Birthright

  again.

  Someone, she promised herself, was going to pay. At the moment, she wasn’t particular who, or how.

  She swung onto a private lane, over a pretty little bridge that spread over the creek, then nearly straight up the cut through the wooded plot.

  She could hear the sounds of construction. The hammers, the saws, the music from a radio. Part of her brain registered that whatever else he was or did, Dolan apparently built well.

  The skeleton of the house showed potential, and it fit well with the rocky terrain, the picturesque woods. The usual construction debris was scattered into piles, heaped into an enormous Dumpster.

  Pickups and other four-wheelers were parked willy-nilly in the mud the night’s rain had brewed. And several large men, already sweaty, were at work.

  She spotted Dolan, his work pants still pristine, his shirt rolled up at the elbows and a blue Dolan Construction fielder-style hat perched on his head as he stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the progress.

  Once again she slammed the door, and the bullet shot of it blasted through the music and noise. Dolan glanced over, then shifted his view and his body as Callie strode toward the house, boosted herself easily onto the decking.

  “Austin and Jimmy,” she snapped out. “The dickhead twins. Where are they?”

  He shifted his weight, scanned the paint splattered over her car. A small, resentful part of his heart did handsprings. “You got a problem with any of my men, you got a problem with me.”

  “Fine.” It suited her down to the ground. “You see that?” she demanded and pointed toward her Rover. “I’m holding you responsible.”

  He could feel his men watching, and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “You saying I painted that graffiti all over your car?”

  “I’m saying whoever did works for you. Whoever did listened to you and your asinine viewpoints about what my team’s doing at Antietam Creek.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. Looks like kids to me. And as far as what you’re doing at Antietam Creek, don’t expect to be doing it much longer.”

  “You got a couple of mental giants named Austin and Jimmy on your payroll, Dolan. And this looks like them to me.”

  Something moved in his eyes. And he made a very big mistake. He smirked. “I’ve got a lot of people on my payroll.”

  “You think this is amusing?” She lost what tenuous hold she had on her temper and gave him a light shove. Work around them ceased. “You think malicious destruction of property, vandalism, spray-painting crude insults and threats on my car is a goddamn joke?”

  “I think when you’re somewhere you’re not wanted, doing something a lot of people don’t want you to do, there’s a price to pay.” He wanted to shove her back, wanted to show his men he couldn’t be pushed around by a woman. Instead he jabbed a finger in her face. “Instead of crying to me, you ought to take that advice and get the hell out of Woodsboro.”

  She slapped his hand aside. “This isn’t some John Ford western, you moronic, pea-brained rube. And we’ll see who pays the price. You think I’m going to let you, any of you,” she continued, scraping a disgusted look over the faces of the laborers surrounding them, “get away with this, you couldn’t be more wrong. If you think this sort of malicious, juvenile behavior is going to scare me away, you’re more stupid than you look.”

  Someone snickered, and Dolan’s face went beet red. “It’s my property. I want you off it. We don’t need your kind coming around here, taking jobs away from decent people. And you’ve come whining about a little paint to the wrong man.”

  “You call this whining? You’re the one who’s going to whine, Dolan, when I stuff your head up your ass.”

  That announcement caused a flurry of hoots and catcalls from the men. And that had her hands balling into fists. What she might have done was debatable, but a hand clamped on her shoulder, hard.

  “I think Mr. Dolan and his band of merry men might have more to say to the police,” Jake suggested. “Why don’t we go take care of that?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Dolan repeated. “And that’s the same damn thing I’m going to tell the sheriff.”

  “He gets paid to listen.” Jake pulled Callie back, began to push her toward the cars. “Consider the fact that there are about a dozen men armed with power tools and really big hammers.” He kept his voice low as he steered her toward her Rover. “And consider that they’ll elect to use them on me first, as I’m not a woman. And shut up.”

  She shrugged his hand off, yanked open the door. But she couldn’t hold it in. “This isn’t over, Dolan,” she shouted. “I’m going to tie up your precious development. You won’t pour the first yard of concrete for a decade. I’m going to make it my personal crusade.”

  She slammed the door, then sent mud splattering as she reversed.

  She drove half a mile, then pulled over to the side of the road. Jake stopped behind her. They both slammed their doors after leaping out.

  “I told you I didn’t need help.”

  “I told you to wait two goddamn minutes.”

  “This is my car.” She rapped a fist on the Rover. “This is my situation.”

  He lifted her off her feet, dropped her ass on the hood. “And what did your pissing match with Dolan accomplish?”

  “Nothing! That’s not the point.”

