The heat wave had broken, thank goodness. Today would be a perfect seventy-eight-degree summer day, not so hot that tempers would rise exponentially due to discomfort. Tempers would be bad enough without the added stress of dehydration and sunburn.
A cool breeze courtesy of the Willamette River, which snaked alongside the park, wafted across the wide swath of grass. The grass strip was so long, it intersected with three bridges. Josh and his team had set up at the south end of the park, just below the historic vertical-lift truss bridge, the oldest of its kind in operation in the United States, according to Maddie, who was prone to giving fun facts about historic structures within the city.
He glanced toward the hotel where she and Ava were holed up, but kept his gaze moving, in case White Patriots were watching. He didn’t want them to see him pay undue interest to that particular building. He scanned to the area where Portland Police Bureau officers were inspecting volunteers for weapons.
Given that many who’d signed up to protect counterprotesters had a history of confrontations with cops, this act went against their sense of self-preservation, but still, they were here, playing by the rules that Josh had managed to negotiate to keep everyone as safe as possible.
Desmond was back, his cut from three weeks ago now a thin line across his dark skin. Remembering his promise to Ava, Josh would invite the young man over for dinner, except he didn’t exactly have a house just yet. And he probably should discuss it with Maddie first, given that the current plan was that they’d all move to a safe house once it was ready.
Maddie.
His body, his heart, heated yet again. Last night had been a new beginning. A restart. A damn miracle. And this morning had been a continuation. He’d woken in her bed to find her hands on him, as if she couldn’t get enough, and he’d made love to her again, knowing it was the first of thousands of mornings that would follow the same pattern.
She’d come apart in his arms, his body giving her everything she demanded, and damn if it wasn’t a thousand times more satisfying than anything he’d felt before.
He’d been waiting his whole life for this morning and hadn’t even known it.
They still had much to work out, and he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that it would be smooth sailing with Ava from here on out either, but there was so much he had to hope for.
He focused on the scene before him. He needed to get his head out of the dreamy afterglow of magnificent sex and get his head—the one on top of his body—in the game. He had a job to do.
Cleared by the police, Desmond approached. After his experience at the last rally, he’d been promoted to green T-shirt and could take a place on the front line if he wanted it, but could also choose to hang back, interspersed with the crowd. Josh wouldn’t pressure him either way.
“Your niece going to be here today?” Desmond asked in a voice that was so not casual, but clearly trying to be.
Josh couldn’t suppress his smile. “Nope. No way. Too distracting for me if she or Maddie were here.”
“Maddie’s your girl? The one who was with Ava at the gym last week?”
“Yes,” Josh said, utterly thankful the relationship was truer now than it had been when Owen joked about it on the radio at the last rally. “She’s all mine,” he added in a whisper that was only for himself. Every curvy inch of her.
“Good. That they’re not here, then. I mean.” Desmond’s words came out a bit stumbling.
It appeared the interest between Ava and Desmond went both ways. As much as that made Josh happy for Ava’s sake, it also filled him with a little dread. Was he ready to deal with the prospect of her dating?
He’d just become a father. He was supposed to have seventeen years to prepare for this moment, and instead, he’d had less than two months. At some point in the future when he could catch his breath, he’d have a stiff drink and assess what bad karma he’d incurred to bring him to this point.
“You want to take the front line, or work the crowd?” Josh asked.
“Front line. No way are those assholes going to scare me off with their bullshit false flag tactics of trying to make it look like we instigated violence.”
“Okay, then. Take your spot. Counterprotesters and White Patriots should start arriving any minute, and we need to be ready.”
“Yes, sir,” Desmond said and went to the line of thin barricades that were supposed to separate counterprotesters from rally attendees on this side of the bridge.
Other volunteers passed inspection and took their places. Slowly, the park began to fill. Josh couldn’t stop himself from glancing toward the hotel again. The two women who were his whole world waited, unprotected, but locked in tight until the rally was over and he and Chase could return.
They were safe. They had planned for every contingency. He needed to focus on the men and women who were here on the front lines and protect them as he’d promised.
The park was filling up fast on both sides of the barricades that had been set up to separate White Patriots from Josh’s team. She was so damned impressed with his willingness to put his physical body on the front line. That man, who lived his convictions, who volunteered his time so others could do the same, was hers.
She glanced at Ava, whose attention was divided between the television and her phone. Local news channels were just beginning coverage of the rally, while counterprotesters were live tweeting from their side of the barricades. Ava was following the hashtag and, Maddie suspected, looking for pictures of Desmond.
The girl had a full-on crush. It was sweet to see, but Maddie also knew Ava was scared for Desmond.
It was impossible not to be worried, given the situation. Josh had been a Navy SEAL, and still Maddie worried. This wasn’t an op. These were Holocaust-denying American citizens who talked about taking “their” country back with violence.
And Josh was down there on the literal front line.
It was scary stuff, and just two days ago, she’d been abducted by one of them.
This rally would be bigger than the last. For starters, it was at a larger, more central park, but also, after the news coverage three weeks ago, even more news organizations had shown up to document every second. The road that fronted the hotel and paralleled both park and river was lined with satellite trucks. She opened Facebook on her laptop to see what was being said about the Portland rally there. There would probably be live videos taken by counterprotestors.
