Kill Devil Falls

by Brian Klingborg

  “I met him on the access road while you was searching in the woods. He was on his way back from Sardine Valley.”

  “He could have easily parked outside of town, snuck in, snatched Rita while we were gone, and headed back to his car to make it look like he was just then returning from the shooting call.”

  “It’s just … that’s crazy. Why? Why would he do it?”

  “The money, Teddy. It’s an almost perfect crime of opportunity. Rita is wanted for a string of bank robberies, right? When he hears Rita is in Kill Devil Falls, he figures she must be here to hide money. Why else come up here? But then it gets complicated. If Rita goes to jail, she’ll get out eventually, and when she discovers the money is missing, she’ll know who took it. She might tell the authorities. What’s she got to lose? She’s already done her time. But if she’s dead … You know the saying. Dead men tell no tales. He can keep the money and no one will ever be the wiser.”

  “Damn, Marshal! That’s my dad you’re talking about.”

  “I know.”

  “The sheriff, for goodness’ sake!”

  “I know, Teddy.”

  Teddy shook his head, kicked at the pavement.

  “I may be wrong,” Helen said. “It’s just a theory. But there’s one way we can prove it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, if it is the money he’s after, he’s probably trying to retrieve it right now, before reinforcements arrive. If we catch him doing that … ”

  Teddy turned away.

  “Teddy,” Helen said. “If you were Rita, where would you hide the money? Some place where no one would just randomly happen upon it. Where it’s safe from fire, water, beetles and worms. Do you know a spot like that? One you think Rita might have used?”

  Teddy puffed out his cheeks. “Yeah. I know a place. A place she used to go. And my dad knows it, too.”

  “Where?’

  “The mine.”

  Near the edge of town, past the double-wide trailer, beyond Lawrence’s house, pavement gave way to packed dirt. Straight ahead, Main Street quickly devolved to a narrow hiking trail and disappeared into the forest. Helen followed Teddy as he turned left, downhill, taking a narrow track, one riddled with potholes and pools of muddy water, crisscrossed with fallen tree limbs and partially blocked by growths of twisted, leafy vines that looked like creeping tentacles.

  Eventually, they turned left again, emerged from a scatter of trees into a long, broad clearing with a granite-faced ridge to the left. To the right were more trees, gently descending to a valley hundreds of feet below.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” Helen said. There were no lights in the valley, just a wide trench of velvety darkness, above which stars twinkled like diamond chips.

  “Makes you feel pretty small, don’t it?” Teddy said. “Like you’re just a little speck in the universe. Like your life don’t really mean much, one way or the other.”

  The bulk of an enormous wooden building dominated the clearing. Helen shined her flashlight on it. “What’s that? A barn?”

  “Stamp mill.”

  “What’s a stamp mill?”

  “In the old days, miners dug ore out of the mine, carted it up here, and dumped it on these conveyer belts inside the mill. The belts ran under huge posts with metal heads, called stamps. The stamps went up and down, crushed the ore to little bits, like a hammer smashing a walnut shell. After that, the bits were spread on a copper sheet coated with mercury. Gold sticks to mercury, you see? Miners would sift out the rock and other stuff they didn’t want and collect the gold left behind. And that’s why we got toxic soil up here. All the mercury they used.”

  “You know your stuff.”

  “Hard not to pick it up, growing up right next to the mill. Also, I did some mining myself before joining the sheriff’s department. Not gold. Sand and gravel, mostly, for cement.”

  “So … we go inside the mill?”

  Teddy shook his head. “Into the mine.”

  “I see. And once we’re inside, do you know where Rita would have put the money?”

  “Uh … ” Teddy scratched his cheek. “Not really. I mean, I know she used to hide out in there, but I don’t know the exact spot. I didn’t go into the mine as a kid. Don’t much care for tight spaces.”

  “Didn’t you just say you used to be in mining before you became a sheriff’s deputy?”

  “I didn’t sling a pick underground, Marshal. I blasted rock topside.”

  “But wasn’t this mine worked for decades? There must be miles of tunnels down there!”

