Tainted Gold (24 page)

“Every hour or so,” he instructed her as he parked the Blazer near the footpath through the woods, “wander by the cave and let me know you’re okay, will you?”

“I thought you weren’t the least bit worried,” Quillen reminded him as she slid out her door and locked it behind her.

“I’m not, but better—”

“I know,” she said, sighing, “safe than sorry. All right, I’ll try.”

“And meet me for lunch!” he called as she started away from him. “In our place!”

She turned around, nodded and waved, then hurried through the gates. She was pretty sure she knew why he’d lingered beside the truck, and she wanted no part of smuggling a bow and quiver full of hunting tipped arrows onto the grounds. Ignorance, in this case, was definitely bliss.

Quillen’s biggest fear was that she’d run into Cal. After what had occurred the day before between him and Tucker, she’d tried not to think about her ex-friend. Adding the prefix hurt, however, and though she realized she’d made another black and white judgment, she just couldn’t help herself.

By midmorning, trudging routinely back to the Wizard’s Cave every hour or so had nearly exhausted her. On her third trip, sometime around eleven-thirty, she loitered in the back row as she’d done the previous Saturday and watched Tucker finish his show. With his right hand he made the two silver coins he’d materialized for her the week before disappear. He didn’t fumble or drop them and she was glad to see that he’d been right, that the stiffness in his fingers had indeed gone away.

The show ended, and once the applause died away and the crowd began to break up, she wove her way through the hay bales toward the caldron where he stood smiling and waiting for her.

“Hi.” She sighed tiredly. “I’m pooped, Tucker. This trekking back here every hour is wearing me out. Honestly, I’m fine—”

“Have you seen Wilson?” he asked, folding his bell-sleeved arms over his diaphragm.

“No, which is unusual. I normally bump into him two or three times a day, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

He didn’t answer, just made a funny noise in his throat as he stared off into space. There were lines around his mouth again, and they were definitely not makeup wrinkles.

“How about lunch now?” he asked, still gazing over the top of her head. “Are you hungry?”

“No. I’m going to go find a nice tall tree with lots of shade and sit there for the rest of the day.”

“Okay, love.” He looked at her and smiled. “Just be careful. Meet me here at closing.”

“Will do.” She kissed him, rubbed the tickle his beard left on her upper lip, and turned away.

At the foot of the Children’s Dell she found the perfect tree, a lofty spruce with piles of cushy needles underneath. She tied her cloak into a bundle, pushed it against the trunk, and sighed as she leaned against it. The location was perfect, and it didn’t take her long to attract a crowd from the children pelting their way to and from the games in the dell. With her legs folded under her and her skirts tucked around her knees, she told them about St. George and the dragon, the full sleeves of her blouse ruffling in the light breeze that sighed through the feathery branches of the spruce.

At first she didn’t see the jester; she only heard his scratchy, off-key tenor and the eerie voice of the lute accompanying him. Twice, perhaps three times, he sang the same song, but she didn’t pay any attention to the words until she saw a flash of vibrant color in the corner of her right eye and turned her head toward it.

“Peril lurks,” sang the small, slight figure in a green and scarlet harlequin costume as it stepped around the spruce, “’twixt the Smythie’s Forge and Ursa’s Gorge—”

The diamond-shaped pattern of his tunic, belled sleeves, and puffy breeches was painted heavily in the same colors on his face, and a black mask covered his eyes. As her own lips parted involuntarily, Quillen heard a startled, collective gasp from her audience, and then the muffled scamper of small, running feet as a shiver iced up her back.

For a long, horrifying second, she wanted to run away with the children, then her start at his sudden, unnerving appearance passed and she winked at the jester, gathered her skirts, and leaped up, preparing to race after her audience, shrieking with feigned terror. There was no answering wink or sign from the spooky, masked face, and she’d run no more than ten feet when he finished the verse again and the scream died in her throat.

“Peril lurks, and the banshee mourns for the fair-headed Eire-born.”

