Jumlin's Spawn Read online

  Yancey looked at her strangely. “How do you know?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” she said. “When we’re somewhere more private. Just trust me on that one.” “Okay,” Yancey replied, glancing around again. “Based upon our initial investigation,

  we have reasonable cause to think these are all stolen Indian artifacts. Can we all sign-off on that?”“I’d rather not search through every box,” Oliver said. “So I’ll just stipulate, yes.”

  “What about you, Elf?”

  Elfie nodded, without hesitation. “Yeah, I agree.”

  Yancey pulled out a roll of yellow tape. “Then this is officially a crime scene. Let’s tape it off so we can get back to our place and talk for real.”

  ****

  His home had once been a modular house onto which Yancey had grafted handcrafted pieces of his soul. Yancey’s huge carved owl still hung above the archway. His willow hoop dream catcher still dangled at its side. His medicine wheel swung off the verticillated transom. As they crossed the house's threshold, Elfie felt like she had awakened from anesthesia after being knocked out for the better part of a year.

  A mountainous Newfoundland sprung up from the front room’s hearth. The dog trotted over to greet her and leaned against her like the old friend she was.

  “Hey, Mato boy,” she said gently, scratching behind the dog’s ears. She looked over at Yancey. “Where’s Chikala?”

  “He took the journey two months ago. Bone cancer,” Yancey said, with his face still grim, “I had to put him down.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said softly, absorbing the news with a hesitant sigh. She gently patted Mato’s head, as if a stand-in for an unseen lost friend. “I know how badly that must have hurt.”

  “Oh, it hurt. Like hell,” Yancey said sharply, “but not like the hell Oliver and I went through in losing you.”

  “Yancey –” she said softly, as if bereft of anything further to say.

  He waved away her reply, and then pointed toward the hallway. “Forget the past for now. Let's head to the den and go over tomorrow.”

  Oliver gestured toward her luggage, which he had placed on the floor. “I'll take these to the guest room.”

  “Thank you, but actually,” Elfie said, reaching for the smallest case, “I'll take this one with me now. I have something to give back to Yancey.”

  “You do?” Yancey asked.

  She failed at a smile. “Yes. I do.”

  Oliver led their way down the hall with as much city grace as Yancey followed with flat-footed Sioux directness. As they moved toward the den, Elfie realized they were approaching the Door. The Door.

  Through their years of friendship, she had walked past the Door a hundred times on her way to somewhere in Yancey’s house. The last walk by before this one, she had been stopped dead in her tracks. The Door was the door to Yancey’s bedroom-the open door to Yancey's bedroom. What she had seen there in that moment almost a year before had changed her life forever.

  The stark clarity of the series of images had faded little over the last year. The memory rushed through her like an aftershock every time she recalled it.

  At first, she had remembered it in every moment she wasn’t thinking of something else…anything else…Oliver and Yancey, intertwined. Yancey’s long black mane streaming over Oliver's blond hair as their mouths mashed together. Oliver seizing the other man’s shoulders and flipping Yancey over, only to have Yancey’s lips clamp down on Oliver’s tongue.

  That was all she had seen. All she had needed to see. She’d walked in on them by accident. They hadn't even noticed.

  Even now, they had no idea what she had seen. They didn't know yet that she was aware her two best friends, to whom she had once been the third musketeer, whom she had known and loved since junior high, had chosen a deeper relationship with each other than the one they shared with her. She had been disqualified and eliminated. And no one had bothered to tell her. Which was why she left.

  Of course, Oliver and Yancey had happened before. She knew they had slept together before. They swore it was a one-time thing. But, what she had seen in the bedroom that day meant it hadn't been just a fling. And now?

  “You okay?” Yancey's voice interrupted her, as she hesitated there, staring through the Door into his room.

  She fought to brush-off the visceral impact of the image. “Yeah, sure, just tired,” she murmured, then followed him into the den.

