Aunt Dimity Goes West

by Nancy Atherton

  “Perhaps the sphere will guide our sight,” she suggested.

  “Actually, we just came in to buy a geode,” I told her.

  “You may think you came into my shop for a mundane purpose,” Amanda said, smiling complacently. “But I believe a greater power guided your steps. Shall we consult the orb?”

  “Oh, why not?” I said carelessly.

  I unbuckled my pack, added it to the pile on the chair, and took a seat at the table. After a brief hesitation, during which he no doubt struggled manfully to keep from voicing his opinion on orb consultations, Toby followed suit.

  Amanda rose and removed from the cupboard a round object covered with a fringed, jacquard-silk cloth. She placed the object in the center of the table, resumed her seat, and swept the cloth aside to reveal a large and quite beautiful crystal ball on a little wooden stand. As she bent over the crystal ball, she bracketed her face with her hands, as if to block everything else from view.

  Toby sat back in his chair with his arms folded, looking askance at the proceedings, but I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the table and resting my chin in my cupped hands. If Amanda had seen Abaddon’s unholy ghost dogging my footsteps, I would have been nervous. As it was, I felt calm, relaxed, and ready for a bit of fun.

  “I see a long journey,” Amanda intoned. “You have come from afar.”

  I almost laughed out loud at her pathetic attempt to impress me. Anyone linked to Bluebird’s highly efficient grapevine could have learned that I lived in England.

  “You will meet a short, dark stranger,” she went on.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be a tall, dark stranger?” Toby muttered.

  Amanda continued to peer intently into the crystal ball, as though Toby’s words were beneath her notice.

  “Those you love most will surprise you,” she said.

  Again, I had to restrain the urge to laugh. There was nothing remotely mystical in Amanda’s mumbo jumbo. I had every reason to believe that she, like everyone else in Bluebird, knew all about my five-year-old sons. It didn’t take psychic powers to predict that little boys would at some point surprise their mother. Will and Rob surprised me every day. It’s what five-year-olds do.

  “Death came to claim you,” Amanda murmured, “but you escaped his grasp.”

  I sat upright and the laughter died within me. Amanda might be throwing darts blindly, but even blind throws struck the target from time to time. This one had hit a bit too close to home.

  “He will come for you again,” she continued. “You risk all by sleeping beneath the eagle’s wings. The killing curse will not leave you unscathed.”

  “That’s enough.” Toby pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “I knew you’d get around to the curse sooner or later, Amanda, but I didn’t think you’d give it such a sick twist. You’re supposed to use your alleged gifts to do good, but I don’t see anything good in scaring people. Did James Blackwell come here, too? Did you try to scare him?”

  Amanda looked up from the crystal ball. “All of my consultations are private and confidential.”

  “How convenient,” Toby scoffed. “It means you don’t have to defend yourself when you’re wrong.”

  “I describe only what the orb reveals to me,” Amanda said serenely.

  “And what you hear in the cafe, and what you make up,” Toby snapped.

  “The inner eye does not lie,” said Amanda.

  “I hate to interrupt such a rousing debate,” I said, with forced nonchalance, “but the closest I’ve been to death lately is a stroll around the cemetery with Rose Blanding—although I may die of starvation if I don’t have dinner soon. Lunch was a long time ago and we’ve done quite a bit of walking since then.” I stood. “Thanks for your time, Amanda. If you don’t mind, I’d like to buy two geodes and get back to the Aerie. I really like sleeping beneath the eagle’s wings. Should I, er, cross your palm with silver here or at the cash register?”

  “Neither,” she said, as unfazed by my reaction as she’d been by Toby’s. “Take the geodes as my gift. To commune with your spirit has been payment enough.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said, avoiding her gaze.

  Toby and I were back on Stafford Avenue in less than ten minutes. I’d seldom been happier to breathe smoke-free air, but Toby looked angry enough to spit fire.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Amanda’s always seemed harmless to me, but I guess she couldn’t resist making the most of the curse.”

