The Main Corpse gbcm-6

by Diane Mott Davidson

  There was no response to his calls.

  Suddenly, Arch pulled off a miracle. He switched on his cap lamp. Tucked in his belt, the bulb had somehow survived the explosion. I blinked in astonishment to see that he was only a few feet away from me. In the distance, I heard the general’s voice calling to us. Are you in there? I fought off panic. Bo’s voice was impossibly faint, as if he were miles away. Goldy? Can you hear me? Are you all right? There was an explosion. . ” Goldy?

  “Yes!” I called, but my voice, too, was swallowed by the impenetrable rock that surrounded us.

  “Mom?” Arch wailed. “Oh, Mom, I have to get Jake.”

  “Arch,” I said, forcing my voice to sound calm, “hold my hand.” I reached for his gritty fingers, then clasped them tightly. Perhaps too tightly. He’s okay, I told myself. He’s not hurt. We’ll get out of this.

  Arch turned his head toward the sump, then swept his light across the rib of the mine. “That’s the way out. Without the light bulbs along the sides, we’re going to have to go carefully, Mom.”

  The smoke stung my eyes and made me cough. Was it getting thicker? Hard to tell. I called again to the general: “Yes! Yes! We’re coming!”

  “Do you have Jake?” Arch shouted.

  But neither Bo nor Marla answered. Cautiously, holding hands, my son and I started back up the tracks. Arch kept his lamp beam down, focused on the rails. Had we heard one gunshot or two? Two. And then the general had shouted his warning, and the blast had rocked the mine. But why? Why a blast? I shook my head. My thoughts were whirling too fast.

  I trod carefully, holding Arch’s hand tightly in mine, determined to get us out of this claustrophobic hell. ! The smoke was indeed becoming thicker as we approached the bend. We made the turn. Arch lifted his beam toward the portal… or to where the portal should have been.

  When he swept the light of his cap lamp down the tracks, all we could see was darkness and coils of smoke. My hopes plummeted. There were two explanations for our predicament: The blast had brought down massive quantities of rock, and a wall of heavy boulders now barred our way to safety. Or we were lost, and we weren’t anywhere near the mine’s entrance. I refused to contemplate that possibility. It also seemed to me that the smoke was not coming from the source of the explosion. Something was on fire – probably the timbers. Arch started to hack.

  “Mom! Mom! Put on your respirator!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, floundering along my belt. The more I tried to catch my breath, the more smoke I inhaled. In front of me, the tiny light on Arch’s head began to wobble and fade. Don’t let me pass out, I prayed. I must get Arch out of here.

  I wrenched the self-rescuer out of the loop on my belt and tore off its cloth cover. To Arch, I said, “Do … you… have yours on?”

  For a long moment he was silent, then, “Yes,” came his nasal reply. “Need light?”

  “No.” I pulled up on the tether holding the nose clip, clamped my nostrils shut with it, and tentatively bit on the lug of the mouthpiece. I breathed. To my surprise, the carbon dioxide burned ravenously down my lungs. Disgusted, I let go of the lug. “I can’t,” I croaked into the increasingly smoky darkness. “The gas is too – “

  “You have to, Mom!” Arch’s voice was sharply adult. “Now breathe with that thing and let’s find a raise back in the other direction! I have to find Jake!”

  His gentle squeeze on the fingers of my free hand belied the harshness in his voice. I bit on the lug and breathed. It was like inhaling paint. Tears stung my cheeks as we turned and retraced our steps. Arch pulled on my hand just as Jake had tugged on the leash, up the tracks, back into the darkness.

  After an eternity, we rounded the bend. Our footsteps grated over wet gravel as we passed the sump. Yes, there were shafts-technically called raises – -for ventilation. This much I knew. But where were they? And what was at the top of them? A fan? Another locked grate? Wasn’t there some law in Colorado about not having openings to mines, so people couldn’t fall down them? And if we did somehow succeed in climbing the ladder of a raise, how on earth would we ever move a fan, if we encountered one?

