“Damn,” Caro swore to herself. Then she raised her voice. “Whoever you are, I’m going around to try to get you,” she said. “Just hang on, okay?”
Caro rushed back into the Court House, the keys jangling, her heels pounding on the old wood floors. She grabbed the map out of her jeans pocket, trying to get her bearings. Within minutes she was descending the stairs to the ancient holding cells and their mysterious occupant.
Caro gasped. “Mr. Ellis! Are you okay?”
There was no answer. Hugh was sprawled on the cell floor, his wheelchair overturned, his face hidden in the shadows. Caro didn’t bother trying to find a light switch. She fumbled with the passkey and heard the lock click open. A second later she was swinging open the rusty, squealing door of bars and kneeling at Hugh’s side.
She felt for a pulse. There was one, but it was weak. “Mr. Ellis? Hugh, can you hear me?”
“My oxygen,” he gasped, his eyes still closed. “Behind my chair.”
Caro scrambled over to the overturned chair on all fours, her hands feeling in the darkness. When her sensitive fingertips found the plastic tubing, she traced the lines back to the tank. Quickly she dragged the tank closer to Hugh and inserted the tubing in his nostrils.
“Shall I turn up the valve?” she asked.
She heard a yes that sounded more like a groan, then felt for the valve, squinting in the gloom as she carefully adjusted the flow and checked to make sure the lines were uncrimped, the oxygen flowing freely.
“Better?” she asked a moment later, once again checking his pulse. It seemed to be a little stronger, but was still far from strong.
“Mm.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Bruised.” A gasp and then a wheeze. “Fell out. Floor’s rough.”
Caro’s aching knees could testify to that. She patted Hugh’s hand and reached for the wheelchair pillow. “I’ll get you some help.” Gently she cradled Hugh’s neck, slipped the pillow underneath, then lowered his head.
“Who did this to you?” she asked, reaching for the cellular phone at her belt and dialing 911.
“Morgan… Please help Morgan…” he whispered.
“I will! I promise I will. Where is he, Hugh?”
There was no answer, no movement.
“Talk to me! Where’s Morgan? Who locked you in here?”
Hugh’s eyes fluttered closed. He was unconscious.
Caro lifted the cellular phone to her ear. Nothing but static. She redialed. This time the “no signal” warning light flashed red. She got to her feet. “Hugh,” she said, “if you can hear me, I’m going outside. I can’t get a phone cell from here in the basement. I’ll be right back, okay?”
Caro raced up the brick steps of the jail area, back through the building and into the open air. She barreled into the prison yard, phone in hand. But she never got a chance to use it. From behind the gallows stepped another woman.
It was Kimberly—and she was pointing a gun right at her face—a small, semiautomatic handgun, with a silencer.
“Put your hands up, please.”
Caro’s answer was inaudible. She took a deep breath, did as she was told, then said in the calmest voice she could muster, “Kimberly, I just left your grandfather. He’s trapped inside a jail cell.”
Kimberly smiled. “I know. I put him there.”
Caro’s jaw dropped. “You?”
“Of course. What better place to hide someone?”
“But he needs an ambulance! He’s barely breathing! I was just about to call 911. I found him on the floor, and he wasn’t hooked up to his oxygen.” Caro glanced pointedly at the phone, her damp palm clasped around it.
“I made sure my grandfather was settled in comfortably before I left. There’s food and water for him, even a radio so he can listen to the baseball game. He’ll be fine.”
“He’s not! He’s on the floor! Go check if you don’t believe me.”
“Nice try, but Hugh doesn’t need any help. I’m his granddaughter. I’d never hurt him.”
“No, you’d just lock him up in a dark, dirty cell so he can’t talk to anyone,” Caro said contemptuously. “Who was he looking for, Kimberly? Wyatt? Me?”
Kimberly’s eyes flashed with fury. “Shut up! Hugh would be home by now if you hadn’t insisted on your little tour of the Court House. That’s why I was here—to pick him up. Now I have you to deal with.”
“Why?”
“Because ever since you showed up, you’ve created nothing but trouble. Especially between Wyatt and me!”
“I’m not here to ruin the friendship between you and Wyatt. I just wanted to help identify that skeleton.” It was the wrong thing to say.
