Crystal Vision

by Patricia Rice

  Teddy’s topaz eyes nearly gleamed gold in anticipation. “The police took apart my thieving cousin’s house and didn’t find anything that might be Lucinda’s book. We’re tearing down half the walls in the remodel, and it hasn’t turned up yet. So if it ever existed. . .”

  “We should look.” Mariah’s spirits lifted, and she glared at her still-swollen knee. Nurse Brenda had worked miracles on it, but even a gifted practitioner wasn’t God. “I just need Daisy’s cart to get around.”

  “I heard you used Mr. Ives as transport earlier,” Samantha said with a laugh. “Maybe we could enlist him. I’m not sure why he’s still around now that he’s appraised the ceramics.”

  “He claims he’s a geologist and mineralogist. Maybe he’s hoping for a gem mine.” Mariah ignored the reference to Keegan carrying her. She’d never been a delicate flower men liked to haul around. She was the sturdy sort who beat them at volleyball and who carried her own surfboard. Men were more likely to expect her to change their tires. Working in a man’s world, she had preferred it that way.

  She was just feeling a bit. . . vulnerable. . . with Daisy’s death. Physical action in the company of others shouldn’t get her into trouble the way her computer vengeance had.

  “Gems are unlikely,” Samantha said, taking her seriously about Keegan’s goal. “Gold, maybe. But with that fault line running through here, not a particularly safe venture. I looked Keegan up the other night. The most I can find is some relation to a mining family in Scotland—although there was one reference to a Malcolm library in his castle. Do you think he’s related to Lucinda Malcolm?”

  Thank goodness someone had the smarts to look him up! She didn’t know if he was one of the people she’d harmed in her reprisal for Adera’s death, but she needed to stay far away from him, just in case.

  A little while later, Mariah stiffly climbed into the front seat of Sam’s Subaru. “I need to be back at the café before the dinner rush,” she insisted.

  “You need to stay off that leg,” Sam protested. “I can handle the café for a few days.”

  “We ought to make the Kennedys set up an urgent care office and put Brenda in charge.” Mariah diverted the topic from her injury. “She gets bored.”

  “Don’t put me in a position between the town’s needs and Kurt’s business,” Teddy protested from the back seat as Sam drove through town. “Kurt and I are still learning this living together thing. He’s more wounded than you realize, and the weight of keeping all his employees while tourism is down is a heavy burden. It’s up to us to make things happen.”

  “If making things happen got Daisy killed, I’m not certain I’m on board with that. Maybe the town needs to die.” Mariah knew that was selfish. Just because she needed isolation didn’t mean it was good for anyone else.

  “You don’t have enough bills to pay if you think we should stifle tourists,” Teddy said with a laugh. “I need the business if I’m spending my spare time studying crystal energy instead of designing high-end jewelry. The art walk really made a difference at the cash register.”

  “And the town needs the income to keep Walker here. He’s only playing police chief because I want to stay and because he thinks there’s a need. If Hillvale turns into a ghost town again. . . He’ll grow bored and go back to LA,” Sam said.

  “Then you and Val better come up with a good use for that land of yours before someone else does,” Mariah said grumpily. “Without Daisy out there guarding it. . .”

  Sam pointed out the windshield. “The vultures will prey,” she finished for her. “That’s not the sheriff’s crew.”

  Trucks were lined up alongside the dirt lane and men were walking down the path to the farmhouse.

  Four

  July 8: Sunday, late afternoon

  At a loud, feminine, “Ahem” from the road, Keegan elbowed Aaron. “We didn’t move fast enough.”

  Aaron snorted. “Not a chance we could have. I just wanted to be here when they showed up.”

  Ahead of them, Walker and the mayor halted to wait for the women. “Official police business,” Walker yelled back at the trio of females.

  Mariah was hurriedly hobbling along on her walking stick. Keegan winced just watching her. He jogged back up the path to offer his arm.

  He’d come to expect her suspicious glare and wondered if it was men in general or just him that stirred her animosity.

