by Cindy Myers
In leaving Vermont, Sharon had lost her son, though she prayed not for forever. But she’d gained a new family and a second chance, here in Eureka. That had to count for something, and when she did find Adan again, he’d be a part of that family. She wouldn’t give up hope for him, or for herself.
Chapter 17
“I’m really sorry about your brother,” Lucas said after he rode over to Alina’s house the next morning. In ripped jeans and a baggy T-shirt, his hair drooping into his eyes, he reminded her so much of Adan she wanted to cry.
But she’d done enough crying. Her eyes felt like they had sand in them from crying so much last night. But this morning she just felt—numb. She drooped against the door frame. “Yeah, it sucks,” she said. Missing Adan had been the worst thing about coming to Eureka, but she’d always been able to think of him safe at home with their dad—only a phone call or a plane ride away. Not knowing where he was, or if he was even safe, left a whole different void in her heart, a jagged pain that couldn’t be soothed.
“If you don’t want to paint today, that’s okay,” he said.
“Painting sounds good.” She straightened. “I need to do something and I don’t want to be alone.”
He waited while she retrieved her bike; then they pedaled slowly toward Main. “If you want to talk about it, that’s okay,” Lucas said. “But if you’d rather not, that’s cool, too.”
She didn’t know what she wanted. “It just . . . it doesn’t seem real. I mean, I haven’t seen him or even talked to him in weeks, so I’d kind of gotten used to not having him around. But still, I always knew he was there. I could have picked up the phone and called him if I wanted.”
But she hadn’t called him. She’d been too afraid he hadn’t wanted her. After all, her father hadn’t said a word against her going away, and Adan wanted so much to be like their dad. He talked like their father and chose to stay in the woods with him instead of coming to Colorado with Alina and her mother. As if he didn’t care. She bit the inside of her cheek hard, tasting blood. But it was better than letting loose a flood of useless tears again.
“Do they know what happened?” Lucas asked.
She shook her head. “Mom said the police think he and Dad argued, and Adan either left on his own or Dad sent him away.” Her voice broke and she swallowed hard. Where would Adan have gone? How could her brother have just disappeared?
Lucas looked miserable, as if he might cry himself. “I wish there was something I could do,” he said.
“Just hanging out with me is good.” She took a deep breath and felt a little steadier. “It helps, having something else to think about. So, what are we going to paint today?”
“Mom said we should do that old shed out back. I don’t think she trusts me with anything inside the house; but it’ll be more fun being outside anyway. But I’ve got a surprise for you first.”
“Oh?” Lucas’s surprises were good.
“Yeah, I took your advice and put out a bunch of flour around the windows and table and counters.” His expression cleared and he was once again the eager Lucas she was used to. “I had to wait until Mom wasn’t around. I thought I could get out there and clean it up with D. J.’s shop vac before she found out.”
“Where did you get the flour?”
“From my grandma’s pantry. That’s another thing—I need to stop on the way home and buy another bag to replace it.”
“Did you get any footprints?”
“I haven’t checked yet. I thought we could do that together.”
“Cool.” She pedaled harder, surging ahead, but he raced to catch up. They turned onto Main, past the Last Dollar, where Danielle waved from the front porch; past the Dirty Sally, closed at this hour. Flowers bloomed in yards along Oak Street, and an apple tree was studded with dozens of little green fruit, like tennis balls tied to the branches.
They slowed and pumped hard to climb the hill up Fourth, breathing hard, muscles straining. The exertion felt good, all that blood flowing letting some of the sadness burn off. At the top, they each took their feet from the pedals at the same time and coasted down the long incline, the cool air blowing through her hair.
They turned onto Pinion and skidded the turn into the drive of Lucas’s house. Next door, Reverend Kinkaid looked up from tending his vegetable garden, then walked over to greet them. “Good morning,” he said. He wore khakis and a faded T-shirt advertising a barbecue place, Hog Heaven. The shirt made her want to giggle, but she managed to keep a straight face.
“Good morning,” she said.
“I was very sorry to hear about your brother, Alina,” he said.
“Uh, thank you.”
“If there is anything I can do to help you or your family, let me know.”
“Thanks. Right now we’re just waiting to see what happens next.”
“I’ll be praying for you.”
“Thanks.” She wasn’t sure if she believed in prayer, but it was kind of nice, thinking of other people petitioning God for her. It couldn’t hurt, right?
She and Lucas left their bikes by the front steps and went into the house, which was unlocked. “How does everybody already know about my brother?” she asked. “How did you know?”
“I heard it from my mom, who heard it from Jameso at the Dirty Sally.” He shoved a ladder to the side so they could get to the kitchen. “Reverend Kinkaid probably heard it from someone who was there, too.”
“How are things going up at the mine?” She felt bad for not asking before. “Have they found the guys that are trapped yet?”
“Not yet. D. J. is helping, running a back hoe to dig.”
She hugged her arms across her chest and shivered. “I can’t imagine being trapped underground like that. Like being buried alive.”
