Page 15 of Lion's Share
“That doesn’t sound very efficient,” Ben said, and I had to agree with that sentiment.
“No, it doesn’t. But I don’t have any other theories.”
Neither did he, it seemed, because we were both quiet for a moment as we drank from our respective water bottles and pondered the situation.
“I’m still trying to understand why anyone would put these markings here in the first place,” I said. “Why the Ogham letters? Why not Roman letters, or Chinese? Or Elvish, if you want to get crazy about the whole thing.”
Not much moonlight filtered through the clouds and the thick canopy overhead, but I thought I still saw the flash of Ben’s teeth as he smiled. “What, do you get a lot of Lord of the Rings live-action role-players out here in the forest?”
Despite my worry, I couldn’t help grinning in response. “Not that I’m aware of. Silver Hollow is kind of far afield for that sort of thing.”
However, his smile faded as he appeared to consider the problem once again. “The letters carved into the portal are Ogham.”
“No one knows about that portal,” I argued, even though a chill wanted to work its way down my spine as the implications of Ben’s words sank in. “Hell, even my mother and grandmother only found out about it lately. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have to believe that if my grandmother had known about the portal before then, she would have written about it in her journals.”
Or at least, I hoped she would. After all, she’d written about seeing unicorns and griffins and manticores, so I didn’t see why the portal wouldn’t have earned a mention if she’d ever stumbled across it sometime in the past.
Unless she’d thought that information was too dangerous to put into written form, just in case someone found those journals and learned exactly what they contained.
But that didn’t make any sense, either. If she’d really been worried about a person outside the family discovering exactly what the woods concealed, then she wouldn’t have written about the unicorns or the griffins or any of the rest of it.
I reached up to rub my temple. The last thing I wanted right then was to get a raging headache, but I couldn’t really fault my brain for starting to hurt.
“Maybe so,” Ben said in response to my earlier comment. He spoke slowly, and I got the sense that he was taking care not to upset me or dismiss my concerns. “However, that guy didn’t look like someone out for a nature stroll. The way he moved — the carvings he left behind — it’s all way too calculated for someone who is your regular garden-variety hiker or nature enthusiast.”
As much as I might have wanted to argue with that statement, I knew he had a point. While I still had no clear idea what the man in the black fatigues had been up to, it was a whole lot more than someone deciding to leave their own mark on the forest.
“If it’s all the work of one person,” I said, “or even the same team, since we don’t know for sure if there could be more people involved than we thought, why aren’t they writing anything that makes sense? Those first carvings we found out in the oak grove last month were pure gibberish. You said so yourself.”
“Yes, they were,” Ben agreed. “But it could be they only looked like gibberish because I couldn’t crack whatever code they were written in. I’m a cryptozoologist, not a cryptographer.”
That comment made me shake my head. It was true, though; he might have earned a Ph.D. in archaeology, and he might have expanded his field of interest to something on the very fringes of science, but it wasn’t as if he was trained to crack the Enigma code or anything close to it.
“So…what do you suggest?”
“That we pack it in for the night and regroup, maybe check the trail cam footage to see if our black-clad friend went to a different clearing instead of this one. But there doesn’t seem to be much point to hanging out here.”
No, there wasn’t. And after putting in a full day at the pet shop, I was ready to head for home and put my feet up.
Whatever mysteries the forest was concealing, we obviously weren’t going to solve them tonight.
Chapter Six
They checked the trail cams when they got back to Sidney’s place and found nothing. Ben wasn’t sure whether he should be disappointed or relieved by that development, and he thought he was probably a little of each.
But it had been late enough that afterward he’d told her to get some rest and let it go until tomorrow, and although she’d looked reluctant, she hadn’t offered any protests and had only murmured that he could call her if he’d heard anything from Marjorie Tran.
And again he’d walked down the porch steps, wondering if there might have been an instant when he could have reached out and twined his fingers with hers, brought her closer so they might finally share a kiss.
That moment hadn’t come, however, and so he’d headed for home.
The cottage was quiet and dark when he unlocked the door and went inside. He knew he probably should have left a light on, but he flipped the switch next to the door as he came in, and the ceiling fan in the living room came to life.
Wrong one.
He touched the switch next to it, and then the lamp on the side table by the couch flared on. Most of the time, the hundred-watt bulb annoyed him, and more than once, he’d thought about replacing it with something a little friendlier, but right then, the bright glare helped him navigate to the kitchen so he could pour himself a glass of water. He’d brought a bottle with him for the hike, but he’d finished it as he was walking Sidney back to her house.
The water helped a little. Unfortunately, he knew there wasn’t much else he could do tonight except wait for morning to come…and with it, hopefully, a report from Marjorie Tran as to what exactly was going on in Silver Hollow.
