Mountain Rampage (33 page)

“I knew more of the gold had to exist, but when I visited the mine last fall, I found the tunnel was solid granite. I needed to deepen the search, figure it out. I was too old, but not Kirina—especially with your help. I proposed the field school idea to the park, talked up the public-relations potential, got them to bite.”

“It was all a façade,” Chuck said, recalling the professor's insistence that the students excavate the tunnel. “Except Kirina didn't turn out to be who you thought she was.”

“In fact,” Sartore replied, his disdain obvious, “she turned out to be more like my mother than I ever could have imagined.”

“Lovesick, you mean.”

“She was captivated by Clarence. Consumed. Enthralled. I told her there would be plenty of time for him later, but she couldn't help herself. I forced myself to believe everything would work out—until two days ago, when the police called with all their questions.”

The flames reached the end of the first-floor hallway, climbed up the back wall, and joined the blazing balcony above. The temperature soared. Smoke hung thick in the room. Chuck took another backward step, edging toward the front door.

The professor trailed Chuck, his back to the flames. “And now you have the same opportunity as Kirina. You can make things right, for both of us.”

Embers tumbled from the burning ceiling, blistering the varnished floor behind the professor. Chuck took small breaths to avoid searing his lungs. How far behind him was the front door? He dared not turn his head to find out. Instead, he looked Sartore in the eye. “Your mother,” he said. “I found her.”

The gun trembled in the professor's hand. “My
mother
?”

Chuck pointed at his pack, resting against the wall at the side of the room. “In there.”

Sartore turned to the pack, his eyes growing round.

“It's everything you've spent your life wanting to know,” Chuck said. “
Everything
.”

“What?” the professor sputtered. “How?”

Chuck tilted his head at the fire coating the back wall of the room. “There's no time.” He pointed at his pack. “In there is—to you—my greatest discovery ever.”

Sartore looked past Chuck at the open front doorway. Chuck held his ground, the heat in the room so intense his shirt burned his skin where it touched his chest.

A tear ran down Sartore's leathery cheek. He lowered the gun to his side, turned away from Chuck, and walked to the pack, his shoulders bowed.

Chuck backed to the front doorway. The cool night air poured past him into Raven House, feeding the flames.

Sartore set Hemphill's gun on the floor, lifted the pack, and rummaged inside it until he pulled out the skull. He held it before him, staring at the bullet hole.

Chuck gripped the doorframe, his eyes locked on Sartore. The breeze flowing into the building stopped. A millisecond later, a violent jet of superheated air blasted Chuck out the door.

F
IFTY
-F
OUR

Chuck flew backward off the front steps as the Raven House roof collapsed into the common room and white-hot flames swallowed the professor.

Driven by the explosive blast of wind, Chuck tumbled across the front yard, his arms and legs flailing. He came to rest on his hands and knees, climbed to his feet, and ran away from the flaming building.

Janelle met him in the middle of the road in front of the collapsed dormitory. She held him in her arms, her cheek to his chest.

Chuck put his hand to Janelle's hair. Blood, dripping from the knife wound on his forearm, stained her shirt.

He leaned on her shoulder, his ears ringing from the concussive collapse of Raven House, as she helped him across the road, her arm tucked tight around him. Carmelita and Rosie met him at the edge of the grass. They wrapped their arms around his waist and buried their heads in his torso. Janelle's mouth moved, but he heard only high-pitched ringing. He looked around him, glad his eyesight, at least, was functioning.

Under Gregory's supervision, Clarence, Parker, and the students stood on either side of Sheila and Hemphill, preparing to carry the two patients deeper into the fields away from the fire. Falcon House, still standing, was engulfed in flames, as were the collapsed dining hall and Raven House.

Tornado-like winds, spawned by the flaming buildings, spun across the road and into the fields, pelting anything and anyone in their path with burning debris. A pair of fire trucks, dispatched from the lodge and conference center, raced around the fields toward the blazing buildings.

Clarence, Parker, Gregory, and the students lifted Sheila and Hemphill and hustled them away from the raging fire.

Janelle released Chuck. He caught his balance, his hands
resting on the girls' heads for support.

Janelle put a hand to his chest. “All right?” she asked, her words battering his eardrums as the ringing in his ears subsided. “Are you all right?”

He nodded but didn't speak, afraid to trust his voice.

She gathered his shirt in her hand and pulled him close. She stared into his eyes. “I love you,” she said. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Damn it all.”

She pried the girls from his side. Taking them by the hand, she led them away from the fire. “Come on,” she said over her shoulder to Chuck.

In front of Falcon House, the international workers retreated deeper into the fields as well—all except Anca. Nicoleta's roommate stood watch over Jake, who sat before her in the grass, his hands and feet drawn together with the nylon cord from Parker's truck, his wrists trussed beneath his ankles.

Chuck approached Jake and Anca on unsteady feet, his addled brain struggling to comprehend how Jake had known about the calaverite in the mine before anyone else.

Chuck spoke to Jake's hunched frame, his words echoing in his head, trying to come up with something, anything, that would get him talking. “You see what you did?” He aimed an accusatory finger at the burning structure that had been Raven House, ablaze behind him. “You just murdered two people.”

Light flickered on Jake's face. Blood from his flattened nose covered his upper lip. “The girl got what she had coming to her. She shot a cop.”

“That wasn't who she was,” Chuck said, repeating his kneejerk defense of Kirina despite what she had done to Nicoleta, and had attempted to do to Sheila.

The fire trucks rolled to a stop in front of the blazing buildings. Firefighters jumped from the trucks and set about unfurling
hoses. A water tanker sped around the fields, joining the two trucks.

“You're telling me I was seeing things?” Jake insisted.

“Greed,” Chuck said. “I see a lot of it in what I do.”

