Rainbow Fire Page 8

  "You could leave me down here in the dark, I suppose, but Melly knows I came here with you today, and Serge saw me climbing down."

  "And I had such plans."

  "I guess you'll have to put them on hold."

  "Abso-bloody-lutely. I'll just have to come up with something else. Maybe I'll pull out my old Agatha Christies to get a fresh idea."

  Unwillingly, Kelsey felt herself smile. "Where on earth are we going?"

  "Right here." Dillon came to an abrupt halt. This time he was prepared for Kelsey to plow into him, and he wasn't disappointed. "A bit spooked, are we?"

  "I'm looking forward to candlelight," she admitted.

  "I like my candlelight with a thick Porterhouse and a beautiful woman." He turned and gave her an appreciative smile. "All I need is the Porterhouse."

  "The candles."

  "The candles." Ducking, Dillon crawled into a space no more than three feet high. "It'll be dark for a moment. Just close your eyes and count to fifty. I'll be out by then."

  Kelsey was reminded of a birthday party she had once attended where she had been blindfolded while the other children hid. When she had finally removed the blindfold, it was to find that the children were all outside eating ice cream and cake without her.

  "I'm coming after you on fifty-one," she warned.

  "You'll seal me in if you do."

  "How do I know that hole in the wall doesn't lead right back to the shaft?"

  Dillon backed out and turned to face her. "You don't. You'll have to trust me. You know the word, don't you, Kelsey?"

  "Five letter words can be as obscene as four."

  Her expression was as nonchalant as her tone, but Dillon could see signs of inner turmoil. He bit back harsh words and touched her cheek instead. "Fifty. I'll try to be back in forty."

  She had no choice but to watch him crawl back into the tunnel. Her eyes were tightly shut, and she had just reached thirty-seven, when she felt a hand touch her shoulder. "You can open your eyes," Dillon said. "And see a truly lovely sight."

  The passage was bathed in the glow of candles. Dillon had lit three, setting two at the mouth of the supply area. He handed the other to her.

  Kelsey took the candle and watched its flickering patterns against the rust and cream dappled walls. "Lovely," she murmured, "but not as lovely as sunshine."

  "You'll get used to being down here."

  "What happens next?"

  Dillon was enchanted by the glow of Kelsey's skin in candlelight. The flame warmed and deepened the peach blush of her complexion and set her hair on fire. What happened next? Next he gave himself a lecture about the young woman who half-believed he had tried to murder her father. Next he reminded himself that he was here to mine opals, not to start something that couldn't be finished.

  "Next I fix the lights," he said, turning his back to pick up the other candles. "Then I'll give you a tour of the mine. That should be enough exposure for today."

  Kelsey watched Dillon amble back the way they had come. She had no reason to follow him so closely this time. Her candle shone brightly, and there were no drafts to extinguish it. She kept Dillon in sight, but she stayed well behind him. Kelsey had seen the softening of his gaze as he stared at her.

  She had never really cared what men saw in her, and, until now, she had hardly paid attention to it. When Dillon looked at her that way, however, it was hard not to pay attention.

  Dillon Ward. He had seen her at her most defenseless, and she could almost blame the warmth in his eyes on his mistaken belief that he needed to protect her. She knew from experience that men were most comfortable when they felt superior. She also knew how angry they could be when they discovered they weren't.

  No one had made the mistake of underestimating her for a long time. But how did that reconcile with the woman Dillon had seen in the past twenty-four hours? She had almost fainted in his arms from heatstroke. At the hospital she had leaned against him as the bad news about Jake had been delivered. Then she had flagrantly violated her own ethics by demonstrating her defense skills in front of him, and just today she had let him hold her when the dark of the mine overwhelmed her.

  Dillon had seen a Kelsey Donovan no one else had seen in a very long time. She had acted like a wimp.

  "Wimp?" Dillon stopped, waiting for Kelsey to catch up.

  She couldn't believe she had spoken her thoughts out loud. "Do you know the term?"

