by M K Dymock
While Beth’s Café catered to the old, Mountain Brew attracted the new.
The cashier, a college-age woman he didn’t recognize, smiled at him. “Congrats on finding the boy.”
He gave an awkward smile and shrug. “Thanks. Can I get a coffee and BLT?”
“Sure.”
He found a quiet booth in the corner, where he could spread out his notes. The cashier set down his food, but he didn’t bother to look up.
With the coffee threatening to burn through the recyclable cup Sol clenched, he stared at his old files. The woman had blonde hair in his memory, but from that brief glance in the cave he swore it was darker. He struggled to recall the length, as she wore it pulled back. She’d been skinny but not in a healthy way, more like a meth head living in a city park way. Desperate was the word that came to mind in his memory.
Physical appearances could be changed. What else did he know about her?
She was capable in the mountains. They’d walked a few trails together, after she had food in her stomach and a bandage on her head. She carried herself in a confident way that showed a lot of time on a trail, nothing uncommon in this part of the world where children hiked with binkies.
At one point, Sol had left the trail and descended into some waist-high bushes. He’d spotted a small waterfall and wanted to check it out. Without thinking about the harm his words could cause, he said, “Kids love water but don’t realize how deep or fast it can be until it’s too late.”
“She’ll know better.” She kept his pace through the uneven terrain without trouble. “She won’t play in the water alone.”
Looking back on that conversation, he realized that was the most confident information she’d given about the child. Everything else had been vague and said with a degree of uncertainty.
Sol set down the report next to his half-eaten sandwich. He’d been wrong. Hylia hadn’t left, and she wouldn’t be found in a town.
No one else knew this country better than him, but one person knew the underground of it better than anyone. He would need her help if he was going to track down Hylia.
19
The warmth seeped out of the mug into Jen’s fingers at Sela’s accusation. “No, my father didn’t kill us.” She didn’t ask her old neighbor why she had that impression; she knew why. “What happened after we left?”
“I don’t understand.” Sela’s brow furrowed.
Jen didn’t understand either—that was the entire reason she was here. “What did they say about my mom’s death?”
Sela’s face fell, and her hands tightened on the mug. “They said she killed herself, but I did not believe it.”
Relief washed through Jen at the knowledge she wasn’t the only one—that her mind hadn’t invented their enemy. “Why not?”
Sela’s mouth opened and closed as if trying out different words. “Where’s David now?”
“My dad? He died a few years ago.” Her voice stuttered on the word “dad” but not the lie itself. She just hadn’t used that title in so long.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Sela stood and placed the kettle in the sink. “We thought the worst when your mother died. You have to understand, all we knew was that your mother had been shot and your father had left with you. A lot of people assumed the worst.”
“What’s the worst?”
She laid down each word as if laying out the clothes she’d be married in. “That your father murdered your mother, then you and your brother, before killing himself. When the police said, Charlotte killed herself, I did not believe it.”
“Why did you think that?” Jennifer had an easier time believing her mother had killed herself than that her father had a hand in it. He’d always been the gentler of the two. It was her mother who killed spiders, while he’d shown the kids how to scoop them onto a piece of paper and set them outside.
“We heard they’d found . . .” She glanced outside at the children and lowered her voice. “. . . some of your blood at the edge of a cliff in the mountains far away from here.” She swallowed deeply as if she threw up a little in her mouth.
“My dad,” she swallowed, “didn’t hurt us.” It had been so much easier to remember him as Merrell—the man he would become and not the man who had raised her.
Their first summer in the mountains hadn’t been spent in a cave but a small cabin high up enough in elevation snow still lingered in the shade. Each night for the first two months, Link cried out for their mother. Jen would hug him in his sleep and weep quietly along.
She assumed they’d eventually go home, but all that changed when her father spotted a caravan of vehicles coming up the four-wheel road. He kept watch on the valley below them with high-powered binoculars that never left his neck.
“Hylia,” he’d screamed from where he stood outside. “Get your brother. They’re coming.”