  “The killing curse,” I corrected him. “It has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Toby said grimly, “that Amanda had better clean up her act or she’s going to go out of business. Tourists don’t enjoy being frightened. You weren’t frightened, were you?”

  “No,” I said. “Personally, I think there are enough real horrors in the world. I don’t have to go looking for them in crystal balls.”

  Toby gave me a searching, sidelong glance, as if to convince himself that Amanda’s unsettling pronouncements hadn’t upset me. My neutral expression must have reassured him because he relaxed and changed the subject.

  “I’m glad you remembered dinner,” he said. “I’m starving.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  If I’d been completely honest with Toby, I would have admitted that I’d used dinner as an excuse to get away from Amanda Barrow and her orb. Amanda might rely on educated guesswork for most of her predictions, but she saw some things much too clearly for my liking.

  Death had come for me, and I had escaped his grasp. Was he lying in wait for me at the Aerie, to complete the job he’d left undone in Scotland? Would I be the killing curse’s next victim?

  As we entered Caroline’s Cafe, I felt a sudden rush of empathy for James Blackwell, lying alone in his bed, wondering what would happen next.

  Fifteen

  Toby and I decided to have dinner at the cafe, to save ourselves the trouble of cleaning up afterward. We returned to the Lord Stuart Trail at half past five, stuffed to the gills with Carrie Vyne’s excellent fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and three-bean salad. As we started up the trail I saw something I hadn’t seen before in Colorado.

  “Do my eyes deceive me?” I said, squinting at the sky. “Are those…clouds?”

  Toby followed my gaze and nodded. “Looks like a cold front’s moving in. We may have a rainy night.”

  I nodded, secretly reassured. I hadn’t dealt very well with thunderstorms since I’d been shot—every lightning bolt ignited flashbacks of Abaddon’s creepy, pale face hovering over me on the storm-wracked cliffs in Scotland—but I could handle a rainy night.

  “What thoughtful weather you have here,” I commented. “No rain until we’re done hiking—or trail riding or cooking out.”

  “It’s not always so considerate,” said Toby. “Which is why—”

  “We always bring our rain gear,” I finished for him.

  A brisk wind was swooping through the treetops by the time we reached the Aerie, and the temperature had dropped by at least fifteen degrees. I was very glad we’d departed from the cafe when we did. If we’d stayed a half hour longer, I would have seriously regretted wearing shorts.

  I left Toby to fill the cookie jar with Calico Cookies while I put Annelise’s aspen-leaf earrings on her dresser and propped the pair of fuzzy buffalo against the twins’ pillows in the playroom tent. When I reached the master suite, I glanced thoughtfully at the blue journal, but decided to postpone my chat with Aunt Dimity until after Annelise and the boys had returned from the ranch. I knew that our conversation would be a long one—it had been a remarkably eventful day—and I didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of it.

  After changing into a pair of soft jeans and a long-sleeved cashmere sweater, and swapping my hiking boots for the blissfully supple moccasins I’d bought at Dandy Don’s, I brought the geodes back to the dining room and placed them on the table, where everyone would be able to see them.

  While I’d
been distributing largesse, Toby had changed into clean jeans, sneakers, and an old gray-plaid flannel shirt. I returned to the great room to find him kneeling before the hearth, laying a fire.

  “No fire pit tonight,” he said. “It’s too windy.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it anyway,” I said, crossing to lend him a hand. “It’ll be baths and bed for Will and Rob when they get back, and I doubt that Annelise will want to stay up late.” I passed logs to him from the bin until the pile was ready for lighting, then stood back. “The geodes will look fantastic by firelight, won’t they?”

  “Yes,” Toby said, but he spoke as if he had other things on his mind. He closed the fire screen, straightened, and turned to me. He studied my face for a moment, then said, “Lori, tell me the truth. After everything we’ve heard today, does the Aerie seem different to you?”

