Читать книгу Stranded With A Stranger - Frances Housden - Страница 9

Namche Bazaar

May

Chelsea watched the guide’s pale blue gaze shift away as if he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Sorry, Ms. Tedman, I can’t help you. Kurt Jellic from Aoraki Expeditions is the one you want to ask. He is the only one who knows exactly where the bodies are hidden…in a manner of speaking.”

Basie Serfontien’s smirk faltered as if the big South African’s harsh-voiced faux pas had just dawned on him.

“Thanks for your help.”

Chelsea began turning away, wanting out of there before Serfontien, the last guide on her list, could get a full view of her trembling lips. Failure. Again.

She wouldn’t cry in front of these hulking great men—not if she could help it—but now she was down to her last and also her best hope, Kurt Jellic. Her mouth twisted in a wry semblance of a smile as she forced herself to turn back. Trust her to forget the most important question. “I don’t suppose any of you know where Jellic is? No one I’ve asked has seen him for days.”

The guide and his team all shook their heads.

It was the fifth time she’d asked someone to guide her up Everest. She had heard rumors about Jellic, and some of the suggestions to look for the man had an if-you-dare quality about them, as if they knew something she didn’t. Too bad. The man could be Frankenstein’s long-lost brother for all she cared, as long as he took her to where the last member of her immediate family—her sister, Atlanta Chaplin—had been killed.

The accident had happened just a few days after she’d received Atlanta’s letter. They had not reached the top as planned. And though that did not seem to matter now, she wished Atlanta and Bill could at least have had their wish before they died.

Atlanta’s letter was tucked in Chelsea’s breast pocket, as if somehow keeping it close to her heart would change the past.

The night when she had caught the news on CNN of another two climbers being lost to Everest had turned her life upside down. She had looked at the screen, taken in the names, but refused to believe. Atlanta and Bill Chaplin?

No, it had to be a mistake. The bodies hadn’t been recovered. She’d held her breath, waiting for better news, even as she had made her arrangements to travel to Namche Bazaar.

Then she’d arrived in Nepal, walked from Lukla to Namche Bazaar, and hope was no longer an option. She touched the letter through her anorak. Its paper had lost its crispness and stopped crackling.

She was sick of getting the same answer to her question. “I’m sorry about Bill and Atlanta. They were a nice couple. But we can’t take our other clients off the beaten track to help you look for their bodies. You want to talk to Kurt Jellic.”

The invisible man. She had begun feeling she was being given the runaround. Chelsea swiveled on her heel, disappointment weighing on her shoulders. Before she could stride off in the direction of her hotel, a hand touched her elbow. “Excuse please, lady.” She turned and the hand dropped away. Its owner, embarrassed and blushing, lowered her dark eyes. The young woman was almost breathtakingly beautiful, the skin of her round face smooth and lustrous. Such a pity that life in the mountains and the wear and tear of this harsh landscape would show on those perfect features before too many years had passed.

“Namaste,” the girl lisped in her delightful accent.

“Namaste.” Chelsea repeated the greeting she had already learned meant “I salute all the divine qualities in you.”

The Sherpa girl fitted the mountain village scene much better than Chelsea did in her pseudomountaineering gear bought in Paris. She’d never been up a mountain in her life.

No matter—she was determined to climb the biggest of them all, or part of it, at least. Leave the summit for those who needed that sort of buzz. She just wanted to find her sister.

“I am Kora. I know where Kurt S’ab is. I saw him yesterday.”

“You did?” Chelsea gasped. Hope at last.

The girl nodded a couple of times from the waist up, her many layers of clothing swaying with her in a rainbow of rusts, browns and blues. “My brother, Sherpa Rei, works for him.”

Chelsea couldn’t restrain her smile. “Good. What is he like? What kind of man is he?”

“Kurt Sa’b is very big man, very big.” Kora drew in the air with her hands, but Chelsea wasn’t sure what to take from that. Was it his stature or large ego that impressed Kora the most?

Yet her heart beat with excitement as she asked, “And where does Kurt Sa’b live? Is it far? Can you take me to him?”