  “The point is you made a tactical error. You confronted him on his turf while he was surrounded by his own men. He’s got a hundred-and-twenty-pound female facing him down under those circumstances, he’s got no choice but to blow you off, no choice but to prove he’s wearing the balls. Jesus, Dunbrook, you know more about psychology than that. He’s the honcho. He can’t be pussy-whipped in front of his men. He can’t afford to lose face in that arena.”

  “I’m pissed off!” She started to leap down, then just vibrated when he clamped his hands over hers to keep her in place. “I don’t care about the psychology. I don’t care about the arena. Or about gender dynamics and tribal hierarchy. Somebody takes a shot at me, I take one back. And since when do you back down from a fight? You usually start them.”

  Oh, he’d wanted to. He’d wanted to wade in swinging when he’d seen her standing there. Surrounded. “I don’t start them when I’m outnumbered ten to one, and when several of those ten are holding power saws and nail guns. And being forced to retreat doesn’t put me in a sunny mood.”

  “Nobody asked you to interfere.”

  “No.” He released her hands. “Nobody did.”

  Even temper couldn’t blind her to the change in him. From fire to ice, in a finger snap. Shame wormed through the anger. “Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have gone alone, maybe I shouldn’t have run out there until I was a little more controlled. But since you were there anyway, couldn’t you have punched somebody?”

  It was, he supposed, as close to an acknowledgment as she could manage. “I don’t have to finish a fight on top, but I damn sure want to finish it in one piece.”

  “I love this car.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed, bumped a heel restlessly against the front tire. She frowned back at the pristine black paint on his Mercedes. “Why the hell didn’t they paint yours?”

  “Maybe they didn’t realize your wrath was mightier than mine.”

  “I hate when I get that mad. So mad I can’t think straight. I’m going to hate this, too.” She looked back at him. “You were right.”

  “Wait. I want to get my tape recorder out of the car.”

  “If you’re going to be a smart-ass, I won’t finish thanking you.”

  “I get a ‘you were right’ and a thank-you? I’m going to tear up in a second.”

  “I should’ve known you’d milk it.” She shoved off the hood. Looking down, she studied the cheerful rush of the creek over rocks.

  He’d come after her, she thought. And in her heart she knew he’d have mopped up the construction site with anyone who’d laid a hand on her.


  It made her feel just a little too warm and gooey inside.

  “I’m just saying I probably shouldn’t have gone after Dolan with a dozen of his men standing around and probably shouldn’t be blaming him for this in the first place. So I appreciate you hauling me off before I made it worse. I guess.”

  “You’re welcome. I guess. You want to call the law?”

  “Yeah.” She hissed out a breath. “Fuck it. I want coffee first.”

  “Me too. Follow me in.”

  “I don’t need to—”

  “You’re driving in the wrong direction.” He grinned as he walked back to his car.

  “Give me my keys.” She plucked them out of the air on his toss. “How’d you know where I was, anyway?”

  “Went by Dolan’s office, asked the still pale and trembling assistant if a woman with fire spurting out of her ears had been in. The rest was easy.”

  He got into his car. “And you’re buying the coffee.”

  When Lana pulled up to the site that afternoon, she had Tyler with her. She only hoped Callie had meant it when she’d invited the boy back. He’d been talking about it ever since.

  She’d closed the office early and had gone home to change into jeans, a casual shirt and her oldest tennis shoes. If she was going to be chasing her son around an excavation, she needed to be dressed for it.

  “If I find bones, can I keep them?”

  She went around to unstrap him from his safety seat. “No.”

  “Mom.”

  “Not only can’t you keep them from my point of view, pal of mine, but I can promise Dr. Dunbrook is going to say the same.” She kissed his sulky mouth, hauled him out. “And do you remember the other rules?”

  “I won’t run, I won’t go near the water and I won’t touch nothing.”

  “Anything.”

  “Either.”

  She laughed, boosted him on her hip and walked to the gate.

  “Mom? What does c-u-n-t spell?”

  Shock stopped her in her tracks, had her mouth hanging open as she whipped her head around to stare at his face. His eyes were squinted up as they were when he was trying to figure something out. She followed their direction, then stifled a gasp when she saw Callie’s Rover.

  “Ah, nothing. Nothing, sweetie. They . . .must’ve left some letters out.”

  “How come they wrote stuff on the truck? How come?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.”

  “Well, what have we got here.” Leo wiped his hands on the legs of his khakis and walked over to greet them. “You look like a young archaeologist.”

  “I can dig. I brought my shovel.” Ty waved the red plastic shovel he’d insisted he’d need.