  "It's one of those tidbits of American slang that sounds like what it is."

  "I'm not a wimp, Dillon. It's too bad I've been acting like one."

  He wanted to tell her that accepting her weaknesses was as important as nurturing her strengths. Instead he just shrugged. "No worries."

  She was at a loss for anything else to say. "So what can I do while you fix the lights?"

  "Why don't you explore? You can't really get lost, everything converges on the main passage eventually. If you do get turned around, just give me a yell, and I'll come looking for you." He reached into his pocket and handed her a pack of matches and another candle. "Just in case."

  Half an hour later Kelsey was wandering through one of the tunnels that honeycombed the mine when Dillon found her. She had wandered through the low-ceilinged tunnels, smoothing her fingertips along claystone ridges that swirled in muted color. She had picked at protruding pebbles with her fingernails and pretended they were opals. She had begun—just a little—to understand why Jake Donovan had stayed in Coober Pedy. The Rainbow Fire hummed a siren's song.

  "The lights are beyond fixing," Dillon said with no preliminary greeting. "I'm going to have to replace them."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Found any opals?"

  The corners of her mouth turned up in a reluctant smile. "Not a one. But then, a chunk could fall on my head, and I might not recognize it."

  "We'll make a gouger out of you next time we come down."

  "Not likely, but we can give it a shot."

  Dillon took note of her sadly shortened candle. He had planned to show Kelsey more, but today wasn't going to be the day. Strangely enough, he was reluctant to leave. There was an intimacy about being under the earth together that he would be sorry to lose. "Ready to see the sky again?"

  She was more than ready, although she wasn't going to tell him. "I suspect climbing up will be easier than climbing down."

  "I'll be right behind you." By dwindling candlelight Dillon led her through the passageway to the ladder. With one foot on the bottom rung, he peered up at the shaft, his face creased by a frown. "There's a bloody joker loose, it seems."

  Kelsey looked up, too. Instead of a blue dot of sky, there was nothing. She hadn't realized how much she had counted on seeing that small slice of heaven. "What happened?"

  "Somebody's idea of fun. The shaft's sealed up tight as a miser's wallet."

  Chapter 6

  WHAT DO YOU mean, it's sealed up?" Kelsey forced herself to remain calm.

  "Somebody's covered the shaft with something."

  "How hard will it be to remove it?"

  Dillon shrugged. "Depends on what it is. I'll have to go up first and see."

  "That means leaving me here alone."

  Sympathy shone in his eyes. "I'm sorry. There's nothing for it."

  Suspicions gathered like clouds before a rainstorm. "You were here all that time trying to fix the lights. Didn't you notice it was covered then?"

  "It wasn't covered then."

  She didn’t want to believe it, but she knew Dillon would have had time to climb the ladder, pull something over the shaft, then climb back down. Her mind was racing along the worst possible path when Dillon stopped her with a frustrated wave of his hand.

  "Look, I'm not going to climb up the ladder unblock the shaft, climb out, then cover it again. If I wanted to leave you in the mine alone, I'd have done all that while you were off wandering. I'd never have come to find you and lead you back here."

  She wasn't sure she was thinking clearly, but what he said made s
ense.

  Dillon put his hands on Kelsey's shoulders and forcibly moved her to one side. "I'm getting tired of your suspicions," he said. "I ought to leave you down here just to shut you up." He started up the ladder with the ease of a man who did it every day.

  She bristled. "That wouldn't shut me up. I'd scream."

  "And who'd hear you? Your good mate, Serge? It was probably Serge who threw something over the shaft."

  Kelsey hadn't had time to point the finger at anyone but Dillon. Now, as she paused to think, his words made sense. "Do you really think so?" she asked finally.

  Dillon was already halfway up. "I think it was Serge. You think it was me. Who's to say?"

  "I don't think it was you," she yelled up at him. "You're right. You would have left me wandering around."

  His voice sounded far away. "Too blooming bad I missed my chance."