“He lives now in a tavern over in the old town.”

The old town? Chelsea looked around her. Although they were standing on the outskirts of a street market dangerously close to the edge of the terrace, none of the buildings built into the other side looked terribly old. She supposed Namche Bazaar had once been a small, quiet mountain terrace village hanging on the side of a hill. Then hordes of foreigners had disrupted its peace, determined to pit their skills against Everest. Once Sir Edmund Hillary had “knocked the bastard off,” as he had put it, nearly every man and his dog had declared open season on the mountain as if it was some sort of macho ritual. Why else had Bill Chaplin dragged Atlanta up there? Not to get himself and Atlanta killed, that’s for sure.

The girl nodded. “Kora can show you the way.”

“Great, wonderful. Can we go now?”

“Sure ting.” Laughter tinkled out as Kora’s smooth golden face creased into dimples. “Follow me, lady. This way.”

Marketplaces like the one they were walking through were always a good indicator of the culture of a country, the food in particular. The scents here were so different from Paris, where the aroma of freshly baked bread frequently led her by the nose.

They passed a stall, and for all her urgency, Chelsea’s taste buds were stirred by the spicy tang of barbecued meat. Her mouth watered. How long since she’d eaten? Breakfast, at least. She’d been far too busy chasing after mountain guides.

On any day but this she would have let the sounds of the market and unfamiliar accents soak into her mind. She always did this in a new place. Sounds and smells were her way of storing the memory so she wouldn’t lose it.

But the little Nepalese girl was swift on her feet, weaving with ease through the multinational crowd, a mix of locals and tourists, and Chelsea needed to keep up with her. She let the murmur of voices slip past her, although the wind chimes ringing on every stall to keep evil spirits away were a different proposition, as were the birds that sang their hearts out in cages. The sound was lovely. It reminded her of a canary Atlanta had bought her for her fifth birthday.

Oh, God, why couldn’t she have waited for me?

All her life her sister had taken off to places where Chelsea couldn’t possibly follow.

The street opened out onto a small square dominated by a Buddhist temple. Prayer flags flapped overhead in a breeze perfumed with food and incense, and brown hands turned prayer wheels as they passed by. Did those wheels and flags work, or were they just another pretty superstition to ward away evil?

Chelsea wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they were as redundant as her own prayers. She’d said some for Maddie after her sister’s letter arrived. Maddie had been a friend since childhood, a woman who would never have intentionally hurt a soul. She hadn’t deserved to die. Chelsea had called the detective in charge of the case, but had gained no helpful information. Didn’t a woman’s death matter anymore?

Spinning a prayer wheel was probably as useless as the entreaties she had sent upward that Atlanta was really safe. All her hopes of them coming together again, her chance to correct past mistakes, had died on the mountain.

But no prayers would be as profound if she couldn’t find her sister and that key. Too many huge American firms had toppled recently, brought down by creative accounting, and this could be another instance. If only she could be sure what was in the safety deposit box.

Last quarter’s financials had been down again, but if Maddie was correct, she needed to find the proof.

That was the only way to stop cousin Arlon.

Kurt squinted at the figures written in his small accounts book. Not that he thought scrunching his eyes would change the fact that if he didn’t score some work soon, his business would be in the red. It had cost him $65,000 to use the fixed lines and aluminum bridges put out by the Sherpas’ association at the beginning of the season. If he didn’t get more work soon…

The up-front payment he’d received from the Chaplins had been eaten up and then some. And he wasn’t such a boor that he would claim from the estate of a couple of friends who’d been killed on his watch.

“Aargh.” He cleared his throat as if that would get rid of the rumors that had been circulating since he’d come back down the mountain without Bill and Atlanta.

The local magistrate had more or less cleared him. That is to say, nothing could be proved one way or another. All they had was his word. But in a close-knit society, once a rumor took hold it was hard to contradict it.

Bad news always traveled faster than good.

If he could get his hands on the bastard who had started them, he’d kick him to hell and gone. His family knew only too well how rumor and innuendo could ruin a life. But when his father had died it had been Kurt and his brothers and sister who’d been left to deal with the mess. Were still dealing with it.

