by Cindy Myers
Coward, she told herself.
The scuff of tennis shoes on the concrete back steps alerted her to Lucas’s arrival. He pushed open the door into the kitchen, his cheeks sunburned, his hair wind-blown, one knee scraped bloody.
“Where have you been?” Lucille asked, trying not to sound accusing.
“I rode my bike up to look at some mines,” he said.
The nearest mines were miles from town, up steep mountain roads. “You rode up there on your bicycle?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He shrugged, as if this was no big deal.
“You need to be careful,” she said. Some of the shafts were disguised by piles of rock. Others looked deceptively shallow, then plummeted straight down like deep wells. Fallen timbers, jagged rusted metal, and even unexploded charges of dynamite littered the old tunnels. “Those old mines are dangerous places. Promise me you won’t go in any of them.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said. “Ms. Wynock already warned me about them.”
Cassie had warned Lucas about the dangers of mines? “Did you tell her you were going up there?”
“I was looking for books about mines. I had to listen to her safety lecture before she’d let me look at them.” He took a bottle of juice from the refrigerator and poured a large glass. “Is supper soon? I’m starved.”
“It’ll be ready in about half an hour.” She didn’t say anything about the letter. She half hoped he’d go up to his room or to the living room to the computer without noticing it. But he’d already spied the envelope on the table.
“What’s this?” he asked, picking it up and turning it over.
“It was in today’s mail.” She watched his face for some sign of recognition, or even alarm.
He studied the return address, and a smile transformed his face from overly serious and mature-for-his-age to all boy. “It’s from D. J.!” He ripped open the envelope and pulled out the letter, eagerly unfolding the pages. “He sent a picture!” He waved a photograph. Lucille came to peer over his shoulder at the photo of a dark-haired man in desert camo standing beside a tanker truck. He wore aviator sunglasses and smiled at the camera, revealing white teeth in a broad mouth.
“He says . . .” Lucas scanned the letter. “He says it was a hundred and twelve there last week—and they have spiders as big as rats. But he says the people are nice and the money is good, so mostly he likes it.” He fell silent, his smile fading.
“What is it?” Lucille asked. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head, then made a furtive swipe at his eyes. “He says he misses me.”
Lucille tried to swallow past the knot in her throat; at the same time, a protective instinct fierce as a mother bear’s rose in her. Why was this man writing and upsetting the boy this way? Why try to maintain a relationship that was impossible, with the man thousands of miles away and things so unsettled between him and Olivia?
The back door opened and Olivia herself came inside. She wore skintight jeans and a Dirty Sally tank top, her hair in twin braids, pink feather earrings dangling almost to her shoulders. “Mom, I got a letter from D. J.” Lucas waved the sheet of paper like a flag.
Olivia’s face paled. “What?”
“D. J. wrote to me. And he sent a picture. See.”
Olivia snatched the photograph and studied it, as if looking for some hidden message in the image. “What does the letter say?” she asked, eyes locked to the photo.
“He says it’s really hot, but he likes the people and the work he’s doing. They have really big spiders there. And he misses me.”
Olivia’s fingers on the photo tightened. “He misses you,” she repeated.
“Yeah, that’s why he wrote. I’m glad he didn’t forget about us when he left.”
Olivia took the letter and scanned it, then let the page flutter to the table. Lucille could read the hurt in her daughter’s eyes and could feel it in her own chest. There was no “us” in D. J.’s letter. He may have missed Lucas, but he hadn’t written a word about Olivia.
She turned and headed for the door. “Where are you going?” Lucille protested.
“Out.” She was gone, the windows still rattling from the force of the door slamming, before Lucille could utter another word. She looked at Lucas, but he was rereading the letter, seemingly oblivious to his mother’s departure so soon after she’d arrived.
“He says he’s got e-mail there, so we can stay in touch that way.” Lucas jumped up. “I’m going to write him now.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Lucille asked.
Lucas looked at her as if she’d just suggested that chocolate tasted terrible. “Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”
“Well, your mother and D. J. aren’t dating anymore. . . .”
“So? D. J.’s my friend. I can have friends of my own.”
“Of course you can,” Lucille said weakly. And God knows, the boy could use a man in his life. But did it have to be this one—the one who still had the power to wound Olivia with a word?
Or with his silence.
The long days of summer brought a stream of tourists to Eureka County. Like salmon spawning upstream, they came in caravans of motor homes or motorcycles, sports cars or sedans. They hiked and fished and rafted and Jeeped. They photographed mine ruins and wildflowers and every building in town, and piled into the Last Dollar and the Dirty Sally in loud, sunburned, and mostly smiling bunches.
On summer afternoons, the normally deserted roads around town became clogged arteries of traffic. Retirees towing camping trailers inched around the narrow curves, white knuckled, while impatient daredevils tried to pass on the smallest straightaway. Tempers flared, and the sheriff’s office responded to both accidents and brawls with equal regularity. In their wake, Rick inevitably sent Maggie. “Get good photographs,” he’d say.
