by Janet Dailey
“What are you doing here, Delaney?” she murmured to herself. “This is crazy. What do you care why Toby put flowers at the entrance?” The jagged walls gleamed with reflected light from her flashlight, here and there the gouge left by a pickax clearly visible. “If you had to do this, why didn’t you get Riley? That would have been the smart thing to do.”
She stopped and flashed her light back toward the entrance, a rectangle of bright light that seemed very far away. By now, Riley would be wondering what had happened to her. Maybe he had called and found out from her father about the note she left. If she were really smart, she would go back and wait for him.
She aimed the beam back into the narrow tunnel and used its light to search what was ahead. She would go just a little farther, then go back and wait for Riley.
Ducking her head to avoid a sagging beam, Delaney moved on. She heard the faint, slow drip of water coming from somewhere ahead of her. She paused a moment to listen, recalling the things Jared had told her about the silver mines, the tunnels, shafts, drifts, air shafts, cave-ins, and floodings. She picked up a rock and lobbed it into the darkness beyond her flashlight. It clattered noisily over more rock. She pressed on. The powerful beam of her flashlight made a puny dent in the blackness.
Three steps farther along, Delaney saw a tumble of rocks blocking the tunnel. Stopping, she used the flashlight to inspect the cave-in from a safe distance. The wall on the right had collapsed. Not completely, though. Darkness gaped beyond the sloping pile of rock on the right. The ore-cart tracks were covered, but a foot of room remained on the left.
Cautiously, she inched closer and ran the light over the cross-timber supporting the ceiling. It looked solid. She tried to see what was beyond the rubble. The shaft to the mine’s various levels had to be somewhere. Was it on the other side of the small cave-in? She couldn’t tell.
Delaney crouched beside the pile of rock and pushed aside the larger ones, searching for a small one to throw. She saw something white and froze.
For a long second, she didn’t move. Then, slowly, she laid the flashlight on the tunnel’s cold floor, keeping the beam aimed at that fragment of white. She started lifting aside the larger chunks of rock, careful not to dislodge the rest of the pile. As she moved the last one, the full skeletal bones of a hand were revealed.
She turned her head from the sight, fighting back a wave of nausea, simultaneously realizing how much she had wanted to be wrong about the reason Toby had left flowers outside. She dragged in a deep breath and steeled herself to turn back. Resting her weight on her knees, Delaney moved more of the rock, exposing part of the right arm’s radius and ulna bones. When she rolled aside another rock, there was the left hand.
A gold ring circled the bone of the ring finger. Delaney picked up the flashlight and shined it on the ring. It was a class ring. She bent closer. The initials on the side read K.M. Stunned, Delaney sat back on her heels, never hearing the soft, protesting cry that came from her throat.
Behind her a stone clanked against the rusted rail of the track. She swiveled around and immediately threw up a hand to block the blinding light aimed directly at her eyes, protesting instantly, “Don’t. I can’t see.”
The light was directed away from her face, but she continued to see the white glare of it that had burned itself onto her retina. She blinked in a vain attempt to get rid of the white spots.
“You found her.” That voice—it didn’t belong to Riley. “Why, Delaney? Why did you have to come look? Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”
“Lucas.” She breathed his name in shock as her eyes gradually began to work again, allowing her to make out the shape of him, his tall body hunched by the low ceiling. He came closer, the backglow of his flashlight reflecting on the planes and hollows of his face, showing its tortured look of regret. She felt a sudden, low sweep of anger. “It’s Kelly McCallister buried under these rocks, isn’t it?”
“It was an accident. You have to believe that, Delaney. Toby didn’t mean to kill her—”
“Toby,” she repeated in surprise, then saw the gun Lucas carried, and experienced the first sense of danger. She knew she had to keep her head. She had to keep him talking. “What kind of accident? What happened?”
