Ancient Shores

13

Searchers found Harry by noon. His family reported him missing at eight o’clock, his car was discovered at nine-thirty, and workmen found an enamel spray can and a flashlight on the shelf in front of the roundhouse at a little after ten. The rest was easy.

Max was outraged to think that anyone would want to damage the artifact. He found it hard to sympathize until he stood at the brink in the middle of the afternoon and looked down.

Arky Redfern appeared near the end of the day. He examined the shelf with Max and shook his head. “Hard to believe,” he said.

Max agreed.

“There is the possibility of a lawsuit,” he added.

The remark startled Max. “He came up here to vandalize the place,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. He was a child, and this is a dangerous area. A good lawyer would argue that we failed to provide security. And he would be right.”

Max’s breath hung in the sunlight. It was a cold, crisp day, the temperature in the teens. “When do we reach a point where people become responsible for their own actions?”

Redfern shrugged. He was wearing a heavy wool jacket with the hood pulled up over his head. “There’s not much we can do now for this kid, but we’ll act to ensure there’s no repetition. That way, at least, we can show good faith if we have to.” He directed Max’s attention toward the parking area. A green van was just emerging from the trees at the access road. “I want you to meet someone,” he said.

The van parked and the driver’s door opened. A Native American wearing a blue down jacket got out, looked toward them, and waved. He was maybe thirty years old, average height, dark eyes, black hair. Something about the way he looked warned Max to be polite. “This is my brother-in-law,” said Redfern. “Max, meet Adam Kicks-a-Hole-in-the-Sky.”

The brother-in-law put out his hand. “Just Sky is good,” he said.

“Adam will direct the security force,” Redfern continued.

“What security force?” asked Max.

“It came into existence this morning,” said the lawyer.

Sky nodded. “My people will be here within the hour.” He surveyed the escarpment. “We’re going to need a command post.”

“How about one of the huts?” suggested Redfern.

“Yes,” he said. “That would do.”

Max started to protest that they didn’t have space to give away, but the lawyer cut him off. “If you want to continue operations here, Max, you’ll have to provide security. I recommend Adam.”

Sky shifted his weight. He looked at Max without expression. “Yeah,” Max said. “Sure. It’s no problem.”

“Good.” Sky took a business card from his wallet and gave it to Max. “My personal number,” he said. “We’ll be set up here and in business by the end of the day.”

Max was beginning to feel surrounded by con artists. What were Sky’s qualifications? The last thing they needed was a bunch of gun-toting locals. Redfern must have read his thoughts. “Adam is a security consultant,” he said. “For airlines, railroads, and trucking firms, primarily.”

Sky looked at Max and then turned to gaze at the roundhouse. “This is a unique assignment,” he said. “But I think I can assure you there’ll be no more incidents.”

Within an hour a pair of trucks and a work crew had arrived to begin putting up a chain-link fence. The fence would be erected about thirty feet outside the cut and would extend completely around the structure. Anyone who wanted to fall off the shelf now would have to climb eight feet to do it. “There’ll be no private vehicles inside the fence,” Sky explained.

That was okay by Max. He was still wondering how the young vandal had managed to spray paint in his own eyes. He was aware that a rumor was circulating that the kid had used his flashlight to look through the wall. And had seen something.

The fence went up in twenty-four hours. Sky’s next act was to set up a string of security lights around the perimeter of the cut. He mounted cameras at five locations.

Uniformed Sioux guards appeared. The first that Max met fit quite closely his notion of how a Native American should look. He was big, dark-eyed, and taciturn. His name was John Little Ghost, and he was all business. Max’s views of Native Americans were proscribed by the Hollywood vision of a people sometimes noble, sometimes violent, and almost always inarticulate. He had been startled by his discovery of a Native-American lawyer and a security consultant. The fact that he was more at ease with John Little Ghost than with either Sky or Redfern left him paradoxically uneasy.

The police investigation of Harry Ernest’s death came and went. Forms got filled out, and Max answered a few questions. (He had been on the escarpment until midnight, he said, and he didn’t think there had been anyone else here when he left. He had completely forgotten the “animal” cry he’d heard.) It was an obvious case of accidental death resulting from intended mischief, the police said. No evidence of negligence. That’s what they would report, and that would be the finding.

Max went to the funeral. There were few attendees, and those seemed to be friends of the boy’s guardians. No young people were present. The guardians themselves were, Max thought, remarkably composed.

The next day Redfern informed him that no legal action appeared likely.

Tourists continued to arrive in substantial numbers. They were allowed onto the escarpment, but they were required to remain outside the fence. Police opened a second access road on the west side of the escarpment and established one-way traffic.

No one had yet found a door.

The security fence ran unbroken across the front of the roundhouse. Now that the area had been rendered safe, workers began to excavate the channel.

With TV cameras present, they brought in a girl in a wheelchair from one of the local high schools to remove the first spadeful of dirt. She was a superlative science student, and she posed for the cameras, smiling prettily, and did her duty. Then the work teams got started.

