Innocents Lost by Michael McBride Read Free Book Online Page B

last thing in the world he needed right now was for the stress to trigger an acute attack of his multiple sclerosis. Lord knew he had enough to deal with right now without winding up in the hospital.
    The television droned beside him, but he had no idea what was on. He merely needed the sound of voices for company, even if he couldn't focus on the words. His students had been given a clean bill of health and a little Ativan for their anxiety, but he still bore the guilt of involving them with a heavy heart. There was no way he could have known the kind of hell they would stumble upon, but he had brought along kids who had trusted him, and whether intentionally or not, he had failed them, possibly even ruined them for their chosen field. They had initially been booked in the rooms next door to his, but Lane had managed to rouse his girlfriend from bed, and she had driven across the state to pick them up and return them to Laramie. Les was grateful they had been able to get home tonight so they could resume some semblance of normalcy in the morning.
    After hours of tossing and turning because his brain refused to shut down, he had finally given up trying and decided to let his thoughts run and see where they would take him. The fact remained that the medicine wheels had originally been built for a purpose, and while the years may have scoured that purpose from the collective memory of the descendents of the ancient Native Americans who had designed them, there was obviously someone out there who at least thought he knew their function. Why else go to such great lengths to mimic a relatively obscure anthropological structure when whoever had built it could just as easily have buried the bodies in unmarked graves and been done with it? It was too convenient to think that the entire setup had been assembled simply for show. The meticulous nature of the construction and the maintenance of the site were proof enough for him, so what did its creator hope to achieve? And more importantly, why had it been necessary to involve an anthropologist, specifically him? He couldn't help but think that it was to answer the question he now pondered: what did the medicine wheel do?
    Unfortunately, that answer was lost somewhere in time.
    What did he know? The Native Americans who had first built them certainly hadn't called them by that name, an archaic term that carried negative, and arguably racist, connotations. There was a spiritual element to them, possibly in the harmony of man and nature motif. They didn't serve as protection from the elements, nor had they been designed with defensible perimeters. On a superficial level, they served as a celestial calendar, primarily to mark a single day in the year with remarkable precision, on sacred land saved from snowfall only during the summer months. So what made that one day, the summer solstice, so significant? What transpired on that single day, be it spiritual or scientific, that made it so important? It was the longest day of the year, and the point at which the northern hemisphere was closest to the sun. Did that imply there were different gravitational forces at work, similar to the moon's influence on the tides? And why the corkscrew trees? What had caused them to grow in such a manner, and only in the direct vicinity of the medicine wheel? They had obviously been there before the stone creation had been erected. Were they the reason this particular location had been chosen in the first place?
    His thoughts strayed to the mystical concept of energy vortices. He scoffed, but here he was contemplating gravitational pull. Could there be a relationship between the two? While the notion of a physical energy that could neither be qualified nor quantified made him roll his eyes, he couldn't argue the fact that some force other than genetics had acted upon the trees to cause the unnatural growth.
    He was running in circles in his mind and accomplishing nothing. Maybe a cup of coffee would serve to