Blood of the Reich

18

Hood’s Cabin, Cascade Mountains, United States

September 4, Present Day

T he last home of Benjamin Hood was a swaybacked cabin of weathered gray logs, its chinking as gapped as the teeth of a punch-drunk prizefighter and its mossy roof shaggy as a bear. The place listed like the Titanic, and Rominy thought its intention was to sink back into the earth. Her new property was not shelter, it was a trauma victim in need of emergency infusions from Home Depot.

Jake once more opened the pickup door from the outside-the need to do so made it seem like they were on some kind of ludicrous date-and then dug a lantern out of the toolbox in the bed of the pickup. While he did that, Rominy burrowed behind the seats to get the first aid kit again to re-dress her knees. A wink of brass caught her eye. It was almost entirely hidden under his camping gear, tucked at the edge of a floor mat. She instinctively reached. It was a small shell casing for a bullet, she saw, empty of powder.

Jake said he didn’t have a gun. A leftover from an earlier owner or outing? She considered asking but he was preoccupied in the toolbox. The casing tickled her memory, but she wasn’t sure why. She pocketed it for later.

“Come on, heiress!” He swung the lantern to help beat a path through high weeds and blackberries to the cabin’s sagging porch. When Rominy stepped up, a piece of deck broke through. Something furtive skittered away. Great.

“Another piece of my fabulous inheritance?” she said, pulling her heeled shoe free of the rot. “I should have worn waders.”

“Another piece of the puzzle, I hope. And I’ve got some spare boots in the truck I can loan you.”

“You have my size?”

“Maybe. Old girlfriend left ’em when she dumped me.”

“Now why would a woman do that?”

“That’s what I asked.” He stepped over some animal droppings and went to the plank door. “You never get an answer.”

“But now you’re Prince Charming and I get a hand-me-down glass slipper?”

“I’m on the trail of a story and you might need to walk in the woods.”

“Gosh, she was wrong. You are romantic.”

She’d joke with him now.

The key from the safety deposit box was to a padlock on a rusty hasp, and Jake had to twist and jerk to force it open. The door swung with the proverbial creak, or more precisely a squall of protest, and let out an exhalation of must. The cabin was dim inside, lit by greasy multipane windows that hadn’t seen a wash in decades. The thought that Hood had decomposed here, until his discovery months later, gave her the creeps.

The place was also a time capsule. There was a Depression-era iron bed frame but no mattress, an old drop-leaf table with three painted wooden chairs, a counter with porcelain basin and hand pump, and a river-rock stone fireplace. The fur rug was so decayed as to make the species unidentifiable. The joists and rafters were bare, the underside of the shingles stained where rain had leaked through. There was even a bookshelf, and Rominy inspected the volumes. Faded tomes on Tibet, Buddhism, zoology, and flying, time having glued their pages to a pulpy mass that mice had chewed. Droppings dotted shelves and floor. Hanging on a peg on the wall was a calendar with a faded scenic of Mount Baker, turned to September 1945. It was as faint as a ghost negative.

“Is that when he died?”

Jake nodded. “Apparently. Remember, he wasn’t found right away. That calendar page is right after the end of World War II, and they found him the next spring.”

“He sat out the war up here.”

“Yep. And this is the edge of the edge. To the east of us is a hundred miles of mountain wilderness.”

She turned, reluctant to touch anything. “All right, Woodward and Bernstein, what are we supposed to find?”

“The story, Lois Lane. What happened to Great-grandpa? He goes to Tibet on the eve of the war, comes back to play the hermit here, and dies forgotten. Except his descendants meet untimely deaths, and a great-granddaughter who doesn’t even know he exists is almost blown up in her MINI Cooper. So finally we have access to his cabin, and to his safety deposit box, and suddenly you’ve got enough moola to buy several new cars, thanks to me. All you have to do is give me the scoop of the century and I’ll be on my way.”

“Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

“I wouldn’t put it so crudely. We’re partners now, Rominy. If I’m Woodward, then you’re Bernstein.”

“I want to be Woodward. You be Bernstein.”

He smiled. “You’re on.”

She glanced around. “The place is a sty.”

