SIX
Chuck stumbled backward, slapping an arm across Clarence’s chest.
The three students grouped on the near side of the newly removed floorboard tumbled backward along with Chuck and Clarence. Carson and Jeremy, on the far side of the plank, threw themselves forward, scrabbling for anything to hold onto as the floor fell away behind them. Before they, like Samuel, disappeared, each managed to grab the snapped end of one of the two rotted timbers that had served as the floorboards’ foundation.
The three remaining students crawled on their hands and knees past Chuck and Clarence. Chuck scrambled forward, reaching a hand to Carson, hanging chest-deep in the black hole that had opened beneath the collapsed floor. Chuck pulled Carson out of the hole and into Clarence’s waiting arms.
Jeremy fought for purchase, his fingers slipping on the wet, broken timber at the edge of the hole, which extended the width of the tunnel and all the way to the tunnel’s back wall.
Chuck jammed a boot against the timber, anchoring himself at the edge of the six-foot-by-six-foot opening. Jeremy latched onto Chuck’s ankle with both hands. Only Jeremy’s head and neck showed above the edge of the hole. The rest of his body dangled into darkness. He gulped in terror, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down.
With the addition of Jeremy’s weight, Chuck’s foot slid along the moist timber, inches from the gaping hole. He threw himself away from the opening, his arms outstretched, reaching for something, anything, before his foot broke free and Jeremy dragged him into the pit.
A pair of hands grasped him from behind. “Got you,” Clarence said in his ear, toppling with Chuck to the ground between the timbers, his arm wrapped tight around Chuck’s chest. Clarence extended his free hand past Chuck to Jeremy, who grabbed it and scrambled up and out of the hole.
As soon as Jeremy crawled past him, Chuck shook himself free of Clarence, rolled to his stomach, and extended his head over the edge of the pit, shining his headlamp into the darkness. To his immense relief, Samuel was not impaled on shattered floorboards at the bottom of the opened hole. The bearded young man clung to the side of the hole, eight feet below the floor of the mine tunnel, his feet kicking in space, his hands grasping the remnant of a handmade wooden ladder affixed to the wall of what appeared to be a downward extension of the mine.
A pair of rusted, iron stanchions secured the splintered, three-rung length of the ladder to the rock face of the vertical shaft. One of the stanchions broke free and the length of ladder dropped several inches on one side, nearly sending Samuel plummeting to the bottom of the pit.
“I can’t hold on much longer,” Samuel said, his voice strained, staring up at Chuck with fear-filled eyes. He toed the damp rock wall before him, searching for a foothold but finding none.
Chuck scanned the squared-off walls of the vertical shaft. He needed rope, webbing, carabiners, but he had no climbing gear at hand nor the time necessary to effect such an involved rescue.
He spoke over his shoulder in a staccato burst. “Grab my ankles. Now. Everybody.”
He shoved himself forward, counting on Clarence and the members of Team Nugget to respond to his terse command. His body canted downward as his torso extended past the edge of the hole. Hands wrapped themselves around his lower legs from behind.
“All the way,” he said, worming his body past the lip of the opening. “Far as you can lower me.”
Harsh exhalations of exertion sounded from behind Chuck as Clarence and the students lowered him headfirst into the vertical shaft. His hardhat slipped from his head and tumbled past Samuel, the beam of its headlamp wheeling off the walls as it fell. It struck one side of the shaft and ricocheted to the other before coming to rest, its lamp still shining, amid the wreckage of the collapsed floorboards and ladder some sixty feet below.
Chuck hung upside down, his face to the rock wall. The tops of his feet rested like angle irons on the lip of the vertical shaft, locking him in place.
He reached downward, past his head, but his outstretched fingers found only blank rock wall and moist air.
“Chuck,” Samuel gasped, his voice flagging.
“Lower,” Chuck called to Clarence and the students, his voice muffled against the rock wall. “You’ve got to get me lower.”
