He took four headlamps from his rucksack, pulled one over his head, and handed out the other three to Janelle and the girls.
“While you watch the last of the sunset,” he said, “I’ll head into the mine and grab the floodlights and make sure everything’s put away.”
He threw his pack over his shoulder and followed the tracks to the mouth of the mine. He unlocked the door, pulled it open with a stubborn squeak, stowed the lock and key in his pack, and hurried to the end of the tunnel.
He clicked on the floodlights, their batteries recharged by the solar panels still set up outside. Working quickly, he strapped his seat harness around his waist and secured a dismantled length of ore cart track to one of the floor-base timbers so that the end of the iron track extended over the mouth of the vertical shaft. He clipped his anchored rope through a carabiner slung from the extended end of the track and edged backward into the opening. When the rope took his weight, he swung free, slowly rotating in the middle of the shaft.
He loosened his belay device and slid down the rope commando-style, equidistant from the shaft’s four rock walls. Halfway down, where the streaks of black material first appeared, he locked the belay device and rocked his body back and forth, coming closer to the walls of the shaft with each swing. When he drew near enough, he grabbed a fistful of the crumbly black matter from the wall he faced. He pulled a Ziploc bag from his pocket, shoved the handful of black material inside it, and dropped the filled baggie down the front of his flannel shirt.
He looked up from where he hung, swinging, in the shaft. The beam of his headlamp followed the rope to the end of the ore cart track thirty feet above.
Nearly half an hour had passed since he’d left Janelle and the girls outside. Darkness would be falling by now, the girls drawing close to Janelle, who would be wondering what was taking him so long.
Was it possible that whoever had locked Chuck in the mine had followed the four of them this evening? No, he assured himself. He’d seen no sign anyone had been at the mine since the field school packed up, and, anyway, whoever it was probably wasn’t that dangerous—they hadn’t stayed around long enough to prevent Clarence from rescuing him.
He bounced lightly on the rope. The ore cart track held firm. The white object was only thirty feet below him.
He put his thumb to the release lever of the belay device, pressed it forward, and slid down the rope. As he descended, the black streaks widened to where they joined together just above the bottom of the mine shaft.
He kicked to rotate himself until he faced the crevice. The light from his headlamp angled into the cleft, creating hard lines of gray and black. He leaned sideways, craning his neck, but couldn’t catch sight of the white object at the back of the narrow opening.
He put his thumb to the belay-device lever, ready to descend to the bottom of the shaft. He pressed the lever just as a shriek reached his ears. It was coming from the mouth of the mine.
TWENTY-NINE
Chuck stilled his breathing.
A second cry echoed the length of the tunnel and down into the pit.
He aimed an ear toward the top of the shaft. When he heard a third shriek, he slumped in his harness, weak with relief.
Rosie was hollering his name.
“Chu-uck,” she screamed a fourth time, breaking his name into two syllables. Her cry was distinct this time; she’d entered the tunnel.
“There’s a hole!” he yelled back, terrified at the prospect of the girls scurrying ahead of Janelle and unknowingly coming upon the vertical shaft. “Careful!”
He peered upward. “Be careful!” he cried again.
Light from moving headlamp beams bounced off the back wall of the mine tunnel sixty feet above him, joining the steady glow of the floodlights.
“You hear me?” he hollered. “There’s a hole!”
Janelle’s voice came from above. “Chuck?”
“The hole I told you about, where Samuel fell,” he called to her. “You’ll see it ahead of you. Keep the girls back.”
A head with a headlamp attached poked over the edge of the shaft. “What are you doing down there?” Janelle asked.
“I’m almost done. I’ll be right up.”
Janelle’s head hovered over the edge of the shaft for a moment before it disappeared. He returned his attention to the problem before him.
He slid down the rope until he stood thigh-deep in the viscous black muck, his legs and feet instantly growing cold. He aimed his headlamp into the fissure. The white object was wedged, as before, where the crevice narrowed to nothing. And there, scattered in the crevice below the object, were light-colored sticks of various lengths and thicknesses.
Still attached to the rope, he edged sideways into the crevice. His back brushed the crevice wall, which collapsed onto his shoulders. The wet, black material dripped from his body and landed in the muck with wet plops.
He leaned into the crevice, his shoulders pressed against the fissure’s narrowing sides. As the walls fell against him, he closed his eyes and reached blindly for something smooth.
He swam his hand through the muck, up, down, sideways, until his fingers bounced off something solid. He dug his toes into the black gunk and shoved himself forward a few more inches. He stretched full out, the black material gathering around him, and took hold of the object, his fingers finding purchase in depressions in its rounded shape.
He held the object against his chest and pushed himself backward with his free hand until he was out of the crevice. Once more he was covered in muck, soaked to the skin, and freezing.
Before he could swipe the grit-covered lens of his headlamp clean to look at the prize grasped in his hand, the wall of the shaft in front of him gave way, raising the level of black muck to his waist.
