Westin’s Wyoming Page 16

  “This is part of a blanket, I think, and the rock looks like a bannerstone.”

  She examined it closer. It had been carved to resemble a butterfly, more or less, with notches on the top and bottom. “What’s a bannerstone?”

  “It was used with an atlatl, a spear, as a kind of weight to make the spear go farther and with more force. It must have fallen from one of the wrappings which means someone’s been tampering with the remains. It sure wasn’t lying on the ground when I was a kid.”

  “One of your brothers?”

  “That seems unlikely. But there’s no way of knowing when this happened without talking to one of them or my father. It could have been years ago.”

  “Or it could have been recent,” Analise whispered. If someone was digging around in this cave for artifacts, they could have come across the exact thing Analise was on a mission to destroy.

  “You look spooked,” he told her.

  “I swear the air smells different here. I know it’s my imagination and that these people died a long time ago, but it feels wrong to disturb this place.”

  “I know. My mother brought me here the first time I came. My father had showed it to her when they were first married. She said she found the cave kind of spiritually uplifting.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not particularly. But there’s no doubt she felt it a place of resting souls. This has to be where she told your mother she’d hidden the infamous ‘it.’”

  “But she also said, ‘High in the summer sky,’” Analise added. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

  “Let’s just start looking.”

  Analise shined her light into a jagged crevasse. Six or eight feet along, she saw a skull amid a jumble of other bones and debris on the floor. A small gasp escaped her lips and she moved away. The next two crevasses held much the same, although occasionally she spotted what looked like pieces of pottery or carved arrowheads and once the shimmer of gold. More direct light and a closer look revealed a crude carved rock bowl with the head of a man forming a sort of handle. The man faced away from the scoop of the bowl, and the crown of his head was covered with gold.

  “Wait a second,” she said at last, turning. “Can you picture your mother reaching into a small space where someone was buried to hide something else?”

  Pierce was across the cavern but his voice carried. “No, I can’t, you’re right.” He turned to face her. “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  For a moment she just stared at him. He was a good twenty feet away and the poor light made him little more than a tall figure in shades of brown and gray until he smiled and the flash of white dazzled her. Good heavens, she loved him. Her whole body felt bathed in the glow of her feelings and it was all she could do to get her mind back on the job.

  “Maybe she used one of the smaller fissures that start too far off the ground to be a practical place to bury a body,” he said as she turned away. “How big is what we’re looking for?”

  This required facing him again. “It’s a diary,” she said, moving her hands to indicate something the size of a trade paperback. It was pointless to try to keep that from him when he was supposed to be helping her search and even more to the point, she trusted him, she always had. “How are we going to look up high?”

  “I can think of only one way. You’re going to have to sit on my shoulders. But wait just a second. We’re doing this to retrieve a girlhood diary? That’s what’s so important?”

  “Yes.”

  “What? Is she afraid some reporter will get a hold of it and reveal she had a torrid love affair when she was eighteen?”

  He said it casually, jokingly. She laughed, but it must have come a few seconds too late or sounded phony because suddenly he was right in front of her. “Analise? Is that it?”

  She met his gaze and knew she couldn’t lie, not to him. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to him, not ever. “Yes,” she said very softly.

  “Is that so terrible? I mean, I know she’s a queen now, but she wasn’t then and it’s not the old days where people judge as harshly as they used to, right?”

  She shifted her weight and shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Tell me.”

  Analise turned and walked a few steps, torn between loyalty to her mother and her feelings for Pierce. She needed him on her side, she needed him to lift her to look in the crags, it was the only way to get high enough without going back for equipment and they didn’t have time for that. She couldn’t do it alone…?.

  She walked back. “When I announced I was coming to America and flying right over Wyoming, my mother told me things she’d never told anyone in the world except your mother many years before.”

  “If she was so worried about this diary, why didn’t she come back for it?”

  “I don’t know. Stuff happens, you know how it is. She entrusted it to your mother and then your mother left and mine was afraid to draw attention to herself—at any rate, that’s just what happened.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Years before she came back to the States to finish her last term and fell desperately in love with a married professor. To top it off, she was engaged to my father and about to get married. The affair was brief and ended poorly. She returned home, married my father, and then she discovered she was pregnant. Seven months later my brother was born. He was a very small baby and it was assumed he was early.”

  “So, your brother isn’t your father’s real son?”

  She nodded, knowing the implications of that would hit him very quickly. “My mother begged me to find the diary. If it got into the wrong hands, well, any hands for that matter—”

  “Wait a second. Then your brother isn’t the heir to the throne?”

  “No. And what no one else knows is that my father is ill and has been for some time. My brother will become king very soon. If it leaks out his blood is not really Emille blood, he will never be crowned and our country will suffer because of it.”

  “Wait,” Pierce said, staring down at her. “Does this mean you’re—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “You’re the legal heir.”

  He’d said it. She nodded.

  “Queen Analise Emille. We really are worlds apart, aren’t we? Well, no matter, you’d be a wonderful queen.”

