Silk and Stone

by Deborah Smith

  Jake shook Mr. Gunther’s hand. “What happened between Tim and me, well, I guess you could call it a philosophical dispute.”

  Mr. Gunther grinned at him. “Still waters run deep. Never figured you for a man with a temper. Heard Ellie rattled a few cages with her speech too.”

  Jake shrugged and politely avoided staring at the package, which was wrapped in bright floral tissue paper and topped with a blue bow. Not Joe Gunther’s style. Mr. Gunther liked to decorate himself, not packages. Every finger gleamed with a gemstone—most of them found, over the past four years, under Jake’s guidance. And in return, Mr. Gunther had looked out for Samantha and her family, and filled Jake in on the peaceful progress of their lives.

  “So,” Mr. Gunther said. “Where’s the rest of your cantankerous crew?”

  “Ellie’s with Father, working at his office. Mother left for Florida this morning, with Katie Jones. Mrs. Jones works the craft show circuit, selling baskets. She talked Mother into going with her. Mother took some of her watercolors. She’s sold a lot of them around here, so she’s thinking of branching out.”

  “How’s it feel to be an educated and free man?” Mr. Gunther asked.

  “Good. I was never much for sitting in classrooms. Got more on my own, reading whatever I wanted, making up my own mind.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt you to go to college, you know. You could study geology, or something.”

  Jake waved a hand at the rounded blue-green mountains looming around the valley like sentinels. “I’ve got teachers.”

  “Money in the bank, the way you dig into them.”

  “They share. I don’t take too much. We have an understanding.”

  “But still, college—”

  “That’s for Ellie. She got a scholarship to Duke, but I’ll help the folks pay for any extras she needs. Besides, if I left, who’d help pay the god-awful taxes on the Cove?”

  “So you’re stuck to this valley like white on rice.”

  “Always have been. It’s where I belong. I like it.”

  “You love it,” Mr. Gunther corrected him. When Jake said nothing, he changed the subject diplomatically. “So what are your plans?”

  “Dig a few rocks, do a little tracking for the Sheriff’s Department”—Jake looked at the bloodhound, who had flopped on a patch of grass at the edge of Mother’s iris beds, dejected—“if Bo doesn’t desert me for giving him flea baths every week. As many weeks as I’ve been dunking him, you’d think he’d get over it.”

  “A man can depend on the goodwill of a dog.” Mr. Gunther studied Bo, who was 100 pounds of loose red hide. “Especially one so ugly no one else would have him.” Mr. Gunther cleared his throat. “But there comes a time when a man ought to ask himself if he needs more company. Something with two legs instead of four. Something that smells better than Bo and wears lacy underwear.”

  “Ellie tied one of her bras on Bo’s head once, and he didn’t seem to mind.”

  “Come on, boy, stop tiptoeing around the point. You’re a good-looking rooster. I’d bet the bank that plenty of sassy gals have been after you. Words out that you’ve never, well, you know. Never tossed your bait in the ol’ fishing hole, if you get my drift.”

  Jake folded his arms over his chest and said drolly, “Just waiting for the right fish to come along. Nothing’s wrong with my rod and reel.”

  Mr. Gunther threw his head back and laughed. “Well, I can’t fault your willpower.” The pleasantries done, he held out the package. “Your little fish isn’t so little anymore. She sent you a graduation present.”

  Samantha. A thread of excitement and curiosity raced through him. He remembered her as the ten-year-old he’d seen four years ago, but his mind’s eye had never lost the older image of her—an image that was closing in on reality now.

  He took the present with a quick nod of thanks but made no move to open it. Self-protective privacy was ingrained in him—he guarded what he knew, what he felt, and what he shared with other people. Mr. Gunther waited in vain for a minute while Jake pretended to examine the absurdly delicate blue bow. He recalled the silent blond toddler who tied bows even on a cow’s tail, and how she’d looked at him as if she’d like to decorate him too.

  “Well,” Mr. Gunther said finally, “I can see I’m about as welcome as a mosquito. Are we still set for the dig on Traders Mountain next week?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Mr. Gunther set one expensive, hand-tooled boot inside his car, posed in the door frame like a pot-gutted Roy Rogers, and studied him thoughtfully. “You really think some of DeSoto’s Spaniards mined emeralds up there?”

