Desert Devil (3 page)

With what was evidently a supreme effort at self-control, he relaxed his clenched hands. "Tell me, Miss Townsend, how well did you know your cousin David?"

The question caught Juli by surprise. She toyed with the cup in her hands, uncertain how to answer. In one way, she thought she knew David very well. In another, she wasn't sure she knew him at all. Her mother and David's mother were sisters, and the two families were close when Juli was growing up. David had always been her good friend, even though he was eight years older. She loved the crazy inventions he was always bringing around to show her. Silly contraptions where the pull of a string or push of a switch would set into motion a whole series of wildly moving parts that would then result in the accomplishment of some mundane little task, like squeezing a tube of toothpaste or stamping a letter. He amused her with silly jokes and taught her little "magic" tricks.

He won awards in high school, and Juli proudly reported to her grade-school friends that he was the smartest boy in the whole world. But one time one of those friends scornfully retorted that her older sister had dated him and he was "weird." Juli had practically flown at her, demanding that the girl take that back, but she wouldn't, even adding that David was "funny looking" and "crazy."

Juli had frigidly dropped the girl from among her circle of friends, and no one else ever dared say anything about David—at least not
to
Juli, though sometimes she had the unhappy feeling they giggled about him behind her back. Even back then, she supposed, she had realized he was different from the usual run of high school boys. He was a loner, awkward at sports and dancing, a very complex person. But he wasn't "funny looking" or "crazy" just because he was plump and wore bottle-thick glasses and was too smart for most people to understand, she sometimes thought with fierce protectiveness.

And even those little quirks seemed to straighten out when he went off to college on a scholarship. He switched to contact lenses, lost weight, and learned to get along better socially. Unfortunately, Juli more or less lost contact with him about that time, except for what she heard through Aunt Kate. Juli had her own problems then, of course: her mother's painful illness and unexpected death; the months of numbed loss; her father's surprising remarriage to a younger woman with three small children.

She did know, through Aunt Kate, that things didn't go as well for David after college graduation as everyone had expected. Somehow he just hadn't seemed to live up to the earlier promise he had shown. He changed jobs frequently, complaining that the companies he worked for were too rigid, that he didn't have enough creative freedom. He seemed generous with financial help for his mother, though Juli sometimes suspected that the money came less regularly than Aunt Kate let on. Aunt Kate had been so excited when she got his letter about the "scientific breakthrough" and his promise that he would soon have the money to bring her out to live in Arizona.

And then came the shocking call about his death in a car accident… Juli took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Are you all right?" Thorne Taylor demanded sharply, peering down at her with a sort of suspicious concern.

"Yes, I… I'm all right. I was just thinking about David. I still find it hard to believe he's dead."

"You didn't answer my question," he prompted.

"I think I knew him fairly well," she finally said cautiously. She realized the paper cup was beginning to crumple under her nervous handling. She set it aside and tried to keep her hands confidently motionless. "Well enough to know that he was certainly capable of producing something of commercial value in the electronics field."

"I won't argue with that. That was the reason we hired him," Thorne Taylor agreed. Harshly, he added, "The question is, what, if anything, did he produce?"

Juli had the unpleasant feeling this conversation was simply going in circles, getting nowhere. The arguments which had sounded so persuasive when she planned them earlier now seemed as flimsy and leaky as a sieve.

Thorne Taylor suddenly seemed to come to the same conclusion. He picked up the folders where he had set them on the coffee table and tapped them impatiently against his other hand. With dismay, Juli suddenly realized the discussion was about to be terminated, and she had accomplished nothing at all.

"Mr. Taylor, you must realize that if you refuse to… to make any financial settlement, my aunt is fully prepared to take this matter to court!" she exclaimed, the words coming out more breathlessly than she intended.

"Indeed," he murmured. He tilted a dark eyebrow. "Is this a warning that is supposed to frighten me into going along with your cheap little trick to bluff some sort of payment out of my company?"

"Cheap—little—trick!" Juli repeated with incredulous fury, so angry the words were hardly coherent. She struggled for control. "Mr. Taylor, I… I assure you that though
you
may have cheated David in the past, I am not going to let you get away with cheating his mother!"

Thorne Taylor's eyes narrowed dangerously. "I wouldn't be tossing around wild, unsubstantiated accusations if I were you," he growled.

Julie tore open her purse and jerked out David's incriminating letter. She thrust it at him, her breath coming in short gasps, as if she had been running at full speed. "Perhaps you won't think my accusations are so wild when you read this!"

He accepted the wrinkled letter, his eyes holding hers until he dropped his gaze to the scrawled writing.

"The first part is just personal to his mother," Juli said hastily. She turned the page over in his hand. "It's in the last paragraph."

She watched him skim over the scribbled lines quickly, then go back and read them again more slowly. "Is that all you have?" he finally said disdainfully.