He looked up from the lined page and realized he should blame the poor light for the problem with his eyes. At five-thirty in the evening his attic room always flooded with gray watery light as the sun dropped behind the Himalayas. He shut the book with a snap. The sound was like a thunderclap in the quiet room.

Though he had taken lodgings on the top floor of a tavern, the old stone walls were two feet thick and swallowed up the noise from the barroom, keeping it to a low murmur he barely noticed.

Kurt scrubbed his hands over his face and combed his untidy hair with his fingers. He needed a shave. His stubble was four days old and as black as his hair. What was the point? He had no one to impress. Clients were staying away in droves.

He pushed up from his cross-legged position on the floor. The wooden boards were ten times more comfortable than any flat spot on Everest. He stretched, his fingers brushing a large beam. The slope of the roof made it necessary to stoop at the far side of the room by his bed, and he had to take care not to knock his head for the first couple of steps after he emerged from the attic.

Running his hands over his pockets, he felt for his matches. Time to light the lamps before he started falling over the furniture and his bags.

A wooden stair cracked outside. The sound of it ricocheted through the silence like a bullet bouncing off the walls. He recognized the sound. That particular step was five from the top.

His hand slid to the knife on his belt. He unsheathed it as he crossed to the door in his sock-cushioned feet and listened for the creak of the step one down from the landing outside his door.

He’d been robbed twice in the short time he’d lived here. The door didn’t have a lock, but then anything of true value he carried on him.

Whoever was climbing the stairs must have been taking them two at a time. The next noise he’d been waiting for didn’t arrive before a gentle tap on the door started it swinging open. Not only did the heavy wooden slab not have a lock, its catch didn’t work worth a damn, losing its grip at the slightest pressure.

There was no announcement. No “Hello, is anyone there?” Only the door moving closer to his shoulder as it was pushed wide. The footsteps were light, as was to be expected in a country where most of the inhabitants were head and shoulders shorter than him.

He let the intruder take no more than two steps into the room, then, knife poised in one hand ready to strike, he wrapped his other arm around the thief from behind. “Don’t move. I have a knife and it’s pointed at your throat.”

The intruder let out a squawk that nearly deafened him. He almost dropped the knife as a padded elbow dug into his ribs. If the aim of the elbow hadn’t warned him his target was taller than he’d imagined, the handful of fluid feminine breast told him he was definitely below the mark by eight inches or more.

It had been so long since he’d touched a woman, touched anything that filled his hand with such soft fullness, that his palm burned through the contact, even through several layers of clothing. Stunned by the unexpected rush to his groin, he grabbed a breath and smelled a floral perfume that clouded his reason and made him squeeze, just once.

As the heel of her boot stomped down painfully on the bony arch of his foot hard enough to make him wince, a second mistake leaped to mind. Her struggles had brought her dangerously close to the blade of his knife. Kurt flung it from him before its sharp edge could slice something a lot more fragile than nylon rope. Before the clatter of metal on wood reached his ears he’d bundled the squirming mass of female body tightly in both arms. “Take it easy, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“All right for you to say now I’ve knocked your knife out of your hand,” she boasted.

Well, at least he now knew she was an American.

She wriggled some more, her butt rubbing against his groin. It reacted accordingly.

“I threw it away,” he growled, unable to stifle his indignation that the woman had laid claim to his act of chivalry.

“So you say now.”

He felt the muscles in her butt tighten against him as she lifted a knee, but he was too busy spreading his legs to avoid her heel to enjoy the sensation. As her foot jarred against the floor its echo went straight from her to him. It was about then she appeared to recognize what was happening behind her, and she squawked once more. “Let me go, you…you lecher.”

The bands of his arms tightened, quelling her renewed struggles. This was getting out of hand. Didn’t she realize this situation was as painful to his ego as it was to her sensibilities? Only one thing for it, he decided.

Letting his arms slip lower without losing their hold, he picked her up. The softest landing place in the room was the bed. No sooner thought than done—he hefted her up and released her onto the mattress.

