Shadows of the Heart

by Lorena McCourtney

  Suddenly she tensed. A shadow moved in that jagged opening overhead. A wild animal? No, a person. She could see the silhouette of a head and shoulders now as he peered into the opening. Her mind hadn’t even time to register hope before she realized it must be Armando, Armando come to make sure he had done the job right this time, come to finish it if he found her still alive! She shrank against the wall, seeking wildly for escape. Perhaps if she clung to the wall, circled around to the tunnel on the far side… But her flesh crawled at the very thought of fleeing down that dark tube again.

  The moment’s hesitation cost her the chance to make her escape unnoticed. A rope dangled through the opening and then a lean figure lithely swung hand-overhand down it. Trish dashed headlong across the cavern before the swinging figure reached the ground.

  “Trish!”

  The commanding voice stopped her, and she turned, her emotions a strange mixture of fear, hope, and disbelief. It couldn’t be… but it was!

  “Marc!” she breathed.

  She stood unmoving at the dark entrance of the tube as he strode toward her. Her eyes took in his tall, powerful figure, the outstretched arms, the chiseled, aristocratic face. But she still wasn’t sure what she saw was real and not some wild fantasy until his arms crushed her against him and she felt the lean, solid strength of his body. They didn’t speak. Trish felt choked with relief, love, shock, exhaustion, and thirst. Almost numbly she felt his lips on her hair as she pressed her head against his chest, drawing on his strength, surrendering to the security of his embrace. Suddenly he pulled back.

  “You’re injured! My God…” His finger touched her face gently and came away blood-streaked. He took her hands in his and looked at her raw fingertips. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  “No…” Her voice sounded hoarse, as if long disused. “No, I—I’m all right. Just let me rest. I was terrified when I saw you. I thought you were Armando, come back to make sure I was dead.”

  Marc’s hands moved up to grip her shoulders and his dark eyes bore down into hers. “You don’t need to fear Armando ever again,” he said gently. “He’s dead. He miscalculated when he set the explosives and the tunnel came down on top of him.”

  Too much had happened. Trish couldn’t even feel relief. “And Edith?” she asked numbly.

  “She’s dead too. Buried under the rocks with Armando.” His voice was compassionate.

  Trish sagged against him, her feelings a mixture of regret, relief, and sadness as what he was telling her slowly sank into her mind. He helped her to the little pile of rocks she had assembled and she sat there. A shiver trembled through her body and Marc sat beside her, his arm tightly protective around her shoulders.

  Edith and Armando dead, she thought, caught in their own trap. She thought again of their silhouetted figures, the rocks raining down upon them. She shuddered, and Marc’s lips touched her temple.

  “How… how did you know I was alive?” she asked tremulously.

  “I didn’t, but I knew I had to look for you. I played around these old tunnels when I was a boy and I remembered this hidden entrance. I’d have been here sooner but I had to go back for the rope.”

  “But how did you know any of us were here?” She had to have the explanation to make sure she wasn’t imagining all this.

  “I saw the three of you rush out of the house and leave when I was on my way to the beneficio. I thought it odd, but I decided that with everyone gone it would be a good time to see Robert Hepler. For months Edith, Armando, or the nurse stopped me whenever I tried to see him. Even when Edith was injured and I went to see him, the nurse insisted on relaying the message to him herself.” He smiled grimly. “But today I decided I would talk to him, nurse or no nurse.”

  Trish smiled slightly, remembering the determined way he had burst into her bedroom that one morning. No, there was no stopping Marc when he made up his mind. She leaned her head against the secure strength of his shoulder.

  “When I saw Seňor Hepler, I offered again to buy his property. He said no, that both his daughters were here now and would own the cafetal together when he was gone. He seemed very happy and proud. That was when I realized you were in terrible danger and that I had been wrong all along. So I followed the pickup tracks.”

  “What do you mean, you were wrong?” Trish asked, puzzled. She lifted her head from his shoulder to look into his eyes.

