The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) Read online

  * * *

  THE GRANITE KEY

  by

  N. S. Wikarski

  The Granite Key

  Book One Of Seven – The Arkana Mystery Series

  http://www.mythofhistory.com

  Copyright © 2011 by N. S. Wikarski

  Second Edition 2013

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Until the lions have their own historians,

  tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

  --African Proverb

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 - Night Vision

  Chapter 2 - A Wake

  Chapter 3 - Prayer Meeting

  Chapter 4 - Sisters And Other Strangers

  Chapter 5 - Corvette and Model-T

  Chapter 6 - Compound Interest

  Chapter 7 - Key Issues

  Chapter 8 - Digesting The Information

  Chapter 9 - Lost In Translation

  Chapter 10 - Photographic Memories

  Chapter 11 - Bowled Over

  Chapter 12 - Power Tools

  Chapter 13 - Destiny's Child

  Chapter 14 - Latte Questions

  Chapter 15 - Paranormal Antiquity

  Chapter 16 - Troublesome Relations

  Chapter 17 - Old School

  Chapter 18 - The World According to Maddie

  Chapter 19 - Conjugal Wrongs

  Chapter 20 - Underground Intelligence

  Chapter 21 - Mothers Of Invention

  Chapter 22 - Damnation Motivation

  Chapter 23 - In Security

  Chapter 24 – The Object Of My Rejection

  Chapter 25 - Motion Sickness

  Chapter 26 - Pythia Practice

  Chapter 27 - Touchy Feelings

  Chapter 28 - Linear Thinking

  Chapter 29 - Hunt For The Bones

  Chapter 30 - The Concordance

  Chapter 31 - Team Quirks

  Chapter 32 - Happy Hour

  Chapter 33 - Knossos

  Chapter 34 - Art And Facts

  Chapter 35 - Wining And Mining

  Chapter 36 - A Plot In The Country

  Chapter 37 - Psychro

  Chapter 38 - Cryptic

  Chapter 39 - Decoding The Past

  Chapter 40 - Rock And Roll

  Chapter 41 - Exit Strategy

  Chapter 42 - Site Unseen

  Chapter 43 - In The Name Of The Father

  Chapter 44 - Double Trouble

  Chapter 45 - The Key To The Kingdom

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Author Bio

  Books By N. S. Wikarski

  Useful Info

  Chapter 1 – Night Vision

  Cassie felt herself sinking. She tried to drag herself to the surface. “Wake up stupid! It’s just a dream. This can’t be real. Wake up!”

  She was standing in the shadows in her sister’s antique shop. It was late. Long past midnight. The room was dimly lit by a green banker’s lamp near the cash register. Sybil was standing in front of the glass showcase with a cell phone in her hand. There was a man standing near the door. A man wearing a Stetson hat and he was pointing a gun at her sister.

  “Where’s the key, sugar?” His voice sounded lazy, casual. He had a southern drawl.

  “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sybil stammered. Her sister put the phone down and started inching her way along the showcase toward the rear storeroom.

  The man shrugged. “Don’t make no difference to me but you don’t want me tearin’ up your neat little shop just to find it, now do you?”

  “I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sybil’s reply was shrill, unconvincing.

  Cassie wanted to rush forward to pull her sister away from the man with the gun. Her feet were glued to the floor. She couldn’t move. She tried to scream a warning. “Get out of here, Sybil. Run!” but all she felt was a rasp in her throat where the words should be.

  The man advanced out of the shadows. He was close to six feet tall, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. Cassie knew this had to be a dream because of his strange outfit. Aside from the cowboy hat, he wore a short denim jacket, a string tie around his neck, jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots.

  The gun flicked slightly in his hand. “I tell you what. The service in this establishment ain’t very friendly.” He flipped his hat aside and it landed on an oak sideboard. His dark brown hair was combed back in a high wave. “I guess if you don’t want to help me, I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and help myself.” He moved forward toward the glass case.

  Sybil darted past him and ran toward the front door. He was faster. He grabbed her by the arm. “Now that’s no way to treat your clientele, honey. Tryin’ to run off and shirk your responsibilities like that.” He twisted her arm behind her back.

  Cassie could see Sybil wince in pain. Her sister looked around wildly for some other way out. The man tightened his grip with one hand and pointed the gun to her head with the other. Sybil struggled but he only wrenched her arm harder behind her back until she stopped struggling.

  “It seems to me like you can’t hear what I’m sayin’.” The man cocked his head slightly, considering the matter. “Maybe we should go someplace private where I can get through to you better.”

  He shoved her toward the door but she twisted out of his grip, running toward the back of the shop. He lunged after her, tackling her. She fell hard against the showcase, head first. Glass shattered and she lay still, face down on the floor.

  Cassie could feel a cry of despair rising in her throat but no sound came out. She willed her feet to move. They seemed to twitch slightly but nothing more. All she could do was watch.

  The man raised himself to a crouch position. A look of annoyance crossed his face. He reached forward to check Sybil’s pulse and frowned.

