Page 45 of Bad Seed

“I’m fine,” he said.

Harley sat down at the far end of the sofa, picked up a pad and pen from the coffee table, then turned to face him and crossed her legs to make a lap.

“Please forgive me for intruding on your time. I’ve been given permission to visit every aspect of the hotel during the audit because Mr. Caldwell wanted a full report, but I don’t feel comfortable stomping into the kitchens of a hotel this size and quizzing people when they’re trying to work. I was hoping I could ask you and save the interference. Is that okay with you?”

Her eyes are blue-green—like she came from the sea.

“Brendan?”

He blinked. “Oh, sorry… I was just thinking about what you said. Ray is family. I’ll do anything to help.”

This was news to Harley. “Family?”

And for the first time, he began to relax. “Well, mountain-style family. Ray’s niece, Rusty Caldwell, was an undercover FBI agent before she married my cousin Cameron Pope. He was with Army Special Forces during his tours of duty. Rusty and Liz Devon are first cousins. Their dads were brothers. So, now, despite the lack of blood connection, Ray Caldwell’s people are now our people, too.”

His smile left a knot in Harley’s stomach.Men shouldn’t be this…this…perfect.

“Are there a lot of you?” she asked.

He laughed, and the knot in her belly tightened.

“A mountain full. A valley full. It was a Pope who first came to the valley where Jubilee now exists. His name was Brendan Pope. I’m named for him. He was a trapper. A giant of a man from Scotland, who took a tiny little Chickasaw woman named Cries A Lot for a wife. Then he started a trading post that became a settlement that became a town called Jubilee, and all of the ensuing generations chose the mountain over the valley for their homes. Their original land grants still remain in their families. There have been Popes here since the early 1800s. The first Brendan is why we’re all so big and tall, and Cries A Lot is where our dark eyes and black hair came from.”

Harley’s lips had parted in disbelief, and she’d forgotten to shut them. She was so caught up in the story that she’d forgotten why he was here.

“That’s the most amazing story I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“That’s not the half of it,” he said. “Their lives together came to a tragic end when Cries A Lot, who he called Meg, went up Pope Mountain one day to pick berries and never came home. They searched for her for days. Didn’t know what happened, and for the next century and a half, she was lost—until we stumbled upon the journal Brendan had kept. It’s now in the Library of Congress in DC, but we hadn’t known about Meg going missing until we read the journal. The tragedy took us all by surprise, and ultimately fueled an all-family search.

“We knew from the journal where she’d been before she disappeared, because they found her berry basket and berries spilled all over the ground around Big Falls. So, we began a search, using modern technology like drones with cameras that map topography and GPS that maps what’s beneath the ground. I was up in the woods south of Big Falls with my brother Sean and some other searchers. One second, I was talking to Sean, and then I took a step and disappeared straight down into a hole. Scared Sean out of his mind, and the broken boards ripped gashes in my back and side on the way down.”

Harley gasped. “Where did you fall?”

“Into what had once been a cellar below a settler’s cabin. The cabin had had long since disappeared, and the floor above the cellar had finally rotted through just where I stepped. But I fell at the feet of the woman we’d been searching for. And there she was…” Brendan stopped, took a deep breath, and then looked away for a moment, gathering himself and his emotions. “There she was, or what was left of her… A tiny skeleton, lying on her side with her hands clasped in prayer.” He looked up, straight into Harley’s eyes, then shook his head. “It changed me. Me finding her seemed like a prophecy fulfilled. Meg’s Brendan had never stopped searching the mountain, but died without finding her. Then here I come, nearly two hundred years later—a sixth generation grandson with the same name, and I found her.”

Tears were rolling down Harley’s face. “Oh my God.Did you ever find out what happened? How she got down there?”

“Yes. It’s a really long story, but I’ll give you the quick version. It was during the Civil War. A group of Rebel soldiers came through Jubilee pulling a wagon. Rumor had it the wagon was carrying gold to fund the war. But when Brendan and his friends went looking for Meg, they found the wagon broken down on the roadway. We surmise the soldiers panicked. They couldn’t leave their treasure unguarded, and the wagon was of no use. They carried the treasure into the woods to hide, planning to come back for it, came upon Meg picking berries, and abducted her so she couldn’t tell where they put it. They trailed the tracks of the soldiers, thinking maybe they’d carried Meg off, but miles later, found the men all dead from some skirmish and no sign of Meg. So now the treasure and Meg were lost to time. The really tragic part of that is that we think she was still alive when they dropped her into the cellar with their treasure.”

Harley gasped. “How could you know that?”

“Because when I found the bones, they were in a posed position. I could almost see her as she’d been…as if she’d curled up on her side to pray and fell asleep. Only she never woke up. No way would the soldiers drop her down there and then arrange her body.”

“Was the treasure still there?” Harley asked.

Brendan nodded. “Only it wasn’t treasure after all. No gold. Just paper. She was killed for a trunk full of Confederate money.”

The horror of it all was on her face. “Oh, Brendan! No!”

“Yeah,” Brendan said. “I’ll take that drink now, if the offer’s still good.”

Harley leaped to her feet and ran to the mini-fridge.

“Wine. Longneck beer. Cans of soda. Bottles of water. Name your poison.”

“Dr Pepper. I don’t drink and drive,” he said.

She handed him the cold can and returned to her seat. “Speaking of your brothers, Wiley came to the hotel today with another officer to pick up a woman who’d been caught picking pockets. He’s something else, isn’t he?”

---