Tainted Gold (17 page)

“Oh, Miss McCain!” she gushed. “You look wonderful! I was so afraid you wouldn’t feel like eating or cooking—”

“Is that your fresh apple coffee cake?”

“Why, yes.”

“Then bring it in,” Quillen said, tugging her inside and shutting the door. “You’re just in time for breakfast.”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to intrude!”

“You’re not,” Quillen assured her, and with one hand on her elbow, steered her toward the kitchen.

Tucker glanced up from the scrambled eggs cooking in the skillet as they entered the room. “Rosalie!” He grinned. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Tucker.” Her lashes fluttered, her cheeks flushed, and she hurried the coffee cake toward the table.

“Rosalie and Tucker?” Quillen asked lowly, raising one eyebrow and resting her right hand on the counter beside him.

“We’re soulmates,” he whispered back, and winked. True to his claim that he hated K.P., Tucker disappeared once they’d finished breakfast. Quillen could hear him rummaging around in the bedroom while she and Mrs. Sipp cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and put the skillet to soak in the sink.

“Thank you for breakfast, Miss McCain,” she told her as Quillen walked her to the door. “It was just delicious.”

“You’re welcome, and thank you for the coffee cake”—she paused tentatively—“Rosalie.”

Her right eyebrow arched stiffly, then smoothed and she blushed. “You’re very welcome—Quillen.”

They smiled at each other, then Mrs. Sipp fluttered up the stairs. Chuckling, Quillen watched her go, then shut the door and turned around.

In the archway between the studio and living room, Tucker stood with his duffel in his left hand, his bow in his right, and his quiver slung over his shoulder. Behind his right ear she glimpsed the teal and red fletchings of the arrows, remembered the razor tips, and swallowed quickly.

“I’ve got to go, love; it takes a while to hook up the seismometer,” he told her, his expression sober. “I wish you’d come with me. I’m afraid to leave you alone.”

“I’m not afraid, Tucker,” she assured him. “I’ll be fine. Don’t forget—I’ve got Mrs. Sipp, the Iron Marshmallow—remember? Could I be in better hands?”

“Only if they were mine.”

Smiling, Quillen walked toward him and slipped her arms around his waist. She laid her head on his chest and his right arm went around her, the bow thumping her gently between the shoulder blades.

“I wish you’d come,” he said, his voice muffled as he kissed her hair. “It’d give us a chance to talk.”

We had a chance earlier, Quillen thought, but said instead, “I’d like to, Tucker, but I can’t.”

“Then I’ll come back tonight and we’ll talk.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” Quillen raised her face to his and kissed him. “Can I help you carry something?”

“No, I can manage.” His arm tightened briefly around her shoulders. “Do you have to mail his highness today? Why don’t you just stay home and rest? Sort of lie low.”

“I think I’ve spent enough time in bed for a while,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him.

“Then I don’t need to come back tonight?” He grinned, but it faded suddenly and he hugged her fiercely. “Remember, I love you, Quillen.”

He left then, refusing, under the pretext of despising lingering good-byes, to allow her to walk out with him to the Jeep. She stood at the living room window instead, shading her eyes with one hand from the dazzle of the early morning sun through the top stained-glass panels. When the Jeep pulled away from the curb, Quillen sighed and walked to her drawing board.

What an odd morning, she thought as she carefully wrapped the prince in a large, padded cardboard mailer made to fit. Paula Clarke stopped in for a cup of coffee and to report that the items taken from her apartment had also been found, undamaged, in a pillowcase behind the garage. From Miss Smythe Quillen heard nothing, and was glad.

It was near eleven o’clock when she left for the post office with the securely packaged painting. A chill finger of remembered fear touched the nape of her neck as she locked the back door, but she quickly shrugged it off and hurried toward the truck.

The pride of Cassil Springs, the city hall clock which
always
kept perfect time, read eleven-ten as Quillen parked in front of the red brick building. She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as she pushed through the double glass doors and started across the brown-tiled lobby the post office shared with the city offices—then she heard Desmond Cassil’s voice behind her and her heart shot up her throat.