  “You’re not police. You’re not even a citizen.” Since the others were striding ahead of them, she grudgingly accepted his arm.

  Her strong fingers gripping his bare arm created a pleasurable thrill that balanced her crankiness. “Walker didn’t want to disturb Sam or Val,” he explained. “But if someone killed Daisy to get into that vault, then we need to know what’s in there. Aaron and I are the only experts around, and Monty thought he ought to represent the town’s interests.”

  “Aside from the fact that our mayor is a Kennedy and represents the resort’s interests as much as the town, what about them?” She gestured at the other men. “Harvey’s a musician. Orval’s a veterinarian. What are they doing here?”

  “They just kind of materialized,” Keegan admitted. “Walker says it happens. He figured he could use them to guard the entrance while we were inside.”

  As they descended the path, Keegan did his damnedest not to notice the sway of Mariah’s breasts, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing much under the embroidered cotton tunic. He concentrated on admiring her sleek black braid adorned with feathers and beads and. . . crystals. Not plastic trinkets. Where the devil did those things come from? These didn’t look like more than glassy diorite, but crystals didn’t lie around on the ground in bead form. Someone had to manufacture them from their rock origins.

  “Why did you decide to come up here?” he asked when she only frowned in response.

  “Not your business,” she said.

  “Mariah, behave yourself,” Sam called back. “Remember, Keegan’s the one with the Malcolm library.”

  Damn and hellfire. How far had the snoopy women dug into his background? He tried to lay low. Living in an isolated area as he did those rare times he was home, he was pretty much invisible to the rest of the world, and he preferred it that way. He wasn’t good at lying or pretending. . .

  As Mariah was. Aaron had hinted that she wasn’t who she seemed to be—although it was pretty obvious that being a waitress wasn’t her aptitude.

  “He’s not telling us everything, so I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t return the favor,” Mariah shouted back. “It’s not as if we have any real evidence about a book except the scribblings of a vengeful drug addict.”

  “A book?” Keegan asked, now very interested. “What book?”

  “Not your business,” she repeated, before calling to the men ahead, “Hey, Walker, is it okay if we take Val’s golf cart back to her?”

  They couldn’t possibly be hunting the same book, could they? It would seem unlikely in any other context. Unfortunately, in Hillvale, everything always came down to crystals, even the art. And the books that had gone missing were all about crystals.

  Ahead, Walker and Aaron were pulling aging shrubbery away from the door to the bunker.

  Walker gestured at the abandoned cart. “Sheriff is done here. Help yourself.”

  Mariah shouted her relief at having her transportation back.

  “Does the sheriff know about the bunker?” Sam asked.

  “I have no way of knowing if the bunker is relevant to the investigation until I take a look at it,” Police Chief Walker said. “The sheriff’s team is only good for forensics. We’re the ones who know who and what’s up here.”

  “That’s my man.” Sam kissed his cheek.

  Keegan admired the easy camaraderie between the platinum-blond scientist and the half-Chinese lawman. Once upon a time, he’d tried that kind of relationship. But Brianna had claimed he was a robot, then found someone new, proving he was better off keeping his nose in dirt.

  He mi
ght be emotionally crippled, as Bri claimed, but he could still manage physical relations. He had hopes that Mariah might be the same.

  Abandoning his arm, she hobbled across the farmhouse foundation to lay a feather and a daisy on the ground where Daisy had died. For a brief second, she looked so forlorn, that Keegan forgot she was a stubborn termagant.

  And then she donned her resolute mask again as Aaron and Walker dragged open what appeared to be a steel door.

  “Bomb shelter?” Keegan guessed.

  “Got it in one,” Mariah said. “It may have originally been an old root cellar. I don’t know who decided to add the concrete, but the Ingerssons and their stoned crew had fun with it. They probably had pot parties or LSD orgies down there. I think they even lived in it after the farmhouse burned.”

  “So you’ve been inside?” Keegan asked, helping her over the rough terrain and the stone foundation.

  “Only once. There’s way too much to take in for one trip to be enough.”

  “Maybe we could turn it into a tourist attraction,” Sam said before following Walker’s flashlight down the stairs.