He could hear her pushing herself backward to the head of the bed, her heels catching on the covers. “Keep away from me. I know karate. No way I’m going to let you rape me.”

“Pity you never got past lesson one, where they taught you to stamp on your opponent’s feet. And while we’re on the subject, who snuck into whose room? Believe me, you couldn’t be safer. I’ve no urge to have sex with a shrew.”

“You should be so lucky.”

“Hold it! Hold it right there. Not another word. If I’m going to be accused of sexual assault, and believe me, I’ve been accused of a lot worse recently, then for a change I want to look my accuser in the eye.” This time the matches sprang to his hold in the first pocket he searched. He lit one, but it didn’t pierce far into the gloom, and the shape on the bed could have been man or woman. But having touched her, he knew better.

“Actually, no one mentioned sexual assault, only…”

He froze, still as a statue, the match flaring in his fingers, as faint and tiny as the light at the end of the tunnel called his future. “Only what?”

“Whatever they say about men like you.”

“Men like me don’t go in for rape either.”

He could tell she’d heard the rumors, but he hadn’t expected her to back down. That made her either a coward or a woman who desperately wanted something he had. And she’d already let him know it wasn’t his body. He blew out the match, then took his ire out on the full backpack he’d left on the floor, kicking it in front of the door to make her escape harder.

The annoyance didn’t go away. Striking another match, he murmured under his breath, “The woman wriggles around against a guy as if she’s giving him a lap dance and she wonders why he gets a hard-on.”

Kurt had done a lot of talking to himself lately. Especially since people he’d once counted as friends had appeared to be avoiding his company. As if they would become guilty by association.

So she’d been asking around, had heard the stories that got worse as they went from mouth to mouth. He could have told her about rumors—that if they won’t go away, you have to learn to live with them.

Without turning his back to her, he lit the first couple of yak-butter oil lamps. Their glow was enough to illuminate long jean-clad legs. The third brought out the curve of her hips. He knew, to his cost, they were softly rounded where his were lean. The lilac anorak was a fashion statement no mountaineer worth his or her salt would wear. Its quilted folds hid the full breasts his palm had lighted on by mistake. He smiled softly as he picked up the next tiny copper bowl filled with oil.

Her hair was black, short, spiky, a match for the dark clumps of eyelashes framing her huge gray eyes. Eyes wide and staring at him as if he were the devil incarnate. As if she too thought him responsible for Bill’s and Atlanta’s deaths.

Sometimes he wondered if maybe he was.

While her expression nagged at his conscience, something in him acknowledged that contempt wasn’t the emotion he wanted to draw from the woman sprawled across his bed. But he wasn’t willing to go deeper into his motives.

With the final lamp lit, a gas cartridge one, the last of the gloom receded to the edges of the attic. Kurt walked up to the bed and looked down at his unexpected guest. Her eyes flashed a warning and her hands bunched up fists of the top cover as if it were the only thing preventing her from leaping at his throat.

“Hi, I’m Kurt Jellic. And you’d be…?”

“One moment you’re threatening to slice my neck, and the next you’re making an introduction as if we’d just met at a garden party,” Chelsea sniped, taking advantage of what seemed to be a truce to push herself into a more dignified sitting position.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m all out of cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea, but I can offer you a whiskey. They do say it’s good for shock. Perhaps it would make you remember your name.”

Taking a good look at him in the lamplight, she was left in no doubt that this guy could have killed her if necessary. She’d watched him move from lamp to lamp with lethal grace. Gradually each small increment of light had revealed the man Atlanta and Bill had trusted to get them safely to the summit of Everest and back again.

Why hadn’t that happened?

Oh, yeah, they had fallen. And she’d heard the word accident flung around with abandon. Kurt Jellic had been with them, and like a few other people she wondered how he had survived.

He threw her a grin, quirking his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?” His teeth were a slash of white in a face brushed with the kind of dark stubble film stars affected, as if it made them unrecognizable. His slightly gaunt features were dominated by dark unreadable eyes under black eyebrows, both sitting above an uncompromising straight slide of a nose.

“I’ve no trouble recalling my name. It’s Chelsea Tedman.”

