“That conniving cow,” I whispered furiously. “She’s been sending her acolytes into the mine shaft to make spooky noises so we’d buy into her story about the curse. She’s been manufacturing the curse.”
Toby’s jaw set in a grim line. “They’re trespassing on private property. I’d love to catch them at it.”
“Me, too,” I said fervently.
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, then?”
“Well, then, what?” I said.
“Let’s go.” He pointed at the floor. “Let’s go down there and get them.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I squeaked. “No, no, no, and absolutely not-in-a-million-years no.”
“Fine,” Toby shrugged. “I just thought you might want to get back at Amanda for teaching your sons to swear. I thought you’d want to punish her for scaring Tammy Auerbach. I thought you’d want to get even with her for trying to dupe you. But if you want to let her off the hook…”
I didn’t consider myself an abnormally vengeful person, but Toby’s words were having their desired effect. I could feel myself weakening.
“I know which tunnel we could use to ambush them,” he murmured tantalizingly. “If we do it right, we’ll give them as big a scare as they gave Tammy.”
“If we do it wrong, we’ll kill ourselves,” I countered.
“We won’t do it wrong,” Toby insisted. “Trust me, Lori. I know my way around the shafts.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “Let’s go.”
Toby stood and pulled me to my feet. “We’ll leave through the master suite, to avoid disturbing Annelise.”
“Good,” I said as we headed for the corridor, “because I have to change my shoes. I’m not going into any mine shaft wearing sneakers.”
Toby fidgeted impatiently while I pulled on my hiking boots, then led the way onto my deck. We climbed over the railing, jumped, and hit the ground running, though we slowed to a fast walk when Toby ducked into the trees and onto a trail downhill from the Aerie.
The moon was so bright that we didn’t need the lantern or my headlamp to find our way, and in less than ten minutes we were standing before a sagging wire fence strung across a rough-edged hole in the mountainside. Toby pulled the fence aside easily and waited for me to join him in the mouth of the mine shaft. I stepped past the fence, then hesitated.
“Toby?” I said. “How cold do you think it is in Panama?”
“Huh?” he said.
“Never mind,” I said and plunged in after him.
Twenty-four
The tunnel wasn’t nearly as horrible as I’d expected it to be. The floor was surprisingly uncluttered by debris, there was ample headroom, and the rough-hewn walls were far enough apart for Toby and me to walk side by side. Better still, the wooden supports didn’t look as though they were on the brink of giving way, I didn’t hear or see a single rat, and the bats had apparently gone out for supper.
Granted, the thought of getting lost and wandering blindly from pillar to post until our lights failed made me want to howl with fear, but Toby seemed to know what he was doing. We passed several openings leading to other shafts, including a rubble-filled one that made me think of Cyril Pennyfeather. I was still contemplating Cyril’s sad fate—and praying silently that we wouldn’t meet with the same one—when Toby skidded to a halt before an opening that looked different from the others.
“Well, well,” he said quietly. “Amanda has been industrious.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She’s carved a new tunnel,” he answered, shining his light into a shaft that was much smaller and more roughly hewn than ours. “I’ve never seen this one before.”
“How could she dig a tunnel without anyone knowing about it?” I said doubtfully. “Where would she put the dirt and rocks?”
“They have a big garden up at the dome,” said Toby. “They could have dumped the diggings there. And if the tunnel mouth is near the dome, they’d have no trouble keeping it secret. The townspeople leave the commune pretty much alone.” He peered into the tunnel again and frowned. “Still, it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to scare the Auerbachs.”
“Oh my,” I said softly, struck by a revelation that should have come to me much sooner. “It might be worth the trouble if it helps Amanda buy the Aerie at a bargain price.”
“What are you talking about?” said Toby. “Mr. Auerbach would never sell the Aerie.”
“It’s been on the market for the past six months,” I informed him. “No one’s put in an offer, so Danny’s lowered the price twice already. Bill told me about it in confidence, so I couldn’t tell you.”
