Belle said, “We gotta get back, tell Mrs. Hannah.”
“Yeah,” Joseph said again, making Belle’s heart skip.
“You know the way?”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay, okay, well … ” But Belle took another glance at the opening, unable to resist taking another look inside. The chamber was alive with diamonds on second look, knowing what she was looking for. And a glance at the other side of the chamber wall between her and the chamber itself had a few choice pieces that were just within reach.
Belle strained to grab a sample out of the muddy wall if she could, so that proof could be at the ready. Belle’s fingers extended, straight, reaching, but her fingertips could barely glance the nearest sparkling rock. Belle got down flat on her belly and reached farther, able to grab the rock. She pulled at it, but the rock, but it wouldn’t budge from the chamber wall.
Belle pulled back and took another look, another smaller rock just a little farther down. Belle slid forward just a bit, reaching for the smaller rock, her hand finally grasping it and giving it a good, hard yank.
But instead of pulling the rock out of the wall, Belle only succeeded in pulling herself out of the shaft and through the hole, falling into the chamber on the other side.
Joseph shouted, “Belle!” and she could feel him grab her feet as gravity sucked her through the hole, pulling her kid brother along with her.
Belle and Joseph fell out into the open air of the chamber, Belle’s stomach flying up into her ribcage, body bracing for a landing. She fell fast and hard, looking down to see the craggy bottom of the chamber zooming up at her like the flat fist of fate, ready for a knockout blow.
Belle hit the ground hard, air knocked out of her lungs. But the ground was muddy and soft, only a few jagged rocks to cut into her skin. Belle looked up quickly from the muck and slime of the chamber floor to see Joseph, also pulling himself up and looking around in a daze.
“Are you okay?”
Joseph nodded. “Yeah.”
Belle wanted to holler at him to say something else other than, Yeah, but she was grateful enough that he was speaking, not to mention the fact that they were both still alive.
For now, Belle realized.
“Help!” Belle cried. “Heeeeellllllp!” But the only answer was the trembling of the mountain around them, rocks falling from the high ceiling of the chamber. They fell close to Joseph and Belle, any one of them enough to injure or even kill one of them if it hit in the right spot.
Belle and Joseph looked at each other, both knowing not to shout out again. There was no point. They were alone in that mountain, nobody to hear their screams.
Belle looked up at the hole in the wall of the chamber, where the fading sunlight was spilling in. Belle pointed to it, and Joseph immediately understood. They both climbed on the jagged, freshly fallen rocks along the side of the chamber, no doubt shaken lose by the recent tremors.
Or the work of the ghost miners, Belle’s silent voice suggested to herself. Never mind that foolishness, her better voice contradicted her, we have to get out of here before this whole place falls in over our heads and we’re trapped forever, miners or not.
They each tried to climb the mountain wall, hoping one or both might be able to squeeze through the opening, maybe dig their way out. But the gap was about fifteen feet above them, and the sides of the chamber were slippery and treacherous. After a few failed attempts, Belle and Joseph both came to the same conclusion.
Climbing out was not an option.
But being that close to the outside meant somebody could hear us, Belle reasoned. If sunlight could get in, sound could get out. But a call out could bring the chamber down around them, and there was still no reason to think there was anybody out there to call out to.
Belle and Joseph had run out of options, the ends of their short lives revealed at last. They would die in darkness, where they’d lived. Escape had never been possible, and never would be; not for them, not for anybody from that cursed Robinson plantation or the inhumane practice which gave rise to it and to the others like it.
For Belle and Joseph, at least, the darkness had won, the only light above them forever out of their reach.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Belle? Joseph?”
Belle’s heart soared to hear the voices, the rush of quick relief so strong that she almost couldn’t answer.
Almost.
Belle called, “Mrs. Hannah? Mr. Jack?”
“Where are you?” Hannah asked, still unseen above them, voice distant and echoing.
“Through the hole,” Belle called. Both Belle and Joseph were standing, arm in arm, eyes fixed on the hole in the chamber wall above them, the one they’d fallen through, the one leading to the shafts.
