“It’s an idea,” Rosa said gratefully. Her glance turned to her sister-in-law. “You and Leoni must go with Mr. Royston, honey. Lyn and I can start trekking, if we’re unable to get a lift.”
“I don’t like the idea of the four of us separating,” Concetta said anxiously.
“I agree with Rosa,” Lyn broke in. “You can’t risk not getting a lift in another car later on, and Leoni’s small legs would soon grow tired if she had to walk.”
“And she’d be pretty heavy to carry,” Rosa remarked. “Very well, I am overruled.” Concetta smiled and thanked Mr. Royston for his kind offer, then she and Rosa hurried into the hotel to pack their belongings. Lyn went in search of Leoni. She had told the child to play on the front lawn, but there was no sign of her, so she made for the children’s swimming pool. It was almost empty this morning, and Terry sat idly on the blue-marbled edge kicking his feet at the water.
“Hi, Lyn!” He jumped to his feet as she walked towards him, her leaf-green dress contrasting attractively with her hair. “Have you seen the magpie?” she asked.
He shook his fair head, and Lyn explained that Concetta had been offered a lift out of the hills on account of the Are, and she just had to find Leoni.
“Are you leaving as well?” Terry asked.
“I think so. Rosa’s a Californian and she knows how unpredictable these bush fires can be.”
Terry gazed over towards the south-east where the sky was sultry and ominous-looking. The sun through the drifting smoke had a saffron glare to it. “If there’s going to be a general exodus, then I’ll take the low road with you and Rosa,” he decided.
“We’d both like that,” Lyn said at once. “But right now I’ve got to find Leoni. She said she was going to play with the Marshall twins.”
“I’ve seen those two!” Terry exclaimed. “They were here at the pool a while ago, then Mrs. Marshall sent her maid out for them.”
At this piece of information Lyn felt a tautening of the nerves inside her. This was no time for Leoni to go wandering! “I’ll see you later, Terry. Perhaps Leoni is round at the stables.” She left him and hurried in the direction of the stables, where she was told by one of the boys that Leoni had not been by to see the ponies. At once her anxiety increased and she hastened into the hotel and made for the Marshalls’ suite. She prayed that they would know her whereabouts ... but they didn’t.
Lyn slipped into Rosa’s room and explained that she was having trouble locating Leoni. “Don’t alarm Concetta just yet,” she added. “The child may have taken a walk to that little glade with the fairy fall, as she called it. I’ll go and look ... it shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes.”
“That kid is the limit!” Rosa grumbled, her hands clenching on the dress she had just taken from a hanger. “Do you want me to come with you? I mean, it wouldn’t do for you to go astray as well.”
“I shall be all right, and it will unnerve Concetta if she’s left alone.”
“You’re right, of course.” Rosa’s glance dwelt on the connecting door. “This holiday has done her good, but her nerves are still rather shaky. Honestly, Leoni is one of those kids who ought to be on a leash!”
“Go on with your packing.” Lyn gave Rosa’s arm a reassuring squeeze. “Ten to one the little pickle is tossing her holiday money into that fall and wishing for a monkey or a paint pony!”
Lyn was worried, but it never helped to spread the contagion to someone else, and after collecting her shoulder-bag and a headscarf from her room she entered the elevator and pressed for the ground floor. Upon reaching the lobby she passed quite a number of people who were departing while the going was good. She hurried out into the bright noon sunshine, and her nostrils tensed at once. Even then she could smell smoke in the air.
Lyn estimated that it was a ten-minute walk to the small, flowery glade where a small waterfall tumbled over a shelf of rock. Someone at some time had thrown a nickel or a dime into the fall and made a wish. These days few people came to Summit Lodge without visiting the falls in order to snatch at a little magic.
Today it would be deserted, Lyn reckoned, except she hoped for Leoni, who after making her mother lose her temper at breakfast had no doubt paid another visit to the magic place in order to make a wish regarding her parents. She loved them both and wanted to be loved by them ... so basic, so simple, yet at times love as you desired it could be so elusive.
