Brood XIX (17 page)

Here he was, standing in the middle of what
could prove to be the anthropological discovery of a lifetime, and
he suddenly wished he'd never found this place. It was an
irrational feeling, he knew, but there was just something...wrong
with the scene around him.

He reached the center of the clearing and
used the coiled trunk of a pine to propel himself up to the top of
the ring of stones. The ground inside was recessed, the inner
stones staggered in such a way as to create a series of steps. And
at the bottom, in the dirt, saved from the wind, was a jumble of
scuff marks preserved by time. The aura of coldness seemed to
radiate from within it.

"Dr. Grant," Jeremy called from the tree
line. "We need a little help setting up this machine."

"You're just trying to force that piece
where it doesn't belong," Breck said.

"Then you do it, Little Miss
Know-It-All."

Les sighed and climbed back down from what
he had unconsciously begun to think of as a well, and headed back
to join the group. For whatever reason, he dreaded assembling the
magnetometer.

He suddenly feared what they would find.

Evergreen, Colorado

Preston sat in his forest-green Jeep
Cherokee, staring across the street toward the dark house. He
couldn't bring himself to go in there. Not today. But he couldn't
force himself to leave yet either. Once upon a time, it had been
his home, a place filled with love and laughter. Now it was a
rotting husk, a shadow of its former self. The white paint had
begun to peel where it met the trim, and there were gaps in the
roof where shingles had blown away. The hedges in the yard had
grown wild and unkempt, the lawn feral.

His life had ended in that house. The world
had collapsed in upon itself and left him with nothing but
pain.

And it had been all his fault.

His child, the light of his life, had been
stolen from him because of his involvement in a case, and he still
didn't know why. Over the last six years, he had begun to piece
together a theory. Unfortunately, that's all it was. A theory.
Grasping at straws was what his superiors had called it before his
termination. Over the past year, nearly eight hundred thousand
children were reported missing. While most were runaways, more than
a third of them were abducted by family members or close friends.
Many of these children resurfaced over the coming weeks, while
still others never did. It was the smallest segment, the children
who vanished at the apparent hands of strangers, that was the focus
of his attention. At least privately. Professionally, he performed
his job better than he ever had. After Savannah's abduction, he had
thrown himself into it with reckless abandon, and at no small
personal sacrifice. On a subconscious level, he supposed he hoped
that by helping to return the missing children to their frightened
parents that the universe might see fit to return his to him. But
there was more to it than that. It was a personal quest, an
obsession, and it had finally led him to a pattern.

Factoring out all of the kidnappings for
ransom, the abductions by estranged parents or family friends, and
the crimes of opportunity, where the child was simply in the wrong
place at the wrong time, left Preston with a much smaller field to
investigate. By narrowing his scope further to encompass only
missing children from stable, two-parent, at least superficially
loving homes, he winnowed the cases in his jurisdiction down to a
handful each year. And of those, if he set the age range at
Savannah's at the time of her disappearance, plus-or-minus three
years, he was left with four cases annually over the past six and a
half years. Not an average of four. Not three one year and five the
next. Exactly four. And they were spread out by season. One child
each year in the spring, another in the summer, a third in the
fall, and a fourth in the winter. And all within two weeks of the
four most important dates on the celestial calendar---the vernal and
autumnal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.

The kidnappings were the work of a single
individual: The man who had stolen his daughter from him. The same
man who had sent the photographs of him at the Downey house, who
had been within fifty yards of him at a point in time when if
Preston had known, he could have prevented the abduction of his
cherished daughter, and the twenty-three children who came after
her, with a single bullet.

Why could no one else see it? Why didn't
they believe him?

Because he knew all too well that the
parents of missing children would say or do anything if there was a
chance of learning the fate of their son or daughter, even if it
meant formulating a theory from a set of points that on paper
appeared completely random, like forming constellations from the
stars in the night sky.

Preston focused again on the house, but
still couldn't bring himself to press the button on the garage door
opener and pull the idling Cherokee inside. There was only solitude
waiting for him within those walls, and the heartbreaking memories
he was forced to endure with every breath he took. The house was a
constant reminder of the greatest mistake of his life, but more
than that, it was a beacon, the only location on the planet that
Savannah had ever called her own. He still held out hope that
wherever she was, one of these days she would simply appear from
nowhere and return to her home. To him. It was the reason he would
never allow himself to sell it. The one wish he allowed himself to
pray would come true.

It was all he had.

He slid the gearshift into drive and headed
south, pretending he didn't know exactly where he was going. Ten
minutes later he was on the other side of town, parked in front of
a Tudor-style two-story, upon which the forest encroached to the
point of threatening to swallow it whole. Light shined through the
blinds covering the windows. With a deep breath, he climbed out of
the car and approached the porch.

The house positively radiated warmth,
reminding him of what should have been. He pressed the doorbell and
backed away from the door.

Shuffling sounds from the other side of the
door, then a muffled voice.

"Just a second."

The door opened inward. A woman stood in the
entryway, cradling a swaddled baby in the crook of her left arm.
She brushed a strand of blonde bangs out of her eyes with the back
of her right hand, which held a bottle still dripping from recently
being heated in boiling water.

"Hi, Jessie," he said.

She still had the most amazing eyes he'd
ever seen.

"Philip," she whispered. "You shouldn't be
here."

"He's beautiful, Jess." He nodded to the
baby. "How old is he by now?"

"Phil..."

They stood in an awkward silence for several
long moments.

"You remember what today is?" Preston
finally asked.