“That’s why you’re here at the Court House, isn’t it? To look at the old photos.”
Caro pretended ignorance. “No, I just wanted to tour the place. I’m… interested in Old West history.” After all, Kimberly hadn’t heard about the skull’s recreation from her. There was a good chance she hadn’t heard about it from anyone else, either.
Kimberly’s lips twisted in an ugly grimace. “Don’t lie to me. You know who the skeleton was, because you kept the skull.”
Caro continued to feign ignorance. “What are you talking about? The skull disappeared when the rest of the bones were stolen.”
“Nice try. But you’re lying. Now ask me how I know.”
Caro tried not to stare at Kimberly’s gun and asked. “How do you know?”
“Because I stole the body from you and dumped it back where it came from!”
Oh, no. Oh, no.
“This is a small town, city girl. People will talk, especially to me. And even small-town dispatchers know all about facial recreations. Tell me, Doctor Hartlan, did you find a match in the mining exhibit? Was his name Lem Bodine?”
Caro couldn’t manage a poker face if her life depended on it. But she tried. “Who?” And failed. Her expression gave her away, and she knew it.
“That damn skeleton! I wish it’d never seen the light of day!”
“Then why did you bring it to Boothill?”
“I didn’t, you fool!” Kimberly spit out. “Hugh decided to come clean about Lem’s death. He asked that Apache girl to find the body and retrieve it.”
“Jasentha Cliffwalker?”
“The one and only. Hugh hired Miz One-With-Nature so he could die with a clean conscience. He figured if anyone could find that skeleton and move it, she could. Hugh met her at Boothill in the dead of night and dropped Morgan’s keys into the skull to point you all toward the Silver Dollar.” She smiled scornfully. “Morgan was careless enough to leave them at my house once when he rode over to see me.”
The mine! The keys were a clue to The Silver Dollar Mine, not The Silver Dollar Ranch! I’ve made a dreadful mistake!
“When he was done with that, he even gave her an anatomy book and asked her to reassemble the whole cursed thing so you’d spot the broken legs. Like it matters after all these years!” Kimberly’s voice shook, but her gun hand remained dead calm.
Caro tried not to focus on that. “Hugh couldn’t have killed Lem Bodine, Kimberly. He was too young.”
“No, but he knew about it. His father, Jodiah, did the killing—with a branding iron to the head—and Hugh was an accessory. It happened in 1909—Lem had found out about the gold and was stupid enough to tell Jodiah. So Jodiah bashed his head in and made Hugh lie. He was the supposed eyewitness who saw Lem trampled to death in the stampede.”
“Hugh was that witness?” Caro was incredulous.
“At his father’s insistence. Everyone was afraid of Greatgrandfather Jodiah, Hugh included. I heard he beat his wife, his dogs and his kids alike.”
Caro was disgusted. “A real gem,” she muttered.
Kimberly shrugged. “We Ellises have known about that Bodine gold for four generations, thanks to Jodiah, then Hugh and now me.”
Caro was horrified. “But Hugh was just a little boy!”
“That’s right. Like J
odiah said, who’s going to doubt the word of a child? So while Hugh’s father was off dumping Lem’s body down a pit, eight-year-old Hugh was telling the widow the sad, sad story. It was either that or his father would beat him. Maybe kill him. He had a cruel streak, Jodiah did.”
Caro’s heart ached for that young boy of long ago. Hugh Ellis was just as much a victim of Jodiah Ellis as Lem Bodine was.
“Like you said, this is all in the past,” she said desperately. “It has nothing to do with now. Please, Kimberly, let me call an ambulance for your grandfather. He needs help.”
“He needs to shut his mouth and keep it shut, or I’ll beat him myself. That gold is ours! We waited for the technology to drain it and start mining again.”
“The Silver Dollar Mine is on Bodine property.”
“But it has an entrance on our property!”
“I don’t believe you,” Caro scoffed. “You have no mine. Wyatt would’ve told me.”
“We have caves, though. The same system of caves that lies above the Silver Dollar. It slopes down the hills and onto our ranch. Wyatt wasn’t the only one who grew up exploring,” Kimberly said smugly. “I know those caves as well as anyone—even Jasentha.”
