Jack and Susan in 1933

by Michael McDowell

  “I’m not going to wait all day!” Barbara screeched.

  “Shhhhh!” said Susan to her dogs, but they knew when to be quiet and the command was entirely superfluous. “She won’t come in,” Susan whispered, “she’ll go away.”

  “Get out here!” Barbara shouted. “Or I’m coming in after you!”

  What am I going to do? Susan wondered.

  Going deeper into the mine was an unattractive idea, but it was preferable to meeting Barbara. So she turned that way—but this wasn’t going to work either. For in this direction, in the blackened shaft leading deeper into the mine, she heard a masculine voice calling, “I’m on my way!” Then she heard footsteps, and a moment later, in the black distance, she saw the gleam of a lantern.

  Barbara wasn’t looking for her at all.

  Barbara was looking for this man who had ventured far deeper into the mine than Susan had.

  When he wiped his brow with the hand holding the lantern, Susan caught a glimpse of his face. The visage was familiar, but she couldn’t immediately place it.

  Then she did place it.

  It was Malcolm MacIsaac, the private detective from Albany.

  He was coming toward Barbara, and Barbara was coming toward him.

  Susan was in the middle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SUSAN GRABBED UP Scotty and Zelda, whispered “Shhhh!” once more for good measure, and then backed across the dark corridor. Glancing toward the entrance, she saw that it was indeed Barbara Beaumont waiting for the detective—Barbara in all her desert splendor of whip-cord jodhpurs, white silk blouse, and knee-length leather jacket in forest green. Barbara peered into the cave, but Susan stood in darkness and could not be seen.

  In fear that Mr. MacIsaac’s lantern would catch on her pale skin, or some of her clothing, or the dog’s eyes, or any little thing that would alert him to her presence, Susan backed far into the secondary shaft.

  Taking a deep breath, she crouched down and backed under the bowed supports and beams.

  It grew narrower quickly, until she could feel the walls on either side of her at once. Yet because she still feared she might be within reach of the detective’s lantern, Susan continued to back up, squeezing herself and holding the dogs even more tightly against her breast.

  They were utterly silent, and she blessed them in her heart.

  She continued to back up until she felt the sinking roof of the passage against her shoulders and back. It was rock, but the rock was crumbly, and sand and bits of gravel spilled down the back of her neck.

  Mr. MacIsaac passed. His lantern light flashed on the walls of the narrow passage, sooty as lampblack, but it did not touch her, and he did not even glance her way.

  She released her breath in a long sigh.

  “I didn’t hear you at first, Mrs. Beaumont,” she heard MacIsaac say. “Sound travels only so far in a place like this, and then it just stops dead.”

  “That is a scientific fact of undying interest to me,” said Barbara, “and I will be sure to note it in my diary tonight. I will also be sure to…”

  Then they passed out of Susan’s hearing.

  Susan waited in the silence and darkness a full minute more before moving—just in case MacIsaac came back into the cave.

  She attempted to put the dogs down, but the walls of the cave were so narrow, she could not move her arms. She tried to waddle forward.

  She couldn’t move. She’d wedged herself in.

  She nearly screamed from fear.

  This was exactly what her worst nightmares were like.

  She tried to twist sideways. She couldn’t. She was stuck. She whimpered.

  Scotty and Zelda whimpered in sympathy.

  She drew in her breath, and then found she was in so tightly she couldn’t even fill her lungs.

  This made her feel even worse, but it also gave her an idea.

  She slowly exhaled all her breath.

  Without worrying that she might break her nose, she simply pitched herself forward and slipped out of her stifling corner.

  She threw out her elbows to keep from crushing Scotty and Zelda beneath her. This saved the dogs, saved her nose, and only tore open the sleeves of her shirt and abraded the skin of her forearms.

  She released the dogs and crawled forward until she could stand upright. She took a deep, full breath, and then peered toward the entrance of the cave. She saw no one outside.

