Gold Trap

by Lilly Maytree

“Doesn’t mean I was convinced you aren’t involved in all this.” He straightened up and this time his eyes softened when he looked down at her, again. “Now, I’m convinced.”

  She felt her irritation begin to melt under that look, before a terrible thought occurred to her. He might only have said that because he read it in the journal. Could be a ruse, using the scenario of the cafe, and just another crafty way to get more information out of her. “Well, it was a” —she turned away on pretense of searching for the tortoise-shell clasp but mostly to reign in the tumult of her feelings—”an invasion of privacy!”

  “For a girl who didn’t hesitate to rifle through someone’s wallet and take all their valuables in the first place, I admit, privacy was the least of my worries.”

  “And to think I was beginning to trust you!” She swept her curls up in a brisk, smooth motion and clipped them in place.

  “You can trust me, priss. I promise.” He waved her toward the embankment as he started filming, again. “No more debates, now. We’re losing the light. This early sun is just right to give you a sort of silhouette effect against the river. So, just walk back and forth a few times at different angles until it feels comfortable.”

  “Then you…you don’t think all this is crazy?” The realization that he had sifted through her innermost dreams and deepest thoughts (the only one in the world who ever had!) just as easily as she had rifled his father’s wallet, made it suddenly important that she know.

  “Crazy? It’s brilliant. Film biographies are a dime a dozen. But you’ve got a unique edge with this idea of…how did you put it…jumping into the shoes of the woman, grabbing hold of the current of adventure-seeking curiosity that drove her, so you can plug it into the bored young minds of today. Well said. And well done.”

  “But I haven’t done it, yet.” She began to pick her way gingerly down the slope and was glad she had the knee-high boots in case she should run into any snakes.

  “You’re here, aren’t you? Everybody talks about their dreams, Meg. Not many are brave enough to actually go after them. In fact wait ‘til we’re finished here, and…hey…watch out…”

  She stumbled over a fallen branch and nearly lost her balance. Tom lifted his head and looked at her over the top of the camera. “Can you do it without your glasses? I was trying to keep away from the glare.”

  “I can if I concentrate,” she replied, without looking back. “But it feels like walking on a giant sponge. Could ruin the whole scene if it doesn’t work out.”

  “It’ll work out.”

  “You seem awfully sure.”

  “Well, it’s what I do for a living.”

  “But I was under the distinct impression” —her voice grew fainter as she moved farther into the brush— “that you were in the health and fitness business.”

  “That’s Mother’s latest project. I’m only handling the business end of it until she gets on her feet. A little off to the right. That way I can catch you just in front of the herd. Beautiful… that’s beautiful.”

  After which, ensued about ten minutes of clambering over the hillside, and then, a rather tumultuous return toward the top. Where, at some point, her left foot sank into a rotten log that immediately came alive with termites and centipedes when it burst open. She squealed and jumped aside, only to lose her footing and topple backward into the thick underbrush. By the time she stood up, again, one side of her hair had escaped its confines, and she scrambled back up the incline, having had quite enough of “being in the picture” for the effect of an illusion.

  Tom reached out a hand with a satisfied smile and helped her over the last steep spot in front of the still running camera. “You’re a regular trooper, Meg…no wonder you’ve been so hard to handle all this time.”

  “What did you expect? It’s what I came here for, wasn’t it? I should hope I would at least be able to…Oh…Oh!” She felt the skitter of an enormous beetle in her tumbled down hair and flung it off.

  “Now, where’s the prop boy when we need one? Mary Kingsley would have never let such a fine specimen escape. If we had a jar to scoop him up in, we could…”

  “I do have one. Don’t let him get away!” Meg scrambled for her duffel with renewed vigor and found it. At the same time Tom scrambled in the other direction to capture the giant bug before it escaped back into the brush. A few moments later, she scooped it into the jar with a stick, and Tom swung the camera around to catch the event. It wasn’t until after she tightened down the cap that he finally pronounced, “Perfect,” and clicked off the camera.