They knew it would be a drawn-out process because of the confined space. Only two people could dig at a time. Meanwhile, the sky turned gray and the temperature rose, a sign of snow. Around the circumference of the building, an army of people wielding brooms was clearing off the walls and the half-dozen braces that anchored the structure to its rocky base. April and Max watched through a security camera in the control module.

This was to be the last week for all except a few designated workers. The rest would be paid and thanked and released. Charlie Lindquist was planning an appreciation dinner at the Fort Moxie city hall, and he’d arranged certificates for the workers which read I Helped Excavate the Roundhouse. (At about this time, the structure acquired a capital R.) Media coverage was picking up, as was the number of visitors. Cars filled Route 32 in both directions for miles.

Periodically April went out, climbed down into the excavation, and strolled along the wall. She liked being near it, liked its feel against her palms, liked knowing that something perhaps quite different from her had stood where she now stood and had looked out across the blue waters of the long-vanished glacial lake.

But today there was a change in the wall. She stood at the rear, near the stag’s head, looking past the long, slow curve at the wooded slope that mounted to the northern ridge, trying to pin down what her instincts were telling her. Everything appeared the same.

She touched the beveled surface. Pressed her fingers to it.

It was warm.

Well, not warm, exactly. But it wasn’t as cold as it should have been. She let her palm linger against it.

The west grew dark, and the wind picked up. Max watched the storm teams assemble and begin distributing tarpaulins. The digging stopped, and workers rigged the tarps around the excavation to prevent it from being filled with snow. When that was completed, they sent everyone home.

No one wanted to be caught on the road when the storm hit. Including Max. “You ready?” he asked April.

“Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. I’m right behind you.”

Max put on his coat. The wind was beginning to fill with snow. Visibility would soon go to near zero.

“Hey,” he said, “how about if I stop and get a pizza?”

“Sure. I’ll see you back at the motel.”

Max nodded and hurried out the door. The wind almost took it out of his hands.

He walked to the gate and was greeted by Andrea Hawk, one of the security guards. She was also a radio entertainer of some sort in Devil’s Lake, Max recalled, and she was extremely attractive. “Good night, Mr. Collingwood,” Andrea said. “Be careful. The road is treacherous.”

“How about you?” he asked. “When are you leaving?”

“We’ll stay here tonight, or until our relief comes. Whichever.”

Max frowned. “You sure?”

“Sure,” she said. “We’re safer than you.”

Whiteouts are windstorms, gales roaring across the plains at fifty miles an hour, loaded with dry snow. The snow may accompany the storm, or it might just be lying around on the ground. It doesn’t much matter. Anyone trying to drive will see little more than windshield wipers.

April resented the delay caused by the storm. She seldom thought about anything now other than the Roundhouse. She was desperate to know what was inside and who the builders were, and she spent much of her time watching the laborious effort to clear the channel.

The day she’d seen Tom Lasker’s boat, she had begun a journal. Chiding herself for an attack of arrogance, she had nevertheless concluded that she was embarked on events of historic significance and that a detailed record would be of interest. During the first few days she’d satisfied herself with accounts of procedures and results. After Max had found Johnson’s Ridge, she’d begun to speculate. And after she had closed the operation down for the winter, she had realized that she would eventually write a memoir. Consequently, she’d begun describing her emotional reactions.

The stag’s head intrigued her. It seemed so much a human creation that it caused her to doubt her results. Somehow, everything she had come to believe seemed mad in the face of that single, simple design. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to formulate precisely how she felt and then trying to get the journal entry right. Important not to sound like a nut.

She put it in a desk drawer and listened to the wind. Time to go. She signed off the computer, and headed out into the storm. She was about ten minutes behind Max.

At the entrance, John Little Ghost forced the gate open against the wind and suggested that maybe she should stay the night. “Going to be dangerous on the road!” he said, throwing each word toward her to get over the storm.

“I’ll be careful,” April said.

She was grateful to get to her car, where she caught her breath and turned the ignition. The engine started. There was an accumulation of snow on the rear window. She got her brush out of the trunk and cleared that off, and then waited until she had enough heat to keep the snow off the glass. Then she inched out of the lot and turned toward the opening in the trees that concealed the access road. She drove through a landscape in motion. The storm roared around her.

Maybe Little Ghost had been right.

She turned left, toward the western exit. It was a long run across the top of the escarpment, several hundred yards during which she was exposed to the full bite of the storm. But she kept the wheel straight and opened the driver’s door so she could see the ruts other cars had made. The wind died when she arrived finally among a screen of elms and box elders.

She passed an abandoned Toyota and started down.

Snow piles up quickly in a sheltered section, and one has to maintain speed to avoid getting stuck. It obliterates markers and roadsides and hides ditches. To make matters worse, this was the second road, just opened by police, and April wasn’t used to it.

She struggled to keep moving. She slid down sharp descents and fought her way around curves. She gunned the engine through deep snow, but finally lost control and slid sidewise into a snowbank. She tried to back out, but the car only rocked and sank deeper.

Damn.

She buttoned her coat, opened the door cautiously against the wind, and put one foot out. She sank to her knee. Some of the snow slid down inside her boot.

An hour and a quarter later, scared and half frozen, she showed up at the security station. “Thank God for the fence,” she told her startled hosts, “or I’d never have found you.”