Lyn hurried on through the woods, plunged so deep in thought that she failed to hear the chuckle of water on her left side and began to weave her way between the slender spruces and giant redwoods on her right. Even the thickening of the undergrowth failed to warn her that she had taken a wrong turning; she merely shifted her shoulder-bag to her left side so she could use her right hand to thrust aside the tall bushes and ferns.
There was, Lyn told herself, a great deal of Rick in the child. Her imagination was vivid, and her blood leapt wild through her veins. She was fearless, beautifully made, everything Julio would want in a son ... and the little daughter knew that she wasn’t the son so ardently desired by him. She was growing up in an atmosphere of constant resentment that she was a girl, and Rick seemed to realize as Lyn did that this could be emotionally damaging for the child.
During the time Concetta had been confined to her bed Rick had taken to coaxing Leoni into his hard, warm arms, giving generously of his affection, and his flattery. Lyn was startled by her thought that he would make an awfully good father when the time came.
Lyn eased her slender body past a bramble thicket and reflected with a wry twisting of her lips that Rick Corderas was the most baffling person she had ever encountered. It evidently took children to strike the gold running beneath his rock-like surface; where dealing with women he was for the most part arrogant and mocking. It was just as well that Glenda Martell, that superbly attractive creature as he had called her, was not the type to want tenderness from a man.
At this juncture it suddenly occurred to Lyn that she was taking rather a long time to reach the glade.
She stopped walking and cocked an ear for the sound of running water, but all she heard was the fluttering and squabbling of the many birds nesting in the heavy foliage of the towering trees all around her. A nearby movement made her jump a little, then she saw the bushy tail of a squirrel just flickering out of sight behind the green lace of a fern brake. This led her to notice the density of the surrounding undergrowth; the dark, closer-knit tweeding of sunlight and shadow. She took a glance at her wristwatch and a startled little cry left her lips. She had left the hotel just on twelve o’clock ... it was now twenty minutes to one and she had plainly sidetracked away from the glade and was now fairly deep in the forest instead of on its fringes.
“You day-dreaming idiot!” she berated herself, when she turned back in the direction from which she had come and saw an almost identical pair of paths snaking away between the tall, crowding trees.
“What do I do now, toss a coin?” she asked herself. She studied the paths and finally took the left fork, fairly certain that she remembered that patch of thickets scratching against her legs. The path snaked ahead of her for several yards, then a barrier of brambles crossed it and as she pushed past them she was certain this was the path she had previously followed.
But now she was on the alert, each quivering leaf shadow catching her eye, her ears strained to catch the cool sound of running water that would indicate the nearness of the glade. A speckled woodpecker flew close by, so startling her that she made it her excuse for her quickly beating heart. Her growing sense of unease.
It didn’t do, suddenly, to remember that she was an English girl with previous experience of being entirely alone in a vast Californian forest. There were stealthy noises, sudden movements not human, while the redwood trees were both handsome and frightened in their towering strength.
Then her heart gave a sudden bound as just ahead of her she caught the lilt and chuckle of water.
It was the glade ... the falls!
>
She ran, her bag thumping against her side, the chestnut wings of her hair swinging against her cheeks that curved with a growing smile of relief. She scrambled through shrub, feathery fern and berry bushes. Water gleamed ahead of her, chattered away over smooth stones beneath the long tresses of weeping willows. Lyn stood dumbfounded on the banks of a stream, while her heart slowly sank as she gazed around her and realized that this... this was not the glade which holiday guests visited so they could toss a coin into a silvery falls.
Lyn’s disappointment was acute, and she sank back against a tree with a hollow feeling at the pit of her stomach. She had wandered further still from her goal, and afternoon had come upon her. She stared at the stream as it swirled about reed-maces and the wide platters of water-lilies. The only thing she could do now was follow the stream and hope that it led back to the falls.
