We had a chance earlier, Quillen thought, but said instead, “I’d like to, Tucker, but I can’t.”
“Then I’ll come back tonight and we’ll talk.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” Quillen raised her face to his and kissed him. “Can I help you carry something?”
“No, I can manage.” His arm tightened briefly around her shoulders. “Do you have to mail his highness today? Why don’t you just stay home and rest? Sort of lie low.”
“I think I’ve spent enough time in bed for a while,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him.
“Then I don’t need to come back tonight?” He grinned, but it faded suddenly and he hugged her fiercely. “Remember, I love you, Quillen.”
He left then, refusing, under the pretext of despising lingering good-byes, to allow her to walk out with him to the Jeep. She stood at the living room window instead, shading her eyes with one hand from the dazzle of the early morning sun through the top stained-glass panels. When the Jeep pulled away from the curb, Quillen sighed and walked to her drawing board.
What an odd morning, she thought as she carefully wrapped the prince in a large, padded cardboard mailer made to fit. Paula Clarke stopped in for a cup of coffee and to report that the items taken from her apartment had also been found, undamaged, in a pillowcase behind the garage. From Miss Smythe Quillen heard nothing, and was glad.
It was near eleven o’clock when she left for the post office with the securely packaged painting. A chill finger of remembered fear touched the nape of her neck as she locked the back door, but she quickly shrugged it off and hurried toward the truck.
The pride of Cassil Springs, the city hall clock which always kept perfect time, read eleven-ten as Quillen parked in front of the red brick building. She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as she pushed through the double glass doors and started across the brown-tiled lobby the post office shared with the city offices—then she heard Desmond Cassil’s voice behind her and her heart shot up her throat.
“Good morning, Quillen. My, you look well.”
Despite your best efforts to the contrary, she thought, as she turned around to face him. “I feel very well, Mr. Mayor.”
He stood near the potted figs clustered at the base of the pedestal which supported the hammered brass bust of his grandfather Jeremiah. His smile was as well tailored as his gray herringbone jacket and charcoal turtleneck.
“You were very lucky, Quillen, that my nephew came along in the nick of time. I shudder to think what might have happened if he hadn’t.”
“I’ll just bet you—” Quillen’s breath caught in her throat and a slow chill made her skin crawl. “What did you say?”
“I said, how lucky—”
“No, no, not that—your—nephew?”
“Yes, Tucker, my baby sister Thea’s son. Quite a— Oh, my.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth and frowned. “He hasn’t told you, has he? I am sorry. I had such high hopes that your acceptance of him meant that you’re finally coming to your senses—”
“I don’t believe you,” Quillen retorted shakily. “You’ve never told the truth in your life.”
“Now, Quillen.” He tsked and turned his head to one side. “Is that any way to talk to your future uncle-in-law?”
“I’ll marry your nephew—if he is your nephew,” she corrected herself quickly, “the same day hell freezes over.”
“Ask around town. Thea was raised in Cassil Springs. Lots of folks know her—and her son.” His smooth smile returned as he looked past the top of her head at the post office doors. “I suggest you start with Mabel Cunningham. She and Thea went to high school together and still correspond.”
“I’ll do that,” she snapped, and spun sharply on her heel.
“Oh, and Quillen?”
She half-turned and glared at him with one hand on the door.
“Don’t forget,” he reminded her in a silken, icy voice. “I’m not a patient man.”
“You don’t scare me, and you can’t intimidate me, either,” she told him, and pushed through the plate-glass door.
It’s a lie, it’s a lie, she told herself as her heart pounded frantically. Oh, God, please let it be a lie.
Seated on a high stool at the middle window in the counter, Mabel Cunningham glanced up from the stack of envelopes she was sorting. She laid them aside and took off her bifocals and tucked them on top of the short, ginger curls covering her head.
“Morning, Quillen. Another painting?”
Unable to find her voice, she nodded and handed the package to the postmistress.