Hannah stuck her head through the hole. “Belle! Joseph!”
“Mrs. Hannah!” Joseph cried, hand reaching up to her.
“Joseph?” Hannah pulled her head out of the hole, and Belle could hear her muttering with Jack.
Jack stuck his head through the hole, finding the kids at the bottom of the chamber. “You kids all right?”
“We're okay,” Belle said. “Get us out!”
Jack nodded, then glanced around the barely lit chamber, diamonds sparkling, practically spilling out of the walls. “My God … it’s true!” But Jack quickly returned his attention to Belle and Joseph. “Stand back, away from the hole, watch for falling rocks!”
Belle nodded and wrapped her arms around Joseph, drawing him back, eyes still fixed on the hole above them. Jack started kicking at the hole from the other side, and the hole got bigger fast, chunks falling into the chamber, big rocks bouncing and rolling loose and free around the chamber floor, some landing right where Belle and Joseph had been standing.
The wall crumbled a bit around Jack’s efforts, and Belle could see him pause, then carefully lean through the hole, not big enough to reveal Hannah and Jack both.
Hannah said, “We’ll go back and get some rope, pull you up. Don’t worry!”
But something behind Hannah and Jack got their sudden attention, the two of them spinning in the cramped confines of the shaft.
“Hey, what the—?”
But both Hannah and Jack tumbled out of the shaft and through the enlarged hole quickly, reaching out behind them as they fell into the open air of the chamber. They seemed to be suspended in mid-air for just a second before their fall resumed, faster and faster before they hit that muddy ground with a pair of hard thuds.
Belle ran to Hannah’s side, Joseph to Jack’s. Belle shook her head, dizzily pushing herself up from the mud and looking around, trying to clear her head and regain her senses. Belle looked over Hannah to see Joseph helping Jack to his feet.
“How clumsy of me!” Belle and the others looked up from the floor of the chamber to see Henry Chisholm peering through the hole, crouched down, a smile creeping out from his graying black beard. “I really should have been watching where I was going.”
Jack said, “Chisholm!”
“I saw you scramble out of that courtroom, didn’t you think I knew where you were going. I should thank you for helping me find the open shaft.”
Hannah said, “But … Don … ”
“Bush-wacked him in the foothills, rifle butt to the back of the head. Don’t worry, I’ll kill him on the way out.” Chisholm looked around at the chamber, lit by the shaft of daylight. “Wow, so the stories were true. Lord, I am going to be … ” He broke out in an amazed crackle of laughter. “Daddy, if you could only see this.” He turned to look back at Hannah and the others. “At least those Negroes didn’t die in vain … and neither did you.”
Hannah and Jack clung to each other and to the children, peering up at him, helpless. Chisholm said, “These must be the Robinson piglets. Don’t seem worth dyin’ for t’me.” He glanced around the chamber again. “Now this, this is worth living for, this is worth fighting for … this is worth dyin
g for. Of course, that last one will be for you to decide.”
“You’ll never get away with just swiping our land,” Hannah said.
“It’s already under contest. Once I produce one of those kids’ bodies, it’ll be easy to prove what you were really doing here, nulling your ownership.” Chisholm pulled a pistol from his gun belt. “The whole thing’ll take about ten minutes, and a few well-placed bullets, that is.”
“You fool,” Jack said, “you shoot that gun and the mountain’ll cave in all of us!”
“It’s a risk,” Chisholm said, glancing at the shaft around him. “It wasn’t my first choice or I’d have plugged you both up here.” He paused to give it some thought. “Even so, I can’t let you live, and I don’t need your bodies alive.”
Chisholm aimed and shot, the gunshot loud and banging around the diamond chamber, ear-splittingly loud as the sound and the bullet ricocheted around the vacuous area. Hannah and Jack pulled Belle and Joseph back, trying to hide behind a rock but only trapping themselves into a jagged corner, nowhere to run or hide, no what to protect themselves.
Bam, bam! Two more shots came close, puncturing the wall of the chamber, each coming closer and closer to Hannah’s head.
