6. Deep, Dark Secrets

6

DEEP, DARK SECRETS

He knew he shouldn’t have been looking forward to this dinner so much. Despite that, Seth couldn’t quite keep his heart from skipping a beat as Deborah entered the dining room and sent an apologetic smile toward him and his uncle Timothy, who was already seated at the head of the table.

“I’m so sorry about that,” she said as she sat down in the chair directly opposite Seth’s. “I was trying hard to see if I could remember anything, and it seems I got so exhausted, I ended up falling asleep.”

“Did anything come back to you?” Timothy asked. Like his wife, he was in his middle fifties, although somewhere along the way, he’d lost a good deal of his hair and was now nearly bald. The straining waistband of his trousers told the tale of the multitude of good meals that had emerged from Ruth’s kitchen over the years, and yet he never seemed too bothered by his girth and would always joke that perhaps it might take a few years off his life, but at least he would die happy.

Deborah shook her head in response to Timothy’s question. It seemed to Seth that she’d tidied up a bit, since those few strands that had come loose from her bun earlier today were now tucked neatly back away from her face. “No, nothing. It’s frustrating, but I’ll keep trying.”

“Of course you will,” Ruth said as she came back into the dining room, now carrying a platter that displayed a fine roast. She put it down near her husband’s place setting and then took the seat immediately to his right. “In the meantime, though, you should definitely eat to keep up your strength.”

Seth did his best to smother a smile. Their clan had a very good healer in Helen, but that didn’t stop Ruth from thinking her home cooking was really the solution to whatever might ail you.

Deborah nodded, and the next few minutes were taken up by Uncle Timothy carving the roast and giving everyone a generous helping, while the side dishes — mashed potatoes and peas and rolls and gravy — got passed around so they all had full plates by the time they were done.

Seeming to sense that Deborah didn’t want to continue discussing her memory loss, his aunt Ruth deftly turned the conversation to bits of chitchat about Jerome, whether it was the new restaurant coming in at the very top of Main Street, kitty-corner from the mercantile, or the prospect of an early monsoon season, considering they’d gotten some good rain just the weekend before.

“You do know about the monsoons, don’t you?” Ruth asked, and Deborah nodded.

“The summer rains you get here in the Southwest, right?”

“Exactly,” Seth’s aunt replied. “Up here on the mountainside, it often feels as if they’re fiercer than they are down in the valley, in Cottonwood or thereabouts.” She paused for a moment as she gave her visitor a considering look. “If you know about the monsoons, then surely you must be from somewhere in Arizona.”

“They have monsoons in New Mexico as well,” Timothy pointed out, but Ruth only made a dismissive sound.

“I doubt very much that she’s come from there,” she said. “It’s all Indians and artists in that colony in Santa Fe.”

Once again, Seth had to keep himself from grinning. And, judging by the dancing light in Deborah’s clear blue-gray eyes, she was just as amused by Ruth’s declarations as he was.

“Oh, I think there are a few more people than that,” he commented as he broke open his roll to butter it. “But I also have the feeling that Deborah comes from someplace a little closer than Santa Fe.”

Possibly, that impression was wishful thinking and nothing more. If she came from nearby, maybe Sedona or Cottonwood, or even over the mountain in Prescott, then she wouldn’t have to travel very far to get home.

If that was the case, he might still be able to see her again after she was restored to her family.

The uncomfortable thought emerged that she might have come from Flagstaff, in which case she might as well be from Timbuktu. No McAllister ventured anywhere near there, even though the bustling mountain town had plenty of residents who weren’t Wilcoxes.

It just wasn’t safe, not populated as it was by a witch clan that used magic to further their own ends and viewed the McAllisters as their bitter enemies. The primuses who ruled that clan didn’t seem to care whether they slipped over to the dark side…as long as the end result was greater wealth and power.

Through all this, the subject of their conversation had remained silent, as if she was listening to their various arguments and trying to decide whether any of them had merit. She reached for her glass of tea — wine had been banished from dinner tables for six years now — and sipped from it before saying, “I suppose anything is possible.”