He relaxed his feet. No longer using his own strength to help hold his body in place, he plunged downward several inches. Alarmed cries sounded from above as Clarence and the students halted Chuck’s descent, their hands tight around his ankles.
Again Chuck reached past his head. This time, his groping fingers found the ladder rung to which Samuel clung. Chuck swept his hands along the rung until he came to Samuel’s fingers, wrapped like steel bands around the wooden dowel. Stretching, Chuck reached lower and took hold of Samuel’s wrists with both his hands.
“Let go,” Chuck panted. “Grab my wrists.”
“No,” Samuel said.
“You’ve got to. We’re running out of time. First one hand, then the other.”
“I can’t,” Samuel said, his voice trembling.
The splintered length of ladder ripped free of the last stanchion holding it in place. Samuel swung away from the wall with an anguished cry, held aloft only by Chuck’s grip on his wrists. He released the ladder rung and grabbed Chuck so that the two were attached wrist-to-wrist like a pair of trapeze artists.
“Up,” Chuck said through gritted teeth, addressing Clarence and the students above. “Up.”
Clarence and the members of Team Nugget pulled on Chuck’s ankles, their groans filling the chamber, but Chuck and Samuel didn’t budge.
“Can’t…do…it,” Clarence wheezed.
Blood pounded in Chuck’s head, his grip on Samuel’s wrists weakening.
“Climb past me,” he told Samuel.
“I can’t,” Samuel whimpered.
“Do it,” Chuck commanded, and pulled upward with his right arm, lifting Samuel’s hand a few inches. “I’m letting go.”
“No!” Samuel cried.
Chuck continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Reach up my back, grab hold of my belt. Give it everything you’ve got.”
“No!” Samuel gasped.
“On the count of one.” Chuck didn’t pause. “One.”
Chuck slid his right hand free of Samuel’s grasp, keeping his left hand wrapped around Samuel’s other wrist. Samuel swung free, locked to Chuck by only one hand. Calling upon what must have been his last reservoir of strength, Samuel clambered monkey-like up Chuck’s body from his belt to the hammer loop on the leg of his canvas work jeans to the lip of the hole and out.
Freed of Samuel’s weight, Clarence and the team pulled hard on Chuck’s ankles, bringing Chuck up a few inches, their heaving breaths echoing in the chamber as they struggled with the awkward angle.
“No…leverage,” Clarence panted.
Chuck ran his hands across the face of the wall. It was wet and slick. He found a protruding nubbin of rock, but as soon as he leaned into it, his hand slipped.
He twisted sideways and stretched out a hand toward the lip of the hole.
“Have to switch,” he gasped.
Hands reached into the pit, seizing Chuck’s wrist.
Chuck twisted farther, reaching upward with his other hand till at last someone grasped it.
He hung sideways in the hole, bent like a pretzel, before hands, now clutching his wrists as well as his ankles, hauled him up and out.
Chuck collapsed on his back in the tunnel, his heart thumping. Clarence sat beside Chuck with his head between his knees. The students gathered on the far side of the floodlights, well away from the hole.
Chuck sat up when he caught his breath. “Everybody okay?” he asked the students.
Samuel bent to give Chuck an awkward hug. “You saved my life,” he said, choking back tears.
“I did my job.” Chuck rose and looked around at the other students. “Everybody did.”
“This is so not what I signed up for,” Jeremy declared. “I’m gonna call a lawyer soon as
we get back to town.”
Chuck stepped in front of him. “And claim what?”
“Pain and suffering.”
“Show me your cuts and bruises.”
“My what?”
“Show me your pain, your suffering.”
Silence filled the tunnel.
Chuck shifted his gaze to Samuel.
“Don’t look at me,” Samuel said. “I’m alive. I’m fine.”
Jeremy stared at his feet.
Chuck clamped his hand on Samuel’s elbow. “What say we get out of here?”
He followed the team members and Clarence down the tunnel, exhausted by Samuel’s rescue on the heels of his sleepless night, eager only to get back to the cabin and curl up in Janelle’s arms.
