From behind us a voice spoke—Hillary’s voice, high-pitched with excitement. “Stay right there! And drop that gun you’re holding, Maddocks.”
I swung around and saw him standing half shadowed in the lantern light, a rifle in his hands. That same rifle that had stood behind the bar at the Timberline? The one that had been used in the attempt on Ingram’s life? I felt sick again with shock and despair.
Jon dropped his revolver, and Hillary stepped forward to prod him with the rifle.
“I saw you going down into Domino,” Hillary said. “So I told Gail to make it good about my being trapped. She’s scared enough by this time to do as I say.”
“But why?” I pleaded. “Hillary, tell me why all this has happened?”
Light from the lantern on the rocky floor threw shadows eerily up his face. “You were such a pushover, Laurie. I knew I had to meet you if I was going to pay off your grandmother, and Ingram too. I had to get you out to Jasper. I’d found out about your aunt in Dillon, and I meant to look her up, maybe meet you if you were around. You saved me a lot of trouble by walking into the theater that day. Then your grandmother sent for you, and all I had to do was tag along.”
“For the money?” I said. “Was that it?”
His voice came down from its strung-up pitch, sounding almost gentle. “In a way I fell for you, Laurie. For a while you needed me, and maybe I’ll put you into a play yet.”
Jon’s arm tightened about me. “Why do you want us here, Lange? What game are you playing now?”
Again Hillary’s voice changed, turning rough—that marvelous stage voice that knew so well how to play on the emotions. Only this was no longer playacting.
“Playing? A game? No, it’s not that anymore. You’re going to suffer a little now. The way my father suffered, because of Persis Morgan. Because of Mark Ingram. You’re going to help me pay off a debt.”
“Gail told us,” I said. “Is it true? Are you really Noah Armand’s son?”
The pressure was rising in him now, keying him up to a dangerous pitch. Yet somehow he managed to hold himself in check. He wanted me to know every bit of it—so the debt he spoke of would be paid.
“Of course it’s true! Though I never knew the story until a year ago, when my father died. In a mental institution. Think about that, Laurie. I was with him at the end, and his mind cleared for a little while, so he could tell me the story. About how badly Persis Morgan had treated him. About how Ingram had left him to die here in the mine, and then had gone off with all that money from Persis Morgan.”
“Did he also tell you that he killed my father?” I asked.
“That too!” Hillary was driven now by a stronger passion than I had ever sensed in him before. A passion of strange and twisted devotion for a father he had hardly known. “Your mother played with him, led him on! He had to kill your father in self-defense. He picked up that extra deringer you’d loaded and used it—as he had to. I found that gun in his things at my mother’s house after he died, and I brought it out here with me. I wish I could have seen your face, Laurie, when you discovered the two guns back in their case. I hunted for your spent bullet too, but I never found it.”
“Does your mother know all of this?”
He brushed my words aside carelessly. “We were never close. And she let him down too. Oh, I’d have told you some of it after we were married, Laurie. I wouldn’t have let you go on thinking what you did about yourself. But now I know you’re one of the cheaters too—running out on me for this cowboy! And for what you did to my father—just by loading those guns! You and your grandmother were to blame.”
I held onto Jon’s arm, weak with horror. Hillary would see only what he chose to see, what he chose to believe, and he had clearly idealized his father out of all resemblance to the real man.
“It’s time now,” he said, picking up the lantern. “You’re going down the shaft—both of you. There’s an old ladder there, though it’s broken in places. If you fall, it’s a pretty long drop. Like the one my father had to take. You won’t have to stay forever, but it will give Gail and me time to get away. And at least we have that jewelry of your grandmother’s to take along.”
Jon said, “We’re not going down that shaft. Just shut us in here, if you must, and get yourself away.”
Hillary had picked up Jon’s revolver, setting the rifle aside. “You’ll do what I tell you to.”
“No,” Jon said.