  He traced the outline of her lips with his finger. “Wrong about you,” he said huskily. “I’d been suspicious of Armando for a long time. I didn’t like his absolute power and influence over Edith. I knew how ambitious and greedy he was. Armando came from a family that was once wealthy, with large banana plantation holdings. But they were wiped out by plant disease and poor management. Armando hated working for someone else and was determined to regain his former status. I was afraid for Robert Hepler’s safety. I suspected Armando Would have no conscience about killing to get the cafetal.”

  Trish nodded slowly.

  Marc went on, his voice rueful. “And yet Armando was such a great actor that sometimes he almost convinced even me that he really loved Edith and wasn’t marrying her just to get the cafetal. But then I heard rumors of a concubina in San Jose, and then you showed up, so much more attractive and desirable than Edith, and I was even more suspicious.”

  Trish nodded slowly. “I felt you were suspicious of me all the time, but I could never understand why. I still don’t,” she admitted.

  “Because I thought you were working with Armando. I thought you had fallen in love with him when he was in the States and that you had come down here to carry out some scheme with him. That was what I suspected from the very first moment I saw you in the restaurant with Armando and Edith. I feared that Edith as well as her father was in danger then, that you and Armando planned to do away with both of them sooner or later.”

  “You suspected me of… of planning murder?” Trish gasped. “But how could you! I was the one who kept having the strange accidents.”

  “That puzzled me,” he admitted. “I didn’t realize what or who was behind those accidents until I talked to Robert Hepler. Then it became clear to me that you were the intended victim.”

  “And all along I was afraid you were the one causing them,” Trish admitted ruefully, remembering that her suspicions had been as totally wrong as those Marc was now admitting. She shook her head regretfully. “We were so suspicious of each other. But you were always so hostile!” she burst out. “And cold and—”

  “Hostile, yes,” he agreed with a touch of a smile. “But never cold.”

  “You told me to go away!” she remembered. “You burst right into my bedroom and told me to go home. ‘Go home before—’”

  He finished the sentence for her now. “Go home before you were so deeply involved in Armando’s evil schemes that you couldn’t get out. Go away before you helped Armando do something unthinkable.”

  “And all the time you thought I was in love with Armando,” Trish said wonderingly. She looked at him tenderly. “Don’t you know what was really happening to me?”

  “I knew what was happening to me. I was falling in love with you,” he said huskily. “I didn’t want to. I tried desperately not to because of my suspicions of your involvement with Armando. That day we went to San Jose… do you remember? I went to see Hepler’s lawyer and ask him to investigate, to see if the lovely blond girl who said she was Patricia Bellingham was really an imposter.”

  Trish’s strength was returning and she straightened indignantly. “You took me to dinner and sight-seeing, and all the time you were investigating me? Of all the… the nerve! You kissed me! How could you—”

  He silenced her with his lips and Trish felt herself swirling dizzily in the embrace. She was breathless when he finally released her.

  “Because, whoever you were, I was falling in love with you,” he said simply. “Even if you were in some conspiracy with Armando, I was falling in love with you. Sometimes I thought you were beginning
to care for me too. You acted as if you were at the fiesta. That night I tried—”

  “Yes, you tried,” Trish retorted spiritedly. “Just what was it you were trying to do?”

  “To seduce you away from Armando,” he admitted. “I thought if I could make you love me I could stop you from getting more deeply embroiled with Armando and his schemes.”

  “Don’t you know you succeeded?” Trish asked softly.

  “You rejected me.”

  “I told you why!”

  “And the next day I thought I knew why. I believed you and Armando had planned and almost succeeded in killing Edith in that car wreck,” he said grimly. “I didn’t know why you were doing it before the wedding, but I was sure the two of you were behind it. Then I knew my attempt to make you fall in love with me had failed.”

  Trish shook her head regretfully. No wonder he had been so cold and hostile that morning at the hospital. He suspected her of attempted murder! “And I thought you were the one who caused the accident so that with Edith dead you could buy the plantation cheaply from Robert Hepler. Later I even thought you had planned to kill me in the accident too.” She paused. “But that time we were both wrong, it appears. The car wreck really was just an accident.”