“We hope they’re alive anyway.” He picked up a glass doorknob, the old-fashioned, faceted kind. “Mom found these at Grandma’s store. She wants to put them on all the interior doors.”
“They’re like big jewels.” She picked up another knob and held it as she looked around the room. Lucas’s mom had painted a geometric border near the top of the high ceilings. Oak wainscoting and refinished hardwood floors added to the look of something old that had been made new. “This is a beautiful room,” she said.
“It’ll be our living room. And these steps go up to the bedrooms. Four of them.”
“And you’ll have the tower to yourself,” she said. “Like your own apartment.”
“They’re letting me fix it up like I want. One room’s going to be my bedroom and the other a kind of study and workshop, with tables and my PlayStation and stuff. We can go up there after we check the flour.”
The flour. She’d almost forgotten. She set the doorknob aside. “Do you think we’ll find anything?”
“Let’s find out.” He pushed open the door into the kitchen.
The kitchen looked the way her bathroom had when she’d dropped a whole box of dusting powder once. White covered the floor and most of the table and countertops, as well as the tools, scraps of lumber, paint cans, and assorted construction debris that littered the room. “It’s going to take you forever to clean this up,” Alina said as she followed him into the room, their tennis shoes leaving tracks in the flour.
“Look!” He pointed to a pair of much smaller footprints in the flour. About four inches long, with distinct toes.
“Oh my gosh!” Alina stared at the trail of prints across the table. “What do you think made them?” Definitely not a ghost, but an animal of some kind.
“I have a book. Let me get it.” He turned and raced from the room.
Of course he had a book. She smiled. He was such a geek. The kind of guy you’d want to be stranded on a desert island with. He’d know how to build a raft, which plants you could eat, and stuff like that.
“I think it’s a raccoon.” He returned, the book open. “Look.”
She studied the page he pointed to, which showed tracks very like the ones in the flour. “It says the
y’re attracted to small objects,” he read.
“Look, he went out the window.” She pointed to the trail of white footprints leading across to the window.
“Maybe we can follow it.” Lucas closed the book and laid it on top of a paint can.
They raced outside and around the house. At first, Alina thought they’d lost the trail; then she spotted a smudge of white. “The flour stuck to the grass in places,” she said.
Bent at the waist, eyes focused on the ground, they followed the trail of flour to the leaning shed in the back corner of the yard. Covered in board and batten siding like the house, the shed was gray with age and slanted a little to one side. The door stood open and Alina could see a jumble of boxes, tools, and what looked like trash filling the small space.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s used this for decades,” she said.
“The raccoon’s been using it.” Lucas walked around the side and pointed to a broken window. Flour dotted the sill below the broken pain. “I think he went in here.”
She leaned toward the window, careful to keep her distance, in case the raccoon decided to jump out suddenly. “It’s too dark to see anything in there,” she said.
“I’ll get a flashlight.”
He ran toward the house, long legs stretched out, tennis shoes making muffled thumps in the weeds. Alina waited in the shade. She was curious to know what they’d find in the shed, but not as excited as Lucas. That was okay. Watching him get excited was almost as much fun as being excited herself.
He returned a few moments later with the flashlight and shone it through the window. The first thing Alina saw was a big spider web. She drew back. “I really don’t like spiders,” she said.
“They won’t hurt you. At least, most of them won’t.” He shone the light on the web. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Come on. Let’s go inside.”
She followed him to the door of the shed but hung back, letting him dive in first. He shoved aside an old lawnmower, a bookcase, and a stack of boxes, until he reached the section of the shed beneath the broken window. When he shoved the last box aside, he shone the light down onto a kind of nest. Alina braced herself to flee an angry raccoon, but the animal was nowhere in sight.
“Maybe he just uses this for storage,” Lucas said. He bent and retrieved a piece of shiny metal from the pile of detritus piled on a faded quilt. “This is my mom’s key fob that went missing a couple months ago.”
While she watched, Lucas sorted through a pile of screws, a teaspoon, a door handle that matched the ones on the kitchen cabinets, thirty-three cents in change, and a bunch of other small, metallic objects the raccoon had apparently collected.
“There’s a hole in the wall,” she said.
Lucas shifted his attention to the hole. “Funny, it doesn’t look like an animal gnawed it,” he said. “It looks like someone cut it out on purpose.”
He bent and shone the flashlight into the space. “There’s something here.”
“More raccoon treasure?” she asked.
He reached in and pulled out a blackened object, about the size of a paperback book. “It’s a purse,” he said. “One of those fancy ones.”
“An evening purse,” Alina said. She reached out and Lucas handed her the object. The black was tarnish—the purse had once been silver. It was heavy, covered all over with little silver scales. What might have been jewels trimmed the frame and the clasp. “I’ll bet this was really fancy a long time ago,” she said.
“Do you think someone put it in the wall to hide it from thieves or something?”
She fumbled with the clasp but was able to force it open. The purse was lined in blue satin, surprisingly bright and clean. “There’s papers in here. Letters.”
She tugged out one small, square envelope, covered in spidery writing.
