Desert Flame

by Janine Grey

  He shrugged. ‘People get disheartened. There was one other guy up here until just after I arrived. Paul Daly – Old Pauly, the locals call him – but he’s gone too, now. He retired. The guy must be well into his seventies, and his eyesight got so bad he probably wouldn’t have spotted a find if it had been right in front of him.’

  ‘Mick said he was away having cataract surgery.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Eliza thought about what he’d said. ‘So when was the last big black opal found around here?’

  He pulled a screwdriver from his tool belt and tapped at the opal seam she’d spotted. ‘Never.’

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘Still think I’m not mad?’ A few more taps and a sliver of rock came free. He spat on it and rubbed it hard against his shirt before handing it to her. ‘Here.’

  She turned it over in her hand. For a moment it looked like dull grey rock, and then – ‘Oh, my! Look!’ – the rock exploded into colour under the light of her lamp. Purples and golds threw dazzling flecks of light around the dark tunnel.

  ‘Pretty.’

  Something in his tone touched her and she glanced up. For a fraction of a second, she thought he was looking at her but it was just the shadows cast by the opal.

  ‘It’s like a fireworks display,’ she said.

  He replaced the screwdriver and hammer in his tool belt and crossed his arms over his chest, eyes on the opal. ‘The fire in the stone,’ he said, his voice soft.

  ‘Fire in the stone,’ Eliza repeated, staring at the small sliver in her hand. Something magical shivered through her. How could the lonely dark produce colours so spectacular? ‘Whoever came up with that knew what they were talking about.’

  Fin nodded.

  ‘My mother had an opal ring, but it was nothing like this,’ she told him. ‘It was beautiful, like – like coconut ice. Pale pink and mauve streaks. I had no idea opal could be this rich, this deep in colour.’

  ‘That’s why black opal is prized above all else. The one I’m looking for is the size of an egg with a flame at its heart that burns like the sun.’

  He all but breathed the last words, as though they came from somewhere deep inside.

  ‘I hope you find it,’ she said, handing the stone back to him.

  ‘I will find it.’ He folded her fingers around the opal piece in her outstretched hand. ‘Keep it.’

  His fingers were warm and firm against hers. In the dim tunnel, she couldn’t make out the expression in his eyes but there was no mistaking the determination in his voice. In that moment, it was as if he might move every tonne of earth and stone in Australia to achieve his goal. That was it. The elusive quality she’d sensed the first time they’d met was a willingness to do whatever it took, to withstand whatever fate threw his way and to keep forging ahead. So different from other men she’d known.

  About to ask why it was so important to him, she thought of his mother, sentenced to live the autumn of her years locked in the past and unable to find her way forward to the present.

  ‘I went to your mother’s nursing home,’ she said, wanting to show him she understood.

  His head swung towards her. ‘What?’ His voice was flinty, and she knew it had been a mistake. Their brief moment of connection was lost.

  ‘I needed to find you and she was the only lead I had. I wasn’t able to speak with her, but I gather she’s developed dementia very young.’

  ‘It’s really none of your business,’ he said. She stumbled on, trying to make it right.

  ‘Mr Weaver might be prepared to help —’

  ‘Okay, tour’s over. Let’s go.’ He bustled her down the tunnel towards the ladder. ‘Just don’t look down.’

  For the next few minutes, it was all Eliza could do to focus on moving one leg after the other till her thighs and calves burnt. When she reached the top, she stepped onto solid ground and leant with hands on knees trying to catch her breath.

  Eliza was aware that Fin McLeod was standing watching her. When she was finally able to stand upright, she said, ‘You’re right, it’s none of my business but if Mairi needs —’

  ‘Enough.’ He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to.

  ‘It can’t be easy. Maybe Mr Weaver could help in some way.’

  Before he spoke, Eliza knew from his face that she’d overstepped the mark.

  ‘We don’t need help and don’t ever use my mother to pressure me.’

  Eliza paled at the raw fury in his voice. ‘I just —’

  ‘Go. Just go,’ he said, turning away.