“Good morning, Quillen. My, you look well.”

Despite your best efforts to the contrary, she thought, as she turned around to face him. “I feel very well, Mr. Mayor.”

He stood near the potted figs clustered at the base of the pedestal which supported the hammered brass bust of his grandfather Jeremiah. His smile was as well tailored as his gray herringbone jacket and charcoal turtleneck.

“You were very lucky, Quillen, that my nephew came along in the nick of time. I shudder to think what might have happened if he hadn’t.”

“I’ll just bet you—” Quillen’s breath caught in her throat and a slow chill made her skin crawl. “What did you say?”

“I said, how lucky—”

“No, no, not that—your—
nephew
?”

“Yes, Tucker, my baby sister Thea’s son. Quite a— Oh, my.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth and frowned. “He hasn’t told you, has he? I
am
sorry. I had such high hopes that your acceptance of him meant that you’re finally coming to your senses—”

“I don’t believe you,” Quillen retorted shakily. “You’ve never told the truth in your life.”

“Now, Quillen.” He
tsked
and turned his head to one side. “Is that any way to talk to your future uncle-in-law?”

“I’ll marry your nephew—if he
is
your nephew,” she corrected herself quickly, “the same day hell freezes over.”

“Ask around town. Thea was raised in Cassil Springs. Lots of folks know her—and her son.” His smooth smile returned as he looked past the top of her head at the post office doors. “I suggest you start with Mabel Cunningham. She and Thea went to high school together and still correspond.”

“I’ll do that,” she snapped, and spun sharply on her heel.

“Oh, and Quillen?”

She half-turned and glared at him with one hand on the door.

“Don’t forget,” he reminded her in a silken, icy voice. “I’m not a patient man.”

“You don’t scare me, and you can’t intimidate me, either,” she told him, and pushed through the plate-glass door.

It’s a lie, it’s a lie, she told herself as her heart pounded frantically. Oh, God,
please
let it be a lie.

Seated on a high stool at the middle window in the counter, Mabel Cunningham glanced up from the stack of envelopes she was sorting. She laid them aside and took off her bifocals and tucked them on top of the short, ginger curls covering her head.

“Morning, Quillen. Another painting?”

Unable to find her voice, she nodded and handed the package to the postmistress.

“Saw you talking to the mayor.” Mabel rolled her brown eyes, slid off her stool, and carried the painting to the large scale at the next window. “You aren’t going to sell to him, are you?”

“No,” Quillen replied, her heart still trip-hammering. “We were talking about his—nephew.”

“Oh, Tucker.” She smiled over her shoulder as she weighed the package. “He’s your new tenant, I hear, you lucky girl. Listen, if his mother wasn’t one of my oldest, dearest friends and if I was thirty years younger—” She winked and turned around to adjust the weights.

Oh, God. It wasn’t a lie. Now Jason’s oddball cracks about who and what and duplicity made sense. He knew who Tucker was—he’d known all along.

“Quillen?” Mabel returned to the window and waved one palm at her. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Oh—” she started and smiled wanly. “Fine. A little weak. I guess you heard—”

“The whole town’s heard. Lucky Tucker was there.”

Cassil had said that, too. She was lucky. Quillen wished her brain wasn’t so numbed with shock. She’d like to think about that.

“Yes, isn’t it,” she agreed vaguely. “How much, Mabel?”

The postmistress told her, Quillen paid, picked up her receipt, and left. Halfway across the lobby, tears started to fill her eyes, but they didn’t spill until she was safely in the Blazer. She didn’t sob, she just sat behind the wheel staring out the windshield as fat, slow tears slid down her cheeks.

Scenes and snatches of conversation flickered through her mind, from Tucker cutting her off and not letting her follow Cassil at the festival last Saturday to his suggestion last night that his uncle wasn’t trying to kill her, just seeing to it that she had nothing to sell. She’d believed him, she’d trusted him—and she loved him.

