The Opal Legacy Part 9

"Tell me. Shouldn't I know? Don't you trust me?"

"Of course I trust you. I hate to worry you-I guess I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned-I don't like to bother you with a problem not of your making."

"When I married you, your problems became mine. How bad is it?"

"We might lose Iron Ridge. Not only the house, the land as well. Everything. You've told me what your opal means to you; Iron Ridge means at least as much to me. To have to sell, to have others, strangers, living at Iron Ridge, I don't know whether I could take that."

"I didn't realize." She walked to the window where she looked across the beach to the dock and the lake beyond. The sky over the water was a cobalt blue. She could understand how much Iron Ridge must mean to Jon.

"You could help me, Lesley." His voice was soft, and when she turned from the window she found his eyes on her as though he tried to read her reaction.

"The opal," he said slowly. "I realize you couldn't sell the opal; I wouldn't want you to. But the stone gives you power, and that's a rare and remarkable gift. A valuable gift if you could bring yourself to use it; not for me, for us. You said you don't dream of things, only of people. What if you happened to meet someone, a person about to begin a new venture? Do you think you could tell whether he'd be successful? Could you do that? What do you think?"

"I don't know." A sudden suspicion about Jon's debts chilled her. "The money you owe. Is Charles Randall involved? The man I saw in Marquette?"

"Yes, Randall's involved. I wish he weren't, but he is."

She pursed her lips. "I don't understand."

"I owe him money. A great deal of money."

She sat on the edge of the bed. I must help him, she told herself. "All right. I'll try. I don't think I can, but I'll try. What do you want me to do?"

He pulled her down beside him, took her in his arms, his hand moving up over her back. For the first time she felt nothing when he touched her.

"No, not now." She got up and stood beside the bed. "I don't feel right about having to use the opal. I'm upset."

"But you will? You said you would."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I'm going to bring someone here. Tonight, to Iron Ridge. His name's Chet Hawley, he's an old-timer from around these parts who wants me to go in with him on a mining venture. The details aren't important, but I could make a great deal of money in a very short time. Or lose the rest of what I have. The result depends on him, on his character, whether he's telling the truth. Maybe even if he's not on the level he's come to believe his own claims; he might be fooling himself. I have to know."

"You want me to meet him tonight then?" Lesley felt tired, though she had slept well.

"Talk to him for a little while; listen to him. That's all. Then use the opal to induce one of your dreams. All I need is a hint of the future, nothing more. You will help me, won't you?"

"I said I would, and I will."

Lesley walked to the door and, without looking back at Jon again, went down the stairs. It's the least I can do, she thought, yet she frowned, troubled. He's using me, a part of her warned.

No, it's for us, not just for him, she answered herself. He didn't know about the opal until after he intended to marry her. It wasn't as though he had married her because of the precious stone, or because of her power of precognition.

Chet Hawley's hair was long and white and he had a white moustache and scrubbed pink cheeks. He sat in the living room with his legs outstretched, ankles crossed, staring down at his worn boots.

"My wife's new to the Upper Peninsula," Jon said as he handed a scotch and water to the older man.

"Won't like it," Hawley said. He took the gla.s.s without raising his eyes.

"I think I will. Of course I haven't been here through a winter yet."

Hawley swirled his drink, then drank steadily until the gla.s.s was half-empty. He uncrossed his feet, immediately re-crossing them the other way.

"Tell us about your mine," Jon said.

Hawley pushed himself to his feet and began to pace, his eyes on the floor as though still looking for promising rock outcroppings. When he began to speak, his hands gesticulated excitedly and his cheeks became even pinker than before. He told them of his discovery of the ore, his need for development capital, the indifference of the big mining companies. He talked without interruption for twenty minutes, sat down, finished his drink, and was silent. After a few attempts at conversation, Lesley excused herself.

"Young lady." Chet Hawley's voice stopped her in the doorway. "Some of them don't last the first winter," he said. "Most of them don't stay for a second."

"We'll see," she said.

Later that night she lay in bed cradling the opal in her hand as she pictured Chet Hawley, willing her mind to close, willing the opal to lead her through the veil of the future.

