Out the door she went, past a wooden rack stuffed with local-attraction brochures—for a relative value of “local.” He tagged along in her wake.
She was nearly at a run. She wanted to get this over with.
Her boots crunched and scuffed across the unpaved lot, and she paused beside a big metal cage that had once lowered miners three thousand feet down the shaft in search of copper. She turned then, and her hair billowed wildly as the wind rushed up the crest behind her. She raised her voice to be heard, almost shouting as she pointed off to the north.
“That’s where the plant used to be, right over there—facing the hoist house, on the ridge’s natural peak! Used to be, they had a set of tracks that ran ore buckets overhead between them!” She turned around, and now her hair was a halo, vast and golden, wilder than Medusa’s. It looked for all the world like she stood at the edge of a cliff and was prepared to jump.
She said something else but Kilgore couldn’t hear her; she was speaking into the wind and the words were lost. But when he joined her, he understood.
More quietly now, she told him, “The mine caved in years ago, but by then, they weren’t digging copper hardly at all: They made more money on sulfuric acid, generated from sulfur dioxide as part of the smelting process—you know, the same stuff that denuded this whole corner of the Smokies. But anyway, there it is. There’s the lake where my friends drowned.”
Beyond the miner cage, all the way down the far side of the sharp, ragged ridge, waited a great crater full of bright blue water surrounded by stiff green trees. It looked like someone’d pulled a plug and the landscape had sloughed down the drain, leaving only this cerulean pool, shimmering at the very bottom of the world.
Kilgore resisted the urge to call the scene “beautiful.” Instead he drew Bethany back away from the edge, stepping down out of the wind.
When they were standing again in the gravel lot, she said, “That’s where they died. Adam first—two days after we got here. A freak accident, that’s what they said. He fell in and … forgot how to swim, or some bullshit like that.”
“Did they send his body back home? I don’t expect they have the facilities out here for an autopsy.”
“Yeah, he’s home by now. Greg, though—he died two days after that, and he’s at the Copper Basin Medical Facility, unless they released his body and no one told me, which is possible. Nobody out here tells me a damn thing. Ammaw Pete thinks I’m an uppity little city bitch, like Knoxville is New York, and I’m carpetbagging for the ages. She doesn’t know I heard her say it, but she probably wouldn’t care if she did.” She looked at Kilgore with something new in her eyes, something cunning. “Maybe they’ll talk to you.”
“I try my best to be a sociable man … but in my experience, people open up faster to a pretty woman like you than a guy like me.”
She shrugged. “Not here. They don’t like me. They don’t trust me. They put me in the same category as the lawyers and environmentalists who closed down the mine and put the whole town out of work. If you’re not for the copper, you’re against it. Like all the life we’re bringing back to this place isn’t worth a damn thing.”
Kilgore Jones made noises of polite protest, but she didn’t respond. She only stared over the ridge, toward that bright blue hole in the pale red dirt, surrounded by all the defiant trees, roots clinging to the steep crater walls, twisted and anchored and still alive—like a big “fuck you” to history.
But she still hadn’t said what he needed to hear, so he prodded her again, friendly but firm. “Tell me what you saw that night, when Greg went under.”
Slowly, she nodded. Not to him, but herself. “Something came up, almost out of the water but not quite. It whispered to Greg,” she said, hardly any louder than the whisper she described. “It called him. Lured him. And when he wouldn’t follow it, it grabbed him—and it dragged him right into the lake.”
“Describe it—the thing you saw.”
“I … I can’t.”
“You’d better, because I’m shit when it comes to mind reading. Bethany,” he said, urgently if not impatiently. “You sent for help. Now talk to me.”
She swallowed and crossed her arms over her stomach, drawing her oversized sweater tighter around her body. “It looked like a man, but it wasn’t. It looked like a miner—one of the old miners, from the eighteen hundreds. But not exactly.” Her eyebrows crunched together. “Do you think it was a ghost?”
