Tainted Gold (5 page)

Barely aware of his hand on her arm, she walked toward the door with her head down. Tears swam in her eyes, and she started visibly when Cal Wilson’s basso voice boomed almost directly in front of her.

“Hi, Quill. Hey, Ferris, fancy meeting you here! Sorry I didn’t catch your show today. I meant to, but—”

What?
Quillen’s head came up sharply and she watched the two men shake hands. If they hadn’t met today at the festival, she wondered, glancing at Tucker’s face, then where had they met? He didn’t look at her, but his fingers tightened on her arm.

“No problem,” he assured Cal with a smile. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Pressing gently on Quillen’s elbow, he nudged her toward the door. She resisted as Cal stepped in front of them.

“Listen, Tuck, I gotta tell you this.” He chuckled. “Old man Cassil nearly flipped his wig—no pun intended—after you walked off the job site yesterday. You really put the fear of Uncle Sam in him when you said the EPA would probably want an environmental impact study before they’d let him build his Gold Rush Days amusement park. Oops.” He winced at Quillen. “Sorry, Quill, but it’s not exactly a secret.”

“So I see,” she replied slowly, glancing again at Tucker as she removed her elbow from his hand. Deep red splotches colored his throat above the open collar of his powder blue shirt and he still avoided meeting her gaze. “Thank you, Cal.” She smiled at her friend. “Good night.”

Don’t stalk, she told herself, fighting to keep her temper in check as she wove her way through the crowded foyer toward the bank of public telephones on the back wall. Behind her, she heard hurried footsteps and shrugged away the hand she felt closing on her sleeve as she jerked open her gray suede clutch. Digging two dimes out of her wallet, she snatched up the receiver and slid the twenty cents into the slot. Two lean, tanned fingers depressed the switchhook and Quillen pivoted on her heel to glare at Tucker as the coins jangled into the return box.

“Take your hand off the phone.”

“Who are you calling?”

“A cab,” she hissed in an icy whisper.

“No, you’re not,” he countermanded, his voice low and his jaw tightening as he leaned toward her and braced his right forearm on the wall. “I brought you here and I’ll take you home.”

Quillen slammed the phone back in its cradle but missed his fingers by a fraction of an inch. He pulled them out of the way at the last second, and she saw just a glimpse of his startled, angry expression as she wheeled around and pushed through the wooden swinging doors. Halfway across the veranda, she heard the hinges squeak behind her and quickened her pace. Tucker caught her on the bottom step and pulled her around to face him.

“What are you going to do?” he demanded, firmly trapping her elbow in his left hand as he pointed at her slingback suede pumps with his right. “Walk to town in those?”

“No,” she spat out as she shrugged away from him. “I’m walking to the gas station at the junction. Now go away and leave me alone.”

“Not until you give me a chance to explain.” He grabbed her arm and again tugged her around as she started away from him. “I was out in the field yesterday checking my seismometer—”

“I said leave me alone!” Quillen repeated, swinging her clutch at his hand. It hit him across the knuckles with a metallic
clunk
. Probably her compact, she thought as she gasped, horrified at her violent reaction.

“Ouch! Damn it!” he cursed, first shaking, then sucking on his fingers.

“All right, talk,” she told him stiffly as she tucked her purse under her arm. “Just keep your hands to yourself.”

“As I was saying,” he continued, frowning as he shook his fingers again and then flexed them. “I was checking my seismometer and I ran into Cal and his boss with a survey crew from Cassil Construction—”

“On my land?” Quillen interrupted shrilly. “They were on
my
land?”

“I don’t know, Quillen,” he replied irritably. “I haven’t the faintest idea where your property boundaries are. I asked what they were doing and Cassil showed me where they were going to put up this monster roller coaster, some god-awful-sounding thing called a Whiplash, and I thought, Whoa, this guy’s talking tons of steel on an unstable area—”

“But you said,” Quillen broke in, “that it’s just a little
fault
.”

