Body Search (19 page)

Or maybe it was hope.

“Do you think so?” she asked quietly.

Hazel shot her a glance. “I know so. But it’s not enough.” The stern warning in her voice was enough to kill the quick tremble of optimism struggling to life in Tansy’s heart. Belatedly, she remembered her parents.

Her father had needed her mother to organize his dinner parties and charm his clients’ wives. He’d needed her to keep the household running smoothly and see to the raising of their only daughter. He’d needed her.

But it hadn’t been enough.

She stared at her toes. “I know.”

“You need to decide what you need from him, and tell him so.” Hazel touched Tansy’s elbow and gestured her towards the raw, bleeding pathway the men had sliced for them. Her voice dropped toward bitter. “Then you need to be prepared to walk away if he can’t give it to you.”

Tansy thought of Trask and Hazel, who each glanced over when they thought the other wasn’t paying attention. Though she hadn’t seen the expression on Dale’s face, ever, Tansy recognized it from her mother’s face. From her own. Need. Stark longing. A wish.

Then she thought of the thing keeping Trask and Hazel apart—a man’s love for his dead wife, and his inability to say goodbye without knowing the truth. And she realized there was another reason for Dale and Trask to enter that weeping, oozing hole in the forest.

They needed to lay the dead to rest.

“Come on, then. Let’s do this.” She touched Hazel’s arm and they walked along the river to the place where a path had once run. With a shudder of foreboding, Tansy realized that the stumps of the slashed brambles were too even, too regularly spaced to be natural. The path had been covered up on purpose, many years ago. But where did it lead?

She touched the broken rock in her pocket. It made her think the trail might lead to a vein of precious stones crumbling from a hillside far above the riverbank, where pieces washed down with the rains
now and then. And islanders unlucky enough to find them were
lost at sea.

If that was the case, then someone on the island must be involved. Roberts was a newcomer. The brambles, and Lobster Island’s reputation, had been sown years ago. As had the legend of a ghost in Dale’s old house. Perhaps it wasn’t a ghost then, but a very human search for the rock Dale had carried all these years.

But who could it be? Tansy thought of the islanders she’d met—poor, honest folk who loved their families and their island, even when it gave them back nothing but heartache. As she walked along the path, she realized she already had her answer.

Roberts would know. He would know who controlled the gems, and who had hired him to buy the island.

He might even know where the graves were.

Ripe male curses and the snick of metal on brush sounded up ahead, though Tansy couldn’t see the men through the nasty fog rising from the forest floor. The brief ray of sunlight winked out, and the world was plunged back into the gray of the oncoming storm. She shivered slightly and forged on.

Scanning the ground for the best place to step foot, she noticed a small stone to one side. It might have been purple, though it was hard to tell in the stormy half light.

“Hey, I think I’ve got another one of the rocks!” She bent down beneath an overhanging limb and
stepped off the path, reaching for the unassuming-looking lump.

Without warning, the ground gave way beneath her leading foot. “Aah!” She jerked back, trying to keep her balance, and banged her head against the low-slung branch.

Hazel yelled, “Trask! Dale! Help!”

And Tansy fell.

DALE TURNED BACK AT HAZEL’S cry. His gut clenched when he realized they couldn’t see the women through the mist. He ran towards them, terror slamming in his ears. He saw only a single figure in the mist where two had been.

And his heart stopped.

“Tansy!” He charged to the place where she’d disappeared, and skidded to a halt at the edge of a crumbling void that had been disguised by a light mat of twigs, dirt and leaves. “It’s a damn pit trap!”

There was so little light filtering through the low canopy that he couldn’t see the bottom. Couldn’t see Tansy. His heart started to beat again, but in an erratic gallop that seemed to say
Too late, too late, too late.

“Tansy!” he called, “Tansy, honey, can you hear me?”

Trask shouldered Hazel aside, away from the jagged edge of the pit, and the three leaned down, peered through the darkness and saw…nothing.

Dale was taking a breath to yell again when he heard a rustle from the pit. Then Tansy’s voice.

“Dale. I’m fine. Keep away from the edge. I don’t think it’s too stable.” She was breathing hard, but her voice was strong, and he felt such a surge of relief and twisting guilt that he closed his eyes momentarily against the power of it. Against the power she held over him.

