Desert Devil

by Rena McKay

  Juli nodded stiffly.

  While they waited for the young woman to return with the personnel file, Thorne Taylor regarded her reflectively. Finally, he asked, "Are you planning to be in Cholla long?"

  "Just long enough to pack up David's personal things to take back to his mother, plus arrange to sell his trailer and property here. And get this matter with your company straightened out," she added firmly.

  He failed to show any reaction to that comment. "What do you do back in—" He paused, checked the file again. "Back in Ohio?"

  "I'm a secretary in the national offices of an insurance company located in our town," she replied.

  "On vacation?" he inquired politely.

  "My boss was kind enough to give me a leave of absence to take care of these matters for David's mother. She had a stroke a while back and is partially paralyzed on one side."

  "How unfortunate." His voice, though unemotional, did sound faintly regretful, and Juli gave him a hopeful sidelong glance.

  "You're alone, then?" he added casually.

  For a moment Juli wondered if he could have some personal reason for asking that question. Then she scoffed at herself. She was reading too much into a polite inquiry. Thorne Taylor certainly had no personal interest in whether or not she was alone.

  "Yes, I'm alone. David's mother is unable to travel at present. She has been taking physical therapy treatments and I believe she's improving. Everyone thought she should go to a nursing home, but she's always refused, and somehow she's managed on her own." Juli hesitated. "David was providing most of her financial support. That's why I think she's entitled to whatever David had coming to him."

  He nodded, sending Juli's hopes spiraling upward. "I'm sure that's true," he agreed. Then his voice hardened and the gray-green eyes turned steely. "However, so far as I know, David had nothing coming above and beyond his regular salary."

  "But his letter said—" Juli broke off, trying to remember David's exact wording. The letter was in her purse and she longed to snatch it out, but she restrained herself. She had decided before coming here that if Taylor Electronics proved balky that the letter might best be saved for showing to an attorney. "David wrote that he definitely had made an important scientific discovery—a 'breakthrough,' I believe he called it."

  Just then the young woman returned with the personnel folder. She waited a moment, looking hopeful, but Thorne Taylor dismissed her with a brief nod. He extracted a page from the folder and handed it to Juli. It was, as he had indicated, what appeared to be a completely legal agreement signifying that anything David produced while employed in the research department of Taylor Electronics belonged to the company.

  "It's standard procedure," he said briefly. "The company can hardly afford to run a research department for the private benefit of its researchers, although we do have a fairly generous incentive and bonus program for outstanding achievements."

  Juli handed the sheet back, feeling slightly bewildered, her eyes not meeting his. Then she remembered another of the arguments she had mustered in case something like this came up. "But I believe there was a well-publicized court case not long ago in which a man was awarded a substantial amount of money from a company which had earlier paid him only a very small sum for an invention he produced while he was working for them."

  Thorne Taylor gave her a long, thoughtful look, as if perhaps reassessing her. "You're considering a court case?" he inquired.

  Juli lifted her head defiantly. "If necessary," she stated.

  But if she thought she had won any victory or pressured him into any concessions, she was wrong.

  "Your information about a previous court case may very well be accurate," he agreed coolly. "But a specific invention of proven worth was involved. Just what did David produce that you are trying to tell me is so valuable?"

  Juli looked at him in dismay, then glanced away quickly before those gray-green eyes could entrap her. She had been so sure that once she confronted the company with her "knowledge" of David's valuable invention or discovery, they could hardly deny its existence. And yet that appeared to be exactly what Thorne Taylor was doing. He was challenging her to prove David had made some important contribution, to identify his invention—a challenge she was afraid he knew she was unprepared to meet.

  Damn David and his secretiveness! she suddenly thought with irrational anger. Why hadn't he explained to his mother what he had invented so they wouldn't be in this awkward position? Why had he been so slyly mysterious? And then she sighed inwardly, guiltily. David probably wasn't being intentionally mysterious or secretive. He had undoubtedly thought that even if he did explain, neither his mother nor Juli had sufficient scientific knowledge or training to understand. And, of course, he certainly hadn't expected to meet his death in a car accident so soon afterward.