“It appears to be, but I won’t know for sure until I’ve collected all my data. That could take weeks, maybe months, and in the meantime, part of my job is not to create a panic. In most people’s minds the word
fault
triggers visions of the San Francisco earthquake. That’s almost definitely not the case here, still—”

“So what’s that got to do with Cal and Cassil?” She cut him off, catching her purse in her left hand as she thrust her hands on her hips. “And the fact that you lied to me?”

“I did
not
lie to you, Quillen. I said I’d met Cal. I did
not
say where or when.”

Uh-oh, she thought, the two syllables ringing ominously inside her head. As she considered the possibility that she’d misconstrued his exchange with Cal, her defensive posture wilted.

“So you just let me assume—”

“You bet I let you. I was there this morning when you started after Cassil with fire in your eyes. I couldn’t think of any way to broach what’s obviously a touchy subject without eliciting this little discussion we’re having now. Not that I blame you. From what I’ve heard about the Cassil-McCain feud—”

“Anything you heard from Desmond Cassil,” Quillen declared fiercely, “is a guaranteed lie.”

“Give me credit for a little sense, will you?” Tucker retorted impatiently. “Everybody here knows everything about everyone else, remember, and they don’t mind telling. Besides, when Cassil offered me money to soft-pedal my findings, figuring, of course, that once the park’s built, there’d be very little the EPA could do about it—”

“So what did you tell him?”

Quillen’s whole body winced at her own question. It was too late, but she bit her tongue anyway.

“Because I don’t think you meant that the way it sounded, I’m going to ignore the question,” he said quietly. “If I thought you meant it, however, I’d leave you here to think about it and the chip on your shoulder while you’re walking to the junction.”

“I do
not
—” Quillen began hotly, then gave it up. Though they were standing in near darkness away from the lights, she looked away from him. “I guess I do have a chip on my shoulder. I wasn’t aware it was that visible.”

“Your camouflage is damn good, but transparent as Saran Wrap to somebody who’s been in your shoes.”

“How do you mean?”

“Can I tell you while we’re walking to the car?”

Though she knew she’d been wrong, though she realized she’d overreacted and misinterpreted everything Cal and Tucker had said to each other, still Quillen hesitated to take the hand he offered her. It wasn’t the gesture, clearly one of capitulation, which bothered her; she’d spent most of her life apologizing for her flash-powder temper. Her reluctance sprang from the remembered traces of his touch, and her certainty, founded in her fear of the intensity of her response to him, that surrender now could be emotional suicide.

“I knew, Quillen,” he went on, “because I lugged a redwood tree around on my shoulders for years. You see, my parents were firm believers in free love long before the hippies came along. They’re terrific people, they love each other like crazy, they’ve just never found a good enough reason to get married.”

The tone of his voice was light and conversational; perhaps too much so, Quillen thought. She was grateful for the darkness now which hid her startled expression, and did not resist as he slid his arm around her elbow and steered her across the parking lot.

“I was about eight when I tumbled to the meaning of the word
illegitimate
,” he continued as they walked between parked cars toward the Jeep, “and the sidelong looks my relatives and the parents of my friends were giving me. I went to Mom and Dad and asked why didn’t they get married. They said they didn’t need a little piece of paper to certify that they loved each other and me and that we were a family. I resented them and the tag they’d hung around my neck for years. I thought then, and still do, that they were being very selfish and willful, but I finally realized that what they do or don’t do reflects on me only if I let it.” He stopped beside the Jeep, unlocked and opened the passenger door. The interior light softly bathed his smile as he turned her to face him. “I realized, too, that the only person punishing me was me, and then I finally had sense enough to stop trying to defend my parents’ life-style.”

“It’s not that easy for me,” Quillen countered. “Cassil Springs is a glass house, you said so yourself. Everybody thinks my father was crazy!”

“So what do you care? You’re not going to change the minds of the people around here, Quillen, and you’d better accept that. If you can’t, then sell out to Cassil or somebody else and go someplace where you aren’t locked into defending people who are dead and things that happened twenty years ago.”

“I can’t,” Quillen told him lamely. “I just can’t, Tucker.”