  Eliza hesitated. She might have overstepped the mark a little, but Fin was behaving as though she’d tried to blackmail him, which wasn’t at all what she’d intended. Inadvertently, she’d touched a nerve, and no words now would turn it around. But she could retain her dignity and professionalism.

  ‘I hope you find your opal,’ she said quietly. ‘By the way, Jerry Bragg said it would be good if you visited your mother soon.’ She walked to her car, took out the pies with a shaking hand and left them on the camping table.

  When she glanced back at him, she saw only a man who wanted to be alone; all the emotion she’d felt from him in the mine had evaporated. Sighing, she clenched her fingers briefly around the opal in her pocket, wincing as the edge dug into her skin. Then she got in the car and headed back the way she’d come.

  CHAPTER 5

  Arriving back in Tamworth was both a relief and a let-down. Not that the city itself was a disappointment, quite the opposite. Eliza found that its homely, down-to-earth vibe calmed her inner turmoil. The spring weather was fine and clear as she strolled around the home of Australian country music, debating her next move, unwilling to give up and return home.

  It was all pleasantly normal, as though she’d been hurtled from another planet back to normality. And yet something was missing. After just four days in the outback, she felt changed, as if her eyes had started to see wider possibilities.

  Fingal McLeod’s chiselled jaw, stormy eyes and other attributes sprung into her mind at unexpected moments, and she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since she’d left him at Ruin Flat. She’d seen her share of well-endowed men before, but there was a raw and primitive beauty about his nakedness that didn’t come from gym workouts. And that didn’t even touch upon what he’d been about to do when she’d interrupted him.

  Eliza felt a blush steel up her face at the still-fresh memory. God! She’d never imagined that watching a man almost do that could be so arousing. No, more than that. Hypnotic.

  Lust was an indulgence she couldn’t afford, though, and it was probably a conflict of interest, too. Hourly, she picked over the carcass of what had transpired at the mine, and the more she picked, the more she grew certain that she was not the problem. Her references to his mother’s situation had lit a spark; he’d chosen to let it burn the house down.

  Eliza had chosen her words very deliberately in suggesting it would be in his mother’s interests to seek Ernest Weaver’s help. She had not intended it to be any reflection on his ability or otherwise to care for her.

  None of her friends would have a clue what to do if such a responsibility was thrust upon their shoulders. George Westland, about the same age as Fin, still lived at home and was entirely dependent on his parents for his job and comfortable lifestyle, whereas Fingal McLeod was clearly both independent and driven. Before meeting with him, she’d made some calls and found out he’d worked for two mining giants since leaving university, moving rapidly up the corporate ladder, and Eliza had mixed with enough business heavyweights to know that that didn’t happen without good reason.

  Still, he’d given it up to hunt opals on the New South Wales frontier . . . or had he? She was struck by Mick’s reference to some sort of problem between Fin and MineCorp that had led to his departure. If she did a more thorough online search, what would she find? She had his name typed into the Google search bar on her phone before hesitating.

  As a
probate investigator, it was her duty to find things out to help her carry out her client’s wishes. As a person, she sensed that Fin would loathe any invasion of his privacy. But she would only look at what was on the public record. It wasn’t as though she was probing his deepest darkest secrets. And really, did she owe the man anything?

  Still unsure, she closed the web browser. She needed information, but for now she would try another investigative angle. In any case, it had been more than a month since she had spoken to Ernest Weaver. It was time she updated him, disappointing though the news was.

  Checking into a small hotel, she sat on the bed in the pretty room and dialled his number. The phone rang for so long she thought no one was there, but finally his quavering voice answered.

  ‘Mr Weaver, this is Eliza Mayberry.’

  ‘Who? Ah, Miss Mayberry. I thought you had run off with my money.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, I have. I have some news: I’ve tracked down Mairi McLeod and her son, Fingal.’ She kept her voice steady as she said his name.

  ‘Fingal, did you say? Can’t say I’m surprised by the name. You can take the McLeods out of Scotland but not Scotland out of the McLeods. Rory McLeod has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking that Rory was Constance’s husband, Fingal’s grandfather?’