  Kelsey felt suddenly very alone. Dillon had disappeared into the darkness. She looked at the candle in her hand and saw that she had little more than an inch to go. The candleholder was a pool of sickly white wax. What would Dillon do if he couldn't move what blocked the shaft? "Come on, Dillon," she muttered. She wondered how he would find enough purchase on the ladder to thrust anything off the top. He would have to hold on with one hand while he pushed. She wondered how he would do it. She wondered if he could do it.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a shouted command.

  "Set the candle on the floor right before you start up. If you're lucky it won't burn out and leave you in the dark. About halfway you'll have some sky to help."

  Kelsey looked up and saw the silver dollar patch of blue. Then her candle was on the floor and she was ten feet in the air before she even had time to think about what she was doing. The trip up the ladder was just as precarious as the trip down had been, but she was ascending into sunshine and fresh air. She almost flew.

  At the top she grasped the timbers supporting the metal collar and lifted herself out to the unbelievably sweet earth. She was still rejoicing silently when she realized that Dillon was nowhere to be seen.

  "Dillon?" Her jubilation began to fade. She spun and noted that his truck was still where he had parked it. He hadn't driven off and left her, but neither was he anywhere in sight. "Dillon?" she called a little louder.

  She saw a movement behind a scrub-covered ridge to one side. Determined to catch up with him, she headed in that direction, carefully watching her step. When she had just crossed the first ridge she saw him coming back over a second. He looked up, and she got the distinct impression that his smile was a cover-up for some darker emotion.

  "So you made it, did you?" he asked.

  "What are you doing over here?"

  He appeared to be thinking of an answer. "Checking some tracks," he said finally. "They didn't lead to anything."

  Kelsey knew he was lying. And she knew something more. Dillon didn't often lie, or he would be better at it. "What were you really doing?"

  She had her hands on her hips, and her clothes and skin were covered with a fine haze of dust a shade darker than her hair. Dillon would have admired the effect if he hadn't been so enraged. "Leave it, Kelsey. You don't really want to know."

  "You'd be surprised." Kelsey stepped around him and started over the second ridge, but Dillon caught her easily.

  "Don't. It's not a pretty sight."

  She shook off his hands only to have them settle on her shoulders again with more force. "What isn't?"

  He regretted having to tell her almost as much as he regretted not finding Serge in the act'of blocking the shaft. He would accuse, and Serge would deny. In the end, Dillon would be left with no satisfaction.

  "There was a piece of iron blocking the shaft," he said slowly. "But I didn't reckon on what would be weighing it down."

  Kelsey frowned, no longer fighting him. "What was?"

  "A dead roo. A female. Someone shot her straight through the heart."

  * * *

  "THAT'LL BE THIRTY-FOUR dollars fifty." The friendly man at the Miner's Store wrapped Kelsey's new hard hat and khaki work shirt in brown paper, tying the package with a length of string. "You're certain I can't sell you the boots?"

  Kelsey counted out each dollar with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Afraid not."

  "I'd hate to see your foot bashed if a rock falls on it."

  "So would I." Kelsey handed him the money. "But limping's cheaper than your boots."

  He laughed. "They'll be here if you change your mind. Don't get much call for a size four. No, we don't."

  Kelsey took her package with a forced smile and headed back out into the Coober Pedy sunshine. It was late afternoon, and the temperature was high enough that she was glad she hadn't learned to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit so that she could compare it to home. She needed a hat to wear outside as well as one for under the ground, but the latter was essential while the former was merely comfortable. She had brought plenty of sunblock with her, and, since her experience yesterday, she had drenched herself in it before going outside.

  She couldn't have made it without the hard hat, though. Because of its size, her father's was no protection. And she couldn't have made it without an appropriate shirt to wear. Her peach blouse was already ripped along one sleeve from scraping against narrow mine walls. Now she was thirty-four fifty poorer and thirty-four times more worried about how she was going to manage until Jake could see her.

