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Chapter Eleven

M y hand ached more than I wanted to admit, but I kept doggedly on, knowing the only thing that would make things better would be to get home so I could attend to it properly.

Ben’s makeshift first aid had helped, of course, and yet I knew I needed to really clean out the wound, pack it with some Neosporin, bandage it up, and hope for the best.

Those symbols we’d found bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

I knew I’d never seen them before, but that didn’t mean much.

The last time I’d hiked out to the oak grove had been when I came home the summer after I graduated from Humboldt State before I left to attend vet school at UC Davis.

That had been almost three years ago now, giving a person plenty of time to visit the grove and scratch their runes…

or whatever those things were…into the trees.

At least Ben had gotten some pretty good shots of them, so with any luck, he might be able to figure out what the odd symbols were and what they meant. With his training in archaeology, he was much better suited to that kind of research than I was.

“How’re you doing up there?” he asked, concern clear in his voice.

I’d told him that I hadn’t hurt anything except my hand when I tripped and fell, which had been about fifty-percent true.

As I’d gone down, I’d taken some of the force of the fall on one knee, but I hadn’t torn my jeans or gotten cut.

No, I’d probably have some bruises, and I knew it would be stiff tomorrow, although I wasn’t so incapacitated that I couldn’t get back to the trailhead without noticeably limping.

Good thing, because I wouldn’t put it past Ben to offer to carry me, or at the very least, provide an arm for me to lean on.

But because it had been impossible for me to ignore the way my body had thrilled at his touch as he tended my wounded hand, I knew more physical contact probably wasn’t a very good idea right then.

While it was impossible to ignore the way I was attracted to him, I told myself there wasn’t any point in trying to pursue something more than our current casual acquaintance, not when he would be going back to Southern California sometime during the next couple of days.

“I’m fine,” I said. My knee might have had a different opinion of the situation, but luckily, it couldn’t talk.

My reply must have been short enough for Ben to realize that I didn’t want to waste any energy on chitchat, because we were both silent after that as we wound our way through the woods, pausing every once in a while to catch our breath and drink some water.

Even though I wasn’t moving as fast as I normally would, we still made good time since we were taking the most direct route back to the trailhead rather than meandering this way and that in order to get photos of the local flora and fauna.

It was probably around eleven-thirty by the time we reached the end of the trail, where my Subaru — well, my mother’s Subaru — was waiting for me. At school, I’d had an e-bike to get around and used Uber when the weather wasn’t cooperating, so the Subaru was the only car I currently had.

If this had been a normal day, I would have been able to get to work by noon without any trouble. After that hike, though, I knew I needed to shower and change my clothes — and get my hand bandaged up properly — so I was glad I’d shifted the opening time to one o’clock.

Ben walked me over to the car and waited until I’d climbed in — and did my best to hold back a wince as I had to bend my knee to get past the steering wheel.

“I’ll check on those symbols after I get all the photos downloaded onto my laptop,” he told me as I fastened my seatbelt. “And I’ll let you know what I find. We should also get together at some point to figure out what we need our posters and flyers to say.”

Right. After what we’d discovered in the oak grove, our plan to start a public information campaign to save the forest from Northwest Pacific had almost slipped my mind.

But while the symbols we’d found were intriguing, it was probably more important to at least get some flyers put together so we could hang them up in various spots around town.

“Tonight after I get off work?” I asked. “I can throw together a pot of spaghetti or something.”

That didn’t sound too much like a formal invitation to dinner, so I hoped he’d realize I’d made the suggestion so we could get right down to work after we’d eaten.

Also, while I would never wow anyone with my cooking skills, in this case, I didn’t even need to try, since I’d found packets of frozen spaghetti sauce and stew and chili in the freezer when I came back to Silver Hollow.

My grandmother was an excellent cook, and she’d always believed in making big batches of stuff and storing the leftovers so they’d be there at the end of a long day when she wasn’t in the mood to put together anything too elaborate.

“Sounds good,” Ben said. “Six o’clock okay?”