  He stood back up, shaking bits of broken glass from his jacket. “Well, that ain’t no help at all,” he said in disgust.

  In a flash, the scene changed and Cassie was back in her dorm room. She could feel the mattress beneath her. “Wake up, dammit!” she commanded herself. This time when she clawed her way up to the surface of consciousness, her mind obeyed her. She sat up shakily. Her skin felt clammy. She tossed off the covers and sat forward rocking, holding her head.

  On impulse she grabbed her cell phone and started to call her sister. “It was just a nightmare, stupid! What are you going to do? Wake her up in the middle of the night to tell her you had a bad dream?” She snapped the phone shut and tossed it on the nightstand.

  Gradually her breathing slowed and she lay back down. Curling herself into a fetal position, she drew the covers up to her chin. “It wasn’t real. It was just a bad dream… Just a bad dream... Just a bad dream...” She chanted the words like a mantra for several minutes until she started to dose off.

  Then the phone rang.

  Chapter 2 – A Wake

  At about three o’clock in the morning far outside the city, four people were staring bleakly at one other around a kitchen table. It was an old style oak table in an old style country kitchen. The kind with tin ceiling tiles and tall glass cupboards above the sink. A single yellow nightlight glowed from the wall.

  At one
end of the table sat an elderly woman in a terrycloth robe and slippers. Despite the late hour, she had managed to roll her white hair into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. She sighed heavily. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Believe it. Sybil’s dead.” The abrupt comment came from a blond man in his mid-twenties at the opposite end of the table. He sat slouched despondently in his chair, arms crossed, his legs sprawled out in front of him. “She called me and she sounded scared. She thought somebody was trying to break into the shop. Then the line went dead. I got there as fast as I could but the cops beat me to it.” He exhaled tiredly. “It’s my fault.”

  “How do you figure?” The question came from a middle-aged woman with bushy red hair sitting to his left. There were distinct frown lines around her mouth. She took a long drag on an unfiltered cigarette.

  The blond man glanced up. “If I’d just gotten there five minutes sooner maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Maybe she’d still be alive.”

  “Did she give you a physical description of her attacker?” The question came from a young man in his early-twenties seated to the right. He spoke with a British accent.

  “Nope,” said the blond man succinctly. “For the past week or so she told me she had the feeling somebody was following her but she never knew who it was.”

  “I think we all know who was responsible.” The elderly woman rose stiffly out of her chair. She walked over to sink, filled a kettle and put it on the stove to boil.

  The other three stared at one another in shock. Anger flashed in the middle-aged woman’s eyes. “Those bastards! What do they want from us now?”

  “Take it easy, Maddie,” soothed the blond man. “We don’t know for sure it was them.”

  The woman called Maddie snapped back at him, “Then who else?” She ground out her cigarette and immediately lit a new one. “What the hell was she working on? Didn’t she tell you anything about it, Griffin?” Her sharp eyes focused on the Brit.

  “No, nothing,” the young man whispered with regret. He rubbed his forehead distractedly. “Maybe if she had I could have helped her, or better yet, persuaded her to stop.”

  The elderly woman shuffled toward the cupboard over the sink. “There’s still the matter of her sister,” she observed quietly. “Poor child, as if she hasn’t lost enough already. This is too cruel.”

  “Does she know anything?” The blond man at the far end of the table sat forward in his chair.

  The woman at the sink turned around to glance at him mildly. “Do you think you could find that out for us, Erik?”

  Erik sat up at straighter, alert now. “What exactly do you have in mind, Faye?”

  The kettle rumbled to a boil. The old woman rummaged around in the cupboard for cups and saucers. “I think you should follow her at a discrete distance. Keep out of sight but let us know immediately if anything unusual occurs.”

  She went over to the stove to switch off the heat. “Griffin, it might prove useful to know what Sybil’s latest recovery was.”

  “Yes, of course,” he agreed readily. “Anything I can do to help.”

  Faye was now spooning loose tea into a porcelain pot. She paused to consider. “What could they possibly want of ours? What, to them, would be worth killing for?”

  Chapter 3 – Prayer Meeting

  In the silent hour just before dawn, Abraham Metcalf was standing in his study, scrutinizing the spine of a volume of sermons on his bookshelf. Actually, his study was more the size of a public library and his home more the size of a medieval castle. It had to be. He was the head of a very large extended family. Despite the barest glimmer of light in the east, Metcalf was expecting a visitor. Fully dressed in a black suit, he cut an impressive figure—a mane of white hair swept back from his forehead, trimmed just long enough to reach the top of his collar—a white moustache and beard shaped into a precise goatee. Despite his seventy years, he possessed a muscular build and ramrod straight posture. His eyes were a frosty shade of blue. They bore a fierce expression under bristling white eyebrows suggesting very little escaped his notice or gained his approval.

  A young man sporting a crew cut tapped lightly on the door. “A visitor to see you, Father.”

  “Send him in.”

  A man wearing a Stetson hat advanced into the study. Metcalf turned to face him. “Hats off indoors, Mr. Hunt,” he instructed curtly.