The sun struck down hotly now she was out in the open, so she took her silk scarf from her bag and tied it over her head. Then, with the whimsical hope that it might bring her luck, Lyn took out the little cherry brooch which she always carried and pinned it to the lapel of her dress. Her courage needed a lift at the moment, for she was alone, she was lost, and not many miles away a brush fire was raging.
Added to which was her anxiety about Leoni. Mr. Royston had planned to leave the hotel at one o’clock, and Lyn could only hope that the child had returned on her own, and that Rosa had managed to persuade Concetta to leave despite her own failure to show up. A wry smile came and went on Lyn’s lips. Rosa had told her not to go astray!
She trekked gallantly on, hugging the banks of the stream, pausing after about an hour to cool her feet in the water and to eat a few pieces of the chocolate bar she had in her bag. It was milk chocolate and though she longed to eat the whole bar she knew that she must save some, just in case she was lost.
Well over an hour had passed and the stream still wandered on, and Lyn was finally faced with the unhappy certainty that if it led to the falls, then it led there in the opposite direction. She could have sat down on a fallen tree and wept; instead she doggedly set her chin and began to retrace her steps.
It was getting on for four o’clock when the stream petered out into a dry bed of stones. By this time Lyn was so weary she had to sit down before her legs let her down.
Until this moment she had held fear at bay, but now she felt it clawing at her nerves as dark lines of smoke drifted across the sky above her head. Her glance roved the forest behind her, gloomy and forbidding, strangely silent and waiting, as if all the birds had now flown off, warned by the change in the wind that the flames were coming.
Lyn now had to make a big decision. She either stayed here, where the stream would offer some protection in the event of the fire sweeping down on the forest, or she ventured across that dry part to where she could plainly see a pathway.
A pathway that might lead her out of the forest, to habitations and people. How she longed at this moment for the sight and sound of another human being!
It was this longing which refired her energy and set her on her feet again. She adjusted her shoulder-bag and plunged down a bank of coarse grass and made her way across to the shadowy tunnel between the trees, the slender heels of her sandals leaving a trail of tiny marks in the sandy bed of the stream.
At intervals along the banks of the stream, fading away behind Lyn, lay scattered in the grass scraps of silver foil from a chocolate bar, and one or two cigarette stubs, their cork tips faintly marked with lipstick. Indications that something female, hungry and nervous had passed this way.
Twilight was invading the forest when Lyn glimpsed the outline of a house among the trees. Her slim fingers clenched on the strap of her bag, her heartbeats quickened and she was almost afraid of reaching the house and not finding it occupied.
Her fear was well founded. The place was deserted, a ramshackle old log cabin, its shutters hanging loose on rusty hinges and its walls overgrown with moss. In any situation the place would have looked benighted, but here in the forest it assumed a ghostliness that almost sent Lyn hurrying past it.
But she was so tired, so footsore and dispirited, and the cabin afforded a break in the sheer monotony of just walking and not getting anywhere. She mounted the front steps, advanced a hand to the door and gave it a push. It creaked open, revealing a shadowy, damp-smelling interior, but Lyn raked her lighter out of her bag and by the small light she took a look at the inside of the place. It was divided into a pair of rooms, and when a fluttering, bat-like noise greeted her in the bedroom she hastily withdrew, banging shut the door between the rooms.
Here in the living-room a few pieces of furniture stood about, dusty and worn, while some discarded fishing tackle had been tossed into a comer. The brick fireplace was a begrimed cavern, and there was an old dresser with some broken crockery left on its shelves. When Lyn spotted a squat piece of candle lying on the dresser she swooped on it and struggled to light the damp wick. It sizzled, sputtered, and finally emitted a small flame. Lyn carefully dripped some of the grease into the centre of a chipped saucer and stood the candle firmly in the pool of grease. Now the place looked and felt less ghostly, and Lyn dusted off a chair with a discarded magazine and sat down to rest her aching limbs.