“Saw you talking to the mayor.” Mabel rolled her brown eyes, slid off her stool, and carried the painting to the large scale at the next window. “You aren’t going to sell to him, are you?”
“No,” Quillen replied, her heart still trip-hammering. “We were talking about his—nephew.”
“Oh, Tucker.” She smiled over her shoulder as she weighed the package. “He’s your new tenant, I hear, you lucky girl. Listen, if his mother wasn’t one of my oldest, dearest friends and if I was thirty years younger—” She winked and turned around to adjust the weights.
Oh, God. It wasn’t a lie. Now Jason’s oddball cracks about who and what and duplicity made sense. He knew who Tucker was—he’d known all along.
“Quillen?” Mabel returned to the window and waved one palm at her. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Oh—” she started and smiled wanly. “Fine. A little weak. I guess you heard—”
“The whole town’s heard. Lucky Tucker was there.”
Cassil had said that, too. She was lucky. Quillen wished her brain wasn’t so numbed with shock. She’d like to think about that.
“Yes, isn’t it,” she agreed vaguely. “How much, Mabel?”
The postmistress told her, Quillen paid, picked up her receipt, and left. Halfway across the lobby, tears started to fill her eyes, but they didn’t spill until she was safely in the Blazer. She didn’t sob, she just sat behind the wheel staring out the windshield as fat, slow tears slid down her cheeks.
Scenes and snatches of conversation flickered through her mind, from Tucker cutting her off and not letting her follow Cassil at the festival last Saturday to his suggestion last night that his uncle wasn’t trying to kill her, just seeing to it that she had nothing to sell. She’d believed him, she’d trusted him—and she loved him.
Dragging the backs of her hands across her face, Quillen thrust the key into the ignition and the engine roared to life. Prudently she backed the Blazer out of its parking place and obeyed the speed limit as she drove out of town. Once past the city limits sign on the highway, she pressed the accelerator and the truck leaped east toward the festival grounds.
If the fault ran near her mine, then the seismometer would be there someplace—and so would Tucker. Fists clenched on the wheel, Quillen wished she’d paid more attention to his map. It didn’t seem logical to her that he’d set up the seismometer on the festival grounds; rather, she imagined he’d select a more isolated, yet close-by location. Probably somewhere on the backside of the hill, opposite where her grandfather had dug the entrance and main shaft to his mine.
When she reached the turnoff, the narrow, winding access road forced her to slow down, and she shifted the transmission into four-wheel drive as the front tires bounced onto the rutted lane leading to the stockade. She parked the truck near the locked front gates and slipped into the trees via a hiking trail that joined the dusty, graveled service road just beyond the far end of the shaggy-barked walls.
The path she followed was one made by the festival performers as a quick side exit to the parking area. It ran for about twenty yards and at the bottom deposited her in the Guildmaster’s Glen. Two more side paths through the stands of trees separating the festival areas brought her into the Gypsy Camp.
It looked deserted, but Quillen walked the entire area anyway, even the cleft where she and Tucker had eaten lunch last Saturday, her jaw set aga
inst the tears that swelled in her eyes. She found nothing and hesitated in the mine entrance, her heart pounding as it always did, and peered into the darkness. There were no sounds of movement inside, and although she doubted a seismometer made noises, she was glad she hadn’t brought the flashlight from the truck; it gave her a good excuse not to go in the mine and look.
Walking the uphill-sloping camp had winded her, and Quillen was grateful that her exit was downhill. As the ground fell away toward the creek, so did the granite cliff face. At the bottom of the camp it was hidden completely by the mixed conifer and deciduous forest.
Quillen crossed the wooden footbridge and followed the opposite bank of the creek until it disappeared into the trees, then turned left. Roughly twenty yards north of the creek she found the footpath she wanted—a narrow, barely perceptible track that cut through the woods to the backside of the hill. It was not a short walk, and the path wound, twisted, and meandered around tumbled, moss-grown boulders and shelves of rock that jutted out of the forest floor. Weak-kneed and breathing heavily, Quillen had to stop within five minutes to catch her breath. Irritated at her weakened condition, she flung herself around to face the way she’d come as she sagged against a thigh-high chunk of granite. She heard underbrush and fallen branches snap and break somewhere on the path behind her. She’d startled something, a deer most likely.