A notification popped up for one of her favorite groups—Archaeologists for Science and Freedom. It was a safe space for roughly five thousand of her colleagues to discuss what was happening in the world and how attacks on the veracity of scientific data and historical facts affected their profession. They discussed the suppression of data on climate change, and academics posted when their universities took action to curtail research at the behest of government or corporations. There were several threads calling out professors for sexually harassing students in the wake of #MeToo.
Failures in NAGPRA enforcement popped up a fair amount, as well as pleas for help when willful destruction of archaeological sites was occurring unchecked. Many landowners believed that because they owned the property, they could destroy sites, but in most states, it remained illegal to knowingly destroy an archaeological site even when on private property. But enforcement of those laws only happened when Cultural Resource Management professionals knew the destruction was happening and it was documented.
The group was a cornucopia of information on what was going on in the world of CRM, mostly in the US, but with contributing members from all over the world. She clicked on the notification, which indicated she’d been tagged in a post, and smiled when she read it. A man she’d worked with several years ago said he intended to go to the rally and was thankful for the Raptor-Bond Ironworks alliance to make it safer for counterprotestors. He tagged Maddie, asking that she thank Josh for him personally, and added concern and support for her abduction on Friday. In the two hours since the post had gone up, there were over two hundred comments from her colleagues, all offering her support and virtual hugs and appreciation for the work she did. Some people knew her, like the original poster, because they’d worked or gone to school together, some were well-known and respected archaeologists who only knew her from the group, and still others were lurkers with unfamiliar names. Her eyes teared as she read them all.
In her rush to shut down social media yesterday, she’d forgotten that in safe spaces like this one, it could also be a comfort.
“Why are you crying?” Ava asked.
“I’m having a Sally Field moment.”
“What does that mean? Who is Sally Field?”
“She’s an actress who, when she won her second Oscar, gave a really sweet and heartfelt speech about what it meant to be liked by all her peers. And she was mocked for it, but really, her genuine emotion was kind of wonderful.”
“Oh. She’s the ‘you really like me’ woman.”
“Yes. She’s also a brilliant actress.”
“And why are you having a Sally Field moment?”
Maddie patted the bed beside her. “Come see. Your uncle is part of it too.”
Ava settled on the bed and leaned close to read the post, then she scrolled through all the comments. She’d scrolled through only about a third of them—with more being added every minute—when she put her arm around Maddie in a surprising, spontaneous hug and said, “Oh, wow. This is really cool. You deserve it, Maddie.”
Maddie hugged Ava back, fully crying now. This was their first hug, and Ava had offered it to comfort her, not the other way around. “Thanks, Ava.”
“I’m glad you and Uncle Josh are back together,” she whispered. “He deserves to be happy too.”
She squeezed the girl, out of words for the moment. She was under no illusion that the road wouldn’t get bumpy again, but right now, she believed she and Ava could forge their own relationship in which Maddie existed in a space somewhere between uncle’s girlfriend and maternal stand-in.
Ava loosened her grip and idly scrolled down the comments. “This one’s from Cressida. I’ve never met her, but Uncle Josh has talked about her. She married another guy from Raptor last year.”
Maddie clicked the heart reaction on Cressida’s comment. “I met her a year and a half ago, when I was in DC and visited Trina.”
“Is…everything okay with the Trina thing? With Uncle Josh, I mean?”
Maddie nodded. “We’re fine. I was never worried about his feelings for Trina. After all, I know what it’s like to have an unbearable crush on her too.”
“You’re not jealous?”
“No.” Maddie smiled at seeing another familiar name in the list of comments. She’d never met the woman, but she’d heard a lot about her from Trina. She pointed to the name on the screen. “Have you ever watched any of Stefan Gray’s marine biology documentaries?”
“I think so.”
“That’s his daughter, Undine. She used to work with Trina and the others in DC.”
Maddie hearted Undine’s comment too and kept scrolling. She would email Cressida and Undine a personal note later. Which reminded her, she needed to send all her real-life friends a note telling them what they meant to her.
Josh and Keith had shared their emotions in the wake of nearly losing their friend Tricia. Maddie had been abducted, and, except for Trina, she hadn’t reached out to anyone.
She’d sent a quick note to her parents, of course, but hadn’t even checked email for a response, and she hadn’t given her mother her new cell phone number. Hadn’t called her brother at all.
She reached the end of the comments and scrolled down to the next post. She hadn’t checked this group in days—maybe weeks? Life had been something of a blur for the last three weeks.
There was a funny archaeology comic posted, followed by a post about global warming and the melting of permafrost in Alaska resulting in the erosion of archaeological sites on the northwestern coast, complete with a sad video taken by an archaeologist on survey for a military project.
The next post was a link to a news article about a twenty-five-hundred-year-old skeleton that had been stolen from a museum in Norway. All that remained of the early Iron Age remains in the museum’s storage facility were the smaller bones. The theft had been discovered a week before, and the post had gone up in the group Friday morning. From the comments, it appeared it had been posted, then disappeared, then reposted multiple times. Either Facebook was wonky, or someone in the group was screwing with posts. But it wasn’t the technical issues that caught her attention, it was the photo that accompanied the report. Familiar. But of course, she spent her days looking at skeletons and, on a basic level, all skeletons looked alike.
She clicked through to view the larger, higher-resolution image on the news website and couldn’t stifle her gasp. Not only was the right ulna broken in two and the femur broken in three, but there was distinctive red staining on the clavicles and scapulae, identical to the remains she’d found in a closet in the Kocher Mansion.