Kiss the Moon (23 page)

She could hear Wyatt behind her, muttering, “Hell,” as he started down the hill after her. She was half slipping, half sliding, leaping over rocks and fallen limbs, branches and brush slapping her legs, arms, face. There was no caution, no careful negotiating of the terrain. She raced pell-mell down the hill.

“Bubba!” she yelled. “Bubba, are you all right?”

The old hermit lay on his side in the snow, his agitated mutt panting and pacing between his master’s head and his toes. When Penelope moved toward Bubba, the dog growled and snarled at her. “Easy, poochie,” she said in her most cajoling voice. The dog snapped, not letting her get close.

Wyatt eased in next to her. “Try a piece of ham or something.”

She dug in her hip pack and located a chunk of cob-smoked ham. She flipped it into the snow a few feet from Bubba, said a few more cajoling words, and the dog stopped barking, eyed the meat, eyed her, then pounced on the ham.

Wyatt, who had a better position, eased between Penelope and the dog and knelt beside Bubba. He took the old man’s wrist and felt his pulse.

Penelope could feel her heart skipping, her knees threatening to go out from under her. “Is he alive?”

Wyatt nodded. He leaned over Bubba’s thin body and examined his face, lifting his scraggly white hair and beard. “It looks as if he took a hit on the back of his head. He could have slipped and fallen.” He glanced at Penelope. “Or not.”

“My cell phone—” She could almost not get the words out. “I’ll get help.”

As she fumbled in her hip pack, Wyatt stayed beside the unconscious hermit. “Bubba—it’s Wyatt Sinclair and Penelope Chestnut. We’re going to get help.”

The dog, finished with his ham, resumed pacing and growling. He didn’t make a move on the two people helping his master, and Penelope dialed, told the dispatcher Bubba Johns was hurt, she didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but they were deep on Sinclair land. “It’s going to be tough to find us. I didn’t bring flares. Look, why don’t we do this. Get a rescue crew to follow the main trail from Bubba’s place. I’ll leave now and meet them.
Don’t leave the trail.
You’ll never find us if you do. We’re way the hell out in God’s country.”

Bubba moaned, barely conscious.

“Wait—he might be coming around.”

Wyatt said softly, “Easy, Bubba. We’re here to help. Can you talk?”

Bubba groaned, a foot moving, his eyes screwing up in pain.

“What happened?” Wyatt asked. “How badly are you hurt?”

But the old man couldn’t answer.

“Never mind,” Penelope told the dispatcher. “Just get someone up here and let’s hope in the meantime he comes around and walks out himself.”

She disconnected and knelt in the snow beside Wyatt for a better look. “I don’t dare move him,” Wyatt said. “I don’t know if he has any broken bones. I don’t want to end up paralyzing the poor bastard.”

“If I start now, I should meet up with the rescue crew before they run out of trail.”

He nodded, grim, but she could see him mentally clicking off their options. He wasn’t one to panic. “It’s impossible to get a helicopter in here. I’ll stay with him.” He turned to her, his dark gaze holding hers. “Be careful, Penelope. Whoever did this might still be out there.”

“You don’t think he just slipped and hit his head?”

“No, I don’t. The bump’s on the back of his head, which means his feet would have had to go out from under him. Otherwise he’d have disturbed more snow, taken out some brush on his way down. It looks as if he just dropped here.”

Penelope threw up her hands. “I just don’t get
any
of it. The messages, my house,
this.
Over a missing plane! It doesn’t make any sense.” But something in Wyatt’s gaze made her pause, and she narrowed her eyes on him. “What? Wyatt, for God’s sake, tell me.”

“Frannie Beaudine made off with ten million in diamonds the night she and my uncle disappeared.” His words were clipped, unemotional. “She stole them from the warehouse when she was helping to pull together the collection my family donated to the Met. I don’t know if Colt was involved.”

Penelope tried to absorb this new twist. “Holy shit. Frannie and Colt had diamonds with them? That changes everything. No one ever said—”

“I know. Even I didn’t know until last night.”

“Your grandfather knew?”

“Yes. He didn’t want to encourage looters.” Wyatt spoke as if this sort of thing happened among Sinclairs all the time. “He didn’t tell my father until he was dying, and he asked him to keep it a secret. Which he did, until I dragged it out of him last night.”

