Body Search (21 page)

Tansy felt the mud give beneath her borrowed shoes and lunged forward, narrowly avoiding another pit trap. A bullet sang above her, in the place where her head had been just moments before.

The shotgun blasted again, sounding farther away,
and Tansy cursed at the knowledge that Dale was backing down the hill, endangering himself as he tried to buy her more time. “Damn it, Dale. Come on!” she muttered in between gasps as she gained the gritty shore of the river and fixed her eyes on the cave mouth high above the opposite side. An incongruous thread of white mist, maybe steam, bled from the tip of the cracked mouth. She had no fear of small spaces, but this cave, like the opening the men had hacked into the forest, seemed to be waiting for something. It seemed almost…alive.

She heard running footsteps behind her and spun to find Dale nearly on top of her. “Come on, sweetheart. Time to go!”

That was when she knew she was never coming out of the rabbit hole. Dale Metcalf had called her sweetheart.

“Did you get Roberts?”

His lack of a reply was answer enough, as was the ready hold he kept on the shotgun. They’d started the trip with twelve rounds. She’d counted ten blasts. That left them with two waterlogged shells.

Tansy gritted her teeth. “Let’s go, then.”

Hands linked, they waded into the water with Dale upstream so the force of the river would break around him. She gasped at the first shock. She’d thought herself cold and wet before. She’d been wrong.

The wind tore at them, howling through the shallow canyon like fury and beating against her until she
thought it might be easier just to collapse into the river and let it sweep her away.

“Come on, damn you. Don’t quit now.” Dale dragged her a few steps closer to the far shore, which seemed a mile away. Her legs were numb and heavy. Her feet could have belonged to someone else. “Don’t you dare quit on me!”

She took another step. Another. And the riverbed disappeared beneath her.

At her cry, Dale braced himself as best he could on the slippery rocks beneath the water and held tight to her hand. “Come on, you can do it!”

He couldn’t drop the shotgun to save her. It was all they had. He’d left his duffel back by the bullet-riddled tree. Ropes and machetes would do them no good if they didn’t make it to the cave.

“Dale!” Eyes wide with fright, lips blue with cold, she struggled back to her feet, hauling on his hand until he thought his shoulder might pop. She set her lips. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

God, she was tough. Together, they trudged across the river. Inch by inch. Step by step. There was no sign of Roberts. Maybe he’d winged the man with one of his shots. Dale could only hope, because he was down to his last shell, having dropped one in his mad, zigzagging dash to the river. The force of the current dragged at his legs and the howling wind dragged at his body, but he did his best to shield Tansy from both. Slipping, stumbling, they hauled each other out of the water to the base of a steep in
cline. A crude flight of steps was hacked into the hillside.

“Wait.” Tansy held him back. “The pit traps.”

Dale froze and cursed himself for being stupid. The path to the river had been booby-trapped. Why not this one? “Do you see another way up?” The wind ripped the words from his mouth, but he barely felt the gale’s brutal force anymore. His face was numb, and his hands and feet. They needed to get inside, out of the wind and the rain, out of the open.

He felt eyes on the back of his neck and glanced again at the dark forest on the other side of the river. Was that movement? Or just the bowing and swaying of the strange, twisted trees? Where the hell was Roberts?

“This way.” Tansy scrambled up a narrower, faintly marked trail, testing each step and watching the ground carefully. “It seems okay.”

Dale followed, keeping watch behind them. But even so, he couldn’t help noticing the slick cling of wet cloth to her body as she worked her way up the slope. The surge of lust was familiar, yet spiked with something new. Desperation.

She stopped at the cave mouth and waved him forward, the caution in her eyes bringing a new fear. What if Roberts had an accomplice? What if someone was waiting for them in the cave?

Zzzzzzzt. Crack!
The bullet smacked into the rock wall beside Dale’s shoulder, and suddenly there was no time to worry about what waited for them inside
the cave, because a tall figure in a long, dark green raincoat was wading determinedly across the river toward them.

Roberts.