"I dreamed last night," she told Jon when she woke the next morning.

"Well?" He turned over in bed, his face on the pillow a few inches from hers.

"About the bluff at Iron Ridge, like I've dreamed before. Nothing about Mr. Hawley. Nothing at all."

"You're sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. I'll try again, but I know it won't work. My foreseeing isn't something I can control, turn on and off. Like any other dream, it just comes."

"You've been against the idea from the first. I wonder if you could help if you really wanted to badly enough?"

"Why do you think I could when I can't? Must you always doubt me?"

"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm worried, Lesley, about the money." He pulled her to him and kissed her.

"No," she said, twisting away. "That's the way you want to settle every argument. To you, I'm little more than a bedmate, someone you can control with s.e.x. That may be your idea of marriage; it's not mine."

"Lesley!"

She swung from the bed. "I'm sorry. I wanted my marriage, our marriage, to be special. Different." He started to reach out to her. "Not now," she said. "Let me alone for now. Maybe you were right and we have been together too much here, just the two of us. Give me a little while and I'll be all right."

She walked from the room and along the corridor to the entrance hall. Opening the front door, she looked across the driveway to the woods. The morning wind chilled her with the cold of winter, and she s.h.i.+vered, quickly shutting the door.

He didn't marry me because of the opal, she told herself once more.

Are you sure? a voice within her asked.

Chapter Twelve.

The change in Jon came slowly, was actually a number of small changes, each seemingly unimportant in itself. Should she become alarmed when her husband preferred one room to another? Or because he enjoyed taking more than one shower a day? Or when he rearranged the furniture?

Their life at Iron Ridge had settled into an uneasy routine. They ate breakfast together, then Jon drove to Marquette or worked in his office writing while Lesley cleaned, washed clothes, or ironed. After lunch they worked together painting or making repairs and later Jon walked on the beach while Lesley read.

At first they spent their evenings in the living room playing cards, doing jigsaw puzzles, and watching television. More and more, however, Jon began to go directly to the library after supper, and when she joined him in the dark interior room she usually found him reading; yet she noticed that often many minutes pa.s.sed without his turning a single page of his book. His eyes were often either closed or staring, as though hypnotized, at the fire.

"There's a draft in here," he said, hunching his shoulders and going to the fireplace to jab at the burning logs with the poker until sparks scattered onto the hearth.

"Why don't we sit in the living room then?" Lesley asked. "I'll make popcorn and we can watch the movie on TV."

"No, even when the television's on I can hear the lake from the living room. I have to listen to the splash, splash, splash of water all day. I get tired of it." He also, she knew, shut away the lake at night by closing the draperies on their bedroom windows.

She became aware of his showers on the day after she met Chet Hawley. Jon always rose early and on this morning he followed his usual routine as he shaved, showered, dressed, and came down to breakfast. Later in the day, about one o'clock, she heard the steady rush of water when she walked past the upstairs bathroom. The shower was running.

"I felt grimy," he said in answer to her question, and then changed the subject. Again that evening she heard the shower, and Jon made no comment. Soon she noticed he showered three or four times a day.

And then there was the arrangement of the furniture. When, on their first day at Iron Ridge, Jon had carried chairs and tables from the attic and the garage to the house, he had asked Lesley where she wanted them placed, and had followed her suggestions. Now he would stand in the doorway of a room, glancing from one piece of furniture to the next, perhaps for minutes at a time. Then he entered the room to move a vase a few inches along a mantel or s.h.i.+ft a chair until it sat at a precise right angle to the wall.

"We need balance," he told Lesley when he saw her watching him. "Haven't you noticed how these rooms are out of proportion? Not much, just enough to be unsettling. I want the house to look right." Lesley said nothing.

As November pa.s.sed and winter closed in around Iron Ridge, Jon drove by himself to Marquette more frequently, spent many hours in the tower, and took long solitary walks on the beach, always, she noted, going in the same direction. When she sensed his withdrawal from her she became more solicitous, brought him coffee in his office, offered to go with him on his walks, or suggested drives to explore the countryside. But, more often than not, he shook his head, putting her off, usually gently, but at times with an impatience that stung her. "Do you always have to be hovering over me?" he asked.

