When Darci came close to losing yet another bar of chocolate (a Snickers, her favorite), she pulled down the front zipper of her cat suit and shoved all of the candy bars down the front.
When Adam heard the noise, he turned back to her, ready to strangle her if she didn’t keep quiet. But when he saw her lumpy chest and her with her arm reaching down inside as she fished about for a particular candy bar, he lost his anger. Shaking his head in disbelief, he said over his shoulder, “Are all people from Kentucky like you?”
“No,” Darci said, still searching for the Snickers inside her tight suit. “Even in Putnam I’m unique.” She looked up at the back of him. “That’s why Putnam’s so mad for me,” she added.
“Makes mad passionate love to you, does he?”
She didn’t like his tone, which implied that it was impossible to believe that someone would make mad, passionate love to her. “The maddest, the wildest. All day and all night. He’s quite young, you see.” At that last remark, Darci saw the tiniest movement of Adam’s shoulders, as though he’d been hit with an arrow right between his shoulder blades.
“Hmph!” he said. “Does this child have a first name?”
When Darci was silent, Adam stopped walking and turned to look back at her.
She still had her hand down the inside front of her suit, and had this been another time and another place, he would probably have found such a pose to be interesting, but now there was such a look of deep thought on her face that it intrigued him.
“You know,” Darci said, “I don’t think I ever asked. If Putnam does have a first name, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it. It’s just so easy to put that one word on everything.”
“Oh, yes, you’re the one who has the boyfriend with the factories, aren’t you? Fifteen, wasn’t it?”
“Eighteen,” she said as she pulled her hand out of her suit, then smiled when she saw the Snickers bar and began to peel back the wrapper. “I had a letter from him, and his father’s built some more,” she said as she took a bite.”Want some?”
“Of Putnam?” Adam asked. “Or the candy?”
“Either,” Darci said seriously. “There’s enough of both to go around. Putnam played all-star football. He’s six-two, three hundred and fifty pounds.”
“But you’re—” Adam broke off as he looked her up and down. He doubted very much, even with the candy bars, that she weighed a hundred pounds.
“Oh, don’t worry about us,” she said blithely. “We manage.” She hoped she sounded worldly, or at least knowledgeable.
“You have chocolate on this tooth,” Adam said, pointing at his own incisor, then he turned back around, smiling.
For a moment, Darci had a vision of transforming herself into Awesome Woman, creature of massive strength, and pulling stones from the walls and bombarding his head with them. But when Adam turned back to look at her, she smiled sweetly and finished her third candy bar.
When Adam stopped abruptly a few minutes later, he put his arm behind him to keep Darci from plowing into his back. And when she opened her mouth to speak, he put his warm hand over her mouth. This so delighted her that she didn’t say a word.
Bending down so he was eye to eye with her, he put his finger to his lips for silence, then raised his eyebrows in question. Did she understand?
Darci nodded; then, with a frown, Adam took the half of the candy bar she hadn’t yet eaten and slipped it down the front of her leotard and silently zipped it up to her neck. Pointing to the far wall, he motioned for her to stand against it and stay there.
Darci didn’t want to admit that his manner was scaring her, but it was. In fact, her heart was pounding in her chest as she watched Adam disappear around the corner of the tunnel. When he was out of sight, she did just what he’d told her to do and stood there in silence and waited. And waited. Then she waited some more. Nothing. No sound whatever. Maybe if she recited some poetry....
On a dark and gloomy night, she thought, then made herself stop. Maybe he was in trouble, she thought. Maybe he had been captured by evil beings.Maybe he....
All in all, she thought it was better not to think along those lines while standing in a dark tunnel. There was some light coming from the direction in which Adam had headed, but she couldn’t see his flashlight. Had he abandoned her? Had he—
With her hands on the rocky dirt wall, she inched along in the direction he’d gone, her shoes making no noise on the dirt floor. Slowly, she moved along, and with each step she took, she dreaded what she was going to see at the end of the tunnel.
But when she did come into the dim light and was able to see, she wanted to yell at Adam Montgomery that he had no right to scare her like that.
Carved out of the earth along one side of the tunnel was a room with an iron fence across the front of it. Inside the fence were shelves covered with cardboard boxes that had words like cups and plates written on them. It was an ordinary storage closet. True, it was underground and, true, it had a strong iron fence across the front of it, but it was, otherwise, quite ordinary. Against the wall, just past the fence, was a table and some shelves holding more boxes, but nothing that she could see was unusual or even very interesting.
So what was her esteemed boss doing in front of the gate? He had bent his body into an awkward position as he leaned toward the fence on the left side, and he had half his left hand inside the fence. She couldn’t see what he was holding, but it looked like a broom handle. Appropriate, she thought, considering where they were. So what was he trying to reach?
Silently, she walked over to stand beside him. “What are you—” she began, but she didn’t have a chance to say another word because suddenly the air was filled with a deafening screech from a high-pitched siren. Putting her hands over her ears, Darci looked up at Adam. She could see that he was shouting at her, but she had no idea what he was saying. Oh, yes, now she could read his lips: “You set off the alarm,” he was saying. There were some other words added to the phrase, but she preferred not to try to decipher those.
