Tainted Gold (3 page)

Damn, Quillen swore silently as she hiked up her skirts and took off as fast as she could for the Gypsy Camp. The midday crowds were heavy, however, and it was slow going. Forty minutes late, winded and disgusted with herself, she pelted to a halt before the Wizard’s Cave as a sharp pain between her ribs—exertion, not disappointment, she rationalized—sat her down on the boulder to catch her breath. Glumly, she looked around at the deserted area and the extinguished fire and sighed. Oh, well, she couldn’t blame him—

“Hey, finally! I thought I’d been stood up—for the first time in seventy-two years, I might add.”

Her heart leaping, Quillen slid off the boulder and turned around. The smile on her face took a nosedive, however, as she saw Tucker exit the mine entrance with a wicker basket swinging from his right hand.

“What were you doing in there?” she demanded sharply.

“Retrieving our lunch,” he answered, resting the basket on the chunk of granite between them. “It’s twenty degrees cooler in the back of the tunnel. Great natural refrigeration.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go in there,” she requested, her voice pleasant but firm. “It’s safe enough, or at least it should be since the committee reshored the roof and recapped the shaft two years ago, but still—don’t give the kids around here any ideas, okay?”

“You got it.” He nodded and offered her his right hand. “Come on, we have to eat fast. I’ve got another show at two.”

“Sorry,” she apologized as she crossed the first two fingers of her left hand behind her back. “I usually carry my watch in my pouch but I left it at home this morning.” Her Timex was, in fact, bouncing gently against her left hip as she rounded the boulder. She slipped her hand into his, enjoying the gentle strength in his grip and the smile that split his bearded face as their fingers laced themselves together.

She walked hand-in-hand with him toward a tree-lined cleft in the hillside about thirty yards to the right of the mine entrance.

“Is this a great spot for a picnic or what?” He looked at her askance, then his pleased-with-himself grin faded. “You’ve eaten lunch here millions of times, right?”

“Once or twice,” Quillen hedged, taking off her cloak as she stepped past him and spread it on the leaf-mounded ground.

The semisecluded cul-de-sac, lined with autumn-yellowed aspen and no more than ten yards square, was Quillen’s favorite place to park her pop-up camper. On spring and summer weekends when her workload allowed, Quillen spent Saturdays and Sundays here, camping and backpacking the trails that criss-crossed the property.

“This is no good.” Tucker frowned as he dropped to his knees beside Quillen, plunked the basket down on her cloak and rocked back on his heels with his lean, long-fingered hands spread on his gray-robed thighs. “I have a confession to make—this whole thing is a setup.”

“What whole thing?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.

“Everything. This picnic, luring you into my show this morning— Well, no, that wasn’t,” he qualified himself as he opened the basket. “I just took advantage of the opportunity.” He handed her a white cloth napkin and one of two bright blue plastic mugs. “There’s two of everything, you see. I’ve been planning this since I saw you at the first performers’ meeting three weeks ago. I’ve lain awake nights plotting and scheming, and finally hit on this romantic little lunch as the perfect way to meet and impress the lovely lady with the gorgeous green eyes.” He paused and smiled tentatively. “So, are you?”

If he’s seventy-two, I’ll kill myself, Quillen vowed. “Am I what?”

“Impressed.” His smile widened. “Favorably, I hope, but if you’re not, please be gentle. My ego is extremely fragile.”

“I’m very—” Quillen faltered, bewildered, and smiled self-consciously. “Flattered—and very confused. Why did you think you had to resort to scheming and plotting?”

His lips, parted, then pressed firmly together as he looked away from her. A shadow flickered briefly across his profile, but Quillen wasn’t sure if it was real or if she’d imagined it—a trick of the light played by a cloud sliding across the sun or a shift in the shade patterns as the aspen quivered in a sigh of wind. Within two heartbeats it passed, and she told herself it was all in
her mind as he stretched out on his side and braced his weight on his right elbow.