Once she could breath normally, she struck off again, but at a slower pace. Another five minutes passed before the trail picked up the creek again, now a deep-sided ravine in the forest floor, and Quillen walked along the south bank. It had been years since she, or anyone else, she decided, had hiked this way. The trail was barely distinguishable, and her concentration on following it and breathing deeply was so intense that she only faintly heard the whispery, telltale rush of rapidly moving water. Four steps later she sensed the mushy ground underfoot, looked down, and gasped, horrified, as she watched the leafy, needled ground separate and move beneath her loafers.
Whirling around, Quillen ran about twenty yards back down the trail before her lungs gave out. Again, she heard bracken and limbs crack as she scrambled onto a solid, multi-ton boulder.
She sat there, shivering, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, until she could breathe without effort and her heart had slid back into place between her ribs. Cautiously then, and stamping each foot firmly in front of the other, she retraced her steps and stopped when the needle-covered earth began to feel soft.
Something was very wrong here; something cataclysmic had happened—and recently. The tremor she and Tucker had felt on Sunday night sprang instantly to mind and sent a shiver sliding up her spine as she backtracked to the boulder, found a spot where the creek was no more than two feet wide, and stepped across it. She repeated her foot-stamping on the north bank and made slow progress along the stream. The ground remained firm, and as she crept along, the rush of the water became almost a roar.
Ahead of her through the overhanging limbs and branches, Quillen could see a jumble of large rocks and fallen trees and moved toward it without hesitation. Bracing her hands on a fallen pine trunk, she leaned over it and looked down a fifty-foot cliff that hadn’t been here when she’d last walked this trail. The creek, gushing down the timber and rock-strewn drop-off, had already cut a new channel on the ground below that spewed into another fork of the same stream, which ran like a crooked silver ribbon through the mouth of the small canyon below. On the opposite bank soared an ancient cottonwood tree, its roots exposed by a deep bend in the streambed.
Almost directly beneath her, standing in calf-deep water in the middle of the creek, bent Tucker. He wore rubber waders over his jeans and a bush-style hat on his head—and he was panning for gold.
Chapter Eight
For a long time, kneeling behind and leaning against the toppled pine, Quillen watched him. What, she kept asking herself with all the impartiality she could muster (not much, admittedly), did panning for gold have to do with studying a fault? Over and over again she came up with the same answer—not a damn thing.
That decided for the umpteenth time, she pushed herself to her feet and started walking, looking for a way down to the creek. She hadn’t gone far when a flash of reflected light in the midst of a swirl of dust caught her attention. Shading her eyes with both hands, she looked past the cottonwood down the road her father had mortgaged Granddad McCain’s house to build so he’d have easy access to his long-fallen-down sluice. A vehicle of some sort was moving toward the creek at a rapid rate of speed.
Quillen wasn’t overly surprised when a yellow Cassil Construction four-by-four became visible at the forefront of the gravel-smoke cloud. It stopped beside Tucker’s Jeep, and a hard, angry, frown tightened her mouth as she saw Desmond Cassil swing out of the driver’s door.
Just faintly she could hear water slosh as Tucker waded toward the bank to meet him, and though she could hear the ring of their voices, the roar of the creek as it tumbled over the edge was too close, and she was too far away to make out the words. Cassil helped Tucker onto the bank and they shook hands. Still shading her eyes, Quillen watched them inspect the contents of the pan, and her heart began to pound furiously between her ribs.
Guilty, guilty as hell, and now she knew what of—collusion with the enemy. No, wrong, he was the enemy. A spy, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold. One lone tear squeezed out of her right eye and trickled down her cheek as she realized how patently perfect his sudden appearance in her life had been.
I kept trying to warn you, her little voice sighed sadly. I’m sorry it worked out this way, though. I was genuinely hoping he was just something simple and straightforward like an ax murderer.