This was more comfortable turf for Kilgore, if not for the grad student. “Ghosts are mostly made of memories and imagination—their own, and everyone else’s. Once in a blue moon one’ll have the strength to make a ripple in the real world, but I’ve never heard of one tough enough to drown a grown man.”
She burrowed her hands deeply into her sleeves, then stuffed them under her arms. “This thing … whatever it was, it wasn’t a memory. It was really there. So if it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?”
“I don’t know yet.” He didn’t give her any guesses because they’d only frighten her. He needed more information, and that meant he needed a local. All his polite protests aside, Bethany wasn’t one, and everyone in the county knew it.
Kilgore wasn’t local either, and Chattanooga wasn’t any more rural than Knoxville—but there was more to being local than your starting address.
He left Bethany on the museum steps. He shook her hand and made her promise to be in touch and stay away from the crater. She agreed to these terms, but he didn’t know how much that meant. Her abject horror at watching her fellow student drown might be nothing compared to the siren song of an otherworldly creature, or even her simple curiosity.
Siren.
The word floated to the surface of his brain and refused to sink back down. He made a mental note of it because there was no sense in denying the overlap. Sirens were water elementals, of a fashion; they called, lured, and killed—though they usually came in a prettier package than that of an old miner. “There’s a first time for everything. Then again,” he mumbled, as he yanked the Eldorado’s bum door and settled back inside the car, “it talked to Greg, and Greg didn’t listen. So it resorted to force.”
He gazed up at the silver crucifix that hung from the rearview mirror, trembling and bobbing like a pendulum. It’d been a gift, from someone who wouldn’t speak to him anymore—a man he’d come to view as a father, at the third church that threw him out. The last church. The one he drove past sometimes, still not quite finished with that argument but knowing better than to go inside.
They’d disinvited him, like he was some kind of goddamned vampire who knew better than to cross the threshold.
He stayed away anyhow. He knew where he wasn’t wanted, and no amount of wishing or praying would change that. Apparently.
He sighed because he sure could’ve used the help right about now; but he sucked it up, withdrew his small notebook from his pocket, and added what he’d learned. Then he flipped to the back page—where two addresses were written down: One was the local watering hole, a joint that went by the uninspiring legend of “Ed’s,” and the other belonged to the woman either named or called “Ammaw Pete,” who volunteered at the museum and allegedly didn’t think much of poor Miss Huesman.
His watch said it was too early to bother with the bar; he wouldn’t find anyone useful to chat up. But Mrs. Pete? It wasn’t even suppertime yet, and she’d said he could swing by before nightfall. She knew to expect him but he would’ve liked to call first, as a matter of manners … but by her own admission, she didn’t have a phone. She took all her messages out of the museum’s line and appeared perfectly content with that arrangement.
Kilgore Jones did have a phone, but it was a POS without a GPS. He consoled himself with the knowledge that by the grace of God, Ducktown had made it onto Google maps, and therefore a stash of home-produced printouts gave him an idea of what the area looked like.
Ammaw Pete lived within spitting distance of the mine—walking distance for someone more hiking inclined
than Kilgore—but it took him fully twenty minutes to find his way to her driveway via the Eldorado. Her road was neither marked nor paved, and he stumbled upon it only after the process of elimination ruled out four other identical roads. How anybody got their mail delivered was a mystery to him, but small towns and out-of-the-way places all had their methods. When everyone knows everyone, things don’t often go lost or missing. And that made the situation with the UTK ecology students all the stranger.
Or then again, maybe it didn’t. Those kids were outsiders, and the community didn’t feel obligated to look out for them. They went missing more easily than the mail.
He engaged the parking brake and the car lurched hard, then settled with its customary squeaking.