  Down, down the tracks we went, deeper into the dark bowels of the earth. I breathed smoke and cursed Tony Royce. And I cursed my own inability to see that he was the one who had caused the terrible problems which plagued us. Tony had somehow deceived his ever-hopeful partner, of that much I was now certain. And he had deceived us. Of course, the impact of Tony’s wrongdoing had been compounded by the idiotic arrogance of Shockley’s storm troopers, De Groot and Hersey. Their arrest of Marla had provoked our current disastrous situation. But most of all, I cursed my own stupidity for allowing Arch to track Tony on this ill-fated trip into the mine. With the pool scent that chronically baffled Jake, the hound had been utterly confused, scenting Tony Royce everywhere. In truth, it was my guess that Tony had been hiding out here since he’d left the Hardcastles’ cabin after attacking Marla and Macguire and once again pointing the finger of guilt at Lipscomb. Perhaps he’d seen or heard us coming, quickly closed the gates, and hidden in the powder magazine. Then he’d only had to wait for us to get deep enough into the mine to seal it forever with God only knew how much dynamite. He had done all of this, so he could make it away with a fortune in stolen cash and gold. Poor Albert Lipscomb, like Marla, had only been a pawn in Royce’s ruthless game.

  We came to a fork in the mine passageway. The drift with the track went off to the left, into what seemed to me to be utter blackness. To the right, when Arch swept his cap lamp over it, the passageway narrowed sharply, and the rock surrounding the drift became much more rough-hewn. An unfinished corridor? Perhaps. Almost certainly another dead end. Arch’s hand tugged me left.

  One step at a time, one railroad tie after another. The rock was so rough, the darkness so total, and Arch’s light so feeble, that I was afraid he would miss an escape route, if indeed there was one. When your eyes become accustomed to dark, I’d always believed, it is because your visual sensors learn to utilize the tiny amounts of light available to see. But when no outside light is available, then what? Then you watch your son flash his cap lamp, left to right, right to left. And breathe. Feel your lungs fight the smoking air. And breathe.

  We’re dying, I thought suddenly. I felt oddly light-headed. Poor Arch. He should have had a better mother. Not someone who went tearing off at every opportunity to solve crimes. A mother who stayed in her kitchen where she belonged and left police work to the police… I bit hard onto the flaming-hot lug of the respirator. And kept walking into the fetid darkness with my son.

  Suddenly, Arch clenched my hand and tugged me forward. His light had picked out a metal rod set in the wall. No – not a rod. His lamplight swung crazily over the stone. Not a rod-a metal chair. No.

  Arch placed my palm around one of the rods. His nose-clipped ‘voice rasped with triumph: “Ladder, Mom! It’s a raise. Climb up!”

  I pulled the respirator from my mouth. “No,” I told, him. “You first. Then if you fall, you’ll fall on me instead of straight down. Use both hands. Clamp the self-rescuer in your mouth.”

  He groaned, but quickly acquiesced. I moved out of the way, listened to the weight of my son moving onto the metal ladder, and watched as his cap lamp lurched higher. He was ascending. I clamped my mouth back on the self-rescuer, and awkwardly started up behind him.

  In the darkness, I had to grope for each new metal rung, tapping it like a blind person, moving my hand across its corrugated surface to assure myself it was really there. The one time I looked up, dust from Arch’s sneakers fell into my eyes, and I resolved not to do that again. I breathed in and thought instead about Tony Royce. Up, up, I went, keeping myself sane by replaying all the incidents with Tony Royce that I could remember, vowing all sorts of nasty revenge. I even had a gratifying vision of testifying against him in court – This man, Your Honor, is responsible for three murders, not to mention embezzling on a massive scale. And he duped my best friend. And framed her for his crimes
. I resolutely shoved that fantasy away. Stick with what you know. What do you know?

  Arch was stamping on something. My fingers fumbled upward: a grate. No, it was a landing. I slid my body through the opening and felt around the edges of the landing with my hands and feet. Arch was already moving upward on another ladder, and I groped for the sides of these new metal steps, working hard to avoid the hole I’d just come through. Then I started upward again.

  I breathed in the fiery carbon dioxide. Think about Tony, I ordered myself When you get out, what are you going to do to Tony? But my lungs screamed with pain. The mouthpiece was so hot I could feel blisters forming. I would never get used to inhaling carbon dioxide, I thought. And how long did I think I would have to become accustomed to this gas, anyway? What had the general said? An hour? If the carbon monoxide in the smoke was not too concentrated – two hours? How far up did we still have to go? Yes – the mountain sloped back, and with any luck we would come out eventually on the grass and rocks of the steep hill, well above the mine. But how many feet would that be? Forty? A hundred? Two hundred? And how long would that take? Would our air supply last long enough for us to reach safety?