“Oh, shut up,” Quillen snapped viciously as she whirled down the hill looking for a way off it.
There wasn’t one. Within a few yards in any direction the underbrush and trees grew thickly, impenetrably together. Retreating to the fallen pine, Quillen glanced down at the creek. Tucker and Cassil were still standing near the cottonwood, talking.
“Stay,” she prayed, “just this once, Cassil, don’t get the hell off my land—wait for me.”
At a steady, loping jog, she started back up the path the way she’d come, but couldn’t keep the pace for long. She alternated then between trotting and walking on rubbery, shuddery legs, and had to stop three times to rest and catch her breath as she made her way out of the festival grounds.
Her throat ached, and so did her lungs when she finally panted up to the Blazer and fished her keys out of her pocket. Rivulets of sweat, cold, not warm, trickled down her rib cage inside her sweater, and her arms were shaking as badly as her legs when she hauled herself behind the wheel.
Although she knew better, Quillen sucked air through her mouth, started the engine, and jammed the floor-mounted shift lever into gear. Her teeth rattled and twice she bit her tongue as she pushed the Blazer hard down the rutted lane. At the intersection with the access read she turned right instead of left, and the truck streaked down the narrow blacktop road toward the county line highway.
The tires squealed as she took the corner at the junction and floored the accelerator. As the Blazer mounted a hill she looked down the slope on the other side and saw the gravel mouth of the canyon road—and the Cassil Construction four-by-four turning right away from her toward The Cascades.
“Damn!” she swore, punching her right fist on the steering wheel as she took her foot off the gas pedal.
There was no point chasing him; he had at least a quarter-mile on her and was gaining distance rapidly. No, she’d settle with Cassil later, she decided as she let the Blazer slow, and then made a sedate turn onto the canyon road. The truck tracked easily through a scrubby meadow, past the McCain family cemetery, and around a long curve toward the creek. Over the gravel dust swirling around the hood, she saw Tucker in the creek again, and watched him turn toward her as she parked the Blazer beside his Jeep and shouldered her door open.
Her knees nearly folded as her f
eet hit the hard, rocky ground, but she willed her legs to stay firm and strode purposefully toward the cottonwood tree. She shivered as she stepped beneath the cool shade puddled beneath its spreading, dusty-leaved branches, and saw Tucker’s bow and quiver leaning against the deep-scarred trunk.
“Hi, love!” he called, grinning at her and waving his hat as he waded toward the bank.
The bright, midday sun cast jeweled reflections across the surface of the water, and diamondlike splashes spewed around his churning knees. He looked so happy, so genuinely glad to see her, that despite her rage, Quillen felt her throat constrict with longing. Hardening herself, she struck a spread-footed stance on the rocky, muddy bank and folded her arms across her diaphragm.
“Have a nice chat with your Uncle Desmond?”
As if someone had frozen a frame of film, Tucker stopped, his left arm in midwave, his face suddenly ashen. The only thing that moved was the water, falling in sparkling rings around his immobile legs. His grin crumpled and he stared at her, stricken and openmouthed.
“Who told you?”
“Who do you think?” she returned bitterly. “Dear Uncle Desmond himself.”
“He isn’t my dear uncle,” he retorted sharply.
“Oh, really?” she taunted, thrusting her weight onto her left hip. “You two looked very chummy to me.”
A ruddy wash darkened his cheeks and his eyes narrowed. “Have you been spying on me, Quillen?”
“Have you been spying on me?”
“What do you mean? When—”
“How about from day one when you shanghaied me into your magic show? How about ever since?”
“What are you—” He drew a sharp breath and his left arm fell limp to his side. “Do you think I’m in cahoots with him or something?”
“If you’re not, then what are you doing panning my creek?”
“I’m looking for gold,” he retorted angrily. “I’m trying—”
“I rest my case.” She pivoted on one heel and started toward the Blazer.
“Damn it, Quillen”—over his shout she heard water splash—“will you listen—”
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