Maybe it was. Since she didn’t seem to want to pursue that subject any longer, he thought it best to steer the conversation in another direction, bringing up the possibility he’d heard bandied around a few days earlier that Jerome might be getting a movie theater in the next year or so.

Ruth openly scoffed at that suggestion, saying that the Liberty Theatre on Main Street provided all the entertainment anyone could want, and that it was much better to see a live production rather than flickering images on a screen made by people all the way off in Los Angeles. Timothy countered that it was getting more and more expensive to have real theater and some folks just couldn’t afford to go, whereas they might have been able to manage the 25￠ that a movie cost.

Back and forth they went, while Seth and Deborah exchanged amused glances but mostly stayed out of the fray. He could see why she wanted to remain silent on the subject, as she was a newcomer here and knew very little about the town. And while Seth had of course been born in Jerome, he’d long ago realized it was better not to engage with his aunt unless it was strictly necessary.

Eventually, though, the meal came to its conclusion, and at once he said, “Aunt Ruth, would you mind if I stole Deborah for a few minutes? I thought we might take a short stroll down the block.”

This was something of a gamble, because he had a feeling his aunt would rather have enlisted Deborah’s help in cleaning up. But then she sent him a shrewd glance, almost measuring, and said with a smile, “No, of course I don’t mind. Timothy can help me clear the table. You two enjoy the evening.”

During this exchange, Deborah had looked almost puzzled, but she didn’t make any protests and seemed amenable enough to heading outside — after asking Ruth if she was sure she didn’t need any extra help cleaning up. Of course Ruth told her briskly that she and Timothy could manage just fine, so a few minutes later, Seth and Deborah made their way down the front steps and onto the sidewalk.

It was a fine night, the air mild and gentle after the heat of the day. Off to the east, a gibbous moon had just begun to rise behind the Mogollon Rim, and a panoply of stars glittered overhead. A soft breeze rustled in the leaves of the oaks and cottonwoods and sycamores, but it wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out the lively notes of a piano played with more enthusiasm than skill in the bar at the Connor Hotel, or the rough laughter of those who didn’t seem to have a problem being so raucous on a Sunday night when they all had to be at work early the next morning.

He knew that most of the bars up and down Main Street served alcohol, even though doing so was enough to get them closed down and slapped with a hefty fine. Jerome was just far enough off the beaten track that most people paid little attention to what might be going on there, and therefore the owners of those establishments tended to operate with an impunity that wouldn’t have been allowed in larger towns like Prescott or Flagstaff or Phoenix.

“How are you settling in?” he asked Deborah, who’d walked alongside him in silence after leaving the house.

She smiled, although he thought something about her expression seemed a little forced. “Oh, very well,” she said. “I can’t say how much I appreciate the way Ruth has given me a place to land. Otherwise, I’m not sure what would have happened.”

You could have stayed with me, he thought, even though he knew that had never been a real possibility. If it had turned out that Ruth was unwilling or unable to give Deborah refuge, Seth knew someone else in the clan would have stepped up. Since he was the one who had found her, they would have believed the McAllisters had a responsibility to keep her safe.

“We would have worked out something,” he told her. “But I’m glad that Ruth was happy to help.”

Deborah nodded, and for another moment, they walked quietly while he did his best not to stare at how her skin seemed even smoother and milkier in the moonlight, or how she walked with a self-assured grace that made him think of a queen in exile.

Or at least a princess. She wasn’t really old enough to be a queen.

“I wish I could think of how to jog my memory,” she said as they approached the terminus of the street where it dead-ended against a spur of the mountain. “It seems so strange to me that I can recall things like the monsoon, or know that the rug in your aunt’s dining room is Persian, and still not be able to remember anything about myself.”

“Maybe that’s just how amnesia works,” Seth replied. “It sure seemed in the books I’ve read where someone had some kind of memory loss, they could remember a lot about the world, just not their place in it.”