And, as she became more and more uneasy, the days pa.s.sed and they picked a date in early December for the party and Jon hired a caterer and a cleaning woman from Marquette. On the day the invitations arrived from the printer, the president was stricken on a golf course in Arizona and rushed to a hospital. And just before Thanksgiving, on one of Lesley's rare trips to Marquette, she walked through a flurry of snow to the post office to mail the last of the invitations and learned that the president would live.

The next day Jon rose early and left the house without waiting to eat breakfast with her, something he had never done before. After Lesley finished the dishes she went outside, where her nose tingled from the cold and she could see the white plume of her breath. Flipping the fur-lined hood of her coat over her head, she pulled on her fur gloves.

The Buick was still parked in the garage, the tower locked and empty, the beach deserted. From the dock she looked out over the lake where the choppy water was gray despite the pale blue of the sky overhead. Turning her back to the bitter wind off the lake, she watched the water wash in and out, in and out, as it ate into the earth of the sh.o.r.eline. Ice, the first she had seen on the lake, formed a thin, brittle coating along the edge of the water.

To the north, at the foot of the promontory, a figure moved toward her. It must be Jon, she thought. In all the weeks she had lived at Iron Ridge she had never seen anyone on the beach or in the woods. Twice she had heard the crack of rifle shots but had never seen the hunters.

Jon saw her, hesitated for an instant, then came on, and as he drew near she saw his black wool cap was pulled down over his ears. He stopped on the sand below the dock and she looked down at him.

"I have to talk to you," she told him. "There's something wrong between us but I don't know what or why."

"I don't understand." His eyes slid away from hers. I love him so much, she thought. And yet- The wind off the lake made her eyes water and then, unexpectedly, she cried. He reached up to her, put his hands on her waist, lifted her down so she stood in front of him, and, leaning against his shoulder, she sobbed, the wool of his jacket p.r.i.c.kly on her face. Clumsily he caressed her hair with his gloved hand.

"Please tell me what's gone wrong," she said.

"There's nothing special to tell. You're imagining things."

"Is it the money? Are you worried about money? About Randall?"

"I'll work that out. You can't help."

"Is it Iron Ridge? Should we leave here, go somewhere else to live?"

"Where else is there? I don't have any place except Iron Ridge. Besides, I thought you liked it here."

"I could if you were happy. I want so much to make you happy."

"Can one person make another happy? Or unhappy?" She raised her eyes to find him staring above her head toward the house.

"I'm forty years old," he said. "I've worked hard and done what I thought best, or what had to be done, or what I couldn't help doing. At one time I possessed more than I dreamed I did, more than I deserved, but I didn't realize it until too late, till it all went bad on me. Then there was nothing I could do, I couldn't go back, you can never go back. Yet afterward nothing seemed to matter to me any more. Nothing. I didn't care what I did, who I might hurt. I've hurt myself, though, more than anyone."

"Wounds heal," she said. "I've seen doctors give up on patients and yet they lived. Time. It takes time."

"How much time? I don't think I have much left." He put his hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently. "Come on, what's the matter with us? Get dressed, we'll go to town, have lunch, see people. We've been alone out here too long."

He took her hand and she ran after him, trying to smile though her face was still streaked with tears.

And for a while, for a week or more, he seemed better and at night she lay in bed with his arm around her and they talked or, during the day, they walked together and took long drives, a two-day trip to Escanaba, another to Ontonagon. And then slowly he withdrew from her again, retreated into himself, and she despaired and forced herself to face what she had avoided for so long.

Since her first week at Iron Ridge Lesley had suspected Jon was meeting someone. The trips to town, the second phone line, the walks along the beach, his alternating moods, all fed her suspicions. On the night she found him on the beach, after she had thought her opal had been lost, she had been sure someone was with him.

In the beginning she submerged her suspicions, rejected them, but as the weeks pa.s.sed and the excitement between them, so steady and strong at first, became intermittent, her uneasiness changed to a nagging doubt and finally to an obsession. She could think of little else. Who did he meet? Where did she come from? At first she thought it was a woman.

