Dangerous Melody (14 page)

FIFTEEN

O
ne moment Stephanie was surrounded by clear blue sky, and the next, she was enveloped by a massive cloud of stinging sand. Tate appeared just before the storm swallowed her up, and then he was gone, overtaken by the undulating cloud. She began to cough, gasping for air as stinging particles flew into her mouth and eyes. She wanted to run, but she no longer knew which was
the way back to the car and which led to the edge of the ravine.

She covered her nose and mouth with her elbow and ran blindly anyway, panic fueling her flight. Anything to escape the painful suffocation. Sand and grit cut her cheeks, and the wind hammered against her. Suddenly a pair of arms wrapped around her legs, bringing her to her knees. Tate.

Tate wrapped her in a bear hug, and
they pressed their faces together as the storm howled around them. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized he was wearing short sleeves, leaving nothing to shield him from the onslaught, so she pressed closer, lifting her arms and trying to cover them both with her jacket. A sudden shock sent them tumbling as a branch careened by them, powered by the wind. They clung together as the storm
crashed over them and a cocoon of sand piled up around their bodies, sifting into their hair, looking for entry into their noses and eyes.

Pounded by the wind, Stephanie lost track of time.
Just hold on,
she told herself, tightening her grip as much as she could around Tate. She felt a second sharp impact as an object, perhaps another branch or rock, ripped from the ground and hit home, knocking
the breath out of her. The rage she felt against the storm, against Bittman and even Tate, gave her the strength to fight, but even that strong emotion ebbed against the power of the wind-frenzied sand.

I won’t let go.

Her clawed fingers began to lose their hold, and she felt herself tearing away from Tate.

“No!” she yelled, and tried with every bit of strength she had left to hang
tightly to him. He was strangely passive in her arms. “Tate!” she yelled.

He did not answer, nor did he stir in her arms. A cold chill of fear crept into her body.

“Hold on!” she screamed again. Was it her imagination, or was the gritty cloud beginning to lighten?

The wind hammered with such violence that in spite of her most heroic effort, he began to slip from the circle of her
arms.

She tried to grasp him under the shoulders, but he was pulled away.

“No!” she yelled again, mouth filling with grit as she threw herself on top of him.

Just as her hold began to fail, the storm passed, whirling away into the ravine.

The silence was shocking. The only sound coming from her was labored breathing and the hammering of her heart. She spit out a mouthful of
sand before sucking in as much fresh air as she could hold.

She let go of Tate and sat up, blinking the sand out of her eyes, shaking it from her ears and unloosing piles of it from her jacket.

“I can’t believe we made it,” she said, coughing and shaking more sand.

Tate lay on his stomach, unmoving.

For a moment, she could only stare in horror.

“Tate?” He was so still.
She could not see the rise and fall of his chest. Crawling over to him, she gently turned him over. His face was covered in blood, seeping from a wound on his forehead where something had struck him. She tried to brush it off with her sleeve, but there was so much—a crimson tide that ran down his neck and soaked into his shirt.

She ripped off a piece of her shirt and balled it up, pressing
it onto the wound.

He still did not move.

She looked frantically for Luca, who was nowhere in sight. Her phone was back in the car where she’d left it.

Terror rose inside until she could not form a coherent thought. She pressed her mouth to his neck.

“Please do not leave me,” she whispered, fingers trying to find a pulse.

Her trembling fingers would not obey.

“Tate,”
she whispered, her tears dropping onto his face, etching trails onto his dusty skin. “Tate, Tate, Tate” was all she could manage, tracing her fingers over his head, his cheeks, the curve of his chin, the hollow of his throat.

She could no longer feel the ground under her or the wind, suddenly gentle, that toyed with her hair. She pressed her lips to his, desperate to feel an answer there.
He remained motionless. The last of her strength left her and she put her face to his chest, tears soaking into his ruined shirt.

She felt movement as he inhaled deeply. Jerking to her knees, she stared into his face as his eyes slowly came open, confused and disoriented.

“Tate?” she whispered.

“You okay?” he mumbled.