“That stamp looks old.” Lucas looked over her shoulder. His eyes behind his glasses grew wide. “What does it say?”
Alina carefully took out a single sheet of stationery and unfolded it. The page was brittle, and the spidery writing was faded. “I can’t read it,” she said. “We need a magnifying glass or something. And better light.”
“I have a magnifying glass up in my room,” he said. “We can go there.”
She tucked the letter back into the envelope. “First, we’d better clean up that mess in the kitchen. And then we have to paint the shed.”
He looked as if he was about to argue, but finally nodded. “My mom will have kittens if she comes in and sees flour everywhere. And even D. J. will be upset if I don’t paint the shed, after I begged him to let me.”
Alina patted the purse. “This will give us something to look forward to.” The letters would probably turn out to be nothing important, but they would be one more distraction from her real-life problems, better than TV or homework.
When Lucille walked into the Last Dollar and saw Chris Amesbury occupying the front booth, she was tempted to turn and leave. The director had managed to annoy and/or offend almost everyone in town, and at least half of them had complained to the mayor about his presence.
But she wasn’t a coward, and she’d learned long ago that ignoring a problem didn’t make it go away. So she hitched her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and strode to his table. “May I join you, Mr. Amesbury?” she asked.
He looked up from the remains of his lunch special (BLT and homemade potato salad) and blinked, like someone coming out of a doze. “Oh, hello, Mayor Theriot.”
“May I join you?” she asked again.
“Uh, sure.” He hastened to move aside a pile of notebooks.
“What can I get for you, Lucille?” Danielle stopped beside their table. She wore a peasant blouse and a flowered jumper. With her hair in twin ponytails, she looked like a milk maid, or possibly the buxom model on the label of a German beer.
“The special is fine. And iced tea.”
“Save room for blackberry cobbler,” she said. “I made it this morning.” She turned to Amesbury. “Would you like some dessert?”
“Could I persuade you to feed it to me?” He gave her what he probably thought was a winsome smile.
“One pie in the face, coming right up.” She winked at Lucille and moved away.
“I can’t believe someone so lovely is hidden away here in the mountains,” he said.
“You do know Danielle is already involved with someone else,” Lucille said.
“You mean Janelle?” He waved his hand as if brushing aside this bit of information. “I’m a very open-minded kind of guy. I don’t mind sharing.”
Just when she thought he couldn’t get any more loathsome. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” she said. “You look absorbed in your work.”
He nibbled a crust and rested an open palm on the stack of notebooks. “I’m just trying to work out on paper how best to present this story.”
“Which story is that?” Was he still stuck on his reality TV idea, or was he focused on the rescue drama?
“I’m thinking of tweaking the reality show idea to make it more of a modern-day gold-mining story,” he said. “I mean, we still have the hipsters, and we still put them together in rustic accommodations, only this time, they’re hunting gold. There’s enough old mines around here I figure we could probably even stage somebody being trapped in one. That would really pull in the viewers.”
“But if you stage something, then it’s not really reality TV, is it?” Not to mention the liability involved in a stunt like that.
“Oh, they’d be really trapped. What I can’t figure out is how to make the rescue really dramatic.”
“I’m not following.”
“I’ve been spending a lot of time up at the Lucky Lady, thinking it would be good to capture the rescue proceedings on film. But there’s so little going on—a little digging, a lot of standing around.”
“What did you think would happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know . . . dynamite. Grieving wi
ves and wailing children. Fighting mistresses. You know—drama.”
She tried to hold back laughter, but in the end it was impossible.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said between gasps of laughter. “It’s just that I know the two men who are in the mine and neither of them is the type to induce that kind of reaction from the people in their lives.”
“So I gather. And hey, that must be hell, being trapped under there. I hope everything turns out all right. But some young dude with three chicks fighting over him would make for much better TV.”
She thought about reassuring him they’d try to do better next time, but suspected the sarcasm would be lost on him. And she had a more pressing matter to broach with him. “Otherwise, are you enjoying your stay in Eureka?” she asked, as Danielle delivered her lunch.
“Pretty much. The food is great and the bartenders at the Dirty Sally pour a mean drink. But my hostess at the B and B has let me know I’ve worn out my welcome. She needs my room for a pair of honeymooners or something.” He snorted. “As if anybody comes here for a honeymoon.”
“I believe the couple live here in town and plan to spend their wedding night at the inn,” Lucille said.
“Well, I told her not to get her panties in a knot. I plan on checking out in a couple of days. I thought I’d stick around and see if anything interesting happened when they pull those two old guys out of the mine.”
“So, will you head back to Hollywood?” Perhaps permanently?
“I’m going to have to meet with my producers. No offense, but I’m not sure Eureka is really what I’m looking for with this show. It’s a little too, well, comfortable.”
A mouthful of BLT saved her from having to reply to that, though she was silently thanking God for this change of heart. Sad as she was to see the town lose the money a television show might have brought in, she couldn’t help thinking they’d be better off without a Hollywood invasion.
Janelle came to take Amesbury’s empty dishes and leave his check. “Any news from the mine?” she asked Lucille.