by Cindy Myers
Maggie flinched as an icy drop hit her face. She looked up and another splashed her in the eye. “Maybe we should turn back,” she said.
“No, this is interesting. No bats, though. There goes the guano empire.”
“Darn. I was already looking forward to designing bat-shit queen T-shirts.”
“I don’t see any gold yet either,” Barb said.
“I don’t think you’re going to find nuggets lying around on the floor,” Maggie said. “I think I remember they found veins of gold in rock. They had to cut the rock out, then crush it and process it with chemicals to get at the gold.”
“What does the ore look like?”
“I have no idea.”
“Fat lot of help you are. You own a mine and you don’t bother to find out these things?”
“When we get out of here I promise I’ll run right out and get that geology degree.” She banged her shin on a rock. “This is ridiculous. We should go back.”
“We haven’t even gone that far yet. Come on.”
“I’ll leave without you.”
“No, you won’t. I’ve got the flashlight.”
Maggie ground her teeth together but continued to follow her friend. Barb halted. “What is it?” Maggie asked, trying to see over Barb’s shoulder.
“A fork in the road.”
“Is this another pun?”
“No, there’s a side tunnel.”
“Don’t take it. We’ll get lost.”
“We won’t get lost. I have a very good sense of direction.”
“Those are probably the last words of everyone who ever got lost in a cave.”
“This tunnel definitely looks like it’s been used more than the other.” The flashlight beam wavered and dipped. “Look!”
“Look at what? I can’t see anything but your back.”
Barb turned sideways and shone the light on a niche in the wall. There, on a shelf of rock, sat a half-empty water bottle, a small colored piece of gravel, and a small silver disk.
Maggie reached past Barb and picked up the disk. “It looks like a religious medal,” she said, recalling the St. Christopher medal a friend’s mom kept hanging from the rearview mirror of the family car when Maggie was a girl.
“Which saint is it?” Barb asked.
Maggie studied the little figure. It was of a woman in a long gown, a halo on her head. She carried a glowing cup, and behind her was what looked like a tower. “I don’t know.” She replaced the disk on the shelf.
“Was your dad religious?” Barb asked.
“I don’t know.” Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think so. No one’s said anything to make me think so, and there’s nothing in the cabin to indicate that. Maybe he found it in here, from whoever owned the mine before.”
“I think it’s a sign we should explore this tunnel,” Barb shone her flashlight down the passage.
All Maggie saw was more rock. “Since when do you believe in signs?” she asked.
“Since they point to what I want anyway.” She started down the passage.
“What are we looking for?” Maggie asked as she followed her friend.
“Some sign someone’s been working in here,” Barb said. “Maybe some chunks of rock—ore. I’m thinking shiny streaks in the rock. I mean, we’re talking gold here. It has to be shiny, right?”
“I haven’t got a clue. Maybe we’ll find another note for Bob: ‘Leave this gold alone!’ ”
“Exactly. Uh-oh, it’s getting pretty tight.” The light dropped down and Barb with it. Something tugged on Maggie’s coveralls. She gasped and jumped.
“Don’t be such a ninny,” Barb said. She was on her knees at Maggie’s feet. “It’s just me. There’s a really narrow part here. We’re going to have to crawl.”
The only thing about Maggie that was crawling was her skin. “Honestly, Barb, I—”
Barb gave another firm tug and Maggie was on her knees. “This is what real cave explorers do,” Barb said. “I saw it on public television.”
Muttering under her breath, Maggie crawled after her friend. “Your butt looks a lot bigger from this angle,” she offered.
“Go ahead and kiss it,” Barb said cheerfully. “Oooh, look!”
She stopped abruptly and Maggie almost plowed into her. “What?” she asked.
“More of those colored rocks. Almost like some of that colored aquarium gravel you can buy at the dollar store. But what would your dad be doing with that?”
Maggie looked at the half-dozen pieces of rock Barb held out to her. The largest was the size of a pea, the smallest a tiny chip, in various shades of blue and green. “You think that’s aquarium gravel?”
“Yes, but I’m no expert. I haven’t seen any since the boys were little. We had a couple of beta fish for a while. The cat got one and the other eventually succumbed to neglect.”
“I can’t imagine why my father would have aquarium gravel, and certainly not in this cave.”
“Maybe they came from the mine.” Barb’s voice rose with excitement. “Maybe that’s where aquarium gravel comes from—mines like this one.”
“Or maybe it isn’t aquarium gravel at all. Maybe it’s some kind of gemstone.”
“Gemstone?” The beam of the flashlight hit Maggie full in the face as Barb swiveled awkwardly in her crouching position to stare. “I thought this was a gold mine.”
“It is. I mean, this is a gold mining district. But my dad had a book that talked about gemstones being found in some of the mines.”
Barb squinted at the rock in her hand. It was tiny, tinier even than the diamond in Maggie’s original engagement ring from Carter. “It’s blue,” Barb said. “Is it a sapphire?”
“I don’t know. I guess I should find someone who can tell me.”
Barb slipped the stone into the pocket of her shirt. “We should definitely do that. Maybe we can even find some more.”
