Digging Up the Dead by Jill Amadio Page A

down, honey. Don’t go jumping to your usual conclusions here. Jeff, is there an address?”
    “Yep. I guess it’s okay to give it to you.”
    Stanger opened the envelope, extracted a receipt, copied the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to Thatch.
    “I’d be interested to hear more about this when you’ve found the owner,” said Stanger. “Oh, by the way, let me show you a couple of other great pieces we found. I know you’ll appreciate them, Thatch.”
    He went to the back and returned with a crystal the size of a large baking potato, explaining it was the biggest, most lustrous and colorful dark kunzite yet extracted from one of the pockets in the mine.
    “And here’s a classic smoky quartz on microcline,” he said, holding out a palm-sized, two-toned, light and dark green gemstone that glittered in the sun.
    At Tosca’s puzzled expression Thatch explained that microcline was a mixture of minerals that share the same chemistry but have different crystal structures.
    “It’s a semi-precious stone and often pink, brown or green. Many of them are translucent, like this one,” he said.
    They exchanged a few more pleasantries with Stanger and left, Tosca clutching both the box and the paper with the address. Thatch carried a small plastic bag half-filled with the small pieces of black, aquamarine, pink and crystal gems they had found in their buckets.
    “Here, Tosca, these are for you,” he said, handing her the bag after they got into the truck. “Not worth much, but since we can take home anything we find at no cost, you should keep them as a reminder of your mining experience. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Besides, these gems were dug with love.”
    “All right, thank you. I could put them in the bottom of an aquarium, if I had one. But ‘dug with love?’ How elegantly poetic.” Her grin softened the sarcasm as she took the bag.
    “If you don’t like dug with love, how about, ‘the poetry of the earth is never dead’?”
    “Did you just make that up?” said Tosca
    “Keats.”
    “What’s the poem called?”
    “The title is ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket.’ The context is wrong for the meaning I want to convey about our time today, but I couldn’t resist,” he said. “Keats was referring to how the grasshopper keeps his song alive during scorching summers, and the cricket’s song does the same for the bitter winters, ensuring that the poetry of the earth never dies.”
    “That is truly beautiful. I don’t know much about Keats, except that he was a romantic, short in stature, and died young while living in Rome. Oh, I see some oranges fallen from that tree. Shall we stop and get them?”
    In response Thatch increased his speed down the mountain despite the hazardous ruts in the trail.
    “No trespassing means just that, so no, we are not stopping. I’ll buy you some.”
    “Don’t bother, Thatch. It’s just that forbidden fruit always tastes sweeter.”
    He didn’t reply, and Tosca began to speculate on Sunida’s identity.

 
     
     
Chapter Twenty-Five
     
     
    “Could she be an illegitimate daughter of Fuller’s? A long-lost sister? A secret wife? At least she lives near us in Laguna Beach,” Tosca said, reading the address aloud. “But what a strange last name.”
    “Not strange at all,” said Thatch, slowing down at each sharp bend as they descended the mountain. “Sounds typically Thai to me.”
    “Thai? How do you figure that? Ah, you are fluent in the language, I suppose,” she said, clearly in disbelief.
    “No, but I learned a few words when working security for a U.S. president and his wife on their state visit to Bangkok. One of the Thai reporters, a beautiful young woman, at the press conference had a similar name.”
    “Oops. I am suitably admonished.”
    “There you go again, going all formal on me.”
    They reached the bottom of the mountain. Tosca stared once again at the huge Pala casino before Thatch turned the truck to the right to head