Skirts lifted, Quillen froze in her tracks as a rush of fright rang in her ears and upended her stomach. In the span of two frantic heartbeats it ebbed away and she whirled around. The jester had vanished and she could no longer hear the lute.

Coincidence, she told herself shakily. He couldn’t possibly have meant me.

“Hi, Quill.”

Cal’s deep voice boomed behind her and she yelped as she spun toward him on one heel. His eyebrows shot up and his mouth fell open as Quillen jabbed her right index finger into his solar plexus.

“A fine friend you are,” she accused. “What’s the big idea punching a man who already had two broken fingers and cracked ribs?”

“Whoa, Quill.” Cal caught her hand in his brawny fist and held it fast. “He took a swing at me with a tree limb.”

“Obviously he hit you in the head,” she shot back nastily, “or you would’ve been hurt.”

“Funny,” he snapped, his cheeks reddening. “For your information, he jumped me.”

“What would you have done if you’d found someone breaking into
your
Jeep?”

“I wasn’t breaking into his Jeep,” he denied vehemently. “I thought the damn tree had just come down and I thought maybe someone was inside.”

“Right.” Quillen snorted sarcastically. “And who gave you that brilliant alibi? Cassil?”

“It isn’t an alibi,” Cal insisted staunchly. “It’s the truth.”

“Oh, yeah?” she challenged. “Then what the hell were you doing on my land?”

“Boy, are you hostile today.” He let go of her hand, shook his head, and backed away from her.

“Not so fast.” Quillen stepped after him and poked her finger in his midriff again. “Tell Cassil that I know about the gold and the new shaft in my mine. Tell him, too, that I’ve got a copy of his theme park plans and that I’m taking them to the EPA office in Denver on Monday.”

Cal stopped retreating. He looked down at Quillen’s finger pressed against his solar plexus and then at her face.

“I wouldn’t do that, Quill,” he said quietly. “He won’t like it.”

“Good.” She smiled. “I hope he dislikes it as much as I disliked having my furnace smashed with a sledgehammer that was stolen from Cassil Construction, and nearly being blown up when somebody set off a charge of dynamite with a plunger that was taken from the same job site.”

“You can’t prove any of that,” Cal answered flatly.

“I don’t have to,” Quillen told him archly. “Sheriff Blackburn’s doing it for me.”

With a smug toss of her head, she turned her back on his incredulous face and walked to the spruce to collect her cloak. She shook it out, flung it over her shoulders, and never looked back as she moved away through the crowds. She hadn’t walked far when two middle-aged ladies in pastel polyester pantsuits asked her directions to the Pirates’ Cove. One of them produced the map that was passed out at the gates and folded it open.

“This way, my lady,” Quillen told her, drawing a line across the map with her index finger.

The Smythie’s Forge and Ursa’s Gorge, the reconstructed fifteenth-century bear-baiting pit, were clearly marked. The jester’s song played again in Quillen’s mind, and her breath caught in her throat as she saw that the halfway point between the two landmarks was the Wizard’s Cave.

The ladies thanked her, folded their map, and went on their way. For a long time Quillen stood in the middle of the path, people weaving and bumping around her, as she tried to tell herself that this was coincidence, too.

A snatch of lute music carried from a distance on the breeze finally stirred her out of her stupor. Head raised, she listened intently, thought she’d pinpointed the direction, and moved toward it. She and the jester were going to have a little talk.

Within a few strides the music stopped, and she wandered aimlessly for some time until she heard it again. She struck off toward it again at a fast walk. It faded away a second time and she was left adrift in the crowds.

It occurred to her then that the jester could be playing some kind of game with her, but she pursued the music doggedly whenever she heard it. Overhead, the sun passed its zenith and the afternoon grew warm. The one o’clock royal procession forced Quillen off a path near the Weavers’ Glade while the king and queen and their court paraded through the festival beneath heraldic banners.

At the rear of the column marched the men-at-arms. Quillen looked for Cal but didn’t see him. When the last pikeman passed, she stepped out into the path and saw the jester’s face in the crowd opposite her. He saw her, too, and spun quickly away into the throng.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she muttered under her breath and pushed her way through the spectators to follow him.

