Chapter 6: Chimney Rock

https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1NKMW_chimney-rock-hawk-watch

     "Karma, I didn't recognize you at first" confides the photographer historian once they settle into a booth with a pitcher of Budweiser and two frosted stanges before them. "I really like the new look."

"Just what the doctor ordered, Matthew" she quips, taking a gulp that drains half the little glass and flashing him a hazel-eyed smile. "Time to move on from hippy days to happy days."

"Tell me about it" he encourages, leaning toward her across the formica table top, "and while you do please call me Matt."

"Well Matt" she begins, pausing to finish off her first little glass and then slumping back in the red faux-leather of the bench seat, "I was offered a job as archivist at the Lilicroestian library."

"That's great" he exclaims, sitting up straight as a large pizza cut into squares is plopped between them. "Isn't it?"

"It would be" she responds, looking up with sad eyes as she grabs a center piece, folds it in half, and takes a big bite, "if that guy wasn't hitting on me."

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   They were sitting in the Chimney Rock Inn, an old brick building in an enlarging water gap. The stream trickling through the gap was known as the Middlebrook, and it was not the source the gap's widening. A basalt quarry dating from the nineteenth century was expanding operations along with increasing demand for gravel from the igneus ridges of the Watchung Mountains. A continuous line of dump trucks and cement mixers had been streaming in and out of the quarry since the early 1960s to fill the roads and lots of an increasingly suburbanized central New Jersey. Farms in the Garden State were sprouting with the subdivisions and strip malls that would feed the growing baby boom.

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     "Holy crap" exclaims Matt, sliding two crusty edge pieces onto his little white plate. "How can you tell he's hitting on you?"

"The usual - a touch here, a glance there, an excuse to meet" Karma rattles off without a thought. "And then this job offer out of the blue."

"That really sucks, the job could have been interesting" he muses while pouring them another round.  "They're a secretive sect with an odd history."

"Odd isn't the right word for that creepy guy who calls himself the Grand Master" she declares before knocking back a second glass.

"No, it's not" he agrees, grabbing another piece and downing half of it in one bite. "The founder of that group admitted late in life that he discovered their breed of sex magic in a Persian brothel."

"Eeuw" she blurts while scooting out of the booth, "let's get out of here."

"Don't mind if we do" he smiles, uncoiling his long frame to stand beside her.

"There's a trail up to White Rock behind this place" she winks while taking his arm, "and I know a different kind of magic."