She could only fight to control her cascading emotions as
the gray eyes cleared and he struggled to sit up. He tried to get to his feet, but he toppled over. She tried her best to keep his head from hitting the ground. She rolled him onto his side and pressed her face to his cheek.

“Stay still, just for a minute,” she whispered into his ear. Holding him around the shoulders, crouched next to him, her cheek touching his, an overwhelming current of
some deep emotion flowed between them. She was transported back in time, past the anguish of addiction, the pain of being shut out. She thanked God again that Tate was alive. It was truly the only thing that mattered.

Tate clutched her hand in his, and for that brief second she wondered if the past was erased for him, too. It was Tate and Stephanie again, facing the journey ahead together,
their back turned on the ugly road they’d already traveled. Did he feel it as strongly as she did?

A shout from the direction of the car broke the spell, and Stephanie got on her knees to find Luca hobbling up, using a stick for support. “Stephanie!” he yelled again.

She waved both arms to show him that she was unhurt and turned her attention again to Tate, who had now raised himself
to a sitting position.

“I think I took a rock to the head,” he said.

Stephanie reined in her emotion and forced a grin. “Won’t do it any harm. You always said Fuego craniums were made out of cement.”

“Plywood,” he corrected.

She gave him her arm to help him get up, and he leaned against her briefly as dizziness overtook him. “You probably have a concussion. We’ll take you to
the hospital.”

“Not likely,” Tate said. “Let’s go. We’ve already lost too much time. Besides, Maria might have been caught in the storm, too.”

He straightened and headed tentatively back to the car, Luca and Stephanie staring after him. Luca examined Stephanie closely. “I tried to call for help, but there’s no signal up here. Not sure who I would have called anyway.”

She rolled
her shoulders. “He should go to the doctor.”

“But he won’t,” Luca said. “He’s as stubborn as I am.”

She shot him a look. “Yes, but I guess we’re all guilty of that character trait. We’ll bandage him up as best we can, and I’ll watch closely in case he really does have a concussion.” She could just make out his tall frame, limping slightly on his way to the car.

Had it all been imagined,
the warmth between them—a by-product of trauma? How could he still have such control over her emotions, this addict, this ruined man who had meant everything to her? She felt angry at herself for imagining feelings that didn’t exist.

Luca put a hand on her shoulder. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Scraped up is all.”

“You look strange, like you just discovered something.”

“What would I discover in the middle of a sandstorm?” she snapped. She felt Luca’s eyes on her as she walked to the ridge to take a look, now that the storm had passed.

* * *

Tate allowed Stephanie to fuss over him with the first-aid kit because he knew she wouldn’t agree to leave otherwise, and it gave him time to get himself together. He still felt confused. One moment he was plunging
through a wall of sand, and the next, lying with Stephanie at his side, stroking his cheek, murmuring something unintelligible in his ear. He was sure he’d imagined the longing he heard in her voice, the tenderness that made his breath grow short, even now, as she wiped the blood from his face and affixed a bandage to his forehead. He didn’t want to experience the strange warmth that coursed
through him and sent him off balance. The strange disequilibrium eased a bit, though the pain in his leg flared anew, and now his head throbbed, too.

She avoided looking into his eyes, muttering something about hospitals and stitches. Then she got behind the wheel, though he tried to edge her out.

“I’m the only able-bodied one around here,” she said. The engine coughed to life, and they
continued on. “It looks as if once we get across these dunes, there’s another road—a trail, more like. It heads in the direction of Lunkville, according to the maps I downloaded.”

Tate let her talk while he kept his eyes trained for any sign of Maria. He prayed she’d not been caught by the same sandstorm. More and more, he felt the urgency to extract them both from the mess that brought Stephanie
back into his life. The violin was the key—find it, and maybe everyone really would get what they needed. He hoped it was quick. He did not understand the intense feelings that he’d experienced over the past few days. It felt like he was standing on dangerous ground, the sand shifting under his feet.

Luca tossed down his phone in frustration. “Useless until we get another satellite link.”

Stephanie approached the end of the plateau, which fed them through a narrow gap between two massive rock cliffs. “What were you researching?”