  “Are you sure you got it?” Meg asked. “The whole thing?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ll let him go, then.”

  “Might as well.” He removed the camera from its perch and began to fold up the tripod. “Since the doctor she was collecting them for is long since gone.”

  “Well, I never mentioned that in my journal. How do you know so much about Mary Kingsley, anyway? You’re the first person I’ve met…other than the professor…who even knew who she was.” She watched the beetle skitter back into the grass and then straightened up with a sigh. “Which I have every intention of trying to change.”

  “Did Pop know you wanted to do a film about her?”

  “He was totally shocked when I mentioned it. Insisted you were paying me to dress up like this. Whatever gave him that idea, I’ll never know. “

  “Now things are starting to make more sense.”

  “Two educators having a subject in common is no reason for one of them to slip an illegal deed to a goldmine off on the other one. I could be sitting in jail right now if you hadn’t paid all that money. I don’t understand it. Not one bit!” She looked back longingly toward the river. Even at this early hour, the sun was already beginning to feel hot. “Could we take just a little more time? To wash up?”

  “In the river?” His blue eyes registered astonishment as he handed over the camera and tripod. “Not on your life…that river’s full of bilharzia. So is almost every other body of water around here that isn’t connected to the ocean.”

  “Do you really believe that? I mean, Mary Kingsley was in and out of every river in this region, up to her neck in slime time and again, and nothing ever happened to her.”

  “Megan, I’m surprised at you.” He gathered the remnants of breakfast off the roof of the jeep and began packing up as he talked. “Hardly anything is the same as when she was here. Bilharzia didn’t really take over until we got the bright idea of damming up the rivers and breaking the natural cycle of cleansing and fertility all these people used to depend on. The fish they made their living with are gone, and that giant, manmade lake pushed thousands of people back onto soil so infertile they can hardly grow anything anymore. Can barely sustain their families. It’s a real mess.”

  He handed her a bottle of water before stashing the rest of them into his backpack. “But I’ll tell you what. As soon as we get to Akosombo, I’ll put you up in the hotel overlooking the lake, and you can use up all the water you want while I go get Pop.”

  “You mean you’re finally going to let me get back to my tour?” She took the half of a peeled orange he held out to her and separated one of the succulent sections.

  “I didn’t say that, exactly. But if you promise to stay put until I round up Pop so we can straighten things out, I won’t insist on hauling you all the way to the Little De Ambe with me. It’s a pretty rugged trek to get back into there.”

  “De Ambe…but I thought you said he was in Akosombo.”

  “He would have been if we could have intercepted him at the harbor when they came in to refuel last night. By now, they’ll be at the Little De Ambe because that’s where we usually stay. So, I’ll have to track him down from there.”

  “And just how long is that going to take?”

  “Up and back, could be a couple days. If the roads are as bad as this one.”

  “Tom, my tour will be half over by then! I might even miss the Mole National Pa
rk, and that’s the most important part of the whole thing!” She sat down on the edge of the backseat in the open doorway and began to unlace her boots. It was starting to get oppressively hot, now, and she would just as soon wear the sandals.

  “Better leave those on.”

  “What?”

  “We’re still about eight miles from town, so we’ll have to walk it. Might meet the road crew somewhere along the way, but who knows how close they…”

  “Eight miles!”

  “Would you rather stay here by yourself and wait for them? Might take a long time depending on how much they have to clear before they even get this far.”

  “If you can trust me to wait for you in Akosombo, why can’t you trust me to drive the jeep back and—”

  “Not on your life. It’d be too hard to find you again if you skipped out on me. One missing person is enough to worry about without having to add another.” He reached over the seat for her duffel.