  Marc shook his head. “No. I inspected the brake line on the car. It was deliberately broken.”

  “But who… ? Why?” Trish asked, puzzled.

  “Armando.”

  “Armando?” Trish repeated blankly. “But that doesn’t make sense. Armando wanted me dead and yet it was he who kept me out of the car that night.”

  “Yes, but Armando had a momentary change of plans,” Marc said grimly. “He decided to kill Edith.”

  “But that still makes no sense,” Trish protested, even more bewildered. “With Edith dead he would have no chance to get the cafetal.”

  “He thought he had. Armando decided he could acquire the cafetal just as easily through you as through Edith. You were both Robert Hepler’s daughters. And heirs.”

  “But I still don’t understand,” Trish protested.

  “Don’t you?” Marc asked gently. He tilted her chin up with one hand and smoothed her dusty hair with the other. “Didn’t you ever take a good look at yourself in the mirror, Trish? Compare yourself with Edith? See how much younger and prettier and more attractive you are? Look at yourself through Armando’s greedy, calculating eyes. Do you not think Armando would rather have had you, so beautiful and desirable, to go with his property rather than plain, dowdy Edith?”

  “Oh, no,” Trish protested again, almost unwilling to accept this fresh evil in Armando’s character, to realize how cold-bloodedly he had decided to get rid of Edith after professing his love for her.

  “I saw him look at you with his greedy eyes,” Marc went on almost bitterly. “Such as the time you came down from the mountain and he saw you there in your torn blouse—though at the time the way he looked at you was only more proof to me that the two of you had some secret… relationship.”

  Yes, Trish thought with a shudder. That night at the fiesta Armando had kissed her hand, kissed it at the very moment Edith’s car was in flames, after deliberately provoking a disagreement with her. He had manufactured a reason to keep Trish out of the sabotaged car. And later he had cleverly taken the blame for upsetting Edith and causing the accident, thereby effectively concealing his real crime in tampering with the car’s brakes. She remembered, too, how he had cut off that final conversation between himself and Edith in the tunnel when the car wreck was mentioned.

  His cold-blooded, evil schemes knew no end. Trish shuddered again, and in spite of what Edith had tried to do to her, Trish found herself hoping Edith had not had time before she died to realize Armando never really loved her, that he had once decided to kill her too.

  “Armando, of course, had supreme confidence in his ability to win any woman,” Marc added with a hint of contempt in his voice. “I’m sure he had a very pleasant vision of himself as a cafetal owner with you as his beautiful wife at his side.”

  “But he changed his mind about me,” Trish said slowly.

  Marc nodded. “Evidently so. When Edith survived the accident, he decided to go back to his original plan and get rid of you. It was safer. He was sure of his ability to control Edith and make her do whatever he wanted. You might be more desirable, but you were also more risky, more independent, less controllable. He knew Edith was so desperately in love with him that she would do anything for him.”

  They were both silent then, thinking of Edith’s love and what it had cost her. Trish realized suddenly how little she had really known her sister, so quiet and reserved on the surface, so seething with passion underneath. How little anyone had really known her, except perhaps Armando. Edith had played her part well too, Trish thought with a pang, remembering all the times Edith had deceived her. All for love of Armando.

  “All that love,” Trish said regretfully. “Wasted on a man such as Armando.”

  Marc nodded. “Yes,” he said. His voice suddenly sounded aloof and impersonal. “Love is sometimes a mistake.” He stood up almost abruptly. “Think you can climb out now?”

  Trish looked up at him, surprised and dismayed by his sudden change of demeanor. “I’ll try,” she said uncertainly.

  She stood on top of the pile of rocks she had collected and grasped the rope tentatively, remembering how long ago she used to shinny up a rope-swing at home, never dreaming it might someday mean her survival. She took a firm grip on the rope and started up. Marc boosted her as far as he could reach and then she was on her own, painfully aware of the rough rope against the rawness of her hands as she worked her way toward that jagged patch of blue sky. She paused to catch her breath just before she reached the opening, wrapping a loop of rope around her foot to support her weight.