  “I don’t want to be queen.” She turned away. The cavern suddenly seemed full of watchful eyes and heedful ears. They were speaking too loudly, too freely.

  “But you would be great, Analise.”

  He’d clutched her shoulders and she leaned back against him, eyes closed for a moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer but she’d never meant any words more. “Alexander has been training to be king his entire life. He’s studied and dedicated himself to this. He’s a kind and diplomatic man and he has the heart of a king. He’ll be able to rule Chatioux fairly and make the tough decisions that are necessary for our country to prosper. I don’t have the head or the heart for ruling. My wants and needs are much more personal in nature.”

  “Marriage, children—”

  “Yes, those, as well as broader concerns like social equality. But not government, not ruling, not closing myself away in a castle for the rest of my life.”

  Pierce turned her to face him. Tenderly smoothing a strand of hair from her face, he kept his voice soft, too. “Honor and duty, Analise. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes. If there was no one else, I would do what was needed. But there is someone, my brother, Alexander.”

  He stared at her intently. “Okay, I think I get where you’re coming from. But once you make the decision not to claim what is rightfully yours, then I assume there’s no going back.”

  “There’s something else you have to remember. My brother has no idea he’s not an Emille by blood. His wife and children believe they know everything about him and thus themselves. My father has no idea his son is another man’s child. Knowledge of this event would not onl
y disrupt Chatioux, it would destroy my family. I will take this secret to my grave.”

  “Then so will I,” Pierce said. “And since this threat wouldn’t exist if my mother had destroyed everything when she was asked to do it, I’ll make certain it’s done.”

  For the better part of the next hour, they moved along the walls, Analise balanced on Pierce’s shoulders. A sense of urgency made her movements quick. She found creepy crawly things and webs, but no diary.

  “I need a break,” Pierce called at last.

  Avoiding the chasm that partially divided the floor of the cave, he sat on a big rock. Analise climbed off his shoulders and collapsed next to him. The rock on which they sat was actually part of a formation that resembled a throne which was kind of funny in a way. It was easily big enough for two people.

  “I remember this place,” he said suddenly, his arm reaching around Analise’s waist. “This is the rock where I sat with my mother that time she brought me here. That’s the south wall over there. I remember her telling me that.”

  “Your mother sounds like an interesting woman.”

  He nodded. “She was.”

  “Were your parents close?”

  “Kind of. Jamie said my father worshipped her. I’ve heard tales that suggest she was an outrageous flirt. And then, there was the postcard and the man she’d been rumored to be seeing who also disappeared around the same time…”

  “It must have been terrible for your father.”

  “It was rough for all of us.”

  Analise took her flashlight out of her parka pocket and shined it on the far wall. Melissa Browning Westin had sat on this rock and stared at that wall. For several minutes Analise aimed the flashlight over the rocks. There was a natural pattern there, not a real clear one, but something.

  “What do you make of that?” she said.

  By the way Pierce jerked when she spoke, she realized he’d fallen asleep against her shoulder. “Huh?”

  “Do you see a pattern on that wall?”

  He studied it in the light and shook his head, then glanced at his watch. “Analise, we have to get back. It’s almost 5:00 a.m. and we still have to travel and who knows what the weather’s doing up top. The police said bright and early. I promise you I’ll come back here after you’ve gone and search every inch of this cavern. If I find what you’re looking for, I’ll destroy it. You have my word.”

  “I know you will,” she said, but she knew she couldn’t leave, not just yet. This was her one chance and she’d blown it. “Would your mother have come here alone when she brought the diary?”

  “If she brought it here, if we’re in the right place,” he said, smothering a yawn. “Yeah, I can’t quite see her sharing that with my dad.”

  “So how could she reach the places we just searched?”

  “She might have been prepared and come with some kind of step stool.”

  At that second, something clicked in Analise’s brain. “I know what that pattern is,” she said, standing abruptly.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  She directed the light on the wall as she advanced. “Look. The fissure near the floor is very narrow.”

  “Too narrow to store a human body.”

  “Exactly. And then it rises up the wall and branches off.”

  “Like a tree. Okay, I see.”

  “Or like a stalk of corn. A stalk of corn, a summer crop, on the south wall which, if you consider the warmth of the season, your mother might have dubbed a summer sky.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “And unless I’m mistaken, the holes and crevices that look vaguely like ears of corn from a distance are spaced so that they make almost perfect foot- and hand-holds. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Sticking the penlight between her teeth, Analise stuck a foot in the lowest opening and grabbed the one above and to the right of it. Back and forth, she climbed the “stalk” until she was fifteen feet off the ground.

  “Be careful,” Pierce called. “I can hardly see you up there.”

  With the penlight in her mouth, she couldn’t answer. She knew she was onto something. At the top, in a crevice that began a few inches above the long one, she turned her head so the light could shine inside. It illuminated a plastic bag stuffed back as far as a human arm could reach.