Andrea Hawk was a talk show host on KPLI-FM in Devil’s Lake. She’d worked her way through a series of reservation jobs, usually exploiting her considerable Indian-maiden charm to sell baskets, moccasins, and canoe paddles to well-heeled tourists. She’d done a year with the reservation police before discovering her onair talents, which had begun with a series of public-service pleas to kids about drugs and crime. She was still selling automobiles, deodorants, CDs, and a host of other products to her dewy-eyed audience. Along the shores of Devil’s Lake, everybody loved the Snowhawk.

She was twenty-six years old and hoping for a chance to move up. Two years ago a Minneapolis producer had been in the area, heard her show, and made overtures. She’d gone to the Twin Cities thinking she had a job, but the producer drove his car into a tractor-trailer, and his replacement, a vindictive middle-aged woman with the eyes of a cobra, did not honor the agreement.

Andrea was planning to do several of her shows on the scene from Johnson’s Ridge. It was clear to her that she was sitting on a big story, and she planned to make the most of it. She’d got Adam’s permission, worked out her schedule so that it would not conflict with her air time, and stocked the security module with equipment.

It was cold inside, despite the electric heater. The modular buildings were well insulated, but they weren’t designed to withstand winter conditions atop a North Dakota escarpment. The wind blew right through the building. Andrea sank down inside her heavy woolen sweater, wishing for a fireplace.

She wondered whether she’d be able to keep her teeth from rattling when she went on at nine o’clock via her remote hookup. As was her habit, she had begun making notes on subjects she wanted to talk about during the broadcast, and she was reviewing these when April stumbled in.

Little Ghost caught her and lowered her into a chair. “Hello,” she said with an embarrassed smile. And then she recognized her old friend. “Andrea,” she said, “is that really you?”

“Hi,” said the Snowhawk.

When April woke, the windows were dark, and the air was filled with the sweet aroma of potatoes and roast beef. A bank of monitors flickered in a corner of the room. “How are you feeling?” asked Andrea.

“Okay.” April pushed the toes of one foot against the other ankle. Someone had put heavy socks on her feet. “What are you doing here?” She vaguely remembered having asked the question before but couldn’t recall the answer.

Andrea pulled her chair forward so April could see her without having to sit up. “Security,” she said. “It pays well.”

“Why didn’t you come see me?”

“I would have, eventually. I wasn’t sure it was appropriate.” She felt April’s forehead. “I think you’re okay,” she said. “What were you doing out there?”

“Waited too long to leave.”

Andrea nodded. “How about something to eat? We only have TV dinners, but they’re decent.”

April decided on meatloaf, and Andrea put one in the microwave. “Max called,” she said. “We told him you were here.”

There was a coziness in the hut that warmed April. Little Ghost didn’t talk much, but he was a good listener, which is a faculty guaranteed to make people popular. He stayed close to the monitors, although they showed little more than dancing blobs of light and curving shadows. They talked, and April saw that Andrea was fascinated by the Roundhouse.

“I’m going to do the show on it,” she explained.

April smiled. “The Snowhawk at the cutting edge.”

“That’s right, babe. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in going on tonight. Want to be a guest?”

April considered it. She owed the woman, but she didn’t want to face phone calls. “I think I’d better pass,” she said.

But she was interested enough to stay and watch.

The Snowhawk’s show ran from nine until midnight. If the subject for the evening was the excavation, it didn’t stop people from calling in to comment on the new property tax initiative, the schools, the tendency of the county to run up postage costs unnecessarily, or other nongermane topics. The Snowhawk (funny how Andrea seemed to change personalities and become more dominant, even confrontational, in front of her microphone) dealt with these callers summarily, slicing them in midsentence. “Eddie,” she might say, “I’m on Johnson’s Ridge, freezing my little butt off, and you are out of here. Please try to stay on the rails, folks. We’re talking about the Roundhouse tonight.”

On the whole, however, April was impressed by the level of dialogue. She wasn’t sure what she had expected. The Snowhawk’s callers were reasonably rational. They were excited by the mystery surrounding the find, but by a ratio of about four to one resisted far-out resolutions in favor of the more mundane. It’ll turn out to be a mistake, they said, one after another. April was reminded of Max.

Toward the end of the show the storm began to weaken. April could make out the dome of the Roundhouse rising over the blowing snow.

It seemed to be glowing.

She turned away and looked back.

It was a trick of the security lights. Had to be. But they were dull and indistinct in the general turmoil of the storm.

Furthermore, the snow looked green.

It was hard to see clearly from the illuminated interior of the security station. She pulled on her boots and took down her jacket. Little Ghost glanced at her. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, and walked out the front door.

April caught her breath. A soft emerald halo had settled over the Roundhouse.

The Snowhawk saw that something was happening, but she was talking with Joe Greenberg in Fort Moxie and did not have a portable mike. She frowned at John Little Ghost and nodded at the door by which April had just left.

“It’s lit up,” Little Ghost said.

“What is?”

“The Roundhouse.” This exchange, of course, went out live. No damage yet. That came a moment later: “Son of a bitch, I hope it’s not radioactive.”