Bam!
The gunfire echoed, the chamber trembling around them. A distant rumbling got louder fast as the mountain shook, rocks falling from the ceiling of the chamber. Hannah and Belle looked at Jack and Joseph, all of them miraculously unharmed as the gunshots ceased and the rumbling got even louder.
Belle looked up, Hannah and the others following her line of sight to see the opening at the top of the chamber, where Chisholm was perched firing. He was looking around, eyes wide with fear and wonder, taking a moment to reconsider his position. He looked down at them and shouted above the rumble, “Guess the mountain’ll do my job for me! See you … in hell!”
He let out a crackle of demonic laughter, shaking his head with the glee of his ultimate triumph, voice cracking with a lifetime of bitterness and hatred finally satisfied. But the rumble boomed with a sudden clap, like thunder pulsing up out of the earth itself. The whole of the mountain seemed to rise up beneath them and then drop back down with a mighty shake, the noise deafening, low and crunching with the collapse of the shafts above.
Chisholm was still laughing when the shaft caved in around him, fast and hard and turning his hellish mirth into a stunted grunt, more animal than man, as the ground came down over him. His lower body was crushed in the thick wall of mud and rock that closed down around him, his upper body peeking out of the shaft and into the chamber twenty feet or more above Belle and the others. The force of the blow had thrown the pistol from Chisholm’s hand, but he was still alive, trapped in the jaws of the mountain.
Belle and the others could only look up helplessly, clinging to each other, as Chisholm hissed and grunted, head thrown back, hands pounding at that heavy wall of rock and dirt. No words that Belle could understand managed to come out of his mouth, though a stream of panicked grunts and panting poured through his clenched lips and locked jaws.
It sent a chill passing over Belle’s body to hear his cramped cries becoming more desperate and high-pitched, squeezed out of him as the mountain closed down on his chest, his guts compressed.
With another unseen thoom from deep in the mountain, as if delivering the fateful blow, the mountain shook again. Chisholm cried out one final time as the wall shifted around him, blood spurting from his mouth before his body relaxed and lay motionless, half sticking out of the chamber wall. His arms and head fell back, forever reaching out for help, mouth open in a silent cry of objection, an unwilling victim of his own greed and of the mountain’s wrath.
But it wasn’t just the mountain, Belle was certain, but the spirits of the miners, finally within reach of the descendent of their murderer, now able to end that monstrous family line once and for all. Even the chamber itself seemed to echo with an eerie calmness, Joseph looking around and nodding at Belle as though to reassure her that justice had finally been delivered and peace finally restored to their tortured souls.
But that wasn’t going to save Belle or her family, now trapped by the collapsed mine shafts around the chamber. But the fading sunlight streaming suggested the one and only escape, and the rumbling mountain suggested that they had little time to reach it before joining Chisholm in his earthen grave.
Jack and Hannah looked at the hole, sunlight beyond. “Fifteen feet,” Hannah said, “maybe more.”
Jack nodded. “You get on my shoulders, the kids climb up on yours?”
“I think so,” Hannah said, turning to the kids. “Think you can do it?”
Belle and Joseph glanced each other and shared a nod. But the earth shook again, a bigger quake than the one which had consumed Henry Chisholm. Rocks fell from the top of the chamber, Belle and the others pulling together in a final embrace as the mountain pounded out its fury. Massive chunks of the walls collapsed into the chamber, Belle’s world crumbling in around her. Rocks of every size and from every angle rained down on them, the whole planet seeming to erupt in anger.
But the rocks from the far side of the chamber, where the sunlight broke through, shook with even greater affect, rocks tumbling back into the chamber. Hannah and Jack pulled the children back, inches from the falling and rolling boulders as the thunderous collapse continued.
“It’s Papa,” Joseph said, Belle turning to look at him through the shake and dust and dark, face lit up by the growing holes in the mountain wall, sunlight pouring in. Joseph looked at Belle with his smile broad and eyes wide, darkness peeled away as the glare of the outside world shone in. “It’s Mamma and Papa!”
