Veiled Eyes

by C.L. Bevill

  He didn’t see the odd look that passed over the older man’s face.

  * * *

  Being inside the mine gave Anna a case of goose bumps. Once she was past the dead-end where there was illumination from the fluorescent lights of the sign, there was nothing but blackness, blacker than the lake. Deep and forbidding, it was as silent as a church five minutes after Mass was concluded.

  Anna could have reached out to touch the darkness; it seemed as solid as any substantial object. She used the flashlight to find the headlamp she had discarded on her last trip, but its batteries were dead. The spare batteries she had dropped were lost in the soil that she disrupted climbing out and then back in. She dropped the headlamp and knew that the flashlight with its own spare batteries would have to suffice. A Maglite 4-Cell D, it could be adjusted to a tight beam or a broad span to shed light on as much as possible.

  The flashlight was immediately adjusted so that it was the broad span. She wanted to see as much as possible. Anna took a breath and began to thread her way down the narrow passage. It didn’t really seem like a mine to her. It was just a constricted burrow someone had once dug looking for something to mine. Whomever it had been could probably see that the sand on the walls indicated the closeness of the surface and that no more salt was to be found here. Was it to make an airway for the miners? Was it a construct so that some industrious miner could steal salt from the mine on his own time? It didn’t really matter. She set her shoulders and went deeper.

  If she concentrated, she could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. Anna was so sensitized to herself that it seemed like her breathing was as loud as the speakers at a rock concert. She suspected that no danger was presented to her unless she lingered too long, and she wanted, no needed, to see what was being hidden from her. And what was being hidden from much of the family as well.

  White streaks of salt on the rough-hewn walls indicated that she was headed in the correct direction…downward. The passage widened, and she saw a rusting piece of rail half buried in the floor. Minutes later she found the railcar she had hidden behind while recovering her self-control and attempting to conquer her rampant fears.

  Anna shuddered again and knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Once she had said to herself that she had never been afraid of anything in her life before the experience of Dan Cullen. She suspected that she had never allowed herself to fully live before that either. Being afraid isn’t a crime. Being afraid to challenge yourself, being afraid to ask questions that you need the answers to, that’s a crime. But not mine, she thought determinedly.

  She came to the first cross section of the mine. A tunnel bisected the one she was in, and she knew which way she needed to go. She couldn’t explain why she knew this, but she continued straight. But first Anna took the pack off her back and opened it. She retrieved what she had put inside it and began to swiftly shake the object in her hand while glancing around her. No breadcrumbs for me to lead my way back through the forest. No skein of twine to mark my passage through the labyrinth. No, I’ve got three cans of Gabriel’s marine-quality primer. The color…battleship gray.

  Anna sprayed the wall of the tunnel with an arrow, pointing the way out. She wanted no confusion in case she was in a hurry upon her exit.

  * * *

  Gabriel looked around the crowds of people and grimaced. All of the extraneous thoughts tended to baffle his gifts. He’d experienced it before. He’d caught her voice thinking something very odd, and he repeated it to himself, attempting to understand what Anna could possibly be thinking about. “Battleship gray?”

  Then he caught sight of Alby LaGraisse and called, “Alby!”

  Alby meandered over to Gabriel with a silly grin on his face. “I bin to the German beer tent and the Australian beer tent and I gotta tell you, those Germans don’t got shit on the Aussies. I mean, the glasses are this big.” He made a gesture with his hands indicating the extreme size of the beer.

  “You’re not driving home tonight, are you, Alby?” Gabriel said ruefully.

  “Hell, no. My daughter-in-law’s driving.” He hiccupped. “She doesn’t drink. She’s a prissy little thing. Dreams about white posies and mittens on kittens and stuff like that.”

  “Where’s Anna?”

  “Anna?” Alby’s tone was innocuous. “Oh, Anna. She stayed at your house for a minute. Said she’d walk back.”

  “At my house?”

  Alby’s voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper that wasn’t a whisper at all because half a dozen people heard him anyway. “Female stuff, she said. You know, she is a female. Though I don’t think she dreams about white posies.”