  “Not miles. Maybe two, three hundred yards. Most of ’em is just dead-ends. We’ll take the main tunnel, go in a ways, and listen. If my dad’s in there, I think we’ll be able to hear him.”

  Helen would have preferred to just wait at the entrance for the sheriff to emerge, rather than go into the mine. But if her suspicions were correct, she wanted to catch him in the act.

  She waved Teddy forward. “Lead on.”

  Teddy led her past the stamp mill, across rutted ground dotted with scrub brush, to the wall of the granite ridge. Tucked between an outcrop and a stunted tree at the base of the ridge was an iron gate, and beyond this, a rectangular opening wide enough for two men to enter side-by-side.

  Teddy opened the gate, shined his light inside. Helen saw walls of solid rock, squared off and pitted with the scars of a thousand pickaxes and drills, and a set of wooden reinforcement posts topped by a wooden wedge placed every ten feet or so.

  “Old man Yates’s grandfather came over from Wales to work this mine,” Teddy said.

  “Mrs. Patterson told me Yates’s father continued digging for gold even after it shut down. And Yates himself is still at it.”

  “Yeah. My dad caught Yates coming in and out of here a few times, but that hasn’t happened for three, maybe four years. I think he’s just too old for that nonsense now.”

  “Does your dad know his way around the mine?”

  “I don’t think so. Like me, he ain’t fond of tight spaces.”

  Helen peered into the entrance. The wooden support posts bracing the tunnel looked like ridges on a trachea, descending down a human throat.

  “How safe is it?”

  “Not very. Those timbers could give way any second.”

  “That’s reassuring, Teddy.”

  “Trust me, Marshal, if anyone’s nervous about going in there, it’s me.” He motioned with his flashlight. “Ladies first?”

  Peering into the maw of the mine, Helen began to feel claustrophobic herself. But if Teddy was game, she wasn’t going to be the one to chicken out. She stepped through the doorway.

  12

  THE AIR INSIDE THE mine smelled stale, musty, and slightly acrid. Helen pictured an old-time prospector, a carbide lamp protruding from the center of his steel hardhat, holding a birdcage with a dead canary inside.

  “Should we be worried about poisonous gasses?”

  “Don’t think so. Otherwise, Yates would’ve croaked a long time ago.”

  Helen started walking. There were piecemeal remnants of ancient metal tracks on the ground, like a miniature railroad. She glanced over her shoulder, saw Teddy still standing in the mouth of the entrance.

  “You coming in?”

  She shined her light in his face. He blocked it with his hand. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  “Maybe I’ll wait out here.”

  “Come on, Teddy.”

  “I don’t like tight spaces.”

  “Me either. We’ll be okay.”

  “I—I couldn’t never bring myself to go in there.”

  “Teddy … I can’t do this without you. I need your help. Please. Take a deep breath. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

  Teddy sucked in a lungful of air, exhaled with a whoosh.

  “Do you think … maybe … you could hold my hand? Just till I feel a little calmer?”

  Christ in a bumper car.

  “Sure, Teddy.”

  Teddy
took another couple of deep breaths, stepped into the tunnel. He shined his light up at the ceiling, touched it with his fingers as if checking for stability.

  Helen walked back, grabbed his hand. “Let’s go.”

  She tugged him along. The ceiling was low enough that even she, at five feet five inches, had to duck her head under each wooden ceiling wedge. Teddy’s hand was hot and unpleasantly moist. She wanted badly to let go, wipe her palm on her pants.

  Water dripped from the ceiling or ran in trickles down the walls, pooling in nooks and crannies on the ground. Helen felt the pressure on her eardrums increase as they slowly descended deeper into the mine.

  “You doing okay?” she asked Teddy. Her voice sounded harsh and hollow in the enclosed space.

  “Okay,” he said, breathlessly. “Just … you know.”

  Helen tried not to think of the millions of pounds of rock and earth pressing down just inches above. “Focus on what’s directly in front of you.”

  The tunnel doglegged and they came to a square chamber, about ten-by-ten feet. Bits of wood and rusted metal lay scattered on the ground. A wooden chair, possibly decades old, tilted on three legs. Dozens of ancient, crushed beer cans were piled in a corner. The black mouths of two tunnels, one directly across the chamber and another carved into the wall on the left, led off into darkness.