  Hugging the walls, she crept closer to the entrance of the mine. The dogs followed at her heels.

  She stood just inside the entrance and listened. She heard nothing.

  Then a harrowing screech.

  She startled so that she slipped and fell forward onto the ground, expecting the worst—whatever that might be.

  But the harrowing screech was only that of a bird of prey wheeling overhead.

  No Barbara. No MacIsaac. And no sign of anyone else.

  Susan was glad now, very glad, that the horse hadn’t arrived in time that morning. For its presence outside the entrance of the mine would have given her away.

  She returned to her cabin the way she’d come, but her progress was even more cautious now. Having seen Barbara and MacIsaac in the Dirt Hole Mine, she wouldn’t have been surprised now to run into anyone at all.

  She entered her own canyon with trepidation. The sun was now on the other side of the mountain, and the crevasse lay in early shadow. If Barbara and MacIsaac knew about the mine, they might also know of this place.

  Susan sent the dogs ahead as scouts.

  “If there’s anyone there, don’t bark—just come back and let me know.”

  The dogs ran as fast as they could to the end of the canyon, disappeared around the little bend, were invisible for a few moments, and then returned, running as quickly as they’d gone.

  “Well?”

  Zelda and Scotty sat on their haunches before her and made no movement or sound.

  No one was there, Susan was certain of it, and proceeded.

  As she was about to turn the corner, she heard a sudden loud scratching in the earth. She stopped dead, turned, and glared at the dogs.

  “I thought you said no one was there,” she hissed.

  But there was no help for it now, so she simply sauntered around the corner, hoping it was Blossom, or Colleen, or Wesley there.

  It was not.

  It was, however, the horse she had been promised that morning. The animal was tugging at the stake to which she’d been tied, and was just about to pull it loose from the ground. Evidently, this horse didn’t care for the boredom of the canyon days any more than Susan did.

  “Oh, thank God,” said Susan. “Thank God it was you, whatever your name is, and thank God it wasn’t Barbara Beaumont, or Mr. MacIsaac, or the police, or Mr. J. Edgar Hoover himself who was here.”

  It suddenly occurred to Susan that Barbara, the detective, half a dozen detectives, and the head of the FBI might all be inside the cabin—or just any one of them. But she boldly pushed open the door and went in.

  The cabin was empty. Apparently Colleen had brought the horse, for she’d also supplied Susan with yet another dreadful novel.

  She saw no other disturbance to the cabin. If either MacIsaac or Barbara had been there, she was certain there would have been some evidence of it.

  That was a relief.

  She fed the horse and brought water from the supply in the covered barrel in the corner of the cabin. She fed the dogs, combed the spurs from their coats, and tickled their ears. Then she made her own little dinner—warmed stew from the night before and a warmed tin of peas— and as she ate, she wondered about what she’d seen that afternoon.

  She wondered how Barbara knew about the mine at all, much less its location.

  Wondered how Mr. MacIsaac knew about the mine.

  Wondered what the detective was doing so much deeper down in the mine than Susan had dared go.

  Wondered what business they had together.

  Wondered if that busines
s had anything to do with her.

  It was this last question that had the easiest answer, for it almost certainly did have something to do with her. For, after all, it was Susan’s ranch, Susan’s mine, Susan whom Barbara was accusing of murder, Susan who was the ostensible reason Barbara was in Nevada at all. And Mr. MacIsaac had already been involved with Susan once, providing the photographs to prove Harmon’s infidelity.

  Susan was certain now that those photographs had been faked. Which meant nothing except that, in the pay of Marcellus Rhinelander, the detective had been willing to fabricate the evidence to prove what the lawyer had wanted to believe. That suggested that MacIsaac was here now to fabricate more evidence—this time to prove that Susan was responsible for the death of Barbara’s father.

  But even if this was a correct deduction, it didn’t tell Susan what Jack’s place was in all this.

  Jack.

  Blossom hadn’t heard from him. If she had, she would have come to tell her by this time.