She started to turn around again, but Maggie caught her elbow. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “We need to turn around. Give me the flashlight.”
Barb sighed and handed over the light. “You’re right. My knees are killing me.”
They reversed course, Maggie leading the way this time. She decided she’d liked being behind Barb better. Up here the view of dark tunnel and encroaching rock unsettled her. She tried not to think about a whole mountain pressing down on her. Instead, she focused on how much her knees hurt and her back ached.
They’d been laboring a while when Barb spoke. “Shouldn’t we be at that intersection by now?”
“I’m sure it’s just ahead.” Though she wasn’t sure of any such thing.
“I don’t remember all this rubble before.”
“It was here, I’m sure. We were just too excited to notice.”
“Oh. Good. Because I was beginning to think we were lost.”
The word was like a jolt of electricity to Maggie. Her heart beat faster and she wouldn’t have been surprised to know her hair was standing on end. “There’s only the one passage,” she said. “We can’t be lost.”
“There may have been some side passages between where we stopped and the intersection. In fact, I’m sure there were.”
“But we haven’t turned. We’ve been going straight down this one passage.”
“We haven’t turned, but we have sort of angled.” Maggie stopped and looked back at her friend. The flashlight illuminated Barb’s smudged face, mussed hair, and muddy clothes. “You look like you’ve been mud wrestling.”
“So do you,” Barb said. “That doesn’t make us any less lost.”
“Stop saying that!” Maggie brandished the flashlight.
“I think we should turn back. Retrace our steps.”
“We aren’t walking.”
“Retrace our crawl, then.” She held out her hand. “Give me the flashlight.”
“No, the last thing I want to do is crawl deeper into this god-awful cave.”
“We should have brought that religious medal with us. We cou
ld say a prayer.”
“We don’t know who the medal is. Besides, I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“Not even a little?” Barb sounded wistful. “I do. At least I think I do. It’s comforting.”
Maggie turned so that her back rested against the rock wall, her knees drawn up to her chin. Barb assumed a similar pose. “When I was little I prayed every day for years that God would bring my father back to me. After a while, I decided no one was listening, because nothing ever happened.”
“I’m sorry,” Barb said. “I never realized you missed your dad so much. You never said.”
“There didn’t seem to be any point talking about it. And really, until all this happened, I’d pretty much stopped thinking about him.”
“Yeah.” They fell silent for a few seconds; then Barb nudged her. “Do you still have those cookies?”
“The Lorna Doones?” Maggie felt in her pocket. “Yeah.”
“Let’s eat them now. We should keep up our strength.”
Maggie handed over three cookies and bit into a fourth. “They’d be better with milk,” she said.
“Or coffee.” Barb almost moaned. “My head is pounding again. I’d kill for a cup of coffee.”
“We should set out again. I’m sure the intersection is ahead. We just haven’t crawled far enough.”
“Not yet. I want to finish my cookies and rest a little.” Maggie heard the crunch of Barb’s teeth on the shortbread, the sound magnified by all the rock around them. “I never told you,” Barb said after a moment. “But Carter made a pass at me once.”
Maggie almost choked on her cookie. “Carter made a pass at you? When?”
“Last year. At our annual Christmas party. He’d had a little too much to drink and caught me under the mistletoe. I think you were in the ladies’ room. He kissed me; then he propositioned me. Said he was going out of town the next week, I ought to sneak off with him.”
Maggie waited for the sick feeling of betrayal that should have come, but felt only a mild revulsion. A good sign, she thought. “What did you do?”
“I told him he was sick and if he didn’t sober up and apologize, I’d tell you. He tried to act like it was all a joke and begged me not to tell you. He said it would only upset you and I realized it was true, so I kept my mouth shut. I felt guilty about that after he told you he wanted a divorce. If I’d confessed then, maybe it would have saved you some heartache later.”
“I probably wouldn’t have believed you,” Maggie said. “It might have damaged our friendship, and then where would I have been when he did dump me?”
“I’m sorry.” Barb gripped her hand. “I know you loved him, even though he didn’t deserve your love.”
“I despised him for what he did, and the way he did it—cheating on me for God knows how long, then announcing it so coolly.” His callousness still hurt. “But we’d been together so long, more than half my life. I couldn’t turn off my feelings for him like a switch.” She studied her hand around the flashlight, the nails in sad need of a manicure. For twenty years she’d had an appointment every two weeks with a nail technician. Now her hands looked like those of a completely different woman. “Carter and I had sex the week before I left to come here,” she said.
“Sex?” Barb’s voice rose. “With that bastard?”
“Yeah, except when we were in bed together I wasn’t thinking about him as a bastard. I was thinking about him as my husband—the only man I’d had sex with for twenty years.” It had felt good, a physical release, if not an emotional one. Of course later, after he left her, she’d felt used and had cried even harder. “I think he was a habit I had a hard time breaking.”
“I think I understand,” Barb said. “I can’t imagine suddenly losing Jimmy after all this time. It would be like losing an arm.”
“Yeah,” Maggie agreed. “But they tell me it gets better. And here in Eureka I don’t think about him quite as much.” She hefted the flashlight and pointed it down the tunnel. “Come on. I’m ready to get out of here.”