Since the shop closed at five-thirty, that would give me just enough time to go home and put everything together.

On the other hand, an earlier start meant we’d probably wrap things up that much sooner, and after our long hike this morning — and banging my hand on that tree trunk — I thought getting to bed early was probably a good idea.

“Yes, that works,” I replied. “See you then.”

He nodded and stepped away from the car, and I shut the door and started the engine. A quick wave as I backed out, and then I was on my way home.

I really hoped I hadn’t made a mistake by inviting him over for dinner.

A nice, hot shower brightened my perspective on life, and since the shop was just busy enough that afternoon to keep me occupied without feeling as if I was running all over the place like a chicken with its head cut off, the rest of the day passed quickly enough.

When I got home, I set the table and poured the defrosted spaghetti sauce into a pan to heat up, then started boiling the water for the pasta.

I already had fixings for a simple green salad, so I threw one together in a big bowl and set it off to the side.

I’d waffled on whether I should put out wine glasses and told myself in the end that it felt weird to eat spaghetti without some wine.

No chianti on hand, although I had a couple of red blends I’d picked up at the supermarket in Eureka during my last shopping trip there.

We had a small grocery store here in town, but it was expensive and didn’t stock all the items I tended to need, so I drove to the city at least every couple of weeks to do some real shopping.

My worries about not having any chianti were put to rest as soon as Ben rang the doorbell. When I went to let him in, I saw he was holding a bottle of that very variety.

“Come in,” I told him. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“I hope you haven’t opened the wine yet,” he replied as he handed over the chianti.

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “The stuff I was planning to serve doesn’t really need to breathe.”

He grinned at me, as I’d hoped he would, and we headed into the dining room.

“We probably shouldn’t drink all of it,” I warned him, then picked up the corkscrew from where it had been sitting on the table and gave it to him so he could open the bottle.

True, I supposed I could have handled that duty myself, but I’d never been all that great at it.

“We need to be able to focus on our work.”

“Duly noted,” he said, and expertly inserted the wine key and pulled out the cork in one smooth, expert motion. I lifted an eyebrow, and he added, “I worked as a waiter to help put myself through college.”

Well, that explained it. “Go ahead and sit down — you can have the spot at the head of the table — and I’ll bring the food out.”

“Need any help?”

“No, I’m good,” I replied. “The salad’s already on the table, so I just have to bring out the pasta and the sauce.”

For a moment, I thought he might try to offer again, just to make sure I wasn’t being merely polite, but then he seemed to realize that pressing the issue would only delay dinner.

“Okay.”

He took a seat where I’d indicated, and I hurried into the kitchen to fetch the food. Soon enough, we were dishing up our salad and spaghetti and settling down to eat.

“This is great,” he commented after his first mouthful. “You had time to put this together after you got home from work?”

As much as I would have liked to take credit for my grandmother’s wonderful bolognese sauce, doing so wouldn’t have been very honest. “All I did was reheat it,” I replied. “My grandmother had this in the freezer.”

That response earned me a nod, but I noticed he appeared very thoughtful afterward. Was he thinking about how she’d put that sauce together and had never been around to eat it?

I didn’t want to think about that, not when similar notions had been crowding my brain for the past three months.

“Well, it’s very good. Thank you for inviting me.” He paused there so he could set down his fork and lift his glass of wine and take a sip. Then he said, “I found a few things when I looked up those runes this afternoon.”

“You did?” I asked. To be honest, I’d been so focused on work and then getting dinner together that I hadn’t had too much time to ponder the strange markings we’d discovered at the oak grove. “What are they?”

“They’re Ogham — ancient Irish,” he replied.

“A couple of the symbols are still unclear — I couldn’t find any analogues online that matched them.

But the letter for ‘oak’ appeared over and over, so it seems clear that whoever scratched them into that tree was trying to draw power from something ancient. ”

“Draw power for what?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure whether I even believed such things were real.

Then again, I’d seen unicorns and griffins and dragons with my own eyes, so it wasn’t as if I hadn’t already acknowledged that some pretty strange stuff was possible in this world.