The Soulmate

by Carly Bishop

  Just why he’d been so optimistic puzzled her. Conversely, Jerome Clarke’s statements went downhill over several weeks, from victorious to downright hateful. As far as he was concerned, no compromise would be made. Though such words never appeared in print, Robyn could almost hear Clarke’s attitude toward compromising. Over my dead body…

  KIEL SOARED AROUND the heavens for a long time after he departed the earthly dimension of the county courthouse—but he found no peace of mind. He knew that he had not only saved Robyn Delaney Trueblood’s life but corrected an injustice done to Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts. Neither act was insignificant or beneath the attentions of an Avenging Angel, especially not Robyn’s life, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that his work in Aspen was not done.

  He dropped into the DBAA offices on Logan Street, out of respect for Gracie’s wishes, materializing out of sight of any mortals hanging around. Grace, however, was on some errand to do with an update of Policies and Procedures.

  Bureaucracy, Kiel thought, he could live without. He dashed off an irreverent note to her with a pen only he could see flying across a page of Gracie’s notepaper, then bounded up the stairs to Angelo’s office.

  Kiel was in luck. Angelo was just polishing off the heavenly paper trail transfer to the mortal family that the littlest Avenging Angel Ariel had requested. Jay and Shanna were going to make great parents.

  “Ezekiel.” He cocked a bushy white brow. “Enjoy your little trek around the heavens?”

  Kiel shot him a look. “I know there’s plenty to be done around here—“

  “Yes, and you’re desperately needed. We’re critically shorthanded around here what with Samuel getting himself banished to another mortal existence and Dash doing what I told him to do for the first time in recorded history.”

  “Imagine Dash following orders.” Kiel grinned. Dash was notoriously allergic to orders, but then the best detective in all the DBAA, maybe all the branches of the Avenging Angels, could pretty much do what he wanted as long as justice was the end result. Kiel wanted to get around to telling Angelo he wasn’t done with Robyn yet, but he had to know what influence Angelo had finally had over the ace detective. “What order did you give him?”

  Angelo scowled. “I told him to follow his heart. And what do you know, he did. He and Liz got married.”

  “That’s nice,” Kiel muttered automatically, then thought about what he’d just heard come out of Angelo’s mouth. “He what?”

  “He got married.”

  “He got married.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “I didn’t think, I mean…is that possible?”

  “Don’t even think about it, Ezekiel,” Angelo intoned. “Like I said, we’re short-staffed enough around here.”

  Kiel put aside that stunning possibility for the moment, if for no other reason than to get Angelo to let him go back and make sure Robyn would be safe. “I just need another earth day, maybe two, with Robyn.”

  Angelo didn’t bat an eye. The dockets might be full, Kiel realized, but Angelo would not take lightly a lingering threat of injustice. “What’s the problem?”

  Kiel shook his head. His feelings for Robyn weren’t going away. How could they? But that was a matter for another time. “I’m not sure I’ve done everthing. Spyder Nielsen’s death didn’t go unavenged. The woman who murdered him wound up driving off the road and getting herself killed.”

  Angelo heaved a weary sigh. “So many victims to keep track of.”

  Kiel nodded. “The false accusations against Trudi Candelaria have been resolved.”

  “And you saved Robyn’s life,” Angelo pointed out.

  “Yes. But there is still the issue of the Hallelujah cave-in.”

  “What’s this?” Dashiell asked, materializing at Angelo’s office door with a Camel stuck in his mouth.

  “Dash.” Kiel grinned, rising to shake hands in the mortal manner with the ace detective. “Good to see you.”

  “You, too, kid. How’s it hanging?”

  Kiel laughed but Angelo rolled his eyes and glared at the cigarette smoke wafting around.

  Surprised to know that Dash had been following the case, Kiel explained the dilemma.

  Out of some overflowing matrimonial good will, Kiel supposed, Dash let his cigarette die and dematerialized the butt. “You’re convinced someone did blow up that mine with you and your doll face inside?”

  “It’s just a hunch. I’ve got no proof.”