Toby’s stunned expression quickly gave way to one of outrage. “If Amanda Barrow conned Mr. Auerbach into selling—”
“Of course she did,” I broke in excitedly. “Amanda wants to expand her empire by buying the Aerie. She targeted Tammy and dug the tunnel in order to scare the Auerbachs into selling it. She must think I’m interested in buying it now that the price has come down. That’s why she tried to scare me.”
“What did you call her?” Toby said darkly. “A conniving cow? Not strong enough, Lori. I’m thinking of a few choice phrases from the twins’ list.”
I waved a hand toward the new tunnel. “Let’s not ambush her gang under the Aerie. Let’s confront their ringleader, face-to-face, at the dome.”
“I’m in,” Toby growled.
He stiffened suddenly, then pressed a finger to his lips, reached over to turn off my headlamp, and switched off the lantern. The darkness was absolute, but the silence was broken by a faint clanking noise and the distant shuffle of footsteps farther down the shaft in which we were standing. Toby’s voice came out of the darkness so softly that I could scarcely hear him.
“Give me the headlamp,” he said.
I slipped it off and passed it to him. A moment later a dim red glow shone in the darkness. Toby had wrapped the headlamp in a red bandana. It would provide enough light to guide us without giving us away.
“Useful,” I breathed, pointing to the red bandana.
Toby grinned, handed the unlit lantern to me, and nodded for me to follow him into the freshly carved tunnel. It descended at a fairly steep angle, but my hiking boots kept me from slipping. Toby had to bend low to keep from hitting his head on the jagged roof, but the awkward position didn’t hinder his speed. He’d clearly lost none of the skills he’d honed in childhood, while disobeying his grandfather.
After a few hundred yards, my thighs began to ache with each jolting, downward step and by the time the tunnel leveled out, my knees were pleading with me to stop torturing them, but I was too distracted by then to listen to them. A faint splash of light had appeared far down the tunnel.
Toby glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was still with him, then increased his speed, racing toward the splash of light as if he wanted to reach it before it went out. I jogged gamely in his wake, wondering what Bill would say when I told him where I’d spent the night. The words stupid, harebrained, and suicidally irresponsible came immediately to mind.
We’d almost reached the source of the mysterious glow when Toby slowed to a walk, slipped the bandana from the headlamp, and let its beam play over a solid wall of rock directly ahead of us. The dead end was illuminated from above by light leaking past the edges of what appeared to be a fairly large trapdoor. The top rung of a wooden ladder had been nailed to the wooden rim surrounding the trapdoor, and its legs were planted firmly in two slots cut into the tunnel’s floor.
Toby didn’t hesitate. He shoved the bandana and the headlamp into his pocket, climbed the ladder, and pushed the trapdoor open. I had to close my eyes against the harsh glare that flooded the tunnel, and when I opened them again, Toby had vanished. I scrambled up the ladder after him, hauled myself through the opening where the trapdoor had been, and found Toby standing a few steps away, looking utterly perplexed.
I was just as confused as he was. I’d exp
ected to find myself in Amanda’s garden, surrounded by row upon row of organic wacky-weed, but there was nothing remotely organic about the tunnel’s terminus, nor was there any sign of the geodesic dome.
We were standing in what appeared to be the living room of an oddly furnished house. Its oddness stemmed from the fact that, apart from a single bare lightbulb dangling from a ceiling fixture directly above the trapdoor, there were no furnishings. Instead, the room was filled from floor to ceiling with densely compacted piles of dirt and rubble. Swathes of cyclone fence nailed to sturdy posts held the piles in place and created a passageway that led from the trapdoor to a hallway off the living room.
“What in heaven’s name…?” I said, in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know,” said Toby. “Let’s look around.”
Toby closed the trapdoor, took the lantern from me, and held it high as we entered the hallway. The front door was to our left, but we turned right, to explore the rest of the house. The bathroom and the kitchen were spotless, but rubble filled the dining room and the largest of the two bedrooms at the back. A small, windowless storeroom behind the rubble-filled bedroom held tools similar to those James Blackwell had stored in the wooden crate at the Aerie, but these tools looked as if they’d been put to much harder use than James’s.