Belle turned to see the wall of the mountain fall away, daylight expanding before them, buildings of the Kincaid estate visible in the haze, Marion County distant beyond that. Belle’s spirit soared at the gust of fresh wind blowing into the chamber, but even more strongly with the power from within.
Joseph was right, Belle was certain. Whatever anybody else would say, and just as surely as those trapped miner spirits had taken their revenge on that wicked Henry Chisholm, it was none other than Mo and Alice Robinson themselves who freed Belle and the others, finally given eternal peace and certain to secure the same for Belle and her new family.
Belle and Hannah stumbled out of the chamber with Jack and Joseph, taking deep breaths of the clean air, fresh, sunlight warm on their faces. Don Bellamy came stumbling up, hands on the back of his head, to the reunited family, relieved to see them all safe. He glanced into the diamond chamber, now open to the world, bold-faced and prone. The mountain had no more secrets, no more captured spirits, no more human hostages. The war was over, the mountain bested, and to the victors would go the spoils.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Kincaid Estate, Marion County, Indiana 1939
Belle lay back, tired after a long day’s visit with her granddaughter, Alice, who at just ten years old reminded her so much of herself at that age, and yet their childhoods could scarcely have been different.
Belle looked around at the bedroom of the house she’d virtually grown up in, the house which had been her salvation. At ninety years old, this had been a place she’d come back to time and again throughout her life, and for the end of it.
“Is it true, Grandma? Is that all a true story?”
Belle smiled her toothless grin. “Every word of it. We came out and the Kincaids were fabulously wealthy, far more than before. And Hannah’d been right about their foes in the government. Once that old man Chisholm was gone, the fight against us ended, and the nation went on to the dirty business of fighting against itself.”
Of course young Alice Robinson Kincaid Saunders knew how that had worked out. But she hadn’t heard all the stories, of the Civil War battles that embroiled the Daughter of the She Bear and her clan, which ultimately included no fewer than three natural-born sons and daughters, despite what their doctors had said, and years later three times as many grandchildren for the ha
ppy Kincaid couple.
And there was another great fight against injustice for Alice’s generation, this one overseas and looming to lurch across the waters and engage the United States of America directly. It was already worse than the Great War of twenty years before, and word was that things had only begun to erupt for the worse.
Belle smiled at Alice and lifted her right hand, thumb tucked into her frail palm, four bony fingers rising. Alice’s own smile stretched out, digging into her round, supple cheeks as she raised her own hand, thumb tucked in and four little fingers extended.
But the day was waning, and Belle was growing tired. Alice stood by the bed as Belle closed her eyes and leaned further back into her pillow. “Go on back home now, Alice, it’s time for your supper.” Alice nodded and stepped away from the bed. “You’ll come back, visit me again tomorrow.”
“My mom’s made some prickle berry jam.”
“You’ll bring me some?”
“A whole big jar,” Alice said, “just for you.”
Belle smiled. “For us, Alice. We’ll share it … we’ll share it all.”
THE END
Except from THE VELVET ELITE: Unforgettable Love
by Emmy Waterford
CHAPTER 1
At the Intersection
My fingers gripped the leather steering wheel, my wrists resting on the cool steel spokes. It pushed against my forehead, cool breeze whipping through my hair. The window was down slightly or possibly broken. I woke up slowly, forcing my eyes open and focusing on the mountain terrain upended in front of me. Pushing myself away from the steering wheel and looking around, I strained to grasp what must have happened. Did I pull over? Did I fall asleep at the wheel? I focused on the big green rectangle posted just a few yards ahead: San Francisco 54 miles south, San Merhita 7 miles north.
Regaining my senses, I rolled down my squeaky and dusty window. I needed fresh air. The breeze blew in, sucking the air out of my lungs. I smelled the salt of the nearby ocean breeze, so I knew I couldn’t be far from the water. I closed my eyes as I inhaled deeply. I looked into my rearview mirror to see the funnel of brown dust bellowing behind an approaching truck. It pulled up beside me and the driver leaned over to roll down the passenger side window.
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