He squinted past the students at the rectangle of light marking the mouth of the mine a hundred feet ahead. He would give the students the rest of the day off. Let them spend the afternoon texting and tweeting all they wanted.
Why not, in fact, have the students spend the remainder of the week at Raven House? There really was no need for them to return to the mine site. Instead, they could spend the last days of the field school sorting and cataloging the many items they’d discovered beneath the collapsed cabin.
If they headed for Trail Ridge Road as soon as they emerged from the tunnel, he’d be back at the cabin in less than two hours to make sure Rosie was still on the mend.
He warmed at the thought of the long, contented summer evenings he’d spent at the cabin with Janelle and the girls these last seven weeks—right up until Rosie’s seizure and trip to the emergency room last night. To assure another field school directorship with Sartore next year—and another summer with Janelle and the girls—Chuck had simply to explain away the mine-floor collapse to the professor as the fluke it was, play down the discovery of the blood by the police, and make sure nothing else got in the way of bringing the field school to a problem-free close on Friday.
He followed Clarence and the members of Team Nugget out of the tunnel to find Officer Jim Hemphill of the Estes Park Police Department standing in the glaring sunlight, holding out a five-by-seven-inch color photograph.
“Anyone recognize this?” Hemphill asked.
Chuck shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the picture. His brain registered three colors: brown, red, and gray. The brown was the background color of the photograph, consisting of dirt and dry grass. The red was a smear of liquid—blood, presumably—on the pictured object lying on the ground between tufts of grass. And the gray was the object itself, an open pocketknife with a four-inch tungsten handle.
Chuck recognized the knife immediately.
It belonged to Clarence.
SEVEN
Hemphill waited, the photograph outstretched. Chuck held his breath and waited, too.
Hemphill cleared his throat. “I told you we might need to check in with you again.”
Chuck inclined his head. The members of Team Nugget edged away from the officer to stand with Kirina and Team Paydirt near the collapsed cabin. Clarence remained at Chuck’s side, the mountain rising behind them.
Officer Hemphill, in his early thirties, stood a tad under six feet in his black leather sneakers. His large front teeth, pillowy cheeks, and flared nostrils gave him the inquisitive appearance of a squirrel.
Hemphill’s pant legs were dusty from his hike to the mine. A pair of sunglasses hung from the front pocket of his creased shirt below his brass badge, and a department-issue windbreaker was draped over his arm. A baseball cap rode low on his forehead, the cap’s crown embroidered with the gold letters EPPD. Hemphill jiggled the photograph, causing sunlight to glint off its glossy coating. “I’m hoping you’ll recognize this. We asked the workers in Falcon House, but none of them claimed it.”
“Where was it?” Chuck asked.
“Outside the back door to Raven House.”
Chuck’s chest constricted. Should he cover for Clarence? No. Lying to Hemphill would lead to no good. Besides, everybody—the residents of Falcon House included—knew who the knife belonged to.
Over the summer, Clarence had spent many of his evenings whittling with his knife while he hung out on the front steps of Raven House, visiting with the field school students and the international workers from Falcon House next door. He made no secret of storing the knife in his backpack, which he left stacked with the rest of the students’ packs in the unlocked Raven House common room each evening, ready to be stowed in the van first thing in the morning for the drive to the mine site.
Clarence spoke at Chuck’s side. “That’s my knife.”
Hemphill showed no surprise. He lowered the picture. “Can you tell me why we found it on the ground behind your dormitory with blood all over it?”
Clarence looked straight at Hemphill. “I don’t know how it ended up where you found it, and I have no idea how it got blood on it, either.”
The officer tapped the photograph against the side of his leg. “But you say it’s yours.”
“I’m saying it’s mine because it is mine, or one that’s identical to it, anyway.”
“Where’d you last see it?”
Clarence pointed at the group’s packs, lined at the edge of the site. “I keep it in my pack.”
“Do you mind?”
Clarence led Hemphill and Chuck across the site to the daypacks. Kirina and the students looked on in silence.
