A Desperate Hope

by Elizabeth Camden

  “You have to admit they looked pretty cozy on their way down the mountain,” Mr. Gallagher pointed out. “How long do you suppose they’ve been carrying on?”

  “I think it’s revolting,” another man said. “She ought to know better than to take up with a man like that. Can you imagine what her dead husband must be thinking?”

  Eloise had heard enough. “Her dead husband isn’t thinking anything because he’s dead. You don’t know what went on at that house, and neither does anyone else. But let’s assume the worst. So what? Who here is perfect? Is it you?” she demanded of Mr. Gallagher.

  “Heavens, no,” he stammered, looking like he wanted to crawl beneath the wagon to hide.

  “In ten minutes we’ll be back in Duval Springs, and we all have jobs to do. If I hear anyone spewing gossip at the hotel, they won’t be welcome for the communal meal.” She looked at Alex. “I expect you to back me up on that.”

  Alex merely shrugged. “I’ve never been a big fan of telling people what they’re allowed to think or say.”

  She planted her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Then start learning. We have a timetable, and I won’t let pointless gossip throw us off schedule.”

  The wagging tongues continued even after they got home, but she did her best to ignore it as she opened the town’s accounting books to track the daily expenditures. She was still working on it when Alex emerged from his room, freshly bathed and wearing a clean suit of clothes. She always loved the way he looked when newly scrubbed and shaved. An involuntary smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She tried to tamp it back, but he saw it and wended his way through the tables to her.

  “Still angry?” he asked.

  It was the wrong thing to say. The humor in his tone indicated he saw no parallel between this morning’s scandal and what had happened to them. “I’m doing my best to ensure the town’s money is properly accounted for, and it takes considerable concentration, so I’m sorry I can’t join everyone in rehashing the humiliation of two decent people.”

  “One decent person, anyway.”

  She threw down her pencil. “When will you grow up? I wish him and Marie well.”

  “I don’t know exactly where he was last night, but I’ll wager my bottom dollar that it looked a lot like an old cider mill.”

  Half the people in the room were eavesdropping, and his comment triggered a round of giggles from the next table. Eloise’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward to speak in a low tone.

  “You don’t have a bottom dollar to wager because you’re in debt past your eyeballs to Bruce, who hasn’t called in the lien on your apple orchard. He could squash you like an insect, and the only reason he hasn’t is because he’s a decent man.”

  Alex rolled his eyes, and Eloise had had enough. She’d been going cross-eyed scrutinizing columns of financial data on behalf of this town and was tired of being taken for granted. Keeping her face entirely calm, she gathered the receipts, tucked them inside the accounting ledger, closed the book, then whapped it against Alex’s chest.

  “Here. See if you can find another accountant willing to work for free,” she said. She turned and made her way to the front of the dining room.

  A row of customers waiting to be seated all stared at her. To her mortification, at the front of the line were Fletcher Jones and her cousin, Nick Drake.

  “Hello, Eloise,” Nick said in an annoyingly cheerful tone. “Have we arrived at a difficult time?”

  She swallowed hard. How much had they heard? Given the shock on Fletcher’s face, probably everything.

  “Wh-what are you doing here?” she managed to stammer.

  “We came as soon as we heard about the fire,” Nick said. “Apparently the security guards we hired aren’t stopping the sabotage, and something more needs to be done.”

  “I agree,” Alex said as he strode up to join them, all signs of his irreverent teasing gone.

  Fletcher didn’t even glance at Alex. He merely looked at her with all the sympathy in the world in his gaze. “Emotions continue to run hot in Duval Springs,” he said. “I warned you about that.”

  “You did. I shall certainly heed your warnings in the future.” She reached out her hand, offering a conciliatory handshake, but Fletcher raised it to kiss her fingers.

  “Stop worrying,” he said. “I am amazed at the progress I see outside. All is well. You’re doing a good job up here, and they’re lucky to have you.” His voice was pure kindness, and she drank it in like a cactus parched in the desert. It felt so good to be appreciated.

