Aunt Dimity Goes West (32 page)

swear. I thought you’d want to punish her for scaring

Tammy Auerbach. I thought you’d want to get even

with her for trying to dupe you. But if you want to let

her off the hook . . .”

I didn’t consider myself an abnormally vengeful

person, but Toby’s words were having their desired

effect. I could feel myself weakening.

“I know which tunnel we could use to ambush

them,” he murmured tantalizingly. “If we do it right,

we’ll give them as big a scare as they gave Tammy.”

“If we do it wrong, we’ll kill ourselves,” I countered.

“We won’t do it wrong,” Toby insisted. “Trust me,

Lori. I know my way around the shafts.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and let it out in a rush.

“Let’s go.”

Toby stood and pulled me to my feet. “We’ll leave

through the master suite, to avoid disturbing Annelise.”

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273

“Good,” I said as we headed for the corridor, “be-

cause I have to change my shoes. I’m not going into

any mine shaft wearing sneakers.”

Toby fidgeted impatiently while I pulled on my

hiking boots, then led the way onto my deck. We

climbed over the railing, jumped, and hit the ground

running, though we slowed to a fast walk when Toby

ducked into the trees and onto a trail downhill from

the Aerie.

The moon was so bright that we didn’t need the

lantern or my headlamp to find our way, and in less

than ten minutes we were standing before a sagging

wire fence strung across a rough-edged hole in the

mountainside. Toby pulled the fence aside easily and

waited for me to join him in the mouth of the mine

shaft. I stepped past the fence, then hesitated.

“Toby?” I said. “How cold do you think it is in

Panama?”

“Huh?” he said.

“Never mind,” I said and plunged in after him.

Twenty-four

T he tunnel wasn’t nearly as horrible as I’d

expected it to be.The floor was surprisingly

uncluttered by debris, there was ample

headroom, and the rough-hewn walls were far enough

apart for Toby and me to walk side by side. Better still, the wooden supports didn’t look as though they were

on the brink of giving way, I didn’t hear or see a single rat, and the bats had apparently gone out for supper.

Granted, the thought of getting lost and wander-

ing blindly from pillar to post until our lights failed

made me want to howl with fear, but Toby seemed to

know what he was doing. We passed several openings

leading to other shafts, including a rubble-filled one

that made me think of Cyril Pennyfeather. I was still

contemplating Cyril’s sad fate—and praying silently

that we wouldn’t meet with the same one—when

Toby skidded to a halt before an opening that looked

different from the others.

“Well, well,” he said quietly. “Amanda
has
been industrious.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She’s carved a new tunnel,” he answered, shining

his light into a shaft that was much smaller and more

Aunt Dimity Goes West

275

roughly hewn than ours. “I’ve never seen this one

before.”

“How could she dig a tunnel without anyone know-

ing about it?” I said doubtfully. “Where would she put

the dirt and rocks?”

“They have a big garden up at the dome,” said

Toby. “They could have dumped the diggings there.

And if the tunnel mouth is near the dome, they’d

have no trouble keeping it secret. The townspeople

leave the commune pretty much alone.” He peered

into the tunnel again and frowned. “Still, it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to scare the Auerbachs.”

“Oh my,” I said softly, struck by a revelation that

should have come to me much sooner. “It might be

worth the trouble if it helps Amanda buy the Aerie at

a bargain price.”

“What are you talking about?” said Toby. “Mr.

Auerbach would never sell the Aerie.”

“It’s been on the market for the past six months,” I

informed him. “No one’s put in an offer, so Danny’s

lowered the price twice already. Bill told me about it

in confidence, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Toby’s stunned expression quickly gave way to one

of outrage. “If Amanda Barrow conned Mr. Auerbach

into selling—”

“Of course she did,” I broke in excitedly. “Amanda

wants to expand her empire by buying the Aerie. She

targeted Tammy and dug the tunnel in order to scare the

Auerbachs into selling it. She must think
I’m
interested

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Nancy Atherton

in buying it now that the price has come down. That’s

why she tried to scare
me.
”

“What did you call her?” Toby said darkly. “A con-

niving cow? Not strong enough, Lori. I’m thinking of

a few choice phrases from the twins’ list.”

I waved a hand toward the new tunnel. “Let’s not

ambush her gang under the Aerie. Let’s confront their

ringleader, face-to-face, at the dome.”

“I’m in,” Toby growled.

He stiffened suddenly, then pressed a finger to his

lips, reached over to turn off my headlamp, and

switched off the lantern. The darkness was absolute,

but the silence was broken by a faint clanking noise

and the distant shuffle of footsteps farther down the

shaft in which we were standing.Toby’s voice came out

of the darkness so softly that I could scarcely hear him.

“Give me the headlamp,” he said.

I slipped it off and passed it to him. A moment later

a dim red glow shone in the darkness.Toby had wrapped

the headlamp in a red bandana. It would provide enough

light to guide us without giving us away.

“Useful,” I breathed, pointing to the red bandana.

Toby grinned, handed the unlit lantern to me, and

nodded for me to follow him into the freshly carved

tunnel. It descended at a fairly steep angle, but my hiking boots kept me from slipping.Toby had to bend low

to keep from hitting his head on the jagged roof, but

the awkward position didn’t hinder his speed. He’d

clearly lost none of the skills he’d honed in childhood, while disobeying his grandfather.

Aunt Dimity Goes West

277

After a few hundred yards, my thighs began to

ache with each jolting, downward step and by the

time the tunnel leveled out, my knees were pleading

with me to stop torturing them, but I was too dis-

tracted by then to listen to them. A faint splash of light had appeared far down the tunnel.