“Emailing back and forth with the retired cop who handled the music store fire.” Luca rubbed at a spot on the window. “He told me Ricardo’s last name is Williams. He worked at Bittman’s store, doing odd jobs and janitorial stuff. That must be how
he saw the Guarneri and decided to take it for himself.”

Tate tried to forget the dull ache in his head. “Why set the fire, though? Why not just run with the violin?”

“He probably figured it would slow down the investigation and give him time to vanish.”

“Which he did,” Stephanie added. “For twenty plus years. Last laugh was on Ricardo when he burned down the shop but didn’t get
the Guarneri.”

Last laugh’s going to be on us, if he gets his hands on it now,
Tate thought.

“But Ricardo never stopped looking for it. He must have been keeping tabs on the music world, too. When he heard Bittman was on the trail, he tried to get close, worked as the pool guy even.” Luca laughed. “Bittman’s gonna have a conniption when he figures that one out.”

It gave them all
a small sense of satisfaction, Tate knew, to think of one way Bittman had been fooled.

The rock cliffs pinched together until there was only a passage barely wide enough for one car. As they crawled toward the gap, trees poked through the earth with limbs twisted and shorn off by the untamed wind.

Stephanie rolled down the window, checking the clearance on the driver’s side. Tate did
the same out the passenger window.

“Going to be a tight squeeze.” She pushed the hair out of her face.

“Not as tight as the Manhole.” He wished immediately that he hadn’t said it. A flush colored her cheeks petal pink, and his own face warmed. He remembered the situation in perfect detail, recalling it from time to time in his happier moments. It was their first foray into spelunking
at a cavern in Gold Country back before the accident, before everything had gone bad. She’d pushed ahead into the darkness broken only by their headlamps, teasing him about being too slow, and shimmied into a hole dubbed the Manhole by cavers over the years. Stephanie had promptly found herself wedged in. While others might have panicked, Stephanie laughed until her face was wet with tears while
Tate crawled around to the other side of the hole and yanked her out by the ankles. He’d called her Pooh Bear, after Winnie the Pooh’s famous “stuck” scene, for months afterward. They’d enjoyed reliving the memory perhaps more than the actual trip.

Stick the memories back in the past where they belong, Tate.
There was only pain in recounting his time with Stephanie. She’d moved on, and he
could not blame her.

Stephanie poked her head out the window again and eyed the sides of the car. Tate did the same. No more than a few inches clearance, but it would be enough if the path didn’t narrow any further. He reached out and snapped off a twig of a spiky shrub to examine it closer. Freshly broken, as were many others.

“Someone’s been this way recently,” he said.

Stephanie
flicked a glance at him. “Eugene?”

Tate shook his head. “He was on a motorbike. I don’t think he’d have caused this much damage.”

“Maria?” Luca suggested.

“Hope so.” Tate didn’t want to think about the other possibility—that Ricardo had already passed by, killed Eugene and taken the violin. A sudden movement along the rocks made them all straighten until Tate caught site of the
source. “An animal, ground squirrel I think. Wait a minute—do you hear that?”

Luca stiffened in the backseat. “There’s a car following.”

“I’ll check it out.” Ignoring Stephanie’s protest, he climbed out the window since there was not enough space to push open the door. Scrambling onto the rocks, he climbed upward to the nearest flat one, where he could get a look at the path they’d just
traversed.

The vehicle was leaving the sand flats. He caught a glimpse of a dark-colored truck before it began to climb the slope. It moved slowly but steadily, vanishing into the tree-covered incline that would lead right to them.

He returned to the car and crawled back inside. “Truck. Don’t recognize it.”

“So we have a decision to make then,” Luca said. “Move forward and get to
Eugene, or stop and find out who’s behind us.”

Tate rubbed at his throbbing head. “We’ve tried the waiting thing already. I say we go. The window of opportunity to save Eugene and this violin is small.”

In silent assent, Stephanie started the car forward, the sides scraping against overhanging branches. They climbed another hundred yards before they reached the pinnacle. Out the back
window the truck was visible, winding its way through the same sunbaked route.