Ammaw Pete’s place was an early craftsman in good repair, with a yard that didn’t get as much love as the hanging flower baskets on the porch. The baskets were emptied of everything but the purple and pink petunias; everything else had died for the season, and these would too, probably before Thanksgiving. But for now they gave the white house with its gray roof a pop of color that said somebody lived there, and somebody cared about the place.
Kilgore tried the steps and found them true, then knocked upon a red-painted door.
Behind the door, he heard a television mumbling what sounded like the local news; a chair squealed, a board creaked, and then a set of footsteps stopped long enough for an eyeball to appear in the small window that served as a peephole.
The door didn’t open. “Who’s there?”
He assumed his most polite pose, hands folded in front of himself, slight stoop to minimize his prodigious height. “Pardon me, ma’am—but I’m looking for Ammaw Pete. Would that be you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m Kilgore Jones. We spoke on the phone this morning,” he told her.
“That’s right, I recall. You’re a big son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“What is it you do again? You’re not with the po-po, I remember that much.”
“I’m a machine-shop worker from Chattanooga.”
The eyeball narrowed. “And investigator of the occasional drowning … ?”
“Not the drowning, ma’am. The thing what caused it.”
He heard a click, the twist of an old knob, and the scrape of a door being drawn back an inch. “You’ve got my attention, big man. Don’t waste it.” She opened the door enough to reveal herself. Small and old, but not elderly yet. Silver-haired and bright-eyed, in a tidy blue dress and gray slippers. “You ain’t a feeler, are you?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t detect anything I can’t see.”
“You’re a fighter, then. Got to be one or the other.” She sighed and tossed the door open all the way with a flick of her wrist. “I guess you’d better come inside.”
Withdrawing to make room for him, she turned and sauntered through a cluttered home that was not the least bit dirty or unorganized—only filled to capacity with whatever things moved her magpie of a soul. Here there were stacks of Time-Life books on the Civil War and the Old West, and over there, that series from the eighties about unexplained phenomena; figurines from nearby and faraway lands alike; rows of bells from assorted tourist traps; spoons with small emblems identifying them as collector’s pieces; photos of loved ones framed and arranged across all but a few square inches of wall space; a batch of prettily organized teakettles and pot holders; a latticework of diverse coffee mugs hung on the walls around the cabinets; handmade afghans with bright colors and unfortunate patterns; curtains sewn from bedsheets; Christmasy villages with ice-skaters and post offices and train stations awaiting the next month with flickering lights and cheerful miniature residents, pets, vehicles—plus wreaths on every door.
“I’ll put the kettle on and you can have a seat.”
Of course she’d put the kettle on. Kilgore would never escape an old Southern woman’s home without tea, same as he’d never settle down to a young Southern woman’s company without coffee, now that he thought about it. It was like nobody could talk without something to sip for distraction.
But they’d done the same thing at the old First Baptist, hadn’t they? If not potlucks then communions, and that’s why they called it a Fellowship Hall.
Ammaw, whose name he’d first misheard as “Grandma,” gestured at the dining-room table, a well-varnished and rough-hewn piece that someone must’ve made for her. None of the pretty little chairs matched, and none of them looked like they’d hold Kilgore without protest and structural failure.
He was prepared to suggest that perhaps they could sit outside on the porch, but then he spied a cedar bench that probably belonged in a garden—but in Ammaw’s kitchen it was piled with folded hand towels and a stack of cast-iron skillets nested together. “You think perhaps I could just … clear off that bench? We’ll both be happier if I don’t break anything.”
She coughed the laugh of an octogenarian smoker, but her age wasn’t so advanced and Kilgore didn’t see any cigarettes. “Do what you gotta.”
It wasn’t just her laugh, he realized. Her words were offered up with that same ragged edge that sounded like more than age peeking through. While he gently adjusted her décor, he said, “I hope I haven’t intruded on you, particularly not if you’ve been feeling poorly.”