  Poker-faced, Jake nodded. “That’s what the legends say. Mrs. Big Stick told me her great-grandfather talked about it. That before the blight killed ’em he found three-hundred-year-old chestnuts growing at the mouth of what looked to be a collapsed mine shaft.”

  “Funny,” Mr. Gunther said, “how most legends about old mines end up being fairy tales, but you got a knack for knowing which ones aren’t.”

  “Just lucky.”

  “You know, it could be a sixth sense—the way you find things, and people.”

  “Nah. I read. I study. It’s all logic.”

  “Okay. Wouldn’t want people to think you’ve got second sight or some such thing. Folks might show up on your doorstep with their tea leaves and tarot cards and ouija boards. Make you feel like a sideshow freak. You’d have to get you a turban and a crystal ball.”

  “They’d be disappointed.”

  “Frannie Ryder loves all that silliness. You should see the pack of half-assed palm readers and fortune tellers and what-not who hang out at her store. She collects more nuts than a squirrel. Poor Miss Sammie watches ’em like they might steal the cash drawer.” Mr. Gunther eased his burly body into the car and slammed the door. Draping one arm out the open window, he shook his head and sighed. “You know how some preachers’ kids get force-fed so much religion that they won’t set foot inside a church after they’re grown? Well, I suspect your little fish has put up with such a load of flimsy mumbo-jumbo, she’ll ask her own shadow for ID before she’ll believe it’s real.”

  He drove off up the driveway, waving his hand. Jake stood morosely in the yard, pondering what Mr. Gunther had said. He frowned at the soft, bulky package, moved leadenly to the porch, and sat on the steps with it balanced on his knees. Slowly he unwrapped it, pushing the colorful paper aside with careful fingers.

  A quilt. A quilt in dark brown and gold, with a zigzag pattern so distinctly familiar he recognized it as a Cherokee design. He drew his blunt, callused fingertips along stitches so tiny and perfect, he wondered how human hands could have made them. Exhaling softly, awed by the work she’d done on a gift for him, he spread his hands on the soft material and absorbed her warmth. She had made him a quilt to sleep under, to dream under, and she had no way of knowing that wrapping himself in it every night would be like wrapping himself in her life, like sleeping with her.

  But she was only fourteen. Chivalry forbade him to think about her that way yet—or at least to try not to think about her that way. He laid the quilt beside him on the porch floor but couldn’t resist smoothing a hand over it one more time.

  But that last impulsive gesture opened a floodgate, and he jerked the quilt up with both hands, staring blankly at it as her despair washed over him.

  “It’s all gone. All of our savings. And it’s my fault.” Mom dropped to the sofa in their living room and stared blindly out a window hung with curtains Sam had made herself, to save money. Just as she’d made most of their clothes, and worked at the store every afternoon and weekends, and done without everything she could for the past four years.

  Sam stood numbly in the center of the small room, feeling the dull fury of betrayal, her gaze seguing from one piece of carefully tended flea-market furniture to the next. She, not Mom, had struggled to get them out of Aunt Alex’s pocketbook all this time, and even though she hadn’t been able to change the fact that Aunt Alex had
made the down payment on this small tract house for them, Sam had taken pride in their ability, finally, to take over the mortgage notes.

  They’d had ten thousand dollars in the bank. Sam had begun to feel independent and secure, to really believe they’d be free of Aunt Alex’s control in a few years, with money for Charlotte to attend college and Mom to pay bills without worrying—free, when Sam turned eighteen, to do whatever she wanted. Free to see Jake.

  Charlotte huddled on the couch next to Mom, small and fidgety and infinitely trusting. “Mr. Drury is gone?” Charlotte asked sadly. “Why would he do that? He was supposed to start a health food magazine with our money.”

  “He’s a con artist,” Sam explained, her stomach twisting. “He talked Mom into lending him money, and then he disappeared. He’s not coming back.”

