I bend down and poke at the creamy white stone wrapping itself around the golden bean. Part of the white stone sloughs off as I touch it. I lift the stone-crusted bean out of the vinegar and stand up straight, holding the golden thing to the light and looking at the strange rocky mush disintegrating all around it. “What is that white stuff?”

Belinda is staring at it, too. “It’s quartz. Sometimes . . . sometimes gold ore that is found underground is encased in quartz. My father told me the acid in vinegar can dissolve quartz crystals. It’s how he tested rocks he sometimes found in the mine. It’s how lots of miners test what they find. Real gold won’t be harmed by the acid, but other minerals that look like gold, like . . . like mica or pyrite, will dissolve or become damaged after soaking in vinegar. But not gold.”

I look up at her. “Still believe there’s nothing in your mine?”

“But . . . but how could I not know? I would’ve known!”

“You told me earlier you didn’t like the mine, that you thought it was dangerous. That you never went down there.”

“Because I didn’t! I don’t! It is dangerous!”

“But you also said that on the day your father died he brought you to the mine because he wanted to show you something. But then he fell. What if he found gold after all? What if he’d found something before that day that looked like gold and he’d had someone verify it to be sure? What if that was what he’d been going to show you? Quartz in the cave with gold running through it, and which he knew for certain was gold because he’d had it verified?”

Belinda ponders this for a moment. “How would James . . . Martin . . . how would he have known about it?”

“That doesn’t matter right now! Maybe somebody talked at an assayer’s office about a man from San Rafaela bringing in some freshly mined gold and Martin overheard it. It doesn’t matter how he knew. What matters is he was going to steal this from you. It’s yours. And he was going to take it right out from under you, using his fake marriage to you as proof he has joint ownership of your property.”

I don’t mention that Martin might have just as effortlessly decided to kill Belinda when he had tapped into the last of the ore in the cave and was finished with the ruse of being her husband. I also don’t mention how easy it is to imagine that Martin was secretly inside the mine the day Belinda’s father died, that Martin pushed him into the shaft when the opportunity presented itself, and then dashed away when Belinda ran for help. She perhaps can’t see him yet as a heartless beast, but it is getting easier by the minute for me to see him as one.

While Belinda reconciles her mind to the truth of why Martin wooed her into marriage, I break open the rest of the bottles. Each one contains silty, decomposing quartz and golden bits. There were more bottles in the past. I’ve no idea where they are. Martin made it seem like he had sold them on his route, but now I am certain he has squirreled them away somewhere or cashed them and deposited the money in a bank account in James Bigelow’s name or Percy Glover’s or someone else’s entirely. I grab an empty canning jar off a rack by the boiler and scoop up the nuggets, careful not to cut myself on the shards of glass.