  Marc was standing down below, looking up at her. From up above, his face looked shadowy in the depths of the dusky cavern, shadowy and faraway. She had felt so close to him in his arms, but suddenly she realized he had said several times that he was falling in love with her. But never that he was in love with her now.

  He had also said he had fought against that love. He had fought against it and won… because now there was Ramona! Trish remembered with an aching heart how Ramona had looked that night in Marc’s home, how his arm had tightened around her as she stood next to him, so lovely in her revealing peignoir. Marc had conquered the love he did not want to feel for Trish and found fulfillment in Ramona’s arms. And in those final words he had told Trish the sad truth: Some loves were a mistake.

  “Is something wrong?” he called out sharply.

  Wrong, she thought wildly. Only that she had momentarily glimpsed the wonders of Marc’s love in the same way she had glimpsed the jagged opening to freedom, as a wondrous, desirable thing. But hopelessly unattainable.

  But all she said was a curt, “Sorry, I was just resting a minute,” before she scrambled out of the hole and into the bright sunlight. Once outside, she glanced around, seeing nothing familiar except the menacing hulk of Monte Deception looming over her. The hole in the ground here was practically unnoticeable among the misshapen rocks and stunted vegetation. A ridge of rock separated it from the main entrance.

  A moment later Marc swung his lean body up beside her. Swiftly and efficiently he untied the rope from a nearby rock and looped it into neat coils.

  “The pickup is over that way,” he said, jerking his head toward the rocky ridge. “We’re going to have to break the news to Robert Hepler.”

  Trish started off, her head held high with hurt pride at his suddenly impersonal attitude. Through all the day’s ordeal, through all the terror and pain, no tears had dampened her eyes, but now she felt them trickling down her cheeks, blinding her. Carefully she kept her face turned away from Marc, aware that he was following her only by an occasional rustle or crunch of rock.

  She blinked, trying to stop the tears, but they wouldn’t go away. She was concentrating so hard on not letting M
arc know she was crying that she tripped over a rock and stumbled almost to her knees before his strong hand caught and straightened her.

  She looked up at him defiantly, aware that she must be a strange sight with a cut face, tear-streaked cheeks, and disheveled hair. She jerked her arm free of his grasp.

  “You’re crying,” he observed. He reached out to brush a tangle of hair from her eyes, but she pulled away again.

  “Why didn’t you just leave me there to die?” she cried in sudden anguish.

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said curtly.

  “Yes, yes, I’m a fool!” she cried wildly, tears streaming unheeded down her cheeks now. “Because I’m in love with you!”

  He regarded her coolly, but a muscle twitched along his lean jawline. “And what will you think if I tell you now that I am also in love with you?”

  Trish stared at him. He was saying he was in love with her and yet his cold eyes and hard face hardly matched his words. He looked down at her, waiting, and slowly Trish’s mind went over the situation and all that had happened. She was Robert Hepler’s only daughter now and someday the cafetal would be hers, the cafetal Marc had long tried to possess.

  “You see?” he said harshly, as the realization dawned on her face. “If I tell you I love you now, you will think I want you only because you will someday inherit the coffee plantation. I love you. But I would never want that suspicion to come between us.”

  “And Ramona?” Trish asked slowly.

  “Ramona.” Marc repeated the name carelessly, without emotion. He shrugged. “I wanted to love her. I brought her out to the house hoping I could forget you in her arms. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t even force myself to touch her. Because I was in love with you. In spite of all the terrible things I believed about you, I Was in love with you. I still am,” he added almost angrily.

  “Someday,” Trish began with a tremulous smile, “someday I’ll tell you all the awful things I believed about you.”

  He reached out and caught her by the shoulders. His eyes were unfathomable now, but they held hers like a magnet. “Can you believe I love you? That I don’t give a damn about the cafetal?” he asked roughly. “That I want to marry you only because I love you?”