Deborah paused and looked up at him, her full mouth curving in a smile. “Do you read a lot of novels?”

Heat touched his cheeks, and he hoped the moonlight wasn’t strong enough to show the way he’d flushed like a stupid schoolboy called to task by the teacher.

“I used to,” he said. “When I was in school, I always finished my work before anyone else, so I hid books in my desk and tried to sneak reading a page here and there when the teacher wasn’t looking at me. It felt like a good way to escape.”

He stopped there, wondering if he should have told her about his illicit reading habits. After all, it didn’t seem much like a show of strength to admit that he’d been bored with his life in Jerome and wished he could go somewhere else, to a place where he could raft down the Nile or experience a safari on Africa’s great savannahs, or travel to the dark jungles of Borneo…or even to the center of the Earth, as described in the wonderful novel by Jules Verne.

Anywhere except this dusty mining town in northern Arizona.

Deborah, however, didn’t appear disapproving, but rather thoughtful. “I can see that,” she said. “Reading is the perfect way to allow you to be someone other than yourself, isn’t it?”

She understood. She wasn’t going to trot out the reproofs he’d heard through most of his youth, that reading was a waste of time and that he needed to focus on the here and now, and not the doings of people in far-off places or the distant future. The McAllisters might have been witches and warlocks, but they also tended to be extremely down-to-earth.

“I always thought so,” he said. “Not that I have much time for that sort of thing these days.”

“Because of your work at the mine?” she asked, and he nodded.

“It’s ten hours a day, six days a week,” he told her. “By the time I get home, all I want to do is eat and sleep.”

Something in her expression clouded as he described his schedule.

Could it be she was unhappy that he had to be at the mine for such long hours, precluding any real chance for him to see her regularly?

No, he wasn’t so puffed up over himself that he thought she would languish if she didn’t get to share his company.

“It sounds hard,” she said, and he had to admit, her tone sounded normal enough, albeit tinged with a note of sympathy. “Why did you decide to work there when your family owns a store here in town?”

A valid enough question, a query he’d faced on more than one occasion. The United Verde wasn’t owned by the clan, which meant anyone who worked there had to be always on their guard lest their civilian co-workers or bosses might detect something strange about their McAllister employees.

“Oh, well,” he said, doing his best to sound noncommittal. “Both my parents and my brother Charles take care of the store, so they didn’t really need me. It just seemed better for me to strike out on my own. It’s hard work at the mine, but it pays well, probably better than working at the mercantile.”

Deborah seemed to absorb this information without any real judgment involved, because she inclined her head toward him without responding at first. Then she said, “I suppose it can be difficult when your family expects you to do one thing and you want to do another.”

Now she sounded almost melancholy, as though she was speaking from personal experience. But how could she be, when she recalled nothing of who she was or where she’d come from?

He wanted to ask…and then decided to let it go. While they were talking quite naturally, he also knew that they’d only recently become acquainted with one another, and it would be rude to probe too deeply. “My parents made a bit of a ruckus,” he admitted. “But after a while, they realized I wasn’t going to change my mind and let it alone. I’ve been there for three years, and now I’m a foreman, the youngest ever at the United Verde.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he could take them back. They sounded far too boastful.

Deborah, though, only appeared thoughtful. “Then it definitely seems as if you made the right choice.” She paused there, and again he got the impression that she was speaking of something beyond his personal situation, as though she was comparing it to her own even when she shouldn’t have been able to recall anything about her past.

By that point, they’d made it almost back to Timothy and Ruth’s house. Seth hated that the walk was over so soon, even as he also knew that trying to lengthen it would only let Deborah know he was all too anxious to spend as much time as possible in her company.

As if that wasn’t abundantly clear.

He also wished there were more signs of her past in her appearance. Her fingers had been bare of rings when he found her, which seemed to signal she wasn’t married or engaged. Or was that wishful thinking on his part? After all, she could have been wearing a ring and lost it when she was brought to the mine.