“Let’s call it a dusty attic of nostalgia.” He glanced up. There were cobwebs enough to festoon a crypt. Mice and spiders and flies, oh my.

“But someone’s been here.” Rominy was looking at scuff marks in the dust on the floor. “If this place is haunted, the ghosts leave tracks.”

Barrow frowned. “Kids, maybe. Through a window? Or drifters looking for food.”

“Or your skinheads. Shining lights around and acting spooky.”

“I don’t think they’d know enough to look way up here.”

Rominy dragged her finger in some dust. “Yeah, for their sake. I think my neighbor would answer the Hitler salute with buckshot, and they’d probably contract a disease in this dustbin. No self-respecting ghost would take up residence.”

Jake smiled. “We’re safe, then.” He sat on the old bed frame, springs groaning. “Welcome home.”

“I hope you don’t think that’s seductive.” Rominy walked to the kitchen window, looking over the enameled sink basin. Outside there were claustrophobic walls of fir in every direction. It was like being at the bottom of a green well. “It is odd that he came here and died here. But just because I’m his descendant doesn’t mean I have any clues.”

“You now have the contents of the safety deposit box.”

“Geez, a fossilized finger? Thank you, Grandpa. Was it the middle one?”

“In that case I think he would have left the entire hand.”

She sighed. “Okay, let’s think about it.” She sat at the painted table, using her forearm to shove off some dust, and emptied the cookie tin of what they’d found at the bank. “A scarf. It’s a memento, I’d guess.” She held it up to the light. “Part of it ripped away, and dirty from someone’s neck. Nice. What else? The Chinese gold pieces are cool. And this is quite a heavy pistol.” She lifted the. 45 so it fell back with a thud. “You could use it to drive nails.”

“Army issue from back then.”

“A compass to find our way, if we had a direction to follow. If it’s not just memorabilia, that suggests a destination and even a map, don’t you think? But no map.”

“Maybe the finger means pointing, like Sacajawea with Lewis and Clark,” Barrow hazarded.

“But no Sacajawea to go with it. And this cabin? He dies at the end of the war. Why? He leaves… what?” She glanced around. “No pictures, no maps.” Shelves and cupboards held rusty cans and utensils. The books were ruined. “Hidden passageway? Secret compartment?” She fingered the rock on the fireplace and then had to dust off her hands. She paced around the tiny cabin, Barrow watching her think. Or maybe just watching her. Guys did that, she knew. Just not quite the right guy, yet.

So who was Jake Barrow? Savior, abductor, stalker, or partner? “So what else do you report on, when you’re not rescuing damsels?” she suddenly asked.

He shrugged. “All kinds of stuff. Reporters are generalists. I like science, actually. Talk about spooky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that the world is a lot weirder than it looks to us, when we peer up at galaxies or down to subatomic particles.” He slapped the bed frame. “Do you know this is all an illusion?”

“I wish it were, but okay, I’ll bite. An illusion how?”

“That things aren’t solid in the way that we think. Atoms are mostly empty space. You make a nucleus the size of a tennis ball, and its electrons are like BBs buzzing around a mile or two away. What keeps us from falling through the floor isn’t matter, exactly, but physical forces that keep atoms together and then repel other atoms. Our eyes give us this illusion of solids, but if we could really see at that level, we’d see this oscillating fuzz of force fields, all the little bits jumping like popcorn in a popper. A lot of it is chance, particles bouncing like dice, but it adds up to normalcy. It’s very, very strange down there at the smallest level.”

“Except you still can’t walk through a door.”

“But what if you could? I mean, if we really understood how matter and energy works? You know, the Bible says, ‘Let there be light,’ and the universe really started as light. Some energy later became matter, and yet this frozen energy can unthaw again in an atomic bomb-all interchangeable. Physicists talk about extra dimensions, multiple universes, and all kinds of bizarro ideas. But it’s no stranger than electricity would have seemed to Galileo.”

“This is what you think about?”

He laid back, the old web of iron squeaking. “When I’m not thinking about other guy stuff. Beer, breasts, and baseball. Men are pathetic, but occasionally we lift our minds above the ooze, you know.”

