Smoke Screen

by Emilie Richards

  "No fair," she said when he began to strip off the remaining barriers between them. "Not the slip and pants at the same time."

  "We're counting by twos now."

  "I've lost count," she admitted.

  "No attention span." He made short work of her blouse and bra, removing them together.

  She shuddered as his hands smoothed over her skin, stopping to explore each curve, each hollow. In a second his shirt was on the floor, followed by his briefs. They stood together wearing nothing except their shoes. "Do we take off our shoes together," she whispered, "or one at a time."

  "I'm wearing socks."

  "Darn your socks."

  "Granny does that," he said, nipping the tender skin at the nape of her neck. "We'll kick our shoes off together and call this a tie."

  "You're not wearing a shirt, you can't have a tie."

  "You're going to be wearing me in a minute," he threatened.

  She kicked off her shoes in anticipation.

  Afterward, still clinging together, there was sleep.

  Chapter 16

  Paige sat at the kitchen table and listened to Jeremy and his father chat over the breakfast she had prepared. As promised, she had risen early and cleaned Rambo's makeshift quarters in the kitchen. Since there had been no sounds of anyone else waking, she had found a cookbook with yellowed pages and read the instructions for omelets. When Adam and Jeremy had come down expecting breakfast, it had been waiting for them.

  Mihi had arrived, too, filled with apologies for sleeping so late. She looked older, as if Pat's brush with death had reminded her of her own mortality, and she merely picked at her food, although she insisted Paige was a born cook. For the first time Paige noticed concern in Adam's eyes when he gazed at the old woman. Even his assurances that Pat would get better didn't make her smile.

  Mihi needed more rest. She needed fewer responsibilities and more time just to enjoy the simple pleasures that meant so much to her: the sunshine warming the front porch and her favorite rocking chair; the feel of Four Hill Farm wool between her nimble fingers; the sound of Jeremy's laughter without the duties of his full care. Paige knew Mihi would only tolerate so much assistance from her family. She would not give up her place as house manager unless Adam married. Then she would gratefully accept a promotion to consultant.

  Adam needed a wife, Jeremy needed a mother, and Mihi needed relief.

  Paige was the only one at the table who wasn't sure what she needed.

  "Do you read tea leaves?"

  Paige looked up from her empty cup and realized that Adam was watching her. She wondered how long she had been staring at nothing. "I wish I did."

  Adam reached across the table and lifted her cup, swirling the dregs of tea. "I see infinite happiness," he pronounced.

  She managed a smile, but when his eyes darkened she knew she hadn't fooled him. He set the cup on the table and shoved it to one side. "I’m going into the thermals. Will you stay with Granny and Jeremy?"

  Paige was surprised. "You're going to look for the mauri today?"

  "Yes."

  "With Pat in the hospital?"

  "That's right."

  Paige knew there had to be something more to Adam's plans, but she waited until Jeremy had been excused to go outside and Mihi had accepted her offer to do the dishes before she questioned him further. Slipping her arms around his waist, she tilted her head to examine his face. "Will you tell me what's going on?"

  "First, why don't you tell me?"

  She knew she couldn't pretend. Adam was the only person who had ever been able to read her emotions. A lifetime of hiding, a lifetime of smoke screens, was over. "All of you need me," she said finally. "And it scares me."

  "It scares you because you don't know if you need us."

  "I don't know why I'm scared. Everything is different. The ground under my feet doesn't even feel steady."

  "I want to be patient."

  "You're not a patient man." She hugged him harder, although she felt his resistance. She wished she could reassure him, but right now there was nothing more she could say about their relationship. "Why are you going into the thermals?"

  "I told you. To look for the mauri."

  "Why today?"

  Adam put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. "Because time is running out."

  "If Hori-i-rangi has been there for centuries, she'll still be—"

  He cut her off with the unvarnished truth. "Hamish Armstrong has been to see your father. Your father's going to sell the land to Pacific Outreach. He'll be here sometime this week to close the deal."

  Paige just stared at him.

