Molly Gibson, the Smuggler. Can't you just imagine the lives of the
men who slaved here, day in and day out, for their three bucks? Round
the clock, hundreds of them, carving this tunnel out of the
mountain?"
"The ones with murder in their hearts, you mean?" The work, the tons
of rock and ore hauled out of here, boggled the mind, and the truth
was, nothing about it fired his imagination, not even considering the
vast fortunes made and lost.
"Well, you'd almost have expected more murders by far than there
apparently were. When you consider what was at stake--"
"Silver crashed in '93," he reminded her.
"They couldn't know that then, though. And murder sure adds a touch of
mystery and danger, doesn't it?"
She lined up another shot of a rail car track heading across a chasm
where the earth had fallen down. "Do you think they could hear the
avalanche down here?"
Keller hesitated halfway through her initials. He'd read through some
of her research materials last night, and knew the death of Jerome
Clarke in an avalanche at the Hallelujah had changed the course of
local mining history. "I'd say that's a safe bet."
The thought of an avalanche, or a rock slide, or even a timber
shifting, gave him the creeps again. "Remind me again," he cracked,
"what we're doing down here."
"Something's not right, Ken. I can't put my finger on it, but I don't
think Jerome Clarke was killed in that avalanche."
He cocked an eyebrow at her. "That's why we're down here? This
hellhole is a place only Dante could really appreciate, Robyn."
"Well," she said, cocking a hip, planting her hand, "I had this sort of
half-baked notion that someone used the avalanche for an excuse to toss
Jerome Clarke down a mine shaft. I was so sure, Ken, that we'd stumble
over Clarke's skeleton."
He blinked at her outrageousness, then finished the T standing for
Trueblood, for him, in her initials. Smart alec, he thought. She
hadn't expected to stumble over any skeletons at all. "Clarke died in
the avalanche, Robyn. Didn't you read his wife's memoirs?"
She stopped clicking pictures and glared at him playfully. "Oh, Mr.
Perfect Recall again, is it? Just because it's written down doesn't
make it so, Ken. Was Mrs. Clarke there? No. Hearsay."
"History is hearsay, Robyn."
"But there weren't enough bodies found afterward for his to be one of
them. Clarke wasn't one of them. Res ipsa loquitur, counselor," she
quoted him.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. "The thing speaks for itself." Trouble is, we're
talking historical accounts here, Mrs. Counselor."
"Ken, Jerome Clarke lost a hand in a blasting accident years before.
How likely is it that he died in the avalanche but his body was left
unrecognizable?"
"Bodies can get pretty smashed up in avalanches, Robyn. Anyway, what's
the point? The guy died. Lucien Mortthank brought the opposite camps
together, they got back to mining and everyone lived happily ever
after."
"Everyone but Jerome Clarke," she muttered darkly. "Sorry to rain on
your parade, sweetheart, but no one cared one way or the other--which
probably means he died in the avalanche and that was the end of
everyone's troubles."
"Or someone did him in, and that was the end of everyone's troubles."
He stopped carving again and twirled a pretend handlebar mustache. "You
wanna bet?" he dared her. "Costs you, you know."
"How are we going to prove it, one way or the other?"
He shrugged. "It's your baby, Robyn. I've got my hands full with
putting Trudi Candelaria behind bars."
He frowned, just thinking of the case. Something was not right there,
either, and he knew it.
"Okay, then sure. I'll bet you--dam straight. Clarke's death was just
too neatly timed, Ken--and you know I
don't believe in coincidence."
"Or neatness," he teased.
"Neatness is for little minds," she retorted, because she needed an
excuse, he always thought, not because she really believed neatness
precluded intelligence.
It was true that she didn't buy into easy coincidence, which basically
spelled out the source of all their arguments, their biggest
differences. Robyn was always looking for trouble. He wasn't naive,
but he never went looking--be just dealt with trouble where he found
it. Prosecuting the perps. Bringing justice, although he didn't
believe for a second that justice was truly served in any sense when
people had been murdered.
Between him and Robyn, the issue came up in different ways. Her darker
suspicions sometimes made him mad, but he knew in his heart she was
just trying to protect a more innocent core in her heart that really
didn't want to believe people could turn out to be as rotten as they
sometimes were.
He'd married her. Taken up protecting her heart. He loved her more
than life, so he forgave her the way she forgave his obnoxious upbeat
attitudes and perfect photographic memory.
