About the time Will brought coffee to the table, along with some bread and cheese, Olivia put down her pen and looked up. "Carlos, what was that thing you wanted to show Will?"
"Oh. Yeah." Carlos picked his pack off the floor and dug into it. He laid the little crystal cluster on the table. "You've been looking at rocks all over the place. Seen anything like this?"
Will turned it back and forth in the late afternoon sunlight for a minute or so, then he got up and took down a box of labeled rock samples from an upper bookshelf. After a few seconds of poking around, he took one out.
"Here, Carlos. Tell me what you make of this. Tim Morton brought it to me two years ago, but as yet I have no idea where it fits in the world." The chunk was half the size of Carlos's hand, but it was crystals on one side and a rough crust on the other.
Olivia was looking at it from the other side of the table, though. She suddenly reached out and pointed her finger at the dull backside. "Oh, my God, Carlos! Look at this!" She grabbed it and turned it over. There was a painted number 214, weathered out. It was a piece of their stolen cathedral geode.
And the colors flashed as she turned it. "Madre de Dios! It's ametrine!" The guy who'd sold the unbroken cathedral geode must have thought it was something a lot more common. What he'd charged was a long way short of what it must have been worth.
Will was looking at Carlos as sharply as he'd looked at the rock. "You know what it is?"
Carlos got himself back under control. "Yeah, we do. Ametrine is a rare precious stone, it's a kind of fusion of amethyst and citrine and has zones of the different gemstones. The source I know about is a place in Bolivia called the Anahi Mine. Legend up-time had it that Spain has a good-sized piece in its royal jewels, had it since the sixteenth century. Anybody's guess whether that's true or not. Sometimes it's called trystine or Bolivianite."
Olivia zeroed in on the thing that mattered. "Will, you said Tim Morton found it? Where?"
****
On the way over to the Morton place, Carlos was still trying to take it all in. Olivia filled Will in on what had happened at the storage shed in 1631. All the evidence had screamed that it happened up-time, and what was gone was gone forever. It was such a crushing loss. What it all might have been worth down-time-now this.
Jack Morton came out at the sound of footsteps on the front porch. When Carlos took out the little cluster, his face lit up. "Hello, Mister Villareal. You've found my lucky piece? I wondered what became of it."
Carlos was too speechless to tell him. Livie did, gently. More of the story came out, as Jack led the way down to the edge of the property, by the road along the bottom of the run. He pointed to the patch of dirt and weeds, where he and Tim had found fragments of all sizes, fanned out around an old concrete well casing a few feet from the road. Will squatted down for a close look. "See here, this is scarred and cracked on this side. This is where the geode must have struck and broken apart."
"Hit? You think . . ."
"Yes. Consider the physics. Olivia, you told us that you found the stones gone a few days after the Ring of Fire, and thought they must have been stolen up-time? What we can see here tells us that the thieves must have used an open truck, and rushed off without securing the load properly-likely because of haste or stupidity. So, then, there is a deep pothole, and there is the well casing. I believe the geode was dislodged by the jolt, and fell free, still moving. That motion then carried it on a ballistic arc-" He showed what he meant with his hand, and then pointed his boot at the banged-up well casing. "-here. Where it struck at the speed the truck was traveling, and shattered from the impact."
Carlos felt a flicker of hope. "Jack, did you guys keep any of it? Besides that little piece you had, and the hunk you gave Oughtred?"
"No, just those. Father found someone to buy all we could find. It was a considerable task to carry it all off. It took us several trips."
I can imagine. That beast weighed two hundred pounds. They sure didn't get what it was worth, not if Tim is still tending bar for me down at the Gardens.
Meanwhile, Olivia was looking at the painting on the wall, of the front of a jeep. She suddenly asked, "What's this, Jack?" She was looking at one spot.
"Oh, the car? I painted that when we first moved here, with a bit of what was left over when we repaired the window frames. Not something I would stand here and do again, I'll tell you, not after hearing a couple of rocks thump into the ground. Cool, isn't it?"
"Yes, but what's this?"
Carlos looked at where she had her hand, and froze.
Jack ran on, "Those two little boulders? They were lying just over there. I thought they would do well as headlights, if I were to cement them in the right place and paint them."
Carlos sucked in his breath. The things were spherical, about six inches across, and the last time he'd seen them was in the shed behind the laundromat, before the Ring of Fire. They were two of the three smaller geodes, from the same lot as that monster cathedral geode.
"Livie, do you mind if we ask Will to dinner tonight? I think we have a lot to talk about."
****
Olivia pushed a little bit, trying to make it home before the rain really got going. They still had to dash in through the garage to keep from getting drenched.
A couple of minutes later Paola and Beth came in and vanished into the photography studio behind the kitchen. Will looked at them intently, and raised an eyebrow.
"My two younger daughters."
Paola had a package in her hand when she came out, and said, "Mom, I have to go to Leanna's, I need the keys-Oh, hi, Mr. O!"
"Wait! I need to know-" She was out the door while the words still hung in the air. "Mr. O?"
Will chuckled, "I'm sometimes called that at the high school. Some of the students are quite impressive." He smiled toward where Paola had gone. "That one is what they call a math head. She has a quick theoretical grasp. She would do well to continue with it."
"Oh. Cute. I hadn't heard that name, but then I hardly ever get to the high school."
"But you do teach, I recall?"
"Well, I taught photography for a while, more the artistic side than the technical. But I decided I'd better hang onto the film I still have in my freezer. I hear they're about ready to start making it, though, so maybe I'll start giving lessons again."
Will gave her a sympathetic smile and went over to look at the large portrait on the wall above the fireplace. He studied it closely for a few moments. "Speaking of photographs, this one is quite impressive. I don't believe I've seen one this fine. Done by a student of yours?"
"No, my mom and I took a trip to Malta in 1981. We went over to Gozo for a couple of days, and when Mom spotted a portrait studio near the beach, she wouldn't let up until I had my picture done. He really was an artist, but I think he went overboard with the costuming and props."
"Mmm-hmm. I like the way he used the mirror to show your face from two angles. Quite ingenious. Well, that explains the wall plaque beneath the mirror. Do you know what it says?"
"No, it's Greek to me."
"Ha! It's from Homer, the Odyssey. 'There is an isle, Ogygia, which lies far off in the sea. Therein dwells the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas, guileful Calypso, a dread goddess, and with her no-one either of gods or mortals hath aught to do.' A very apt description of Calypso, I might add."
July 10
Grantville looked a lot different ever since the food crisis in '31 made a deep dent in ornamental gardening. Olivia sat on the back patio resting her eyes for a while on the two white rose bushes they'd kept, turning over in her mind the problem of cutting three verses of poetry down to two, and still bringing it to a clean ending. Finally, she decided the best thing was to leave it for a while, and turned her hands to the potato patch.