  Oliver’s man-eating television occupied a far wall. The last she had seen it, the set was sitting in his Rapid City condo. His impressionist paintings had been moved into Yancey’s place and now hung on another wall. This house had clearly stopped being Yancey’s pad and started being Yancey and Oliver's home.

  Elfie perched herself precariously at the edge of a sofa, to which she once would have surrendered like a second home. She set the suitcase she had carried in beside her.

  “So, no more Duryea hero-worship, huh?” Yancey asked briskly.

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly, “you had his number from the very beginning.”

  “Don't start the Duryea pillory without me. Dead or not, I hated the bastard,” Oliver said, returning from depositing Elfie's other bags in the guest room…a room that had once been Elfie’s room.

  Oliver seated himself in a big, overstuffed armchair. In his black suit and cultured finesse, he was the antithesis of nearly everything around him. He swept back his hair, removed his glasses, and leaned forward, toward the suitcase that Elfie had carried in with her. He looked up into her eyes directly.

  Elfie drew the small case toward her and opened it. A protective sheet of cushion plastic obscured its contents.

  Yancey came around to stand between Oliver and Elfie. “So, what is it?”

  “This is what I was talking about earlier. When Narvel died under such suspicious circumstances, my curiosity got the best of me,” Elfie explained. “I had been restricted from his storage areas. This concerned me, since it was my job to speak for the whole of the collection. Yesterday, after you two called me, I decided to break the locks and investigate. What I found there far exceeded my worst fears.”

  She peeled away the protective cushion wrap from the sheltered pieces of hardened clay, chiseled rock and black glass.

  Yancey leaned over them like a protective big brother. “It's the Jumlin antiquities,” he said, in a hushed voice. “That thieving son of a bitch.”

  “From looking at his records,” Elfie said sadly, “I think the rare antiquities that he didn't steal; he bought off poor locals who were just trying to survive. Then, he sold the items to big city collectors at a massive mark-up.”

  “I wonder why he kept these,” Yancey said.

  Elfie replied, “Probably because of his crazy theorizing about Egyptian-Sioux-Irish vampire people. Narvel had these items in his private storage. I didn't mention it to the Captain because I was afraid they'd be seized for evidence, just like the stuff we looked at today.”

  “Yeah, they would have been,” Yancey said. “Where the hell did Narvel get them in the first place?”

  “His notes said he stumbled over them deep in the Angel Caves,” Elfie said. “I knew right away it was nonsense. I’ve always heard the Angel Caves were very dangerous.”

  Yancey nodded. “The caves are lined with obsidian, a black volcanic glass that’s sharp as hell and deadly when somebody falls on it. The obsidian also makes the cave system really dark in places. There are drop-off projections all over them. Every couple of years, they find some poor, dumb kid impaled on one of the spikes.”

  “Then how did Narvel, or whoever he got them from, come into possession of them?” Elfie asked.

  “They weren't buried deep,” Yancey said. “I believe they were in the sacred outer areas where ancestral graves are. As our anthropology professor friend can tell you, everyone knew the relics were there.”

  Oliver leaned forward, a number of thoughts appearing to crowd his face. “True, their inherent sacredness, not
to mention the very convenient legendary curse on them, kept them safe in the past. What I don't get is, if Duryea found them, or paid someone to find them, why did he return to the same place? That's where he died.”

  Yancey shrugged. “Looking for more maybe?”

  “Probably researching his Lakota Book of the Dead, I think,” Elfie said.

  “It's not a big area to research, the part that can be walked,” Yancey replied, “and the M.E. Report said he had cave dust on his shoes. There is a handful of old cave-walker Sioux who can survive them. They probably made the trek for him, killed him and kept whatever they found. Duryea walked over dust that they had tracked out.”

  “Then how was he drained of blood?” Elfie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Yancey said. “Some wacko cult group working together pumped the blood out of him so they could blame it on vampires, maybe?”

  “And they expected the police to believe it?” Elfie asked, her eyebrows crowding together in confusion.

