“Damn it.” He stalked over on stiff legs, aware of the worry in Tansy’s eyes and the fact that she probably thought he’d flipped. Then again, maybe he had. That was the only reason he was considering the crazy plan that had come to him. They’d be safer hiding out in Churchill’s mansion, drinking the last of the bottled water until help arrived. She’d be safer in the mansion, for sure.
But suddenly, he didn’t think he could hide. The others were counting on their help. The island needed their help. So he stooped down and inspected the ugly purple rock. There was a long crack running through its center.
Dale reversed the shotgun and smashed it into the ground, butt first. When he pulled it away, the rock lay neatly halved. The broken facets were smooth and shiny, a deep royal purple that glowed with an inner light.
The center of the stone was shot through with a lightning bolt of yellow, a burst of color that Dale could imagine faceted and set, hanging from the graceful curve of Tansy’s neck.
He glanced at her. “I think we’ve found our ‘why.’”
She stepped closer and leaned down, and everything in Dale’s body relaxed with her nearness and tensed up from the greed. Without any real thought, he picked up the two halves and handed one to her. He put the other in his pocket. When he stood, they were facing each other, barely a breath apart.
“We’re heading upriver to find Roberts, aren’t we?” she asked. Her body language told him in no uncertain terms that she would not be left behind, as did her addition of, “Partner.”
But Dale had no intention of leaving her. Somewhere along the line, he’d gotten used to treating her as a lover and had forgotten about being her partner. She was the better, stronger half of their team. And this is what HFH doctors did.
They saved lives.
So he nodded and stuck out a hand. “Yes we are. Partner.”
But when their hands gripped and held, and their eyes locked and a spark of connection arced between them, it was all he could do not to drag her into his arms and kiss her until none of it mattered anymore—not the past or the future, or the things they never seemed to get quite right between them.
And not the specter of the man he imagined waiting for them, high above the water on the deserted hill that made up the southern claw.
Chapter Ten
“I’m going with you, too.” Trask’s announcement was unexpected and not entirely welcome. Dale turned on his uncle, intending to tell him that he and Tansy would be better off traveling light and alone, as they had so many other times before. But Hazel beat him to it.
“The hell you are!” She glared at Trask, who recoiled in surprise. “We’ll wait here until we’re certain the storm has missed us. Then when help arrives from the mainland, we can turn this over to the authorities. There’s no need for foolish heroics.” Her voice climbed toward shrill on the last few words.
“But, Hazel—”
“No!” she snapped at him, her eyes welling with tears. “When will it be enough? Sue is dead. I don’t know why you can’t just accept it and move on.”
Trask reached for her, his eyes dark and confused.
She evaded his hands. “Don’t bother, Trask. I’ve had enough of waiting for you. It’s over, do you understand me? Over.” Then, as suddenly as it had come, the fight seemed to drain out of her. She gave a shaky laugh and scrubbed both hands across her face. “Never mind. You’re right.”
Trask scowled helplessly. “Right about what?”
“It’s up to us to find Roberts. He can’t be allowed to poison the river.”
If that was even his plan. They had nothing to go on besides their suspicion that the answers lay upriver.
“There is no we here,” Dale said quickly. “Tansy and I are going because we’re trained in this sort of thing.” That was a stretch, but there was no way he was taking Hazel and Trask along. “Besides,” he said, scrambling for a reason to leave them behind other than You’re too old, or I don’t want anything to happen to you, “Hazel needs to stay behind in case there are more poisonings.”
She treated him to a withering glare. “You know as well as I do that there’ll be no need for respirators if he hits the river.” She widened her grimace to include Trask. “We’re going along whether you like it or not. There’s safety in numbers.”
“She’s right,” Churchill said quietly, lifting his hand when Dale rounded on him. “You’ll need someone to watch your back if he is up there.”
“But the patients.”
“There will be no new patients, Dale. You know it. And the few left alive here just need sleep. Mickey and I can watch over them.” Churchill sighed. “I’d go up with you, but my knees just won’t take it. Besides, don’t you think Trask deserves to go?”
Because of Suzie. Dale hung his head, feeling the arguments slip away. All except one. “I don’t want anyone hurt on account of me.”
Trask lifted a tentative hand to Dale’s shoulder. The weight was heavy and solid. Family. “It’s not on account of you, boy. It’s for the island.”
Dale felt Tansy’s eyes on him and met her questioning gaze when he nodded his head. “We go together, then.”
As the four filed out of the motel room and into the yellow-gray light, Dale thought he heard Churchill murmur, “And may luck go with you.”
Dale touched the broken stone in his pocket, heard it clink against his mother’s engagement ring and wondered whether there was any such thing as luck on Lobster Island.
And if so, whether it had any use for him.
THEY PILED INTO TRASK’S jeep and drove down to the docks for supplies. There was no sharing seats on this trip. Tansy and Hazel sat pressed together on the tiny back bench while Dale and Trask manned the front. Conversation was nonexistent as Hazel and Trask brooded over their fight, Dale and Tansy over their plans.
Churchill claimed the storm had turned, but the clouds hung heavy and gray.