“It was her fault,” Lucas insisted. “If she hadn’t come charging into the house—Susan and I were upstairs, you see. Toby was in the old parlor watching television. She started yelling at Toby. When I came down to find out what was going on, she grabbed a fireplace shovel and started hitting me with it, screaming at me to get out of her house, accusing me of ruining her brother’s marriage. Somewhere, Toby found the gun Susan kept for protection.”
In town. The old Victorian house on the West End, the one Susan had gotten from Jared in their divorce settlement, the one she lived in—and the one Toby had run from in terror the evening they walked back from the concert at the Music Tent. Now it was easy to guess the reason. Toby had been afraid of it.
“Toby wanted her to stop hitting me. That’s why he shot her. To protect me.” His voice wavered. “He didn’t mean to kill her. He didn’t even know what he’d done. A week before, I had taken him to the dress rehearsal for a play I was in. It was a small part. My character was killed in the opening scene. Toby got upset and rushed on stage thinking I was really dead. I showed him the prop gun, the fake blood. That night…he couldn’t understand why Kelly didn’t get up.” His hand tightened its grip on the gun, his knuckles showing white in the light of the flashlight. “Don’t you see? It was all a horrible mistake. An accident. She was dead. There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t call the police. They would have taken one look at Toby and put him back in an institution. I couldn’t let that happen to him. It wouldn’t have been right. It wouldn’t have been fair.”
“That’s when you decided to hide her body in this abandoned silver mine?” Delaney remembered the night of the shooting, the way Toby had stared at Susan’s body and asked Lucas if he had to touch her—and other times when he had expressed his abhorrence of dead things.
“The mine was Susan’s idea. I wanted to dump the body in the woods, but she was afraid some hunter or cross-country skier might find it and the police would start asking questions.” He stopped, expelling a harsh laugh. “God, she had a devious mind. She had plans for herself, and she didn’t want any murder scandal ruining them. She came up with the idea of making it look like Kelly had run away. She went out to the ranch and got all of Kelly’s clothes and things, then met us on the old mining road. After that, we hauled everything back here.”
Delaney altered her position slightly, angling her body more directly toward him, trying to be casual about it, covering the movement by asking, “What about the locket? How did it end up in that pawnshop in L.A.?”
“Luck,” Lucas replied with a smile. “I stayed around Aspen only a couple weeks after Kelly ‘ran away,’ then split for L.A. When I was unloading my things from the car, I found the locket in the trunk. I took the pictures out and burned them, then paid a girl five dollars to hock it for me. When the investigator Jared hired finally located it, everybody was convinced she was another runaway. It worked. It all worked.”
“Until Susan started blackmailing you over this.”
“She was never satisfied, no matter how much she got. She was bleeding me dry,” he said angrily. “We had to stop her.”
“We?”
He hesitated, as if regretting his words. “I had to tell Arthur. She was making demands I couldn’t meet. I didn’t know where else to turn. I couldn’t go to the police. Arthur thought of you.”
“And Rina?” She had to grit her teeth to hold back the rage she felt.
“Rina turned out to be a godsend. Suddenly we didn’t have to invent an imaginary stalking fan.” He paused and looked genuinely contrite. “I’m truly sorry we used you like that, Delaney. You have to believe that.”
“You knew all along it was Susan, didn’t you? You knew she was coming over. That’s w
hy you wanted to go out on the deck, isn’t it? It was all a setup to get me to shoot her. And I fell for it.” She felt raw, every nerve screaming. “I suppose it was Arthur who fired that first shot. The gun you have—is that the one he used?”
“No. His was loaded with blanks.” His mouth twisted in a rueful line. “We had it all worked out, even to the point of sabotaging your radio. Then it all started going wrong. Arthur was supposed to get there first so he could put the gun near Susan’s body, but your men reacted too fast. He had to hide again before they saw him. When he got there, it was too late.”
“So you waited until the next day to plant the gun?”
“You weren’t supposed to get arrested. It was supposed to look like self-defense.”
“What happens now, Lucas?” She shifted more of her weight to her feet, aware that she had to get that gun away from him before he used it on her.