  We arrived at what must have been our fourth landing. I wondered if Marla had shot Tony. Or vice versa. There had only been two shots. Albert’s body, Jake scrambling away, the explosion, being trapped. It was all too much. I started up a fresh set of ladder rungs, hearing Arch’s steps above my head. We’re not going to make it, I thought as I breathed in the boiling-hot, acidic gas from the respirator. Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t mean to get us buried alive. Tears stung and I cursed them, too. Damn it, Goldy. Think of Arch and go up a rung, then another, reflect back on what you really know about Royce. Why would he stay here for three days? Why wouldn’t he have left the country right away? Because… because he was waiting. He was waiting for something or someone. Someone who could give him something. What? What did he need? Escape. Escape, the same as what you want now… .

  Arch paused. He was stamping around on one of the landings, but this one seemed to be bigger than the previous ones. And was some distant gray light seeping down, entering the landing, or was it a hallucination? Arch swept his light upward to a metal grate. On one side of the grate was a fan, but it was not revolving. The electricity which moved it had probably been, knocked out by the blast.

  “Let me try to open it,” I said, since I was taller than Arch. I pulled off the nose clip. Oh, blessed, blessed air. It was smoky, but it contained sweet, sweet oxygen. I panted voraciously. I was a starved person, wolfing! down air like the first food in a week.

  “Move, move,” I ordered the grate, and shoved hard at it. It didn’t budge. “Could you point your lamp to the edge?” I asked Arch.

  He did so, and I saw a lock like the type used on a fence gate. It appeared rusted shut. I heard – clear and close as a bell – Jake’s mournful howl. Clenching my despised self-rescuer with all the force I had left, I swung at the lock. It made a hideous grinding sound before clanging away from the locked position. I stepped up two rungs of the ladder leading to the grate and desperately, with every ounce of strength I’d gained from hefting food trays, heaved my body against it. The grate screeched open. I wriggled through, onto a passageway that led horizontally to the side of the mountain. I held my hand out to Arch. His smiling face made my heart sing.

  We ran down the sloping passageway. And then we were in the open, on grass, between rocks, looking out at the sky. The misty air smelled like heaven.

  “Look, Mom!” Arch called excitedly. He was pointing down. There were the sheds, there was the Jeep, there were Marla and General Bo, puzzling over a map. And there, tethered to the general, with the spare leash, twirling awkwardly because he had caught the smell of his master on the breeze, lifting his nose to the air, and howling joyfully, was Jake.

  21

  After we had scrambled down the mountain above the Eurydice, after we had all hugged and confirmed that we were okay, after we had marveled at the fall of huge rocks caused by the explosion, after Jake had licked the bloody scratches on Arch’s face at least a hundred times – after all that, we got the bad news.

  “He got away,” the general reported, disconsolate. “Royce. I saw him. I was thirty feet away from him… .” He gestured with the hand that clasped Jake’s spare leash, and sighed.

  Marla’s spangled sweat suit was smeared with mud. So was her face. “I tried to shoot him. The son of a bitch. I missed twice. Then he just pushed me down, into the mud.” She shook her head, disgusted almost beyond speech. But Marla was never beyond speech. “I wish to hell I had killed him.”

  “But… where did he go?” I was incredulous, and felt a whiff of fear. Who knew what more he was capable of? I scanned the sheds and the road below. But the shabby storehouses still looked deserted, as did the wide ribbon of mud that led away from the mine and down to Idaho Springs. “I’m still not clear on exactly what happened. How do you know he’s not still around?”

  Before they could answer, however, there was a sharp cracking sound. We jumped, thinking it was another gunshot. But this sound was thunder. Fat, chilly raindrops pelted out of the clouds. The general stuck out his chin. “I caught up with the dog and grabbed his collar. Then I saw the fuse. Smelled it first, actually. I saw Royce running, wearing a big backpack, holding a suitcase… or maybe it was a briefcase. Next thing, Marla was firing at him.” He ran his fingers across his close-cropped head of pale hair. “I kept hold of the dog, but I ran like crazy after that guy. Only problem was, he knew where he was going, and I didn’t. He escaped around there.”

  He pointed to the mountainside. There was a small garagelike hut on the far right side of the mine opening. I took a few steps in the thickening rain. Heading away from the garage was one set of muddy car tracks.

