Sacred Ground by Barbara Wood

Author:Barbara Wood [Wood, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0-312-70270-1
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-12-01T23:59:08.361000+00:00

By the time Erica changed out of her evening clothes and into comfortable sweats, the storm had increased, creating a muffled roar inside her tent. She pictured the grunion hunters running for their cars— and the fish riding the waves as they had done for thousands of years, unthreatened by capture. Then she turned her attention to the object on her worktable, the astonishing find from Level IV that afternoon.

At the time of discovery, she had been overwhelmed by it, her mind centering on the object like a dog on a bone. But now she almost wondered what the thing was and why she had attached so much importance to it. All she could think of was Jared.

She forced herself to address the task at hand. It was what she had done all her life, it was what kept her from drowning in her own pain. Don’t think of the demon that haunts you and it won’t exist. “The hair is black with no signs of gray,” she dictated into her recorder in a voice that sounded a little too loud, “plaited into a fourteen-inch braid which appears to have been cut off at the nape of the neck. I am surmising that it is a woman’s braid.” Using tweezers she plucked out what looked like a pink flake. “The braid appears to have been buried with petals,” she said, turning the brittle flake over in the light, examining it under a magnifying glass. “Bougainvillea,” she pronounced after a moment.

She swallowed hard. The heaviness in her chest was still there, like a sinister black-feathered creature that had been waiting for her in the shadows beyond the Dimarco pool deck, watching for a moment of weakness when Erica’s guard was down and it could fly in and take roost inside her rib cage.

“As the bougainvillea plant wasn’t introduced into California until after 1769, and since the braid was found at a lower level than where we found the American one-cent coin, but at a higher level than where we found the tin crucifix, whatever strange ritual took place in the cave involving the severing of the braid happened between 1781 and 1814.” She paused, her eyes went out of focus, her hands froze over the specimen, and she thought, We’re coming closer in time.

She picked up the braid in both hands, felt the heavy hair in her fingers, tresses that had once crowned a young woman’s head, and she wondered why such a brutal act had been committed— for surely shearing off a woman’s hair in a century when all women wore their hair long had to have been a punishment, or an act of discipline or humiliation. The victim wasn’t American, Erica knew that for certain. Not at the level where the braid had been found. So she had been a Spanish lady who had been dragged to the cave by morally outraged brothers, where they had cut off her hair for soiling the family honor. Or perhaps they were the Mexican sisters of a young man who had committed suicide when she scorned his love.

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