He shoved the object down his shirt and shrugged his pack around to his front. He dug out his ascending devices, attached them to the rope, wrestled his boots into the loops hanging from the devices, and commenced the arduous climb up the rope, this time hanging from the ore cart track above, safely away from the four crumbling lower walls of the shaft. He ascended from the gathering muck twelve inches at a time, the brisk climbing movements staving off the worst of the cold, his breaths coming in sharp gasps.
“Chuck?” Rosie called from above. “Is that you?”
He paused halfway up the shaft. “Sure is, sweetie,” he called with forced cheeriness. “I’m almost there!”
The light of a headlamp illuminated him from above as he resumed his ascent. “Up from the primordial muck,” Janelle observed.
When he reached the top of the shaft, she took hold of the shoulder straps of his pack and helped him clamber onto the floor of the mine tunnel. He unclipped himself from the rope and lay on his back while he caught his breath. The round object, enveloped in his T-shirt, rose and fell each time he inhaled and exhaled.
The girls stood well back from the open shaft, their headlamps aimed at him.
“What’s that sticking out of your tummy?” Carmelita asked.
Chuck sat up as his breathing slowed. He reached beneath his shirt and removed something white. Though his headlamp was still covered in grit, the headlamps of Janelle and the girls lit the object in his hand. It was a skull, all right. The stick-like debris, now buried in the bottom of the pit below, undoubtedly had been the rest of the skeleton.
Janelle backed away until she was even with the girls. She drew them to her.
Chuck rotated the skull in his hand. The cranium was small, not surprising given the smaller stature typical of miners a hundred years ago. The skull’s eye sockets, dark and vacant, sat close on either side of the sinus cavity.
“What’s that?” Janelle asked, pointing.
Smack in the middle of the skull’s forehead was a pea-sized hole.
Chuck reached with his forefinger to touch the edge of the perfectly round opening. The edge of the indentation was slightly concave where it entered the skull.
“A bullet hole,” he sa
id.
THIRTY
“That is so gross,” Carmelita declared, the beam of her headlamp fixed on the bullet hole.
“Uh-huh,” Rosie concurred, crossing her arms over her chest. “Gross, gross, grossy-gross.”
Carmelita stepped forward. “Can I touch it?”
Rosie dropped her arms to her sides. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we? Can we?”
Janelle turned her headlamp on the girls. “I’m sure you’re not allowed to do anything with it.”
Chuck cradled the skull in his hand. He couldn’t see Janelle’s eyes behind the light of her headlamp, but he knew by her calm tone of voice what was in them: complete and utter composure. Janelle’s toughness was well earned—the girls’ father, with whom Janelle had taken up as a rebellious teenager, had been a drug dealer in Albuquerque’s South Valley until the day of his death by gunfire.
Carmelita and Rosie pressed forward on either side of Janelle, who held them back with extended arms. The girls focused the beams of their headlamps on the skull. Chuck wiped his headlamp lens and directed its light at the object in his hand as well.
The skull differed markedly from the ancient Native American skulls he encountered in the course of his archaeological work on federal lands across the Southwest. Those skulls featured receding jaw lines and wide nasal passages. The skull resting in his palm had a prognathous, or extended, jaw line and a narrow nasal opening associated with Caucasians. A thin, bony protrusion between the eyes known as a nuchal ridge also pointed to the skull’s European ancestry.
Chuck rotated the skull to study the bullet’s jagged exit wound.
Deaths in Colorado’s hard-rock mines were commonplace.
Mountain-town cemeteries dating from the late 1800s were lined with the graves of miners who’d died of everything from tunnel collapses to carbon-monoxide poisoning to silicosis caused by rock-dust inhalation. Murder, on the other hand, was rare in the state’s tight-knit mining communities—yet the skull in his hand revealed death by a deliberate hand.
Chuck turned the skull back around and rubbed his thumb across the small, dark circle in the center of its forehead. How had the miner come to be shot and killed?
Rosie leaned on her mother’s arm while balancing on a couple of loosened floorboard planks. The planks squeaked against one another beneath her weight. The sound, similar to the squeak of the mine-mouth door, startled Chuck.
The baggie of sodden black material fell from his shirt as he scrambled to his feet, thinking of the locked door that had been eased closed in silence at the mouth of the mine just twenty-four hours ago. He peered down the tunnel past Janelle and the girls. The rectangle of starry night sky was visible at the mouth of the mine. The door was still open.
He shoved the baggie and skull into his pack and led Janelle and the girls down the tunnel at a fast clip, the rectangle of sky growing larger with each step. He increased his speed, almost jogging, as they passed the tunnel’s halfway point.
“What’s the rush?” Janelle asked, herding the girls as best she could behind him.
Though the end of the tunnel was less than a hundred feet away, the reinstalled floorboards seemed to stretch far ahead of him.
He broke into a run.
THIRTY-ONE
Fifty feet to go. Thirty. Ten.
Chuck burst from the mine and stood, panting, between the ore cart tracks.
Janelle ushered the girls out of the mine behind him. “What were you thinking?” she demanded.
“Yeah,” Rosie said, placing her hands on her hips. “What were you thinking?”
Chuck swung his headlamp all directions. No one was there.
“I was thinking,” he said, grabbing Rosie beneath her arms, “how incredibly cute you and Carm are.”