  “What, for tourists into creepy crawlies?” Teddy yelled from the top of the stairs. “There better be no skeletons. I’m done with skeletons.”

  “No spiders or snakes,” Sam called up. “A cobweb or two but Daisy took pretty good care of it.”

  “Did Daisy live here?” Keegan asked.

  “Some of the time. She didn’t have a place of her own. She usually stayed with Val if it was cold or rainy, but she liked it here.” Sorrow tinged Mariah’s voice. She released his arm and braced her hand on the wall inside the bunker, using her stick for balance.

  Seeing that Harvey and Orval were roaming the foundation, and the surfer-dude mayor was keeping watch, Keegan followed after her. Aaron brought up the rear.

  The stairs may have been tiled at one time. Keegan could make out pieces of colorful ceramics in the eroded concrete. Sam and Walker were lighting lanterns below that illuminated mirrors, colored glass—and crystals?—along the stairwell. At the bottom, Keegan assisted Mariah to a carved wooden bench situated in front of stacks of canvases. The wall above the stacks was covered in small portraits of people from a decidedly different era. Long hair flowed. Beaded headbands, scarves, furry vests. . .

  “Very seventies,” Aaron said dryly, studying the works. “Pretty amateurish, some of this.”

  “We need a way of identifying these people.” Sam turned a light on the paintings. “They may all be dead by now, but the ones still living might give us some insights.”

  “Not if they’re evil,” Mariah argued. “Do we really want them back in Hillvale?”

  “Evil?” The artwork didn’t hold Keegan’s interest. He left Teddy and Aaron working their way through the oils while he studied the construction of the bunker. Walker obligingly beamed his powerful flashlight along the walls.

  “Daisy only collected the portraits that corroded—the ones she called evil,” Sam explained. “Portraits of my grandparents and the Kennedys’ father are down here, as well as the criminal who blew up our mountain. I suspect the mural at the café was doctored to cover up any corrosion, but we don’t know for certain if those faces had red eyes like the ones Daisy collected.”

  “Evil, huh.” Keegan poked at a crack in the concrete but nothing moved.

  He sensed interesting structures all through the cellar, but other than the few crystals glued to the walls, he couldn’t find the mother lode, if it existed.

  Sitting on the bench, Mariah was riffling through the stacked canvases. “There are several paintings of the Ingerssons and Geoff Kennedy in this stack. If they are any example, the unfamiliar faces may be dead people also. There’s a chance that Daisy knew who was living and who wasn’t.”

  Teddy and Aaron joined Mariah in studying the canvases, while Sam and Walker continued in Keegan’s path, examining the walls.

  “The energy here is different,” Sam said, running her hands under one of the paintings. “The further back I go, the stronger the effect.”

  “Energy?” Keegan had sensed crystalline structures, but energy? Just how eccentric were Hillvale inhabitants?

  “I can’t explain it,” Sam admitted. “I never studied energy beyond what’s good for plants. Mariah, can you toddle down here and see if you feel it too? Aaron?”

  The antique dealer picked up his walking stick and began running it along the wall.

  Curious, Keegan returned to the front of the shelter to assist Mariah to her feet. He enjoyed her weight at his side, and she seemed to be accepting his assistance more readily. He wondered if that meant anything. Not enough to trust him, he figured.

  She poked her walking stick along the base of the wall as she hobbled along. “Not negative or positive.”

  “Maybe pushing at each other?” Aaron suggested. “What on earth did they build this thing in? Radioactive material?”

  “Not radioactive,” Keegan said, then regretted it. If they could sense earth energy in a manner few people could, then he should be allowed to speak of his extra sense, but he wasn’t certain he was ready to.

  Mariah poked his shoe with her stick. “Speak, Oh Great One, lend us your knowledge.”

  She was jesting, he was certain. He glared down at her. “Rocks hold natural radioactivity. Concrete doesn’t. So unless they were storing uranium, the energy isn’t radioactive. Not that I understand how one feels energy.”

  “Most people don’t,” she said smugly, without further explanation.