“So be a martyr,” he told her bluntly. “But ask yourself sometime if you really think that’s what your father wanted for you.”

Quillen did think about it while Tucker drove back to town the short way. That, and his silence, smarted like salty tears on her exposed feelings. She’d never felt so transparent, so revealed, so mortified, and yet, at the same time, so relieved and comforted. Finally someone else understood, and she wished with all her heart that she hadn’t let her temper get the best of her and make a fool out of her for the umpteenth time. More than that, she wished, stealing a glance at Tucker’s face as he turned the Jeep around the corner onto her block, that she hadn’t blown any chance they may have had at a relationship.

“This really is a terrific old house.” He sighed, looking up at the white gingerbread trimming the roof, as they walked toward the front porch. “I sure wish you had a vacancy.”

I’ll bet you do, Quillen thought dryly, like you wish there was an empty padded cell in the local asylum. Still, she appreciated the fact that he was trying to be kind, and smiled at him over her shoulder as she unlocked the front door. He followed her into the hall.

Dread gnawed at the pit of her stomach as she crossed the Oriental carpet covering the polished hardwood floor and slid her key into the lock on her apartment door. Well, here we are, she thought, home again, home again, jiggity-jig, and now we have to somehow figure a graceful way out of this awkward little corner me and my temper got us into.

“Tucker, thank you for—”

“Hush! Be still!” Realgar the wizard commanded. “You’re interrupting the flow of cosmic consciousness!”

Pushing the door open and turning around in the threshold, Quillen stared in bewilderment at Tucker. He stood in the middle of the Oriental rug, feet spread, eyes closed, and fingertips pressed against his forehead. He reached out with his left hand, and Realgar’s rich, vibrant voice filled the hall.

“I see a sign,” he said, his forehead wrinkling. “A small white sign, words in black written upon it, pitched in the middle of the front lawn next to the birdbath. The letters spell—‘Vacancy, Apply Within.’”

Why had she worried, Quillen wondered, laughing, and Tucker opened his eyes and grinned at her. Leave it to Realgar to figure a way out of a tight spot.

“Close, but no cigar,” she told him. “I stake the sign on the other side of the walk and it says, ‘Vacancy, Call for Appointment,’ with my phone number underneath.”

“Fortunately, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” He winked as he walked toward her and gave her no choice but to back through the door into her apartment. He shut it behind him and leaned against it. “And if Realgar’s sight should fail, which it hardly ever does, I’m still applying to fill the vacancy in your life.”

“What?” Quillen echoed faintly, still backing away from him.

“You don’t have a steady fella, you rarely go out—I ask questions, remember, and as I told you earlier, it pays. I’m new in town, I’m lonely, and I’m crazy about you. How can we miss?”

Quillen’s left heel struck one of the brass andirons on the hearth and it toppled over on the carpet with a thud. She leaned on the mantel to steady herself. “I wasn’t expecting this,” she admitted. “I was expecting a polite peck on the cheek.”

“Because you lost your temper and went off like Mount Saint Helens?” A smile curved one corner of his mouth as he walked slowly toward her. “If you’re trying to get rid of me, Quillen, you’ll have to do better than that.” He stopped in front of her and gently, almost delicately, curved his hands around her face. “I never give up until I get what I want, and what I want happens to be you.”

His fingers traced her cheekbones, his touch so light, so deft, that Quillen could almost feel every ridge of skin in the tips of his thumbs. Closing her eyes, she savored the feathery, yet scintillating caresses as her lips parted, and she swayed toward him.

Very softly, his mouth brushed hers, then he stepped back and his hands dropped to her shoulders. “Will you have lunch with Realgar tomorrow?”

Instantly Quillen’s eyes flew
open. A hot, sizzling flush prickled up her throat and, embarrassed, she ducked her head.

“You don’t really want me to stay, Quillen,” he told her as he curled his index finger under her chin and raised her eyes to meet his, “and if I kiss you like I want to kiss you, I won’t want to leave. And I’d just as soon spare us both that humiliation.”