“Two reasons. One, I was afraid if I just walked up to you and said, Hi, let’s go out, you’d think I was arrogant and brazen, which I am, of course, but, two, I wanted to impress you with my charming, witty personality first.” He grinned as he lifted a foil-wrapped paper plate from the basket and pulled back the crimped aluminum edge. “I didn’t want you to think I’m just another pretty face.”

“No danger of that,” Quillen answered with a laugh as she took a fried chicken leg off the plate. “But when do I get to see the real you?”

“How about at dinner tonight?” he asked as he sat up and crossed his legs.

“Careful,” she cautioned him playfully. “You’re being arrogant and brazen.”

“It’s okay now, you’ve been warned. So how about it?”

“Sure, I’d love to have dinner with you tonight. My address—”

“I know your address,” he interrupted. “I asked around at the meetings until I found that out, and your name, that you’re an artist, and that you own this property. Small towns are wonderful, aren’t they? Everybody knows everything about everybody.”

“Tell me,” Quillen agreed ruefully. “So what about you?”

“I’m a geologist with the EPA,” he told her, licking his fingers as he dropped a gnawed chicken leg on his napkin. “I’ve been transferred out here to study a fault one of our mapping crews stumbled over last year. When I heard about the festival, I barely had time to set up my seismometer, before my audition with the committee. I’m a frustrated actor, you see. I couldn’t pass up this chance to perform.”

“Fault?” Quillen echoed. “You mean as in San Andreas?”

“Nothing that big,” he assured her with a smile. “Just one that bears monitoring for a while because of all the old mine shafts honeycombing these hills.”

“Oh, good,” she sighed, relieved. “Where were you transferred from?”

“St. Louis. Missouri. Being an avid spelunker, I really miss the old Show Me State.”

“Spe-whater?”

“Spelunker,” he explained with a grin, “is the term applied to a grown man who doesn’t have any better sense than to go crawling around in caves. Missouri’s the spelunking capital of the world, did you know that? The whole state’s riddled with caves. It’s a spelunker’s paradise. Nothing here to poke around in but old mines. Pretty dull stuff for the most part, though I’ve stuck my nose in one or two that look like they could be interesting.”

Quillen’s mouthful of chicken stuck halfway down, and she swallowed hard to clear her throat.

“Forget mine,” she said sharply. “It’s a deathtrap. A side shaft came down on my grandfather about thirty years ago, and the last cave-in ten years ago killed my father.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, his bushy white eyebrows drawing together over his rather large nose.

“They never found much of anything, anyway,” she continued pointedly. “A little copper, some silver, but very,
very
little gold,” she finished emphatically.

“Who said anything about gold?” he asked, one eyebrow arching curiously.

“No one, I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Don’t worry, Quillen.” He smiled as he planted his left hand between them and leaned toward her. “The only gold I intend to lust after is the little flecks of gold I see in your eyes.”

She tried to laugh, but only managed a breathy, giddy sigh as he rubbed his shoulder against hers and a flutter of warmth flushed up her throat. Quickly bowing her head to hide the pink staining her face, Quillen picked at the flaky brown coating on her chicken leg.

“Sorry, but you’re much too old for me—”

“Is my makeup
that
good?” He laughed, shook his head, and leaned closer. Leering and growling in the back of his throat, Tucker leaned over her, then spun away quickly as the gong hung in the jack pine tree
bong
ed loudly and repeatedly.

Behind him, Quillen scrambled to her feet and followed him out of the cleft. Two blue-jeaned little boys were taking turns bashing the gong with the mallet.

“Oh, hell, I’d better go before they beat it to a pulp.” Tucker frowned and waved at the remnants of their picnic. “Could you—”

“Yes, I’ll clean up,” Quillen finished. “You go on.”

“Sorry.” He brushed a whiskered kiss on her cheek, then took off at a trot. “Pick you up at eight!”

Touching her fingertips to the tingling spot on her jaw, Quillen watched him go. About ten yards shy of the tree, he slowed his pace to a fast walk.

“Here, here, young masters!” he called sternly. “Is that any way to treat the property of Realgar the sorcerer, who’s widely renowned for his skill at turning small boys into toads? Be off, lest I forget that this is a festival day and send you home in green skins and warts!”

