patent leather hair would come back into vogue someday and was prepared for it.
“Well then, what can you tell me?”
Erik shrugged. “Not much. She lives in a dorm at school. Keeps to herself a lot. I’ve been following her around ever since…” He trailed off.
Faye sighed. “Yes, we all miss Sybil, dear. It was a terrible shock. A terrible loss.”
Erik continued. “Anyway, ever since it happened, I’ve been following her. Went to the funeral but I kept out of sight. I didn’t see anybody odd. She went to Sybil’s apartment yesterday. I guess she was sorting through stuff. I stayed out in the hall for awhile listening.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I heard a lot of crying.”
“Poor child,” Faye said quietly. She smoothed the folds of her housedress. “Poor lost child.”
Erik hunched forward on the couch. “Do you think she knows anything about Sybil’s recovery? About us?”
Faye shook her head. “No, Sybil was most emphatic. She told me that she didn’t want her sister involved. She wanted to keep her safe. She believed the less Cassie knew, the better.”
Erik looked skeptical. “I don’t see how keeping somebody in the dark is going to keep them safe. They’re more likely to do something stupid when they don’t know what they’re up against.”
The young man stood up and began to pace. “It just seems wrong. Somebody ought to tell her.”
Faye fixed her gaze on her visitor. Her expression was mild, almost curious. “Exactly how could we explain ourselves in a way that she would understand?”
Erik ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. We probably can’t. But this whole thing is making me edgy. I don’t like it. Just hanging around and listening to a girl cry.” He threw himself back down on the couch, exasperated. “Can I quit yet?”
“I’d like you to keep watching her for awhile longer.”
Erik picked up his car keys and jingled them distractedly between his fingers. “What exactly do you expect will happen?”
“I expect that sooner or later the person who killed Sybil will reveal himself.”
“He probably found what he wanted in the shop. He’s probably long gone by now.”
Faye stood and walked over to the picture window. She watched the morning breeze shake loose another batch of blossoms. “And if he didn’t obtain what he was looking for, how long do you think it will take him to find Cassie?”
Erik stopped jingling the keys. He looked down at his hands. “I guess I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”
“Nor would I, dear.” Faye turned toward Erik. “Let’s watch her a little while longer just to be sure.”
Chapter 6 – Compound Interest
Despite her best intentions, it was after sunset the following evening before Cassie found her way back to Sybil’s apartment. Time to put all this in the past, she told herself decisively as she got out of her car and crossed the street toward the Gold Coast high-rise. Yeah right. She was so eager to put things behind her that she’d procrastinated until nightfall to avoid confronting the residue of her sister’s life again. And she didn’t even have the excuse of going to classes anymore. School was on hold indefinitely. There was still the tricky matter of deciding where to live. She would probably move out of the dorm and into Sybil’s place. Right now that thought made her shudder. Not quite ready to deal with that idea yet.
She got off the elevator on the fourth floor and headed toward Sybil’s flat at the end of the hall. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the bottom of the door. There was light coming from inside. Had she forgotten to switch off the power the day before? Who knew? She shrugged and sorted through the keys on her ring. When she turned the lock, she thought she heard a click coming from inside. Cassie swung the door open wide. She stood on the threshold listening for a moment. The place was dark, completely still.
She walked across the room toward an end table to turn on the lamp. Something or someone slammed into her, shoving her sideways. She hit the wall, the breath knocked out of her lungs. Scrambling to her feet, she caught a glimpse of a man fleeing through the open door. Cassie gasped. He was wearing a Stetson hat and in his hand was an object she remembered seeing the day before.
He was down the hall, through the fire exit door and halfway to the ground floor before she could move.
“Hey, hey you! Stop!” She started to run toward the lighted hallway when she collided with another man. He shoved her back into the apartment. She didn’t think she recognized this one but the place was still dark so she couldn’t be sure.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Who are you?” she countered. “Where did you come from? What are you doing here?”
“No time for that now!” His voice was urgent. “What happened?”
“A..a man. He must have broken in. He…he was wearing a cowboy hat,” she stammered.