"Of course," she whispered. "Do you honestly
think I could ever forget?"

He shook his head and looked across the lawn
toward the forest.

"What happened to us, Jess?"

"I'm not getting into this with you
again."

"Does he at least treat you well?"

"Who? Richard?" Anger flashed in her eyes.
"He's emotionally stable, physically available, and isn't hell-bent
on his own systematic destruction. And I don't cringe when he
touches me. What more could a girl want?"

"But does he make you happy?"

She sighed. "Of course, Phil. I wouldn't
have married him if he didn't." The baby started to cry, and
quickly received the bottle. Jessie shuffled softly from one foot
to the other in a practiced motion Preston remembered well. Only it
had been with a different child, in a different lifetime entirely.
"Why are you really here?"

"I needed to know that you were okay." He
glanced back at her and offered a weak smile before looking away
again. It was still impossible to think of her as anything other
than the woman he had loved for the better part of his life, since
the first time he had laid eyes on her. It hurt deep down to think
of her as anything other than his wife. "That's all."

He had to turn away so she wouldn't see the
shimmer of tears in his eyes, and used the momentum to spur his
feet back toward his car.

"Phil."

He paused, blinked back the tears, and
turned to face her again. Even with the recent addition of the
wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, she was still the
most stunning woman he had ever seen. And the baby seemed to make
her glow. He couldn't bring himself to ask her his name.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

He shook his head, releasing streams of
tears down his cheeks. No, he would never be all right ever
again.

"Do you still blame me, Jessie?"

"You invited the danger into our home,
whether intentionally or not," she whispered. "I will always blame
you."

"So will I," he said, and struck off toward
his car again. "I hope you have a good life, Jess. You deserve to
be happy."

He heard her start to softly cry as she
closed the door.

"Don't ever let him out of your sight,"
Preston said. "Ever."

His heart broke once more as he walked away
from the love of his life.

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

Les stood beside one of the cairns in the
outer ring and watched his students perform their tasks as they had
been taught. Jeremy guided the magnetometer in straight lines
between the short walls that formed the spokes of the wagon wheel
design. He wore the sensing device's harness over his shoulders and
held the receptor, which looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner,
a foot above the ground. It interpreted the composition of the
ground based on its magnetic content, and forwarded its readings
into a program on Les's laptop that created a three-dimensional map
of the earth to roughly ten meters in depth. Every type of rock had
varying content of ferrous material and left a different magnetic
signature, as did extinguished campfires, the foundations of
prehistoric ruins, and various artifacts lost through the ages.
Often, one ancient site was built upon another when a more modern
culture eclipsed its forebear, like the Acropolis in Athens rose
from the rubble of a Mycenaean megaron. If there was an older
structure beneath this one, they would be able to find and map it
without so much as brushing away the topsoil, but of greater
importance were the relics left behind by the Native Americans who
had meticulously crafted this ornate design. Hopefully, these
buried clues would provide some indication of the function of the
medicine wheel, the identity of its creators, and the reason it had
been erected in the first place.

The magnetometer would also serve a
secondary function he had chosen not to vocalize. Primitive
societies often built cairns to mark the burial mounds of
individuals of significance. If there were indeed corpses interred
under their feet, then the magnetometer would reconstruct their
unmistakable signals as well in hazy shades of gray. Fortunately,
they had yet to isolate any remains. Based on the condition of the
stones and the level of preservation, he feared any bodies they
discovered might not be as ancient as he might prefer.

So far, the only signals had come from rocks
under the soil, in no apparent pattern and of varying mineral
content, save one square object roughly a foot down, midway between
where he stood now and the central ring of stones. Breck and Lane
had cordoned off the square-yard above it with string and long
metal tent pegs, and had begun to excavate in centimeter levels.
They were only six inches down, and had yet to sift through
anything more exciting than the coarse dirt.

"I still don't think this thing is working
right," Jeremy said. "I can't seem to get rid of that strange,
streaky feedback a couple yards down."

"I told you that you were putting it
together wrong," Breck said.

"You could always switch with me and lug
this thing around, princess."

Les rolled his eyes and tuned them out.
Their bickering was grating on his nerves. Besides, he needed to
try to sort out his thoughts, to figure out exactly what was so
wrong with this site.

"There's another one over here!" Jeremy
called. "Same size, same shape, and same location within this
section."

"Mark it and try the next section over," Les
said. Two could be a coincidence. Three was a pattern. "Let me know
immediately if it's there."

What was roughly five inches square, half an
inch thick, and crafted from metal? He would know soon enough, he
supposed, but the objects made him nervous. The Bighorn Medicine
Wheel predated the development of Native American metallurgical
skills. If what they uncovered was manmade, then this site wasn't
nearly as old as it had been designed to appear.

The wind shifted, bringing with it a scent
that crinkled his nose. It smelled like something had crawled off
into the forest to die. He stepped around the cairn and walked into
the wind, but the smell dissipated. A cursory inspection of the
forest's edge didn't reveal the carcass he had expected to find.
Perhaps the detritus had already accumulated over it. The breeze
waned, and he returned to his post, where he resumed his
supervisory duties.

"Right here," Jeremy said. "Just like the
other two. What do you want me to do?"

"For now, just mark it and keep going with
the magnetometer. I want to map as much of the site as we can
before sundown."

"I could just dig it up really quickly."

"That's not how it works and you know
it."

Les sighed. The impatience of youth.

"Can't blame a guy for trying," Jeremy said
with a shrug, and went back to work.