“Then you should know exactly where the ore’s located. Is there any silver on Ellis land? Or gold, for that matter?” Caro demanded. “Tell me that, Kimberly.”
Kimberly’s face turned ugly, and Caro knew she had her answer. The gold was on Bodine land.
“The Silver Dollar Mine gave up its silver generations ago, so it doesn’t matter,” Kimberly snapped. “As for the gold, the Ellis family sweated blood over it. We even shed blood over it!”
“And let’s not forget grave robbing—twice,” came Caro’s accusation. “Someone else had to be buried under Lem Bodine’s name. In his grave. Who was it?”
“Some nameless drifter who died on Ellis land. He’d been buried in the family cemetery and Jodiah dug him up. His body was thrown under the cattle, then buried in the Bodine family cemetery with Lena’s name on the tombstone.”
Caro shivered at Kimberly’s words. Still, her investigative instincts made her press on. If she was going down, she’d go with all the answers. “Where does Jasentha come into this? Did she know where the true remains were hidden?”
“Only Hugh knew until I stumbled on those bones while I was having the machinery set up.”
“That must have been… quite a shock.”
“Hardly. More of an annoyance than anything else. But I just couldn’t leave the bones there, or bury them in the family plot without arousing suspicion. Hugh knew about the gold. Hugh knew about my pumps. I figured he’d know about the body, too.”
Kimberly paused. “What I didn’t know was that he’d ask Jasentha to transfer them to Boothill. He told her the bones needed a proper burial. I don’t know what else he told her—she’s an odd bird anyway—but it did the trick. Who would’ve thought Hugh would develop a conscience so late in life?”
“It’s not too late to do the same, Kimberly!”
“Of course it is, even if I wanted to—which I don’t. I succeeded where no one else did. Jodiah somehow found out about Lem’s gold, and claimed it for the family—”
“You mean killed for it.”
Kimberly airily granted Caro that point. “True on both counts, but no Ellis could ever get to it. The mines flooded soon after Jodiah’s discovery. There was no way to get down to the flooded veins in those days, but the gold was close enough to the top to make me try.”
Kimberley smiled proudly. “I was the one who hired workers who couldn’t speak English. I was the one who risked my neck transporting gold to my Mexican bank. I was the only Ellis to succeed! For the first time ever, our ranch is out of the red. That gold belongs to me, and I don’t care if it is on Bodine land!”
“I won’t argue with you, Kimberly. I don’t care who gets the gold. I only care that no one gets hurt. Like Hugh.” Caro said a quick, silent prayer, then went on, “Kimberly, I’m going to put my hands down and use the phone to call an ambulance. Then we’ll both go check on Hugh.”
Kimberly’s response was instantaneous. She squeezed the trigger. The phone shattered into pieces of sharp-edged plastic as the silenced bullet slammed through it. Stunned, Caro felt a sticky warmth slide down her fingers.
“I’m sorry, but my grandfather stays here. While you—” Kimberly gestured with the gun in an easy motion. “—you’re coming with me.”
CARO SAT BEHIND the wheel of Kimberly’s truck, Kimberly right beside her, gun in hand.
“Where are we going?” Caro asked, bumping along on the desert land. She could see a faint path in sight, but nothing looked familiar. Driving was difficult, and her injured hand wasn’t helping matters.
“To The Silver Dollar Mine.”
“But this isn’t the way.”
“This is my way. A secret way.”
Caro shook her head, confused. “I don’t understand.”
“I told you I have a system of tunnels on my land that lead straight to the mine. Tombstone is a mining town. This whole area is honeycombed and crisscrossed with tunnels and natural caves. It’s like a labyrinth down there. Think subway system, city girl.”
Caro threw her captor a withering look. “I’m from Phoenix. They don’t have subways in Phoenix.”
Kimberly glared at her. “For someone with a gun on her, you’re pretty glib.”
“Shoot me and you’ll crash the truck. Then everyone will know my death wasn’t an accident. Just like they’ll soon know Lem Bodine’s death wasn’t an accident. That’s what you have planned, right? Shooting me.” Caro glanced at her quickly. “You intend to get rid of me in the mines, just like you got rid of Morgan.”
Kimberly sighed. She pushed a strand of blowing red hair away from her face with the gun barrel.