She wanted to apologize, but behind him she could see a small round light coming toward them: a flashlight, and by the look of it, whoever was holding it was moving fast. She pointed, and, turning, Adam saw the light. In the next moment, he grabbed Darci’s hand and pulled her toward the end of the tunnel from which they’d just come.
But Darci didn’t move. Her feet moved, but her head stayed where it was. She yelled in pain, but even she couldn’t hear herself above the siren’s screeching.
In an instant Adam saw what was wrong: Darci’s hair was caught in the lock on the gate.
Adam moved without thought. Thrusting his arm through the bars of the cage, he grabbed the dagger he’d been trying so hard to get without setting off the alarm, and in one whack, he cut Darci’s hair from the back of her head, leaving a big piece attached to the lock. In the next moment, he picked her up and tossed her onto one of the high shelves outside the fence among some boxes. Darci curled into a ball, making herself as small as possible. But the problem with her position was that she could see nothing. She couldn’t see what Adam was doing or where he was. He wouldn’t do something dumb but heroic, would he? she wondered.
When the alarm stopped, it took all of Darci’s willpower to stay curled up where she was and not move. She very much wanted to rub her ears, rub her jaw, and stretch her legs out straight. But, most of all, she wanted to see where Adam was.
“I hate that thing!” said a man’s voice. “Why don’t they get it fixed? Damned thing goes off twice a night.”
“It is fixed. That’s the way she likes it. Sensitive.”
“Sensitive, hell,” the first man said. “A sneeze sets it off. And I swear those cats do it on purpose.”
“Look at this,” the second man said.
“What is it? I don’t see anything.”
“Get your glasses changed. It’s a couple of long strands of hair. It was in the lock.”
“Somebody’s doing a spell, no doubt.”
There was silence for a while, and Darci desperately wanted to know what they were doing, but she didn’t dare move and draw attention to herself. As long as they didn’t find her or Adam, everything would be fine. But why did they have only a few strands of her hair? When Adam had freed her hair, it felt as though half of it had been cut away.
“You know something,” the second man said softly. “I think this hair is from a natural blonde. I don’t see any dark roots.”
“What a great sense of humor you have. A natural blonde. You’ve been drinking too much of that stuff they brew over in the east tunnel.”
“Maybe,” the second man said thoughtfully, “but, all the same, let’s take these strands to the boss.”
“Suits me. Maybe she’ll give us a pay raise.”
“Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath. She didn’t get what she’s got from being generous. You ready?”
“Yeah, sure. This place gives me the creeps.”
“That’s because you know too much,” the second man said, then chuckled deep in his throat at his own joke.
Darci heard the men leave, but still she didn’t move from her perch on the shelf. She didn’t lift her head or move her legs, even though both of them had gone to sleep.
She didn’t move until Adam reached up and pulled her down from the shelf and set her on the floor. But when her numbed legs gave way under her, Adam put his hands under her arms and pulled her upright. With a little smile, Darci pointed down at her legs to show him that there was no blood in them. He gave her a look of appraisal to see if she was faking it or not, then he tossed her over his shoulder and began to jog down the tunnel they had entered from.
By the time they got to the big room with the vending machines, Darci could have told him that her legs were fine and she could walk by herself, but she kept her mouth shut. Instead of protesting, she put her arms around his waist—upside down, true, but it was his waist and it was her arms—and she was resting her head on the small of his back. It wasn’t his shoulder, but it was better than nothing.
He put her down when they reached the staircase. With his finger to his lips, he warned her to say nothing; then he thrust her arms into the too-large jacket and that was when she realized he was angry. Probably very angry, if she knew men.
He put on his own jacket and gave her a little push up the stairs. When she came out into the relatively bright light of the restored slave cabin, she took a deep breath, then ran out the door into the clear, clean air.
6
“OF ALL THE STUPID, asinine things I have ever seen in my life,” Adam Montgomery said from between his teeth when they were just a few yards from the slave cabins. “These people are dangerous, but you treat all of this as if it were a game. Vending machines! Candy bars! And talking nonstop. I told you to stay where I put you and to wait for me, but what do you do? You stick your head in the path of a laser beam and set off an alarm! Do you have any idea what could have happened to you if you’d been caught?”
Darci couldn’t suppress a yawn. Maybe she should go to bed earlier tonight, she thought.
When she heard nothing more from Adam, she looked up at him. He was staring at her angrily.
“I can tell my words are having no effect on you,” he said coldly.
“Sure they are. You’re scaring me to death.” Once again she had to work to suppress a yawn.
For several minutes they walked side by side, him a foot taller than she, both of them silent.
Suddenly, Adam didn’t want to be angry. He didn’t want to lecture Darci on the seriousness of what they’d just been through and what could have happened. From the time he was three years old he’d been angry, and it sometimes seemed that his anger hadn’t let up since then for even seconds.
But there was something about Darci that made him see only the present. When he was near her, she seemed to drain away the past and the future.