  “You want a piece of advice? Stick with those hunches, kid. So what’s the question? If no one had a motive to murder Keller Trueblood, then who did it?”

  “Yeah, that would be the question.”

  “Classic deduction, kid.” Dash grimaced. “if the murder wasn’t about Keller, it was about his wife, wouldn’t you say?”

  Over my dead body.

  And then, of course, Jerome Clarke had died, Robyn thought, closing up the file. She was no further along in her thinking about this story than she’d been a year earlier. Even then she’d thought Clarke’s death far too convenient. The interesting part was that no one cared what had become of old Jerome once the compromise was put into effect.

  But sitting there in the historical old rattletrap of a newspaper building, her imagination caught fire. Spyder Nielsen’s death had affected the town in much the same way as Jerome Clarke’s. Little more than a week ago Scott had posed the question, what if Abe Lincoln had sneezed in the instant he was killed? Here the question became, What if someone murdered Jerome Clarke? Juxtaposed against the high-profile celebrity murder of Spyder Nielsen, the hypothetical question might make a great book.

  She had to bounce this idea off Lucy. Taking the file, she spent a few moments tracking Margaret down to thank her for rekindling her interest in this story and for making the microfilm copies, then took her leave and hurried back to Lucy’s building.

  She was greeted as she exited the caged elevator on the second floor by a receptionist and Lucy’s young sidekick. He stopped her long enough to hand her Adelmeyer’s reports, which documented both surface and core residues of ordinary dynamite at the Hallelujah.

  “Thanks, Todd. Nothing we hadn’t really expected, is it?”

  “Sorry about that. Wish we could’ve been more helpful.”

  “It is helpful to know this much—but I’m not sure it matters anymore. Is Lucy around?”

  He grinned. “Out to a late lunch. Anything I can do?”

  “No, thanks, really. I’m just going to tackle the mess in here. Just let her know I’m here, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  The district attorney’s office had promised Robyn the return of all Keller’s notes once the prosecution of Detective Crandall was over. She tore out one page near the end of his collected notes. The sketch was abstract, but in its lines she saw herself and Keller, hand in hand.

  Resolving to keep her heart off her sleeve and back where it belonged, she spent the next hour packing up the rest of the boxes. Lucy Montbank let herself in just as Robyn was taping shut the last box.

  Lucy crossed the room and gave Robyn a quick hug. “You could have left this, Robyn. There was no need to do it all by yourself.”

  She gave a weary smile. “I didn’t mind, Lucy. You’ve been more than wonderful to let us use the space. Packing up was the least I could do.”

  “What is this little charm you’re wearing these days?” Lucy asked.

  “This?” She lifted the chain from which Kiel’s ivory carving hung. “Angel wings. Why, don’t you like it?”

  “It’s just so commonplace. I’m personally bored silly with all the infatuation with angels these days.”

  Robyn might have agreed except that Kiel had carved them for her.

  “In any case—” Lucy lowered herself into one of the chairs not cluttered with a box “—what will you do now? Go home to Denver?”

  “I’ve been thinking about staying around a few days. I’m really very excited about an idea I h
ad that I wanted to bounce off you.”

  “Robyn, you’re positively glowing! After everything that’s happened, I thought I’d find you in a funk. Tell me your idea—but…before you do, let me say this. I want you to know how sorry I am that I made such a stink toward Kiel at my party. After the two of you left, I felt like such an idiot. Such a false friend for begrudging you his help and friendship.”

  Robyn swallowed on a lump of loneliness lodged in her throat. She hadn’t known or even thought about exactly what Kiel had done to seal the rift in reality he had made when he whisked them away from the scene Robyn herself had begun to create.

  But her friend’s apology gave Robyn a sudden new insight. More than any celebrity, Lucy represented this town, its history, its penchant for image, and she wanted nothing, nothing, to reflect badly upon her.

  “Lucy, please don’t worry about it. Kiel was quick to point out to me what wonderful friends I have, how lucky I am in that.”

  Lucy’s impeccable blond brows rose. “Don’t tell me he included me among them, Robyn.”