The only jewelry she’d been wearing was a small pair of gold hoops in her ears. Piercings such as that weren’t very common, except among the women in the Mexican families who’d settled in Cottonwood to work the fields there. However, Deborah clearly wasn’t of Mexican descent, so he wasn’t sure what he should think about that particular accessory. He supposed pierced ears might have been a family tradition. Whatever the reason for her having them, he had to admit they added to her attraction, her mystery.

There was so much he didn’t know about her.

So much she didn’t know about herself.

When they came to the walkway that led up to Ruth and Timothy’s front porch, Seth found himself blurting, “I work long hours, but I’m still almost always finished by six-thirty. Would you be interested in going to the English Kitchen with me?”

Her brows lifted slightly. “That’s a restaurant, right?”

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s just down the hill from Main Street — Chinese food,” he added, since he knew the name of the restaurant didn’t give a very good indication as to the actual content of its menu.

A moment of hesitation, one that made him think for sure she was going to turn him down, and then she said, “I love Chinese food. Do you want to meet there, or come get me here?”

“Oh, I’ll meet you here,” he said hastily. While he supposed it would be safe enough for her to go to the restaurant by herself…especially since six-thirty was still full daylight at this time of year…he also didn’t like the thought of her wandering around downtown Jerome on her own, not with so many rough types who would also be out and about around then, looking for their own food.

And drink, even though it was supposedly forbidden.

“A quarter to seven?” he ventured next, and she smiled.

“Sounds perfect.”

Seth slept extremely well, better than he thought he had in a long while. Although he didn’t dream of Deborah Rowe, he knew the realization upon awaking that he would see her again tonight made him smile even as he sat up and stretched and knew he needed to hurry to get to the mine on time.

They were working on a newly opened section that morning, and keeping an eye on everyone and directing traffic — in addition to perusing some new reports from the survey team — kept him busy enough that he didn’t have much of a chance to break away and check on the shaft where he’d found Deborah two nights earlier. However, toward the end of the day he had a brief opening to go take a look and write up a quick memo to the superintendent as to the eventual fate of the shaft…only to find the man himself already there, with a team starting to tack up some sheets of wood across the entrance.

“Mr. Allenby,” he said, doing his best not to sound surprised.

“Ah, McAllister,” his supervisor returned. Lionel Allenby was a tall, thin man with fair hair that always glistened with brilliantine and close-set gray eyes. Despite the dust and the general dirt that accompanied their profession, he was always impeccably turned out, with crisp white shirts and a bewildering variety of tailored waistcoats and silk ties. “I was looking over the surveyor’s reports on this shaft and decided it was time we closed it up. Too much of a liability to simply leave it open like this if we’re not actually going to mine this section.”

Seth had thought much the same thing, which was part of the reason why he’d returned here at the end of the day. Still, it was generally his job to oversee a small project like boarding up the mine shaft, not the superintendent’s.

However, he knew better than to question the doings of his superior. “I’m sorry about the delay in getting it closed up,” he said. “It was on my list of things I needed to do this week.”

“It’s fine, my boy,” Allenby said, and clapped an avuncular hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I know you’ve been busy. But as I always say, what difference who does the work as long as it gets done in the end?”

“Of course,” Seth responded right away. While he wasn’t afraid to stand up for himself — or his team — when the situation truly warranted it, he also knew it was foolish to jeopardize his position at the mine by making specious protests. “I’m glad to see it was so easy to take care of.”

“Well, it was rather a small shaft,” Allenby said. “Too bad there wasn’t anything worth digging up here, but I suppose that’s just how it goes sometimes. I’ll let you get back to finish up with your team.”

Those words were an obvious dismissal, so Seth only nodded and headed over to the open pit where his men were working to finish the final part of their quota for the day. After all, he didn’t want to linger here, not when he would be meeting Deborah for dinner very soon.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t quite stop himself from wondering why Lionel Allenby had been so motivated to make sure that particular mineshaft was hidden from public view.