She loosened the straps of her sandals and lit herself a cigarette. She wasn’t normally a smoker, but was glad upon this occasion that she happened to be carrying a pack which she had bought for Rosa and forgotten to give her. As she sat smoking she wondered if by now a search party had been sent out from the Lodge to look for her. And most of all she wondered about the fire. More than once in the past hour she had noticed the resinous pungency of the drifting smoke, as if the fire had got a grip on the pine trees edging the hills around Summit Lodge.
Lyn sat alone and afraid in this run-down cabin, while the piece of candle made flickering shadows, and she felt the crowding closeness of the trees all around the place.
Suddenly she tensed in her chair and felt the prickling of goose bumps on every area of her body. Her glance swung to the open door of the cabin, for out there in the rustling gloom she had heard the snapping of a twig as if trodden upon, and her mind flew to wild cats. They came out after dark and they stalked in the undergrowth ... then her breath caught sharply in her throat as a tall, dark figure loomed out of the forest and came towards the steps of the cabin.
She jumped to her feet and stood like a creature at bay ... her eyes were large, drowning her other features, as she stared at the man who mounted the steps in a single stride. He blocked the doorway, his shoulders powerful under a lamb-lined jacket, his left hand thrust into the pocket of corded trousers.
“You have given me one hell of a long walk, chiquita,” Rick Corderas drawled.
Lyn’s throat unlocked and she swayed where she stood. “And you have given me one hell of a fright!” she retorted.
Back went his black head and his deep laughter filled the cabin and sent its ghosts fluttering into their corners.
“You devil!” Lyn choked. “Why didn’t you call my name ... let me know it was you out there?”
“And risk having you dash out of a possible back door?” He entered, his shadow looming large up the wall. “It is now dark and your trail would be less easy to follow in the dark. By the way,” he withdrew his left hand from his pocket, “I found this down by some thickets. It must have come undone as you scrambled through them.”
Red cherries gleamed in his fingers, and a little mockery glinted in his eyes as he came towards her.
CHAPTER X
Lyn accepted her brooch from Rick, then they stood confronting each other a moment longer. She had prayed, hoped that someone would be sent to search for her, but she hadn’t dreamed that it would be Rick. But here he stood, larger than life, a sardonic smile on his ferociously handsome face.
“The explanation is really quite simple,” he said, as if reading the questions in her upraised eyes. “The moment we heard at the hacienda that a fire had broken out in Yucca
Canyon, I jumped into my car and broke all speed limits getting to the Lodge. I made it by half-past one.”
“Did Leoni go back to the hotel and did Concetta leave with the Roystons?” Lyn had to have answered the questions which had been bottled up for hours.
Rick rumpled his black hair with a large hand, and there was a crisp ring to his voice when he said: “You do the darnedest things, don’t you? Leoni did go to the falls, but why did you not wait patiently at the hotel for her return? Her sense of direction is really much better than yours.”
“I - I was worried about her.” Lyn flushed at his scorn. “I thought she might dawdle on the way back and that Mr. Royston might leave without Concetta—”
“You upset that little plan anyway, chiquita. Concetta refused to leave when you failed to return. Fortunately I arrived by one-thirty and I insisted that Rosa use my car to get the three of them away. I have since been searching for you. Tell me and ease my curiosity - whatever induced you to go wandering back and forth along the banks of that stream? I wasted some time going in the wrong direction, for there were two sets of your heel tracks.”
“I thought the stream might lead me to the falls. Anyway, you didn’t have to waste your precious time looking for me. I’m sure the hotel management would have sent someone else if you had asked them.” Her eyes met his, wide and defiant against the paleness of her skin, heavy-lidded with her fatigue.
Abruptly his expression softened. He muttered something in Spanish, then before she could protest he lifted her bodily into the chair. “Come, let me latch your sandals.” He knelt in front of her and she watched dumbly as he secured the straps, and she winced a little as his fingers lightly explored the backs of her heels. “Yes, you have blisters. I thought as much from the uneven tracks I later followed.”
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