Another shrug. She pointed her chin at the book and box. "What can you tell me about that?"
"Welsh. I can't read more than a word here and there, but it's Welsh. The four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. A translation of the Gospels into Welsh. Probably done in Wales, there's a place name that looks like some kind of abbey or monastery." Caroline sat and stared at the book, stunned, shaking her head.
Aunt Alice stirred from her waiting. "How old is it?"
Caroline shook her head again, putting clues together, adding in the origins of Stonefort. "I'm the wrong person for that. You need an expert. But I'm guessing maybe tenth, eleventh century. A thousand years old, give or take a few hundred." A book, as old as some of those pots and flints she kept poking through for her dissertation.
Aunt Alice nodded. She glanced at Kate. "Can you make any kind of guess at what it's worth?"
"Oh, God. No. How do you put a price on something unique? Truly unique, not that damned semantic nonsense of 'very' unique. I couldn't tell you within a million dollars. Within ten million. Worth more'n the House, that's certain."
Caroline thought for a moment, about her father and grave-robbers and antiquity laws. "You want to be damned careful who you let see that. And if you ever went to sell it, I bet there'd be a couple of governments that would try to confiscate it as a stolen 'National Heritage' treasure, and build a museum around it." Not just a medieval Gospel manuscript, but a vernacular translation that old, and annotated . . . there might be a theological firestorm or two hidden in that ink.
Kate touched her brooch, caressing it as if it felt alive to her, alive like Atropos snuggled in her lap. "A thousand years old. Made for my family. Kept in my family all that time." She shook herself, as if waking from a trance. "It stays in my family. Jeff's a Rowley. The stones know him."
Caroline wouldn't touch that with the proverbial ten-foot pole. Relationships between Kate Rowley, Jeff Burns, and that damned stone circle were going to remain Kate's problem. Caroline had enough tangles of her own to sort.
Speaking of which . . . she stood up. "Guard it, keep it in an archive vault for choice. A place with controlled temperature and humidity. It's priceless, literally. And I'd suggest asking your lawyers to see if they can trace it back through old wills and estate inventories. You should be able to prove you have a right to it, if the question ever comes up."
Aunt Alice looked up at her, Caroline's body-language already halfway out the door, and cocked her head. "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?"
Caroline grimaced. "That soup is driving me crazy. I'm not out on the island yet, and I'm already starving."
Her aunt laughed, practically a wicked-witch cackle. "Sorry, but you didn't warn me. The girls will probably scarf down whatever Kate leaves when they get home. That initiation turned them into bottomless pits. Neither one of them can hunt worth a damn."
"Congratulate them for me, if I don't see them soon."
Caroline looked down again at the book, Kate's heritage. It was such a beautiful, powerful thing, but good. Peaceful. Exactly what Kate needed after her ordeal. Just those four Gospels, it didn't even get into Saint Paul — rigid roles, warped sexuality, church politics and ego-games. But above all, none of the feeling of hunger and cruelty that Gary said the Mayan flint had broadcast. None of the sense of domination that had taken Ben's soul and twisted it.
Twisted it in a direction it was already primed to go, of course. Hope he isn't too old a dog to learn some new tricks. Otherwise, he's going to have a rough time with Gary and Jane.
She gritted her teeth and walked right past the soup pot, through the steamy savor of onions and chicken and tarragon. If she ate now, she'd just have to spend that much longer on the island, fasting, waiting for her brain to clear. She drooled, Pavlovian reflex, but she made it through and out the kitchen door.
She got into her car and it started with the first crank again, a mechanical "thank you" card for the oil-change and new filters she'd given it. Out along the roads, she knew everyone she saw, and all of them knew her. Home. Stonefort felt like the right size for people. Evolution hadn't had time to move human genes beyond allegiance to the village and the clan.
Back into the woods, on two-rut roads like Kate's, she unlocked a chain across the road and drove through to Naskeag lands. She locked it again behind her and drove on through patches of "green" harvesting and some spruce and pine almost as old as Kate's. Down to a gravel clearing a quarter mile from the lake's edge, there was portage access only, and dead leaves and needles lay undisturbed on the turnaround.
The lake. The island. Mom would know which lake, which island. Aunt Alice knew. Naskeag lands. The tribe owned the whole watershed, the title held by a corporation that answered to the tribal council. It was not a reservation — legal games played out back in colonial times when natives had no legal standing saw to that. Morgans had been involved.
And probably Rowleys.
She thought about Aunt Kate, and the book, and those lands out on the ridge. Balance. They leveled the balance between Aunt Kate and Aunt Alice, eased the "poor cousin" friction. Both women were rich. Neither really owned her riches. It was more like their peculiar wealth owned them.
Caroline parked her Scout and didn't bother to lock it, even leaving the keys on the floorboard under the seat. Some second or fifth cousin might need to move it. She untied the lashings on her canoe. She shouldered a light pack,
