The Sunstone Brooch : Time Travel Romance Katherine Logan (no david read aloud TXT) 📖

now. He had to go in or lose face. And what kind of warrior allowed that to happen?

“Ensley and I can go in first,” Austin said. “Places like that don’t bother me, except when I can’t stand up straight.”

No way in hell were the youngsters going to show him up.

David steeled himself for the inevitable and came up with an excuse. “Ye’ve been in here too many times. I’ll see things ye might think aren’t important. But keep talking and send in the equipment.”

“I’ll sit here at the opening and pass things through to you,” Kenzie said.

He kissed her. “Thanks, babe.” Having her close would keep him grounded when the walls started closing in on him. But as he crawled through the entrance, the memory of lumbering through the cave below Fraser Castle when he traveled back to 1944 to rescue Kenzie hit him hard, and his heart rate accelerated into super-fast gear.

“You okay, McBain?”

“Don’t ask me again, Kenz. Every time ye do, it reminds me of how much I hate closed-in spaces. If ye’re going to sit there, be helpful.”

“How about pretending we’re having phone sex? You know, don’t you, that you can’t have two emotions at the same time. So if you’re sexually excited, you can’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared. And getting me turned on will only get my ass out of here before I can get anything done.”

“Gotcha. No sex talk. Well, how about politics?”

He growled. “That’ll only get me pissed off.”

“Okay then, you’re on your own.”

He crawled inside, then pushed to his feet, shook off his nerves, and swept the flashlight beam around the interior. He did a three hundred sixty-degree sweep to determine if any dangerous obstacles would impede progress once they started the survey. He ballparked the dimensions, guessing the ceiling to be twelve feet, the width approximately thirty feet, and the depth about the same, give or take a few feet in depth and width.

There were no stalactites and stalagmites. The walls were limestone with deposits of gypsum, and the floor was hard dirt. There were several partial footprints and three complete sets—Austin’s, Ensley’s, and Erik’s.

Kenzie slid the generator and lights through the opening. “You doing okay in there?”

“Haven’t seen any rats so far.”

“That’s encouraging.”

David quickly set up the lights in the middle and along the walls, and when he found the Yggdrasil, he couldn’t stop staring. The resemblance to JC’s birthmark was uncanny.

As he moved farther into the guts of the place, he stopped short. “Goddamn. What the hell?”

The rear wall was an art exhibit, with dozens of pictographs and petroglyphs similar to the Yggdrasil and the Viking ship marker outside. It would take years to decipher them without expert help to identify patterns in these signs, and he knew hiring cave art researchers was out of the question.

“David, can we come in now?” Kenzie yelled. “There are five impatient people out here.”

“Yeah, come on in,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the paintings.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

He didn’t answer.

He’d just spotted the petroglyph of a brooch, similar to the ones surrounding the cave door at Fraser Castle on the far right side of the wall. The pictographs were of an island, Viking ships, North America’s coastline, objects falling from the sky, ax-wielding warriors, and several figures and shapes he couldn’t identify.

Kenzie came in first, brushing dirt off her hands. “What are those pearly balloon thingies on the wall?”

“Deposits of gypsum. Forget about them and come here. Ye won’t believe this.”

Kenzie stood beside him, staring. “Holy shit! What does it all mean?”

“It’ll take years to figure it all out, but once we do, we’ll be able to verify what we know about the brooches.”

“Seriously?”

David laughed. “Aye. But it’d be nice if we could hire cave art researchers to explain it all.”

Ensley entered, and behind her Austin, and they joined Kenzie and David at the wall.

“What the hell?” Austin said. “JC and I were in here dozens of times, but we never saw this. How’d it get here?”

“When was the last time ye were here before the other day?”

“If I remember right, it was the night before I graduated from high school. You have to remember we were teenagers. But if we’d seen this wall, we would have told Elliott.”

“We didn’t have the best light the other day,” Ensley said. “Austin showed me the Yggdrasil, but we never noticed this. Although, honestly, we weren’t interested in spelunking right then. So I can’t say for sure whether these paintings were here or not.”

Sean walked up and stood beside David. “I thought I knew every inch of the farm. I can’t believe this is here and I didn’t know about it. But it does make me wonder if my grandfather knew. And if he did, why didn’t he tell my father or me?”

“I’ve been coming to MacKlenna Farm since I was a teenager,” David said, “and like ye, I thought I knew every inch of the farm. I might expect something like this in Scotland, but not here in Kentucky.”

David watched Paul walk a grid that only Paul could see in his mind. When he reached the back wall, he slowly walked side to side and back again.

“What are you doing, Paul?” Kenzie asked.

“I have hyperthymesia and can recall most of what I experience in excruciating detail. In the future, whether it’s twelve hours or twelve years, you could ask me about the day I first visited the cave. I could tell you the date, time, and everything about this place.”

“Does your mind take pictures that you can recall later?”

“The occipital lobe, located in the back of our brains, is responsible for processing visual information. Mine takes distinct pictures of my experiences, and I can recall in minute detail what happened and when. It’s a curse and a blessing.”

Kenzie smiled at David. “I wish I had Paul’s…hmm…unique ability. Then I could remember everything about the first time I saw you. All I remember now is that you acted like an ass.”

“Wasn’t Jack there?