  It was only seven o’clock now, however. Perhaps Blossom hadn’t yet returned from Reno.

  Susan made a fire, sat in front of it, and hoped that Blossom would come with a message from Jack.

  Then she berated herself for simply sitting and hoping and sitting and hoping and sometimes just sitting, exactly like the dreadful young women in those dreadful novels that Colleen had stocked in the cupboard.

  It was nine o’clock. Blossom hadn’t come. She certainly would have returned from Reno by now.

  Susan decided she should check on the horse.

  The horse was well, and asleep, and Susan looked at the horse, and then looked up at the stars. Then she decided that as long as she was outside, she might as well go to the mouth of the canyon, where she could see more stars.

  At the mouth of the canyon she not only saw more stars, she watched the moon rise above the ugly mountains across the way. It was not bright enough to read a newspaper by perhaps, but bright enough to ride a horse a mile or two over level ground.

  She went back to the cabin. At their places before the fire, Scotty and Zelda raised their heads in silent greeting.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” said Susan, trying to sound cheerful and confident, and succeeding just about as well as she had succeeded in everything else she had tried in the past few months.

  The dogs looked so dismal at Susan’s decision that she instantly repented of it. After all, it was a terrible idea.

  She took up one of Colleen’s novels and began to read it. Despite her intention, she grew very interested in the plight of the young heroine, who’d been born rich but who’d become an orphan and lost all her inheritance to a wicked uncle. But when she became engaged to the man who was patently wrong for her and studiously ignored the gentleman who was patently right for her, Susan hurled the book into the fire.

  She plucked it out again instantly, remembering it wasn’t her property, but Colleen’s.

  Thinking of Colleen made her think of Blossom, and thinking of Blossom made her reconsider her decision not to go to the Excelsior Ranch tonight. Certainly Blossom should know as quickly as possible of what Susan had learned. Perhaps Blossom would see something of the matter that Susan couldn’t see herself.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” said Susan again, and this time she wasn’t swayed by the dismal looks of Scotty and Zelda.

  After two in the morning, danger of being seen by Barbara or any of Blossom’s other guests was past. The moon was still bright and clear above, and the way there was unmistakable, even though she’d traveled it only once.

  She threw on an extra sweater, and threw a jacket over that. Outside, she wakened and saddled the horse, and led her to the mouth of the canyon. Then she mounted and trotted silently a hundred yards or so out into the desert. No one was going to be out so late at night—Susan had never even seen anyone there during the day—and the horse’s way would be easier here than among the stones at the base of Bright mountain.

  The night was beautiful. Clear, dry, and chill.

  But not silent. Loudest, of course, was the rhythmic noise of the horse’s hooves on the baked ground. Beneath that she heard the horse’s breath, her own breath. She heard crickets. The coo of some nightbird she didn’t know but had heard in the cabin as well.

  She heard the scurrying of small frightened creatures across the desert floor.

  And she heard the noise of a motor behind her.

  More accurately, behind her and above her.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw nothing at first. But she followed the sound, and then discerned a black shadow moving across the field of stars.

  Moving across the field of stars directly above.

  It had no lights, and it was impossible to tell anything about it as it sailed over her.

  However, she saw it in somewhat more detail when it banked around and came back.

  It was a biplane, old-fashioned and rickety. The moonlight glinted off the propellers.

  It continued to come closer, and its altitude dropped. It roared down at Susan so fast and hard, she was certain it intended to hit her, but at the last moment it veered off to the left.

  At the same time, however, Susan’s horse, whinnying in fright, veered off in the other direction. With good reason, Susan thought. She didn’t like it anymore than the horse that an unlighted plane was playing practical jokes in the middle of the night in the middle of the Nevada desert.

  Susan somehow suspected this wasn’t a practical joke.

