TREASURE KILLS (Legends of Tsalagee Book 1) (19 page)

Without a word, but amid the gasps of all those watching, she swiftly lowered the pot and filled the cup in front of Punch, sloshing a good portion over the cup’s top and into the saucer. When the pain didn’t come, Punch opened one eye to venture a look at her, but only found her stony stare while she held the pot in a re-cocked position. He gave her another lip-twitching smile.

Hayward, the closest witness, vainly tried to suppress his amusement by taking a sip of his own joe, but ended up snorting it onto the counter, then breaking into a coughing fit. Jo Lynn walked away from Punch giving Hayward a couple of sound pounds on his back as she passed behind him. Everyone else returned to eating, believing the immediate crisis had passed.

After Hayward had recovered, and started yanking out paper napkins from the chrome counter dispenser to wipe up his spewed coffee, he said to Punch, “So what’s this all about?”

“Aw, she’s always mad at me about something.”

“I know that, you knucklehead. I mean why’d you want to meet me here?”

“Well, you know that letter you’s talking about at the last Founders Day meeting?”

“Letter?” Hayward said. He paused to think. “Oh, you mean that Ed Reed letter that was supposed to be with Buck’s picture?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what about it.”

“I got it.”

“You got it? How’d you get it?” Hayward said in a louder than normal voice.

Punch looked over his shoulder at the inquisitive eyes of the other patrons looking back at him. He pinched his face and lips into a shush expression and leaned closer to Hayward. “I took it from the back of the picher after Sunny found it.”

“Why’d you do that?” Hayward asked with a hint of disapproval.

“I don’t know why,” Punch said. “I remember Buck and you talking about that letter and that treasure. I guess I thought if I had the letter...well, you know. But when I read it, it didn’t make no sense. When I saw that picher I just took the letter on the spur of the moment.”

“Well, why didn’t you just come out with it at the last meeting when we all talked about it?”

“I guess I just didn’t want to take the ration I figured I’d get from Sunny for taking it.”

Hayward looked square at Punch with mock astonishment. “Oh, so you thought keeping it to yourself would keep you out of her crosshairs. Now it makes sense why you been ducking and hiding all week like a scared rabbit.” Hayward shook his head and chuckled scornfully. “I swear, son. If you ain’t one piece of work when it comes to women. You might ought to think about moving to Tibet and becoming a monk.”

Punch looked contrite and embarrassed. “I know,” he said. Then after a few seconds asked, “Where’s Tibet?”

“Well, it’s sure a hell of a long way from here, I can tell you that. But the good news for you would be that the only females you’d likely encounter there would probably be yaks.”

“Is them some kind of Chinese?” Punch asked.

Hayward sighed, thinking the conversation was getting off track. “What’s my part in all of this?” he asked.

“I wanted to give you the letter.”

“Me? Why don’t you just give it to Euliss? She’s the committee chair.”

“Oh, no. Don’t think I wanna do that. I don’t need another woman ragging on me. Besides, I thought maybe you could kind of help cool things off between Sunny and me.”

Hayward looked at Punch incredulously, then he looked around the room to make sure Jo Lynn and Galynn weren’t within earshot. “Well now, I think the last thing I want to do is get in between you and your women’s sights. Naw, you better come up with another idea.”

“Aw come on, Hayward.” There was desperation in Punch’s voice. “You could just say the letter turned up. Maybe that you found it amongst some of Buck’s things you had. I don’t know. I just really need your help on this. The main thing is, the committee will get the letter. It’ll be back in the right hands.”

“How’s that gonna help you square things with Sunny? Seems to me your avoiding her all week has made it pretty obvious to her who had that letter.”

Punch rubbed his chin. “Yeah, I guess so. But if you had that letter, I think she’d lighten up. I’ll think of something to get her off her mad. Not like I ain’t been there before.”

“No, I expect that’s right,” Hayward said. “Okay, you got this letter on you?”

Punch unbuttoned the flap on his shirt and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper and handed it to Hayward, with visible relief on his face.

Hayward unfolded the brittle piece of paper and looked at it. “You know,” he said. “Soc Ninekiller says this treasure is cursed.”