Clarence picked out his backpack, a black North Face with a large compartment for food, water, and clothing, and a small, outer pocket for sundries. He checked the outside pocket and came up with nothing. He rummaged inside the main compartment, extracting his rain jacket, a sack lunch, and a liter bottle of water, but no knife.
He turned to Hemphill. “It’s gone.”
“You live in Raven House, right?”
Clarence nodded.
“Any reason it might be back in town, in your room?”
“I keep it in my pack. I use it to make the crew’s excavation sticks.”
In response to Hemphill’s furrowed brow, Clarence explained, “They’re for digging out and cleaning found objects. Everyone thinks trowels and dental picks are best, but for close-in work, you want wood because it doesn’t scratch. I make different sizes, with blunt and sharp points.”
“You know your way around a knife,” Hemphill observed.
Clarence’s eyes filled with fury. Before he could cut loose on the officer, Chuck jumped in. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
“Just an observation,” the officer said, his voice flat.
Chuck made no attempt to hide his anger. “Sounds like you’re making use of the same keen observation skills you used last night. Take a million pictures, keep my students up all night, and for what? A little bit of blood soaking into the ground.” He exhaled, attempting to calm himself. “Look, you and I both know what happened. Somebody took a chicken from the cafeteria, cut it up, dropped it, made a mess, whatever. Probably one of the cooks. He doesn’t want to admit to it because he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble.” Chuck pointed at Clarence’s pack. “A guy who would steal from the cafeteria would have no problem stealing somebody’s knife, too.”
“I considered that,” Hemphill said. “Then I got back to HQ, put a drop of the blood we collected on a slide, and stuck it under our microscope.”
“HQ,” Chuck mimicked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “CSI: Estes Park.”
Hemphill’s face flushed, but his voice remained steady. “I was a paramedic before I joined the department. It’s pretty simple, really. Red blood cells are distinctive from animal to animal. Pig to cow, cow to chicken.” He paused. “Chicken to human.”
Chuck straightened. “I take it your microscope told you something.”
“We won’t know for sure until we get the official test results back in a few days. But the red blood cells on the slide had the distinct donut shape that is unique to one creature and one creature only—Homo sapiens.”
“You
’re saying last night’s blood was…is…human.”
“That’s the early indication.”
At Chuck’s side, Clarence drew a breath.
Chuck’s heart thumped hard in his chest. No wonder Hemphill was still on the clock after working the scene through the night—and why he’d deemed it worthwhile to hike all the way to the mine this morning. “But you don’t have a body, right?” Chuck asked. “And no one has turned up injured at the hospital?”
Hemphill’s silence provided the answer.
Clarence faced the police officer. “That’s my knife in your picture. You and I both know it.” His voice rose. “But I sure as hell didn’t stab anybody with it.”
Hemphill stiffened, his arms tight at his sides.
Chuck clenched and unclenched his jaw. “If you have no more questions,” he told the officer, “then I think we’re done here.”
Hemphill pivoted and held the photograph out to where Kirina and the students stood in a knot beside the excavated cabin site. “Can any of you tell me how this knife might’ve ended up behind your dorm building last night? Or how it could have gotten blood on it?”
Chuck opened his mouth, ready to break in before the students said anything incriminating. But what if one of them offered information that would free Clarence from suspicion? Chuck settled back on his heels.
Hemphill allowed several seconds to pass. When none of the students responded, he said, “Thank you for your attention.”
He turned and spoke only to Clarence. “We’ll be in touch.”
EIGHT
Not until the police officer was well away from the mine site did Chuck turn to the students.
“Lunch break,” he said.
Kirina clapped her hands. “You heard the man.”
The students removed their sack lunches and water bottles from their packs and spread out around the site in twos and threes, sitting on boulders or the stacked cabin logs or cross-legged on the ground. They leaned close to one another, whispering and directing furtive glances at Clarence, who stood in place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Chuck picked up his pack and motioned for Clarence to do the same. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, leading Clarence across the mine site to where Samuel sat looking at his sandwich.
Mountain Rampage Page 4