talk about secretly marked trails and petroglyphs carved into rocks.”
“Is this why you became a historian?” she ventured, leaning in. “Because of your Pops’ stories?”
He straightened at the idea. He’d never considered Pops’ influence on his life choices, beyond this particular expedition, but he supposed his own curiosity about the past had been born in this very cabin. “This is Last of the Mohicans territory. Pops’ stories drew a picture of a time when this land wasn’t fenced off as private property or relegated to park status, when Native Americans still lived here the way they did for thousands of years.”
“You don’t think Grandpa MacCabe kissed the Blarney Stone once or twice?”
He raised his beer again and watched her over the top. “You’re not a romantic, Casey Michaels.”
“Absolutely not.”
Too quick, that response. She had been a romantic, once. Maybe that fiancé she didn’t want to talk about had killed that sensibility.
“Call me a cynic,” she said with a forced laugh. “Do you have any idea how many crazy stories I’ve heard in my travels?”
“I’d like to hear one or two.”
“We’ve got three weeks coming. I’ll ration them out.” She swung her legs up and planted her feet on the bench. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she sat sideways, gifting him with her profile. “Have you ever heard about that guy who parachutes off skyscrapers? I’ve interviewed him. I’ve also interviewed a man who lives in Yosemite. I mean, lives in Yosemite. Kills deer and hunts rabbits to eat, shelters in a cave. I keep telling myself I’m going to write it all down someday. Call it Travels Across America. But I never seem to have the time between assignments. This job, it keeps me on my toes.” She pressed her cheek on her knee and looked at him from under those sultry lashes. “Sounds like your Pops’ story would fit right in with all those tall tales.”
“It would.” The music of a chorus of evening bugs suddenly swelled. With the grill lighter, he lit a citronella candle on the picnic table. “He was only a boy when his grandfather took him on a couple of smuggling trips, but he remembered the markers on the path. He was forced to memorize them, he told me, just in case he got lost and had to find his own way home. Landmarks, rock formations, petroglyphs, that kind of thing.”
She looked up from under her lashes, her damp hair lit by the golden sun, letting her silence create a vacuum he couldn’t help but fill with words.
“Here’s what really sparked this expedition.” He rolled the bottom of his beer in the pool of its own condensation. “A couple of years ago, I was doing some research on the French and Indian War, and I found a map folded up in an old history book in the archives of the New York Public Library. It had been drawn by a French explorer hired to figure out how the fur traders were sneaking their wares to the English. The map was quite a find on its own…but I saw something else in it.”
“What?”
“The map included a small drawing of an owl’s head not more than fifty to a hundred miles from where we are sitting right now. A marker for the same sort of journey Pops took as a boy. But the one marker on the map was made nearly two hundred years earlier.”
She lifted her head from her knees. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
“The whole thing has the smell of old parchment, I know. But I’m convinced Pops’ memory is true.” At least it had been back then. “If I can find those landmarks, if I can link them to that map, then Pops wasn’t weaving tales for the amusement of his grandkids. He was regaling us with American folk history.”
“Wow.” She slid her empty beer bottle back on the picnic table. “We’ve got a story here. You are a romantic, Dylan.”
He squinted toward some far horizon, unwilling to admit to his fatal flaw.
“I have to write this down.” She swiped her phone, stopped the recording, and swung her legs off the bench. “While it’s still fresh.”
He couldn’t look away as she stood up, the hem of her dress shooting down to swish around her knees.
“I assume,” she said, grabbing her empty plate and the bottle of ketchup, “that we’re launching at dawn, Captain?”
“A little later than that. We have to pack the car, lash the canoe, and get to the dock by nine a.m.”