Yes, the witches’ tunnel had been hideous. To think that evil could have carved out such a place. . . . To think of what he knew sometimes went on in such places....
But now, at this moment, the air was clean and fresh, the leaves beautiful, and he knew that this little woodland sprite of a woman near him was ready to laugh. He’d already learned that Darci was always ready to see humor in any situation.
“If they’d looked up at that shelf,” Adam said softly, “I wonder what they would have thought you were? One of their cats?”
With eyebrows raised, she looked up at him. “Where were you?”
“Hiding under the table behind a box. But I didn’t fit very well, so my feet were on one side of the box, my hands on the other, and my head was....”He turned his head to an uncomfortable-looking angle, which perfectly showed how it had been wedged below the table.
Darci laughed. “At least you could stretch your legs out. Mine went dead asleep. I couldn’t even stand up.”
Adam put his hand to the small of his back as though in pain. “Tell me about it,” he said with a grimace.
“Are you saying that I’m too heavy for you?!” Darci said in mock outrage.
“I think it was the candy bars.” He gave her a one-sided grin. “I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet that the inside of that black thing you have on is covered with chocolate.”
Darci didn’t have to look because she could feel it. The candy bars had burst their wrappers and been squashed when Adam had carried her out. She batted her lashes at him. “Wanta bite?”
“Do you always have your mind in the gutter?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “If you’re not interested I think that that nice young man in 4B might be,” she said as she took a couple of long strides ahead of him.
Catching her arm, he pulled her back. “You can’t think of going after—” he began, but then he saw something in her eyes that made him know that if he took that line, he’d regret it.
“You know, I could stand something to eat,” he said. “How about if we go to the grocery and see what we can find, then take it back to the guest house and have a feast?”
For a moment, Darci only blinked at him. “You mean, buy anything we want?”
“Anything,” he said, smiling. “From the bakery, the deli, whatever. There’s a fridge in the house so we can put leftovers in there.”
“‘Leftovers’?” she asked. “Is that a Yankee word?”
“It’s—” Adam began, then realized she was teasing him. “We could even buy a couple of bags of Hallowe’en candy.”
“Race you!” Darci yelled, then took off running. Smiling, Adam followed her. It didn’t take much speed to keep up with her as she ran down the path past the main house of the Grove, then out to the street. Once again, she ran across the street, right in front of two cars, in order to get to the Camwell grocery.
Adam went to the corner and waited for the light to change before crossing the street. Through the big windows of the grocery, he could see her pushing a cart and looking at the items in the store. She made him feel . . . well, grateful, he thought. She took so much pleasure from the simplest things in life, such as food and clothing, that she made him see how much he’d taken those things for granted.
But while he was smiling beatifically, Darci turned around and he saw the back of her head. A big chunk of her hair was missing! From what he’d seen of this town, if anyone saw her hair, it would take about five minutes for everyone in town to know who had been snooping in the tunnels today.
When the light changed to WALK, Adam was already halfway across the street, and he was inside the grocery in four long strides. He caught Darci just as she was picking up a can of something called deviled ham. And there was a woman coming down the aisle. Knowing Darci’s propensity for talking to anyone anywhere, Adam had no doubt that Darci would start a conversation with the woman.
Having nothing else to use, Adam slapped his hand over the back of Darci’s head to cover the missing hair. “There you are,” he said loudly. “I was looking for you everywhere.??
?
He had to give it to Darci: She didn’t miss a beat. Any other woman Adam knew would have demanded to know what he thought he was doing with his hand holding her head in what had to be a painful grip.
“I’m so glad you found me,” Darci said cheerfully, then smiled at the woman as she pushed her cart past them. Reaching up, Darci put both her hands over Adam’s. “He can’t stand being without me for even a minute,” she told the woman. “Really, it’s most annoying. Every minute it’s, ‘Where’s Darci? Has anyone seen Darci? I need my Darci!’ I can’t get a moment’s peace.”
The woman gave Darci a tentative smile; then she steered her cart to the farthest side of the aisle. When she was past both of them, she nearly ran to the end and turned.
“Would you stop that?” Adam hissed down at her as he forcibly pulled his hand out from under hers. “Why do you have to tell everyone everything about us?”
“Then it’s true? You really can’t stand to be without me?”
Rubbing his hand, for Darci had held it so tightly that she’d cut off circulation, Adam shook his head in frustration. “No, it’s not true. I was covering your hair. There’s a big piece of it missing and I don’t want people to see that.”
Darci felt her hair. “Right. The blonde strands that the man is going to give to some witch. Did he really only get ‘strands’? It feels like a huge piece is missing.” Right away Darci saw that Adam had clamped his mouth shut in a way that meant he wasn’t going to answer that question. I’ll find out later, she promised herself; then, lowering her voice, she fluttered her eyelashes at him. “You know, I really am a natural blonde.”
“And therefore too easy to recognize,” Adam said.
“Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll do something with your hair tomorrow. What is this stuff?” he asked, looking into the grocery cart.
“Food,” she answered, puzzled.
“No, this.” He held up a package of cheese with individually wrapped slices and another package of “pizza snacks.”