“Thank you, God,” Hazel breathed, and the sentiment expressed everything that was in Dale’s heart but would never be said.

“Can you shine one of the lights down here?” Tansy called up. “I’m wedged against something.”

The lights. Of course. Dale reached into the pocket of his slicker for one of the flashlights they’d picked up at the dock. He aimed it into the hole and snapped it on.

His mouth dried to dust.

The pit was perhaps ten feet deep, and rough-sided. Tansy lay at the bottom, flat up against one wall. She was wedged, all right.

By a thick, sharpened stick.

“Huh.” Trask blew out a breath and rocked back on his heels.

Dale felt a flash of irritation at his uncle’s characteristic emotionlessness. If there was ever a time in his life that he wanted to panic, it was now. But he couldn’t. Tansy needed him.

“Dale?” Her muffled voice carried upwards, sounding so much farther away than she really was. “Is it like the ones we saw in Africa?” With her face pressed against the dirt, she couldn’t see that the pit
was lined with thirty or so three-foot-long spikes. But she’d reached a hand back to touch the one that held her in place. The knowledge was in her voice, as was the fear.

“Yeah, it’s like Africa,” Dale said, unable to think of a reason to lie. They’d saved a village elder, and much of the village, from a rare pulmonary disease. The healthy men had hunted in celebration of the elder’s recovery, and Dale and Tansy had been given the dubious honor of watching their dinner skewered to death in a pit not unlike this one.

Dale tried to banish the memory of the blood, and armor himself against the knowledge that he’d almost lost Tansy just now. “Hang on,” he said inanely, aware that his voice cracked on the second word. “I’m coming down there.”

He shushed the chorus of protests with a quick gesture. “You’re not strong enough to boost her up if she’s hurt,” he said to Hazel. He turned to Trask. “And I’m trusting you to haul me out.”

Something shifted in the older man’s eyes, an emotion hidden beneath so many layers it almost couldn’t find its way out. Dale held his hand out for a shake, and somehow the shake became an embrace.

For a brief moment, Dale was seventeen again. No longer a boy, not quite a man, he’d stood beside the empty graves and wished for a hug. Now, standing beside the pit that could have been Tansy’s grave, he realized something.

Fifteen years later wasn’t too late, after all.

“Of course, boy.” Trask turned away and cleared his throat as he pulled one of the thick, fishy ropes from the bags they’d hauled with them.

Dale handed the shotgun to Hazel. “Here, keep an eye on this for me, will you?”

An islander to the core, she said nothing, merely accepting the weapon with a nod.

With Trask counterweighting the rope, Dale slid down the crumbling side of the pit, flashlight clamped between his teeth. The moist dirt was cool and faintly slimy to the touch, and a shower of small rocks cascaded down on his head every time Trask’s feet shifted.

“Dale? Watch out for the spikes.”

He grinned around the flashlight at Tansy’s unnecessary caution, but understood her need to say something. Anything.

His feet touched bottom more quickly than he might have imagined, and he let go of the rope that had slowed his descent. Above, Trask cursed in relief. The lobsterman was tough as nails, but deadweight was deadweight.

“I’m here, Tans.” Dale didn’t waste time with a survey of their surroundings. Instead, he knelt, and ran quick, testing fingers over her.

“I said I’m fine,” she snapped as though she didn’t want him touching her, but he passed it off as stress and maybe a bit of shock.

“I just want to make sure there aren’t any hidden injuries, Tans.” He spoke soothingly, as he might to
a patient, and was startled when she slapped at him with her free hand.

“Just get me out of here, okay? I think I’m lying on…something.” Her voice tailed up at the end of the sentence. When she began to struggle in earnest, Dale abandoned proper procedure and helped lever her up and aside, freeing her left arm where it had been pinned beneath her, and sliding her away from the unyielding spike.

“You’re okay. I’ve got you.” He wasn’t sure which one of them needed it more, but he dragged her into his arms and held on tight, heedless of the flashlight dropping to the floor of the pit. “I’ve got you.”

She burrowed in tight and hung on. He wondered if she could feel his heart beating fast and furious. Part of him hoped she couldn’t.

“You two okay down there?” A flashlight beam from above caught them for a few seconds, then discreetly slid away. Trask muttered, “Oh, sorry.”

