“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.”