  General Bo continued, “There’s the four-wheel-drive road I told you about. Fifty feet down that hill – I checked the map. It goes to Central City, but first it crosses Highway Six heading back to Denver, so Royce could basically be anywhere.” His keen blue eyes caught mine. “I called the authorities, Goldy, when the two of you were trapped inside there.” He checked his watch. “At eleven hundred hours. That was thirty minutes ago.”

  The cold rain was turning the grime on my arms to a thin sheen of mud. Half an hour, and not a single law enforcement or rescue vehicle had yet arrived? “Did you… call the Idaho Springs fire department?” I asked. “They should have been right up here.”

  The general glanced down the wet road. “No, I called your sheriffs department. Furman County. I said we had a dead man and two people trapped in a mine. Maybe they figured it was a hoax. But they could be here soon, if only to check it out. So, if you still want to protect Marla and keep running, we should be going – “

  “We can go,” I said, decisively. “But I want my son out of this mess. Now.”

  “We can’t do both,” said Marla sourly. “Come on, Arch.” She put an arm around his thin shoulders. “I know where there’s a shower in the shed over here. We’ll get soap and water on those scrapes. We’ll have a little while until the sheriffs department comes to bust me again.”

  Arch shot me a confused glance, but allowed himself and a damp, wriggling Jake to be led off by Marla without protest.

  I asked Bo, “Did you tell the department who you were, and that you saw Tony Royce?”

  “Yes, of course I did.” His voice was flinty with anger. “I even said he drove off in a green Explorer, although God help me, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, I couldn’t catch the plate number.”

  So Tony had come up here in Albert’s car. He’d thought of every detail. How long had it taken him to plan all this out? From the thinking I’d done ascending those interminable ladders in the mine, I had an idea that this faked-death scheme had been percolating in Tony’s cranium for some time. He’d planned, he’d schemed, he’d set things up; he even had a backup strategy, in case anything went wrong. Marla’s ver
y public squabble with Albert at the party probably changed Tony’s original time frame for his crimes, but that hadn’t meant he’d abandoned his escape hatch.

  “Look, Goldy,” the general pleaded, “we could track him in less than a day – “

  I held up a hand. “No.” I had had at least ten flights of metal rungs to think about what I was going to say to General Bo Farquhar, so I let him have it straight. “Here’s my idea: I think Tony’s trying to get out of the country, and for some reason he couldn’t do that until this afternoon, possibly even tonight. You and I and hopefully the police can stop him, but I want Arch and Marla and the dog out of it.”

  He narrowed his eyes against the rain, gave a considered glance down the mountain road, then nodded. “Whatever you say. I just want this guy. I’m listening.”

  I shook my head. “We need to get out of here, because the Furman County Sheriff’s Department probably still has it in for Marla. We need to take Marla, Arch, and the dog back to the Hardcastles’ cabin. And then I’ll tell you where I think Tony’s headed.”

  The general gave me the full benefit of his commanding glare. “I hope for your sake, Goldy, that we’ll have time.”

  “Either I’ve guessed his scheme or I haven’t. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  The general scowled. “Marla is the only family I have left… .”

  “She’s my oldest friend,” I said quietly. “And I love her, too.” In the distance, sirens sounded. “it’s time to go. We’ve got a criminal to catch.”

  An hour later, I watched Arch wave from the cabin stoop. Marla held up one hand in halfhearted farewell. With the other she gripped Arch’s shoulder. Jake beamed with idiotic happiness as we climbed into the Jeep, probably delighted to see me go.

  Then the general gunned the engine, and we catapulted back toward Bride’s Creek. “Okay, what do you have in mind?” he asked, as if we were going out for dinner. I glanced out the window at the thinning clouds. Then I asked, “Do you remember when I told you about Prospect’s chief investment officer being killed in a car crash? Victoria Lear discovered that the gold ore at the Eurydice had played out. My guess is that she confronted Tony Royce with what she knew, and got killed for her pains. Then the party – that was when Marla and Albert Lipscomb had their terrible argument. They argued about an assay report from a disreputable lab. Albert didn’t believe the ore was worthless, I’ll bet, and he didn’t know Tony was using an untrustworthy laboratory. Albert always trusted his grandfather’s claims about the Eurydice still having gold in it. Whenever Marla heard about the mine, it was, ‘Albert says.’ Never, ‘Tony says.’ Never. But Tony was the person running the fraud, and in this state, gold scams are the oldest ones in the book.