  "I saw Armstrong yesterday to ask him about Pat." Adam saw the disappointment and hurt on Paige's face. He decided not to add to her distress by telling her his suspicions. They were only that as yet, and still largely unformed. "Armstrong thinks he's won, but if I can find the mauri, maybe that will change your father's mind."

  Paige shook her head, upset by the news that she had been totally bypassed on the decision. All her negotiations had been for nothing. "That wouldn't sway him."

  "Perhaps not by itself, but if we got the right kind of publicity after the find, he might not have any choice."

  Silently, Paige considered Adam's plan. If there was proof of the thermals’ significance in Maori history and religion, Carter Duvall would find it difficult to rationalize a sale to Pacific Outreach, especially if the Maoris’ offer was just as good. He might be prejudiced, but he was too crafty to be public about it.

  She tried to put her own loss behind her for the moment. One fact stood out above all others: Adam was planning to go back into the thermals. Back into the thermals where, in the last week, both he and Pat had almost met their death. She searched for a way to convince him not to go without telling him her fears.

  She kept emotion out of her voice. "What makes you think you can find it today when you've been looking most of your life?"

  "Because now I'm going to look in the one place I've never bothered with before."

  "I don't understand..."

  "You don't have to." He turned as if to go, but her hand on his arm stopped him.

  "Adam, don't go." She went on before he could reassure her. "I'm afraid," she admitted softly. "The thermals are a lot more dangerous then you've led me to believe. You were almost killed, and Pat will be lucky to come out of his accident intact. I'm afraid." Her voice trailed off.

  He tensed and pulled his arm away. "What would you have me do, kaihana? Turn them over to Armstrong without a fight?" Irrationally angry and growing angrier, he faced her. "But perhaps that is what you want. Perhaps you think Pacific Outreach ought to go in there with bulldozers and cranes and concrete. They could civilize the piece of land God forgot."

  Since that thought had occupied her mind more and more lately, Paige couldn't deny it. "The area's not safe," she pleaded. "Look at the things that have been happening. Maybe it does need taming, Adam. Would that be so terrible? Would it be so terrible if no one ever had to die in there? Would it be so terrible if it was a health resort instead of a piece of Hell?"

  "What are you saying?"

  She was so afraid, she knew she would say anything to stop him. "Maybe Hamish is right," she went on. "Maybe his resort is the best use of the land. Maybe I've been trying to be fair when the fairest thing would be to sell it to him anyway. At this point I don't even know what I'll recommend to my father—if I have the chance."

  Adam's eyes were black wells of fury. He grabbed her hand and jerked her toward him. He had shared his dream, his vision, and now she was telling him it was nothing more than a foolish, worthless risk. Her disloyalty was the final straw. He could only read it one way. She had decided not to be part of his life. He shut his eyes, and for a moment he could almost hear Sheila's voice telling him that she was pregnant and leaving him. "Do you know what you're saying?" he asked, yanking her even closer.

  She felt a throb of alarm and tried to pull her hand from
his. "I'm saying that with money and time the thermals might be made safe."

  "Safe, or profitable? That's what this is about, isn't it? You're afraid to stand up for your own people, afraid we won't have the resources that Pacific Outreach has. Our heritage means nothing to you. I mean nothing to you. You'll take the money and leave!"

  "That's not it at all," she protested. "That's not what this is about!"

  But Adam was beyond listening. He gripped her hand harder, squeezing her fingers tightly together. "I'll show you what this is about," he said, his voice low and deadly. With one hand he pulled out his pocketknife, flipping one blade. Then with a lightning-swift movement, he nicked her finger.

  Paige gasped in outrage and tried to pull her hand from his, but he held it tight, squeezing until a tiny bead of blood appeared. He flipped her hand, and both of them watched as the single ruby drop spilled to the floor. "If you had any Maori blood," he said contemptuously, "you don't now. There's nothing Maori about you. You are your father's child. You are nothing to me! Nothing!" He flung her hand away and turned on his heel.

