That done, I ran out into the front office, startling Trinksie so badly that she screamed and dropped the files she was carrying. Danny Stanford was there too, and though he didn’t scream, he also looked shocked.
“Callie!” Trinksie yelled. “Where did you come from?”
“What happened to you?” Danny echoed, and I realized that I was covered, head to toe, in mud.
“Trinksie, call nine one one,” I said, but she just stood there, stunned.
“I’ll do it,” Danny offered, stepping toward the phone. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said breathlessly, “but I’ve been down inside a mine.”
“A mine?” asked Trinksie.
“A gem mine. Like rubies, emeralds? This building sits atop an entire mine, and there’s an entrance to it right from Zeb’s office.”
They stared at me like I was crazy.
“Yeah, hold on just a second,” Danny said into the phone, and then he looked at me skeptically. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“Just say they need to send the police out here right away. But no sirens, because we’ve got to get the other exit covered before he tries to come out.”
“He who?”
“Zeb Hooper. He’s in the mine now, and he may have realized I’m onto him.”
Trinksie started fanning her face with her hands.
“This just isn’t happening,” she said. “You’re nuts.”
Charging past me, she headed straight for Zeb’s office. I followed along behind as Danny tried to explain the situation to the authorities over the phone.
In the office, Trinksie saw the moved desk and the spilled box and demanded to know what I had done. Just then, the door from the mine began rattling, and I knew that Zeb was on the other side, trying to come through. Trinksie screamed.
“I’ll handle this,” Danny said, squeezing past us and going to the desk.
Even as the door continued to rattle, Danny rifled through various drawers.
“What are you trying to do?” I said.
He found what he was looking for in the back of the top left drawer. As he pulled out his hand, I saw that he was holding a gun. Pointing it at the door to the mine, he squeezed the trigger. A bullet blasted through the cinder block, leaving a smoking hole the size of a fist.
Instantly, the rattling stopped. From inside, we could hear the sound of Zeb’s body falling down the stairs.
Danny turned toward us, the gun still clutched in his fist. Trinksie and I stared at him, open-mouthed.
“Move the desk away from the door,” he commanded, gesturing with the gun.
Maybe I was a little slow, but it took me a good 30 seconds to realize that he was now pointing the gun at us.
I wanted to do something quick and simple to disarm him. But Trinksie stood between me and him, and there was nothing I could do that wouldn’t put her in even more danger.
Danny held us at gunpoint while Trinksie and I struggled to move the desk away from the door. Once we succeeded, he ordered me to stand with my hands against the wall, then he pointed the gun at my head and told Trinksie to go into the storage room and get a roll of duct tape. She did as he said, and then he ordered her to tape my hands together behind my back.
“I’m sorry, Callie,” she sobbed as she did so. I didn’t reply but merely kept my eyes, unblinking, on Danny.
When she finished with me, he had Trinksie turn off the office light, pull the door shut, and then open the door to the mine. Gun to our backs, he forced us to go down the stairs as he brought up the rear, pulling the door shut behind him.
Zeb was lying at the bottom of the stairs, his right shoulder covered in blood. Trinksie ran to him, still crying, and I was surprised that he was alive. I was also surprised to see that there were lights on inside the mine, a string of bare bulbs along the ceiling, wired from a plug near the door.
We crowded at the bottom of the stairs, blocked by the heavy beams. Danny pointed to one of the beams and told Trinksie to kick it out of place. As she did so, the beam fell to the ground and a shower of dirt rained down on all of us.
“Pull him through,” Danny barked.
She tried dragging Zeb between the beams but he was too heavy. Finally, Zeb used his legs to push himself while Trinksie pulled on his good arm, and they managed to make their way past the beams to the center of the room. At Danny’s command, I followed until we were all to the far wall of the chamber. He threw the roll of duct tape at Trinksie and told her to tape Zeb’s hands. Zeb moaned as she did so, in terrible pain from his wound.
“The police will be here any minute,” Trinksie said as she worked.
“The police aren’t coming, you idiot,” Danny said. “Did you really think I dialed nine one one?”
Once Zeb was taped, Danny frisked him and came up with a pocketknife. After tossing it to one side, he ordered Trinksie to sit down with her back to me, and then he managed to duct tape the two of us together using one hand and his teeth while he held the gun steady with the other. When he was finished, he stepped back and admired his handiwork.
“Well,” he said, breathing heavily from the exertion. “What do you think of this? Callie, thanks to you, we’re all here together.”
“What’s going on?” Trinksie whimpered.
“What’s going on is that Zeb and Danny are illegally mining on Tinsdale land,” I explained. “I was trying to explore the mine after Zeb had left for the day, but for some reason he came back.”
Zeb stirred and then rasped, “I needed the sump pump. My basement’s taking on water.”
I looked from Zeb to Danny, who was watching us with a bemused expression on his face.
“Why don’t you let us go, Danny?” I said. “Zeb’s still alive. It’s not too late to save this situation.”
“Oh, this situation has dragged on way too long already. Zeb, I do believe it’s time we parted ways.”