  He hadn’t, not at all. He’d been referring to Mike and Jessie and Scott, but whether Kiel liked Lucy or not, she was a friend and had been long before Kiel came onto the scene. “It doesn’t matter, Lucy. Don’t give it another thought.”

  She smiled gratefully. “So, where did our Mr. Alighieri take himself off to so fast?”

  Robyn shook her head. “I don’t know. Off exploring the Hallelujah for all I know.”

  Dismay flickered in Lucy’s expression. “Surely not!”

  “I was just being flippant, Lucy,” Robyn rushed to reassure her, wondering why such a ridiculous idea had spilled out of her mouth, anyway. “I really have no idea where Kiel is right now.”

  “That was quite a speech he made this morning. Reminded me of Keller and that bedrock integrity.”

  Her throat tightened, but only for a moment. “Kiel did a terrific job. Keller would be—” not pleased, she guessed “—satisfied, I guess. Clear conscience.”

  “A thing to be desired,” Lucy quipped.

  “I know Kiel was very disturbed about the treatment Trudi and Stuart got at your party.”

  Lucy nodded and sighed. “I invited them—and I suppose they came—because we’d hoped this town was ready to shed its holier-than-thou attitude. Anybody would think Spyder Nielsen was some kind of martyred saint, when the truth is, he was a fourteen-karat son of a bitch with more money than scruples or brains.”

  “Maybe now that Trudi’s been exonerated, things will be different.” Robyn hoped so, more for Stuart Willetts’s sake than Trudi’s.

  Seeming preoccupied, Lucy flicked one talonlike thumbnail against the other. “Tell me about your idea.”

  Shifting mental gears, Robyn stacked a few boxes. “I went by Margaret’s office earlier today—you knew she went to the trouble a year ago of having those old newspaper accounts of the avalanche that supposedly killed Jerome Clarke printed out for me.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “Yes.” She moved a crate of files to the floor and sat down in the chair near Lucy’s. Sitting cross-legged, she described her book idea. “The thing is, I think I can draw a really dynamite analogy between Spyder Nielsen’s death and Jerome Clarke’s. I got to thinking about it this way. People here didn’t really care that Spyder had been murdered—wouldn’t you say that’s accurate?”

  Lucy nodded thoughtfully. “He’d become somewhat of an embarrassment with all his drunk and disorderlies, the women, the drugs—“

  “Exactly. Where once he was king of Aspen Mountain, his popularity was far more hype than real. He’d actually become a potential liability to the Aspen image. Jerome Clarke was a perfect example of the same thing, only in a different time and circumstance. If it hadn’t been for his apex strike on the very same mountain, this town was Nowhereville—until the ski industry came along, at least. But his welcome wore out, too, especially after winning that court battle. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  Lucy frowned. “I’m afraid I do, Robyn. It sounds like exploitation of image and celebrity to me, not to mention revising history to suit your own purposes.”

  Bewildered by Lucy’s resistance to the whole idea, Robyn decided she must have been less than clever in explaining what she wanted to do with the book. “It’s just an analogy, Lucy, a way to point out that the more things change, the more they stay the same. You can’t deny this town thrives on its image. That the town as a whole has an idea of itself that commands attention.”

  “Spyder Nielsen’s murder had nothing to do with what image this town holds of itself.”

  “That’s true, Lucy, but the point is, no one cared. It gave people an excuse to ostracize Trudi Candelaria, but other than that, his death meant nothing. I think the same is true with Jerome Clarke. He made a tremendous impact here, but when he died—whether he was murdered or not—no one cared.”

  Expressionless now, Lucy said, “You believe he was murdered.”

  “I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to haphazardly rewrite history. Don’t you see any potential in this story, really?”

  “None.” Lucy’s frown deepened. “Why do you care, Robyn? What is it about this that you can’t let go of? Did losing Keller make you believe people care about these things?”

  Robyn blanched. “That feels like a cheap shot, Luc.”

  “I don’t intend to be mean-spirited, Robyn, but something has stuck you into this frankly morbid bent of mind.”

