Chapter 57
Rose had insisted over the phone that Beatrice bring her new friend with her. “We’ve plenty of room here,” she’d said. “You can’t leave him alone with Vera. She’ll make mincemeat of him with all her questions.”
Beatrice had agreed, so she and Jon made the trek up to the mountain, driven by Samuel, Rose’s youngest son. Jon was tired from his flight and napped most of the way. Beatrice didn’t mind. Bluegrass music filled the car, and she relaxed and let the music lift her spirits even more. Samuel had never been much of a talker, so the trip was mostly scenery and music, which suited Beatrice just fine.
When they arrived, Rose had laid a table for them. They ate a late supper of wild turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, pickled okra, and biscuits.
“I’ve not had wild turkey in years,” Beatrice said. “I’ve forgotten how good it is. How different.”
“It’s a magnificent feast!” Jon said, lifting his wineglass. “My compliments to the cook!”
“Thank you,” Rose said, blushing.
Beatrice laughed. She took another bite of her gravy-soaked mashed potatoes and swore she couldn’t take another bite of anything, until Rose brought out a pumpkin pie.
“Made from pumpkins out of the garden,” she said, smiling at Beatrice.
“You know me. That’s my favorite. Lord, I can barely stand canned pumpkin these days,” Beatrice said.
Jon’s eyes grew wider. “I’ve never seen this kind of pie before.”
“You’re in for a treat,” Beatrice said.
While Jon was working on his third piece of pie, Beatrice sipped her tea, more satisfied than she had been in quite some time. Homemade mountain cooking from her cousin always soothed her. But this time was different. She looked at Jon, and a warm rush of acceptance came over her. Now she felt able to admit how she felt about him to herself. He and Rose had taken to one another like family already. The food of home, the good company, and the surrounding autumn hills, trees ablaze in crimson, gold, orange. Yes, she was home.
“How is the murder case going?” Rose asked her.
Beatrice filled her in.
“And Cookie?”
“She is still in jail, as far as I know. Speaking of which, I have to take care of something for her tomorrow. I promised I’d take this scrapbook of hers and place it in the caves. It’s going to help her somehow.”
“Really? That’s an odd request.”
“You’ll have to trust me on this. Maybe someday we can talk about it. But for now, I can’t tell you much more than that.”
Rose’s gray eyes lit up as she lifted her eyebrows. “I love those caves. We had such fun there as kids. Remember?”
Beatrice nodded, looking at her cousin, a few years younger than herself, wrinkled, a little hunched over, with heavy lids, but still Rose as a girl was in Beatrice’s memory as clear as day. She still had the same smile, the same mannerisms. Beatrice thought about how time was not a friend to our bodies—but to our spirits, if we were lucky, it was the best thing.
“You know, there are all sorts of stories about those caves,” Rose noted.
“I sort of remember . . . ,” Beatrice said.
“The creek that runs underneath them, along with the calcite, and their exact coordinates make it a wonderful place for meditation, prayer, ritual. We used to have the best midsummer rituals there.”
“Do you go there often anymore?”
“No,” Rose said. “I’ve stopped. A few years back a new group started holding rituals and things up there. Moving rocks around. Taking too many herbs and plants and not reseeding. Bad energy.” Rose was a practitioner of what was frequently called PowWow, which was a combination of old German wisewoman beliefs and Christianity, blended with Native American precepts. Rose saw no irony in this belief system. It made sense to her to blend it all together.
“What do you mean?” Beatrice asked.
Rose shrugged. “I used to go up there and collect herbs and mushrooms. The mushrooms stopped coming. The herbs left there are not quality. I’ve found evidence of ritual, but not earth-friendly ritual. They leave their trash. Also, the calcite is disappearing.”
Interesting. Didn’t Cookie mention calcite?
“Will you stop mincing words with me? What’s going on up there?” Beatrice said.
“It’s a group of people who call themselves the New Mountain Order. Zeb McClain has set himself up as some kind of guru. I don’t know what they are up to. Some folks say they are Mennonite. Some say they are pagan.” She stopped and looked at Beatrice. “But they are neither,” Rose said.
“How do you know?” Beatrice said, feeling a little scared now about taking Cookie’s beautiful scrapbook up there and leaving it. She had said. ‘You’ve got to be careful, Bea, to see that nobody catches you or takes the book before you have it in place’.”
“I was talking to some people about them. What they are doing is making up a religion based on some other religions. They claim they are going back to their German roots and practicing an old Germanic paganism called Asatru. But they seem to be blending some Mennonite precepts into it and, from the looks of it, neo-Nazism,” Rose said.
“It’s stupid young people wasting their time,” Beatrice said.
“Oh, Bea, I wish that was so,” Rose said. “But there seem to be new people coming here as their ‘followers’ all the time. And they know enough about magic and the elements to be dangerous. Lawd, have mercy.”
Cookie’s words came back to Beatrice. Cookie was telling the truth.... At least this part of her story held up.
“Magic? Humph,” Beatrice said.
“Call it magic or call it prayer. Call it whatever you want.”
Beatrice’s brain clicked. “Do you think these folks would know anything about the baby? Or the murders? You know, that Luther boy was questioned, and his DNA was taken to see if he was the father.”
“Land sakes, Beatrice, everybody up here knows who that baby’s father is. It’s Zeb.”
“What? He’s old enough to be Rebecca’s father!” Beatrice sat back and crossed her arms.
“And that’s who she was living with, off and on, during her pregnancy.”
“Why don’t the police know this?”
Rose sipped more of her herb tea. “I should think they do by now. All they’d had to do was talk to anybody in Jenkins Hollow about it.”