Except for Trinksie’s sniffling, the three of us on the ground were silent. Danny seemed to catch his breath and calm down, and then he pocketed the gun and methodically went about doing something with the beams near the stairs. At one point, he stopped and went deeper into the mine.
“Zeb,” I whispered when Danny was out of earshot. “That’s your gun he’s got. How many bullets are in it?”
“From my desk?” Zeb asked in a weak voice.
“Yeah.”
“Six. Well, five now.”
That was still five too many.
Danny came back into the room, humming, carrying a small ladder. I watched as he propped it against the wall near the beams, checked it for steadiness, and climbed with what looked like a pick in his hand.
“Danny, don’t,” Zeb said. “You’ll bring the roof down and kill us all.”
“Hmm,” Danny said sarcastically as he climbed. “Well, I think it’s worth the risk, and you folks are going to die anyway.”
When he reached the top of the ladder, he braced himself against it with his legs, then he swung the pick at the ceiling. Dirt poured down on him as he did so, but he didn’t seem to care; he just kept working.
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“He’s taking out the queen,” Zeb replied.
“The queen?”
“I stopped him from working on it weeks ago when I realized he was compromising the integrity of the ceiling. If he brings that stone out, I believe the whole area will cave in.”
I leaned forward and looked, and from what I could see, Danny was chipping away at the dirt around a giant rock that protruded from the ceiling. The white-and-blue color of the rock was the same as the one I had pulled from the bucket earlier, except it was about a hundred times bigger. At least.
“What kind of stone is that?” I asked.
“Sapphire,” Zeb said. “The whole mine is sapphires.”
“You wanna talk about sapphires,” Danny called out to us as he worked. “This queen is gonna top your Princess Tatiana
at least four times over.”
Princess Tatiana. I thought back to where I had heard that name, remembering that Princess Tatiana was the woman Zeb Hooper was rumored to have run away with in his youth, when he later came back wealthy enough to buy a construction company.
“Who is Princess Tatiana?” I asked.
“Not who, what,” Danny said. “It’s a sapphire. One of the biggest ever found. Until now.”
Of course! Zeb didn’t leave town with a woman way back then. He left town with a big, valuable stone. He took it to a gem dealer, sold it, and came home with the profits. Princess Tatiana was a sapphire, not a person.
“Is that how long you’ve been stealing from this mine, Zeb? Since you were a young man?”
“When I was a young man, this was a working mica mine. They didn’t even care about the sapphires back then.”
“The story goes that Zeb used that big, ugly rock as a doorstop in his house for about ten years,” Danny said, chipping away. “Then one day he realized what he might have, so he took it to a dealer and sold it for a small fortune.”
“What happened between then and now, Zeb?”
He exhaled slowly, and though I knew he must’ve been in considerable pain, he seemed willing to talk.
“I just wanted to buy the mine,” he said. “I tried to come by things legitimately. I’ve bought property all over this town, looking for gems. But there’s never been any vein like this one, and Lowell wouldn’t sell it to me.”
“So you tunneled your way in from the other side of the mountain?”
“That tunnel worked fine for years. But I’m getting older. I thought there was an easier way. When I found out Lowell was donating land to Su Casa, I made sure we built right where we did. I gave myself a new entrance, straight from my own office. What could be simpler? Or so I thought, until my gem dealer came down here from New York and tried to blackmail his way into my source.”
“Your gem dealer?” I asked, thinking of the man who was stabbed behind the church on Sunday night.
“That’s me!” Danny said loudly, taking an extra big swing at the ceiling. As the pick connected with the dirt, an entire chunk came flying down and almost knocked him off the ladder.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Danny, you’re a gem dealer? What about Detroit and your job as an accountant?”
“What about your parents’ accident?” Trinksie added.
He paused in his work and looked at us.
“People are so gullible,” he said. “Give ’em a good sob story, and they’ll believe anything.”
“Danny’s from New York,” Zeb said. “Everything he’s said or done since he got here has been a lie. Now he’s gonna kill us all, just the way he killed Morales and just the way he killed Roy.”
“Roy?”
“His old business partner. The man who got stabbed Sunday night? Roy came here looking for a sweet deal himself, but nobody blackmails the blackmailer. Danny simply did him in.”
“Danny stabbed that man in the parking lot?” Trinksie asked angrily. “Danny, you’re the one Snake was trying to protect?”
“Snake is the best flunky I ever found,” Danny said. “That kid would do almost anything to become a member of the club.” He laughed, his voice echoing against the rock. “A club. Best idea I ever had.”
I took a deep breath in the dusty air, trying to clear my mind.
“Wait a minute,” I said to Zeb. “How could Danny have killed Enrique Morales? Danny wasn’t even living here back then.”
Danny laughed.
“I was visiting,” he said. “I came here to call on my buddy Zeb, to see where he was getting such sweet stones. I knew there was something funny about his situation, but I never guessed he was building himself a secret entrance to somebody else’s mine.”
“Danny only stayed in town a few days that time,” Zeb explained. “And he kept a very low profile while he was here—he was either in the mine or at my house. I don’t think anyone else ever saw him. When Enrique discovered the hidden door, Danny tricked me into luring him down here, and then he killed him.”
“Hey,” Danny said, swinging his pick. “It’s a tough job, but somebody had to do it.”