  His visitor smiled lazily and doffed his hat. “Now that’s right kindly of you to remind me, sir. My momma, God rest her, would pitch a fit if she saw me forget my manners like that.”

  Metcalf sat down behind his massive oak desk. He did not invite his visitor to be seated. He studied Hunt in silence for several seconds. The younger man did not flinch under his gaze but stood grinning, his stance relaxed.

  “I don’t see the key in your hands, Mr. Hunt.” Metcalf observed.

  “No need to stand on proper names now, is there? How about you call me Leroy and I’ll call you Abe?”

  “You may call me Father Abraham if you wish,” Metcalf offered stiffly.

  “Sorry, sir, but you ain’t my daddy. Don’t rightly know who he was, come to think on it.”

  Metcalf’s face remained impassive. “I don’t see the key, Mr. Hunt.”

  Leroy Hunt shrugged off the implied rebuke. “Well, sir, it was like this. I encountered a bit of trouble in obtainin’ said object.”

  Metcalf had picked up a letter opener and was examining it intently. “Define trouble,” he commanded.

  Hunt selected one of the chairs in front of Metcalf’s desk and sat down. “That gal you set me to followin’ had herself an unfortunate accident. We got into a tussle and she fell and bumped her head and well, sir, she’s dead.”

  “Dead!” Metcalf echoed in disbelief.

  “That’s right, sir. Not to rise again til Judgment Day.”

  “Dead,” Metcalf repeated somewhat less emphatically.

  “Yup, dead,” Leroy concurred, smoothing the wave in his hair.

  The older man considered the problem in silence for several moments before he spoke again. “You did manage to search the shop at least?”

  “That I did, sir. I spent about a half hour diggin’ around before somebody called the cops. I had to high tail it when I heard them sirens but I was through lookin’ anyhow. That key you set such store by, well sir, it wasn’t to be found.”

  Metcalf stood up and towered over Hunt. “I’m most disappointed in your report, Mr. Hunt.”

  Leroy chuckled. “I guess, if I was you and I wanted that key so bad, I’d be a bit down in the mouth too, sir.”

  “I hardly think this occasion calls for levity, Mr. Hunt.” Metcalf’s eyebrows bristled in disapproval.

  Hunt looked up at him appraisingly. “I don’t expect there’s much in your life, sir, that you’d think would be a fit occasion for levity.” Before Metcalf could supply a retort, he continued. “Now don’t you go worryin’ yerself to pieces over this. I still ain’t done. Gal’s got a sister, don’t she? How bout I follow her around for a bit. Maybe see what’s what?”

  Metcalf relaxed his scowl by a hairsbreadth. “Yes, that would seem to be the proper course of action to take at this juncture.”

  Leroy stood up and gave a mock salute. “You got it, chief.” He retrieved his hat and turned toward the door.

  “Before you go, Mr. Hunt…”

  “Sir?”

  “Let us say a prayer together.”

  A flicker of anger crossed Leroy’s face. “Like I said, I ain’t one of yours.”

  Metcalf was already on his knees behind his desk, hands folded. “Yes, I know. That’s why I’ve entrusted you with a matter like this. A matter that requires divine assistance to complete. You will pray with me now.”

  Wordlessly, Hunt returned to the opposite side of the desk, knelt, folded his hands, and screwed his eyes shut as if in anticipation of a bad tasting medicine.

  Metcalf addressed his remarks to the chandelier overhead. “Oh Lord, g
uide this man’s hand that it may do your bidding. Let him smite down those who oppose your will. Let the wicked be put to shame that the Blessed Nephilim may inherit the earth. Amen!”

  Chapter 4 –Sisters And Other Strangers

  Cassie was sitting cross-legged on the living room rug in her sister’s apartment. There were stacks of paper piled around her. Boxes of magazines and scattered articles of clothing littered the couch. Tears were running down her cheeks. She didn’t bother to brush them away. She had been crying for days now. Maybe it had been a week. She couldn’t remember. It started right after the phone call came. The police were at Sybil’s shop. They needed her to identify a body. But she already knew who it would be. The dream had been a 3-D Technicolor preview of the real thing.

  She felt as if she was still inside her nightmare when she arrived at the antique store. The green banker’s lamp was on. Her sister lay sprawled across the floor face down exactly where Cassie had seen her fall. Only now there were photographers and police swarming like flies over her sister’s remains.

  Rhonda, her sister’s business partner, was there too. White-faced and shaking, she came up to hug Cassie. The two clung to each other for several moments, too much in shock to speak.

  The detective who questioned her sounded like he was standing in an echo chamber. His voice was distorted, coming at her from a distance. “What was Sybil doing in the shop alone at such a late hour? Was anything of value missing from the shop? Did she have any enemies?”

  Cassie gave the same answer every time. “I don’t know.”

  Even now she marveled at how little she knew about anything her sister was doing or why. “What were you involved in, Sybil?” Cassie didn’t know much about antiques but she did know that a lucrative black market trade existed. Had Sybil been doing something shady? Smuggling artifacts into the country illegally? Again she didn’t know.