We paused briefly in the storeroom, then retraced our steps to the second bedroom. It was, in its own way, the strangest room of all. The single bed in the corner had been so fastidiously made up that it would have passed muster in a Marine boot camp. The chest of drawers was aligned precisely with the desk opposite the bed, and both were neat as a pin. I found the room’s excessive tidiness unsettling, but two other features made it seem downright weird: The window above the bed had been heavily coated with black paint, and the walls were papered over with maps.
Some of the maps were hand drawn, some were standard, government-issue topographic maps, and some were so old that they’d been sandwiched in clear sheets of plastic to keep them from falling apart. Toby crossed to the desk to examine the hand-drawn map that hung on the wall above it.
“Look,” he said, tracing lines with his fingertip. “It shows the underground route between the new tunnel and the shaft underneath the Aerie.”
“Does it tell you where we are at the moment?” I asked.
Before he could answer, a loud thud sounded in the living room.
I leaned close to Toby and whispered, “Someone’s opened the trapdoor.”
The first thud was followed by a second, as the trapdoor fell back into place. Toby quickly extinguished the lantern and stationed himself in front of me. I stared past his shoulder, spellbound, as the clump of heavy footsteps approached the bedroom. My nerves were strung so tight I could feel them twanging, and I nearly shrieked when a hand reached around the doorjamb to hit the light switch, but my reaction was tepid compared to Dick Major’s.
He was dressed in coveralls, work boots, and a miner’s helmet, and he carried a lantern similar to ours. His pink face contorted with rage when he saw us, and his pale blue eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. He let loose a string of expletives, as if to illustrate from whom my sons had learned them, and finished with the relatively mild, “What the hell are you doing in my house?”
“Hello, Dick,” Toby said calmly. “We were just about to ask you the same thing.”
“You.” I inched around Toby as comprehension dawned. “It wasn’t Amanda. It was you.” I looked at the maps surrounding us and gave a satisfied nod, convinced that I’d finally seen the light. “Your house is on the edge of town, closest to the Aerie. You drove off your neighbors so they wouldn’t spy on you, and you made yourself the most unpopular man in town so no one would ever visit you.” I glanced at the blacked-out window. “Did you pile the diggings around the house when you ran out of room inside? Is that why you collected so much junk? Are the mattresses and old couches there to disguise the piles of rubble?”
Dick took a step toward me and balled his free hand into a fist. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you, little lady?”
“I do, as a matter of fact,” I said defiantly and pointed a trembling finger at his face. “You’re pink! Everyone else in Bluebird has a tan, but you don’t, because you hardly ever see the sun. You dig at night and sleep during the day. That’s why you never show up at Carrie Vyne’s cafe until late afternoon. That’s why your usual drink is strong black coffee.”
Dick snarled, but I was on a roll and barely noticed.
“You’re even built the right way,” I said. “Look at your shoulders, look at your big hands. You don’t get muscles like that fishing. You’ve been digging. You hacked a tunnel from your house to connect with the one leading to the Aerie because…because…” I fell silent, having run out of revelations.
“I know why you did it, Dick.” Toby jerked his head toward the hand-drawn map above the desk. “You’ve been searching for gold, haven’t you? You’ve been scavenging whatever’s left down there. You’ve been stealing gold that doesn’t belong to you.”
Dick thumped his chest furiously, bellowing, “It does belong to me. It all belongs to me. My great-great-grandfather discovered the Lord Stuart Mine, and the Auerbachs stole it from him.”
I staggered back a step and my mouth fell open. “You’re Ludovic Magerowski’s great-great-grandson?”
“The Auerbachs drove Ludovic crazy,” Dick shouted, flecks of spittle flying from his lips. “They drove his wife to suicide. They put his son in an orphanage. My great-grandfather changed his last name to Major, but it didn’t change our luck. Nothing’s gone right for us since the Auerbachs stole the Lord Stuart.”