“Poorly?” She paused at the stove and shot him a look. “Oh, the cough, you mean? Hardly even a rattle, and I guess you ain’t been in town too long, or you’d have heard it by now. All us old folks who grew up here … we all got the voice.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Why? It don’t hurt, and I don’t mind. Makes you feel like part of a tribe,” she informed him, and she hauled a box of tea bags from a cabinet, then yanked two mugs off the wall. For herself she chose a soft pink jobbie with a nicely shaped handle. For him, Tweety Bird sitting in a bathtub. “Once upon a time, Ducktown and Copperhill had a big tribe between ’em. The mine took good care of its workers,” she insisted, her cough to the contrary. “Now it’s gone, and so are most of us. It’s just the way of things.”
“But the land’s come back real nicely,” he said, accepting a measure of steaming water and dipping his tea bag, prompting it to steep. “So there’s that.”
“There’s that, yes. And there’s snakes, and there’s rats and bugs, too. Didn’t used to have any of that nonsense, but here they come, creeping back. None of them worth the trouble of those goddamn trees. We liked our red dirt, I’ll have you to know …” she eyed him over the edge of the mug. “But you’re not here for tea or bitchin’. You want to talk about the crater, and what sleeps inside it.”
He didn’t like the way she phrased it. It offered up too many suggestions, too many implications. He wondered how much she really knew, so he asked outright. “Yes, ma’am. And you’ve worked the museum longer than anyone, besides being local to boot. I figure you’re the best person to ask.”
“How much do you know already?”
“Only what Bethany Huesman thinks she saw.”
Ammaw Pete made a derisive noise that flicked at the surface of her tea. “That girl. Thinks she knows so much. She didn’t tell me she saw anything. Didn’t tell the sheriff either.”
“She said you don’t like her any. Thinks it’s because she’s an out-of-towner.”
“It’s because she tried to order a skinny half-caff something-something at a gas station on the edge of town, and acted snotty when she couldn’t have anything but old-fashioned drip,” she snapped. But Kilgore figured they were saying the same thing. “So she didn’t say a damn thing to me … but she’ll talk to you. All right then, so she saw something, did she?”
“Something shaped like one of the old miners, rising up from the water. It dragged her friend down into the crater and drowned him.”
“Shaped like one of the miners?” she echoed pensively, and gave it a question mark. “Well, sometimes these things take the shape they’re called by. They sh
ow us what we expect to see.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply over her teacup, taking the steam and smiling at it, but her smile verged on the grim. “Them things that were here before us … before the mine. Before the Indians. They’ll be here still, when the last of us are gone.”
“You think that’ll make them happy? The last of us being gone?”
“I don’t know. They belong to the land.”
Kilgore frowned. “But the ecology students from UTK are here for the land too—they’re putting it back in order. You’d think any resident haints or elements would be glad to see them.”
“Ducktown don’t want ’em here. Whatever’s at the bottom of the lake don’t want ’em here. The whole world ain’t made of hippies and sunshine, big man. It’s a balance, you know—and here in the basin, it’s always been about the metal. There’s the earth that holds the copper, the things that draw the copper, and things that work the copper. A balance.”
“Yeah, well this place hasn’t been in balance for 150 years, and those kids shouldn’t have to risk their lives to put it back.”
“Why not?” she asked with a wink, but there was a gleam of something hard behind the flutter of her lid. He feigned astonishment, but she waved it away. “No, now. You know I’m only teasing. Whatever that little ol’ Nick might be, it shouldn’t be left to grow there. Shouldn’t let it fester. You’d better take it out and deal with it.”
“How?”
“Beats me. But if it’s nasty enough to kill people, a good talking-to won’t do it. Not from you, anyway.”
He considered this. “Thank you,” he finally said, his lips pausing on the rim at the top of Tweety’s head. “You’ve given me plenty to think about.”
He finished his tea, thanked the woman again, and retreated to his hotel to get ready for the night’s work. He’d booked a room in the same Holiday Inn Express the grad students used, not by any great design but because there was nothing else for miles.
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