“I wish I could believe you would walk away from here and forget what you’ve seen. For Toby’s sake, not mine. But you won’t, will you? Dammit, why did you have to tell Toby about putting flowers on people’s graves? Why did you have to give him a ride? Why couldn’t you have stayed out of this?”
“It’s no use, Lucas—” She heard the screeching protest of the corrugated tin at the mine’s entrance.
“Delaney! Are you in there?”
Distracted by Jared’s shouts, Lucas turned toward the entrance, giving Delaney the opening she had been waiting for. She lunged for his gun hand. As her hands closed on his wrist, his fingers automatically tightened their grip on the weapon, squeezing the trigger. The tunnel reverberated with the loud clap of the shot, the bullet ricocheting off the rocks in an angry whine.
Using her forced impetus, Delaney slammed his hand against the rough wall, knocking the gun loose. As it went clattering off into the darkness, she rammed an elbow into his face. He staggered sideways from the blow. With a quick twist, she jerked his arm behind his back and forced him against the wall, face-first. Only then did the sound of Jared’s running footsteps finally register.
“Delaney, are you all right?”
“Yes.” She was breathing hard, partly from exertion and partly from the swift flow of adrenaline. She saw the flashlight on the floor and gave it a kick toward Jared. “His gun is over there somewhere. Get it for me.”
He picked up the flashlight and shined the beam over the floor. “I found it.”
“Thanks.” She held out her hand for it, not taking her eyes from Lucas. Jared pressed the gun into it. “How did you know I was here?”
“I stopped by the condo to see you. Your dad showed me the note you left.” He raised the light to Lucas’s face. “What’s going on? What’s he doing here?”
She hesitated, then stalled. “It’s a long story.” She loosened her grip on Lucas. “Don’t move until I tell you, Lucas,” she warned. “I think by now I’ve proved I not only can use this, but I will.” She released him and stepped back. “Okay, turn around. Slowly.”
Lucas did as he was told, cautiously flexing the arm she had wrenched behind his back. “I wouldn’t have hurt you, Delaney. I swear.”
“Save it,” she snapped. “We’re going to walk out of here, and you are going first.”
Jared pushed the flashlight into her left hand. “Take this,” he said as her fingers automatically closed around it. “I’ll get the other one.”
A second later it hit her that he meant the one she had left next to Kelly’s remains. “Jared, no, don’t go over there!”
“Why—somebody’s buried under these rocks.”
“I know.” There was no gentle way to tell him, so she said it bluntly. “It’s Kelly.”
He was behind her, making it impossible for Delaney to see his face, but the silence from him was deafening. She moved sideways a foot to bring him into her side vision, keeping the gun trained on Lucas.
Jared was kneeling beside his sister’s bones, his hat shadowing his face and the grief that contorted it. She wanted to go to him, comfort him. But she couldn’t leave Lucas unguarded. She moaned in her throat, wishing it had been Riley or her father who had come to find her—anyone but Jared.
He lifted his head. “You killed her. You bastard, you killed her!” He sprang at Lucas, shooting past her before she could react to stop him. The two men tumbled to the floor, Jared’s hands seeking and finding his throat.
“Jared, no.” Delaney made one futile attempt to pull him off, then swung the flashlight, clipping him alongside the head, stunning him just enough to enable Lucas to throw him. Immediately she stepped from between them, ignoring choking coughs for air from Lucas.
Dazed, Jared pressed a hand to his head and looked at her, the rage that came from intense grief still in his eyes. “How the hell can you protect him? He killed Kelly. He killed my sister!”
“No—”
Lucas broke in before she could say more. “It was an accident.” There was a hoarse edge to his voice. “She found out I was seeing your wife. She came over—she had a gun. I tried to get it away from her. We struggled and…it went off.”
Delaney stared at him, then realized what he was doing. The actor was rehearsing a confession scene, perfecting his delivery, adding the emotional touches where they would be the most convincing. He had to get it right before he performed it for the police. His life depended on it. And more important to Lucas, Toby’s life depended on it.
