Birthright (20 page)

“Who was he?” she asked Jake.

“Which?”

“The femur.”

“He was a man, about thirty-five. About five feet, ten inches tall.” But he knew what she wanted. “He learned how to farm, how to grow food for himself and his tribe. How to hunt for it, fish for it. His father taught him, and he ran the woods as a boy.”

She swiped an arm across her damp forehead. “I think the humerus, those finger bones are his, too. They're the right age, the right size.”

“Could be.”

“And the hand ax we found here.” She squatted down. “That's what killed him. Not that one—they wouldn't have buried him with what killed him, but with one of his own. That slice in the humerus, it's a blow from a hand ax. Was there a war?”

“There's always a war.” There was one in her now, Jake thought. He could see it on her face, and he knew she was using the picture of the man they were building together to keep it at bay.

“Another tribe,” Jake said. “Or maybe a more personal battle within this one. He'd have had a mate, children. He could have died protecting them.”

She smiled a little. “Or he could've been an asshole, gotten himself hyped up on fermented juice, picked a fight and got himself killed.”

“You know, Dunbrook, you're too romantic for your own good.”

“Ain't it the truth. Macho jerks aren't a modern phenom. They've been around since the dawn. Guys bashing each
other's brains out with a rock because it seems like fun at the time. It wasn't always for food or land or defense. Sometimes it was just for sheer meanness. Respecting remains, studying, learning doesn't mean painting our ancestors in pretty pastels.”

“You ought to do a paper on it. ‘The Macho Jerk: His Influence on Modern Man.' ”

“Maybe I will. Whatever he was, he was someone's son, probably someone's father.”

She circled her head to relieve the tension in her neck, then glanced over at the bullet shot of a car door slamming. Her lips twisted into a sneer. “And speaking of jerks.”

“You know this guy?”

“Douglas Cullen.”

“Is that so?” Jake straightened as Callie did, measured the man, as Callie did. “He doesn't look very brotherly at the moment.”

“Stay out of this, Graystone.”

“Now, why'd you have to go and say that?”

“I mean it.” But as she boosted herself out, so did Jake.

Doug strode across the site like a man striding into a battle he had no intention of losing. He noted the man standing beside Callie, and dismissed him.

He had one purpose, and one only. If anybody wanted to give him grief about it, that was fine, too.

He was in the mood.

He stalked up to her, bared his teeth when she tilted her chin up, planted her hands on her hips. Saying nothing, he yanked the legal papers out of his back pocket.

He held them out so she could see what they were, then ripped them to pieces.

Nothing he could have done would have earned her anger—or her respect—quicker. “You're littering on our site, Cullen.”

“You're lucky I didn't stuff it in your mouth then set fire to it.”

Jake stepped forward. “Why don't you pick up the pieces, champ, and try it.”

“Stay out!” Callie jammed an elbow into Jake's belly and didn't move him an inch.

Work around them stopped, reminding her of her confrontation with Dolan. It passed through her mind that she and Douglas Cullen might have more in common than either of them would like.

“This is between her and me,” Doug said.

“That much you got right,” Callie agreed.

“When we're finished, if you want to go a round, I'm available.”

“Assholes through the ages,” Callie grumbled, and solved the problem by stepping between them. “Anybody goes a round,
we
go a round. Now pick up the mess you made and take a hike.”

“Those papers are an insult to me, and to my family.”

“Oh yeah?” Her chin didn't just come up, it thrusted. And behind her shaded glasses, her eyes went molten. “Well, accusing me of being after your mother's money was insulting to me.”

“That's right, it was.” He glanced down at the scraps of paper. “I'd say we're even.”

“No, we'll be even when I tramp around where you work and cause a stink in front of your associates.”

“Okay, right now I'm putting in some time at my grandfather's bookstore. That's Treasured Pages, on Main Street in town. We're open six days a week, ten to six.”

“I'll work it into my schedule.” She tucked her thumbs in her front pockets, stood hip-shot, using body language as an insult. “Meanwhile, get lost. Or I might just give in to the urge to kick your ass and bury you in the kitchen midden.”