The air, though, remained motionless. Tansy felt the moisture in it cling to the insides of her nostrils and the back of her neck. She rubbed her arms and felt the fine hairs ripple as though lightning had struck nearby.
“Storm’s coming,” Trask grunted as he parked the jeep. “Churchill’s weather folk are dead wrong about the hurricane turning. I’d bet a full catch she’s headed straight at us.”
As if in answer, a breeze tugged at Tansy’s hair. It wasn’t a refreshing wind, though. It was cold and wet and full of malice.
Dale’s lips set as he considered the implications. “We can’t turn back now.”
“You’re right,” Tansy agreed. “Roberts has a solid head start on us. He could make it to the headwater before the storm.”
Trask and Churchill had agreed that for Roberts to poison the island, he would have to follow the river upstream to the place where a larger flow branched into three smaller ones. Those three together fed the water supplies of the entire island.
Hazel gritted her teeth, visibly daring any of the others to suggest she stay in town with Mickey and Churchill. “Then let’s get to it.”
Tansy slid out of the jeep, onto to the deserted lobster dock. A shiver crawled down her back. The docks had looked barren before, when the Churchill IV had pulled her and Dale from the water and brought them ashore. Now, with the remaining boats either winched out of the battering surf or sent around to the other side of the island for safety, the dock moaned its emptiness.
Or maybe that was the wind.
“Tansy, you and Hazel look in the sheds for slickers and rope. Trask, you come with me. We’ll need a machete or two, and shotgun shells if you have them.” There was a fierce, bright light in Dale’s eyes that made him look like the man Tansy had known in Tehru, and a hundred places since. The man she’d fallen in love with.
Action suited him, just as it suited her. She felt the siren’s call of it thrum through her veins and pound just beneath her skin like tribal drums.
Like thunder. Or gunshots.
“You okay?” he asked, an
d she looked up to find him close. Too close. She could smell his familiar scent over the stink of the incoming storm, and wanted to kiss him. Wanted to drive herself into him and wrap him around her until there was nothing but them and the storm.
And of the future? There was no future beyond the incoming hurricane and the hunt they undertook. It was always this way for them in the field, when they took that first step away from the safe base hospital and out into the unknown. Here, they were finally in their element. And though they might not ever leave this island, or the river that beckoned with glittering gems and a madman’s trail, Tansy had the wild urge to throw her head back and laugh into the threatening sky.
Instead, she looked straight at Dale, the man she’d loved despite everything, and nodded. “I’m great. Let’s do this.”
They found beacon-bright yellow rain jackets and pants hanging in the sorters’ shed, and loaded up on rope and portables that might double as weapons. Canvas duffels were loaded with two machetes and a few assorted metal hooks with wickedly pointed ends. The doctor in Tansy shuddered at the thought of the barbs entering human flesh even as the survivor in her was glad for the protection.
And worried that they might need it.
On the drive to the southern claw, they swapped seat positions so she rode in the back with Dale, Hazel in the front with Trask. But still, there was little talk. It was difficult to converse over the engine and the rising wind.
Hurricane Harriet was on her way.
“We’ll have to walk from here,” Trask said, stopping the vehicle where the dirt road softened to sand. “We drive in much farther and the jeep’s likely to sink with the rain.”
They hiked down to the beach and walked along the heavy storm-tossed surf for nearly half a mile, passing churned up seaweed and dead and dying creatures. The charnel stench reminded Tansy of the cold room where the islanders had laid their dead.
When the storm passed, it would be time for burials and more tears.
When the storm passed…
They reached the river as the first fat drops of rain began to fall, and Tansy thought it was unnatural to hear water on all sides. The surf pounded behind her, the river gushed in front of her, and the rain beat a quickening tattoo all around, echoing hollowly on the yellow hood she pulled high and fastened across her throat.
The river was wide where it met the sea, running fast as though anticipating the rain and the wind. Tansy couldn’t see any more of the glittering purple stones in the water or on its banks, but Eddie’s rock had been a devious gray until it was held up to the sunlight. Only then had it shown its purple core.
She touched the shard of rock in her pocket and winced when a sharp edge pricked her finger.
“This way,” Trask called over the symphony of water. He waved towards the thick wall of trees that verged the beach near this lonely, unused part of the island. “There used to be a path up to the headwater, back when I was a boy.”
When he turned away, Tansy heard Dale’s voice beside her. “I don’t know if I would have found this place without him.” The words echoed oddly through the rain hood.
Hating the way it narrowed her vision and obscured her hearing, she pushed the hood back off her head, noting that Dale had done the same. “What?”
“Trask,” he repeated. “I think we were right to bring him.”
Tansy watched the older man scramble up the shifting beach, towards the trees, with Hazel following doggedly in his wake. Their bright yellow raincoats glowed in the storm light, and the forest looked dank and dark, wreathed in an oily mist that would cling and slip rather than hide. She shivered with quick foreboding.
The brief burst of euphoria she’d felt at the prospect of one last field adventure with Dale faded, leaving behind the knowledge that this was no simple trek through a rainforest to an ailing village. No, this was a manhunt, pure and simple, with a posse of four, a single shotgun and a short dozen shells.