  “I’ve noticed,” said Gabriel dryly. Feeling a little twinge of relief, he thought, Female stuff? Anna, what are you doing?

  Chapter 22

  Saturday, February 21st

  The practice of opening all the doors and the windows of a house while a man is dying will ensure that his soul will have free egress upon his death. A locked door or a closed window will keep his tortured self near the place he passed, and he will haunt the living thereafter.

  Anna knew the way. She didn’t stop to ask herself how she knew the way, but she knew it all the same. All she had to do was to pause at an intersection, and it came to her which way to go. The tunnel became increasingly snowy white as she descended into the mass of the salt dome itself, finally losing all vestiges of the dirt and sand that lay far above her. Passages became larger as men had once cleared the way for removing the white gold to the surface. The world transformed into a glittering cosmos of spectacular walls the color of glistening milk pouring down into the deepest chasms of the earth.

  At each junction Anna took the spray can from the pack and marked her exit. Within an hour she had used up one can. She passed through tunnels she was positive she hadn’t seen before, even in the confusion of her past exit, but now she was sure of her route. The passages became cavernous with vaulted ceilings where salt had been taken from every crevice, and she saw remnants of the mining process as it had been before. There were machines down here, left to rot in the humidity, and air ventilation units that were silent in the musty closeness. Metal shrouds disappeared into the salt, eventually finding their way to the world above, to allow fresh air to circulate below the ground.

  Like the Madonna she’d seen before, there were other carvings. Some were crude caricatures of figures. One was obviously a woman someone had admired greatly, judging by the size of her basketball-sized breasts. Another was a large cross upon which an almost ambiguous Jesus hung, demonstrating the fundamental Catholicism of the region. One wall had a virtual roster of men who had worked this mine carved into the salt, only perceptible when the shadows were cast diagonally across the surface. There were names scratched there and dates accompanying them. Theriot was there. So was Bergeron. Benoit was another. She recognized some of the names. Alby LaGraisse had carved his in September of 1945. She lingered only for moments and went on.

  Anna didn’t hear anything but herself moving and the drips of moisture as it gathered at points of the mine’s tunnels and dropped down, causing funny echoes to ring through the passageways. She looked down at her watch and discovered that it had stopped at 7:35 p.m., not giving her any indication of how long she had been down here or how long she had before Gabriel started waving the red flag of distress.

  Her internal sensor guessed about an hour or perhaps two. She didn’t know how far it was to where she was going. The salt dome was crisscrossed with shafts making it a literal maze of tunnels. Meg had said that some of the shafts were flooded, that only God above knew when the rest of them would go. But Anna hadn’t seen any sign of flooded tunnels, only the relentless drip-drip-drip of water working its way downward, just as she was. Little rivulets of water showed her the way.

  The shadows danced around her as she walked. Holding the Maglite in one hand, the beam of the flashlight bounced with her movements. She kept looking over her shoulder finding nothing but darkness followi
ng her. Keeping her seeping anxiety under her personal lock and key, she further forced it down where it couldn’t be used to alert any of the family to her activities.

  Abruptly, Anna was standing in the same place she had been before. The pristine white of the salt path beneath her feet had leveled out, showing a long passageway that ended in a dark hole. Her knees were shaking with exertion of climbing downward. Her thighs burned with effort. Pausing, she knew she had stood here before in the very same spot and watched something huge move in the shadows beyond her, something that had threatened her with its sheer force and will.

  Imagination? Or someone playing psychic games?

  The broad beam of the Maglite revealed only the opening to another room in the mine. The residual refraction of the light bounced off the salt in that cavernous area and revealed nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that shifted and moved like a giant beast intent on eliminating the unwary intruder. Anna forced her tired limbs to move forward. One achingly slow step after another, she worked her way down the last part of the passageway until she reached the edge of the opening.