He didn’t lead her a merry chase, just a long one. Several times he glanced over his shoulder, and each time quickened his pace as he hurried along the paths toward the bridge at the foot of the Gypsy Camp. His song played again in her head, but she suppressed the shiver it raised on the nape of her neck and lengthened her strides to keep up with him.

About ten yards ahead of her, the jester broke out of the crowds into the clearing on the creek bank. One last time he glanced back at her, then ducked into the forest down the same path she’d followed to the cliff the other day.

Hands clenched nervously at her skirts, Quillen paused and stared at the split in the trees where he’d disappeared. Was it coincidence that peril lurked between the Smythie’s Forge and Ursa’s Gorge for the fair-haired Eire-born? Or was it a warning? She had to know, but hesitated, casting a longing glance at the bridge, the Gypsy Camp, and the Wizard’s Cave beyond. No, she didn’t have time to fetch Tucker, she told herself as she drew a deep breath to still her rapidly beating heart, ran across the clearing, and slipped into the woods behind the jester.

He’d vanished again, and she moved slowly and as quietly as possible down the trail. Ahead of her she saw a flash of scarlet, quickened her pace—but he disappeared again. Twice more the same thing happened, and she realized then that he was luring her deeper into the forest. She didn’t like that and came to a halt with her hands on her hips.

“Look,” she said loudly, her voice firm, “if you were trying to tell me something with that badly rhymed song you sang back there, why don’t you stop all this cat-and-mouse stuff and come out and say it?”

Branches rustled, twigs and underbrush snapped, and the jester stepped out of the trees about thirty yards ahead of her. He didn’t speak, he just stood there.

Finally Quillen had sense enough to be scared, but it was almost too late for that. She did have presence of mind enough to look over her left shoulder as she started forward to meet the jester. She saw a glimpse of something move in the screen of autumn leaves behind her, then her right boot toe struck something, caught, and she tripped and fell.

A second before she hit the ground hard and the breath
whooshed
out of her lungs, she heard the
zing
over her head—precisely where her head would have been if she hadn’t fallen—and felt the tug and heard the tear in her cloak. Winded and stunned, she sprawled on her stomach for a moment, her nose filled with the peaty, dank smell of half-rotted leaves, then she pushed herself up on her left elbow, looked over her right shoulder, and saw the arrow pinning her cloak to the trunk of an oak tree. The shaft and the teal blue and red fletchings were still quivering.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, another on the thongs of her cloak, raised her head and looked at the jester. He’d lifted his mask from his eyes and she gasped.

“Jason!”

“Hurry!” He tugged the thongs of her cloak free, yanked her up by the elbows, and pulled her around the thick-trunked oak.

Flattened there with the rough bark digging into her shoulder blades, Quillen bit her lip and tried not to cry. Beside her, Jason caught her hand in his.

“C’mon,” he said lowly, “let’s get out of here.”

“No, wait.”

She pulled her hand free, rolled on her left shoulder, and inched around the tree. She had to look again; she had to make sure. Cautiously she wormed her way around the oak, listened carefully, heard nothing, and eased out onto the path.

The arrow and her cloak were still there, and the fletchings were still teal blue and red. No doubt about it—Jason’s song had been a warning. Was this why Tucker had smuggled his bow and quiver onto the grounds? She hadn’t seen him do it, of course, but it was obvious now that he had. Still, she couldn’t believe it, she didn’t want to believe it—but the arrow was irrefutable proof. Lowering her head miserably, she saw what had tripped her: a surveyor’s stake with the name Cassil Construction burned into the wood.

“I tried to tell you yesterday,” Jason said quietly behind her. “Ferris was in the old man’s office when I went in to clean out my desk. It was lunchtime, the place was deserted, and they didn’t hear me come in. The door was open and I heard them talking. Then they got real serious, said something about disposal methods, and then D.C. shut the door.”