“Does Dunning know?”

“He doesn’t have the specifics. My father told him he believed there was something of value in the wreckage and wanted Jack to make sure you hadn’t changed your story because you’d tucked the goodies into your fanny pack. If you had found the wreckage but hadn’t touched anything, he was supposed to secure it before it could be looted.”

Penelope bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from going to pieces. Wyatt had had time to tell her this little tidbit about ten million in diamonds last night, this morning over breakfast, at any point during their three-hour trek to the plane wreck. Of course, she’d had
days
to tell him she’d found the Piper Cub.

“And these diamonds—they’re not in the wreckage, either?”

“As far as I could see they and the bodies are gone.”

“Did you tell Jack or your father I was taking you here?”

“My father,” Wyatt said. “Not Jack.”

Penelope inhaled a sharp breath. “This is one hell of a turn of events. Diamonds. When were you going to tell me?”

His expression didn’t change. “I didn’t know if I’d tell you at all.”

“Damn,” she breathed. She straightened, cleared her throat, focused on the immediate problem of Bubba Johns. “Okay, I need to get moving if I’m to meet the rescue crew before they get impatient and get themselves lost. You’ll be here when we get back?”

“I’ll be here.”

She wanted to believe him. This morning, she had started to believe she could trust him, that they had a bit of a partnership going. But he hadn’t told her about a quaint little thing like ten million in stolen diamonds—and never mind that she’d taken days to come clean about the wreckage. That was different. He knew all along she was lying. She hadn’t had a clue he was holding something back.

She left him the water and her wilderness medical kit and charged up the hill, retracing her steps, moving fast, trying hard not to think.

It was ninety minutes before Penelope returned with the rescue team. Wyatt did what he could for Bubba Johns, and every time his mind conjured up images of Hal dying at his side, shivering, cold, beyond pain but lucid until the end, he pushed them back. This wasn’t the same thing. This was New Hampshire, they weren’t that far into the woods, the weather was good, help was on its way, and it was a remarkably fit old man who’d just been bonked on the head—not two thirty-two-year-olds who’d stepped off the edge of a mountain in the frigid Tasmanian wilds.

By the time they heard the rescue team thrashing through the brush, Bubba Johns had regained consciousness and was sitting up. He was ashen, nauseous and incoherent enough that Wyatt didn’t try to interrogate him. He asked for his dogs, and the one mutt licked his face while Wyatt explained the other had made its way to his shack. The old man shut his eyes and collapsed against a rock, not complaining but clearly in pain.

Wyatt stood out of the paramedics’ way. They descended on the old man, and for the first time he understood Penelope’s protectiveness of him. Bubba Johns was a stringy, harmless old hermit who apparently wanted nothing more than to live his life in solitude. That he’d been sucked into a decades-old mystery didn’t seem fair.

The two paramedics treated his head injury with extreme caution, bracing his neck and doing the whole routine despite their semiconscious patient’s moaning protests. They and the young cop who’d tagged along knew Penelope and groused about expecting to be strapping her to a stretcher sled. She kept asking them if they thought Bubba would be okay. Finally, one, a heavyset woman, told her she didn’t think he was severely injured. He’d taken a good hit to the back of the head, but it looked like a concussion, not a fracture.

“Still,” she added, “we need to get him to the hospital for the doctors to take a look.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Bubba muttered, barely understandable. “I just need my dogs.”

They ignored him. The cop informed Penelope that Andy McNally and Pete were en route, and she and Wyatt were to stay there until they arrived. As an incentive, he was staying, too.

Since his comments weren’t directed at him, Wyatt kept quiet.

After the rescue team set off with Bubba, his mutt trotting alongside him, the cop grinned at Penelope. “We had a pool going for when your dump story would come apart. I lost. I was giving it through the weekend.”

She scowled at him, and he grinned. He was young, probably in his mid-twenties, and he, like most males in Cold Spring, treated Penelope like a recalcitrant sister or a fishing buddy. Wyatt found this odd. He wondered how this penchant for being one of the guys affected her attitude toward him. Now that they’d slept together, was she figuring he’d gotten his sexual interest in her out of his system? Was she expecting him to offer to split a six-pack with her and fish off her dock?