“ Very occasionally, from my experience.”

“What do women think about?”

“Nuclear fusion.” It surprised her that she was comfortable teasing him. But a lot had happened in a very short time.

“See? Partners. I like mysteries and your great-grandfather is a crackerjack conundrum. What the heck happened? Isn’t it fun to try to figure it out?”

It was fun, but exhausting and frightening, too. She’d been grabbed by the most intriguing guy she’d ever met. Concentrate, Rominy. You’re here to solve a puzzle, not moon over the mysterious Jake Barrow.

She went to the calendar, studying it. It was hung on a narrow wood peg, maybe whittled by a lonely hearts Benjamin Hood out here in exile. Except Dunnigan said there was a woman who represented Hood at the old bank, and was that Great-grandma?

The odd thing was that the view of the mountain looked like it was taken from across Baker Lake, which gave her a chill. That’s where her parents-her adoptive parents-told her she’d been found, in a Forest Service campground. Had her biologic parents taken her to that spot deliberately?

She lifted the calendar clear and turned a leaf over, so she was looking at August. “There are two dates, circled,” she said. “His birthday?”

Jake came to look. “August was the end of the war. Ah, interesting. August sixth and ninth. Kind of chilling, really.”

“Why?”

“Those are the dates Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.”

“Ick. Hood didn’t have anything to do with that, did he?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe it wrapped things up for him, you know? The Japanese surrender.”

She flipped the pages. They held other faded scenics: hardly a clue to world war mysteries or even her great-grandpa’s personality. Not even a Vargas girl pinup. You’re not going to get your scoop, Mr. Reporter, because there’s no scoop to be had. Maybe Benjamin Hood was just a cranky old hermit who simply hadn’t accomplished whatever he was supposed to accomplish in Tibet. Try, fall short, retire, die. That about summed it up for most people.

And then she noticed the stamp.

It was blue with what looked to be some kind of animal in the center, a cat or deer. The creature was surrounded by graceful writing like a cross between Arabic and Chinese, or the Elvish of Middle Earth. At the bottom, in English lettering, it read, TIBET.

Her heart began hammering. The stamp was folded over the edge of an old calendar page, except it was two pages, she now realized. They were stuck together. If she hadn’t thumbed the calendar she wouldn’t have noticed it. She used a fingernail to slit the stamp and then gently pry the aged paper apart. What had been stuck together were two blank back pages of the calendar. Except they weren’t blank.

They opened to reveal a curious design. Carefully inked lines ran sinuously like elongated ripples in a pond, filling the pages with an abstract pattern. It looked familiar, but how?

Barrow had come up behind her. Now he grasped her upper arms and leaned over her shoulder, his breath hot by her cheek. “You found something.”

“Doodles.” She wasn’t sure whether she had or not. She was very conscious of his holding her, and not sure what she thought about it.

“No, it’s too convenient to be in the only calendar, the only hanging, in the place, but hidden. It’s a map, I think.”

“If so, it’s a map of a maze.” She turned to release her shoulders from his grasp but when she did so she was between the wall and Jake, looking up at his annoyingly handsome face, her hands trembling slightly. Yes, she’d found something. And he was standing very close.

He hesitated, considering for a moment. “I think it’s a contour map,” he finally said. He stepped back.

She exhaled. “What’s that?”

He took her elbow. He did seem to like to touch her. “Come to the table and I’ll show you.”

They spread the old calendar out. “A contour map uses lines to show elevations. These swirls here actually mark ridges and mountains, I think. See, here’s a mark for what might be the cabin, a square. This is a map of the surrounding hills, I’m guessing.”

“But why?”

“To direct Hood, or us, to someplace near. Don’t you think? Wait. I’ve got a Geological Survey map in my truck.”

Jake’s map was green and much more finely drawn. “Here, I’ve marked where we are, so we just need to orient Hood’s map to our own.”

They studied the two.

“They’re nothing alike,” Rominy finally said. “Yours shows the river, but Hood’s is just lines.”

Barrow frowned. “You’re right. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe his map is of Tibet.”

