She opened it, feeling the uneven thickness of the pages, old stiff parchment, and again she found it hard to breathe. My God. No wonder Mom wouldn't burn this. . .
Hand lettered, illuminated, she couldn't read the text, couldn't even recognize the language. Maybe Caroline would know it. Or know someone who did. The colored inks glowed with fire, red, green, blue, brown, deep pure black, twining foliage and Celtic knotwork, gold leaf, saints with their hands raised in symbolic gestures, mythical beasts. She ran one finger along a line of script, feeling the weight and thickness of the ink, the groove left by the ruling stylus, thinking as she did that she committed some kind of sacrilege by touching the parchment with her naked hand.
Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . She conjured those words in Grannie Rowley's voice, not from Alice and the Naskeags. The Morgans were Catholic, the Welsh Alice said had come to Stonefort back before the dawn of history. The Naskeags were mostly Catholic. The English, the Scots, the rest, they'd brought the Reformation with them, Church of England and Baptists and Methodists and the Pilgrim Congregationalists.
Where had the Rowleys come from? When? This Bible sure as hell wasn't in English. Didn't look like Latin, either.
Bible, or something else? The title page bore words so twined in ivy or knotwork she wondered that anyone could pick out the letters. Under them sat a sprig of rowan, green leaves and orange berries. Twin to the brooch.
She took a deep breath, giddy, forcing air back into her lungs. Closed the book. Lifted it and lowered it back into its box, sealed the lid in place, and wrapped it.
*~*~*
Kate set the handbrake on her truck and shut the engine off. She sat and thought and stared at the box stashed in the passenger-side footwell. Twenty years or more that treasure had waited in the dark and dust, on the top shelf of the parlor closet. She didn't have a clue what to do with it now that it had seen light again.
It belonged in a vault somewhere, or in a bulletproof glass case filled with nitrogen under controlled-spectrum lighting. Alice would know what to do. Caroline would know. Kate was just a carpenter.
But if someone had handed her the book and told her to protect it, that cedar box would be damned near what she'd do. No power tools, metal hard to come by, that was what she'd make. She stared at her hands, her scarred maimed hands that spoke to wood and stone.
Some ancestor's hands had looked like that. Grannie Rowley made things, Dad made things. She still had some of their tools, hand-made wood-bodied planes, chisels reforged and tempered for specific cuts, fine-toothed dovetail saws and shaped cabinet scrapers, a set of wood-carver's knives that Alice said had been forged from a meteor's nickel-iron bones.
Strange, the traits that lived in the blood, down through generations. Lived, or skipped — Jeff was closer to being her son that way, closer to Rowley blood than Jackie, whatever the names might say.
She didn't know what to do about the book, about the brooch. They'd waited twenty years. Another day or two wouldn't be the end of the world. And she wasn't ready to forgive Alice, not yet. She was working on it, now that she could dump the major blame where it belonged. Mom and Frank would have a lot to answer for when Saint Peter opened up his book.
"Never amount to much . . ." Kate muttered her memory to herself. Jesus was a carpenter.
The book would wait. She did what she always did, when faced with a problem she couldn't solve — shoved it to the back of the stove to simmer and went straight ahead with what needed doing next. She climbed down out of the truck and locked the door.
Lew's house. Jeff should be up on the back side of the roof, laying shingles. Quiet, no tap-bang of the hammer, he must be taking a break. His bike was here, leaning against the corner of the house, aluminum-framed mountain bike with a bazillion gears and knobby tires that could climb trees. Grass was still wet from the morning fog, tracks coming and going.
She headed across the lawn and around the corner, stopping for a moment to pick up Jackie's beret from the grass and swat it against her thigh to shake off a couple of dead leaves. Damn kid kept losing bits of clothing, jackets or boots or scarves or gloves, expected her mother to pick up after her.
Kate froze, her eyes burning with almost-tears. Jackie was dead. She kept forgetting.
She stared at the beret in her hand. Purple, she was sure she'd bought it a couple of years ago. Turned it over. Looked inside the band. There was the label she'd sewn in, "J. Lewis." Jackie'd fumed over that, snarled that sewing labels into things meant Kate still thought her daughter was a baby. Wrong. Sewing on a name tag meant they'd get the hat back when Jackie left it somewhere.
Like here.
The hat hadn't been here when Kate mowed the lawn a week or so ago. She felt the fabric. Dry. Hadn't been here through the rain a few days back, hadn't even been here overnight when the fog rolled in so thick you couldn't see the end of the driveway. Kate shivered. Then she straightened up and clenched her teeth, anger replacing the sudden fear.
Ghosts? Bullshit. Ghosts didn't leave hats and scarves and jackets behind them. Didn't even leave ectoplasm, if you believed Alice. Someone wanted to freak her out. Probably someone from the Pratts — Jackie had taken the