The gun was pointed at Jon, and Hillary’s nervous finger was on the trigger. There was one chance, and I had to take it. I flung myself against Hillary’s arm, knocking it up, so that the shot went wild, roaring and reverberating through the tunnels, making the very walls tremble. Jon threw himself to the side into darkness, and Hillary fired again and again, wildly, so that the roaring increased and I could hear bullets striking rock, ricocheting, bringing down slabbing over our heads. He wasn’t aiming at anything now—just firing wildly, out of control.
It didn’t stop until the gun was empty. The lantern had fallen on its side, and I couldn’t see Jon, couldn’t tell if he had been hurt. I wasn’t even sure about myself. All the roaring had confused and frightened me.
When the echoes shivered away, the sounds didn’t die out with them. There was a new cracking and creaking all about us, as though ceilings and walls might crumble in and crush us. Jon was on his feet, catching me by the arm, pulling me along.
“Quick!” he shouted.
Hillary had seen what was happening too, and he was ahead of us. Already rock was crumbling into the doorway. The overhead beam had cracked, and timbers and rock were coming down. The crash sent up a great roar of its own, and even as we stared in dim lantern light, the mountain seemed to move. For an instant Hillary stood silhouetted against the moonlight. Then he was gone.
The entire wall, the ceiling, the beams over the doorway—all crashed in, filling the space that had made an opening into the mountain. For what seemed a long time afterward, chunks of rock fell. We could hear some of them rolling down the slope outside.
Finally it was quiet again—almost quiet. I stood very still in my terrible fright, while Jon picked up the lantern, still burning, and held it high. The opening had been blocked with rock. And Hillary was in there. What was left of Hillary.
When there was nothing more to fall, Jon went to the mound of broken timbers and crumbled rock. But there was nothing that could be done. Hillary could never have escaped alive. So much rock had crashed in that a small mountain closed the door and not even a crack of moonlight shone through.
“There’s nothing to do but wait,” Jon said. “There may be a long night ahead until someone from the house comes looking for us.”
“There’s Gail,” I said. “Maybe she’ll have heard.”
“If we can expect anything from her. She’s going to save her own skin first.”
“But we’ve got to do something …” My teeth had begun to chatter from the reaction, from the shock of Hillary’s death—the shock of everything he had told us that was now beginning to come through to me. Even Belle’s tragic, pointless death.
I must have sagged against the wall, for Jon reached out to steady me. “Hang on, Laurie. We’ll wait for a while and see what happens. If no one comes, we’ll try the tunnel I sealed up, to see if there’s any way of digging past the cement. I saw an old shovel back there. In the meantime let’s see if we can get some rest. It may be morning before they come for us.”
In the lantern light I looked at my watch. It was already the morning of a new day, but it would be hours until dawn. Jon drew me down and we sat together against a rock wall. The floor was infinitely cold and hard, and so was the wall at our backs, but we held each other for warmth and I took comfort in his arms. He smoothed the tangle of my hair, and his touch was tender, as it had been so long ago.
It was something to have the lantern for as long as it burned. It would be worse when total darkness came. As it had come for Noah Armand down in that shaft, and for Mark
Ingram, who had tried to rescue his friend, losing his leg in the effort, then somehow blaming my grandmother all these years for sending them both into disaster.
I pressed my head against Jon’s shoulder.
“It’s nearly over, Laurie,” he said. “Just a little while more.”
For all those early morning hours we huddled together, and time went by. I tried not to think of Hillary. I tried not to think of the Glory Hole out there—where all those men had died. I thought about the future. There had to be one—with Jon. If ever we got out of here, I would make it happen.
I must have slept a little in Jon’s arms. But when I woke with a start, I found myself lying on the rock floor while he moved toward the blocked entrance, lantern in hand.
“There’s someone out there,” he said.
I could hear the voices now, the shouting. One voice seemed to be giving orders, sharply and clearly.
“That’s Mark Ingram!” I cried, and Jon shouted back to him.
“We’ll get you out!” Ingram called, and I heard the vigor and determination in his voice. “I’ve got some of my men here to start the digging. So just hold on.”
