Sadie frowned into the forest in front of her cabin. What was this about? The guy just leaves a note and expects her to obey meekly?
Sadie crumpled the paper in her hand, crushing it with angry force and then throwing it at the woods. Dammit. She was being paid to do a job here. Morgan couldn’t expect her to change her plans simply because he was in the mood to test theirfriendship. She didn’
t care if she still hadn’t found the socks he’d kissed off her feet; she was not playing his game.
He had plenty of nerve to leave such a note, instead of having the decency to knock on her door and explain his reasoning.
What to do? What to do?
If she stayed in camp today, what message would she be sending him? That she was a good, obedient little lass whom he could bend to his will on a whim?
Yet Morgan didn’t strike Sadie as a man who issued idle orders. Nor was she a woman to ignore a sincerely given suggestion if there was sound reasoning behind it.
“Dammit, MacKeage!” she hollered, shaking her fist at the woods. “You’re an arrogant jerk!”
Her echoing outburst unanswered, Sadie let out a frustrated breath and returned to her fallen gear. She picked up the dry bag that had her papers inside and took out Jean Lavoie’s diary and her own journal. Then, still angry at herself for letting six simple words rule her day, Sadie stomped down the steps and strode to a pair of towering maple trees with a hammock strung between them.
She pretty nearly hung herself getting into the hammock. As it was, she ended up on the ground, creating a cloud of dust that made her cough.
She had to get a grip here before she did herself bodily harm. Oh, she would stay out of the woods today, but Morgan MacKeage would be getting a rather scorching lecture onfriendship —if and when she ever saw him again.
It amazed Sadie the amount of workshe could get done when driven by a healthy dose of anger. She had spent more than three hours lying in the hammock, completely engrossed in Jean Lavoie’s diary, furiously scribbling notes in her own diary that would help her map out Jean’s movements through the valley.
Now she was giving her old kayak a good waxing and replaying Jean Lavoie’s diary through her mind. This entire valley had been heavily cut in the early 1900s. The logging camp where Jean cooked had slowly migrated upriver with the cutters. There seemed to be three camps at least, maybe four, she’d been able to discern from the diary, erected over a six-year period.
But all of this had taken place more than eighty years ago. The remains of the camps would be mostly rotted back into the forest by now.
And Jean Lavoie, for all his attention to detail, was not a very gifted writer, especially considering that the diary was laced with enough French-Canadian words to make the reading downright impossible in places.
Still, it seemed that Jedediah Plum had visited camp number three during the fourth year of Jean’s stint as camp cook. And camp number three appeared to have been set someplace on the west side of Fraser Mountain, away from the banks of the Prospect River.
Sadie turned her kayak over on the picnic table and began rubbing wax on the top surface. She needed to find camp number three. That was the last known place Jedediah had been seen alive. And the west side of Fraser Mountain was also the area near which Frank Quill had suspected the gold was located.
Her daddy’s years of research had only been able to pin the location down to about a two-thousand-acre area, however. And finding a small pool full of placer gold in two thousand acres was like trying to find one particular grain of sand in a desert. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny streams running down off these mountains, and any one of them could be the source of Jedediah’s gold.
Sadie tossed the wax-covered rag onto the table, picked up a clean rag, and began wiping the kayak with strong, circular strokes. She would travel to the base of Fraser Mountain tomorrow and set up her camp there. She’d search not for Jedediah’s stream, though, but for the site of the third logging camp. If she could find it, then maybe, just maybe, she could also find a clue that would lead her to the gold.
The sound of a fast-moving truck broke into Sadie’s thoughts, and she looked up to see Eric Hellman arrive in a cloud of dust-laden gravel and pine needles, making a mess of her newly raked yard.
“It’s Monday,” he said as he jumped out of the truck and strode toward her. “Which means you’re on the clock, Quill. Why aren’t you out looking for Plum’s gold?”
Sadie set her fists on her hips and glared at her boss. “Because I’m just now deciding where to look. And the question is, Eric, if you thought I was out hunting for gold, what are you doing here now?”
Her words, and quite possibly her posture, stopped him in mid-stride. “I… er, I brought the aerial photos you asked for,” he said, lifting his empty hands and staring at them. He turned around and returned to his truck.
“I drove to Augusta this morning,” he said over his shoulder. He opened the truck door, took out a cardboard tube, and walked back to her. “I didn’t want to wait until they mailed them out. After you came by my store yesterday and told me which sections you needed, I decided it was easier simply to drive down this morning.”
He held the tube out to her. “And here they are. I was going to leave them in your cabin.”
Feeling a bit foolish for snapping at him, Sadie took the tube and pulled the photos out, unrolling them on top of her kayak.
“You take good care of these,” Eric said, looking over her shoulder at the photos. “They cost a small fortune.”
Sadie turned in surprise. “Didn’t you tell them in Augusta that they were for the park?
They shouldn’t have charged you a penny.”
Eric shook his head. “Not a chance, Quill. The consortium is footing the bill until the park is accepted. Then the state will take over the costs. Which is why you need to find Jedediah’s gold, so we’ll have all the funding we need.”
“The gold might not exist,” she shot back through gritted teeth, not liking what he was implying. “Dammit, Hellman. I was never told the consortium was counting on that gold for funding.”
“How in hell do you think we intend to buy the land? Do you have any idea what productive timberland goes for?”
Sadie set her hands back on her hips and narrowed a level gaze on Eric. “Are you saying a group of intelligent businessmen is actually putting up the money for this proposal based on a legend?”
“Jedediah Plum is not a legend,” Eric countered, getting angry himself. “The man roamed this valley for nearly sixty years. He knew every inch of it. And he did find gold.
My great-grandfather saw it himself when the old prospector came into town. Hell, Jedediah bought beers for everyone that entire summer.”
Eric suddenly sighed and sat down on the picnic table, looking up at her. “And the plans for the park are real, Sadie. It will help this area in countless ways. And we’ll eventually pull together the funding we need to buy the land. But finding Jedediah’s gold will make it happen that much sooner.”
“But if we find an actual lode? We can’t just walk in and take it if we don’t own the land.”
Eric grinned. “Even your daddy knew there’s no mine, Sadie. Jedediah was a panner, not a digger. And if you pan for placer gold, you get to keep it. As long as it’s not in the ground but in state waters, it’s finders keepers. And that means we can legally keep the gold to build our park.”
Eric stood, rolled the photos up, and stuffed them back into the tube, then used the tube to point at her. “So if I were you, lady, I’d use every daylight hour available for hunting.
If the Dolan brothers find the gold before us, it’ll be years before we can raise the money we need.”
“What’s in it for you, Eric?” Sadie asked, remembering Morgan’s accusations two nights ago. “Are you part of this as an environmentalist or a businessman?”