Follow the Sun (59 page)

“
Kat
. The mining rights are yours, now—yours and your cousins’. I found out some things that put the family feud in a different light. Tess and Erica are staying
at the Peachtree Plaza, waiting to see you this morning. Don’t worry. They know the truth now, and they’re proud of you. Our deal’s done. I’m going to Surador. You’re free, Katie.”

Kat lay back on the couch, tears scalding her eyes. “Not free,” she whispered. “Just alone.”

CHAPTER 10

T
ESS AND ERICA
grabbed her duffel bag, then drew her into their hotel room and hugged her. She immediately began to cry. “You don’t hate me?” Kat asked.

“For trying to rescue the land?” Erica asked, sniffling.

“And falling in love with a sweet man like Nathan?” Tess added.

“How do you know I’m in love with him?”

They led her to a couch and sat down on either side of her. “We suspected it that day at the homeplace.”

“We
know
how people look at each other when they’re in love.”

“We’re really quite expert on it, both of us.”

Kat smiled at them wanly. Nathan didn’t love her, but she couldn’t bring herself to say so at the moment. “Why did he give us the mining rights back?”

“Because he loves you.”

“And because it’s the only honorable thing to do,
now that he’s seen the other side of the Chatham-Gallatin feud.”

Kat wiped her eyes and looked from Tess to Erica in surprise. “Another side?”

“The family history Dove wrote down. Grandpa Sam finished translating it,” Erica explained. “We told Nathan. He said it was too detailed and made too much sense not to be true.”

She took Kat’s right hand. Tess took her left one. Kat looked back and forth between them, scrutinizing the solemn excitement in their eyes. “What did Dove say?”

Tess smiled. “Your great-grandfather Holt didn’t shoot Nathaniel Chatham, but he was a prime suspect because everyone knew the Gallatins despised Nathaniel.”

“Nathaniel was the Union officer who captured Justis in the Indian Territory during the war,” Erica reminded Kat. “His men took everything the Gallatins owned. The only way Katherine could save Justis from being executed was to bribe one of Chatham’s men with the three medallions. After Justis escaped, Chatham found out about the bribe and confiscated the medallions.”

“That’s what the big scandal was about,” Tess noted. “Chatham was accused of taking part in the bribe, because he also had a gold nugget that belonged to Justis.”

Kat frowned, trying to sort everything out. “So Chatham kept our medallions?”

Tess nodded. “At least that’s what everyone thought. It couldn’t be proved. But it’s why Holt was accused of ambushing him, a few years after the war. The Chatham family started a campaign to have Holt arrested and tried—”

“And for a Cherokee, that meant automatic death,” Erica explained. “So Holt became an outlaw. He had to.”

Kat looked at her askance. “So he
did
go around blasting people?”

“No, he went around robbing every business the Chathams owned. Dove said he never shot anyone except in self-defense, not in all the years he tormented the Chathams.”

“Until finally they sent a small army of U.S. marshals after him,” Tess interjected. “Holt had a log fortress hidden in the hills. The marshals found it, and when Holt refused to surrender, they burned the place to the ground.”

Kat felt Erica’s and Tess’s hands squeezing hers tighter. Erica looked at her sympathetically. “But the horrible thing was, Holt wasn’t there. His wife was there, and his five children, and they’d lied to the marshals to throw them off Holt’s track.”

Kat winced. “So that’s why Dove and my grandfather Joshua were born so late in Holt’s life. They were his second family. Poor Great-Grandfather.”

Tess nodded. “Right. And after that. Holt waged war on the marshals
and
the Chathams.”

“Finally, thirty years after Nathaniel was shot, a witness came forward and said that Holt wasn’t responsible.”

“So Great-Grandpa was cleared of the murder charge, and he turned peaceful?” Kat asked.

Both cousins nodded. “But he never forgot that the Chathams had his mother’s medallions,” Erica said. “When he was an old man he and Eli, Nathaniel’s son, tried to call a truce. Eli said he’d give the medallions back if Holt would sign over the mining rights to the Blue Song land in Georgia.”

“So that’s why Great-Grandpa did it,” Kat said softly. “But why’d he and Eli have a gunfight years later?”

“They just plain couldn’t stand each other,” Tess said, imitating Kat’s sideways twang.

“So they killed each other. Dove inherited the Blue Song land and the medallions.”

Kat sighed. “She got Eli’s married son, Micah, too.”

Erica straightened proudly. “Well, I believe in Dove. I live in her house now, you know, and I think
that she told the truth about everything, including Micah.”

“So what’d she say?”

“Oh, they were having an affair, all right,” Tess admitted. “But they’d been in love for years before Micah married someone else. Eli wouldn’t let his son marry a Gallatin—he threatened to disinherit him, and apparently Micah was
not
gallant enough to forgo money to marry Dove.”

“Dove made the mistake of still loving him,” Erica noted. “But I think we can forgive her for loving too deeply, can’t we?”

Kat nodded. “Then she got pregnant—”

“And she went to England to save everyone some grief.”

“But Micah’s wife learned the truth, anyway. End of story.”

Kat looked at her cousins with tears that matched their own. “But what happened after Dove’s baby and her English husband died?”

“Dove came back to the States and settled on the reservation in North Carolina.”

“Did Dove say anything about Justis and Katherine? I guess they’d passed on before she was born.”