  “But what about the Jeep? What if somebody steals it? And if you already know where he is, what’s the point in dragging…”

  “Mick’s vehicles are well-known around here. He’s got family on both ends. Things like this happen all the time. He gives commissions to anyone who returns one, which makes doing business with him more profitable than stealing from him. As for Pop…”

  He tossed his backpack up onto the fallen tree. “I won’t know where he is until I’m looking at him. This gold thing has me baffled. Isn’t like him to fall for something like that…he knows the ropes around here. And slipping the deed into your bag? Isn’t like him to sneak around like that with anybody. Much less, a perfect stranger. Something is definitely wrong. Way wrong.”

  “He thought someone was trying to prove him incompetent. To be honest”—Meg snagged her glasses from his pocket as he leaned back in to put the keys into the ignition. She put them on long enough to read which of the two plastic bottles she had taken out of her string bag was sunscreen, and then pushed them back on top of her head— “He thought it was you.”

  “Are you serious? Sure, I hired Gilbert Minelli to tag along with him, but…” Now, it was Tom’s turn to be convincing. As if she were a judge seated behind the bench, he began to explain in a ‘whole truth and nothing but the truth’ sort of tone.

  “He seemed very insulted by that.”

  “I only did it because he still insists on walking the streets at odd hours. Anytime he feels like it! Thinks nothing’s changed since the fifties. But, believe me, Meg, incompetent is the last word I would use to describe my father. Much less think of him that way. He’s one of the craftiest people I’ve ever known. Better wear your hat.”

  “I don’t like it. If it gets too hot, I’ll use my umbrella.”

  “Well, you better get it out, then. Even the sun’s more intense since Mary Kingsley’s day.”

  “Will you please stop ordering me around? I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”

  “But you’re out of your element.” He waited for her to get the umbrella out of the duffel, and then zippered it closed for her before tossing it up onto the tree with his backpack. “And for being in the country less than a week, you haven’t exactly set any records for staying out of trouble.”

  “That, Tom Anderson, is a matter of opinion. And where might I ask is your hat?”

  “Right here.” He pulled an Australian bush hat from one of the pockets of his vest and looked over the jeep a final time as he put it on. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be, I suppose. But just out of curiosity”—she ducked her head and one arm through the strap of her string bag so it wouldn’t constantly be slipping from her shoulder, and then handed him the old-fashioned black umbrella with a curved handle to set on top of the tree— “Why did you…” Now, just how on earth was she going to get up there? “Why did you waste so much time helping me with my camera this morning if you were in such a hurry to get to Akosombo?”

  “Had to wait ‘til the sun came up. This is not the kind of place to be wandering around in the dark. As for wasting time, I never call capturing the perfect shot a waste of time.” He pulled himself up on the fallen log and then paused for a moment to look down on the other side. “You almost never run into the same opportunity, again. And just for your information…”

  He turned and reached down to lift her up after him (with one hand, yet!). “It just so happens I’ve been trying to talk the company into doing a documentary on Mary Kingsley, myself, for about three years, now.”

  Such a coincidence was almost too staggering to register. “My Mary Kingsley?”

  “Travels in West Africa, published in 1897…I read it a few years ago. Yep, she’s the only one I know of. So, what do you say, priss, after we get this thing with Pop straightened out, maybe we can do a deal?”

  “Don’t tell me you teach at the film institute, too!”

  “Nope. I’m a producer.”

  Gold Trap

  12

  Turning Point

  “‘ You don’t seem to feel these things, Miss Kingsley.’ Not feel them, indeed! Why, I could cry over them… ”

  Mary Kingsley

  Meg felt lightheaded at the sheer shock of such a coincidence. She hardly believed it (after all, he had read her journal)…was he trying to manipulate her, again? She was about to mention her skepticism (what were the odds?) except that, at that very moment, he jumped down on the other side of the tree and then reached up to take her by the waist and lift her down after him. The way he slowed down halfway to setting her on the ground, looking at her with that softening in his eyes, again, as if she were someone to be cherished, made her feel all fluttery inside. In a rather unnerving sort of way.