  “Well, the fake vampire theory is better than the real vampire one, isn’t it?” Yancey asked. “Who knows…maybe I'm wrong, maybe he got deep in the caves somehow. Could be he cut himself on obsidian groping around in all the darkness and bled to death inside. Could be he just stumbled out and died in the opening, with no blood around him.”

  “If the caves are dark enough for that to happen, why do they glow from the outside?” Elfie asked. “Isn't that why they call them the Angel Caves? Because of the halo glow?”

  “The theory is the black glass reflects a whole series of natural light shafts from various points in the mountain,” Oliver explained. “That gives them the optical illusion of a glow from the outside when you look up from Willow Wash.”

  “Willow Wash? I thought this place we’re talking about was some place on the Stronghold,” Elfie said.

  “No, you're thinking of the Wounded Knee place,” Yancey said, “where Wovoka and the Ghost Dancers were. The Angel Caves are beyond Willow Wash.”

  “Beyond Willow Wash?” Elfie asked, wincing slightly. “That's a two or three day drive over that terrain.”

  Yancey shrugged. “It's going to take some time to get there. We're going to take Oliver's Land Rover. The bench seats fold down into beds.”

  Elfie frowned a lot. “I hate camping, you know that.”

  Yancey smirked in reply. “I know that, but my Starfleet transporter is on the fritz.”

  Elfie groaned in frustration, and then finally leaned back in surrender. “Okay, okay, I guess we're going camping. Besides…” Elfie pushed the case gently toward Yancey. “I need to put these back where they belong.”

  Yancey's eyes widened with amazement. “We can seize the other items because he hid them on Sioux land. But wouldn’t keeping these get you in trouble with his estate?”

  She shrugged. “They aren't in the paperwork anywhere. And, there is the fact it was theft. Let them set the dogs on me, I don't care at this point.”

  Yancey slowly leaned down toward her. He cradled one side of her face in his hand and planted a firm kiss on the other side. He moved his mouth against hers for a moment. As he'd never kissed her on the mouth before, she leaned away from the strangeness of the gesture, but her eyes burned with a tender memory of a time past.

  His voice tightened around every word. “I appreciate this. More than I can say.”

  She fought a smile. “To whatever extent I’m responsible for assisting in what he was doing, I owe your tribe at least this much.”

  “What about what you owe our tribe?” Oliver asked suddenly, sitting forward with his artful grace, as if to close the distance between them.

  “Our tribe?” she asked, knowing a second later she had fallen into the trap.

  “You don’t think you owe Yancey and me an explanation for why you left?” Oliver asked.

  She considered the question for a long moment, but turned away. “I've told you. I had personal reasons.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Yancey said. “We don’t have personal reasons between the three of us. We don't have boundaries. We’ve known each other too long for that shit.”

  “I’ve come to believe,” she said, “that boundaries are a good thing.”

  “Stop it!” Yancey lashed out at her. “Stop talking like we’re new acquaintances at a cocktail party. I kicked Morgan Stewart’s ass in junior high when he made fun of you. We held you the night your father was killed. Don’t treat me or Oliver like we’re strangers. Get mad at me. Yell at me. Say something!”

  “What do you want to hear?” she asked with her voice thin and crisp as rice paper.

  “I want to hear whatever it was that drove you away,” Yancey said. “I want you to sound as hurt as you are. Like leaving tore your heart out, just as it tore us apart. Don't sound like the last fifteen years didn't matter in the first fucking place!”

  She shut her eyes in frustration, carefully conceiving of each word before it was spoken. “I have spent the last year trying to get over what you want me to relive again. When there is a long-time circle of trust like the three of us had…”

  “Like we still have,” Yancey said through tight teeth, “and we have to force it out so we can deal with it. We can’t heal a wound we can’t see, Elfie.”

  She swung a hard glance directly at him. “What if it isn't possible to heal it?”

  “What if it is?” Yancey snapped back. “I mean, don't you owe us an attempt to try?”

  “Owe you?” she finally erupted, slamming a fist against the arm of the chair. “I owe you? What about what you owed me?”

  “What do we owe you?” Oliver asked.