  She felt stung. Attacked. “Maybe you’re not interested in this kind of thing, but I like to think my books have hit the bestseller lists because the what-ifs really fascinate people. The mystery, the sense of how things go wrong in people.”

  “You’re right, Robyn. I’m not only not interested, I dislike looking for—as you say—the ways things go wrong.”

  “I’m sorry if it offends you. I thought with all your interest and historical collections—“

  “Oh, I quite like all of that, and I’m glad to help you any way that I can. You’re a friend, Robyn. But I would suggest that you go home to Denver and see if you can’t find something a bit less macabre to fill your time.”

  Smiling to defuse the tension between them and dispel the disquieting sensation that perhaps Lucy was right on target, she couldn’t let go. She didn’t know why. “Lucy, this is what I want. Will you help me?”

  “How?”

  “I would like to go back to the Hallelujah, just once.”

  Lucy looked aghast. “For God’s sake…why? You can’t be serious!”

  “I am, Lucy. I’ve never been so serious in my life.”

  “But why? What good can possibly come of it? Let me take you somewhere else, one of the tourist mines, or—“

  “No. It’s got to be the Hallelujah, Lucy.” She took a deep breath. There were important reasons for her to revisit the old silver mine. She wanted to say goodbye to Keller once and for all. She wanted to get over her fears about the dark. The Hallelujah was where all that terror had begun.

  Even more important, she wanted to be able to trust her own feelings again. In the wake of Kiel Alighieri, determining the fate of Jerome Clarke, a silver mining mogul who had died or been murdered more than a hundred years ago, had somehow become vital to learning to trust herself again.

  She couldn’t even write if she couldn’t rely upon her instincts.

  “If you don’t want to go, Lucy, maybe I could ask that old miner friend of yours. Tee Palmer, wasn’t it?”

  “Robyn, are you absolutely sure this is what you want?”

  Her friend’s tone made prickles climb her spine. “I’m sure, Lucy.”

  “Then—” the older woman shrugged “—I will take you.”

  THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC FEEL of the Hallelujah chilled Robyn to the marrow. Shaking inside, but determined not to show it, she despised it all. The dark. The riveting silence. The way their voices dropped like stones into a bottomless void. Lucy had assured her that the mi
ner’s helmets they wore were state of the art, but Robyn thought their light beams pathetically weak against the hellish perpetual night.

  Robyn urged that they press on when Lucy would have stopped. She tried to keep track of the shafts and the offshoots, the stopes that dead-ended, the railcar tracks that extended out over virtual cliffs. If what she’d wanted was a sense of the mine, of its enormity and complexity, she had that long ago. By her watch, they’d been plunging deeper and deeper into the mine for an hour.

  Creeping along, skittish, just waiting for support beams to groan anywhere near her, breathing the dank, dead air in a fashion that could pass for near-panic on a movie soundtrack, Robyn called out to Lucy to stop.

  Her friend turned, and for a moment Robyn was blinded by the light from Lucy’s helmet. Breathing heavily, she clutched at the ivory angel wings at her breast.

  “The point of this drill is escaping me at the moment.” Lucy said nothing, only sank down to her haunches. Robyn went on. “What do I have to prove, and to whom? I don’t want to die anymore. Overcoming my fear of the dark here is just ridiculous.”

  She’d survived, Keller hadn’t. What foolishness was it to bid her soulmate goodbye in the place where he had died when his soul had risen again as the Avenging Angel Ezekiel?

  Which left her virtually no reason to be down in the yawning depths of the Hallelujah. None but Lucy’s tightlipped resistance to the notion that Jerome Clarke had been murdered. And even that seemed meaningless at the moment.

  “Lucy? Say something.”

  “What did you expect to find down here, Robyn?” Her voice was curiously wooden.

  She swallowed hard. “I wish I knew, Lucy. I’m sorry.”

  “Not sorry enough, are you?”

  “I don’t understand….”

  “You push too hard, Robyn. You won’t take a friend’s advice. You want to pick things apart for all the ways they can go wrong? Pick this apart You went looking for trouble like you always do. This time,” she jeered, “you hit the jackpot.”