XXI
It took what seemed forever to accomplish, but the rock had fallen in a limited area around the doorway and it was still loose enough to move when there were many hands with shovels. We knew when Hillary’s body was found and carried away.
The task was done at last, and welcome daylight poured into the mouth of the tunnel, where we waited. When Jon pushed me out ahead of him, a cheer went up from the men standing around with shovels and pickaxes. Then Jon was out beside me, and what we saw was more heartening than anything we could have imagined.
Beyond the workmen, yet close enough to be in command if necessary, Persis Morgan sat proudly in the front seat of a Land Rover. She was dressed as I had never seen her, in Levi’s and jacket, and Caleb Hawes sat glumly beside her, behind the wheel.
I ran toward them and hung onto the door next to her, unable to find words.
“Don’t sputter, Laurie,” she said. “I can’t get up on a horse yet, but they couldn’t stop me from coming. I thought I’d better supervise this job.”
Her words were jaunty, but her eyes told me how worried she had been. I hugged whatever I could reach of her.
Mark Ingram, astride his horse, regarded us ruefully, but with a reluctant gleam of respect for my grandmother. He wasn’t the same man I remembered. Loss and pain had shaken and beaten him, dispelling the cocky benevolence. This was a grim but far less driven man. More than ever I knew that he had loved Belle Durant.
We weren’t able to put together all the details of what had happened until some time after when we were back at Morgan House.
Gail had indeed heard the crash and rumble of falling rock. She had ridden her horse up the trail and seen that the door to the mine had been closed by the mountain itself. She was already afraid of Hillary, not knowing how to escape what she had started. I remembered her weeping that night in the church. When she saw the rockfall, she rode straight back to Morgan House, roused my grandmother, and returned her jewels. Persis had then phoned Ingram for help, and he’d gathered his men and headed for Domino, with Persis insisting that she must come too.
Gail had not gone with them. She didn’t want to see Hillary again, alive or dead, and was going home to her family for a while. If anyone wanted her, that was where she would be.
On the way to the Old Desolate, Ingram rode along beside Persis in the Land Rover, and he had admitted without shame the bluff he’d tried to pull when it came to those bones in the mine. The buckle, for instance.
All those years before, when he had tried to get Noah out of the shaft, he had used Noah’s belt in a futile effort to pull him up the ladder. But he had fallen himself, injuring his leg so badly that it had been removed later. When Tully had rescued him, before they took Noah out, Ingram still had that belt in his hands, and he’d kept the buckle all this time. To remind him of a debt of vengeance he meant to pay. But since Belle’s death he wanted that no longer. All he wanted now was to get away from this cursed place. After what had happened to Belle, he couldn’t stay on.
As I listened to all this, I thought again of human complexity and marveled at the old mingling of good and evil—in all of us.
“You can buy me out if you want,” he told Persis. “I’ll charge you a good price. But I never want to see any of this again.”
In Domino someone went first to minister to Tully, and he had been taken back to Jasper and was safe in bed at the Timberline recovering.
While we talked of these things over breakfast in Persis’ room, she sat against her pillows, sipping milk laced with brandy. She looked weary, but pleased with herself.
“Now then,” she said when the telling was over, “what about you two?”
That was a good question, but I didn’t look at Jon, nor he at me.
She snorted indignantly. “Go away then, both of you, and talk! I was never so backward when I was your age!”
Jon smiled at her, but his look was sober when he turned to me. “Do you want to go for a walk, Laurie?”
I was in a mood to go anywhere he led me, no matter how tired I felt.
Persis held out a hand to each of us, and I bent to kiss her cheek. Caleb came into the hall as we left and held out his own hand, a bit hesitantly, as though he weren’t sure I would take it. But I could forgive him now. I understood a little better.
Outdoors, we found the sun climbing high above the mountains, and I stood for a moment looking off toward Old Desolate.
Jon watched me quizzically. “Maybe we’d better do as she says and talk a bit.”