She began crawling faster, ignoring the muddy gravel digging into her palms and the sharp pains in her knees. Barb was right; she didn’t remember so much rubble before, but this had to be the right way.
Five minutes later, she felt a surge of triumph as the passage widened and they emerged into a corridor tall enough to stand. “This has to be it,” she said, rising stiffly.
“Thank God.” Barb stood beside her, massaging her back. “Much more of that and I’d have been crippled for life.”
“I don’t care what’s in this mine, I’m not the one to get it out,” Maggie said.
“You can hire others to work it for you,” Barb said. “Maybe that Bob guy would help.”
“Bob would pocket at least half the profits for himself,” Maggie said.
They quickened their pace toward the entrance. Maggie’s confidence rose as they approached the little niche with the water bottle and the saint’s medal. They were definitely headed in the right direction.
A few steps more and she was blinded by a beam of light. “Hey!” she shouted, shielding her eyes.
“Maggie? Is that you?” called a masculine voice, distorted by the echo off rock.
“Who is it?” she called, squinting, spots of light dancing before her eyes.
Footsteps hurried toward her; then someone gripped her arm. “It’s me, Jameso. Are you all right?” He sounded out of breath.
Maggie was having a little trouble breathing, too. She was torn between the urge to throw her arms around him and the fierce desire to hit him over the head with the flashlight. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
He put his face close to hers, the creases around his eyes sharp, his expression worried. “I was coming to rescue you,” he said.
Chapter 12
Barb later said she thought it was romantic that Jameso, upon arriving at the house and finding her gone, though the Jeep was still in place, had followed their tracks to the mine and plunged in after them. Maggie, however, was annoyed.
“I don’t need rescuing,” she told him. “This is my mine and I have a right to be in here.”
“It’s dangerous,” Jameso said, his mouth set in a stubborn line. They were back at the cabin by this time, Maggie drinking coffee and waiting for her turn in the shower while Barb cleaned up. “Murph told me he put that gate up because the mine tunnels were unstable.”
“There’s nothing unstable about solid rock,” Maggie said, ignoring the flutter of fear in her stomach.
“What were you doing in there anyway?” He scowled at her as if she were a child who’d misbehaved. The expression infuriated her.
“It’s my mine. I wanted to see what was in there.”
“That’s a stupid reason.”
“Stupid? Are you calling me stupid?” Where was that flashlight when she needed it? She looked around for something else heavy to hit him with.
“It was stupid to go in that mine, where you could have been hurt.” The lines along either side of his mouth had deepened, his nostrils flared. She’d rarely seen a man look so furious.
And so sexy. The thought ambushed her, weakening her legs so that she dropped into a chair to keep from falling. Was Jameso angry because he cared? She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He’d moved over to the coffee maker and was refilling his cup.
“There’s no gold in that old mine. Nothing of value. That’s why Murph sealed it up.”
“He didn’t seal it,” she said. “He put a gate over it with a lock. And I have the key. And how do you know there’s nothing of value in there?”
“Because he told me there wasn’t.”
“And you think my father never lied?” All she’d learned of her father so far made her believe he wouldn’t hesitate to make up whatever story he thought was necessary.
“He wouldn’t lie to me.”
Their eyes met and she saw the real hurt in his gaze. Because Murphy might have lied to him? Because Maggie
was doubting him? The emotion in those brown depths made her uncomfortable. She looked away. “Why did you come all the way up here this afternoon?” she asked.
“I wanted to let Barbara know I returned the moving van. And to give her these.” He reached into his pocket and took out a pair of black cat-eye sunglasses, rhinestones at the rim.
“You could have left them on the front porch.”
“I started to when no one answered my knock. Then I noticed the Jeep was still here.”
“You didn’t think we might have gone for a hike?”
He made a face. “Barbara didn’t strike me as the hiking type. But yeah, I might have thought that, if your tracks didn’t lead down the path to the mine. On the way up here yesterday she peppered me with questions about the place. I figured she’d talked you into investigating.”
“It’s my mine,” Maggie said again. “Why shouldn’t I investigate it?”
“Suit yourself.” He tossed the sunglasses onto the table. “I don’t know why I bother trying to reason with you.”
“Why do you bother?” Why did he give two cents what happened to her?
“Your dad meant a lot to me.”
“The night we met, you made it sound like you didn’t even like him much.”
“I was angry at him for dying. He’d still be around if he took better care of himself.”
“You can’t know that. Maybe it was just his time.” She winced inwardly at the words. She didn’t believe that; it was just something people said as a kind of false comfort.
“Now you sound like Danielle,” Jameso said. “She and Janelle think everything happens for a reason. That everything’s connected.”
If a person followed that way of thinking, Carter left Maggie so that she’d be on her own when her father died and left her this place. And she’d come here why? To get rich from what may or may not be gemstones in the mine? To meet Jameso?
The last thought sent a tremor through her that was definitely more fear than desire. The last thing she trusted right now was her ability to have anything like a healthy relationship with a man. Especially one she felt wasn’t being entirely truthful to her, about his relationship with her father or his reasons for always showing up on her doorstep.