“Why do you want to run photos of mangled vehicles on every front page?” she asked him as he hurried her out the door of the newspaper office for the sixth day in a row.
“The locals like to see the tourons get theirs,” he said.
“If it weren’t for those tourists, this town might curl up and die,” she said, mindful that she herself was practically a tourist—though she hoped not a touron, that melding of “tourist” and “moron” that Rick used to refer to all but the most attractive female visitors.
“Then think of the photos as a public service, reminding our visitors what can happen if they don’t take it easy on the road.”
So once more she set out with her camera and notebook, but by the time she reached the site of this latest accident—a scenic overlook west of town—there was nothing left to photograph but a mangled bumper and a dented guardrail. Maggie dutifully photographed this evidence, then stood for a moment between a Winnebago from Arkansas and a minivan from Texas, and savored the view of a mountain peak whose name she couldn’t remember. A golden spill of tailings stained its side, and the remnants of an old mine tram ringed its middle like a rusty belt.
“It’s pretty amazing anybody ever got up there, much less built all that,” a man in a battered fishing hat who stood beside the Winnebago said.
“I guess the thought of all that gold will lead a person to do almost anything,” a woman in a matching hat replied.
Gold probably had something to do with it, Maggie agreed. But she had a feeling that, for some of the pioneers at least, gold wasn’t the only thing that drove them to climb mountains and stake their claim. Maybe some of them were charmed by the idea of conquering something bigger than themselves. Of making their mark in a place few others dared to go.
Before coming to Eureka, she hadn’t thought much about the legacy she’d leave behind, but whether it was her father’s death or her approaching fortieth birthday or the precarious nature of life lived on a mountaintop, the question nagged at her more these days. Would she remain in Eureka? Write a novel? Have a baby? Some days she felt as if she was holding her breath, waiting to find out what would happen next. She had a hom
e of sorts here in Eureka, but her life still felt impermanent and unsettled.
Reluctantly, she returned to the Jeep and headed back toward town. She still wasn’t completely comfortable driving in the mountains, so all her concentration was on the road, and she registered only annoyance at first when she saw the motorcycle parked in the narrow pullout to her right. What was he doing parked there? It was the wrong side of the road for the view, snugged up against the rock, and pulling back into traffic he was liable to cause a wreck.
Then the rider turned his head and she recognized Jameso. He had his helmet off and a wrench in his hand, tinkering with something on the bike. She didn’t want to think too much about the way her heart sped up before her brain could even register that it was him. He’d taken her refusal to go out with him so cavalierly, she couldn’t believe he’d really been serious, but sometimes—especially alone in her bed at night—she wondered if she’d made the right choice, telling him no.
Chapter 16
Maggie switched on her blinker and eased the Jeep in behind Jameso, managing to squeeze in between the cliff and the road, her rear bumper a scant six inches from traffic. She rolled down her window and stuck her head out. “What happened?” she asked.
“Fuel pump.”
Right. As if that made any sense to her. “Get in and I’ll give you a ride to town,” she said.
“Thanks, but I can’t leave the bike up here.”
“I don’t think you have much choice.” She watched in the side mirror as the traffic crawled past. “I don’t think anybody will bother it.”
“This is a 1948 Indian Chief,” he said. “There are people who would sell their mother for a bike like this.”
She would have accused him of making a bad joke, but it was clear he was serious, in that way men had of being serious about things like cars and guns and all kinds of machinery. “No one I want to know,” she said.
“Yeah, but they’re around. I won’t take the chance.”
“So you’re just going to stay up here babysitting your motorcycle?”
He stowed the wrench in a compartment on the side of the bike and eyed her Jeep. “I’m wondering if we take your backseat out, we could—”
“No! You are not loading that motorcycle into my car.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, then shook his head. “You’re right. It would never fit.”
“Why don’t you call a wrecker or something?” she asked.
“Phone doesn’t work up here.”
She flipped open her cell phone and frowned at the message: NO SIGNAL.
He walked around to the back of the Jeep and began rooting through the contents: her dad’s jean jacket, a pair of his boots, a piece of tarp, a coil of rope, and more ore samples.
“I can’t believe you still have all Jake’s stuff in here,” he said.
“I’ve been too busy to pay much attention to what’s back there,” she said. “You can have any of it you like, except the jacket.” The jacket she’d keep, to wrap around herself on cool nights and remember what little she knew about her father.
He took out the tarp and rope. “I’m going to cover it up.”
“All right.” She waited while he swathed the bike in tarp and rope. Now if anyone tried to steal it, it would be gift-wrapped for them.
Twenty minutes later, he stowed his helmet in the back of the Jeep and climbed into the front passenger seat. “Thanks for waiting,” he muttered.
“No problem. I’ll take you into town.”
“Take me to my place. I’ll get my truck and the bike trailer. That is, if you have time.”
“I have time.” Rick was probably expecting her back at work, but he’d understand she couldn’t leave a friend stranded. Besides, she was curious to see where Jameso lived.