The stranger grabbed her by the arms and shook her to get her attention. “Now listen! This is important! Did he take anything?”
Cassie was having a hard time thinking clearly. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. “Yeah, I think…”
“What?” the man shook her again. “What was it?”
“It was a stone ruler. Five-sided. About a foot long with weird markings all over it.” She twisted away from his grasp. “That’s all I could see. Now who… ” Before she could get the rest of the question out, the man vanished.
She heard him shout back at her from down the hallway, “Call the police!” Then she heard the fire exit door slam and heard feet clattering down the emergency stairs.
Cassie was shaking. Delayed shock. She collapsed on the couch and switched on the table lamp. She looked around at the contents of the room. Trying to get her eyes to focus. To get her brain back to the present. Everything was just as she’d left it the day before. Except for one thing. The stone ruler was gone. Stolen by the man from her nightmare.
She got up weakly and crossed the room to a bombé chest that held a telephone. When she picked up the receiver to dial 911, she noticed an envelope underneath the base of the phone. It had been hand-addressed. All she could see was the initial letter “C”. Putting the receiver down, she slid the packet out from its hiding place. In Sybil’s script, the letters “C-A-S-S-I-E” were scrawled across the front. Her hands were trembling as she ripped the envelope open.
***
Erik could hear footsteps ahead of him at the bottom of the stairwell. He waited until the man had gotten to the ground floor before he moved forward. He didn’t want Cowboy to know he was being followed.
Once the exit door slammed shut, he raced forward. Outside he saw Cowboy climbing into a red pickup parked across the street from the highrise. It tore away from the curb, heading north. Erik noted the license plate number. Shouldn’t be too hard to follow. He jumped into his car and tailed the thief, careful to keep several vehicles between them. With all the early evening traffic on the roads he didn’t think he’d been spotted. Cowboy got on the northbound expressway. He drove past the looming shadows of downtown highrises, past the suburban bedroom communities, past the overcrowded shopping malls, past the point where any expressway lights remained to illuminate the road. It was almost an hour before the pickup took a westbound exit that led to nothing but farm land. Erik knew it would be harder to keep from being noticed out in the middle of nowhere. He got behind a semi-trailer that was going in the same direction. Cowboy drove on for another half hour through pitch black countryside then turned right onto a side road marked with a yellow Dead End sign. Erik couldn’t follow him in there. It would be too obvious.
He pulled his car off to the shoulder and got out, hoping he wouldn’t find one of those “Do Not Park Here” stickers plastered on his windshield when he got back. He started walking. Fortunately, lights appeared in the distance almost immediately. The road turned out to be a very, very long driveway. The building at the end of it couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away. Erik kept to the shoulder, in the shadows.
The road ended in front of a pair of iron gates about ten feet high. Each of the gates was decorated with a capital letter P with an X through the middle of it. Erik didn’t know anyone with that monogram. He noticed the guard shack with security cameras mounted on either side of the gates and quickly ducked farther into the shadows. A ten foot chain link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the property. Company was clearly not welcome in this place.
He couldn’t be sure how long the fence was but he could guess it stretched around several acres. Beyond the gate at the far end of the gravel drive, Erik could see Cowboy’s car. Somebody had been expecting his visit.
Erik headed for the trees that bordered the fence to the east where more of the layout was visible. He focused his attention on the house, if you could call it that. The building was as big as a castle, or maybe “fortress” would be a better word. It looked as if it could withstand a siege. The design was squat and square with a flat roof, like a massive cinderblock. Towers flanked the building on either end. Erik guessed there might be two on the back end as well. The building was studded with tall narrow windows recessed deep into the walls. Light glowed through drawn curtains making it impossible to tell how many people were inside. Floodlights bleached the limestone façade to a blinding whiteness.
Aside from the main building, Erik counted at least eight other structures around the perimeter–smaller replicas of the main house. Then he noticed an odd assortment of sheds, garages and trailers that must have been used for storage. A compound. He smiled to himself. It had to be them. Nobody else would live like this. Now he knew for certain who had hired Cowboy to steal Sybil’s find. The only thing he still couldn’t figure out was why.
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