  “No.” I smiled up at him and raised my hand as if I were taking an oath. “Scout’s honor, Toby, the Aerie feels just as welcoming now as it did when I first set foot in it. Even if I did believe in curses, I couldn’t believe that this place has ever been anything but loved.”

  “I really could strangle Amanda,” he said darkly.

  “Let’s forget about Amanda,” I told him. “Weren’t you going to show me the stuff James Blackwell left behind? You may as well do it now, while we have the place to ourselves.”

  “Okay,” said Toby. “Come with me.”

  I followed him through the passageway at the end of the kitchen and up two flights of stairs to the caretaker’s apartment. Since I was scrupulously respectful of Toby’s privacy, I would never have invaded his space without his permission, but once I was there, I couldn’t help taking a look around.

  The caretaker’s apartment turned out to be a small, self-contained unit with a kitchenette, a living/dining room, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a private deck. The rooms were comfortably if not extravagantly furnished and clearly intended to be used by one person. Toby had personalized his somewhat spartan living quarters by lining the windowsills with chunks of quartz crystal he’d collected during our hikes, but apart from that, the rooms were as immaculate and impersonal as a hotel suite.

  I was a bit taken aback by the apartment’s cleanliness—Toby was, after all, a college student—until I remembered that Toby had spent nearly all of his waking hours at the Aerie with us. If the rooms looked unlived-in, I reasoned, it was because he hadn’t really lived in them yet.

  Toby must have noticed my inquisitive glances because he grinned and said, “It’s humble, but it’s home. Come through to the bedroom.”

  The bedroom seemed to be the only room Toby used on a regular basis. The bedclothes on the single bed were rumpled, his hat hung from a bedpost, and his hiking boots sat next to the dresser in a circle of dirt and dust from the trail. Pine cones, rocks, and feathers littered the top of the dresser, and the nightstand was piled with books. When Toby opened the closet door, I caught a glimpse of flannel shirts on hangers and blue jeans on built-in shelves. His red jacket hung from a hook inside the door.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  Since there was nowhere else to sit, I sat on the bed. I was beginning to wonder why he’d brought me to the bedroom when, grunting with the effort, he dragged a large, open wooden crate out of the closet and pushed it to the side of the bed. Small though the apartment was, it would have taken a lot more effort to drag the crate all the way to the living room.

  “Well?” he said, standing over the crate. “What do you think?”

  The crate was filled with dirty, scratched, and dented tools: several pointy-ended hammers, a crowbar, a shovel, a sledgehammer, and a pickax along with a coil of nylon climbing rope, a battery-operated lantern, and a hard hat with a built-in headlamp.

  “It looks like the kind of stuff a miner would use,” I said.

  Toby nodded. “When I found it, my first thought was that James had taken up prospecting as a hobby. A lot of people spend their free time smashing rocks for fun.”

  “And your second thought?” I inquired.

  Instead of answering right away, Toby took several slips of paper from the drawer in the nightstand. He handed them to me, and I saw that they were credit card receipts from a hardware store in Denver, where James M. Blackwell had purchased everything he’d left in the wooden crate.

  “See the dates?” Toby said. “He bought the crowbar and the lantern in mid-April and the rest of the stuff a couple of weeks later.”

  I shuffled through the receipts, then handed them back to Toby, saying, “Okay, I’m with you so far.”

  Toby put the receipts on the pile of books on the nightstand and sat beside me on the bed.

  “I may be way off base,” he began, “but the way I see it is, James went to the historical society in late February to ask for information about the Lord Stuart Mine. He went back in March to find out more about the mining disaster. In mid-April he bought a crowbar and a lantern. A couple of weeks later he bought a sledgehammer, a pickax, a shovel—tools he could use to…” Toby’s voice trailed off, as if he couldn’t bring himself to speak his thoughts aloud.

  I pulled the crowbar onto my lap for a closer inspection. It was nicked and abraded, as if it had been used for some heavy-duty prying. As I ran my hand over the deep, gritty scratches, I recalled what Toby had told me while we sat before the fire on my first night at the Aerie: Mr. Auerbach had a team of engineers seal the entrance to the Lord Stuart Mine. It’s tight as a drum….