Beatrice sighed. There was Annie and Vera and all the scrapbook club trudging around on the mountain the other night, among all these crazy people! They could’ve been killed. Oh, the stupidity.
The next morning the alarm went off at four. Beatrice was loath to rise from her bed of quilts, but she could smell the coffee brewing and was hoping for a piece of pie before they went up to the caves. Sure enough, Rose had the pie there—along with biscuits, gravy, and scrambled eggs.
Beatrice was grateful for a full stomach and a thermos of herb tea as they took off through the woods. She was surprised to find that Jon kept up with two old, strong-legged mountain women. It was a slow and steady climb compared to their youthful jaunts.
Once, while taking a break and sitting on a boulder, Jon looked out over the quickly fading fall-colored landscape and marveled at the beauty of it. “No wonder you never want to leave here,” he said.
“I don’t get up here often enough,” Beatrice told him.
“C’mon, you two. Let’s go,” Rose said.
The caves were almost exactly as Beatrice remembered them, but the entrance looked smaller. Huge mountain laurels grew around the craggy opening. She found herself grateful that they’d not be going far inside today. When they were kids, they had no idea what dangers were inside. These caves were wild and not some tourist attraction.
Beatrice clutched the scrapbook as she watched Rose enter the cave opening. The caves had grabbed her by the heart from the first time she’d entered them.
As Beatrice grew up, she had learned about the mystical meaning of caves. In literature, caves represented many things—the womb, a place of safety and creativity, a sanctuary, a mysterious or unexplored part of ourselves. Of course, mythology was rich with cave references. Zeus was raised in a cave by Rhea. Somnus, the god of sleep, resided in a cave where the sun never shone and everything was in silence. And the great Oracle at Delphi was deep in a cave. Beatrice loved great stories—whether they were about myths, mathematics, love, or crystals.
“Every time I enter this place, I think of Jesus being buried in a cave,” Rose said once Beatrice and Jon were at her side.
“That was more common than you think,” Beatrice said.
“Many people worshipped in them. Before . . . anything. . . caves were recognized as the womb of Mother Earth,” said Jon.
Beatrice smiled and turned back to look at him. She ran her fingers along the rocky walls and breathed in the cool, damp air. The three traveled together in single file, Beatrice in the center, until she spied the diamond-shaped rock.
She blinked hard. Was she seeing things, or did something give off a little spark? She remembered her murky childhood dreams of this place. She was often mesmerized by the sparks coming from the calcite that was all around and by the light from small openings here and there. It bounced and created an otherworldly effect, depending on the time of day.
“Here it is,” she said. “The rock I need to leave this thing on.”
She placed the shiny, thick book in the center of the dusty gray-brown rock and was relieved to have shed its weight. She glanced down in the ravine next to the rock. She’d dreamed about that spot, too, about falling into it. One of her mother’s fears and admonitions.
“Shall we go a little farther?” Rose asked.
“Certainly,” Jon said.
Beatrice hesitated. “Why don’t you two go without me? I’ll catch up or catch you on the way back.”
Rose shook her head. “Now, Bea, we can’t leave you here by yourself. Against the rules. You know that. We stick together.”
Beatrice knew she would say that.
“Jesus, Rose, I’ve been coming up here since I was a child. I’m not going to do anything foolish. I just want to sit here with the scrapbook a few more minutes.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. We’ll stay together until you’re ready to move on.” She looked at Beatrice with a firmness in her jaw, which, Beatrice knew, meant she was resolved to stay.
“Suit yourself,” Beatrice said, sitting on the ledge of a rock that was there. Jon sat beside her, reaching for her hand. She looked down at their hands touching like this. Such a human gesture. She thought about the generations that came before her and what the simple act of holding a hand could mean. She wondered who the first human was that discovered how important touch was to life. How important this one gesture was.
Yet she dared not look at her cousin, or else they would burst into fits of schoolgirl giggles. So she kept her eyes lowered. Then, suddenly, the sparks in the cave became more vibrant, and she lifted her eyes to see her cousin looking at them and smiling in awe at the little lights everywhere.
The light was bluish, then white, and it seemed to get brighter. All three of them were spellbound by the lights and shadows. It felt like time was standing still. Beatrice wanted to imprint this moment on her brain so she would never forget the beauty.
And just as suddenly the lights faded, and Beatrice swore she could hear something scuttling. A rat? A bat? A bear?
“I’ve never seen that before. In all the years I’ve been coming here,” Rose finally said.
Beatrice nodded. “Me neither.”
“Extraordinary,” Jon said in a hushed tone.
Beatrice glanced at the diamond-shaped rock, where she’d placed the scrapbook. It was gone. Vanished. She walked over to the rock and ran her hands along it. Yep. Gone.
“What happened to the scrapbook?” Jon asked.
“Maybe it fell,” Beatrice said, shining her light into the crevice. Even with the flashlight, it was hard to see, for the hole reached farther into the mountain than her light could reach. “I don’t see it.”
“Well,” Rose said and placed her hands on her hips, “it couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. It must have fallen. We can’t do anything about it now.”
Beatrice thought a moment. Could it be that everything Cookie had told her was true? Up until this moment, she had entertained the possibilities but hadn’t exactly believed any of it. Did the scrapbook of shadows disappear into a time warp?
Beatrice shrugged. “I guess we will never know.” As a quantum physicist, she was used to such conclusions and accepted them readily, but Rose was not and took off toward the entrance.
“Now, either someone took the damned book while we were stargazing or it fell. If someone took it, we damned well are going to find them,” Rose declared.
When they came out into the open air, it didn’t look like anybody was around. But Rose pointed to a boot print in the dirt. “Was that here before?”
Beatrice and Jon shrugged.