Punch looked over his shoulder to follow Jo Lynn’s movement through the cafe, then out the window to check for Sunny. “I’d dang sure go along with that,” he said.

As if on cue, the doorbell jangled, and Soc walked in. He proceeded along the counter, and sat on the stool at Hayward’s left.

“Haddy, Soc,” Hayward said. The elder Cherokee nodded, and then pointed to Hayward’s coffee cup when Galynn came up to him on the opposite side of the counter. She pulled out a cup and saucer and poured the coffee. “You want anything else?” she asked him with a quick smile. Soc pointed to the half-empty covered tray of cinnamon rolls behind the counter, and said, “Roll.”

“You want it heated?” Galynn asked. Another quick nod from Soc.

“Looky what I got here,” Hayward said to Soc, passing him the letter.

Soc took the paper, extracted his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, positioned them on his nose, and started reading. After a bit he said, “Mmmph. Where’d you get this?”

“Our boy Punch here brought it to me.”

Soc leaned forward and looked around his friend toward Punch. Punch grinned at him and gave a two-fingered salute.

“You took this from the picture?” Soc asked in his quiet voice. With his solemn expression, eyes looking at him above the reading glasses, Punch thought Soc had the look of a severe and accusatory divorce lawyer. He suddenly felt guilty and ashamed.

“Well, I... yes, sir. But I wasn’t going to keep it. That’s why I brung it to Hayward... and you.”

Soc stuck his lower lip out and nodded again. Then he folded the paper along its well-worn creases, and handed it back to Hayward. “You don’t want to go after that treasure,” Soc said. “It’s got bad medicine.”

Punch nodded and looked serious. “That’s what I been hearing,” he said.

“Well, I gotta go,” Hayward said. He held the folded letter up to Punch’s face and said, “I’ll take care of this,” then he put it in his shirt pocket. “We don’t want this getting out, or worse, getting in the hands of Bobby John Samuels. He’d probably want to print it in all the papers, and the nut jobs it would bring into this town would make the casino look like a Sunday school.”

Soc got up, leaving his half-eaten cinnamon roll and a five-dollar bill on the counter. He winked at Jo Lynn on the way out.

Galynn stood a few feet away at the end of the counter filling saltshakers, hovering on the edge of the conversation. She moved toward Punch after Hayward and Soc left, and refilled her dad’s coffee cup, all the while looking around the room and toward the kitchen to locate her mother. “What have you gotten into now, Daddy?” she half-whispered like a suspicious and scornful parent.

The doorbell jingle announced the entrance of Artie Lancaster. Both Punch and Galynn looked up at him when he came in. He walked with a limp and the aid of a cane. His left arm was cast-free, but an eight inch long dark pink scar zippered his forearm, and most of the hair on the side of his head had grown back. “Hello, Artie,” Galynn said with a tight smile.

Artie hobbled over and sat next to Punch. “Hi,” he said to Galynn. He nodded to Punch and then grabbed one of the menus from the small rack on the counter. “What’s going on?” he asked as he looked over the menu.

“Not much,” Galynn said. “It’s good to see you,” she added.

“I got kind of tired being cooped up in that old house, no one coming around. Kinda lonesome,” he said looking straight at Galynn with what he hoped were apologetic eyes. “Thought I’d come down here to get a bite to eat, and see if anything exciting was going on.”

Galynn nodded and said, “I was just asking Daddy that question.” She looked back at Punch and waited. Punch looked at her then at Artie. He looked over his shoulder, then left, then right.

“Can you kids keep a secret?” he asked.

Chapter 18

Hill Man Gets a Taste

The creature stood to his full eight-foot height, and sniffed the cool night air intently. As mainly a herbivore he knew every scent of every plant, nut, and root growing in the wooded hills, but this powerful smell wafted alien through his large nostrils. The chemical message his keen olfactory nerves sent to his brain could find no purchase within the vast array of his memory. The only understanding conveyed to his consciousness was that the odor came not from animal, nor did it come from mineral. It came, most definitely, from vegetable.