  Inside there were dark shapes that remained completely still. Trembling, Anna brought the flashlight up and saw vehicles. There were dozens of them. Mining equipment? The bones of a once-grand operation left to rust in the bowels of the earth. She caught herself and remembered something she’d seen contained in the book that featured the lake’s history. There had been a photograph on one of the pages showing the interior of the mine, deep inside where it hadn’t been practical to tote broken equipment and machinery back to the top to be disposed of properly. So the miners had designated a huge well-worked tunnel for all of their garbage and began to put what didn’t work or was no longer needed in there. The caption on the photograph called it what the miners had laughingly named it...the graveyard. Meg’s thoughts came back to her. Graveyard. Anna? Beware, Anna. Beware.

  Here it is. The graveyard. Not an actual cemetery, but a graveyard of misbegotten apparatus, of parts they couldn’t use anymore, of disabled tools, and vehicles too old to rebuild.

  Anna stepped inside and found a huge room full of items dating from the ‘30s, the ‘40s, and so on. She saw a Ford Model-T, mostly whole, its rubber tires falling away from its skinny metal rims. As she followed a cleared path into the room, she noticed that the oldest things were in the front, as if the miners had deposited it in the closest area with the minimum amount of effort, then worked their way to the back. There was other miscellaneous equipment that she couldn’t identify, and there were parts of cars and whole cars covered by falling mounds of salt. There was a tractor off to one side and a funny kind of car that looked like it dated from the ‘40s with a third headlight centered on its grill. She brought the flashlight all around her in a slow sweeping arc and made a disturbing discovery.

  Not enough mining equipment. Too many cars. Anna chewed on her lower lip. Maybe some of these people got rid of their cars this way instead of leaving them to rust in their yards. But…

  She approached an old sedan from the ‘50s. Black and once sleek like the lines of a great sea animal, the window was half open and its prominent, oversized steering wheel was visible. The seats were shredded by time and dry rot, but the vehicle itself was complete. All the tires were resting flat on their rims, but Anna knew that if she opened the hood, she would find the engine there, and only a little rust discolored the body.

  Anna froze into place. There was a leather purse sitting on the passenger seat. A black lady’s purse rested there as if a woman had put it down only a moment before. She unfroze her limbs and reached for the purse. A wallet fell out of the top, and she touched that instead, pulling her hand slowly back out of the window with her prize. Bracing the flashlight between her arm and her body, she opened the wallet and saw that it belonged to Liza Trent of 13411 Harrowway Street, Los Angeles, California. The driver’s license expired in 1954, but the money inside the wallet was still good, some seventy-six dollars of it. Most of the bills were dated in the ‘40s and one twenty-dollar bill was dated 1952.

  Anna dropped the wallet back inside the car and looked in the rear. There was nothing there. Who had Miss Liza Trent been, and why was her car and her purse at the bottom of a salt mine?

  Casting the beam of the flashlight around, her eye caught on a 1950 Nash Rambler. It was a roll-top convertible. The top was missing off this model. It was once white with its funny little car shape so distinctive. Anna had worked on one once in El Paso. A man with a T-shirt shop owned it, kept it pristine, and drove it to work every day. There was a suitcase in the backseat of this one. An old-fashioned, plaid suitcase, it had a tattered nametag attached to its handle. She flipped it over and read the name. Jared Slate had lost this suitcase, and probably this car, as many as fifty years before. He had lived at 211 Oakville Manor, in Memphis, Tennessee, and there was a five-dollar reward for the return of the suitcase.

  There were others. A ‘60s Mustang still had its wide white streak running down its hood. A Jeep Scrambler sat next to a flame red Cadillac Seville with a prominent dent in the hood. Anna saw some purses and belongings sitting in the vehicles just the way they’d been left. As she approached the far side of the yawning hollow in the earth, the vehicles became newer. There was a ‘90s Mazda Miata that almost completely hidden behind a nearly new Dodge 3500 pickup. Both appeared as though Anna could start them up and drive them out of this place. She looked in the back of the truck and saw scuba-diving gear. Tanks, masks, flippers were all were accounted for, and she shook her head in confusion.