“So you decided to balance the books?” said Toby. “You came here to take what’s rightfully yours?”
“Yes. But I came too late.” Dick’s voice sank to a hoarse whisper, and his eyes became bleak. “There’s no gold left. The Auerbachs took it all.”
“If there’s no gold left in the Lord Stuart,” I said, “why did you go back down there tonight?”
“If I can’t have gold, I’ll have justice,” Dick shouted, shaking his fist at me. “I know how to get it, too. I worked bomb disposal in the army.” He bared his teeth in a savage grin. “I left a surprise package under the Aerie tonight, a little thank-you gift for the Auerbachs. It’s set to go off at midnight. By then I’ll be on my way to Denver.”
For a heartbeat, Toby and I stood as if carved out of stone. Then Toby launched himself at Dick, punching him so hard that the big man collapsed in a heap.
I leapt over Dick’s prone body, dashed up the hallway, and flew through the front door. I didn’t stop to check my watch or to see if Toby was following. I charged up the dirt road and onto the Lord Stuart Trail with only one thought thundering in my head: I had to get my sons and Annelise out of the Aerie before Dick’s “surprise package” exploded.
Moonlight silvered the trail and scattered it with shadows. Aspen leaves chattered overhead, but I could scarcely hear them above my gasping breaths. My lungs ached, my legs burned, and flashbulbs seemed to pop before my eyes, but I ran on, hurtling myself upward, past the wildflowers, past the ponderosa pines, past the fir tree I’d leaned against, giggling with Toby, one day ago.
When the Aerie came into view, I realized with a sickening jolt that the front door would be locked. I instantly changed course, flung myself over the railing and onto my deck, sprinted through the master suite, and raced down the corridor, shouting for everyone to get out. By the time I reached the great room, Annelise had roused the twins and pulled them from their sleeping bags, though they were still clutching their fuzzy buffalo.
“Out!” I shouted breathlessly. “Get out!”
Annelise scooped Rob into her arms, I darted forward to lift Will, and we fled the Aerie as if the hounds of hell were after us. We nearly crashed into Toby as he bounded across the clearing, but he swerved in the nick of time, took Will from me, and led us back down the Lord Stuart Trail. We’d just spilled out onto t
he dirt road when a deafening explosion rocked the ground beneath our feet. I stumbled, turned, and saw a fireball billow gracefully into the night sky.
“Reginald,” I whispered, stricken. “Aunt Dimity.”
Twenty-five
I could feel my heart breaking as the devouring flames leapt skyward, taking with them my precious Reginald and the blue leather-bound journal that had connected me for so long to my dearest friend and wisest counselor, the remarkable, unforgettable Aunt Dimity. Tears filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. My breath came in rasping sobs, and when Toby spoke, his voice seemed to come from a distant planet.
“Well,” he panted, “thank God for that.”
“Thank God for what?” I snapped, rounding on him.
“Dick’s aim was bad,” he said. “He missed the Aerie.”
“He…he missed?” I stammered as a knee-weakening wave of relief flooded through me.
Toby shrugged. “It’s easy to get turned around in the tunnels if you haven’t grown up exploring them. I’d say he planted his bomb about a half mile to the west of where he intended to plant it. If we can get the fire under control, the Aerie should be okay.”
“Bomb?” said Annelise, raising an eyebrow.
“I’ll explain later,” I told her.
A siren howled in Bluebird and a cacophony of voices echoed over Lake Matula. The townspeople were awake. A truck from the volunteer fire department roared past us as we limped along Lake Street and Toby flagged down the local sheriff as he drove by.
“Hey there, Tobe,” said the sheriff, running an eye over our little band of refugees. “Any idea what caused the explosion?”
“Yeah.” Toby jutted his chin toward Dick Major’s house. “You’ll find him in the back bedroom. Lock him up, Jeff. I’ll drop by the jailhouse and explain everything once we find beds for these kids.”
“Carrie Vyne’s got an empty guest cabin,” the sheriff suggested.
Aunt Dimity Goes West Page 22