Something blocked the light at the entrance. Then Riley’s voice called out, “Delaney, is that you?”
“Yes. I need help.”
Riley wasn’t alone. Wyatt was with him. When they reached her, Riley glanced at Wyatt. “I guess we can stop looking for Lucas,” he said, then explained to Delaney, “I called the condo to let you know he had pulled a disappearing act on us. Your father told me where to find you.” He arced his flashlight at Jared sitting next to the pile of rock, his hat dangling from his hands. Then he saw the remains. “Better get the police, Wyatt.”
“Right.” He headed back to the entrance at a crouching run.
“What happened?”
Delaney gave Riley the gun. “It’s Jared’s sister.”
He swore a soft and succinct, “Damn,” then waved Lucas toward the entrance.
She turned to Jared. “Are you coming?”
He shook his head, the sheen of tears on his cheeks. “I’m staying with Kelly. I can’t leave her here by herself.”
“I’ll stay with you.”
“No.” His voice became thick. “I want to be alone with her.”
She hesitated, then reluctantly gave him his private time to grieve, and turned to follow Riley.
Twenty minutes later, the police drove up in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and the questioning began. Delaney kept her answers brief and left the elaboration to Lucas Wayne. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it was merely the way it happened.
From a distance, she watched an officer take a Miranda card from his pocket and read Lucas his rights. Then he fastened handcuffs to his wrists.
She knew Lucas had given a convincing performance. She wasn’t surprised. She remembered how completely he had convinced her that the threat from Rina Cole had him living on the edge of his nerves—convinced her to the extent that she had lived that way, too.
“It looks like we’re out of a job,” Riley commented when Lucas was led to the patrol vehicle.
“He manipulated me into killing Susan. He used me, Riley,” she murmured. “He turned me into a weapon. He had me primed, loaded, and cocked. In a way, he even pulled the trigger.”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” he said quietly. “But pain is usually the source of wisdom. I don’t know why.”
A stir of activity at the mine’s entrance had Delaney turning to identify the cause. They were bringing Kelly’s remains out. Jared stepped into the mountain’s shadow, emerging from the mine for the first time since he went in. He paused and pushed his hat back on his head, then started down the slope.
Delaney hesitated
, then went to meet him. He saw her coming and stopped. His eyes were red-rimmed but dry, the pain washed into them instead of out of them. He faced her, not so much looking at her as through her.
“Jared, I want you to know I wasn’t protecting Lucas. I was protecting you,” she said. “I couldn’t let you kill him.”
He considered her words for a long second, then nodded and walked away.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DENSE CLOUDS HUNG LOW, concealing the peaks of the Elk Mountain range. Delaney stood at a window in the airport terminal and watched the fall of a gentle rain. A tank truck loaded with jet fuel lumbered past, its windshield wiper rhythmically sweeping back and forth, its tires splashing through the shallow puddles on the airport’s tarmac.
A newspaper was pushed in front of her face, jolting her into noticing that Riley had joined her. “I thought you might be interested in this little item.”
She took the Entertainment section of USA Today from him. It was folded open to a celebrities-in-brief kind of gossip column. She glanced at the paragraph he had indicated, half-expecting to see a mention of the charge against her being dropped. Instead she read that Rina Cole had married Dr. Timothy Collins-Jones the previous day at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas.
“Interesting,” she murmured and gave it back to him.
Riley glanced at it again, shaking his head. “The sexpot and the scholar—talk about a marriage made in Hollywood.”
Unable to smile at his wry observation, Delaney leaned down and picked up her overnight bag. “Are you ready to go through security?”
Riley checked his watch. “Our flight won’t be boarding for another twenty minutes yet.”
“I know, but we can find a seat in the gate area.”
“You seem to be in an awfully big hurry to leave Aspen. It’s almost as though you’re trying to run away from something.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?” he countered dryly, annoyingly sure of himself. “Have you talked to Jared since his sister’s body was found?”