Lesley pictured the other woman-older than herself, beautiful, with jet-black hair, probably someone Jon had known the last time he lived at Iron Ridge.

The imagined woman, Lesley realized, resembled Karen, the girl who danced with Jon at the party in San Diego.

Then, after she saw Charles Randall in Marquette, she wondered if his presence had caused Jon's withdrawal, whether he was the one her husband called from his office, the one he met secretly on the beach. She began to watch Jon, seeking a clue to the truth, ashamed of herself but unable to stop. Nothing he did convinced her she was mistaken; neither could she prove she was right. And yet she knew she was. I have to find out, she decided at last, preferring to know the worst rather than live with her uncertainty.

Early that afternoon Jon looked into the living room where Lesley was reading. "I'm going for a walk," he told her casually. An elaborate and unnatural casualness, she thought.

After he left, she pulled on her jacket and followed him along the beach, being careful to stay near the edge of the woods. The day was cold and overcast, the lake calm. Ahead of her Jon strode forward, pausing only once to look out over the water to where, a half mile offsh.o.r.e, an outboard droned north with a man huddled in the rear Jon did not, however, look back.

He pa.s.sed the foot of the bluff, stopping when he came to the creek. Lesley ducked behind a tree, holding her breath as she peered around the trunk. Jon glanced both to her right and left, appearing not to see her for he immediately struck off inland. Lesley hurried along the beach but when she reached the bank of the creek she could no longer see him among the trees.

She followed the path, the one they had taken weeks before, into the woods where the only sound came from behind her-the rus.h.i.+ng of the lake over the beach. Time seemed suspended for nothing moved in the forest, no birds sang, the branches over her head were stilled. She came to the turnoff to the trail Jon had told her not to follow and she hesitated, but only momentarily, for she realized that from the time she left the house she had known this was where he would go.

After climbing steadily for a few hundred feet she stopped to peer through the trees. A clearing lay just over the crest of the hill so she circled through the woods to her right, the needles slick underfoot, her steps m.u.f.fled by the thick duff on the forest floor. When she stepped on a dead branch she jumped, startled by the sudden snap, and, fearing discovery, she glanced quickly about but heard no other sound.

Small, bare-limbed trees mingled with the evergreens on the edge of the clearing. Lesley approached the open s.p.a.ce cautiously, keeping behind the ma.s.sive trunk of a pine. When she reached the tree she touched the rough bark with her hands, edging around the trunk. The clearing lay only a few feet ahead.

Jon, alone, stood with his gloved hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the ground. As she watched, he looked up and stared in the direction of the lake and she thought he pursed his lips, then talked to himself, though she couldn't be sure for he was on the far side of the clearing.

Though his breath came in white puffs, he seemed oblivious to the cold. Lesley s.h.i.+vered and her feet began to ache, so she bent and unbent her toes inside her shoes until they tingled. At last Jon thrust his hands into his pockets and turned, crossed the clearing and, not looking toward her, entered the woods some distance from her hiding place. That must be where the path is, she thought.

At first his footsteps crackled on the dead leaves under the barren trees but when he reached the pines she could no longer hear or see him. She waited. Once a twig snapped but, though she strained toward the sound, she heard nothing more. After letting at least ten minutes pa.s.s, she left the concealment of the tree to enter the clearing and walk across the stubble of gra.s.s. Through the pines ahead of her the gray lake seemed to merge at the horizon into the darker gray of the clouds.

Here, she thought. This was where Jon had stood. She looked down. A small area had been leveled and cleared and in the center, set flush with the ground, was a rectangular stone marker. She read the inscription, Mary Mulholland Hollister, and the dates of her birth and death. Jon's wife had been twenty-eight when she died. So this was his rendezvous, Lesley thought. Relief flooded through her-he had not been unfaithful, had not met Charles Randall-and then she frowned. How can I compete with a memory? she wondered.

Someone watched her from the forest. She swung about, half expecting to see Randall in the shadows of the pines. A man stood there, tall, his coat coming to his knees, a fur cap square on his head. Not Randall. The man stepped into the clearing and she backed away as, step by step, he drew nearer. She recognized him.

"It's you," she said. "What are you doing here?"