“You never said you were going to kill him,” Zeb said. “I just thought you would rough him up a bit. Convince him to keep his mouth shut.”
“I don’t understand,” Trinksie said. “Why did you put Enrique’s body in the apples?”
Danny gave a sharp laugh.
“That was just supposed to be temporary,” Zeb said. “We hid the body there ’cause we needed to stash it somewhere in a hurry. We weren’t sure if Enrique had told anyone about the mine, so we couldn’t leave the body down here, in case someone came looking.”
“We were gonna come back and get the body out of the apples that night, after dark,” Danny continued, “maybe throw it in the lake or bury it in the woods. But by then, the apple bin was gone. The truck had come and picked it up, and that migrant had already been sealed tight in the apple storage, with no way to get him out until springtime.”
“So the day that the room was unsealed,” I said, “Danny was supposed to be driving the forklift, and the bin of apples you came to pick up in your truck was the bin with the body in it?”
“If all had gone according to plan,” Zeb said. “Though we knew it might be a bit tricky.”
Trinksie shifted her weight, causing the duct tape to cut into my side.
“What about that letter from New York?” I asked. “How did Roy’s fingerprints get on it?”
I wrote that letter and sent it to Roy,” Danny snapped. “He was just supposed to put it in an envelope and mail it back down to Luisa. But the idiot had to go and read it first. That got him curious enough to eventually come down here and see what was going on for himself.”
Trinksie shook her head.
“I still don’t get it,” she said. “Danny, why did you move here and take a job on the farm? Why did you pretend to be someone that you’re not?”
He paused in his work to consider her question.
“I haven’t seen a vein this rich with sapphires in my entire life,” he said. “I knew a job on the orchard would give me a good cover for sapphire mining—plus it would give me the chance to get that migrant’s body out of the apple storage before anyone else saw it.”
“Why did it matter, after all that time?” I asked.
“Because of how he died!” Danny said. “The chemicals, the mica. We knew if they did an autopsy, somebody would put two and two together eventually.”
“But then why the position with Go the Distance?” I asked. “The whole orchard liaison thing?”
“Because Karen Weatherby is set to inherit this entire place. Duh. Maybe Tinsdale wouldn’t sell this property to Zeb, but I was gonna give it my best shot to marry into it. The old guy was supposed to die long before now.”
I thought of Karen and Pete and Lowell’s will, and I realized that Danny had no real interest in Karen. He only wanted her for her inheritance—an inheritance she didn’t even know she wasn’t going to get! I had let myself get sidetracked by their issues. They had nothing to do with any of this.
The real issue was that Danny Stanford was a sociopath, willing to manipulate, lie, steal, and kill just to get what he wanted.
“You said it couldn’t be done,” Danny cried exuberantly. He swung the pick with a mighty blow, and then we all watched as the big rock broke loose from the ceiling. Like a giant pendulum, it hung there for a moment, and then it came completely free and crashed to the ground with a deep, heavy thud.
I braced myself for what would come next, closing my eyes and bending my head. The roof held, however, and after a moment, Danny cheered with glee.
“I told you, Zeb!” he said, tossing the pick. “I told you it would hold!”
He ran to the big bucket of soaking gemstones and dumped the liquid out onto the ground. Then he started going around the room and collecting sapphires from vari
ous piles, throwing them all into the bucket. Apparently, if this was the last looting of the mine, he was going to do a thorough job of it.
Finally, he took off into the cave, laughing.
“Where is he going?” I asked Zeb.
“He’s probably collecting the stones from all of the buckets,” Zeb replied.
“Is he gone?” a voice asked from the top of the stairs.
“Snake?” Trinksie whispered. “Is that you?”
“I thought Snake was in jail!” I said.
“I bailed him out this morning,” Trinksie replied.
We heard the door open, and a moment later Snake appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
“I-I been listening through the hole in the door,” he said softly. “Is he gone now?”
“Snake!” I whispered sharply. “Grab that knife by the wall and come cut us loose!”
He did as I directed, grabbing Zeb’s pocketknife that Danny had confiscated, running over to us, and quickly slicing through our bonds. My hands were numb, and I flexed my fingers in front of me as I ran for the pick that Danny had tossed to the wall. Snake helped Trinksie to her feet, and then she tended to Zeb.
“All right, folks!” Danny cried, coming into the room with two bucket handles in each hand. “It won’t be long now.”
When he entered the room, he hesitated, momentarily surprised when he saw we weren’t still taped together on the ground. He recovered quickly, however, dropping the buckets and reaching for his gun.
Just as quickly, I swung back the pickax to throw at him, but then Snake decided to be brave and make a run at Danny. With Snake in the way, I had to hold off from throwing the sharp tool. In an instant, Danny gained the upper hand.
“Stop!” Danny cried, pointing the gun as the boy froze in front of him. Still looking at Snake, Danny said, “Callie, put the pickax down and come back over with the rest.”
Reluctantly, I dropped the tool into the mud and rejoined the group.
“Snake, buddy,” Danny said, forcing a smile. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve got some heavy things I could use your help with.”
A Dime a Dozen Page 31