She waited for a reaction, but wasn’t overwhelmed with surprise when she didn’t get one. Why would Atlanta have mentioned an estranged sister she hadn’t seen since before Chelsea entered high school?

He stepped around a heap of red and yellow ropes on the floor in front of a huge old-fashioned chest, then lifted a bottle. The reflection from a butter-oil lamp glimmered through the amber liquid sloshing near the bottom. The bottle had been well and truly broached. Hell, she hoped he wasn’t an alcoholic.

That was all she needed.

“Okay, now the formalities have been taken care of, how do you take your whiskey—straight or straight?”

“I take it in a glass.”

The bottle made a hollow clunk as he set it back down and picked up the glass sitting next to it. He peered into its depths and didn’t look particularly happy with what he saw.

Chelsea almost choked on a breath as he pulled out the tail of his tan-and-brown-checked shirt and proceeded to wipe the glass with it. His glance caught Chelsea’s horrified expression. Kurt’s embarrassed smile was almost boyish, if anyone with bristles could be likened to a boy. “What did you expect? This isn’t the Ritz. No room service. It’s either use what you have to hand or put up with a layer of dust floating on your whiskey.”

Apparently satisfied with his efforts, he poured some liquid into the glass, then opened the top drawer of the chest. He withdrew a blue plastic mug and emptied the rest of the bottle’s contents into it.

Chelsea’s innate fastidiousness made her hesitate to take the tumbler, even considering that alcohol was an antiseptic.

“Will it help if I tell you I put this shirt on clean not more than two hours ago?” He lifted the blue mug as if toasting her. “And you were the one who insisted on a glass.”

She took the tumbler, lifting it by the rim, wary of touching any part of this man whose sexual heat had burned through her as if he hadn’t held a knife against the tender skin of her throat.

He hadn’t actually said she was acting like a wimp, but she certainly felt like one. How had it come to this? Atlanta had been the delicate flowerlike child, while she had been the tomboy. Her sister had gone the ballet-and-piano-lessons route, while she had ridden horses and played basketball. Even at thirteen she’d been two inches taller than her elder sister and had made an ungainly, sulky bridesmaid at Atlanta’s wedding, letting everyone know she was doing it under protest.

When had their roles reversed? Atlanta roughing it on a mountain in boots and anorak, while Chelsea swanned off to watch the ballet in Paris dressed in the latest fashion as if she were a changeling.

And she was. She fluttered around Paris like a dilettante, playing at being a translator at the American embassy. Well, she was a translator for real. Though in truth, she worked in a basement office of the embassy, translating secrets that terrorists would give their lives to get their hands on. That’s if they even knew IBIS, the Intelligence Bureau for International Security, existed. Jason Hart, the bureau chief and initiator of the bureau, had taken extreme measures to insure its anonymity.

Kurt knocked his mug against her glass. “Sláinte.”

“Cheers.” The sip she took burned all the way down, and her face flamed as Kurt Jellic settled his massive frame on the edge of the bed, making the mattress dip. She was honest enough not to blame the blush on the whiskey. It had been a long time since she’d let down her guard enough to get this close to a man on a bed, even fully clothed.

“So what brings you to this neck of the woods, Chelsea Tedman?”

“I want to go up Mount Everest.”

A spark lightened his eyes, but not the intensity of his gaze on her. “And?”

“I was told you were the one to take me.”

He frowned, his black eyebrows coming together, shading his eyes as well as hardening his expression. “So no one but Aoraki Expeditions could fit you into their group?”

“Not where I wanted to go. But they all said you were definitely available.”

He took a slug of whiskey out of the incongruous plastic mug, but if he’d done it to hide his reactions it hadn’t worked. There was nothing enigmatic about the twist of his mouth, or the way his nose flared as he breathed in hard. “Did they tell you why?”

“They didn’t have to. I’m Atlanta Chaplin’s sister. And I already knew you were the one who took her and Bill up Everest.”

Something between a growl and a moan ripped from Kurt’s lips as he sprang to his feet, turning his shoulder to her for a second. She would almost have preferred he’d stayed that way. She wasn’t prepared for his ominous glance.