“Get in the cave!” Dale yelled, shoving her inside. He had to yell, because the wind suddenly doubled in intensity, wailing and gnashing at the island, whipping the river to whitecaps that swirled around Roberts’s legs, then his waist.

The raincoated figure staggered and dropped to one knee in the rushing water, leaving Dale to wonder whether he’d wounded the man already. Then he decided he didn’t care. It was Roberts or them, and Dale had promised to keep Tansy safe. He was going to get her off the island or die trying.

Calmly, he lifted the shotgun and fired into the wind, trusting Hurricane Harriet to send the pellets back into the river. The blast was quiet in comparison to the sound of the storm, which blotted out any cry from the man below. The figure simply jerked, folded over and fell into the rushing, white-flecked water.

In moments, the dark green raincoat slipped around a bend in the river and was gone.

It took longer for Dale’s system to level, and for the rough, ready rage to subside. Then he waited another minute, thinking the feeling of vindication should come next.

But it didn’t. In its place lingered a vague disquiet and a growing, numbing cold where the wind and the rain bit down to his skin.

“Dale? Are you okay?” Then Tansy was at his side, and the cold didn’t seem so bad anymore. But the adrenaline and the rage remained, tempered now to something that felt less like anger and more like heat. She touched his arm, igniting a thousand pin-prick fires. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the cave.” She was silent for a moment, then asked, “Do you think he had a chance to dump the toxin in the river?”

“I don’t know.” Lightning flashed and thunder grumbled. The sky closed in for good, and almost all of the yellow-gray light was extinguished as though it had been sucked into the clouds. “I guess we’ll have to trust Hazel, Trask and Churchill to keep the islanders away from their taps until the storm passes.”

Trust. It was a new concept for him, yet it seemed to fit well here, in this place that felt like the end of the earth.

“Come inside,” she urged, tugging him toward the cave. “You’re freezing.”

They both were. Tansy’s lips were blue, and Dale’s fingers, nose and toes were numb. Now that Roberts was gone, they needed to concentrate on practical matters like getting warm.

Feeling as though he was taking a monumental step, Dale set one foot inside the cave. The wind pushed him with a gentle hand and he stepped another foot inside. And waited.

But there were no ghosts waiting for him. Only Tansy.

And she was everything.

The floor of the cave was covered with coarse, faintly purple sand. Hundreds of boot tracks pock-marked the surface, beginning four or five feet inside the cave as though the last big storm had washed away part of the humans’ passing.

A few feet past the boot marks, the dim outside light failed and the cave, about ten feet across at that point, faded to inky black. Resigned to the sight he feared would greet him, Dale reached into his pocket and pulled out the sadly abused waterproof flashlight he’d borrowed from the sorting shed.

He flicked on the light and panned it across the cave, empty shotgun at the ready, just in case.

Then the light faltered.

The gun sagged.

And Tansy gasped.

It was beautiful. The flashlight’s feeble yellow glow was picked up and thrown back at them from a hundred thousand facets. Purple-black. A slash of orangey yellow. Deep, throbbing green.

“God,” Dale breathed, the word coming from deep in his gut. The walls of the arched cavern were an artist’s palette, the stalactites hanging from the ceiling, spears of pure color.

“This is why they died,” Tansy breathed at his shoulder, “so nobody would find this place.”

She gestured, and Dale followed her gaze to the far wall, where tool marks and shattered crystal marked crude mining efforts. Dale felt his heart
squeeze in his chest. Greed. It all came back to greed. “Yeah.”

Almost unable to bear the sight of a natural wonder perverted to man’s grand design, he doused the flashlight, once again becoming aware of the chill. The wind. Tansy’s shivers. His own.

“Come on,” he urged. “Let’s see where the steam is coming from.” Logically, it had to be hotter than the outside air, to create that thin track of white that wound around the jagged ceiling.

It wasn’t until they’d crept halfway across the immediate cavern that Dale realized he could see shapes in the darkness, even though the flashlight was off.

“There’s light up ahead,” Tansy murmured, a quiver in her voice betraying cold or fear or both. “And it feels warmer.”

There was no hum of machinery. No whisper of cloth or murmur of voices save their own. The place felt deserted, though Dale wasn’t yet ready to trust his feelings.