  She snapped the reins and headed the horse to the mountain. There was no shelter there, but they’d be less visible against a wall of rock. The horse was a dark roan, and that helped. Susan’s white jacket didn’t. She awkwardly shed it, transferring the reins from hand to hand as she did so, and then tossed the garment to the ground.

  The plane had circled round again. It came still lower.

  “Giddap!” Susan screamed.

  She heard the plane directly at her back. It sounded very low and close.

  She leaned forward till her head was pressed against the horse’s neck.

  The horse neighed in fright, and while the plane suddenly swerved upward, narrowly avoiding a collision with the side of the mountain, the horse reared up every bit as violently.

  Susan lost her grip on the reins and the horse’s neck. She grabbed at the mane, but the horse reared again and she was thrown through the air holding a fistful of coarse hair.

  Sailing through the air was a peculiar sensation. She saw the stars and the moon, bright and clear.

  Then she felt something hard and coarse and uneven at her back—and then the stars and the moon seemed dim and blurred.

  Then, before she’d lost total consciousness, she had time for only one more thought in a single syllable.

  A name.

  Jack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “JACK,” SHE SAID, but this time aloud.

  “No,” replied a woman’s voice. “It’s Blossom, Susan.”

  Slowly she pried open her eyes. Blossom smiled down at her, an angular, trembling, tentative smile.

  “I must have been dreaming of him.”

  “You weren’t asleep,” said Blossom. “You were unconscious.”

  Susan looked around. At first she couldn’t focus beyond Blossom’s face. Then her surroundings became more distinct. She wasn’t in her cabin. She didn’t recognize the room.

  “Reno?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Are we in Reno?” Susan asked.

  “No, we’re at the ranch,” said Blossom. “This is my room.”

  “Unconscious,” she murmured, closing her eyes again. “You said I was unconscious.”

  “This morning when Wesley got up, he found Coral outside the stable, so we knew something must have happened. Colleen and I found you halfway between here and the cabin. Why were you out riding so late?”

  “I was coming to see you—” She couldn’t talk more. Her head hurt very
badly.

  Blossom poured water into a glass and raised Susan’s throbbing head. She gently poured the water into Susan’s mouth in tiny sips.

  “And how could you have fallen off Coral? She’s the gentlest mare we have.”

  Susan pushed the water away. “I didn’t fall,” Susan whispered. “She threw me.”

  Blossom’s eyes widened.

  “A plane swooped down at us and Coral was frightened—”

  “A plane—?”

  “Yes,” said Susan, “the pilot was trying to kill me.”

  Blossom stared at Susan.

  “No,” said Susan, reading her cousin’s thoughts, “I didn’t dream it.”

  “But—”

  “And I didn’t dream about Malcolm MacIsaac being in the Dirt Hole Mine yesterday either—”

  “Who is—”

  “The detective that Marcellus Rhinelander hired to prove Harmon’s infidelity.”

  “A detective from New York?” said Blossom carefully. “You saw him in the mine yesterday?”

  “Yes,” said Susan, “he was meeting Barbara there. They almost saw me, but I hid and—”

  Blossom shook her head like a doctor at the bedside of a favorite patient raging with a hallucinatory fever.

  “No!” cried Susan. “It was all real. The plane, the detective, Barbara—I even remember what she was wearing—she—”

  The door of the room flew open, and Barbara Beaumont herself stood there, smiling broadly, carrying a large bouquet of desert flowers.

  “Did I just hear my name mentioned? I hope you were saying something nice about me, Susan!”

  Blossom stood up from the bed. “How did you know she was here?”

  “Oh, news travels fast in a place like this…” Barbara strode forward and laid the flowers on Susan’s breast, the way she might have laid flowers on her father’s grave. “Susan, I hope you’re not too much hurt. I trust there’s no permanent injury to your brain. It really is the most incredible coincidence, your being found practically dead in the desert not two miles from where I’m staying.”

  “It’s not such a coincidence,” said Susan, giving Blossom a glance. Follow my lead, it said. “Blossom is my cousin.”