  “Well then. We’ll put you to work.”

  “This is Tyler.” Lana breathed easier as his attention was diverted from the obscenities. “Ty, this is Dr. Greenbaum. I hope it’s all right. Callie said I could bring him by sometime. He’s been dying to come back.”

  “Sure it is. Want to come along with me, Ty?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ty reached out, leaning from his mother’s arms into Leo’s.

  “Well, I’ve been replaced.”

  “Grandparent pheromones,” Leo said with a wink. “He knows he’s got a sucker. We’ve got a nice collection of spear points and arrowheads over in the knapping area. Interested?”

  “Actually, I am. But I need to speak to Callie first.”

  “Just come on by when you’re done. Ty and I’ll keep busy.”

  “Can I have a bone?” Ty asked in what he thought was a whisper as Leo carried him off.

  Lana shook her head, then skirted mounds and buckets on her way toward the square hole where Callie worked.

  “Hey, pretty lady.” Digger stopped work to give her a wink. “Anything you want to know, you just ask me.”

  He was standing in another square, but leaped out nimbly to catch her attention. He smelled, Lana noted, of peppermint and sweat and looked a bit like an animated mole.

  “All right. What is it you’re doing here with . . .” She leaned over to look in the hole, noted it was dug in geometric levels. “Are those bones?”

  “Yep. Not human though. What we’ve got here’s the kitchen midden. Animal bones. Got us some deer remains. See the different colors of the dirt?”

  “I guess.”

  “You got your winter clay, your summer silt. Flooding, get me? The way the bones are layered shows us we had us a settlement here, long-term. Gives us hunting patterns. Got some cow in there. Domesticated. Had us some farmers.”

  “You can tell all that from dirt and bone?”

  He tapped the side of his nose. “I got a sense for these things. I’ve got a lot of interesting artifacts in my trailer over there. You wanna come by tonight, I’ll show you.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Digger, stop hitting on my lawyer,” Callie called out. “Lana, get away from him. He’s contagious.”

  “Aw, I’m harmless as a baby.”

  “Baby shark,” Callie called back.

  “Don’t you be jealous, Callie sugar. You know you’re my one true love.” He blew her a noisy kiss, gave Lana another wink, then dropped back down in his hole.

  “He offered to show me his artifacts,” Lana told Callie when she reached her section. “Is that an archaeologist’s version of the old-etchings ploy?”

  “Digger’ll flash his artifacts at the least provocation. He’s a walking boner. And for reasons I’ve yet to fathom, he bags women with amazing regularity.”

  “Well, he’s cute.”

  “Christ, he’s ugly as the ass end of a mule.”

  “Yes, that’s why he’s cute.” She looked down at Callie’s work. “What happened to your Land Rover?”

  “Apparently somebody thought it would be entertaining to decorate it with a variety of crude remarks and suggestions. I figure one of Dolan’s men.” She shrugged. “I let him know it this morning.”

  “You’ve spoken to him about it.”

  Callie smiled. She thought Lana looked as fresh and pretty as a high school senior out on a summer picnic. “You could call it speaking.”

  Lana angled her head. “Need a lawyer?”

  “Not yet. The county sheriff’s looking into it.”

  “Hewitt? More tortoise than hare, but very thorough. He won’t blow it off.”

  “No, I got the impression he’d cross all the T’s. I know he was going to speak to Dolan.”

  “However sincerely sorry I am about your car, the more complications for Ron Dolan right now, the better I like it.”

  “Glad I could help. Since you’re here, I’ve got a question. Why do people iron jeans?”

  Lana glanced down at the carefully pressed Levi’s she wore. “To show respect for the hard work of the manufacturer. And because they show off my ass better when they’re pressed.”

  “Good to know. I see Leo’s dragooned Ty-Rex.”

  “It was instant attraction, on both sides.” She looked at Callie’s work. Suppressed a shudder. “Those aren’t animal bones.”

  “No, human.” Callie reached for her jug, poured iced tea into a plastic glass. “Male in his sixties. Almost crippled with arthritis, poor bastard.”

  She offered the tea, chugging it down herself when Lana shook her head. “We’re getting some intermingling with this area. See this.” Callie tapped a long bone with her dental pick. “That’s female, about the same age though. And this one’s male, but he was in his teens.”

  “They buried them all together?”

  “I don’t think so. I think we’re getting scattering and intermingling here due to changes in water level, in climate. Flooding. I think when we get deeper in this section, likely next season, we’ll find more articulated remains. Hey, Leo’s got Ty