  “I was so sure of him,” Mom said, covering her face with one pale, thin hand. “I studied his charts, I saw good lines in his palms, I—”

  “You saw stars and got a line all right,” Sam said. Mom’s wounded expression made her bite her lip. Her mother was an eternal optimist, and lonely, and deeply, irrevocably unable to tell the difference between sense and nonsense. “I did what my instincts told me to do,” Mom said wearily. “You have to trust your faith sometimes, Sammie.”

  “No, you don’t. You have to trust cold, hard facts. And the fact is, Malcolm Drury looked a little like Daddy and talked like a dreamer, and you didn’t listen to me when I pointed out that he couldn’t take Daddy’s place.”

  “Sammie, don’t,” Mom said, tears sliding down her face. “I’m sorry. Don’t hate me.”

  Sam couldn’t help crying too. “I don’t hate you. I hate that you asked Aunt Alex for money again.”

  “Sammie, your aunt doesn’t mind. She loves us. She wants to help. It’s just a loan. I’ll pay her back.”

  “We’ll always be paying her back,” Sam answered.

  Alone at the store the next afternoon, Sam’s energy dissolved. Business was slow; no one had come in for an hour. She wandered to the storage room in back and sank onto a rump-sprung couch in front of a narrow window that let in a hot, murky beam of summer sunshine. She kicked off her sandals and sank on the hard vinyl cushion with her legs folded under her and her arms crossed on the couch’s back. The vinyl stuck to her bare legs beneath her khaki shorts; the sunlight was fiery on her arms and hands. She tugged uselessly at the short sleeves of her thin plaid shirt. Mom’s odd theories even included sunshine. Pollution was eating up the atmosphere, she said, and getting a tan was no better than sticking your head in a microwave oven.

  Mom had greased Sam and Charlotte with antitanning lotions and shaded them with umbrellas for so many years that Sam had given up on ever seeing her skin turn a lovely, sunbaked brown. Her hands, when she bothered to notice them, looked as if they’d been molded from fine porcelain, and the perfect oval nails grew so fast, she had to pare them down with clippers every over day. She supposed Mom’s insistent regimen of vitamin and mineral supplements was responsible for that.

  Resting her chin on her arms, Sam gazed dully at large hills covered in dingy office buildings and busy streets. On the edges of the city the mountains were cool and dark green, and a sweet-smelling bluish mist crept over them in the evenings. But here everything looked gray, even the air.

  She wanted their savings back. She wanted to be so much older, and she wanted to believe that a boy she had talked to only three times in her life, a boy whose family her aunt hated, had not considered her graduation present an unwelcome reminder of silly promises he’d made to a child.

  “Samantha?” The voice was very deep and rich. She lifted her head but couldn’t make herself turn on the couch for fear she’d only imagined it and would look like a fool if she searched for the source. She’d been so engrossed in thought, she hadn’t heard the jingle of the door chimes when someone entered the shop. “Samantha?” he said again, and this time she knew he was real. Somehow, he always found her when she needed his help. That wondrous mystery was the one strong, abiding pattern in the fabric of her life.

  Her heart in her throat, she turned around slowly.

  Jake stood in the doorway.

  She wasn’t a child anymore—had never really felt like a child before—but now her body had caught up with the plan. A startling new awareness of being female complicated what had been simple devotion. Mother would say she’d discovered the yin and yang of sensuality.

  Sam called it biology. And suddenly it was the most powerful force in the world.

  He walked toward her slowly, gauging her with intense green eyes hooded with black lashes, as if he had to catalogue her details as thoroughly as she studied his. Sam didn’t know where to look first. She saw him through a fog of rediscovery colored with disturbing shyness. He was much taller than she remembered, an inverted pyramid of wide shoulders, thick arms, and lean hips set on long legs. His hair was a soft reddish-black, the color of a hot charcoal ember, and it swept back from his high forehead in a glossy, rebellious mane that stopped just short of his collar. He wore a thin blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and thin suspenders with brilliantly colored beadwork on them, and faded jeans just loose enough to make the suspenders look necessary. The jeans were threadbare around the bottoms, which sank into the folds of leather boots that made no sound on the hard floor.