“I don’t want to kill you. I just wanted to scare you off. But Wyatt had your car checked, and you caught the slashed cinch. I didn’t want to kill Morgan, either. But he was as bad as you. Nothing I did would make him leave me alone.”
You killed Morgan! What am I going to tell Wyatt? How can I tell him if she kills me?
“But when he found out, I had stop him.”
“When did Morgan find out you were stealing gold from the Silver Dollar?”
“The Bodines were always smart stockmen. Give them a bull and a few cows, or a stallion and a few mares, and they made money hand over fist. We never had cash-on-the-hoof luck. But when it came to mining, we were way ahead of the Bodines. They were dead-mule stupid. Still are.”
Caro drove through a particularly bumpy wash. The creek beds seemed to be everywhere in this section of pasture, and the flying dust made visibility worse. It took all her concentration to navigate the rough patch before she could talk again. She was glad she had her seat belt tight and snug. Kimberly, like many dirt-road drivers without the highway patrol to fine them, didn’t bother with a seat belt. She just grabbed the side of the window with a well-practiced motion.
“Why are the Bodines stupid?” Caro asked. “Because they trusted you? Because they didn’t realize you were stealing their gold? Or because they didn’t figure out that you murdered one of them for it?”
“All of the above, really. I didn’t want to hurt anyone— I just wanted to keep Hugh from going to Wyatt. I mean, he’s been quiet about it all these years. He’ll come around, and then everything can go back to the way it was.”
“What about Morgan?”
“I didn’t want to hurt him. But what could I do? He was always underfoot, following me, looking at me like a lovesick puppy.” Kimberly scowled. “He found out about the gold. One of the local bartenders—who happens to speak Spanish—found out about it from one of my workers. And Morgan favors that same bar. Morgan wanted to go straight to Wyatt. I couldn’t let him.”
“What did you do?” Caro asked. “Hit him in the head with a branding iron before you dumped him down a mining shaft?”
“Hardly,”
Kimberly drawled. “But Morgan was getting in the way. It all started at the dinner party where you pulled the gold out of Hugh’s wheelchair treads. That damn guano and gold must’ve stuck tight after Jasentha took him over to our caves to retrieve Lem’s bones. Then Morgan got suspicious. Wyatt didn’t notice the guano in the chair, but Morgan did.”
“And that’s why he showed up at the mine when Wyatt and I were there!” Caro realized with sudden insight. “You cut my cinch—didn’t you? And I blamed Morgan…”
“Yes.” Kimberly actually laughed. “You know, Morgan’s a better detective than either you or Wyatt. Too bad he didn’t have the same instinct for self-preservation that you do.”
Caro felt sick to her stomach. Morgan couldn’t possibly be alive, could he? “You never answered my question. What did you do to Morgan?”
“Mostly just batted my eyelashes and talked sweet. I told him I wanted to spend the day exploring the caves—with him. I said I’d show him the gold.” She paused, shaking her head sadly. “Morgan almost ruined everything, you know.”
“I don’t know,” Caro replied. “Tell me.”
Kimberly’s face grew soft with an almost ethereal beauty. “I love Wyatt. I’ve always loved Wyatt. I plan to marry him. He’d get a loving wife, and I’d get him.”
“Plus, a legal claim to the gold as his spouse.”
“Exactly! Only if I decided to tell him—no sense rocking the boat. Until you showed up, it was a win-win situation.”
“Don’t forget Morgan,” Caro said contemptuously. “What did you do, leave him where your family left Lem?”
“Not exactly there. But close enough. He’s in the mine, all right.” She gestured ahead with the gun. Caro could see a man-made opening in the natural rock formation.
“Dead?”
Kimberly smiled, her face still ablaze with that strange, unearthly beauty. “Well, if he wasn’t when I shoved him down that pit, he ought to be by now.”
“My God!” Caro stared at Kimberly in horror. “How could you do that? He’s the brother of the man you love!”
Kimberly merely laughed.
Caro shivered at the sound. She’s crazy. Despite a hand that was bleeding and raw, she clenched her fingers tight around the steering wheel. She hadn’t grown up driving in the desert for nothing. Caro prepared herself to take her foot off the gas pedal, prepared to jam on the brakes, prepared to jerk the steering wheel hard to the right.
Anne Marie Duquette Page 22