  Finally, Juli said aloofly, "I imagine, if the case should go to court, that your own company records would reveal David's accomplishments—providing the records are not tampered with, of course."

  That statement brought Thorne Taylor to his feet, his face dark with anger, and for one panicky moment Juli thought she had gone too far. His chiseled lips compressed into a thin line, and a muscle jerked along his lean jaw. Juli drew back, blue eyes wide, again aware of that raw, almost primitive masculinity about him that seemed intensified by the surge of anger. She suddenly reached for the coffee cup and took a shaky sip of the now-cold liquid, her eyes meeting his warily over the rim, as if the cup were somehow a protective barrier between them.

  With what was evidently a supreme effort at self-control, he relaxed his clenched hands. "Tell me, Miss Townsend, how well did you know your cousin David?"

  The question caught Juli by surprise. She toyed with the cup in her hands, uncertain how to answer. In one way, she thought she knew David very well. In another, she wasn't sure she knew him at all. Her mother and David's mother were sisters, and the two families were close when Juli was growing up. David had always been her good friend, even though he was eight years older. She loved the crazy inventions he was always bringing around to show her. Silly contraptions where the pull of a string or push of a switch would set into motion a whole series of wildly moving parts that would then result in the accomplishment of some mundane little task, like squeezing a tube of toothpaste or stamping a letter. He amused her with silly jokes and taught her little "magic" tricks.

  He won awards in high school, and Juli proudly reported to her grade-school friends that he was the smartest boy in the whole world. But one time one of those friends scornfully retorted that her older sister had dated him and he was "weird." Juli had practically flown at her, demanding that the girl take that back, but she wouldn't, even adding that David was "funny looking" and "crazy."

  Juli had frigidly dropped the girl from among her circle of friends, and no one else ever dared say anything about David—at least not to Juli, though sometimes she had the unhappy feeling they giggled about him behind her back. Even back then, she supposed, she had realized he was different from the usual run of high school boys. He was a loner, awkward at sports and dancing, a very complex person. But he wasn't "funny looking" or "crazy" just because he was plump and wore bottle-thick glasses and was too smart for most people to understand, she sometimes thought with fierce protectiveness.

  And even those little quirks seemed to straighten out when he went off to college on a scholarship. He switched to contact lenses, lost weight, and learned to get along better socially. Unfortunately, Juli more or less lost contact with him about that time, except for what she heard through Aunt Kate. Juli had her own problems then, of course: her mother's painful illness and unexpected death; the months of numbed loss; her father's surprising remarriage to a younger woman with three small children.

  She did know, through Aunt Kate, that things didn't go as well for David after college graduation as everyone had expected. Somehow he just hadn't seemed to live up to the earlier promise he had shown. He changed jobs frequently, complaining tha
t the companies he worked for were too rigid, that he didn't have enough creative freedom. He seemed generous with financial help for his mother, though Juli sometimes suspected that the money came less regularly than Aunt Kate let on. Aunt Kate had been so excited when she got his letter about the "scientific breakthrough" and his promise that he would soon have the money to bring her out to live in Arizona.

  And then came the shocking call about his death in a car accident… Juli took a deep, shuddering breath.

  "Are you all right?" Thorne Taylor demanded sharply, peering down at her with a sort of suspicious concern.

  "Yes, I… I'm all right. I was just thinking about David. I still find it hard to believe he's dead."

  "You didn't answer my question," he prompted.

  "I think I knew him fairly well," she finally said cautiously. She realized the paper cup was beginning to crumple under her nervous handling. She set it aside and tried to keep her hands confidently motionless. "Well enough to know that he was certainly capable of producing something of commercial value in the electronics field."

  "I won't argue with that. That was the reason we hired him," Thorne Taylor agreed. Harshly, he added, "The question is, what, if anything, did he produce?"

