Page 35 of Silver Linings

A nice, hot shower brightened my perspective on life, and since the shop was just busy enough that afternoon to keep me occupied without feeling as if I was running all over the place like a chicken with its head cut off, the rest of the day passed quickly enough. When I got home, I set the table and poured the defrosted spaghetti sauce into a pan to heat up, then started boiling the water for the pasta. I already had fixings for a simple green salad, so I threw one together in a big bowl and set it off to the side.

I’d waffled on whether I should put out wine glasses and told myself in the end that it felt weird to eat spaghetti without some wine. No chianti on hand, although I had a couple of red blends I’d picked up at the supermarket in Eureka during my last shopping trip there. We had a small grocery store here in town, but it was expensive and didn’t stock all the items I tended to need, so I drove to the city at least every couple of weeks to do some real shopping.

My worries about not having any chianti were put to rest as soon as Ben rang the doorbell. When I went to let him in, I saw he was holding a bottle of that very variety.

“Come in,” I told him. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“I hope you haven’t opened the wine yet,” he replied as he handed over the chianti.

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “The stuff I was planning to serve doesn’t really need to breathe.”

He grinned at me, as I’d hoped he would, and we headed into the dining room.

“We probably shouldn’t drink all of it,” I warned him, then picked up the corkscrew from where it had been sitting on the table and gave it to him so he could open the bottle. True, I supposed I could have handled that duty myself, but I’d never been all that great at it. “We need to be able to focus on our work.”

“Duly noted,” he said, and expertly inserted the wine key and pulled out the cork in one smooth, expert motion. I lifted an eyebrow, and he added, “I worked as a waiter to help put myself through college.”

Well, that explained it. “Go ahead and sit down — you can have the spot at the head of the table — and I’ll bring the food out.”

“Need any help?”

“No, I’m good,” I replied. “The salad’s already on the table, so I just have to bring out the pasta and the sauce.”

For a moment, I thought he might try to offer again, just to make sure I wasn’t being merely polite, but then he seemed to realize that pressing the issue would only delay dinner.

“Okay.”

He took a seat where I’d indicated, and I hurried into the kitchen to fetch the food. Soon enough, we were dishing up our salad and spaghetti and settling down to eat.

“This is great,” he commented after his first mouthful. “You had time to put this together after you got home from work?”

As much as I would have liked to take credit for my grandmother’s wonderful bolognese sauce, doing so wouldn’t have been very honest. “All I did was reheat it,” I replied. “My grandmother had this in the freezer.”

That response earned me a nod, but I noticed he appeared very thoughtful afterward. Was he thinking about how she’d put that sauce together and had never been around to eat it?

I didn’t want to think about that, not when similar notions had been crowding my brain for the past three months.

“Well, it’s very good. Thank you for inviting me.” He paused there so he could set down his fork and lift his glass of wine and take a sip. Then he said, “I found a few things when I looked up those runes this afternoon.”

“You did?” I asked. To be honest, I’d been so focused on work and then getting dinner together that I hadn’t had too much time to ponder the strange markings we’d discovered at the oak grove. “What are they?”

“They’re Ogham — ancient Irish,” he replied. “A couple of the symbols are still unclear — I couldn’t find any analogues online that matched them. But the letter for ‘oak’ appeared over and over, so it seems clear that whoever scratched them into that tree was trying to draw power from something ancient.”

“Draw power for what?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure whether I even believed such things were real.

Then again, I’d seen unicorns and griffins and dragons with my own eyes, so it wasn’t as if I hadn’t already acknowledged that some pretty strange stuff was possible in this world.

Of course, I couldn’t tell Ben any of that.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m not an expert on this sort of thing. Pre-Columbian Mexico was more my area of specialty.”

That made some sense, considering he was from Southern California. He wouldn’t have had to travel very far to visit many of those digs.

One of which had led to that encounter with the chupacabra…and sent him down a very different path from the one he’d originally envisioned for himself.

“There’s a professor at U.C. Davis who could probably analyze the carvings for us,” Ben went on. “Dr. Ogilvy. If you want, I can reach out to him and send him several of the photos we took, see if he can offer some insights.”

I’d never heard of Dr. Ogilvy during my tenure at that university, but I didn’t think that was too strange, not when I’d been focused on my DVM degree and didn’t have any further undergrad requirements I needed to fulfill by taking the odd archaeology or linguistics course.

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