  "You don't want to understand!" The door slammed before she could protest further. Tears blurring her vision, Paige searched the floor for the place where the drop of blood had fallen, but already it had been absorbed into the soft, dark wood.

  * * *

  Adam was almost to his destination before he faced the truth. He had behaved like a madman.

  His finger throbbed. He had cut Paige and watched her bleed, yet it was his finger that throbbed, as if he had bled, too. She was part of him; she was inside him.

  Adam thrust his hands deep in his pockets. His right hand touched the cool metal of the knife. Without a thought, he jerked it from his pocket, turned and flung it high, watching the sun reflect off its silver surface until it had fallen to the path behind him. "Fool!" he shouted, only to have the sound carried back to him, an eerie echo off the cliff walls.

  Paige was not Sheila, and he was not the man he had once been. Nothing was left of the idealistic young man who had trustingly reached out for love. Instead a bitter tyrant had emerged, a man who saw disloyalty when it didn't exist.

  If he found the mauri, would he recognize it? It could be on the path right in front of him, and he would probably step over it. It could be at his fingertips, and he would probably bend down and search the ground at his feet. If Horo-i-rangi were to be found, someone who could see the nose in front of his face would have to find it.

  Adam walked faster. It was useless to look for the mauri today. But he'd had another reason for coming. It had to do with the sweat on Hamish Armstrong's forehead and the bandages on his hand. It had to do with his own middle-of-the-night realization that during their meeting, Armstrong hadn't been wearing his glasses. Glasses were more apt to be broken and palms injured during a fight than a rescue. And from what Adam had learned about him, at any time of any given day, Armstrong was more apt to be lying than telling the truth.

  He would do what he had come to do, and then he would go home and try to put his world back together. If anything was left of it.

  Adam was close to Kaka geyser. Respectfully he moved closer, listening for sounds and watching for signs that the geyser was about to play. It played rarely. Once he had seen it in its full glory, an enormous, steaming, feathered spout of water, as deadly as it was beautiful. Another time he had caught the very end of the geyser's cycle and watched it slowly return to the crater in the earth where it would grow and expand until someday it exploded again. He had wanted Paige to see the geyser play, but they hadn't yet shared that pleasure. Now he wondered if they ever would.

  Today the surface around the crater showed no signs of an eruption. Adam pressed his ear to the ground and listened. Papa, the earth mother, rumbled, her music as mysterious to him as it must have been to his ancestors. When he straightened and stood, he knew little except that crossing the steaming rocks beside the geyser was safe—at least for the next few minutes.

  On the other side of the rocks he followed a path that skirted the edge of the cliffs. He walked silently in the shadows without so much as a pebble rolling beneath his feet. As he walked, he listened. Not a falling leaf or the flapping wings of a bird escaped his notice.

  There was no difficulty recognizing the place where Pat had been injured. Where once there had been a slick, algae-covered shelf of rock, now there was an uneven pile of jagged boulders blocking the path. The debris reached Adam's waist and extended fifteen yards, partially filling in a spring that spouted angrily from between cracks, struggling to break free.

  Pat's survival was miraculous, and, at the moment, Adam was in no mood to believe in miracles. Nor was he in the mood to believe that by coincidence, twice in one week, immense, solid slabs of millennia-old rock had crumbled into pieces.

  He picked his way carefully along the edge of the boulders, a feat made even trickier by the spring at the side of the narrow path. Where had Pat fallen? And how had he survived? Unless he had been at the edge of the rockslide, the crushing rocks would have killed him instantly and told no tale.

  What tale would Pat tell if he were able to?

  Adam examined the boulders closest to the path until he was satisfied there was nothing more to see. Then he scrambled on top of the rubble, his body tensed and alert to the dangers of shifting rocks, and, cautious step after cautious step, made his way toward the cliff. At last, spread-eagled against the smooth surface, he inched along, examining the rock face for faults. But the secrets it hid remained secrets.