"All!" Juli gasped. "It says he has made this scientific breakthrough on something he's been working on for a long time, something he doubted had ever been approached really scientifically before. It says he'll soon have enough money to bring Aunt Kate out to live with him. And it says that
you
, Mr. Taylor, will not be able to cheat him out of anything
this
time!"

Thorne Taylor's broad shoulders moved in a careless shrug, which only angered Juli more. And with increased fury she realized he had tricked her into showing him her one piece of evidence.

"I wondered when I received your letter just what sort of con game you were going to try to pull. Now I know," he said contemptuously. One hand suddenly shot out and caught her shoulder in a cruel grip, the strong fingers biting so harshly into the soft flesh that she stifled a gasp. His eyes burned into hers. "I can tell you're an amateur at the con-game business, Miss Townsend. I suggest you get out of it before the going gets a little rough."

Juli's breath caught as she looked up into that hard, unrelenting face, too stunned and angry even to object to the painful grip on her shoulder. "How… how dare you accuse me!" she finally managed to gasp.

The grip loosened, leaving pale, bloodless marks where his fingers had crushed her skin. Instinctively, she rubbed the sore area with her other hand.

"Enjoy your stay in Cholla," he said with a derisive smile and an exaggeratedly polite nod of his head. "You've come at our most pleasant time of year."

Juli watched in furious astonishment as the door closed behind his broad shoulders, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Not only had Thorne Taylor rejected any claim of Aunt Kate's to payments for David's invention; he had denied any such invention even existed. And he had contemptuously accused Juli herself of trying to pull some tricky "con game" on the company!

Or was that, she thought suddenly, just a cheap trick to try to frighten her? David's letter plainly indicated Thorne Taylor was not to be trusted. And he seemed exactly the kind of man who would believe the best form of defense was attack.

Juli jammed the letter back in her purse and snapped the catch shut with a savage twist. With head held high, she stormed out the door and across the busy office, aware of eyes following her all the way. At the glass door she turned and looked back, her gaze sweeping scathingly over the room, stopping abruptly on the tall, gray-suited figure watching her from a doorway. He was too far away for her to read his expression, but she had no doubt but that he was congratulating himself on getting rid of her so efficiently.

But he hadn't seen the last of her, Juli thought grimly. Not by a long shot.

The tires squealed as Juli's little car shot out of the parking lot. Her thoughts were wildly incoherent. He had accused her of trying to
cheat
the company! Of all the incredible, insufferable nerve—how dare he! And all the time
he
was the swindler, stealing David's invention and cheating Aunt Kate out of what was rightfully hers. Grabbing Juli's shoulder as if she were some sort of thief—warning her! Angrily, she realized she hadn't even had a chance to tell him what she thought of Taylor Electronics' truck drivers who hogged the highways.

She was back at the bridge over the dry riverbed before she calmed down enough to realize she was headed in the wrong direction to find David's trailer. She retraced her tracks, still fuming, and finally found Reynaldo Road. It was a pleasant, older street lined with orange trees, some still holding colorful balls of fruit. She drove along slowly, watching for David's address number. Farther out the sidewalks disappeared and the houses were shabbier and farther apart. The paved street dwindled to gravel and then, to Juli's dismay, to dirt tracks that followed a ridge of yellowish boulders into the desert.

A few mailboxes gave evidence of habitation, but the houses were hidden in the dips and rises. The desert was neither as level nor as barren as it had appeared from a distance. Juli recognized the tall, stately saguaro cactus from pictures she had seen, as well as the paddle-shaped prickly pear cactus. But more numerous than either of these was a particularly vicious-looking cactus with angled branches entirely covered with golden thorns.

Juli had almost decided she had somehow gotten on the wrong road and was ready to turn back when she spied one last lonely mailbox leaning crookedly by the side of the road. On it was the name "Flynn" in faded red letters, the last "n" drooping, as if the painter had miscalculated and failed to allow room for it. David, Juli remembered with an affectionate sigh, had never cared much about appearances.

That fact was even more apparent after Juli cautiously guided her car over the rocky driveway and finally spied the trailer parked in a flat, bare area out of sight of the road. No effort had been made to make it look pleasant or homey. It just sat there, a pink and aluminum colored metal box with an air cooler, like some sort of ugly growth, on the roof. A nearby saguaro offered only a few fingers of shade.

Juli tried to swallow her dismay. She fished the key out of her purse. It had been sent to Aunt Kate along with a few other personal things of David's after the accident.

She wrinkled her nose at the heavy smell of stale air when she opened the door, and her eyes widened at the sight of the disarrayed interior. Clothes flung over a chair, piled carelessly in a corner, draped from doorknobs. Books everywhere. A shelf with several of David's whimsical contraptions that had fascinated Juli as a child, dust-covered and motionless now. Sink full of dirty dishes. Counter incongruously littered with chunks of rock.