  This had to be it. Relief bubbled up her throat. The last foothold was slightly canted and she was able to lean into the cave face and hold on with one hand. She took the flashlight out of her mouth and laid it on the fissure floor, and then reaching past it and balancing herself, she snagged the plastic and felt the reassuring sharp edges of a small book.

  Once it was in hand, what to do with it? She needed both hands to descend.

  “Analise? Did you find something?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said, carefully stuffing the bundle under her jacket and gingerly beginning the descent.

  His hands clutched her calves when she was still five feet from the ground and he lifted her the last couple of feet. He set her on the ground and looked down at her. “Are you sure you have it?”

  “We’ll know in a minute.”

  The plastic slipped off easily to reveal a lapis-blue book with My Diary emblazoned in gold on the cover. She opened it and her mother’s elegant handwriting filled the pages.

  Oddly, she didn’t want to read a word of it. She already knew more than she wished she knew. It was enough to just know the threat looming over them all was all but over. “I can’t tell you what a relief this is,” she said, gazing up at Pierce. “Let’s take it back to the other cavern and burn it.”

  “Better you should just hand it over to me,” a new voice said, and Analise and Pierce spun around as one.

  Bierta stood ten feet away and she was holding a gun.

  Chapter Twenty

  Pierce realized immediately he’d been so caught up in the chase he’d forgotten to guard their backs. He’d neglected to figure out a way to check all the rocks outside the cave, all the hiding places. Damn.

  “First, toss your weapon over here, Mr. Westin,” Bierta said. Her voice sounded different, but that wasn’t the only thing about the maid that had changed.

  Once before Pierce had seen her without her glasses and then he’d thought she looked myopic and vulnerable. But now, with her brown hair pulled back in a high, tight ponytail and her eyes full of purpose, she looked sturdy and decidedly fierce.

  Her gun was pointed at Analise. Pierce hadn’t brought a rifle with them for the simple reason it was hard to carry on a snowmobile with a passenger. He took the hand gun from its underarm holster, and ignoring her warning to empty it of bullets, all but threw it at her. It clattered to the rocky ground behind her, but she didn’t move. Not once did she take her eyes—or her gun—off of him.

  “Now, then, give me the diary,” she said.

  “Bierta?” Analise gasped. “You’re the one behind all this?”

  “I want that diary.” The maid took another step forward. Her shuffling gait had disappeared along with her glasses. She waved the gun in measured strokes. “Get out of the way, Mr. Westin.”

  Pierce stayed where he was, slightly in front of Analise, reviewing his options. Apparently what he was thinking showed on his face, for the next thing he knew, Bierta fired off her gun. The bullet hit the ground a few inches in front of his left foot. “If I had wanted to hit you, I would have,” she said after the echoes died down. “Now give me the book.”

  Analise shouldered her way past Pierce. “How did you know about this diary?” she demanded.

  Bierta’s smile was no more than a smug lift of her upper lip. “I didn’t, Princess, not until I overheard you telling Mr. Westin about it. Up until now you two have made a mess out of my mission, but this diary will fix all that. It will break Chatioux like a brittle stick in a way that even your kidnapping and death couldn’t have.”

  For a moment, Pierce thought Analise might give Bierta the book. Instead she clamped the diary tighter than e
ver to her chest. “What mission? What are you talking about?”

  “Stopping the pipeline, it has to be that,” Pierce said.

  “Of course,” Bierta said, almost strutting, “I’ve been working on this for more than a year.”

  “You recruited Lucas and his brother?” Pierce said, wondering how in the world this woman could have met up with Doyle and Lucas Garvey.

  “At a place called Clancy’s in Woodwind, Wyoming, months ago, right after the castle announced a layover in Wyoming for the princess and right before I became her humble servant,” she said, and her voice slipped easily into a Midwestern twang. “Doyle wasn’t hard to convince. He was a greedy man with big appetites and a tiny brain. It didn’t hurt that he liked crude women and hated the Westin family.”

  “You were never a victim of the kidnapping,” Analise said. “You didn’t suffer trauma or migraines or any of the rest.”

  Bierta scoffed. “Of course not.”

  “I understand the politics behind this,” Analise said slowly, “but I don’t understand how you could be so ruthless with Toby. He’s never done you any harm. And poor Mr. Harley—”

  Bierta’s eyes hardened. “People like you, Princess, and your spoiled little cousin are blights on the world. As for the bodyguard—he was expendable.”

  “You think everyone is expendable,” Analise fumed.

  “The Doyle brothers were weak. Killing the bodyguard in the ice shed and the other man in the generator building, leaving their bodies so easily found—stupid! They had no discipline.”

  “And so you shot Lucas to keep him from talking,” Analise said.

  Pierce shook his head. “She couldn’t have killed Lucas. She was the only one Pauline saw over and over again that day because Pauline was worried about her after the supposed head injury. Her alibi is the only one that sticks.”

  Bierta waved the gun toward the opening. “You’re stalling. I assure you, there’s no reason to. No one but me knows you’re here.” At this she withdrew the paper Pierce had folded into the red mug before they left the house hours before.

  Pierce swore under his breath.