  ‘Regrettably,’ the old man groused. ‘Connie had a perfectly good life ahead of her until Rory McLeod turned up. Mind you, she was always headstrong. Father tried to tell her what she was giving up, but would she listen?’

  Eliza smiled. She would have liked Constance. ‘Fingal is a miner, working some way from Lightning Ridge.’

  ‘A miner? No, that can’t be right. Just a boy. Might be at college now, I suppose. Time passes.’ His voice was unsteady.

  ‘He’s in his thirties, Mr Weaver, and very much a man.’

  Oh, yes.

  ‘I spoke to him and he was not especially receptive to my approach.’ Eliza framed her next question as delicately as she could. ‘He expressed disappointment with the lack of family support that his mother received after Logan left them.’

  There was such a long pause that she started to worry he’d nodded off – or worse. ‘Mr Weaver?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, and she heard in his tone echoes of his great-nephew’s gruffness. Clearly Fingal had inherited some Weaver as well as McLeod characteristics. ‘One never likes being reminded of what one might have done differently.’

  Regret was something she knew all about. With a pang, she realised she had not thought of her father for some days, her mind distracted by the McLeod family dramas. Then she heard her mother’s voice in her head, telling her to concentrate on the job at hand. Odd that her mother seemed closer in death than in life, more so than her father. Or perhaps not so strange. It was practical advice she needed now, and that was where her mother had excelled.

  ‘When I received the letter from Mairi,’ Mr Weaver went on, ‘I wasn’t surprised to hear that her husband Logan had left them high and dry. Never met him, but if he was anything like his father Rory, he would have been a wild one. Not good husband material. I wrote back and offered her and the boy a home here. Big house, just me, you see.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, hearing the loneliness in his voice, the longing for family when it was all but too late. ‘What about Constance and Rory. Were they still around?’

  ‘Connie, she –’ he cleared his throat. ‘There’d been a car accident, almost forty years ago now. A truck driver fell asleep at the wheel. Terrible, terrible.’ His voice cracked. ‘My sister died instantly. Rory survived a few weeks. I should have gone to see him, to see young Logan. There’d been a falling-out before then. But I should have . . . Well, anyway. That was that.

  ‘Logan didn’t keep in touch. He was only a young man then so I can’t blame him, I suppose. Oddly enough, Mairi did, though I never met her. Nice girl. Must have found my address. She sent me a photo from their wedding, and one of the boy when he was born. Never said anything about her family.’ He frowned. ‘You mentioned the boy is a miner? Opals?’

  ‘Yes, just out of Helton, north-west of Lightning Ridge. It’s pretty wild, and remote.’ Like Fingal McLeod himself. Wild, remote, tantalising.

  ‘Well, I wonder . . .’ The old man’s voice trailed off but had lost its haunted quality. He sounded almost excited. ‘I dabbled in the gem trade, you see.’

  Eliza remembered her earlier research. Fin McLeod might have more in common with his great-uncle than he thought.

  ‘When Mairi told me in passing that Logan had acquired an opal mining claim, I was interested,’ Ernest Weaver continued. ‘I asked her if they needed help with industry contacts, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Did you hear anything after that?’

  ‘Mairi eventually wrote back. They moved about a bit, I think, she always wrote from a different address. Sometimes I didn’t hear for a while. She said something about Logan being a proud man, but reading between the lines, it sounded like a struggle.

  ‘I spoke about it with Hugh. Good man, your father. Dabbled in all sorts of investments. Instead of offering the family a hand-out that would be rejected, he suggested I take a financial stake in the mine.’

  ‘You had an interest in Logan McLeod’s mine?’ Eliza asked, surprised.

  ‘I suppose I did,’ Weaver said. ‘I’d almost forgotten all about it until I spoke with your father about finding the boy. Buying into the mine was a first for me. I’d always been at the other end of the business up to that point, dealing in cut gems, mostly.’

  ‘Can I ask what your interest in the mine was? Were you a full partner?’