She smiled when she said it—a big, wide, mean smile. And the dimples winked out.

“Christ. Jesus Christ.” He stared at her as the ground shifted under his feet.

His face went so pale, his eyes so dark, she worried he might topple over at her feet. “What the hell's wrong with you? You probably don't even know what a kitchen midden is.”

“You look like my mother. Like my mother with my father's eyes. You've got my father's eyes, for God's sake. What am I supposed to do?”

The baffled rage in his voice, the naked emotion on his face were more than her own temper could hold. It dropped out of her, left her floundering. “I don't know. I don't know what any of us . . . Jake.”

“Why don't you take this into Digger's trailer?” He laid a hand on her shoulder, ran it down her back and up again. “I'll finish up here. Go on, Cal.” Jake gave her a nudge. “Unless you want to stand here while everybody on-site laps all this up.”

“Right. Damn. Come on.”

Jake bent down to gather up the torn papers. He glanced to his left, where Digger and Bob had stopped work to watch. Jake's long, cool stare had bright color washing over Bob's face, and a wide grin spreading over Digger's.

They both got busy again.

Shoulders hunched, Callie stalked toward Digger's trailer. She didn't wait to see if Doug followed. His face told her he would, and if he balked, Jake would see to it.

She swung inside, stepped expertly over, around and through the debris to reach the mini-fridge. “We've got beer, water and Gatorade,” she said without turning when she heard the footsteps climb up behind her.

“Jesus, this is a dump.”

“Yeah, Digger gave his servants his lifetime off.”

“Is Digger a person?”

“That's yet to be scientifically confirmed. Beer, water, Gatorade.”

“Beer.”

She pulled out two, popped tops, then turned to offer one.

He just stared at her. “I'm sorry. I don't know how to handle this.”

“Join the club.”

“I don't want you to be here. I don't want you to exist. That makes me feel like scum, but I don't want all this pouring down on my family, on me. Not again.”

The absolute honesty, the sentiment she could
completely understand and agree with, had her reevaluating him. Under some circumstances, she realized, she'd probably like him.

“I don't much care for it myself. I have a family, too. This is hurting them. Do you want this beer, or not?”

He took it. “I want my mother to be wrong. She's been wrong before. Gotten her hopes up, gotten worked up, only to get shot down. But I can't look at you and believe she's wrong this time.”

If she was walking through an emotional minefield, Callie realized, so was he. She'd gotten slapped in the face with a brother. He'd gotten kicked in the balls with a sister.

“No, I don't think she's wrong. We'll need the tests to confirm, but there's already enough data for a strong supposition. That's part of how I make my living, on strong suppositions.”

“You're my sister.” Saying it out loud hurt his throat. He tipped back the beer, drank.

It made her stomach jitter, and again engaged her sym-pathies as she imagined his was doing a similar dance. “It's probable that I
was
your sister.”

“Can we sit down?”

“We'll be risking various forms of infection, but sure.” She dumped books, porn magazines, rocks, empty beer bottles and two excellent sketches of the site off the narrow built-in sofa.

“I just . . . I just don't want you to hurt her. That's all.”

“Why would I?”

“You don't understand.”

“No, okay.” She took off her sunglasses, rubbed her eyes. “Make me understand.”

“She's never gotten over it. I think if you'd died, it would have been easier for her.”

“A little rough on me, but yeah, I get that.”

“The uncertainty, the need to believe she was going to find you, every day, and the despair, every day, when she didn't. It changed her. It changed everything. I lived with her through that.”

“Yeah.” He'd been three, Callie recalled from the newspaper articles. He'd lived his life with it. “And I didn't.”

“You didn't. It broke my parents apart. In a lot of ways, it just broke them. She built a new life, but she built it on the wreck of the one she had before. I don't want to see her knocked off again, wrecked again.”