  “You’re too kind, Fletcher.”

  You’re too kind, Fletcher.

  The words still galled Alex more than an hour later as he guided both commissioners up to the Timberland camp. He needed their help, but surveying the fire damage in the clear light of day was stomach-churning. Most of the Irish workers had gone to their jobs at the road-building project, leaving the wives and children to clean up the camp. It reeked of soot and despair.

  Nick and Fletcher looked grim as they surveyed the camp, but Alex didn’t feel any sympathy. “These people shouldn’t have been housed in an isolated camp if the state can’t protect them.”

  “Who set the fire?” Fletcher asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “And yet the odds are good it was someone from your town,” Fletcher retorted.

  “I don’t think so,” Alex said. “It was probably one of your workers from the other camp.”

  Nick held up his hand. “We aren’t here to figure out who did it. That’s the sheriff’s job. We’re here to get this camp back into operation and keep it safe.”

  Nick gestured for them to follow him down the trail to the road. When they were out of earshot of the camp residents, he spoke in a low voice. “The guard reported that he saw the fire traveling up to the camp along a line of dirt soaked in accelerant, probably kerosene. It came from somewhere near Highpoint. Whoever set the fire knew the work camp was being patrolled overnight, and that’s why the fire was set from Highpoint. That person prepared carefully. He was able to move around during the day, planting the kerosene, and not arouse suspicion.”

  It made Alex physically ill to believe someone from his town could have set this fire. Whoever it was had probably poisoned a drinking well too.

  “I’m hiring undercover detectives,” Nick continued. “I’ll station them at various points throughout the valley. I’ll assign them a reservoir job, but in actuality they’ll have their eyes open and ears to the ground. I’m planting two at the main camp, two at the Timberland camp, and two will cover Highpoint and Duval Springs.”

  “Spies?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, spies,” Nick said without hesitation. “If your people are innocent, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

  Most of the people in Duval Springs were salt of the earth, but not all. Alex wouldn’t trust Oscar Ott if the man said the sun rose in the east. If there was a snake in their town, he needed to know.

  But Fletcher balked at the suggestion. “Who’s going to pay for this?”

  “You are,” Nick and Alex both answered simultaneously.

  “I only have funds for people gainfully employed by the water reservoir,” Fletcher retorted.

  Nick’s face split into a smile, but it was a wolf’s smile. “Oh, you’re paying,” he asserted, then swiveled to glower at Alex. “On my way into town this morning, I passed the cemetery, with hundreds of gravestones looking serene and untouched.”

  “That’s right,” Alex replied.

  “I want all the graves disinterred and moved. We aren’t building a reservoir over dead bodies.”

  It was a gauntlet. Last spring when Nick had first announced that all bodies buried in the valley needed to be disinterred, a mob had attacked him. It wasn’t the town’s finest moment. Alex’s mother had died only six months earlier, and when Nick insisted she needed to be dug up and buried somewhere else, Hercules threw the first punch. Alex regretted the fight, but he wouldn’t orde
r anyone to do the abhorrent task of digging up their own relatives.

  “Moving the bodies is the state’s responsibility,” he said. “We’ve got more urgent work to do.” Between the schoolhouse accident and the fire, they were badly behind schedule.

  “I’ll have the undercover men start the disinterment process,” Nick said. “People who died within the last decade probably still have family living in the area. That will give my men an excuse to circulate among the residents, asking where they want the body moved, poking around for gossip or resentment toward the reservoir. They’re professionals. They’ll know how to pry out information before anyone knows the prying is even happening.”

  Alex had to admit it would be a perfect cover story, and Nick delivered on his promise. Three days later, six private detectives arrived in the valley. Two went to the Timberland camp, two to the main camp, and Alex found room for the two men covering Duval Springs at the Gilmore Inn.

  Willard gave him an odd look when he learned the state was paying for gravediggers to stay at the hotel rather than up at the main camp with the other manual laborers.