Chuckling, Quillen watched the boys drop the mallet and take off at a dead run with Tucker close behind. I’d run, too, she thought as she walked back to her cloak and started rewrapping the chicken. She tucked the plate back in the basket, helped herself to a slightly overripe peach, then sat back suddenly on her heels as she remembered where she’d heard the name Realgar.

It wasn’t a name at all, but a word, for arsenic something or other, a reddish or orange-yellow substance that her father had once found in granulated crystals in the mine. She remembered vividly his flushed, excited face as he’d shown it to her and her mother.

“See?” he crowed triumphantly. “It means it’s there! Realgar occurs naturally with gold!”

Also with silver and lead ores, Quillen had found out later when she’d looked it up in her encyclopedia.

Sighing sadly, Quillen closed the basket and picked it up with her cloak. Realgar was derived from an Arabic word which meant, quite literally, dust of the mine.

Chapter Two

Dust of a different sort occupied Quillen’s mind that evening as she raced around her apartment trying to create order from chaos before eight o’clock. It never failed. If she cleaned and scrubbed and polished, no one visited her for weeks on end, but let one morning go by when she didn’t run the vacuum cleaner, throw away the newspapers, or load the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and everyone she’d ever known in her entire life chose that day to drop in.

Born under the sign of Libra, she was basically a neat, tidy person who loved order and balance, but who had a streak of procrastination in her nature. Frantically she snatched up and crumpled cast-off sketches and bits of tracing paper as the gilt minute hand on the face of Grandma Elliot’s china clock edged closer to seven-forty-five. Don’t be early, please, she begged as she stuffed the litter in the wastebasket by her drawing table and raced into the bathroom.

Gathering the overflow from the hamper, she picked up the lid, capped the white wicker barrel, and flew into the kitchen. She stuffed the dirty clothes in the washer, then shut it and the fold-open doors which concealed the laundry area.

Finished, she sighed, leaning against the ivory-painted louvered panels, and wondered how accurate her mental picture of Tucker would be. Probably not very, she’d decided during the drive home, since she hadn’t had much to work with.

From her own five feet and seven inches, she guessed his height at six feet two or three, and from the close-fitting drape of his robe she figured his weight at about one-eighty. Lean but well-muscled, judging by his arms. Warm skin type reckoned by his deep tan, probably dark-haired, and beyond that—? Only the Shadow knew.

The doorbell rang; two soft, harmonic chimes. Clammy perspiration sprang on Quillen’s palms, which she wiped nervously on her pleated gray slacks as she hurried through her studio, which had once been Grandma Elliot’s dining room, and into the living room.

Here it was, the moment of truth. Would her imaginings live up to the real McCoy? Most likely not, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was the pleasure she’d felt in his company and her certainty, founded only in the giddy flush that had surged through her when he’d rubbed his shoulder against hers, that no matter what this man looked like, he was a prince, not a toad. Taking a deep breath and pasting a smile on her face, Quillen opened the door.

“Hi.” Tucker smiled with an offhand lift of one shoulder as he slid his hands in the pockets of his snug-fitting navy trousers. “Here I am—the real me.”

Oh, my God, Quillen thought with a startled and fortunately inaudible gasp, he’s gorgeous. She knew she was staring but couldn’t help it, couldn’t believe that her mental picture had been so far off. The only thing she’d guessed right was his dark hair, which curled damply around his ears. His features, straight, perfect nose, high cheekbones, and slightly dimpled chin, looked as if they’d been rubbed out of marble.

“You’re disappointed, right?” he asked with a frown. “Okay, then, how’s this?” He withdrew his left hand from the pocket of his waist-length, tan leather battle jacket and stuck Realgar’s bulbous false nose over his. “Better?”

Afraid that if she opened her mouth she’d drool, Quillen plucked the fake nose off his face and pressed it over her own. “No, I think I like this better.”

He laughed, peeled the swarthy piece of rubber off her nose, and dropped a quick, light kiss in its place as he stepped past her into the living room. “What a great old house.”