really.”
“Why?”
“Those are the dates Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.”
“Ick. Hood didn’t have anything to do with that, did he?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe it wrapped things up for him, you know? The Japanese surrender.”
She flipped the pages. They held other faded scenics: hardly a clue to world war mysteries or even her great-grandpa’s personality. Not even a Vargas girl pinup. You’re not going to get your scoop, Mr. Reporter, because there’s no scoop to be had. Maybe Benjamin Hood was just a cranky old hermit who simply hadn’t accomplished whatever he was supposed to accomplish in Tibet. Try, fall short, retire, die. That about summed it up for most people.
And then she noticed the stamp.
It was blue with what looked to be some kind of animal in the center, a cat or deer. The creature was surrounded by graceful writing like a cross between Arabic and Chinese, or the Elvish of Middle Earth. At the bottom, in English lettering, it read, TIBET.
Her heart began hammering. The stamp was folded over the edge of an old calendar page, except it was two pages, she now realized. They were stuck together. If she hadn’t thumbed the calendar she wouldn’t have noticed it. She used a fingernail to slit the stamp and then gently pry the aged paper apart. What had been stuck together were two blank back pages of the calendar. Except they weren’t blank.
They opened to reveal a curious design. Carefully inked lines ran sinuously like elongated ripples in a pond, filling the pages with an abstract pattern. It looked familiar, but how?
Barrow had come up behind her. Now he grasped her upper arms and leaned over her shoulder, his breath hot by her cheek. “You found something.”
“Doodles.” She wasn’t sure whether she had or not. She was very conscious of his holding her, and not sure what she thought about it.
“No, it’s too convenient to be in the only calendar, the only hanging, in the place, but hidden. It’s a map, I think.”
“If so, it’s a map of a maze.” She turned to release her shoulders from his grasp but when she did so she was between the wall and Jake, looking up at his annoyingly handsome face, her hands trembling slightly. Yes, she’d found something. And he was standing very close.
He hesitated, considering for a moment. “I think it’s a contour map,” he finally said. He stepped back.
She exhaled. “What’s that?”
He took her elbow. He did seem to like to touch her. “Come to the table and I’ll show you.”
They spread the old calendar out. “A contour map uses lines to show elevations. These swirls here actually mark ridges and mountains, I think. See, here’s a mark for what might be the cabin, a square. This is a map of the surrounding hills, I’m guessing.”
“But why?”
“To direct Hood, or us, to someplace near. Don’t you think? Wait. I’ve got a Geological Survey map in my truck.”
Jake’s map was green and much more finely drawn. “Here, I’ve marked where we are, so we just need to orient Hood’s map to our own.”
They studied the two.
“They’re nothing alike,” Rominy finally said. “Yours shows the river, but Hood’s is just lines.”
Barrow frowned. “You’re right. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe his map is of Tibet.”
“But where in Tibet? Damn!” There was ferocity in his frustration. He wanted this story very badly. Maybe his career depended on it.
“Or maybe it’s some other clue entirely.”
He glanced at her. “What?”
“I don’t know, Jake. I’m so tired.” She slumped into a kitchen chair. “I’m hungry and I’ve had a headache all day. All I’ve had is wine.”
He glanced from the map to her, fingers drumming, clearly impatient. But then he nodded sharply. “Yes. Yes! I’m an idiot. Look, I’ve got food in my toolbox, too. Stove, sleeping bags in the cab, the whole nine yards.”
“What are you, a Boy Scout?”
“Eagle. Be prepared. I’m going to cook up something on my camp stove and we’ll think about it. Sleep on it, even. We’re close, Rominy. Closer than I’ve ever been. But we need to eat and think. I’m missing something.”
So they did eat. The can of spaghetti, with carrot sticks as salad and M amp;M’s for dessert, apparently stretched Jake Barrow’s cooking skills to the limit. No wonder he’d been in frozen foods. While he heated she changed into some old-boy jeans he loaned her, cinching them in with a belt. Her heeled shoes were set aside for the boots, which did fit. She wondered about the girl who’d worn them but didn’t ask. Then she swept the place out with a fir bough, throwing away the ratty fur rug.
It got cold as the sky darkened. Jake had gathered some wood and now he lit a fire in the old fireplace, the flames pushing aside the musty feel. The crackle and scent of smoke was reassuring. Rominy was more comfortable in the new clothes and warming cabin, but it also felt like she was losing her identity. She’d fallen down a rabbit hole.
Jake heated water on the camp stove and used powder packets to make hot apple cider. The warmth relaxed her. Rominy still felt trapped at having to sleep here, but it was too late, and she was too tired, to think of any alternative. She unzipped one of the sleeping bags and draped it on herself like a quilt as she sat in the chair, considering it a shield against the chill of dusk and anything Barrow might try. Not that he tried anything. And not that she wouldn’t have been curious if he had tried something. He seemed to be leaving any move to her, which was good, except for the ways in which it wasn’t.
She realized she’d phoned no one, since she had no phone. The radio had never been switched on. Had the MINI Cooper been identified with her? Was somebody searching? Her adoptive parents were gone and there was no real boyfriend at hand, but what were her friends thinking?
She would miss work tomorrow. It seemed on another planet.
“There’s obviously no mattress but I brought pads,” he said. “We’ll sleep on the floor and figure out what to do in the morning.”
“We?”
“You can sack out as near or far as you want. No drama.”
She wished there was drama, just a little, so she could have the satisfaction of telling him to stick to his own side of the cabin, but he seemed as weary as she. So they bedded down on either side of the fireplace, a Puritan six feet between them.
Rominy begged for sleep to come but her mind kept nagging at where she’d seen Hood’s pattern before. Some art museum, maybe, or a child’s book of mazes. Why couldn’t she think of it? She needed sleep! She sneezed from all the dust.
And then it came to her with a bang like the explosion of her beloved car. She sat abruptly upright in her bag. It was utterly dark in the cabin, inky and spooky.
“Jake, I’ve got it!” she hissed.
No reaction.
So she crawled out, still in jeans and her morning’s knit top-she wasn’t about to give him a peek at her panties, although she had considered it-and shook him. “Jake!”
“What?” He’d already fallen asleep. Men!
“I think I’ve got it! Hood’s map-it’s not contours, it’s a fingerprint.”
“Huh?”
“Light the lantern.”
When he did so, both of them shivering in the cold of the cabin now that the fire was only dull coals, she reached inside the cookie tin from the bank and took out Hood’s mummified finger. Carefully she rolled it in the dust of a kitchen shelf and lifted the hissing camp lantern to study the dust. It had left the faint impression of a fingerprint. Then she looked at the inked calendar page. “This one.” Jake bent close. “See? This ridge has the same pattern as his finger.”