  Helen shined her light on the tunnel to the left. A few badly weathered plywood sheets were nailed slantwise into the wooden posts on either side of the opening. She examined the other tunnel. It was clear.

  “You hear anything yet?” Helen said.

  They listened. Water plopped. Teddy breathed loudly through his nose.

  “No,” Teddy said after thirty seconds.

  “Let’s keep moving.” She relaxed her hold on Teddy’s hand. He held on for a bit, then let go. She waited long enough to not be obvious, then surreptitiously wiped her palm on her coat.

  They entered the mouth of the open tunnel. This one was narrower than the first, with curving walls, narrow bottlenecks and passageways extending off to the side that appeared to have been abandoned after only a few yards. As she penetrated deeper into the mine, Helen caught herself fixating on the slowly constricting space. Her heart beat faster. She began to worry she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

  Calm down! Focus!

  It wasn’t working. She reached back, found Teddy’s hand, squeezed. He squeezed back. The touch of another human being, even one with a clammy palm, was comforting. Helen breathed easier.

  After minutes that seemed like hours, she felt a rush of cool air caress her skin.

  “Feel that?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  They emerged into a cavern with a fifteen-foot ceiling. Fresh air wafted down from above. Helen tilted her flashlight up. She saw a long shaft drilled into the ceiling, and at the top of the shaft, a metal grate with fan blades lazily rotating behind thick iron bars.

  “Ventilation shaft,” Teddy said, letting go of her hand. “I know exactly where we are now. Right behind Yates’s house. There’s a brick well just inside the forest with a grate on top. Been there since long before I was born. The miners drilled a few of them over the years. One here, another closer to my place, a couple the other side of Main Street. We used to piss down them for fun.”

  “Sounds like a hoot.”

  “Ain’t much to do in a small town,” he said defensively.

  “Teddy, I don’t care if you used to take a dump down these things. What matters is that I can breathe air that doesn’t smell like the earth’s asshole.”

  Teddy snort-laughed. He directed his flashlight around the room.

  “Lookit this stuff.”

  His light washed across a set of arcane mining tools: picks and shovels, a broken-down wheelbarrow, some kind of machine-gun apparatus with a large pointed tip extending from its barrel, which Helen took to be a portable drill; more beer cans; and stacked against the wall, a half dozen wooden crates and a yellow plastic box.

  Teddy lumbered over, lifted the lid off one of the crates.

  “Oh, man. Yates, you crazy old coot.”

  “What is it?” Helen looked over Teddy’s shoulder. Inside the crate were paper-wrapped cylinders in a thick bedding of sawdust.

  “Is that—” she started.

  “Dynamite!”

  Long, coiled fuses extended from the tips of the cylinders, just like sticks of dynamite she’d seen in old movies featuring cowboys and train robberies.

  “Jesus on a jukebox,” she said.

  “There’s enough dynamite in here to bring down the whole mountainside.”

  “He’s been using this to mine for gold?”

  “Looks pretty old,” Teddy said. “Maybe it belonged to Yates’s father. He did a six-month stretch once for possession of explosives.”

  “What’s it doing down here after all these years?”

  Teddy shrugged. “We’ve heard rumbling from time to time over the years. Figured it was the mine settling. But maybe Yates still blows a bit of rock, now and again.”

  “I thought you said he was retired.”

  “As far as we know, he is. But … ” He waved at the crates.

  “Let’s not mess with it,” Helen said.

  “Don’t worry. I ain’t touching this stuff. Dynamite’s real unstable. And the longer it sits, the more unstable it gets.” Teddy replaced the lid on the crate, crouched down by the plastic box. “Can you give me a light?” Helen held his flashlight for him as he opened the box. Inside were coils of blue tubing.

  “Oh gosh.”

  “What is it?”

  “Det cord.”