Toby glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was

still with him, then increased his speed, racing toward

the splash of light as if he wanted to reach it before it went out. I jogged gamely in his wake, wondering

what Bill would say when I told him where I’d spent

the night. The words
stupid, harebrained,
and
suicidally
irresponsible
came immediately to mind.

We’d almost reached the source of the mysterious

glow when Toby slowed to a walk, slipped the bandana

from the headlamp, and let its beam play over a solid

wall of rock directly ahead of us.The dead end was illu-

minated from above by light leaking past the edges of

what appeared to be a fairly large trapdoor. The top

rung of a wooden ladder had been nailed to the wooden

rim surrounding the trapdoor, and its legs were planted

firmly in two slots cut into the tunnel’s floor.

Toby didn’t hesitate. He shoved the bandana and

the headlamp into his pocket, climbed the ladder, and

pushed the trapdoor open. I had to close my eyes

against the harsh glare that flooded the tunnel, and

when I opened them again,Toby had vanished. I scram-

bled up the ladder after him, hauled myself through the

opening where the trapdoor had been, and found Toby

standing a few steps away, looking utterly perplexed.

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Nancy Atherton

I was just as confused as he was. I’d expected to

find myself in Amanda’s garden, surrounded by row

upon row of organic wacky-weed, but there was noth-

ing remotely organic about the tunnel’s terminus, nor

was there any sign of the geodesic dome.

We were standing in what appeared to be the liv-

ing room of an oddly furnished house. Its oddness

stemmed from the fact that, apart from a single bare

lightbulb dangling from a ceiling fixture directly above the trapdoor, there were no furnishings. Instead, the

room was filled from floor to ceiling with densely

compacted piles of dirt and rubble. Swathes of cyclone

fence nailed to sturdy posts held the piles in place and created a passageway that led from the trapdoor to a

hallway off the living room.

“What in heaven’s name . . . ?” I said, in a hushed

voice.

“I don’t know,” said Toby. “Let’s look around.”

Toby closed the trapdoor, took the lantern from me,

and held it high as we entered the hallway. The front

door was to our left, but we turned right, to explore

the rest of the house. The bathroom and the kitchen

were spotless, but rubble filled the dining room and the largest of the two bedrooms at the back. A small, win-dowless storeroom behind the rubble-filled bedroom

held tools similar to those James Blackwell had stored

in the wooden crate at the Aerie, but these tools looked as if they’d been put to much harder use than James’s.

We paused briefly in the storeroom, then retraced

our steps to the second bedroom. It was, in its own

Aunt Dimity Goes West

279

way, the strangest room of all.The single bed in the corner had been so fastidiously made up that it would have

passed muster in a Marine boot camp. The chest of

drawers was aligned precisely with the desk opposite

the bed, and both were neat as a pin. I found the room’s excessive tidiness unsettling, but two other features

made it seem downright weird:The window above the

bed had been heavily coated with black paint, and the

walls were papered over with maps.

Some of the maps were hand drawn, some were

standard, government-issue topographic maps, and

some were so old that they’d been sandwiched in clear

sheets of plastic to keep them from falling apart.Toby

crossed to the desk to examine the hand-drawn map

that hung on the wall above it.

“Look,” he said, tracing lines with his fingertip. “It

shows the underground route between the new tun-

nel and the shaft underneath the Aerie.”

“Does it tell you where we are at the moment?” I

asked.

Before he could answer, a loud thud sounded in the

living room.

I leaned close to Toby and whispered, “Someone’s

opened the trapdoor.”

The first thud was followed by a second, as the

trapdoor fell back into place. Toby quickly extin-

guished the lantern and stationed himself in front

of me. I stared past his shoulder, spellbound, as the

clump of heavy footsteps approached the bedroom.

My nerves were strung so tight I could feel them

280

Nancy Atherton

twanging, and I nearly shrieked when a hand reached

around the doorjamb to hit the light switch, but my

reaction was tepid compared to Dick Major’s.

He was dressed in coveralls, work boots, and a

miner’s helmet, and he carried a lantern similar to

ours. His pink face contorted with rage when he saw

us, and his pale blue eyes nearly popped out of their

sockets. He let loose a string of expletives, as if to

illustrate from whom my sons had learned them, and

finished with the relatively mild, “What the
hell
are you doing in my house?”

“Hello, Dick,” Toby said calmly. “We were just

about to ask you the same thing.”

“You.”
I inched around Toby as comprehension

dawned. “It wasn’t Amanda. It was
you.
” I looked at the maps surrounding us and gave a satisfied nod, convinced that I’d finally seen the light. “Your house is on the edge of town, closest to the Aerie. You drove off

your neighbors so they wouldn’t spy on you, and you

made yourself the most unpopular man in town so no

one would ever visit you.” I glanced at the blacked-out

window. “Did you pile the diggings around the house

when you ran out of room inside? Is that why you col-

lected so much junk? Are the mattresses and old

couches there to disguise the piles of rubble?”

Dick took a step toward me and balled his free

hand into a fist. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t

you, little lady?”

“I do, as a matter of fact,” I said defiantly and

pointed a trembling finger at his face. “You’re
pink
!

Aunt Dimity Goes West

281

Everyone else in Bluebird has a tan, but
you
don’t, because
you
hardly ever see the sun.You dig at night and sleep during the day.That’s why you never show up at

Carrie Vyne’s cafe until late afternoon. That’s why

your usual drink is strong black coffee.”

Dick snarled, but I was on a roll and barely no-

ticed.

“You’re even built the right way,” I said. “Look at

your shoulders, look at your big hands.You don’t get

muscles like that
fishing.
You’ve been
digging.
You hacked a tunnel from your house to connect with the