Halfway Dead by Terry Maggert Page A

Major’s grandmother owns the company, and she runs it, too. She grew up crazy poor and wants to do some good in the world, which led to him being sent here on this . . . whatever it is. I guess you’d call it a hunt.” I told her the entire story in exacting detail, pausing as she asked for clarifications leading up to the moment when he said Thendara.
    Gran steepled her fingers, and the gesture lent her even more of an air of power. She was really three women; my grandmother, of course, but also a sage and a mother in her own right. The three faces were closely connected, and all of these people flickered in her eyes while she considered my report. After a long contemplation, she asked, “Do you have the picture? The one that led Major’s people to this spot?”
    I held out my phone, the image hovering on the screen. Gran looked at it with a scrutiny that was unsettling if you were the subject; she let her eyes investigate every aspect of the image. She did not hurry.
    “Those stones behind the trees, do you see them?” she asked. When I nodded, Gran placed her hands on the table, fingers drumming lightly. “That is not a random pile of rock. In fact, it isn’t really rock at all.”
    That was new to me. I thought I could recognize ordinary rocks. I was wrong.
    “What Major Pickford has stumbled onto is a ruin,” Gran said. Her voice was soft and distant. She was in the grip of a memory.
    “What is it, Gran?” I took her hand as the first tingle of concern began to crawl up my neck. There was something sad here; I could feel it coming.
    She shook her head lightly, chasing ghosts. “Do you know why Thendara is no longer a place?”
    “I thought a distant relative was killed there. I haven’t heard the story since I was little; you always just used it as a sort of cautionary tale about the forest. I sort of thought it was so long ago, that it had passed into the realm of legend.” I raised my shoulders slightly. I was reaching all the way back into my oldest memories to recall the nuance of how Thendara came to be a dirty word.
    Gran pressed her lips together in a grim line. “A boy. There was a boy who was a blood relation to our family, and his father took him to scout the route for a canal that was being built. It was supposed to transform the mountain communities; each little town would be linked to Lake George in the east, and the Great Lakes in the west.”
    “You mean they thought they could connect to the Erie Canal? Here?” I waved around. The mountains weren’t exactly soaring, but they were almost certainly too high to consider building a manmade waterway through.
    “That very thing.” Gran sighed, wistful and with a degree of condemnation at the folly of man. “This relative of ours, a man named Bentley . . . well, he was an engineer who would build the locks for the canal. His word was considered law regarding the course of the canal, because he was the only person who could accurately plot a route that wouldn’t run straight into bedrock. That sort of hitch would kill the project in its infancy. Bentley was a genius with stone, and he had his oldest boy with him in hopes of teaching him the family trade, as it was.”
    “What was his name?”
    “Erasmus. He was twelve, more than a boy. A young man at that point,” Gran said heavily.
    She fiddled with her cup for a moment, then continued. She wasn’t nervous; there was nothing on the planet that could discommode my Gran, but she was processing something. I could see shadows flicker in her eyes, and then she sighed again, but less gusty, and pointed at my phone. “That picture is not some random assembly of broken rock. It’s the site where Bentley began to survey and place holder stones for the building of the lock system. I’m sure he wanted to assure himself that the small ravine was stable enough to hold such a structure.”
    There were well-preserved locks throughout New York; some of them could still open and close to raise the