The scent led him to a place where he had come before. The winter had just passed, so the night air lay warmer this time, but not by much. His breath still came out in billows of whiteness as he stood in the moonlight at the edge of this dwelling place. He would not go near the places where the Others dwelled. By the example of the old ones in his group, at that young time in his life when he had stayed near the group, he had learned this. His kind knew that the Others could be dangerous and should be avoided. Long ago that had not been so hard, but as the winters passed the Others had become more and more numerous, and avoiding them had become increasingly more difficult.

He had never really experienced danger from the Others. Most he had come in contact with frightened easily, and ran away like rabbits when they saw him. But some carried a great power he did not understand. He had experienced that power first hand. On a day many winters past when an Other spotted him and had sounded his power toward him from a distance, he felt a sudden and great pain in his shoulder. Something had gone through him, and he bled from two holes. It took a complete birth of the moon for the holes to heal, and he suffered.

One time he and a male from the Others had come upon each other unexpectedly in the hills. The Other male had pointed the power at him and tried to sound it, but it only clicked. The frightened Other dropped the power he held, and fled while making a loud noise with its mouth. The Other had also left a strong scent of fresh urine on its leaving trail. The creature had gone over to look at the power thing that lay on the ground, and had pushed it around with his foot. Finally, he picked it up and took it back to his shelter.

For some time now, he chose to leave his dwelling only after dark. He could forage in the darkness with little concern about the Others, for they didn’t come out into the night like most creatures of the hills. When he did see the Others in the woods at night, they always sat near a bush of dancing light and heat. They rarely moved away from this bush during the darkness, and kept putting parts of trees upon it, which made it brighter and hotter. At their dwellings at night, light came from places on the sides of their shelters, and from tall branchless trees that stood near their shelters

This place he had come to, this Other’s dwelling, had an arrangement of shelters he remembered. He had gone into the large shelter one night looking for the tubers the Others would store in those places. He had not found anything except some seeds inside a large soft pod, and they had no taste. The shelter had some other animals in it, of which he had no interest. The four-legged ones made a great noise and ran from him, and the fat birds made a lot of noise, too. That night a female of the Others had come out of the smaller shelter at the dwelling and made an angry noise. Then she sounded her great power into the night, and he ran back to the woods. He probably would never have come back, had not the scent of the strange new food brought him there.

As he moved by the large shelter, the fat birds inside started making their noise, and the four-legged animals began giving out their uneasy sounds. But the scent didn’t take him to the inside of the shelter. The food scent grew stronger toward the side opposite where the four-legged animals gathered in a nervous knot.

When he approached the place where the odor grew strongest, he stopped. In front of him stood a small, elongated hill of grass, and nearest him, at one end of the hill, there seemed to be an entrance to a cave underneath the grassy hill. But several flat pieces of wood, held together like those that made the side of the big shelter, covered the cave entrance. He took more steps toward the grassy hill, but something startled him and he stopped in his tracks. There above the cave entrance on a ledge, a very small one of the Others stood looking back at him.

His first instinct told him to leave, to slip back into the woods before the small Other called out to more of its kind, but the assault of the food scent on his senses was so powerful at that point that his longing overrode his instinct. He looked back at the little creature in challenge, curling his upper lip and giving forth a short, low growl. The small Other didn’t flee; it only stood with arms at its side and stared back at him. It had unusual coverings, and its head came to a point. Some sort of hair covered most of its face, and in the light of the gibbous moon that night, the little Other gave off a shiny reflection.

He growled again, louder and longer, but the small Other gave no response or movement, and just continued to stare back at him. Tentatively, he approached the small Other, and reached toward it. When the tips of his fingers first touched the small being, it felt cold and wet. He drew back his hand quickly, then after a few seconds, reached out again. His second touch lingered, stroking the side of the creature, then tracing his fingers up to the top of the pointed head as he studied it. Although it looked like a living thing, it had no more life than a rock. He snorted and turned his attention to the flat wooden thing covering the cave entrance. When he grabbed one side and pulled on it, the wooden covering came up freely. He looked down into the dark maw of the cave. The smell of the cave was musty and dank, much like his own shelter, but the food scent became so powerful that drool started to seep out of the corners of his large mouth and run down into the matted hair on his chin. He sniffed again and moved down into the cave.