It made her sick inside, sick and sorry. Yet it was removed from her. Just as the death of the man whose bones she'd unearthed was removed. “I don't want to hurt her. I can't feel for her what you feel, but I don't want to hurt her. She wants her daughter back, and nothing is going to make that happen. I can only give her the knowledge, maybe even the comfort, that I'm alive, that I'm healthy, that I was given a good life with good people.”

“They stole you from us.”

Her hands clenched, ready to defend. “No, they didn't. They didn't know. And because they're the kind of people they are, they're suffering because now they do know.”

“You know them. I don't.”

She nodded now. “Exactly so.”

He got the point. They didn't know each other's family. They didn't know each other. It seemed they'd reached a point where they would have to. “What about you? How are you feeling about all this?”

“I'm . . . scared,” she admitted. “I'm scared because it feels like this is an arc of one big cycle, and it's going to whip around and flatten me. It's already changed my relationship with my parents. It's made us careful with each other in a way we shouldn't have to be. I don't know how long it'll take for us to be easy with each other once more, but I do know it's never going to be quite the same. And that pisses me off.

“And I'm sorry,” she added, “because your mother didn't do anything to deserve this. Or your father. Or you.”

“Or you.” And tossing blame at her, he admitted, had been a way to keep his guilt buried. “What's your first clear memory?”

“My first?” She considered, sipped her beer. “Riding on
my father's shoulders. At the beach. Martha's Vineyard, I'm guessing, because we used to go there nearly every year for two weeks in the summer. Holding on to his hair with my hands and laughing as he danced back and forth in the surf. And I can hear my mother saying, ‘Elliot, be careful.' But she was laughing, too.”

“Mine's waiting in line to see Santa at the Hagerstown Mall. The music, the voices, this big-ass snowman that was kind of freaky. You were sleeping in the stroller.”

He took another sip of beer, steadied himself because he knew he had to get it out. “You had on this red dress—velvet. I didn't know it was velvet. It had lace here.” He ran his hands over his chest. “Mom had taken off your cap because it made you fussy. You had this duck-down hair. Really soft, really pale. You were basically bald.”

She felt something from him now, a connection to that little boy that made her smile at him as she tugged on her messy mane of hair. “I made up for it.”

“Yeah.” He managed a smile in return as he studied her hair. “I kept thinking about seeing Santa. I had to pee like a racehorse, but I wasn't getting out of line for anything. I knew just what I wanted. But the closer we got, the weirder it seemed. Big, ugly elves lurking around.”

“You wonder why people don't get that elves are scary.”

“Then it was my turn, and Mom told me to go ahead, go sit on Santa's lap. Her eyes were wet. I didn't get that she was feeling sentimental. I thought something was wrong, something bad. I was petrified. The mall Santa . . .He didn't look like I thought he was supposed to. He was too big. When he picked me up, let out with the old ho ho ho, I freaked. Started screaming, pushing away, fell off his lap and right on my face. Made my nose bleed.

“Mom picked me up, holding me, rocking me. I knew everything was going to be all right then. Mom had me and she wouldn't let anything happen to me. Then she started screaming, and I looked down. You were gone.”

He took a long drink. “I don't remember after that. It's all jumbled up. But that memory's as clear as yesterday.”

Three years old, she thought again. Terrified, she imagined. Traumatized, and obviously riddled with guilt.

So she handled him the way she'd want to be handled. She took another sip of beer, leaned back. “So, you still scared of fat men in red suits?”

He let out a short, explosive laugh. And his shoulders relaxed. “Oh yeah.”

I
t was after midnight when Dolan moved to the edge of the trees and looked on the site that he'd carefully plotted out into building lots. Antietam Creek Project, he thought. His legacy to his community.

Good, solid, affordable houses. Homes for young families, for families who wanted rural living with modern conveniences. Quiet, picturesque, historic and aesthetic—and fifteen minutes to the interstate.

He'd paid good money for that land. Good enough that the interest on the loan was going to wipe out a year of profit if he didn't get back on schedule and plant the damn things.