  Helen was familiar with detonation cord. It was a thin plastic tube filled with pentrite—basically, nitroglycerin. Given its flexible structure, det cord had a thousand and one uses. It was employed as a precision cutter to remove cables, pipes, wiring, and other structures by wrapping it around a target. It could be lowered vertically into a well to destroy obstructions to the water flow. She’d even heard of people wrapping it around tree trunks and blowing them in half. And it was perfect for stringing together multiple explosive charges and igniting them all at once.

  “Maybe you should shut that lid.”

  “Det cord’s pretty safe, not like the dynamite,” Teddy said. “Here.” He pulled an object that resembled a video game controller from the box. It had a long handle, shaped like a pistol grip, and a rectangular unit on top with a thick black antenna. “Transmitter.”

  He rummaged around some more in the box.

  “Teddy, I don’t think you should be doing that.”

  He removed another object, square, with dangling wires. “Receiver. Hook this up to the det cord, get yourself a safe distance away, and squeeze the trigger on the transmitter. Ka-Boom!”

  “Put that stuff back,” Helen said.

  “Sure thing.” Teddy laid the receiver and transmitter in the box, shut the lid.

  Helen searched the perimeter of the cavern, noted four tunnels. One appeared ancient and abandoned. Another two looked more recent. They were narrow, roughly hewn, with wooden supports that were relatively new. The fourth was the one they had just come through, leading back to the square chamber and the main entrance.

  She also discovered an electrical wire strung with naked light bulbs. It emerged from one of the newer tunnels, ran partially around the ventilated chamber, and disappeared down the other recently carved passageway.

  “Look,” she said to Teddy, showing him with her flashlight.

  “Yates strung lights down here,” Teddy remarked. “Must be a generator at one end. Maybe we should try to get ’em switched on?”

  “If your dad’s here, that will just tip him off that we’re down here, too.”

  “Right.”

  Helen considered her next move. It seemed unlikely a sixteen-year-old girl would penetrate this far into a dark and dangerous hole in the ground, even to avoid the unwanted sexual attentions of her stepfather. Maybe this was all a
wild goose chase.

  “Do you think Rita could have come all this way?” she asked Teddy. “As a teenager, I mean?”

  “I don’t know about when she was a teenager, but it does seem a long ways to carry a load of money. For someone as skinny as Rita.”

  Helen flicked her light across the crates of dynamite. She hadn’t counted on finding a stockpile of explosives down here.

  “What if we’re barking up the wrong tree?” she said.

  “I’m happy to get the heck out of here, if you want.”

  “Yeah. Maybe—”

  Clink!

  Helen froze. “Did you hear that?”

  Teddy shook his head. “I didn’t hear—”

  “Shh!” Clink. “There is it again. Someone’s down here.”

  “Where?” Teddy asked.

  Helen inspected each tunnel in turn. Inside the mouth of the old, seemingly abandoned tunnel, she spied a cigarette butt lying among splinters of old wood. She picked it up, sniffed it, rubbed it between her fingers.

  “Marlboro Red. Fresh. Your stepsister’s brand, if I recall correctly.”

  “Good call. So she went that way.”

  “I’m guessing.” Helen motioned with her flashlight. “You want to take the lead, since you have the big gun?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, Teddy.”

  He swallowed, his dry throat clicking. “All right.”

  He squeezed past her. Helen caught a whiff of rank body odor. She didn’t judge. She probably smelled like a boxcar hobo herself.

  They moved forward. Helen didn’t hear any further sounds and began to worry she’d imagined them. The tunnel veered upward. Helen gradually became aware of a dim glow ahead.

  “Shut off your flashlight,” she whispered. She slipped hers into a pocket. Teddy slid his flashlight into the loop on his gun belt, unsnapped his holster, put his hand on the butt of his .357 revolver.

  They came to a bend. Teddy was making a racket, his heavy boots scraping the ground, his labored mouth breathing, his keys clinking. Helen worried he would ruin the element of surprise. She tapped him on the shoulder, edged past him to take the lead.

  Ahead was a final section of tunnel, about twenty feet long, leading to a narrow opening, and beyond, some sort of cavity. Alternating shadows and light came through the opening. Someone was moving to and fro in front of a light source.