  He had almost reached the beginning of the pile when one foot slipped, and his boot heel wedged between boulders. He slipped his foot out of the boot, then sat carefully and reached down to work it free. Cursing softly, he threw the boot over the rubble to the ground below. Not bothering to stand, he slid along the final bit of rubble, swinging off to land on both feet. Pain shot through the bootless heel, and, surprised, he lifted his foot to find a spreading spot of blood darkening the sole of his sock. Ignoring the pain, he squatted down to search the ground for the source of the cut.

  The answer was only inches from his fingertips. It was lightly tinted glass, a slender shard that was nearly invisible against the rubble-strewn ground. Adam sat and stripped off his sock. The cut was shallow and already beginning to clot. But the glass was more interesting.

  With the calculated strategy of an archaeologist looking for artifacts, Adam began to search the ground inch by inch, tossing rocks into a pile beside the path as he worked. He had lifted rocks for almost twenty minutes before he found what he had suspected was there. Under a boulder so large he had been forced to roll it away, were a mangled pair of glasses, the remains of lightly tinted lenses still clinging to gold designer frames.

  "And did these just happen to fall under the rock when you rescued my cousin?" he asked the man who had come up behind him so quietly that Adam hadn't heard him until it was too late.

  "No." Hamish gave a short, humorless laugh. "They fell off when your cousin attacked me."

  "And you lost them in the fight?"

  "It seems your cousin was unhappy that I'd taken liberties here and there with sticks of gelignite. He was afraid you'd be hurt looking for your precious statue. I warned him to get away, that the explosives I had just set might bring down the cliff, but he was too drunk to know what he was doing."

  Adam turned slowly. Hamish was holding a revolver. "Why didn't you leave him for dead?" he asked, suspecting the answer.

  "Because of those." Hamish pointed to his glasses with the gun barrel. "They'd been in my pocket. When I got back to my hotel I realized they were gone. I came back to look for them, but I wasn't as lucky finding them as you were. Your cousin was still breathing, I heard voices nearby—"

  "And you decided you'd be safer bringing Pat to the hospital. That way, if your glasses were found at the scene of the accident, no one would think twice."

  Nonchalantly, Hamish lifted his palm in praise. Sunlight glistened off the weapon in
his hand. "Excellent deduction."

  "Just one thing."

  "I'd be pleased to help," Hamish said in a silky voice.

  "What if Pat told the story when he regained consciousness?"

  "Quite unlikely. You see, Pat was helping me. He kept me informed about your little hunting trips in here, and he kept me informed about your relationship with Miss Duvall. He even acted as my personal guide. Pat wanted a ticket out of Waimauri, and he thought I just might be the ticketmaster. If he told what he knew, his own part in our little drama would have come out."

  Pat's betrayal was like ashes in Adam's throat. "And now you're going to get rid of me? A bullet hole might be a bit harder to explain than a rockslide."

  "Oh, but there are places to kill you where there won't be enough left of your body to show a bullet hole." Hamish motioned with the revolver. "I've got one all picked out."

  "And if I don't go?"

  Hamish shrugged. "Then I'll kill you here and drag you there. Most unpleasant, but all in the line of duty." The click of the revolver's hammer underscored his words. "Which shall it be, Tomoana?"

  * * *

  "Adam's never late for the evening meal." Mihi stood at the kitchen door, gazing sightlessly across Four Hill Farm's pastures.

  Paige had weighed every answer she had given Mihi during the unending day. This one was no different. "Adam was very serious about Finding the mauri. I imagine he's lost track of time."

  "Adam never loses track of time."

  Paige wanted Adam to return, too. Only then could she go home and cry the bitter tears that had slowly strangled her since he had walked out the door. But she couldn't tell Mihi that. Mihi had enough on her mind. Paige walked to the doorway and put her arm around the old woman. "Please don't worry. You should be feeling wonderful. The doctor thinks Pat's going to regain consciousness soon, and the minute Adam comes home, you can tell him the good news."

  "Something's wrong."

  Paige tried again. "Look, you've had a difficult twenty-four hours worrying about Pat. Now you've got to remember how to quit worrying."