  Elfie shook her head hard. “How about loyalty? The truth? What about the right not to live an illusion? What about things like that?”

  She forced herself into silence by standing up and walking to the picture window that faced Yancey’s ceremony garden. It gave her time to think. In the window’s reflection, she watched Yancey shake his head, as though in total confusion.

  “What in the hell does that –”

  “Yancey,” Oliver said quickly as he reached out to touch Yancey's arm, “she knows. About us.”

  She watched in the reflection as Yancey turned toward Oliver, and the two men seemed to share a slow-rolling gaze of understanding. The Sioux man looked away at the impact of the guilt.

  “Elfie…” Yancey shrugged a little, like he didn't know what to say. “I’m sorry. I honestly didn't think you'd take it this hard.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  Yancey wove his arms across his chest. “I wanted to believe you knew somehow. You somehow had guessed and it didn’t matter. I mean, you knew already that Oliver and I had slept together.”

  “I knew,” she said quickly, “that you'd been together casually a couple of times. You both told me it was over. I was told there wasn’t a relationship.”

  “So what is this?” Yancey asked, his voice sounding like he was out of words. “Homophobia?”

  “Give me a break!” she yelled back. “I've known you go both ways since high school. I never had a problem with that. This is different. You two have formed a relationship, have you not?”

  Oliver looked over at Yancey, then back at Elfie. Oliver met her gaze directly and honestly. “Yes, we have.”

  “When it started this time, it was forever, or it wouldn’t have started,” Yancey said. “I mean, it’s not just a one-night stand thing, if that's what you're worried about. I wouldn’t do that to Oliver.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, “but you would do this to me?”

  Yancey appeared taken aback at the question. “And what the hell does that mean?”

  She smiled, although it hurt like hell to do so. She shook her head. “It means I’d never have had a romantic relationship with one of you, simply because it would have diminished my relationship with the other one. Made him feel left out. And I could never do that…to either of you. But not only could you do that to me…you did do
that to me. And that, in a nutshell, says how little I meant to you.”

  Oliver and Yancey looked to each other again, the inward battle with guilt they were sharing written plainly over their faces.

  “We never intended to hurt you!” Yancey said. “You should know how much you mean to us.”

  A quiet pain worked its way through her voice again. “We didn't have a normal friendship. We were one entity. We were the three musketeers. Out of that, you two formed a relationship that meant more to you than your friendship with me. Which tells me exactly where I’ve always stood in our relationship.”

  “That isn’t true,” Oliver said.

  “That’s your assumption, Elfie,” Yancey shot back. “You jumped to a conclusion and then ran away. Because something scared you.”

  “Oh, here we go!” she said, “It's all my fault again. You tell me what other way I should have taken that big a betrayal of trust. Tell me how you'd feel if the circumstances were reversed.”

  Standing, Yancey's black eyes darkened, as though searching inside him for a possible answer. After a long moment, he turned toward her again. “Okay, I’d probably feel betrayed.”

  “Probably?” she asked. “You know damned well you would. Now, man up and admit it. You two made your choice. At least allow me to make my own.”

  “She's right,” Oliver said to Yancey. “We acted without thinking.”

  “All right, I admit it,” Yancey said, taking a step back from the circle. “We were thinking with the wrong heads.”

  Oliver's blue eyed stare turned brightly toward her. “So, Elf, tell us. What do we do to fix it?”

  “We can't,” she said sadly. “Our friendship was a wonderful, youthful moment of time in our lives. But, the mirage is gone now. We can't bring it back.”

  “What if we can build something even better?” Yancey asked.

  “Can we save that question for later?” Elfie asked with a thin, raspy weakness to her voice. “I'm exhausted. I've had a long, weird week. And a long trip in an even longer day. I just want to turn in early. I am assuming we leave in the morning on this great adventure of ours?”

  Yancey smiled with a tinge of regret. “Yeah, at dawn. We have an appointment to meet with Wolfram Ten Bears at 8 AM. That's stop number one.”