She glanced up at Dale and saw her own reservations written in his cool blue eyes. She longed to kiss him, to touch him, to reassure him that she was there for him, would always be there for him. But he didn’t want that. Didn’t want her.
Didn’t want them.
So she took a deep breath and found a brave smile. “Hazel and Trask are fine. I’m not so sure about this rain gear, though.”
“It’s designed to show up against the water when a lobsterman goes overboard.” Dale looked toward the trees, where the others glowed like neon. “Let’s keep them on for now and ditch them about halfway up. Roberts has a good head start, and he won’t be expecting pursuit, so we should be safe until then.”
“Hoy there!” came Trask’s shout from up the beach. “We’ve found the path.”
But when they reached it, the so-called path seemed even more densely wooded than the stunted beach forest around them. In theory, the trail followed the wide river from the verge of the sand and sawgrass, up a rocky hill to the tall hump of the southern claw. Most of the settlements on the island, along with the dock and the airstrip, stretched along the creature’s tail and northern claw, leaving the southern claw bare. Though Tansy knew “civilization” was no more than three or four miles away, the distance felt much greater than that.
She held out a hand to stop Dale when he would have followed his uncle right away. “Are you sure this is the best plan? Something feels wrong to me.”
He shook her off. “We don’t have a choice, Tansy. The islanders need us.”
He hadn’t answered her question, which was all the reply she needed. He felt it, too. But she could tell from the frenetic glint in Dale’s eyes and from Trask’s wild, driven motions as he hacked away at the underbrush and forced a path where one used to be, that the men weren’t simply bent on saving the island.
They were looking for revenge.
The first band of rain passed, and in the capricious way of storm skies, the clouds parted to let a finger of sunlight break through. Tansy lifted her face into the weak warmth for a moment. Then she looked into the jagged maw Trask had carved out of the tangled growth. Dark and forbidding, it oozed a wet mist that smelled like rotting vegetation. Or worse.
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea anymore,” she murmured to herself. “The storm hasn’t turned and we have one shotgun among the four of us. Why are we doing this again?”
“Because we love them,” Hazel answered unexpectedly. The middle-aged doctor stepped up beside Tansy and brushed her hood back as they watched Trask and Dale hack their way into the dark, stinking undergrowth. “And because they need us.”
“Dale doesn’t need anyone,” Tansy answered, aware of a simmering layer of resentment.
Hazel laughed softly. “That’s what he wants you to believe, child. But I’ve never seen anyone need another human being the way Dale needs you. His eyes follow you when you’re not looking. He leans on you, and you don’t even notice it.”
Grunts of exertion, the thwack of machetes and the rustles of brush being dragged aside punctuated the men’s progress, but on the beach, Tansy felt that wan ray of sunlight touch her face again.
Or maybe it was hope.
“Do you think so?” she asked quietly.
Hazel shot her a glance. “I know so. But it’s not enough.” The stern warning in her voice was enough to kill the quick tremble of optimism struggling to life in Tansy’s heart. Belatedly, she remembered her parents.
Her father had needed her mother to organize his dinner parties and charm his clients’ wives. He’d needed her to keep the household running smoothly and see to the raising of their only daughter. He’d needed her.
But it hadn’t been enough.
She stared at her toes. “I know.”
“You need to decide what you need from him, and tell him so.” Hazel touched Tansy’s elbow and gestured her towards the raw, bleeding pathway the men had sliced for them. Her voice dropped toward bitter. “Then you need to be prepared to walk away if he can’t give it to you.”
<
br /> Tansy thought of Trask and Hazel, who each glanced over when they thought the other wasn’t paying attention. Though she hadn’t seen the expression on Dale’s face, ever, Tansy recognized it from her mother’s face. From her own. Need. Stark longing. A wish.
Then she thought of the thing keeping Trask and Hazel apart—a man’s love for his dead wife, and his inability to say goodbye without knowing the truth. And she realized there was another reason for Dale and Trask to enter that weeping, oozing hole in the forest.
They needed to lay the dead to rest.
“Come on, then. Let’s do this.” She touched Hazel’s arm and they walked along the river to the place where a path had once run. With a shudder of foreboding, Tansy realized that the stumps of the slashed brambles were too even, too regularly spaced to be natural. The path had been covered up on purpose, many years ago. But where did it lead?
She touched the broken rock in her pocket. It made her think the trail might lead to a vein of precious stones crumbling from a hillside far above the riverbank, where pieces washed down with the rains now and then. And islanders unlucky enough to find them were lost at sea.
If that was the case, then someone on the island must be involved. Roberts was a newcomer. The brambles, and Lobster Island’s reputation, had been sown years ago. As had the legend of a ghost in Dale’s old house. Perhaps it wasn’t a ghost then, but a very human search for the rock Dale had carried all these years.
But who could it be? Tansy thought of the islanders she’d met—poor, honest folk who loved their families and their island, even when it gave them back nothing but heartache. As she walked along the path, she realized she already had her answer.
Roberts would know. He would know who controlled the gems, and who had hired him to buy the island.
He might even know where the graves were.
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