  At least Jake was holding his own. She had placed a call to Adelaide when she returned from the mine, and she had been able to speak directly to Jake's doctor. He and his staff were optimistic. Jake had regained consciousness twice since arriving, and his vital signs were stable. The doctor had promised to call her daily to give her information and immediately if there was a change she should know about.

  In the meantime she was going to stay in Coober Pedy despite blocked mine shafts and slaughtered kangaroos.

  The luscious smells from a narrow storefront almost pulled Kelsey inside. Dillon had shared his lunch with her on the way back to town, and, after a minimum of protests, she had eaten a sandwich and banana. But now her stomach told her she should be thinking about dinner. Unfortunately, her wallet said otherwise.

  She had already eaten two full meals that day, and she was going to have to continue that pattern if she wanted to save money. She would look forward to a good breakfast and ignore the dinner she was missing. With an iron will, she continued down the street toward the motel that was eating up her cash.

  Eating.

  * * *

  “WHERE WAS I on the evening of December first?” Dillon stretched his long legs in front of him in a deceptively casual pose. “Haven’t you been watching too much television, Sergeant?”

  “I’ll thank you to answer the question.”

  Dillon lifted his eyelids just enough to regard the man pacing in front of him. He had ignored the police sergeant’s orders to come in for questioning as long as he was able. Now he hoped that the impending dinner hour would make this session painlessly short. “You’ll wear yourself out for nothing,” he said. “Pacing won’t threaten me into confessing something I didn’t do.”

  Sergeant Newberry raised his voice. “Where were you?”

  “Half the town can tell you. I was at the pub waiting for Jake to show up.”

  “Not between seven and seven-forty. You left, supposedly to see if you could find him.”

  “And I didn’t.”

  Sergeant Newberry scribbled something on a notepad. “The trip from the pub to the Rainbow Fire takes fifteen minutes if the road is clear. Four minutes on the bitumen, eleven through the mine field.”

  “Apparently addition’s your subject.”

  “By my calculations, you could have driven there, pushed Jake down the shaft and come back, all in forty minutes.”

  “Einstein couldn’t have estimated it more closely.” Dillon leaned back in his chair. “Except for one thing.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,�
�� Sergeant Newberry mocked.

  “I’m afraid I can give you a list of people who saw me looking for Jake here in town during that time.”

  The sergeant’s pencil paused.

  “Starting with a deacon of the Catacomb Church.”

  There was a snapping sound as pencil lead succumbed to pressure. Dillon reached inside his shirt pocket and held out a pen.

  Sergeant Newberry ignored the offer, dropping his pencil on the desk behind him. “You got to the pub at six. That doesn’t explain what you were doing before that.”

  “I was digging a fifty-foot grave for Jake. You only think it was a mine shaft.”

  “Why you should think this is funny is beyond my comprehension.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s beyond your comprehension.” Dillon set all four legs of his chair on the floor. “Friendship and loyalty.” He stood. “I assume we’re finished?”

  “What were you doing before six?” The sergeant’s voice was a decibel louder.

  Dillon was tempted to walk out of the police station without answering any more questions. Inbred respect for the law, not fear, made him stay. He repeated the story he had already given right after Jake’s rescue.

  “Jake and I quit work a little past four. We went back to the dugout, showered and changed our clothes. Then I dropped Jake off in town so he could get some tucker. I was going to eat with him, but I remembered that I had two stones I wanted to ask Gary to set for me, so I told Jake I’d meet him at the Showcase at half past five and went back to the dugout.”

  “Stones?”

  Dillon kept impatience out of his voice. “Pieces of boulder opal I got from a friend in Queensland.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I picked up the stones and drove to the Showcase. When Jake didn’t show up there by six, I went over to the pub.”

  “What time did you get to the Showcase?”

  Dillon shrugged. “Half past five or so.”

  “We have no one who remembers seeing Jake in town that afternoon.” Sergeant Newberry’s smile was thin-lipped and self-congratulatory. “No one.”

  “And you’ve questioned everyone in Coober Pedy?”

  The smile altered a fraction. “Of course not.”