“Yes, but she wrote down what Holt told her,” Tess said softly. “The only reason Justis had to have
a
white wife was to keep Katherine’s land for her. In the state of Georgia any man who married a Cherokee was considered a Cherokee, too. He would have lost everything, including the Blue Song land.”

“And Amarintha Parnell needed a respectable husband,” Erica said, “who was willing to give a respectable name to a baby that wasn’t his.”

Kat sank her head in her hands. “So Justis kept up a show for Katlanicha’s sake.”

There was a knock at the door. “Must be the pot of tea I ordered,” Tess murmured, as she crossed the room. “We can certainly use it.”

The waiter tromped inside, loaded with a full tray,
and immediately tripped over Kat’s duffel bag. As everyone tried to help him up, he grimaced.

“Are you hurt?” Tess inquired.

“My foot hit something
hard
in that bag. I think I broke it.”

“Your foot?” Erica asked.

“No. Whatever’s in the end of the bag.”

“My sash weight!” Kat cried. She pulled the bag open and dug clothes out of it desperately. “It was so rusty and frail. And it’s hollow, Nathan said. If it’s broken—not today, please, not today, I can’t take it-”

Kat stuck one hand into the bag and hit a pile of metal fragments. Swallowing tightly, she finally managed to say, “It’s broken into about a hundred little pieces.”

“There are two dozen more of those weights back at the homeplace,” Tess said gently.

Erica hugged Kat’s shoulders. “That’s right.”

But this is the first one Nathan and I found together
. Crying silently, Kat pulled a handful of broken metal out of the bag.

The coins caught the light and held it—golden, ageless, and shimmering with dreams that had finally come true.

K
AT HAD A
quarter of a million dollars, her share of the modern market value for 850 gold coins minted before 1810. Hidden inside twenty-five hollow iron sash weights, the rare coins were expected to send collectors all over the world into a frenzy. There were an additional thirty coins, but each of the Gallatin cousins kept ten for sentimental reasons.

Nathan put the newspaper down and wished he hadn’t gotten this news on his first day back from Surador. He’d lived for this day, hoping that time and restored mining rights had helped Kat forget that he’d tried to manipulate her into staying with him.

And that he had every intention of manipulating her again
.

Nathan smiled grimly. The medallion would help him win her. He was the only person who knew what it said, who knew what great-great-grandmother Katlanicha had been waiting all these years to tell them.

“
L
ISTEN!
his name
is Tahchee. He is adopted of the Deer clan. His body, I take it. His flesh, I take it. His heart, I take it. Bind his soul to mine, never to turn away. I am
da-nitaka
, standing in his soul. It was decided long ago.”

She’d said those words several times a day for the past three weeks. If anything could make Nathan come here on her terms, they would. The conniving rogue was home from Surador, and if he wanted his gold nugget back, he’d have to beg for it—and bring her medallion to trade.

If he didn’t, she’d have to think of another way to get him to come to her.

The brisk September air made her glad she’d donned a long-sleeved work shirt, plus knee-high socks under her jeans and Reeboks. A breeze carried whispers of fall through the trees, and a hawk swung overhead, black against a deep blue sky. Kat watched it quietly.

The hawk floated for a moment as if suspended in time, and then glided out of sight.

Carrying rough sketches of her house, Kat shut the door of the camper she’d rented and walked along the ridge to the old homesite. It was cleared now, the crumbling fieldstone foundation showing where the Blue Song house had stood and also showing, with the blackened rocks, that it had burned the day the soldiers came.

She, Tess, and Erica figured that even Katlanicha and Justis hadn’t known about the sash weights full of gold coins. Justis would have had plenty of opportunity to gather them during his trips back to Georgia to visit Amarintha Parnell, and he surely wouldn’t
have left the sash weights lying around on open ground, thinking that no one would steal them.

Obviously Katlanicha’s parents had hidden the gold coins when they built their house, before their children were born.

So the land was a legacy from Katlanicha Blue Song, who became Katherine Gallatin but never forgot her Cherokee homeplace; and the coins were a legacy from the Blue Song family.

Kat stood in the center of the old homesite, thinking how the house was going to rise from the ashes like a phoenix, restored as close to the way it’d looked” before as she could determine, though maybe it’d be a little bigger—there had to be plenty of room for Tess and Erica to visit with their families. They expected to build places here someday, but for now she’d be the only Gallatin on the property.

Well, not the only one, but the only flesh-and-blood one. Okay, so she really didn’t believe in ghosts—she simply liked to think she wasn’t alone here. Nothing odd about that.

Kat shut her eyes and pictured the house finished before Christmas. Her first Christmas in her old home. Her old home?

“
Osiyo
, Katlanicha.”

She dropped her sketches and whirled, searching the woods. Nathan, dressed in his buckskin breeches, moccasins, and a light gray sweater the color of his eyes, was leaning against an oak, his arms crossed nonchalantly over his chest as he watched her.

Her medallion gleamed on the end of the long gold chain he wore.

Her heart racing, Kat pulled the chain with the gold nugget out of her shirt. “
Osiyo
, you sly-footed hellion.”

He smiled slowly and walked toward her, every step a measured enticement telling her that he read the welcome in her eyes. But this feud wasn’t over.

Nathan stopped too close for her comfort and said in a droll voice, “You’re a rich little hummingbird now. You’ve got money, you’ve got your land, you’ve
got your home—and nobody can ever hurt it again. That’s what Katherine and Justis intended. You don’t need to know what your medallion says. Everything’s settled.”