Tainted Gold (15 page)

“When’s my next lesson?”

“Give me twenty minutes.”

Laughing,
Quillen hugged him and sighed as his fingers kneaded her curls.

“What are the chances that you’re pregnant, love?”

In the darkness, she could just make out the soft blur of his features. His fingers still smoothed her hair and his voice was quiet. The question didn’t offend Quillen; she understood why he’d asked it, but she hesitated, counting backward in her mind to make sure before she answered.

“Don’t misunderstand, I’d be delighted,” he told her quickly. “I just don’t want to rush the wedding.”

“Whose wedding?”

“Ours.”

“Oh, really? When did you ask me? When did I say yes?”

“You said yes when you made love to me. And don’t worry, I’m reasonably certain that my parents will forgive you in time.”

“Forgive me? For what?”

“For marrying me. They’ll think it was all your idea, you know.”

“This isn’t funny, Tucker,” she told him sharply.

“These are not jokes, my love.” His hands settled on either side of her face and his thumbs touched her temples. “I’m dead serious. Will you marry me?”

“You’ve only known me four days.”

“Correction, you’ve only known
me
four days. I’ve had a jump on—” He drew a sudden, deep breath. “Is that why you feel you can’t trust me? You don’t think you know me well enough?”

“Well, that’s part of it—”

“You know I love you, Quillen, and you love me. What else do you need to know?”

He’s got a good point there, her little voice commented. Simplistically put but well made.

“I do love you, Tucker,” she whispered, touching her fingertips to his chin.

“So your answer is yes?”

“Probably, but I’d like to think about it.”

“Think fast. I have the advantage here and I have no intention of letting you out of this bed until you say yes.”

“Then yes.” She laughed, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. “But no, I’m not pregnant.”

“We’ll fix that
after
we’re married.” He kissed her soundly on the mouth. “Are you hungry? I’m starved.”

“Right now I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look food in the face again, but I am thirsty.”

“Then shall we retire to the kitchen?”

“Yes, let’s.”

He kissed her again, then rolled away from her across the bed, turned on the lamp, and put on his glasses.

Blinking in the light as she sat up and drew the sheet over her breasts, Quillen watched him fumble left-handed beneath the covers. He looked so funny sitting there on the side of the bed, an Adonis-like figure with rumpled hair and puffy, red eyes behind his glasses.

“You lied to me, Tucker.”

Momentarily he froze, his hand on his shorts, and glanced at her over his shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“About your glasses,” she said with a puzzled smile. “You’re wearing them more and more. I don’t think you’re farsighted—I think you’re just plain old blind.”

“My love, my eyes are as exhausted as the rest of me. They need all the help they can get.” He smiled at her, and the taut, flexed muscle in his left arm relaxed as he stood up and pulled on his shorts. “I’d also like to remind you that I did not have these on my face when I shot the pants off your friend— Oh, hell!” His eyes widened and he jerked the sheet away from her and flung it and the comforter off the bed. “The arrow—don’t move until I find it!”

The covers billowed, uncovering her nightshirt, and Quillen snatched it up and wriggled into it while he rounded the foot of the bed, leaned over, and retrieved the arrow. Sighing with relief, he sat on the edge of the mattress and eyed the arrow as he held it up vertically. The razor-sharp tip still gleamed menacingly and Quillen stifled a revulsive shiver.

“Damn, bent the shaft.” He looked at her and smiled. “But you weren’t hurt and that’s all that counts.”

“What are you doing with hunting arrows?” She sat forward on her knees and hands and watched him frown as he stroked the teal blue and red fletchings. “Aren’t you the man who throws up if he shoots a rabbit?”

“I’m not going to shoot at a rabbit, love.”

“What then?”

“The clown who pulverized my seismometer.”

His gaze lifted and met hers, and Quillen went cold all over. Blue ice glittered in his eyes.

“Tucker,” she said shakily, “you should let Sheriff Blackburn handle it.”

“I gave him his chance. Now it’s my turn,” he said shortly, swinging off the bed and backtracking to the cinnamon chair where his bow and quiver leaned against the wall. “He fed me the same stuff you did about the kids around here. I didn’t believe him, either.” He slid the arrow into the quiver and glanced back at her. “Tomorrow I’m going to hook up my spare in the same spot, and when the villain returns to the scene of his crime, he and I are going to have a little chat.” He smiled coldly. “Then I’ll call Sheriff Blackburn.”

“What if it
is
a child?”

“Good God, Quillen!” His eyes widened. “I’m not going to shoot anybody. I might, however, take a couple potshots in his general direction.” A sliver of the icy smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Just to get his attention.”

“What if you miss and hit him?”

“I never miss what I aim at.”

“Tucker, you’re crazy!” she shrilled at him. “All this over a hunk of machinery?”

“There’s a helluva lot more at stake here than my seismometer.”

“What?” she demanded, rising on her knees with her hands on her hips.

“The tremor we felt Sunday night was
not
Mother Earth yawning and rolling over. It was a dynamite blast.”

“What?” she gasped. “Where?”

“In your mine,” he answered quietly, his eyes fixed on hers. “Someone’s sinking a new shaft.”

Stunned, Quillen sat back hard on her heels. “Why?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you this until you were feeling better, but—”

He bent over the other side of the chair and reached inside the dusty navy blue duffel Quillen hadn’t seen since Sunday night. With a large, square-folded map in his left hand and something else closed in his right fist, he returned to the bed. Sitting down beside her, he unfolded the map and spread it on the bed.

“This covers the one hundred-and-twenty-five-square-mile swatch of the foothills just east of town. Here’s your mine.” He laid his finger on a large red “X” that had been redrawn many times, then traced his fingernail down a penciled vertical line. “This is approximately how the fault lies.”

