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Is this woman going to kill two people to steal a gold claim? No, but the woman I see might not be the real Yolanda. Could she have gotten into recent financial trouble? Facing a lawsuit we know nothing about? Desperate for a sudden infusion of cash?
Then there’s Penny as Bruno’s potential partner. Did she really follow Yolanda into the forest? Could she have thought she was following Bruno, wondering why he was going out to “their” claim at night? Could she have been the one going to it, and we only presume she was following Yolanda? Could Bruno have realized Penny was gone and suspected she was up to something?
I like Penny. Or I like the version of her I’ve gleaned from others. That has nothing to do with how thoroughly I’ll investigate her as a suspect, any more than I’d target Yolanda because I don’t like her. That’s a lie anyway. I’m pissed off at Yolanda, but I respect her and I think it might even be possible to like her if I didn’t get the impression she’d really rather I didn’t.
I once killed someone in cold blood. You can throw around excuses for that, but I don’t, and I also know that I don’t present as the kind of person who’d do that. Few people do. Penny could have pushed Bruno off the cliff. Yolanda could have pushed him and killed Penny and our mystery woman.
It could also be someone else in town, and that’s the possibility I spend the evening pursuing, reading through employee records and trying to find connections. Any overlap with Bruno? Past jobs that could have brought them into contact? Yolanda has put together a crack team, and some of them have worked together before. I find none of that for Bruno. Nothing obvious, at least. That doesn’t mean no one here has crossed paths with him before. He’s an engineer. He’d have contact with a lot of people on a lot of jobs.
I’ll need to dig into this more tomorrow. For now, we need to get to bed at a decent time. We’ll have an early start in the morning, heading out to talk to one person who might have answers. The person unwittingly at the center of what has unfolded here. The miner at that claim site.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We’re up at five thirty, with plans to leave at six. Dalton has commandeered breakfast ingredients from the kitchen, and he cooks while I make coffee and feed Storm. We’re eating when someone bangs on the door.
“Fuck, no,” Dalton mutters. “Can we go one night without an emergency?”
“Technically, it’s morning.”
He grumbles and waves me down as I go to stand. Then he ambles to the door, taking his time.
“It’s not even six,” he says as he pulls open the door.
“Tell me about it,” Yolanda grumbles back.
I walk into the living room to see her on the front porch, shoving the sat phone at Dalton.
“It’s for you,” she says. As she walks away, she calls back, “We need to talk. I’ll be in the commissary.”
Dalton shuts the door and lifts the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
I hear a woman’s voice answer. Dalton grunts, lowers the phone, and switches to speaker.
“It’s Isabel,” he says. “And Phil.”
“Please tell me you’re just calling to check in,” I say. “Tell me you’re in Toronto and forgot about the time difference, and that this isn’t an urgent call and the next words out of your mouth will not be ‘we have a problem.’”
“We have a situation,” she says.
I sigh and slump into one of the living-room chairs.
“My apologies,” she says. “That was rude. How is the town? How is your house? How are you? Now, about this problem…”
I smile as I shake my head. Sometimes I think that the surest way to know whether I’ll get along with a woman is to see how fast she skims through the pleasantries and gets to business. I seem to surround myself with women who have spent their careers being told to be nicer, be less direct… and stuffed that advice in the bin where it belongs. There are exceptions, of course, but Isabel isn’t one of them.
“What’s up?” I say.
“The schedule has accelerated.”
I glance at Dalton and ask, cautiously, “By how much?”
“We’ll have ten new residents arriving in two weeks.”
“What? No. Absolutely not. I need to speak to Émilie.”
“We already did, and we argued. She isn’t jumping the gun. It’s an urgent situation.”
“Howurgent?”