  Juli had the unpleasant feeling this conversation was simply going in circles, getting nowhere. The arguments which had sounded so persuasive when she planned them earlier now seemed as flimsy and leaky as a sieve.

  Thorne Taylor suddenly seemed to come to the same conclusion. He picked up the folders where he had set them on the coffee table and tapped them impatiently against his other hand. With dismay, Juli suddenly realized the discussion was about to be terminated, and she had accomplished nothing at all.

  "Mr. Taylor, you must realize that if you refuse to… to make any financial settlement, my aunt is fully prepared to take this matter to court!" she exclaimed, the words coming out more breathlessly than she intended.

  "Indeed," he murmured. He tilted a dark eyebrow. "Is this a warning that is supposed to frighten me into going along with your cheap little trick to bluff some sort of payment out of my company?"

  "Cheap—little—trick!" Juli repeated with incredulous fury, so angry the words were hardly coherent. She struggled for control. "Mr. Taylor, I… I assure you that though you may have cheated David in the past, I am not going to let you get away with cheating his mother!"

  Thorne Taylor's eyes narrowed dangerously. "I wouldn't be tossing around wild, unsubstantiated accusations if I were you," he growled.

  Julie tore open her purse and jerked out David's incriminating letter. She thrust it at him, her breath coming in short gasps, as if she had been running at full speed. "Perhaps you won't think my accusations are so wild when you read this!"

  He accepted the wrinkled letter, his eyes holding hers until he dropped his gaze to the scrawled writing.

  "The first part is just personal to his mother," Juli said hastily. She turned the page over in his hand. "It's in the last paragraph."

  She watched him skim over the scribbled lines quickly, then go back and read them again more slowly. "Is that all you have?" he finally said disdainfully.

  "All!" Juli gasped. "It says he has made this scientific breakthrough on something he's been working on for a long time, something he doubted had ever been approached really scientifically before. It says he'll soon have enough money to bring Aunt Kate out to live with him. And it says that you, Mr. Taylor, will not be able to cheat him out of anything this time!"

  Thorne Taylor's broad shoulders moved in a careless shrug, which only angered Juli more. And with increased fury she realized he had tricked her into showing him her one piece of evidence.

  "I wondered when I received your letter just what sort of con game you were going to try to pull. Now I know," he said contemptuously. One hand suddenly shot out and caught her shoulder in a cruel grip, the strong fingers biting so harshly into the soft flesh that she stifled a gasp. His eyes burned into hers. "I can tell you're an amateur at the con-game business, Miss Townsend. I suggest you get out of it before the going gets a little rough."

  Juli's breath caught as she looked up into that hard, unrelenting face, too stunned and angry even to object to the painful grip on her shoulder. "How… how dare you accuse me!" she finally managed to gasp.

  The grip loosened, leaving pale, bloodless marks where his fingers had crushed her skin. Instinctively, she rubbed the sore area with her other hand.

  "Enjoy your stay in Cholla," he said with a derisive smile and an exaggeratedly polite nod of his head. "You've come at our most pleasant time of year."

  Juli watched in furious astonishment as the door closed behind his broad shoulders, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Not only had Thorne Taylor rejected any claim of Aunt Kate's to payments for David's invention; he had denied any such invention even existed. And he had contemptuously accused Juli herself of trying to pull some tricky "con game" on the company!

  Or was that, she thought suddenly, just a cheap trick to try to frighten her? David's letter plainly indicated Thorne Taylor was not to be trusted. And he seemed exactly the kind of man who would believe the best form of defense was attack.

  Juli jammed the letter back in her purse and snapped the catch shut with a savage twist. With head held high, she stormed out the door and across the busy office, aware of eyes following her all the way. At the glass door she turned and looked back, her gaze sweeping scathingly over the room, stopping abruptly on the tall, gray-suited figure watching her from a doorway. He was too far away for her to read his expression, but she had no doubt but that he was congratulating himself on getting rid of her so efficiently.

  But he hadn't seen the last of her, Juli thought grimly. Not by a long shot.