  He eased down carefully on the couch, an arm’s length away, resting big, rough-looking hands on his knees and regarding her with an unwavering gaze that took her breath away. Dazed, she fumbled inside the collar of her shirt and slowly drew out the necklace. When he saw the thin, tarnished chain with the homely gemstone dangling from it, his face relaxed. He raised one hand toward her, stopped with his outstretched fingers posed near hers, and waited. Sam hesitantly touched her fingertips to his; the contact burned away the awkward moment, and she slid her hand into his. Immediately their hands merged in an intimate grip, his thick fingers weaving gently between her slender ones. She clutched his hand atop the cushion between them.

  “You did that the first time I saw you,” he said, his voice low.

  “What?” Her own voice was a whisper.

  “Held my hand like you’d never let go.”

  They were silent, every second hinged on the next heartbeat and the warm clasp of their hands. “I don’t remember that,” she admitted sadly. “Did you mind?”

  “No. I’m glad you haven’t changed.”

  “I’ve been called stubborn more than once.”

  “That’s all right. People confuse faith with stubbornness.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She lunged to her knees on the couch, flung her free arm around his neck, and hugged him, turning her face away but pressing her cheek against the warm, smooth side of his neck. Just as quickly she sank back on the couch, but continued to hold his hand tightly. Either he or she—or both of them—was trembling. “Hello again,” he said gruffly. “I heard you had some trouble.”

  She stared at him, amazed. “Where did you hear?”

  “News gets around. I keep an ear tuned.”

  “You must have long-range antennae.”

  “You could call it that. Tell me what happened.”

  Before she knew it, she was pouring out the details of Mom’s infatuation with Malcolm Drury, who had invaded their lives with glorious ideas about starting a magazine about herbal medicine, then bolted as soon as Mom invested their savings in his plans. Sam shivered. “We had money in the bank. We were doing fine. We didn’t need Aunt Alex’s help anymore. But the money’s gone. Mom made a mistake with it. I couldn’t stop her.”

  “I know.” He said that quickly, then looked as if he wished he hadn’t. Sam peered at him, searching her mind for explanations. Of course. She said very carefully, “I bet I know who told you. I bet his name’s Joe Gunther. Because you asked him to help us, and he always has.”

  He seemed, oddly enough, relieved. “You must be psychic.”

  She flinched. “Please, don’t even jo
ke. I live with that kind of junk. Mom’s happy to believe in it, but as far as I’m concerned, every self-made guru on the planet ought to be rounded up and shipped to a desert island, where they could con only each other out of money.”

  A strange, somehow lonely expression crossed his face. “You don’t trust anyone. You’re afraid to. Even me.”

  It was as if he’d seen right through her, to the tired, frightened core. Sam bit her lip and stared out the window. She wanted so badly for him to stay. She had a thousand questions to ask about himself. His hand pressed tighter around hers, a disastrous, coaxing gentleness that frightened her because it was so irresistible. Nothing and no one but he had ever made her feel that way. The shock of seeing him again segued into alarm over the consequences. “I decided a long time ago to take care of my mother and my sister. Aunt Alex means a lot to them. Maybe she’s the only one I can trust.”

  “You hate being afraid of her,” he said.

  That bombshell made her instantly defensive. She couldn’t deny it, but how did he know? “And you’re not?” she asked coolly.

  “I’m afraid of what she can do to other people in retaliation. I’m afraid of what she can do to you.”

  A soft oh of pleasure melted through her, but couldn’t erase the anxiety. “Then why did you come here if you know it might only cause trouble?” He looked away, his eyes shuttered, a muscle working in his jaw. “I’ll leave soon. For your sake.”

  “I—Jake—I don’t want you to—I wish …” Her voice trailed off miserably, and her shoulders slumped. “You must have a lot of girls,” she said finally. “And a car. And … freedom.” She glanced at him. “You can even vote now.”

  “You’re wrong about the girls.”

  “Hah. The way you look? You’d be crazy not to—” She halted, wishing she could pull those words back.

  “Must be crazy then.”

  “I could pass for eighteen. I feel that old.”

  “There’s no hurry.”