  Alex was nonchalant as he provided a justification. “These men will need to consult with people in town about where they want their relatives moved. It makes sense for them to stay here.”

  Alex wouldn’t tell anyone about the detectives’ real purpose. Not Willard, not Eloise, not even Hercules. It went against his nature to withhold information from his closest friends, but there was a saboteur somewhere in the valley, and until he knew who it was, he’d keep his cards close to his chest.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Six

  Alex lunged out of the way when the boom arm of the excavator swung straight at him.

  “Sorry!” Cormac hollered, his teeth shining white in a wide smile. “The left and right is all backward on this rig.”

  The detectives wanted a security fence built around the Timberland camp, the kind with concrete posts sunk deep into the ground so it would stand up to vandalism. Cormac McIntire, the foreman at Timberland, had asked to borrow the excavator to speed up the process, and Alex agreed, even though the machine belonged to Garrett, not the town. Alex had already signed his life away to borrow it, so he figured it was his to loan.

  He turned his attention back to Cormac. “Let’s give it another try,” he hollered and held his breath. Learning to operate the boom and the pivoting bucket was a delicate operation, and Cormac had been practicing all afternoon on this patch of land a few acres outside the Timberland camp.

  The bucket smashed against the ground harder than necessary, but the machine didn’t seem damaged as Cormac wiggled a stick to turn the bucket’s teeth into the earth and scoop up a load of soil. The hole he dug was around four feet deep, but it needed to be six. Cormac lined up the bucket for another scoop.

  A clang pierced the air, and the excavator shuddered to a halt. Alex winced, for something had just gone badly wrong. Cormac vaulted out of the driver’s bench to squat beside the hole. The excavator’s arm and bucket tilted at an unnatural angle in the hole. This entire valley was riddled with limestone deposits, the kind that could break equipment with one bad strike.

  “Let me get down there and see how bad the damage is,” Alex said grimly.

  The earth crumbled as he slid down into the hole and landed with a thump at the bottom. He squatted beside the bucket. Sure enough, the connecting rod between the bucket and the cylinder had broken off. Was this a ten-dollar fix or a ten-thousand-dollar fiasco?

  “How bad is it?” Cormac asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Something was strange. It wasn’t limestone the bucket had hit. The teeth of the bucket had left furrows in the soil, revealing something bright blue and glossy. Metallic. Alex scraped the dirt away, his hand rubbing against smooth, cold metal.

  “We hit something,” he called out. And it seemed big. He walked to the other side of the hole and toed the soil away, revealing the same blue sheet of metal. This made no sense, but everywhere he moved away the dirt, he hit the same thing.

  “Send a shovel down,” he called out.

  They had just found something very odd.

  Despite her threat to quit, Eloise couldn’t walk away from Duval Springs, not when she was still needed. As much as she longed to get back to a safe office job in the city, the move wasn’t finished, and loyalty compelled her to stay.

  Just like everyone else in town, she was completely fascinated by the strange discovery up at the Timberland camp. Throughout the day, she listened to the volunteers as they came in to the hotel for lunch and dinner, bringing updates about the strange discovery. The excavator was broken, so the digging was now being carried out by hand, and it was slow going. By the end of the day, they still had no idea what they’d found.

  Digging had started again at the crack of dawn this morning. The Pollard house was supposed to be moved today, but that was on hold because so many workers had gone to help dig at the Timberland camp. It now looked like they’d found a large metal structure buried in the dirt.

  Eloise was on kitchen duty and peeling potatoes when Tasha came in with an update.

  “Dr. Lloyd says it looks like a railway car,” Tasha said as she bounced Ilya on her hip. “The top is the same shape and size, but why would anyone bury a railway car?”

  “Smugglers?” Eloise guessed, but it seemed like a lot of work to bury something so deep when there were caves all over the valley.

  A rapid thud of footfalls in the lobby of the hotel was followed by a man shouting. “It’s a boxcar! They’re about to open it.”

  Eloise met Tasha’s gaze across the mound of potatoes. “Let’s go!”