The tip of his finger came to rest where the pencil line intersected the red “X” and Quillen felt the blood drain out of her face. Her skin crawled and gooseflesh prickled her scalp.

“Oh, my God.” She pressed her fingertips to her mouth as tears flooded her eyes and the map swam out of focus. “My grandfather—Daddy—”

Tucker’s arm swept around her shoulders and his lips pressed against her temple. He held her until she stopped shaking.

“The fault,” she said, wiping tears out of her eyes, “is the reason the shafts kept collapsing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, love, I’m sorry.” He kissed her temple softly, then gently chafed her arm with his hand. “It’s been there a helluva long time, probably since there were camels in Kansas, but nobody knew, and right now it’s under a lot of stress.”

“From one blast?”

“There have been half a dozen that I know of, and it looks to me like more are planned. I found blasting caps down there and a lot of seepage in the older tunnels—”

“But what are they looking for?”

“Gold.”

He opened his right fist. A darkish lump of rock almost the size of a marble—a gold nugget—lay on his palm.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tucker, that’s tourist stuff. My father panned nuggets that size out of the creek behind the mine all the time. It’s how we lived.”

“I broke into a Cassil Construction truck yesterday—it was parked in the ‘exec’ lot—and found a whole slew of these, all of about the same size and purity. This one is roughly six hundred bucks’ worth of gold. Now you multiply that by ten or so, Quillen, and
you
tell
me
what they’re looking for.”

“There is
no
gold in my grandfather’s mine,” she insisted stubbornly.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he replied impatiently, “I’m a geologist. I know there isn’t. I panned this at a bend in the creek by an old cottonwood tree—”

“My father panned there all the time.”

“Smart man. It’s the lowest point in the streambed, that’s why they collect there. Now you and I both know that any prospector worth his pickax goes looking for the lode when he finds a placer deposit of this size. And man, being the logical creature that he is, starts looking in the closest spot—your mine. But”—he laid his finger on the map again and traced the black squiggles indicating the creek—“the stream meanders through most of this whole area. There’s a lode out there someplace that the nuggets keep washing out of. I don’t know how large or small, I don’t know where it
is
,
but I know where it
isn’t.
And Cassil,” he finished, his voice exasperated, “should know it, too.”

“Gold does that to you,” she told him quietly. “It’s an obsession. To obtain it, you’ll resort to almost anything—”

Her voice failed and Quillen finished the sentence inside her head—
even
murder.

Chapter Seven

Somehow Quillen managed neither to scream nor to faint—though deep down inside she felt like doing both. Deciding she probably had the dregs of the sedative to thank for the fact that she didn’t, she was nonetheless grateful for the calm it provided while she puttered distractedly around the kitchen with Tucker and considered her options.

It all made sense now, but she still had a credibility problem—it would still be her word against Desmond Cassil’s. The only thing she had positive proof of was that someone was jumping her claim. She couldn’t prove who and she wasn’t even sure there were still laws on the books that covered such things.

“That damn gold,” she muttered absently while she sat on her navy stool at the sink, washed salad makings, and stared out the window at the driveway. “That damn tainted gold.”

“‘O accursed craving,’” Tucker added, kissing the top of her head as he plucked a tomato out of the vegetables she was rinsing in the colander.

“What?” Quillen asked, blinking as she looked up at him.

“Virgil—from the
Aeneid,
I think.” He picked up a paring knife and his mouth pursed thoughtfully. “Or is it Homer?” He shrugged, the light over the sink winking on the lenses of his glasses as he cored the tomato.

“Tucker,” she said tentatively, as she turned off the water, “can I tell you something?”

“Sure, love, what?”

“Desmond Cassil called me yesterday,” she began slowly. “He asked me if I’d decided yet to sell. I said never—”

Nervously twisting her left thumb in the wet fingers of her right hand, Quillen told him the rest of it, backing up briefly to explain Miss Smythe’s notice, Miss Smythe’s close ties to Mrs. Cassil, and her own theory about Martin Phillips. Staring at the half-sliced tomato on the cutting board, Tucker listened in silence, the knife idle in his right hand, his left spread flat on the red-tiled counter.

Quillen never took her eyes off his drawn, tight-jawed profile, finally realized the cramp and ache in her thumb and let go of it as she finished. “I told him I’d sell this house if I had to and that the only way he’d get his hands on my land was over my dead body. He said that if I continued to be unreasonable that could become a distinct possibility.”

Around the handle of the paring knife, Tucker’s fingers made a fist. He studied it for a moment, then opened his hand. The knife clattered onto the counter and he looked up at Quillen.

“And what did you say to him?”

“I told him to go to hell and I hung up the phone.”

One corner of his mouth lifted and he folded his right arm across his naked torso as he backed against the cabinet behind him. He raised his left hand, pushed his glasses onto his forehead, and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, Jesus, that was probably the worst thing you could’ve said to him.”

“Tom thinks,” she went on, her voice unsteady, “that somebody belted my furnace with a sledgehammer. Do you suppose it was the same one and the same person who smashed your seismometer?”

“He said
what
?” Tucker’s hand fell away from his face and his glasses landed crookedly on his nose. “I didn’t—
oh
—yes, I did hear him say that.”

It wasn’t so much an “oh” as an “oooh,” halfway between a wince and a groan as he bent his elbows, parked the heels of his hands on the edge of the counter, and looked at the floor. “Are you going to Sheriff Blackburn with this?” he asked, his voice as tight as the muscles across his chest and upper arms.

“With what? I don’t have the sledgehammer, and even if I did, so what? Cassil can prove it was stolen.” She paused and watched the tension ease out of his body. “And what would I tell him? What Cassil said to me on the phone? Do you have any idea what he’d say, Tucker?”