G'Day to Die: A Passport to Peril Mystery - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,39

envied everyone. He wanted what everyone else had. When I earned some notoriety, he wanted to be me. On his death bed, he said if he had to do it all over again, he’d do everything differently so that he’d be the person everyone wanted to be. I don’t think he was happy for more than a minute throughout his entire life.” He shook his head and raked his hand through his hair. “He died just about a year ago.”

“I’m so sorry, Guy.”

“Thanks. It’s a real shock to lose someone when he’s in perfect health.”

“Excuse me?”

“Prior to being broadsided by a semi, there’d been nothing wrong with him. Afterward, he had so many internal injuries, they couldn’t piece him back together again. His kidneys stopped functioning, so I volunteered to donate one of mine, but preliminary tests showed that I’m diabetic, so that eliminated me from the donor pool. By then it was only a matter of time. He never lived long enough to undergo surgery. That was a hell of a month.”

“It’s too bad he never got to talk to the clerk in the jewelry store here. She would have made him feel really important. She knew all about your family history. Were you aware that in Victoria, the name Madelyn is right up there with the Queen? You should talk to the clerk. She’ll make your head swell.”

“Is that right? Yeah, my dad would have eaten up the attention and been on top of the world. He might have even been happy for a day. Guess my kids will have to experience the excitement for him. They’re going to be so full of themselves. But they’re good kids. They deserve the attention.”

I saw a few familiar faces when we arrived at the shelter. Lola Silverthorn sat on a bench in the bright sunlight, slopping lotion on her legs. Diana Squires waited in the shade beneath the building’s overhanging roof, hardly recognizable in her floppy hat and sunglasses. Roger Piccolo paced the grounds in what looked to be a futile search for rare vegetation. And the two Dicks exchanged belly laughs as they huddled near Lola’s bench.

“Will you excuse me?” Guy asked as he powered up his camera. “Since your beaus are off-limits and Bernice is in absentia, I find myself in the market for willing substitutes. Wish me luck.”

“Have you ever tried looking at people face-to-face instead of through the viewfinder of your camera?”

He laughed. “Too late for that. I don’t know any other way.”

“The tour begins in two minutes!” a man called from the mine entrance.

I caught up to the Dicks, whose belly laughs diminished to giggles when they saw me. “Hi, guys. I see the ladies cut you loose. So what are they up to?”

“Fanning their muumuus in front of the electric hand dryers in the ladies’ room,” Dick Teig howled. “One minute we’re panning for gold at the edge of a mighty river, and the next minute—”

“Splat!” said Dick Stolee, slapping his hands together with belly flop loudness. “Helen stumbled into Grace and they both went down like Sumo wrestlers. It was hideous. The screams. The flailing limbs. The wails for help.”

“I thought they were goners,” said Dick Teig.

“Oh, my God! What did you do?”

“Jumped in after ’em.”

“But you can’t swim!”

“A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” he said humbly.

“That was so heroic!” I gave him a congratulatory pat on his shoulder, suddenly struck by something very peculiar. I stood back, eyeing him up and down. “So you jumped bravely into the river and hauled the girls to shore.”

“Yup.”

“How come your clothes aren’t wet?”

Dick Stolee wheezed with laughter. “Because the water’s only two inches deep!”

“Two inches deep?” I scoffed. “That’s a creek!”

Dick Teig stuck his jaw out defensively. “In Iowa it’d be a river.”

“This way, folks,” our tour guide called out. “Have your tickets riddy. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you worked a mine like this, you could be as young as thirteen years old, and you’d most likely be Chinese. It was dark, dirty work, but the money was good. If you could stay alive, you prospered.”

I let people file in front of me as I paused to dig my camera out of my shoulder bag.

“I hope this tour’s a beaut,” Heath remarked, stopping beside me. “I admire the commercial genius who came up with the idea of having blokes pay to explore a fake gold mine. We should do that in Coober Pedy. We’ve got plinty of real mines to