He spun Rosie around and around, his boots digging into the gravel between the tracks, the stars rotating above their heads.
“Whooo!” Rosie cried, grinning in the light of his headlamp, her legs flying free as she twirled.
Chuck slowed, set her down, and used her as a staff, leaning on her shoulder and bending forward. “You’re not a little girl anymore, you know that?” he said between gulps of air.
“No, I’m not.” She clapped her hands. “I’m a big girl.” Displaying no signs of dizziness, she looked at Janelle, her headlamp lighting her mother’s face. “I’ve always been a big girl, haven’t I, Mamá?”
“In every way,” Janelle agreed. She directed her headlamp at Chuck’s grit-encrusted pack. “I thought archaeologists weren’t supposed to mess with human remains.”
“Generally, that’s true.” He straightened. “But if it was me who’d been murdered—even it was more than a century ago—I wouldn’t mind if somebody tried to figure out what had happened.”
She aimed her headlamp at his face. “This is your idea of making sure everything’s ‘squared away’ around here, is it?”
He answered with a question of his own. “What say we get out of here?”
Two hours later, Chuck stopped the truck halfway down the cabin’s driveway. He climbed out and looked up at the slice of sky showing between the trees lining the drive. Light from the moon, high in the eastern sky, nearly washed out the stars.
When he’d returned to the resort with Janelle and the girls half an hour ago, he’d spotted only a couple of police cars along with the mobile command vehicle still parked in front of the dormitory buildings.
After showering off his latest round of black grit, Chuck convinced Janelle—and himself—that she’d be okay on her own with Carmelita and Rosie for a little while.
“It should only take a few minutes to check in with Clarence and see how things went at Falcon House,” he said.
She glanced out the front window at the dark forest surrounding the cabin.
“You can come along,” Chuck said. “But…”
Behind her, in the tiny bathroom at the back of the cabin, the girls giggled as they brushed their teeth, wrestling for position in front of the sink.
She sighed. “Straight there and straight back.”
From where he stood outside the truck at the edge of the driveway, Chuck’s eyes fell on his grimy pack resting on the floor between the truck’s front and back seats, lit by a sliver of moonlight angling through the trees. He would wait until he was on his way out of town to turn the skull over to park officials. He would also let them know about the ram carcasses rotting in the forest on the north flank of Mount Landen.
His thoughts returned, compass-like, to Nicoleta’s murder, and to the fact that he’d put off checking in with Professor Sartore for far too long. He fished his phone from his pocket and punched up Sartore’s number.
The professor answered before the first ring ended. “Chuck, I swear to God—”
“It’s been nonstop here, professor,” Chuck said. He hurried on, outlining the murder and its aftermath, knowing full well Sartore had been following events online as they unfolded.
“Shut everything down first thing tomorrow morning,” Sartore said when Chuck finished. “I want those students out of there.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“No, you won’t ‘do your best,’” the professor growled. “You’ll get them out of there tomorrow, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
“I’m afraid there is one ‘but,’ sir. The police are telling me they’d like the kids to stick around until they give the all-clear.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Some of the kids knew the young woman who was killed.”
“You mean to tell me the police are considering them as suspects?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I will not have my students held hostage,” Sartore thundered. “I’ll go to the governor if I have to.”
“I’ve met twice so far with the officer in charge of the investigation. He sees himself as a tough nut, likes to play hardball. He’s careful to not say the students have to stay, but he’s suggesting it very strongly. I think he’d almost like it
if you took him on.”
“Goddammit.”
“My feelings exactly, professor. Not sure we have a choice in this, though.”
Sartore grunted in defeat. “I’m driving up tomorrow, then.”
“You really don’t need to.”
“Wrong. I do need to,” Sartore said. “I was counting on you, Chuck. But you’ve failed me. You hear that? You’ve failed me.”
Chuck clamped his mouth shut. Best to ride this out.
“Stay close to those kids until I get there,” the professor continued, his tone growing more reasonable in the wake of Chuck’s silence. “All of them. And keep me posted.”
“We’ll be okay by Friday,” Chuck said. “I’m sure of it. The police just have lots of people to talk to.”
Sartore huffed. “I want to know everything as soon as you know it. I know you like to handle things on your own. Hell, that’s why I hired you. But not now, not with this. These long stretches between calls? No more of that. You hear me?”
“I hear you, sir.”
Hemphill stepped out of the mobile command vehicle when Chuck parked in front of Raven House.
“Where have you been?” the officer demanded, striding across the parking lot before Chuck could escape into the dormitory.
“Working. I’ve still got a job to do here.”
Hemphill aimed a finger behind him. “Come with me.”
Once again, they settled into the seats opposite one another at the small table inside the command vehicle. The interior lights were turned low, giving Chuck the impression he was seated with Hemphill in a quiet bar. The new-vehicle smell inside the RV had been replaced by the greasy odor of burgers and stale French fries.
Harley gave Chuck a weary nod from his seat at the rear counter. Even in the dim light, Chuck could see that Harley’s eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn. Chuck could only imagine what his own face looked like after two nights with virtually no sleep.
Mountain Rampage Page 13