  He wasn’t a violent man, but he could easily see how one might wish to wring the graceful curve of this woman’s neck. She deliberately set out to be provocative, and not in a good way.

  But to put people off, he realized in surprise. This native princess didn’t want anyone getting close. Why? Now his scientific mind was fully engaged.

  “You have to accept the supernatural or the paranormal or whatever,” Walker explained. “The women won’t talk to you otherwise.”

  “Women don’t talk because they’re devious,” Keegan argued. “If they’d just state their positions upfront, we wouldn’t have such difficulty communicating. I grew up surrounded by females who declare they are descendants of Druids. My mother claims to have second sight.” Vague warnings certainly hadn’t saved his family from disaster. “Who am I to dispute them? But I know nothing of imaginary energy.”

  Mariah actually turned to look at him. The gleam behind her opaque brown gaze sent shivers down his spine, or maybe straight to his groin. She was a striking woman when she wasn’t even trying. It would be a battle royal if she decided to really take him on.

  “You are related to Lucy Wainwright, otherwise known as Lucinda Malcolm?” she demanded.

  “That was a high-flying leap of logic,” he muttered. “Are you claiming second sight as well?”

  Knowing who Keegan was, Aaron merely smirked and returned to testing energy.

  “I was simply using basic math by putting two and two together,” Mariah said. “A few weeks back, we discovered Lucinda Malcolm visited Hillvale, painted a futuristic painting for us, and left a book on crystals here. The Null of all Nulls, owner of a Malcolm library, shows up later, claiming his family is descended from Druids. What are the chances of that adding up?”

  “I need a good stout before I attempt explaining any of that,” he grumbled.

  “Unless anyone sees anything valuable in this dungeon, hitting the bar sounds like an excellent idea.” Walker headed for the front. “It’s been a damned long day.”

  Studying the wall crystals, Teddy, the jeweler, shook her head. “It’s interesting, and I’d like to explore more, but I’m not finding diamonds and rubies. I need to get back to my shop.”

  “No books, no treasure trove.” Sam returned from the end of the bunker. “Just a lot of old art we’d need an expert to evaluate. Or Daisy. I’m afraid any secrets died with her.”

  Mariah continued to stare at Keegan expectantly. Aaron l
eaned against the wall and waited. Keegan had never really explained himself to Aaron. They were acquaintances—who in a different time and place had acknowledged that they were different.

  Here was where he either gained Mariah’s trust or sent her rolling on the floor with laughter.

  Keegan rubbed his nose while he formulated his words. “Unless you understand the physical structure of crystals, I cannot begin to explain what I sense. Put very crudely, I can tell you if there are diamonds behind this bunker. There are not. There is however possibly magnetite, which is of the same octahedron structure as diamonds.”

  They all stared at him. They wanted beer, not a lecture on molecular structures.

  “You want us to believe you can sense what kind of rocks are around us?” Mariah asked in obvious disbelief. “You could make up anything you liked, and we’d have no way of proving it without blowing up the bunker.”

  Keegan shrugged. He’d expected disbelief.

  “Magnetite—iron ore, ferrous oxide,” Teddy said with interest, not questioning his statement as the annoying waitress did. “Not useful for jewelry but fairly common to California. I’ve been studying up on the power of crystals. Magnetite is pretty interesting. It can be found in the human brain. They think it may be related to memory, but magnetite is what creates magnets.”

  “Which possess positive and negative energy,” Sam crowed, taking the ball and running with it.

  Keegan rubbed his brow. These women were as seriously weird as his family.

  “Iron rusts,” Mariah said disparagingly, using Keegan’s arm as a crutch and heading for the door. “And I wouldn’t believe a Null without proof.”

  He let her lead him out, still amazed that no one had laughed. They were each processing his information through their own strange perspectives. He could comprehend Mariah’s rejection easier than the acceptance of the others.

  Mariah continued without his asking, “Not that I believe Keegan can sense such things, but in theory, if the artists used magnetite in their paint, then could that cause the corrosion in the paintings?”