  But the confusion was suddenly forgotten. Beyond the Dodge, parked against the far wall was a Peterbilt truck. There was no name or logo on the sides of the truck. Blacker than the lake, it still had the metal fangs attached to the grill. The Barbie doll was missing. Perhaps it got knocked off when the driver was negotiating some of the tighter passages in the mine, Anna thought reasonably. And if I open the door, what am I going to find? Had Dan Cullen fled from the authorities to find someone else waiting for him? Someone who worried about Cullen talking about what a drugged Anna St. Thais had said to him?

  Anna shivered. Silence echoed back at her in the darkness that stretched out around her. The police and law enforcement from every state in the union was looking for Dan Cullen. Border crossings into Mexico and Canada had been alerted to watch out for this psychotic whackjob that had a proclivity for strangling hitchhikers after he was done with them. It didn’t matter. He was down here with Anna.

  She glanced around her. No bodies. There was only a graveyard of dead cars and trucks, each with their own story. I know why Dan Cullen had to vanish. But what had Miss Liza Trent done to the family? Saw something she shouldn’t? And Jared Slate of Memphis with a Nash Rambler? Had he come probing into the family’s business and had to be eliminated?

  “He was a reporter,” said a voice that echoed through the chamber and Anna started wildly. “Someone who was following up on Lisette and Varden, you remember the story that Sebastien told you. God’s truth was that Varden couldn’t go around killing men without someone taking notice. Not like your trucker. He killed a dozen girls, and no one paid him a lick of attention.”

  Anna’s fingers shook as she turned off the flashlight and ducked behind the Peterbilt. Aurore. It’s Aurore Benoit speaking. Her gentile southern tones were unmistakable.

  “It won’t make any difference about the flashlight, Anna,” she said kindly. Anna looked around the fender of the large truck and saw a faint glow on the opposite side of the huge void of the mine. “It took five years for Varden to track down the men who had taken Lisette. Took another seven years for Mr. Slate to track us down. It seems his brother was one of the men that Varden killed. I reckon it wasn’t a pretty sight; Varden was very angry. He was still angry when he told me about it years later. And Mr. Slate, he wasn’t happy about it either.”

  Aurore’s voice stayed in a single place. Anna’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she could see the vague shapes aroun
d her, but there wasn’t much light to go by. She tried to reach out to Aurore’s mind to find out what it was that was motivating her and discovered she couldn’t find anything at all.

  “That won’t help you, chère. You’ve been thinking about how the family has different powers. You’re a strong one all right, but I’ve got decades of experience on you. No one will hear you, not unless you really want them to.” Her voice became sly. “And you don’t really want Gabriel charging down here to rescue you, do you?”

  “Why not?” she finally found her voice in a quavering question that amused Aurore.

  “I’d have to kill him then too. You see, the whole family doesn’t need to know about our business. My father’s business too. And Sebastien’s as well. Sebastien’s father is the one who got Mr. Jared Slate down here, not I. I was only, oh, about eleven years old at the time. What’s good for the family isn’t necessarily something they all ought to know about. And well, Gabriel, he isn’t one to keep a secret.”

  Gabriel dead? The thought of it brought Anna’s rampant thoughts to a raging halt. She struggled for internal control and found it with the barest rein on her emotions.

  “There’s no need for that,” Aurore called to her. “No need at all.”

  “And Meg?” she called back. “You killed her too?”

  Aurore was silent for a moment. “It’s so interesting about bloodlines here. The strongest ones are able to do the most. The strongest ones become elders and protectors.” A brief silence followed that, and then she added, “Despite that, neither of my sons could ever find their way down here without a map. Like you can.”

  The photograph Arette had kept in the book came back to Anna’s mind. She had thought it a photograph of Gaspard Benoit. But she hadn’t accounted for the simple issue of time. The photograph was at least twenty-four years old, and Gaspard would have been a child. It wasn’t a picture of the son, but of the father, of the man that Arette had secretly loved, a younger Sebastien. “Sebastien was my mother’s lover.”