I nodded, determination growing in me. Together, but not touching by so much as a finger—as though we’d never spent those frightening, tender hours in the mine—we followed the path to Jon’s cabin. Red came with us joyfully, more sure than I was that we three belonged together.
Inside, when the fire leaped in the grate to Jon’s satisfaction, throwing a rosy flicker over the room, we sat a bit stiffly on the couch, watching the flames. What a stubborn, impossible man he was!
“I’m sorry about Hillary,” he said at last. “Sorry about all you must be feeling. Sorry if you loved him.”
“I thought I loved him. At first. But then I met a cowboy I’ve known all my life. A stubborn, impossible cowboy.”
“Don’t, Laurie,” he said.
I’d had enough, and being a Morgan, I went right on. “If you won’t, then I must. It’s hard to believe that you, of all people, would put money ahead of life.”
“Shut up,” he told me, but there was no sting in the words. “I’ll do my own talking—if you’ll just listen. I don’t like all that Morgan money behind you. I’m not all that liberated. But I love you, Laurie, no matter what. And I think maybe you’ll fit in out here, after all, though I didn’t expect that at first.”
“But I belong here—” I began to protest.
“Wait! You don’t really know that yet. You haven’t had a chance to live here under normal circumstances. There are all sorts of objections I could give you.”
I suppressed a desire to sputter out some objections of my own. Men could be so terribly slow. They came to conclusions through careful steps of logic—yet they were the same conclusions a woman flew to surely and instinctively, leaving the man behind with his plodding good sense. Now I must be careful and submit to logic.
He went on. “I don’t want a wife to wash my socks and cook my meals. I can do those things just fine for myself. And I don’t want a big house with servants and all the possessions that go with that sort of life. I don’t want to be owned by possessions. So—what will you do, Laurie Morgan, if you make your life out here?”
I didn’t need a moment’s time to think. “I want a job. I’d like to help on the plan you and Persis have going. That’s where money can be spent. And I can help if you’ll teach me. I want to find a way to use me.”
“That
’s what I want for you,” he said, and kissed me.
There was a mingling in me of happiness and sorrow. It would be a long time before the effects of what had happened would wear off. But now, with Jon’s arms warm and comforting about me, I knew that this was a beginning. Perhaps the beginning of the very first day of my life.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to those who helped to make Domino possible. To Marlys Millhiser and Lucinda Baker, who know the West, and whose books I admire. To David Clemens of the Huntington Public Library, who found all that wonderful material about deringers for me. And especially to Sara Courant of the Patchogue Public Library, who never fails me, no matter what peculiar roads of research I choose to follow.
A Biography of Phyllis A. Whitney
Phyllis Ayame Whitney (1903–2008) was a prolific author of seventy-six adult and children’s novels. Over fifty million copies of her books were sold worldwide during the course of her sixty-year writing career, establishing her as one of the most successful mystery and romantic suspense writers of the twentieth century. Whitney’s dedication to the craft and quality of writing earned her three lifetime achievement awards and the title “The Queen of the American Gothics.”
Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, to American parents, Mary Lillian (Lilly) Mandeville and Charles (Charlie) Whitney. Charles worked for an American shipping line. When Whitney was a child, her family moved to Manila in the Philippines, and eventually settled in Hankow, China.
Whitney began writing stories as a teenager but focused most of her artistic attention on her other passion: dance. When her father passed away in China in 1918, Whitney and her mother took a ten-day journey across the Pacific Ocean to America, and they settled in Berkley, California. Later they moved to San Antonio, Texas. Lilly continued to be an avid supporter of Whitney’s dancing, creating beautiful costumes for her performances. While in high school, her mother passed away, and Whitney moved in with her aunt in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from high school in 1924, Whitney turned her attention to writing, nabbing her first major publication in the Chicago Daily News. She made a small income from writing stories at the start of her career, and would eventually go on to publish around one hundred short stories in pulp magazines by the 1930s.
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