When she started spouting off those dark suspicions, that's when he
knew she was feeling threatened, and he knew it was time to make her
feel less threatened. His best bet was always making love to her, and
since he came away feeling less isolated and alone in the world
himself, their relationship only got deeper. Richer.
"Proof, although forthcoming, will have to wait," she said, bringing
his mind back to the moment. "Right now I'm occupied with my
camera."
He just grinned and started hatching his collection process for the
kisses she would owe him on her lost bet while he carved the heart
around their initials and shot it through with an arrow.
She only stopped snapping photos when she ran out of the high-speed
film. She put her camera away, and her notebook. Inspecting his work,
she touched him in a breathtakingly intimate way and dropped a
distracted kiss on his bare shoulder.
He put the lantern down on the floor by an old set of tracks for the
ore carts, aiming its beam in the direction they would return. Beyond
a cone of six or eight feet, pitch black resumed.
"Thanks for coming with me, Ken." She leaned in the shadows against a
jagged wall of stone, facing him. The cold, he thought, had finally
punched through her enthusiasm and she shivered. The dark stain of
damp sweat at her breasts still remained. Her neck shimmered with the
sweat of exertion and her nipples beaded in the cold, poking through
the flimsy fabric. Keller ached.
He let his gaze travel the twisting, decaying beams. He couldn't touch
her passion for this hellhole with a ten foot pole, and he called
himself a moron for resenting a hole in the ground sparking her like
this. He stuck his fingers in his jeans pockets to ease the fit and
shrugged. His voice dropped. Thickened. "Whatever turns you on,
Robyn Jeanne Delaney Trueblood."
"This place interests me." She swallowed and blinked and swallowed
again. Her nipples thrust harder. Keller ached worse. "You turn me
on."
He let his head fall forward until his chin touched his chest. The
pain of wanting her was such an exquisite buzz. The play of their
shadows on the far wall caught his eyes. He pointed them out to Robyn,
then reached for her. Eyes glued to the wall, they watched the shadow
of his hand approach the peaking shadows of her breasts, his fingers
hovering, straying, never quite touching her.
At last he hooked his fingers into the scoop neck between her breasts
and pulled her to him. He took off her helmet, she took off his. They
dropped them to the ground and the noise echoed.
Coming together, the shadows lost resolution. Keller lost his mind and
flattened his hand to her breast and kissed her neck until she lost her
mind, too.
His lips traversed her bare shoulder, past the bandanna, up her neck to
her ear. He played with her nipple and stroked the curve of her
breast, and he wanted her as much in that nasty, dank creepy place as
he had ever wanted anything in his life, but his reverence for her
finally swamped him.
She knew who he was, what he was about, and God knew, what he was about
wasn't all hearts and flowers or perfect by anyone's standards. But
Robyn Delaney brought him laughs and rare insight, peace and a place to
hang his hat no matter where either of them were. His time with her
was' too precious and fleeting.
He whispered things in her ear he had never admitted before, even in
his secret-heart. He lifted her and tasted her, and she came to him
open as a book, wrapping her legs around his waist, and when the earth
began to move, neither one of them knew that the earth had in fact
begun to shudder and collapse and disintegrate.
The horrible, twisting yawn of splintering beams rocked their dark and
dank world. Robyn cried out and clung to him, trying to protect his
head and body with hers, but the force of the rock-hard granite,
heaving and collapsing, cleaved them apart.
He shoved her toward the solid rock wall and dove sideways to save the
lantern, but above them the supporting beam, the one with their
initials carved in a heart, crashed down.
His back was broken, his body crushed. Keller True-blood died with
Robyn's name on his lips and her desperate, keening cry ringing in his
head... but the last image Kiel beheld was one in which the devastation
happened all over again, only it was Robyn, in his vision, whose body
lay twisted and broken and lifeless beneath a splintered beam and
deadly briffitts of dust.
"KIEL?"
He twisted in his seat. Pain roared through his head. "Dear God, how
do you stand it?" he croaked.
"Stand what? Kiel, what's wrong? Are you all right?" He wasn't.
Even Robyn's car felt stiflingly small to him. Keller's memories faded
and died, as his human form had died, but Kiel was left with the
overwhelming sense of what it was to have the life crushed from his
body. He recovered. Even Keller, from the instant of his death, had
not suffered long.
The one left to suffer sat beside him. Kiel could not look at Robyn
without knowing the scope of the battle she had waged to survive. The
heart-pounding terror of any darkness after she was buried alive,
unable to see her hand in front of her face. The physical trauma she
had overcome in the face of memories of Keller dogging her every step
of the way.