Dragging the backs of her hands across her face, Quillen thrust the key into the ignition and the engine roared to life. Prudently she backed the Blazer out of its parking place and obeyed the speed limit as she drove out of town. Once past the city limits sign on the highway, she pressed the accelerator and the truck leaped east toward the festival grounds.

If the fault ran near her mine, then the seismometer would be there someplace—and so would Tucker. Fists clenched on the wheel, Quillen wished she’d paid more attention to his map. It didn’t seem logical to her that he’d set up the seismometer on the festival grounds; rather, she imagined he’d select a more isolated, yet close-by location. Probably somewhere on the backside of the hill, opposite where her grandfather had dug the entrance and main shaft to his mine.

When she reached the turnoff, the narrow, winding access road forced her to slow down, and she shifted the transmission into four-wheel drive as the front tires bounced onto the rutted lane leading to the stockade. She parked the truck near the locked front gates and slipped into the trees via a hiking trail that joined the dusty, graveled service road just beyond the far end of the shaggy-barked walls.

The path she followed was one made by the festival performers as a quick side exit to the parking area. It ran for about twenty yards and at the bottom deposited her in the Guildmaster’s Glen. Two more side paths through the stands of trees separating the festival areas brought her into the Gypsy Camp.

It looked deserted, but Quillen walked the entire area anyway, even the cleft where she and Tucker had eaten lunch last Saturday, her jaw set against the tears that swelled in her eyes. She found nothing and hesitated in the mine entrance, her heart pounding as it always did, and peered into the darkness. There were no sounds of movement inside, and although she doubted a seismometer made noises, she was glad she hadn’t brought the flashlight from the truck; it gave her a good excuse not to go in the mine and look.

Walking the uphill-sloping camp had winded her, and Quillen was grateful that her exit was downhill. As the ground fell away toward the creek, so did the granite cliff face. At the bottom of the camp it was hidden completely by the mixed conifer and deciduous forest.

Quillen crossed the wooden footbridge and followed the opposite bank of the creek until it disappeared into the trees, then turned left. Roughly twenty yards north of the creek she found the footpath she wanted—a narrow, barely perceptible track that cut through the woods to the backside of the hill. It was not a short walk, and the path wound, twisted, and meandered around tumbled, moss-grown boulders and shelves of rock that jutted out of the forest floor. Weak-kneed and breathing heavily, Quillen had to stop within five minutes to catch her breath. Irritated at her weakened condition, she flung herself around to face the way she’d come as she sagged against a thigh-high chunk of granite. She heard underbrush and fallen branches snap and break somewhere on the path behind her. She’d startled something, a deer most likely.

Once she could breath normally, she struck off again, but at a slower pace. Another five minutes passed before the trail picked up the creek again, now a deep-sided ravine in the forest floor, and Quillen walked along the south bank. It had been years since she, or anyone else, she decided, had hiked this way. The trail was barely distinguishable, and her concentration on following it and breathing deeply was so intense that she only faintly heard the whispery, telltale rush of rapidly moving water. Four steps later she sensed the mushy ground underfoot, looked down, and gasped, horrified, as she watched the leafy, needled ground separate and move beneath her loafers.

Whirling around, Quillen ran about twenty yards back down the trail before her lungs gave out. Again, she heard bracken and limbs crack as she scrambled onto a solid, multi-ton boulder.

She sat there, shivering, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms
wrapped around them, until she could breathe without effort and her heart had slid back into place between her ribs. Cautiously then, and stamping each foot firmly in front of the other, she retraced her steps and stopped when the needle-covered earth began to feel soft.

Something was very wrong here; something cataclysmic had happened—and recently. The tremor she and Tucker had felt on Sunday night sprang instantly to mind and sent a shiver sliding up her spine as she backtracked to the boulder, found a spot where the creek was no more than two feet wide, and stepped across it. She repeated her foot-stamping on the north bank and made slow progress along the stream. The ground remained firm, and as she crept along, the rush of the water became almost a roar.