  I put the crowbar back into the crate and turned to Toby. “Do you think James was trying to break into the Lord Stuart Mine?”

  “He’d be crazy to try,” said Toby. “It’s dangerous down there.”

  “Could he break into the mine?” I asked.

  “Not by the main entrance,” Toby answered. “But he could have tried to reach it by a secondary tunnel. I told you before, the mountains around here are riddled with mine shafts.”

  “You’re right,” I said, brushing the grit from my hand. “He’d have to be crazy to try a stunt like that.”

  “Crazy or…greedy.” Toby chewed his lower lip worriedly, then went on. “You heard Mrs. Blanding. Men came from as far away as northern India to look for gold in the Vulgamore Valley. James had a gold mine on his doorstep. All he had to do to find his fortune was to break into it.”

  “But the Lord Stuart Mine was played out,” I reminded him.

  “What if it wasn’t?” Toby swung around to face me. “What if the Lord Stuart Mine closed before it was played out, to cover up the truth about the cave-in? James had done a lot of research. He could have decided that it was worth risking his neck to find out if there was still some gold left down there.”

  “And if there was?” My eyes widened as I realized where Toby’s argument was headed. “Are you saying that James quit his job because he’d filled his pockets with gold?”

  “If he had, he wouldn’t mention it to Mr. Auerbach,” said Toby, “because the gold would rightfully belong to the Auerbach family.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands tightly clasped together. “I hate to accuse a man I’ve never met of theft, but it would explain an awful lot: why he was so interested in the mine, why he bought the tools, why he left so suddenly without giving notice and without leaving a forwarding address…”

  “But he was a nice guy,” I protested. “Carrie Vyne, Brett Whitcombe, Rose Blanding—they all thought James was a good guy, and good guys don’t steal from their employers.”

  “Gold fever does strange things to people,” Toby observed sagely.

  “He was an amateur historian, not a miner,” I insisted.

  Toby thrust a hand toward the crate. “What was an amateur historian doing with these tools?”

  I pondered the question for a moment, then replied, “He was investigating history. Do you remember what Rose Blanding told us? James wanted to know if the Lord Stuart curse had some basis in fact.”

  “Not the curse again,” said Toby, groaning.

/>   “The curse is a part of the Aerie’s history, whether you want it to be or not,” I said sternly. “If James went into the mine, I think it was because he wanted to know what really happened down there. He wanted to establish the facts about the disaster in order to…” I glanced hesitantly at Toby, then took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “In order to exorcise the Aerie. He wanted to free it from the curse. He wanted to prove that the mine had collapsed for perfectly reasonable reasons, not because someone had cast an evil spell on it.”

  “You’re not telling me that James believed in the curse, are you?” Toby said scornfully.

  “It doesn’t matter whether he believed in it or not,” I said. “Enough people did believe in it to make him want to prove them wrong.”

  “Then why did he leave so suddenly?” Toby asked.

  “Because we were coming,” I said, struck by a blazing flash of insight. “He hadn’t found the proof he needed, but he was afraid that Annelise or I or maybe even the twins would find out what he was doing. He knew that Danny Auerbach would be furious with him for reopening the mine—Danny doesn’t want his kids falling down an abandoned shaft, right?—so he took off before Danny could fire him.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Toby said flatly. “Your scenario doesn’t ring true to me. James would have to be a structural engineer and an archaeologist to figure out what caused the cave-in. He couldn’t just stroll in there and say, ‘Aha! Weak braces!’”

  “He’s an intelligent man,” I argued. “Maybe he found some books in the library that—”

  “Books?” Toby interrupted. “If books taught James anything, it would be that he’d need years and years of special training to excavate the site and determine what went wrong. Sorry, Lori, but your explanation doesn’t make sense.”

  “I like it better than yours,” I said, eyeing him grumpily.