It was a relief when he tipped back his head and drained the whiskey from the blue mug, a relief to no longer feel like a slug he’d almost stepped on. Finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You took your damn good time before mentioning that. So what’s it to be—pistols at dawn, pushing me down a crevasse when I’m not looking, or are you going to get your lawyer to sue me? I warn you, you won’t get much. Everything I own is tied up in a half-built lodge in Aoraki, New Zealand. And as it stands it’s not worth much.”

“I’ve no intention of suing you. Do you think I’m so stupid I didn’t check out the circumstances of the accident with the local magistrate? I’m not as green as a cabbage.”

“Huh, looks like I passed, or you wouldn’t be here. But anyone less like a cabbage I’ve yet to meet.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, but at the moment I couldn’t give a hoot if you thought I had buck teeth and a squint. All I want from you is your help in recovering my sister’s body.”

“I’m not sure that it can be done. Even if we could reach them and get their bodies out of there, transporting them down the mountain is almost impossible. Anything of any size is transported either up or down on the backs of Sherpas. Climbing takes two hands. Apart from that, a lot of Sherpas believe the bodies of fallen climbers should remain with the mountain goddess.”

Chelsea felt safe to scoot to the edge of the bed. Holding the glass made her efforts awkward but didn’t deter her, not now that she thought her goal was in sight.

“Here, give me that.” Kurt took the tumbler from her and she rose from the bed.

She stood in front of him and found she had to look up. “You don’t look like a superstitious guy.”

“I’m not, but I am cautious. You don’t succeed at mountain climbing by rushing into stuff hell-for-leather.”

“Good. I haven’t got a superstitious bone in my body.” Kurt ran his glance over her as if checking out her bones—or rather what covered them, she decided, as the flame in his eyes took her straight back to that moment when his hand had covered her breast. Fear for her life hadn’t been enough to stifle the arousing quality of his touch, or the discovery that her breast had fit perfectly into his palm.

He took a sip from her glass, but she felt no inclination to mention it, nor do anything to stifle the persuasive power of the whiskey. For all his faults, her father hadn’t raised a fool.

“It won’t be cheap. If we can recover the bodies, we’ll need a large team of Sherpas on the way down to carry them in relays.”

“Money is no object. Getting my sister home is all that matters.” Her statement suddenly felt like a boast, a clunker dropped into this attic where money was obviously scarce.

She kept her eye on Kurt in case he appeared to see it that way, too. He ran his tongue around his teeth as if pondering the situation. Then, as if realizing he was still holding her glass, he thrust it toward her.

“No, you keep it,” she said coolly. “I prefer mine with soda.”

He took her at her word, taking a smaller mouthful than the one that had made his throat work as he swallowed the last of the whiskey in the mug. “Okay. Prepare yourself for it taking a week or more to get everything organized. Where are you staying?”

“At the Peaks Hotel.”

A raised eyebrow was his only acknowledgment that the hotel was the most expensive accommodation in Namche Bazaar.

“Have you done any climbs with Bill and Atlanta? Better tell me what experience you’ve had.” He waited expectantly

This was the crunch moment that would make or break her chance of recovering her sister and the key. “No, I’ve never climbed with my sister and her husband. We didn’t see each other that often. I live in Paris and…well, you know where they lived.”

“So what’s it been—the French Alps, Mont Blanc?”

“None of those. I stayed in Paris mainly, but I belong to this gym with a huge climbing wall and my speeds on that are considered expert level.”

He let out a whoop that ran around the attic, bouncing off the walls and coming back to her more times than she appreciated. What did he know? She was expert level.

He stopped chortling long enough to spit out, “A climbing wall? Lady, you crack me up.” Then he sobered. “No way am I taking a rookie climber up Everest. My reputation is shot as it is. It would be dead in the water if I took up an inexperienced climber. It was hell losing your sister and brother-in-law. If I lost a third one I might as well shoot myself. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.”

“But—”

“No. Don’t try to persuade me, or bat those eyelashes my way. If you think that would work, then you are greener than a cabbage.”