  ‘Oh, this would have been more than thirty years ago, before the boy was born. I barely remember. I think we had a lawyer draft something up. We signed it and Logan got the cash. Fifteen thousand, I seem to remember. He had already bought the mine and registered the claim but he needed funds for equipment to get it back in working order. It hadn’t been worked for a decade, you see.’

  ‘Do you remember where it was, Mr Weaver? Was it at a place called Ruin Flat?’

  ‘I really can’t remember. It might have been. I do recall the name of the mine sounding like a portent of doom!’

  ‘What happened then?’

  A few long moments passed and Eliza had the impression he was digging deep into his memory vault. ‘Nothing. I heard nothing for years after investing in the mine. No response to my letters until, finally, Logan’s wife contacted me to tell me she hadn’t seen him for years. It came as no surprise, if I’m honest. I always thought . . . Well, that’s all water under the bridge now.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like you thought much of your brother-in-law, Rory, or of his son, Logan.’

  ‘True,’ he acknowledged. ‘But things change. And Mairi struck me as the decent sort. One can only hope that the boy has taken after her.’

  *

  Old Pauly looked, Fin thought, like a pirate. He sat at the bar, one eye still bandaged after his cataract surgery, screeching like a galah in response to every joke that was cracked, no matter how weak, including his own. When Fin had confessed about his near-disaster with the ladder, Pauly had howled like a lunatic – and then insisted on sharing the story with the entire bar.

  ‘How ya feeling?’ Mick yelled at Pauly from across the noisy bar.

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ Pauly answered. ‘But I think I liked it better when I couldn’t see how bloody ugly all youse mongrels are!’

  A roar of laughter followed. Fin smiled into his beer. The last few days had yielded some small finds. He’d brought the opal with him to Helton and made a few dollars. But nothing had indicated there was anything of substance. He kept drifting back to the northern drive, where Logan had concentrated his efforts. Something about it must have tweaked his father’s interest but, as a geologist, Fin couldn’t work out why. As far as he could tell, the structure of the rock was pretty consistent in all three levels, although he had only worked the first few me
tres of each.

  Every time he worked the lowest drive where he’d extracted Miss Mayberry’s tiny opalised rock, he felt a pang of guilt. Just because she was in business didn’t mean she was anything like the sharks at MineCorp, one of whom just happened to be his ex, Danielle.

  Man, he’d really gone overboard when all she’d done was point out the obvious.

  ‘What are you so hangdog about, then?’ Pauly asked, interrupting his introspection. ‘Can’t have missed me that much. I heard you had company of the feminine persuasion up at the Ruin.’

  ‘Family stuff.’

  ‘That right? Yer sister, was she? Yer aunty?’

  ‘What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?’

  ‘Heard she was a looker. Mick’s fallen arse over tit. He’ll cop hell when his missus gets back from walkabout.’

  Fin just grunted.

  ‘Pretty ones don’t usually come up this way voluntarily. Was she a – a professional?’

  Fin scowled. ‘She damn well wasn’t a hooker.’ As if he had the cash for that, even if he had the inclination, which he didn’t.

  ‘Keep your shirt on. Just making conversation, which ain’t easy. You got something against opening yer trap?’

  ‘She said something similar,’ Fin muttered.

  ‘Bloke gets uncivilised living up there on his own. Forgets how to be with people.’

  Fin drained his beer. ‘Gotta go.’

  ‘Have another. My shout.’

  Before Fin had a chance to refuse, Pauly was shouting the whole hotel, which caused a series of wild whoops.

  ‘So, you found anything yet?’ Pauly asked as Chris pushed two foaming schooners towards them.

  ‘Nothing much. Sold some small pieces today.’ They concentrated on their beer for a few minutes.

  ‘Gotta be an easier way to make a living,’ Pauly said with a sly wink.

  ‘If there is, I haven’t found it yet.’ Fin drained his beer and stood. ‘Early start tomorrow. Thanks for the beer, mate.’

  ‘Any time.’

  *

  The conversation with Ernest Weaver had given Eliza plenty of food for thought.