“But where in Tibet? Damn!” There was ferocity in his frustration. He wanted this story very badly. Maybe his career depended on it.

“Or maybe it’s some other clue entirely.”

He glanced at her. “What?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I’m so tired.” She slumped into a kitchen chair. “I’m hungry and I’ve had a headache all day. All I’ve had is wine.”

He glanced from the map to her, fingers drumming, clearly impatient. But then he nodded sharply. “Yes. Yes! I’m an idiot. Look, I’ve got food in my toolbox, too. Stove, sleeping bags in the cab, the whole nine yards.”

“What are you, a Boy Scout?”

“Eagle. Be prepared. I’m going to cook up something on my camp stove and we’ll think about it. Sleep on it, even. We’re close, Rominy. Closer than I’ve ever been. But we need to eat and think. I’m missing something.”

So they did eat. The can of spaghetti, with carrot sticks as salad and M amp;M’s for dessert, apparently stretched Jake Barrow’s cooking skills to the limit. No wonder he’d been in frozen foods. While he heated she changed into some old-boy jeans he loaned her, cinching them in with a belt. Her heeled shoes were set aside for the boots, which did fit. She wondered about the girl who’d worn them but didn’t ask. Then she swept the place out with a fir bough, throwing away the ratty fur rug.

It got cold as the sky darkened. Jake had gathered some wood and now he lit a fire in the old fireplace, the flames pushing aside the musty feel. The crackle and scent of smoke was reassuring. Rominy was more comfortable in the new clothes and warming cabin, but it also felt like she was losing her identity. She’d fallen down a rabbit hole.

Jake heated water on the camp stove and used powder packets to make hot apple cider. The warmth relaxed her. Rominy still felt trapped at having to sleep here, but it was too late, and she was too tired, to think of any alternative. She unzipped one of the sleeping bags and draped it on herself like a quilt as she sat in the chair, considering it a shield against the chill of dusk and anything Barrow might try. Not that he tried anything. And not that she wouldn’t have been curious if he had tried something. He seemed to be leaving any move to her, which was good, except for the ways in which it wasn’t.

She realized she’d phoned no one, since she had no phone. The radio had never been switched on. Had the MINI Cooper been identified with her? Was somebody searching? Her adoptive parents were gone and there was no real boyfriend at hand, but what were her friends thinking?

She would miss work tomorrow. It seemed on another planet.

“There’s obviously no mattress but I brought pads,” he said. “We’ll sleep on the floor and figure out what to do in the morning.”

“We?”

“You can sack out as near or far as you want. No drama.”

She wished there was drama, just a little, so she could have the satisfaction of telling him to stick to his own side of the cabin, but he seemed as weary as she. So they bedded down on either side of the fireplace, a Puritan six feet between them.

Rominy begged for sleep to come but her mind kept nagging at where she’d seen Hood’s pattern before. Some art museum, maybe, or a child’s book of mazes. Why couldn’t she think of it? She needed sleep! She sneezed from all the dust.

And then it came to her with a bang like the explosion of her beloved car. She sat abruptly upright in her bag. It was utterly dark in the cabin, inky and spooky.

“Jake, I’ve got it!” she hissed.

No reaction.

So she crawled out, still in jeans and her morning’s knit top-she wasn’t about to give him a peek at her panties, although she had considered it-and shook him. “Jake!”

“What?” He’d already fallen asleep. Men!

“I think I’ve got it! Hood’s map-it’s not contours, it’s a fingerprint.”

“Huh?”

“Light the lantern.”

When he did so, both of them shivering in the cold of the cabin now that the fire was only dull coals, she reached inside the cookie tin from the bank and took out Hood’s mummified finger. Carefully she rolled it in the dust of a kitchen shelf and lifted the hissing camp lantern to study the dust. It had left the faint impression of a fingerprint. Then she looked at the inked calendar page. “This one.” Jake bent close. “See? This ridge has the same pattern as his finger.”

He sucked in his breath. “What does that mean?”

“I’ve no idea. It’s midnight in the middle of nowhere.”

He grinned, looking up at her. “I rescued a genius,” he whispered in triumph. And then, before she had a chance to think about it, he kissed her.