He was silent the first ten minutes of the drive, staring out the window. When he did speak, his voice was subdued. “Go ahead and say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I’m too stubborn for my own good. That I was stupid to even think about trying to take the bike.”
“You’re talking to a woman who has four cartons of antique glass taking up space in my living room. I’m not one to criticize anyone for being attached to some personal possession.”
“Antique glass? Really?”
She nodded, then tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She hadn’t asked Barb to bring the glass to her, but now that it was here, she wasn’t in any hurry to deal with it. Common sense told her to sell the stuff, or find a way to display it so at least she could enjoy it. But no, it sat in those boxes, every piece a memory she didn’t want to look at every day, but something she couldn’t bring herself to release. “It’s Steuben glass. My ex gave it to me.”
“I bought the bike off a dealer in Tucson,” he said. “It was the first purchase I made after I got out of the army.”
“You were in the army?”
“I was in the first wave of troops sent to Iraq after nine-eleven.”
“So you and my dad had that in common—you’d both fought in wars.”
“Yeah.” He shifted in the seat, leather creaking. “Have you interviewed Cassie about her play yet?”
So the war, or maybe her dad, was off limits as a topic of conversation. She could take a hint. “No, I haven’t interviewed Cassie.” She’d been putting it off, hoping Rick would forget about it.
“You’re not afraid of her, are you?”
“No!” What was the deal with him always accusing her of cowardice? “Every conversation I have with Cassie ends the same. She hates my father. She wants the book he took from the library and didn’t return.”
“Why don’t you just give her the book?”
She opened her mouth to deny she had the precious volume, but the lie stuck in her throat. Something in Jameso’s expression was too knowing. She cleared her throat. “The book’s all marked up. Someone—I suspect my father—took a black marker and blotted out the names of a bunch of mines. I can’t imagine why.”
“Poor old Cassie might stroke out if she saw that.”
“Exactly, which is why I can’t give the book to her. I should just burn it and be done with it.”
“You don’t strike me as the book-burning type.”
“What do you know?” Of course, he was right. She’d grown up in a home where books were at least as valued as currency and not to be folded, spindled (whatever that meant), or mutilated. “Why would Jake mark up that book that way?” she asked.
“Haven’t a clue. He was a hard man to figure out sometimes.”
“Yet you remained friends, despite all the things you didn’t like about him.”
The knowing look was gone, replaced by a darker emotion. She recognized the mixture of grief and anger as one she’d felt after the dissolution of her marriage—equal parts frustration that someone she cared about wouldn’t behave the way she wanted, and dismay at herself for caring so much.
“Do you remember studying the Roman god Janus in school?” Jameso asked.
“The god with two faces.” Was he saying her father was two-faced?
“In the story, the god has a young face and an old one. A beginning and an ending. Now we think of someone as ‘two-faced’ when they’re hypocritical or double-dealing. Jake wasn’t like that, but he had two faces he could show to the world. He could be as kind and generous as anyone you ever met. If you were poor or hurt or someone had done you wrong, there wasn’t anything in the world he wouldn’t do for you.”
“But he had a violent side.” She thought of Bob’s shattered face—and her mother’s broken heart.
“Yeah, that was his other face. He could turn as cold as ice. On days like that, I think he could have killed a man and not thought twice about it.”
She shuddered. “Why was he like that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was something that happened to him in Vietnam. Or maybe he’d been like that his whole life.”
“How could you be friends with s
omeone like that?”
He laid his head back against the seat and contemplated the ceiling a moment. “Sometimes I think you just connect with people,” he said. “The day I met Jake I was angry at the world. Mad enough to do violence. I was shooting a pistol at tin cans up in the mountains, but I could just as easily have shot the next person I saw. Except that next person was Jake.”
“I take it you didn’t shoot him.”
“No, he was up there on one of his camping trips. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d been drinking. He wasn’t drunk, but he was, um, ‘lubricated,’ he called it.”
The word surprised a laugh from her.
Jameso’s half smile was both sad and sexy. “It was a good way to describe it. The alcohol loosened everything up.”
“What were you angry about?”
“I didn’t always need a reason in those days. I think . . . mainly it was just that life hadn’t worked out the way I’d planned.”
“I know the feeling.”
He glanced at her. “I guess I was up there in the mountains having my own pity party when Jake showed up.”
“What did he do?”
“He pulled out a pistol and started shooting right along with me. Even with a few drinks in him, he was a good shot. When we’d used up all our ammunition, he turned to me and said, ‘It feels good to plug a few sometimes, don’t it? If only we could blow our troubles away so easily.’ Then he offered me a drink of his whiskey.”
Male bonding over guns and alcohol. She supposed friendships had been formed on a lesser basis. “What was the life you had planned that didn’t work out?”
“I was going to go into the army to earn money for college. Instead, I ended up in a foreign country that might as well have been hell. I was there fifteen months, scared to death every second. I saw buddies blown up right in front of me. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. I came home a wreck, and the girl I’d been seeing before I left had married someone else without bothering to tell me.”