It was the only slightly amusing thought he’d had in the last hour. His sexual interest in her was not out of his system. Making love to her had only made him want her more. He found himself contending with a romantic interest, the lies and distrust between them notwithstanding. He was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about their prospects. He was simply determined to know this woman better.

Ten minutes later, the chief of police arrived with his sole detective at his side. McNally must have been working up a good head of steam the entire trip. He was out of breath and out of sorts. He immediately pointed a finger at Penelope. “Goddamn it, I knew you were lying!”

She sniffed at him. Wyatt stayed out of it. She and McNally had been going toe-to-toe long before he’d wandered into Cold Spring, New Hampshire. He expected Penelope to launch into tales of stolen diamonds and missing bodies, but she didn’t, keeping her mouth shut while the cops got their bearings. McNally listened to the young cop’s report, then checked around the area where they’d found Bubba while Pete went up the hill and examined the wreckage, calling down to his boss, “Andy, there aren’t any bodies.”

McNally shifted to Penelope. “You’ve got some explaining to do. First you hold back on those messages, now I’m out here with a possible assault and a plane wreck with no Colt Sinclair and no Frannie Beaudine.”

“What, do you think
I
took the bodies? Come on, Andy. I didn’t even get close to the wreckage until today, and I had Wyatt with me the whole time.”

But Wyatt could see that saying she’d struck off into the wilderness with him wasn’t any better than saying she’d struck off on her own. McNally gritted his teeth, his scar turning redder as he took in the complications of this latest chapter in Penelope Chestnut’s week-long troubles. An unconscious hermit. A forty-five-year-old plane wreck with no bodies.

Pete made his way down the steep hill, and McNally stepped aside to let his detective question Penelope and Wyatt about how they’d come to be here. The police chief seemed of a mind to find a reason to lock them up for the night.

Wyatt didn’t mention the diamonds. Neither did Penelope.

Pete told them they were free to go, and he, his boss and the young cop started to the wreckage. Wyatt didn’t blame McNally for his foul mood. It was a long, arduous trek to the downed plane, and the circumstances of it could have been avoided if Penelope had been straight with him from the beginning. The man was flat out of patience.

As they made their way through the woods, Penelope peeled off her anorak and tied it around her waist. She’d already done her share of hiking for one day. She said, “I didn’t tell him about the diamonds because I think it complicates things. They could have been stolen years ago. Frannie might have gotten rid of them before she got on the plane—we don’t have enough information at this point.” She squinted at him. “I wasn’t trying to spare you or your father.”

Wyatt ignored her cool tone. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Besides, McNally’s irritated enough with a plane wreck and an unconscious hermit. He doesn’t need ten million in missing diamonds on top of it.”

“Penelope…”

She held up a hand. “I’m upset, Wyatt. I’m tired, and I’m upset. I know you were caught between a rock and a hard place and just did what you thought was right. Believe me, I understand how difficult that can be.”

“But you’re still pissed,” he said.

A faint smile. “Yeah.”

He understood. Even if she had withheld the truth about the plane crash past any point he considered reasonable, he’d learned about the diamonds
after
she’d confided in him. She’d made the gesture of trust, and in effect, he’d thrown it in her face.

But right now, they had more immediate concerns. Bubba’s scroungy dog trotted out to greet them before they reached his shack. He wasn’t barking and growling, but he seemed confused.

“The rescue team must have managed to get rid of him,” Penelope said. “Give me a minute, and I’ll put out water and food for both dogs.”

The second dog—older and more independent—joined them, and both mutts followed her to the brook, where she dipped two pans of water, and to the garden shed, where she found a big barrel of dog food and scooped some into another two pans.

“I guess I should just leave them out here,” she said tentatively, looking around the isolated homestead. “I can check on them later, in case Bubba has to stay at the hospital.”

“If they’re used to Bubba, they’ll be able to fend for themselves.”

Her green eyes focused on Wyatt, and he noticed her cheeks were pale in spite of all her hiking, the last few hours taking their toll. “What do you think Bubba was doing out there?”

Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know. He must have been hit before we arrived. Otherwise we’d have heard something.”