  Chapter Two

  The tires squealed as Juli's little car shot out of the parking lot. Her thoughts were wildly incoherent. He had accused her of trying to cheat the company! Of all the incredible, insufferable nerve—how dare he! And all the time he was the swindler, stealing David's invention and cheating Aunt Kate out of what was rightfully hers. Grabbing Juli's shoulder as if she were some sort of thief—warning her! Angrily, she realized she hadn't even had a chance to tell him what she thought of Taylor Electronics' truck drivers who hogged the highways.

  She was back at the bridge over the dry riverbed before she calmed down enough to realize she was headed in the wrong direction to find David's trailer. She retraced her tracks, still fuming, and finally found Reynaldo Road. It was a pleasant, older street lined with orange trees, some still holding colorful balls of fruit. She drove along slowly, watching for David's address number. Farther out the sidewalks disappeared and the houses were shabbier and farther apart. The paved street dwindled to gravel and then, to Juli's dismay, to dirt tracks that followed a ridge of yellowish boulders into the desert.

  A few mailboxes gave evidence of habitation, but the houses were hidden in the dips and rises. The desert was neither as level nor as barren as it had appeared from a distance. Juli recognized the tall, stately saguaro cactus from pictures she had seen, as well as the paddle-shaped prickly pear cactus. But more numerous than either of these was a particularly vicious-looking cactus with angled branches entirely covered with golden thorns.

  Juli had almost decided she had somehow gotten on the wrong road and was ready to turn back when she spied one last lonely mailbox leaning crookedly by the side of the road. On it was the name "Flynn" in faded red letters, the last "n" drooping, as if the painter had miscalculated and failed to allow room for it. David, Juli remembered with an affectionate sigh, had never cared much about appearances.

  That fact was even more apparent after Juli cautiously guided her car over the rocky driveway and finally spied the trailer parked in a flat, bare area out of sight of the road. No effort had been made to make it look pleasant or homey. It just sat there, a pink and aluminum colored metal box with an air cooler, like some sort of ugly growth, on the roof. A nearby saguaro offered only
a few fingers of shade.

  Juli tried to swallow her dismay. She fished the key out of her purse. It had been sent to Aunt Kate along with a few other personal things of David's after the accident.

  She wrinkled her nose at the heavy smell of stale air when she opened the door, and her eyes widened at the sight of the disarrayed interior. Clothes flung over a chair, piled carelessly in a corner, draped from doorknobs. Books everywhere. A shelf with several of David's whimsical contraptions that had fascinated Juli as a child, dust-covered and motionless now. Sink full of dirty dishes. Counter incongruously littered with chunks of rock.

  Juli, for a few awful moments, thought the trailer had been ransacked or vandalized, but on closer inspection she realized it had not. This was simply the way David had lived, and housekeeping obviously was not one of his priorities.

  She picked her way across the gritty floor and opened the windows. The outside air, if not cool, was at least fresh. She went on through the trailer, opening bathroom and bedroom windows. David had evidently taken up rock collecting, because there were several cardboard boxes of rocks stacked in the bedroom.

  She felt almost guilty as she surveyed the unmade bed, as if she were peering into an area of David's life where she had no right to be. He wouldn't have liked the intrusion.

  But it couldn't be helped, she sighed to herself. The bedroom had an exterior door and she opened that, too, trying to get some circulation going in the stuffy air. In back of the trailer she saw a dilapidated shed, a pole with some sort of electrical box fastened to it, and a makeshift clothesline.

  It all had such a forlorn look, and Juli was suddenly angry again. Did Thorne Taylor pay so poorly that this was the best David could afford? And now he was trying to cheat David even further. It wasn't fair!

  She hurried out to the car and lugged her suitcases inside, again surprised by the heat at this time of year. She was perspiring lightly by the time she changed into denim shorts and halter top with bare midriff. She had felt a little foolish packing such clothes with snow on the ground back in Ohio, but she was certainly glad she had them now.