  “Tom Anderson,”—she dropped her hands from his shoulders as soon as her feet touched the ground—”you’re looking at me as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  “I almost feel like I have. To find you, again, and like this, seems too incredible to be real. But there can’t be two of you, you’re so outlandish, Meg, you drive me crazy. Like some slippery thing I can’t keep hold of.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” Meg objected, even though inwardly her heart pounded. “You’ve managed to drag me halfway across the continent, kicking and screaming. How much more hold do you need on a person?” This close she smelled the leather straps and that hint of Old Spice, again, and to make matters worse, the addition of the hat suddenly reminded her of someone she had seen in movies (of all things! What was happening to her?).

  “I need to hear you say it, Meg. That you’re her. That extraordinary lady who ran away from me at the cafe when it started to rain. I suspected it might be when you finally took that crazy hat off and put your hair up, yesterday. But, I’ll be honest with you, the first thing I thought was that you really were part of this mess.”

  Meg gasped at the inference.

  “That you must have been tailing me that day for some reason. Some kind of a decoy while they roped Pop into…”

  “But, Tom, I would never…”

  “Then when I saw the clothes and the journal while they were going through your things at customs…I knew it was true, and it almost floored me. I had to read the journal. It was the only way to get to the bottom of this thing. Stayed up most of the night, reading it with a flashlight.”

  Meg suddenly realized she was holding on to his vest and self-consciously let go of it. “You don’t…” She took a step back to put more of a decent distance between them. “You don’t still think I could have done something like that, do you?”

  “Not any more. The things you wrote in that journal, Meg,”—he moved close to her, again—”made that encounter seem a lot more amazing to me than this mix-up with Pop. Then to meet, again, like this, do you know what that means? Doesn’t it amaze you, too?”

  “Not if it isn’t true. And if it is, why did you wait until now to tell me? You never gave the slightest hint of anything like that back at the airport.”

  “You were in hysterics.
You wouldn’t have believed anything I said, then.”

  “Or, maybe the only reason you know about the cafe is because you read my journal. You could just be trying to get more information about your father…and I wouldn’t blame you. But I’ll tell you right now you don’t act the least bit like that man at the cafe, because he was…”

  She turned away from him more to collect her emotional bearings than the physical ones, but was suddenly awestruck by the beauty of the scene in front of them. They were in a place where the forest made a canopy above them, and away and ahead there were still traces of an early morning fog that snaked along in wisps on the ground. It rose in front of the tall trees in a ghostlike shroud, almost like steam. Meg could see why they were called “smokes” in this region and felt as if she were standing in some enchanted place that might disappear into a dream at any moment. The rocks along the edge of the road were covered with ferns and mosses in various shades of green, and although she could no longer see the river, she could hear the sweet, long, mellow whistle of some exotic water bird calling into the morning.

  “That man in the cafe had no idea his father had just disappeared.” Their eyes locked and held, again, when she turned around. “Thing like that would shock anybody. I’m only human.”

  She broke the spell by starting off over a swampy piece of roadway (she had to do something…anything!), but he took her arm and fell in step beside her, as if it had become something of a second nature to him. Then he helped her up and over a slide of rock and debris that had come down from the hillside when the tree fell across. “You have to admit you’ve been something of a trial, yourself, priss. That swing of yours, yesterday, practically laid me out.”

  “I was at my wits end!”

  “Obviously.”

  Meg was beginning to get upset, again. Not so much that her man in the rain might actually be Tom Anderson, but because if he was (and if this really was her second chance at that divine appointment) well, she had never acted so horribly in her entire life as she had in these last two days. He had seen her at her very worst. Her lowest point. And what “dashing prince” (much less any ordinary man) would want anything to do with someone who behaved like that? Not that she was trying so hard to impress Tom Anderson. Dashing prince, or not, now that she knew more about him, he was, without doubt, the most audacious, outspoken, demanding man she had ever met.