The torrent of Keller's memories lasted no more than a few seconds in
real time, but Robyn knew something was wrong, that something had
happened to Kiel.
She put her hand on his left forearm. "Kiel, what is it?"
"I just... I just witnessed the Hallelujah collapsing."
Struggling to stay on the road, Robyn shuddered. "How?"
He could not lie. "As if I had been Keller. Robyn, it's a miracle you
survived at all."
"I didn't think so, Kiel. Not for a long time. Where was my Guardian
Angel then? Where was Keller's?"
The question haunted Kiel, too. "Some things are destined, Robyn. I
don't really know the answer. I had no sense of how hard it really is
to be human."
He didn't know either how she coped from day to day with such
devastating memories lurking below the surface, ready -to spring on her
at the slightest crack in her guard.
"It's easier, being an angel?"
He gave her a sideways smile. "We aren't usually troubled by painful
emotions or memories. Every time you turn around, Keller is there,
isn't he."
"Yes." She sniffed. "Not only Keller, though. I still remember the
shame when my dad cracked my knuckles for not using a knife. I
remember my great-grandma brushing my hair. I loved that brush. It
was this amber . color with a cameo lady on its back. I don't know
what became of her brush, but in my memory it's still the most
beautiful thing I have ever seen. She made all my little-girl problems
feel like fairy dust I could gather up in my hand and blow away."
"You loved her very much."
Again, filled with complicated emotions, she nodded. "Grandmama Marie
was old country right down to her Bible. Austrian. She had this thing
she used to say--I'd almost forgotten. I guess it's like the Austrian
national theme. "Veil, my deer," she'd say to me," Robyn quoted,
mimicking her grandmother's accent, "'ze situation iss hopeless, but
not so serious.""
Robyn took her eyes off the road and glanced at him. Her eyes,
moonbeams on mink, Kiel thought, glittered. She took a deep breath and
expelled it. "Guess that about says it for the human condition,
doesn't it? Everyone of us is a hopeless pit of emotions, but it isn't
so serious after all. Life goes on. We get over it or we don't.
Either way, life does go on."
Kiel smiled for her. "You've come a long way, Robyn" '
She smiled. "I have, haven't I. Anyway. What do you think of going to
Lucy?"
"You like her?"
Robyn nodded. "I do. She's very down-to-earth for a woman who owns
whole chunks of Aspen real estate. We spent a lot of time together.
I'm sum she could turn us onto explosives experts."
"So how do you handle it? Alone? Together?" "Do you want to meet
her?"
"Sure. But I'd like to spend some time going through Keller's trial
transcript notes."
"Not to. mention interviewing Chloe Nielsen, Shad Petrie and Pascal
Candelaria." Robyn came to a stop at the intersection of the county
roads. She waited on a couple of high-end, pricey four-by-fours, then
turned back to Aspen. "We've got two things going here. One, was it
really Trudi who murdered Spyder? and two, was she or whoever did kill
Spyder threatened enough by
Keller to want him dead? Did you think Crandall was telling us the
truth?"
"The truth according to him. But he made the case against Trudi
Candelaria. Why would he play devil's advocate to his own work?"
"For the sake of the truth?" Robyn suggested. "The truth is set in
concrete for guys like him."
"Mmm. A 'don't confuse me with the facts' kind of guy."
Kiel laughed. "That's a good one, But to be fair, the weight of facts
had to be on Crandall's side, or Keller would never have signed on as
special prosecutor."
"I don't agree with you, Kiel. Keller--er, Kiel--" The juxtaposition
and similarity of the two names had her tongue tied in knots. Laughing
at herself, she started again. "Keller said it often enough. A
prosecutor's case is only as good as the weakest link. Crandall was
the crucial link, and I think, after listening to him today, that he
had his mind made up. Once the grand jury indicted Trudi Candelaria,
the die was cast:' She darted through a yellow light and pulled into a
slanted parking place in front of a popular cappuccino bar.
Ready to lambaste her theory, Kiel rolled up the window to prevent any
passersby from overhearing him. "Think about what you're saying now,
Robyn. Based on one interview with Ken Crandall, you're saying Keller
Trueblood, your husband, a man whose instincts and integrity you
trusted to the nth degree, caught and ran with the ball of a man whose
instincts turn you off and whose integrity is yet to be proven."
"That's not--" Robyn broke off. Propping her hands over the steering
wheel, she gave a weary sigh. "You're right. What can I say? I
guess, deep down inside, Kiel, I believed Trudi Candelaria."
"You want to believe her, or you do?"
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