But it was enough to interrupt the moment. Dale released Tansy, waiting a moment to make sure she was solid on her feet, then called up to Trask, “Stand by on the rope. Let’s get her out of here.”

With a heave and an indelicate boost, Dale helped Tansy scramble up the side of the pit. Chunks of wormy dirt broke free as she gained the outside.

Suddenly alone in the damp darkness, he bent down and scooped up the flashlight, which had fallen near where she had been trapped. The beam glinted off something other than dirt. Dale froze.

I think I’m lying on…something.
And she had been, though not the bones that he had briefly feared.

No, it wasn’t a skeleton. But it was evidence that they weren’t the first to visit the bottom of the pit. Splinters of rotted wood suggested that spikes had been shattered and replaced. And a cheap plastic watch lay broken, abandoned beside a corroded piece of jewelry.

“You ready?” Trask called down from above.

Dale flashed his light quickly around the pit, which was maybe ten feet square. Spikes and dirt. No other signs of violence, which in a way made the evidence all the spookier. He bent and picked up the watch and what turned out to be a friendship locket, of the sort island high school boys might give to their sweethearts when the couple agreed to go steady.

“Ready.” Past ready, Dale thought, as the rope snaked back down to the bottom of the pit. “Get me the hell out of here.”

Though it was dark and drizzly, and the wind had sprung back up after their brief respite, he felt a blast of warmth as he emerged from the pit trap back onto the ground level of Lobster Island. Maybe it was being out of that black, deathly pit, he thought.

Or maybe it was the sight of Tansy, Trask and Hazel waiting for him.

Chapter Eleven

They gathered near the pit trap with their backs to the jagged hole, not ready to move on, but not wanting to stare into the obscene thing.

“Was it Roberts, do you think?” Hazel asked. Her eyes were stark and worried. She held the shotgun at the ready as though fearing the woods were alive with enemies.

As well they might be, Tansy thought.

Dale shook his head. “No, I think that’s been there a long time, longer than Roberts has been on the island. And I’m worried that it’s not the only one. Someone doesn’t want us on this path, that much is clear.” He glanced down at the cheap necklace and the broken watch he’d found at the bottom of the hole, and took a deep breath before his eyes found Tansy’s. “I want you and Hazel to go back down to the jeep and wait for us. You’ll be dry there, and she has the gun, so you’ll be safe, too.”

Though part of her wanted to run screaming, Tansy glared at Dale and wished the ground would
open up and swallow him whole. Then she hugged herself and shuddered, realizing she’d never wish that on anyone ever again, having experienced it firsthand. Those first few moments, when she’d been trapped in the cold, oily blackness had been bad. Realizing she could easily have been killed was worse. But understanding that someone had laid the trap beside the old pathway and baited it with a chunk of the purple rock?

That was downright gruesome.

Still, she clenched her jaw and shook her head. “I’m not going back without you. We’re a team.”

A team. That was all, because Hazel was right. It wasn’t about what Dale would or wouldn’t take from her anymore. It was about what he could give her.

What she deserved.

Dale bared his teeth in a feral expression so far removed from Dr. Dale Metcalf, M.D., that she backed up a step. “Damn it! Why can’t you be sensible and go wait in the car? This doesn’t have anything to do with you, don’t you get that?”

Tansy flinched but stood firm. She thought she caught a ghost of desperation in his expression, but it might have been wishful thinking. She would give him this before they said goodbye. She’d see him through this quest for his parents, this search for his past, then she’d go, knowing she had done her very best.

But also knowing that she’d accepted defeat before she lost her self-respect.

“I’m. Not. Leaving.” She glared up at him. “Got it?”

He didn’t answer. He stared down at her, breathing heavily, his eyes darkening almost to midnight.

In that instant, she thought he might kiss her and every traitorous, womanly fiber in her body yearned for the contact, yearned for the warmth amidst the cold and the calm amidst the storm. They swayed ever so slightly toward each other, compelled by a force greater than the wind.

“Just kiss her and let’s move on,” Trask demanded from behind them, “We’ve got maybe two hours before the storm hits for real.” He punctuated the complaint with an
oof
that Tansy figured came from an elbow planted in his ribs.