  A March snow was falling, and they bundled Ilya into his warmest clothes before heading out. Dozens of people were heading up Mountainside Road, and she and Tasha scurried as fast as they could. It was easy to get out of breath as they trudged uphill, but now that she’d succumbed to curiosity, Eloise couldn’t bear to miss the actual opening of the car.

  At least a hundred people gathered at the rim of the pit to watch the final bit of excavation. Eloise nudged through the crowd for a better look. A metal boxcar, painted blue but with huge patches of rust marring its surface, tilted at an incongruous angle in the pit. A dozen men with shovels and pickaxes scrambled to clear the last of the hard-packed dirt. The railway car had no lettering on the outside, and the double sliding doors were firmly closed. One of the grubby men swiveled to flash her a wink. It took a moment for her to recognize Alex, his face grimy with dirt that couldn’t mask his anticipation.

  She returned his smile. It was exciting. There could be anything in that boxcar—long-forgotten treasure or smuggled goods.

  Most of the car was still mired in dirt, but the area around the sliding doors was clear now. Alex tossed his shovel aside.

  “I’m ready to give it a try,” he said. He grabbed a metal clamp on the rim of a door, trying to release the mechanism. Eloise heard the scrape of rusty metal as he tried to pry it open.

  “It’s rusted shut,” Alex said, and Hercules jumped into the pit with a pickaxe to scrape rust from the mud-caked tracks. When Alex tried again, the door budged a fraction with an awful sound of metal on metal. Hercules joined in, slipping his hands into the narrow opening and lending a hefty push. The screeching was awful, but applause broke out when the door was finally open.

  Alex took a huge step up to get inside the car and froze.

  “What do you see?” someone called out.

  Had Alex heard? She didn’t think so, for he hadn’t moved a muscle or made a sound. He just stood motionless and stared. After a moment, his entire body swayed, like a tree about to topple over. Hercules jumped inside the car to steady him, then looked about the interior of the car himself. A moment later he turned away, his face white.

  “We’re going to need the sheriff,” he said. “This car is filled with dead people.”

  Alex had never been so revolted in his life as when he step
ped inside that boxcar. At first, he couldn’t understand what he saw. It was dim, and the car seemed empty except for some lumpy padding on the ground. As his eyes adjusted, he saw woolen clothing, hair, and boots. It took a moment to realize he was looking at desiccated bodies. A lot of them.

  He’d cleared out of the boxcar quickly, but the image was seared onto his mind. The bodies had been dressed in thick clothing, with coats, boots, and scarves. They were curved around one another, as though huddled for warmth.

  The sheriff took charge of the scene and ordered everyone away except Dr. Lloyd, whose cursory examination showed that the bodies were in good shape, perfectly preserved, and bore no sign of bullet wounds or violence. There was no blood on their clothing.

  Alex wanted answers. They had just uncovered a very good motivation for the ongoing sabotage up at the Timberland camp. It wasn’t resentment against Irish workers or the reservoir; it was probably an attempt to prevent the discovery of that boxcar. People in the valley had been angry about the reservoir for years, but sabotage hadn’t started happening until construction on the Timberland camp began last September.

  Every seat in the tavern was filled with people batting around ideas about the dead bodies. Eloise and Tasha arrived, the maid carrying the sleeping baby over her shoulder. Alex flagged Eloise’s attention and made room for her on the window seat. They hadn’t been on the best of terms lately, but when he reached for her hand, she didn’t reject it. Which was a blessing. The sight of those bodies had shaken him more than he cared to admit.

  Everyone had an opinion about what had happened. “I think they froze to death,” Jasper Trudeau said. “Doc Lloyd said he saw scorch marks on the floor of the car, like they’d been tending a fire to keep warm.”

  “Or starved,” someone else chimed in.

  “Were they buried alive?” Oscar Ott asked, his voice rich with excitement. “That means they would have suffocated.”

  Alex wanted to punch the enthusiasm off Oscar’s face, but it was more important to gather people’s theories about what had happened.