But the word didn't describe Kirina, who'd been coerced into doing what she'd done by Professor Sartore, her father. Chuck shook his head to clear it as the ringing in his ears continued to diminish. The description of Kirina as greedy didn't fit her—but it fit Jake to perfection.

Chuck looked down at the wrecker owner. “Sometimes I find things people want real bad.”

Jake stared at the fire trucks parked end-to-end in the road. He dug his heels into the grass, turning himself away from Chuck to face the firefighters as they worked.

A swirl of wind, launched by the fire, swept across the grass, flattening the stems to the ground before lifting them straight up. The heat from the spinning wind dried the sweat on Chuck's brow, but the perspiration returned as soon as the mini-tornado passed.

“It seems you found something this summer before I found it,” he said to Jake.

Jake continued to eye the firefighters.

“Those
sandbags
,” Chuck said. “For sighting in rifles at the gun range.”

Jake flinched.

Chuck continued, “The dead girl, Nicoleta. You knew her.”

Jake spoke without looking at Chuck. “I already told you that.”

“But you didn't tell Hemphill.”

The wrecker owner's shoulders drew together beneath his coveralls.

“Why not?”

“She was disgusting,” Jake said, trembling.

Chuck bit his lower lip. Only Kirina had known, all summer long, that gold might be hidden in Cordero Mine.
Only Kirina
. He remembered, with a start, Jeremy disparaging her earlier in the summer: “One of those square-faced dykes who swing both ways.”

He turned to Anca. “The people Nicoleta slept with—they weren't all men, were they?”

Anca shook her head, the movement slow and deliberate.

Chuck stepped in front of Jake. He caught Jake's gaze only for an instant before Jake lowered his head and averted his eyes, but that was enough for Chuck to see in them everything he needed to know.

Jake could have heard about the gold from only one person: Kirina. She had told Nicoleta about the possible riches in the mine; Nicoleta, in turn, had told Jake.

Chuck had overheard Kirina describe to Sartore, just moments ago, Nicoleta's all-consuming desire for a green card. The young woman from Bulgaria had been so determined to remain in America that she'd been willing to sleep with anyone and everyone who might provide a way for her to stay in the country. She'd even cut herself, soaked Clarence's knife with her blood, and called the cops anonymously, planning to blackmail him into marrying her. It was easy to see why Nicoleta would have slept with Kirina when the opportunity presented itself, and it was equally easy to see that someone as conniving as Nicoleta would have had no trouble prying lovelorn Kirina's big secret out of her. In fact, Kirina might well have told Nicoleta about the gold for her own purposes, promising Nicoleta a payoff in return for keeping her hands off Clarence.

But why would Kirina, bisexual or not, have slept with Nicoleta in the first place? Kirina was infatuated with Clarence, not Nicoleta. Rather than sleep with Nicoleta, Kirina should have resented Nicoleta for sleeping with her beloved.

Perhaps, Chuck reasoned, Nicoleta had been the next best thing for Kirina—a chance to get one physical step closer to Clarence, and to show him she, too, could play his game.

Chuck spoke to the back of Jake's downturned head. “How did Nicoleta pay you for the work you did on her car?”

Jake stumbled over his words, speaking to the ground. “She…she…I…”

Chuck's stomach climbed into his throat. “You killed her, didn't you?” he demanded.

He'd been right all along: Kirina was not a killer. So strong and competent on the outside, she was a lost soul on the inside, hopelessly infatuated with Clarence. At some point in the course of the summer, she'd sought physical solace in Nicoleta—solace that had cost Kirina her life.

Chuck had heard Kirina admit to Sartore that she had tried and failed to find it within herself to kill Sheila—but she'd never actually confessed to killing Nicoleta.

“
You murdered Nicoleta
,” Chuck repeated, standing over Jake. “She paid you in sexual favors for fixing her car, and she told you about the gold, trying to use the information to win herself a green card.”

Jake's body stopped trembling as Chuck continued, glaring down at him. “You figured it out. You found the calaverite—the gold. No more tuition worries, especially when added to what you stood to make off your poaching. All you had to do was kill another ram or two and slip a few loads of ore out of the mine. But Nicoleta got her claws into you, didn't she? She wouldn't let go.”

Chuck shuddered. It all made sense now. With the summer drawing to a close and her return to Bulgaria eminent, Nicoleta had worked two angles at once—cutting herself to blackmail Clarence, and threatening to reveal her sexual relationship with Jake as leverage over him.

The words of the librarian, Elaine, rang in Chuck's ears: “I've been around long enough to know that when someone dies, there's usually a reason for it—and the person who's dead is usually part of the reason.”

Chuck stared at the back of Jake's head. “You agreed to meet her. She said you had to find her a husband, a visa, some way to stay here, or she'd tell everyone what you'd done with her. The two of you argued. You lured her into the forest and gave her a good shake, just to make her see reason. But she screamed instead. You were desperate. You had to keep her quiet.” Chuck recalled the fluidity with which Jake had flipped open his switchblade a few minutes ago. “Your knife appeared in your hand as if by magic. You didn't mean to kill her; it just happened.”

Jake looked up at Chuck, his eyes black and bottomless. He opened his mouth and howled like a caged beast, twisting his bound wrists. The cord securing him fell away and he scrambled to his feet.

Chuck stepped back, stunned. Jake had retrieved his knife from the grass and used it to cut through the cord binding his hands and feet without anyone noticing.

Jake swung his arm, aiming for Chuck's stomach, his knife flashing in his hand. Chuck leapt away. The instant the blade passed him, he danced forward on his toes and unleashed a straight-ahead left to Jake's face. His fist exploded against Jake's cheekbone, snapping Jake's head backward. Chuck followed with a right to Jake's body. Jake slashed backhand with his knife. Again Chuck leapt away—but not quickly enough.