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Chapter Nineteen

A s much as I disliked going through my mother’s things, I knew I didn’t have much choice.

If there was even the slightest chance that her belongings — or those of my grandmother — contained something that might help me and Ben during our foray into the woods tonight, then I needed to look and see what I could find.

My mother’s jewelry box didn’t contain any other mysterious pendants, though, and neither did my grandmother’s.

They’d both liked to have some accessories, although they’d never gone wild with them the way some women did, and it didn’t take long to poke around and determine there wasn’t much to be found.

Well, time to see if my grandmother’s file cabinet contained anything of note.

Because she’d already signed the house over to my mother — and because it clearly stated in the will that I was to inherit the property and everything it contained — I hadn’t worried too much about what might be in my grandmother’s papers.

Most likely, I’d been so numb since their disappearance that I hadn’t allowed myself to focus on anything except the most top-level stuff, whatever I needed to survive day to day.

Now, though, I had to wonder if possibly my grandmother had hidden some additional notes in her files, something she hadn’t wanted to put in her journals, for whatever reason.

I didn’t find anything like that, however.

No, instead I discovered why my mother had been able to send those hefty checks to my father for so many years.

Multiple bank accounts, each of them with a balance that went right up the FDIC-insured limit of a quarter million dollars.

CDs. T-bills. Statements from various brokerage houses.

I still didn’t know the exact amount, but it sure looked to me as if everything was worth well north of ten million dollars.

My brain wanted to go blank at that staggering number. How in the world could my grandmother have accumulated so much money?

Family real estate investments, I guessed. Wealth that slowly accumulated generation after generation, all while the women of my line lived quietly and modestly. No big fancy cars and European vacations, no flashy jewelry.

Just an understanding that they would always be safe and protected, sheltered from some of life’s harsher realities by a nice cushion of cash.

When would they have told me? I wondered. When I was getting ready to settle down and get married? Would they have quietly taken me aside and told me why it was important for me to get a prenup?

I didn’t know. All through college, I’d been focused on getting my DVM and nothing else.

The white picket fence and the kids could wait until I had my practice up and running.

Yes, I’d known we were comfortable — partly because I’d never had to take out loans for college, although I’d still tried for whatever grants and scholarships I could get — but still, this was an order of magnitude more than what I’d been expecting.

Had my father known how much my mother’s family was worth? Was that why he’d blackmailed her, saying he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut unless she guaranteed a comfortable life for him?

Once again, I had no idea. I supposed it was possible that blackmail hadn’t been involved at all, and she’d offered him the stipend as a way of saying thank-you for his silence.

That scenario didn’t seem very plausible, though. Not with the way their marriage had fallen apart.

Right now, though, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I hadn’t found a single thing that would help Ben and me with our quest tonight.

Assuming it didn’t turn into a big ball of nothing. He was making an educated guess that the moon would still be dark enough to allow the stone circle to reappear, but neither of us knew that for sure.

In a way, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t. That would mean it only emerged once a month during the actual new moon, and therefore we’d have a lot more time to prepare for its return.

But would Ben even want to hang around that long?

Difficult to say. He was interested in me, I could tell that much, but I honestly hadn’t had enough time to slow down and think about what that meant.

I’d gotten past the point where I could plausibly deny that I found him attractive, true, and yet I still didn’t know what to do about that attraction.

Maybe nothing. That would be the simplest way to handle the situation, even though I didn’t like it very much.

Even if we’d declared our undying love for each other…

which we certainly hadn’t…I knew he must have plenty of reasons why he couldn’t stick around in Silver Hollow indefinitely.

Where he’d come from, he probably had a lease to deal with if nothing else, not to mention any family in the area.

At least his work would allow him to be almost anywhere with a decent internet connection, but it also sounded as though he did plenty of in-person speaking engagements as well.

For all I knew, he had one coming up pretty soon and would have to leave town to fulfill that commitment.

Don’t borrow trouble, I told myself, even as I thought maybe the least problematic solution to this whole mess would be that we’d see nothing tonight, Ben would decide Silver Hollow was a non-starter, and we could both go back to the way our lives had been before he bumped into my estranged father in that bar in San Francisco.

A little pang went through me as I imagined that scenario, and I realized it might not be as easy as I thought to wrap all this up with a bow and send Ben on his way.

I shouldn’t have unbent even an inch the other night. No matter how kind and helpful he was being, he’d still begun our acquaintance by, if not outright lying to me, then certainly hiding information he knew was important.

Why did this all have to be so damn hard?

Because it was part of being an adult…even if that adulthood happened to involve unicorns and magical circles of stone hidden deep in the forest.

Well, at least now I knew there was nothing in the house that would aid me in my search. While I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around how much money my grandmother — and mother, I supposed — had been hiding, I knew I could push all that to the back burner for the time being.

Now it was time to meet Ben for dinner.

Like me, he’d dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt and hiking boots, although he’d brought a jacket along with him.

That kind of attire didn’t stand out very much at Whole Hog, and I was relieved when Katy, a woman I’d gone to school with who was now a waitress at the barbecue joint, didn’t even send me a knowing look when she came to take our order.

No doubt the news had already circulated around town that Ben and I were sort of seeing each other. Still, I was glad when I didn’t have to answer any leading questions or respond to a whole new set of knowing looks.

Because we knew we were both going to be wandering around in the forest…

and that we didn’t know for sure how late we’d be up…

neither Ben nor I ordered alcohol. We settled instead for iced tea, and after Katy dropped it off and said our platters would be out in a few more minutes, an awkward silence descended on the table.

Was it just me, or had Ben also spent the afternoon trying to evaluate our relationship, such as it was?

Wanting to break the quiet — well, as quiet as it could be in a place filled with people eating and chatting and with country music blaring from the speakers — I said, “Did you find anything new after I left?”

I’d phrased the question as obliquely as I could, since I didn’t really want to broadcast to everyone the real reason why Ben and I had met here for dinner tonight. However, he understood at once and shook his head as he reached for his glass of iced tea.

“Not really. Mostly, I found corroborating evidence that proved my translation of those engravings was right. But in terms of anything else?” His shoulders lifted. “Not really. I think we’re kind of wandering in the wilderness, so to speak.”

And in a little while, we’d be doing it literally, not just metaphorically. Maybe it was good that he hadn’t discovered anything that would make us change our plans.

Or maybe I would have preferred a way to back out. Sure, the stone circle had seemed quiescent enough the night before, but what if it became more unstable the farther it got away from the dark of the moon?

There was just so much here we didn’t know.

Ben looked confident enough, though, so I only acknowledged his comment with a nod and then drank some of my iced tea.

“It would be good to know who put those words there,” he continued.

“The only thing that seems clear is that they were carved by two different people. The markings in the oak grove appear almost sloppy by comparison, and that doesn’t even take into account the way the ones we saw last night actually represented a real word rather than a bunch of gibberish. ”

Yes, I still hadn’t been able to figure out that part of the puzzle.

Was it that the oak grove vandal had maybe seen Ogham letters once and thought it would be fun to play with them to mess with people, or was there something else altogether going on here, some pattern that might become clear in time?

Hard to say. And even if the stone circle appeared tonight, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to provide all the answers we needed.

Katy came back then with our platters — brisket for Ben and smoked chicken for me — so we thanked her and settled down to eat.

Since he seemed to relax almost at once, I got the impression he was glad we had to table our discussion for now.

Just too many what-ifs, too many topics we couldn’t discuss openly when we were surrounded by so many people.

Or maybe he was just really hungry. We had breakfast so late that I hadn’t bothered with lunch, and for all I knew, he’d done the same thing.