She was right. His face was warmer than his back. He moved toward the heat, aware of Tansy close behind him, and stopped dead when he reached a man-high opening in the gem wall and smelled the warm, moist air coming from the natural antechamber.

An opening high above them let in the light, which filtered through a jutting purple stone to give the grayness a touch of lavender.

Tansy’s gasp reverberated through his body, set
ting up greedy little thrills and warning bells. “Is that…?”

He nodded, though he wasn’t sure anymore what he was agreeing to. “Yep. It’s a hot spring.”

Chapter Twelve

It shouldn’t have been awkward for them to undress together. They’d done it a hundred times on assignments before they became lovers, and many more times since. But Tansy turned away from him now, and her fingers shook from more than cold as she tugged at her shirt and pants.

After an agonizing moment, he turned away. “I’m going to scout the rest of the cave and make sure there’s really nobody here. I’ll probably take a look outside, too.”

“Be careful,” she called, but was grateful when he was gone. Hot baths and Dale were a potent combination. She wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough to resist, even though she’d come to grips with the fact that they would go their separate ways once they left Lobster Island.

If
they left Lobster Island.

“No. I won’t think like that,” she said aloud, wincing when the strange crystal walls picked up her words and threw them back at her.

She listened for Dale, or for gunshots, but the doctor in her knew that Roberts would soon be irrelevant if she didn’t bring her body temperature up. Though it was probably forty degrees outside, the wind and the rain made it feel far colder. She debated keeping on her panties and bra, then shrugged, wrung them out and added them to the line of clothing she’d spread on the gritty floor along one wall. Hopefully, the warm air and the slight breeze from the hurricane winds above would be enough to dry them.

When she dipped a toe into the oily-looking water that swirled in a rocky bowl near the far wall of the eerie cavern, she found the water blood-warm. Slipping in, she felt strange mineral salts tingling against her skin. With a sigh, she let her head fall back and felt the warmth caress her scalp. Warm. She was finally warm. She arched up and felt the heavy mineralized water sheet off her breasts.

“God.” The single word in Dale’s voice was less a curse than a prayer.

Tansy straightened in the chest-high water, aware that it all but glowed amethyst around her. Dale stood near the door with the shotgun in one hand and a knapsack in the other. His eyes were fixed on her.

“I found some food near the back of the main cave,” he said thickly. “It’s not much, but it’s packaged, so it should be safe. I also found three unopened cases of saxitoxin from Beverly Labs. I think we can be safe in assuming he didn’t poison the island.”

The reminder of their peril should have been
enough to jerk her back to reality, but the purple light and the man standing at the water’s edge wouldn’t allow Tansy to climb back up out of the rabbit hole. Part of her wanted to stay down here forever.

“I, uh, found some string in a pile of equipment, and rigged a trip wire at the front. If anyone comes in, the noise will warn us.” He took another step closer to the water, eyes dark in the strange half light of the storm that raged far away, outside the suddenly steamy cave.

“You’ve done your best, Dale. Now come and get warm. You must be freezing.” She patted the water beside her and saw his eyes flash with the memories that crowded her head, as well.

There was no future for them, she knew, but what was the harm in one last moment in the present?

He dropped the knapsack near the water’s edge and set the gun beside it. “We should probably take turns bathing. It’ll be safer.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Roberts is gone, Dale. Even if he made it out of the river alive, there’s no way Harriet is letting him—or one of his friends—back up here today.” As if in confirmation, the hurricane winds blasted past the rocky opening high overhead, creating an eerie, moaning descant that raised the hairs on Tansy’s body as she stood in the warm water. “We’re safe enough for right now.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” His voice rasped on the words and Tansy realized what he’d meant by “safe.”

She wouldn’t be safe from him, or from the wild urges she’d seen reflected in his eyes after Roberts had gone downriver.

“Oh.” Suddenly hotter than the surrounding steam, Tansy patted the water again and felt the ripples tingle at the tops of her breasts. “Then come into the water, Dale. Please.”

She would give herself this one last, unwise interlude before she said goodbye.