Both of their heads jerked up from the books they were reading, and they ran outside to the creek—a plan their father had drilled into their head since they’d arrived. They followed David to a nearby gulch with a rushing river a few hundred feet below. He threw a backpack at her. “Take your brother to the edge and wait for me.”
“Why?” The raging rapids below drowned out everything but a yell. They had practiced everything up until this moment.
“Do it now.”
She grabbed Link’s trembling hand in her own and led him to the edge. The mists from the slamming water below floated around them.
Her dad pulled out a plastic bag filled with a dark red, almost brown liquid from a cooler bag he’d carried since leaving home. She recognized it. A few months before everything went bad, he’d drawn some of their blood for a test he said their mom wanted to run. She’d questioned at the time why he was drawing their blood and not Charlotte, but he said she was too busy to do it. Once the bruises faded, so did her memory.
Using a serrated knife, he cut through the first bag and dumped the contents on the ground. He glanced up and caught his daughter watching him. “Inside my backpack are the harnesses. Get them on now.”
Part of their summer had been spent rock climbing—a skill Link took to like a monkey. Her fear of heights slowed her own progression. They’d never climbed anything more than thirty feet or so. With the cliff behind them, she unzipped the pack and pulled out their harnesses.
“Faster, Hylia. They’re coming.” That would be the last time anyone ever called her that. She harnessed Link in first, and then slipped on her own, tightening the straps until they cut into her belly and thighs.
Her dad pulled out a gun; she’d never seen him carry a gun. Instinct made her move between him and Link. David pointed the gun in the air and fired several times before dropping it in the dirt. The bullets cut through the mist and roar, and for a moment the entire forest seemed to hold its breath.
Abandoning it, he ran to their side and tied a rope to her. “I’m lowering you down. There’s a ledge fifty feet below.”
“No,” she whispered.
“When you hit it, untie and wait for Link.”
“No.” This time she made enough of a noise to be heard.
He knelt and put his hands on her shoulders. “They are going to kill you and your brother just as sure as they killed your mother. You have to save him.”
She nodded and clutched the rope as he walked her to the edge.
Sela’s voice broke through the memory. “The police thought your parents made some sort of suicide pack. They searched the river but never found you.” She caught Jennifer’s eyes. “What happened that day?”
What happened was that they took shelter in their first cave while helicopters buzzed the river for days. The dad she’d known drowned that day in the river. It was easier for her to think of them as two separate people—one from before and the other from after.
Jen met Sela’s kind eyes. “We died that day.”
20
Sol pulled out his phone and thumbed through the thousand or so numbers. One would think he was Mr. Popul
arity with all his contacts. While he knew them and they knew him, Sol had created a distance since Daisy’s death that he hadn’t figured out how to breach—or even if he wanted to. After losing his wife and best friends in a year’s time, he hadn’t had the energy to build more connections beyond numbers in a phone.
He stopped at the one number and name he needed, Catherine Kessler, the so-called mine expert. She was getting her PhD in history, specializing in the mining industry. According to her, more than half the mines in the Lost Gorge Mountains were still unmapped and were therefore filled with unknown history. Catherine had come into town last fall and knocked on Sol’s door, announcing he had to help her because everyone said he knew more about the mountains than anybody and always helped everybody.
The first few times they spoke, her direct way unnerved him, but he quickly adjusted and then appreciated it. Others in town found her eccentric, which said something considering the odd folks Lost Gorge attracted.
The town was the gateway to a small portion of the Rockies historically untouched by much of the tourist hordes. They didn’t have an airport, national park, or interstate paving the way in for people. Winter lasted for much of the year, and it wasn’t unheard of to be cut off from the world due to avalanches for days at a time. The ski resort held some of the best steeps skiing in the country, but it required hours of hiking or a helicopter to access.
To be a full-time resident here, full-time meaning more than one continuous season, required something more of its citizenship. Sure, it required a degree of toughness, but a person also needed to be a bit of an odd duck who wanted to escape the broader world.
Daisy had the toughness in spades but wasn’t the odd duck. The world held too much intrigue to leave her content.
Catherine, however, had the odd-duck thing in spades; she was acquiring the toughness. He pushed send on the phone, and she answered in one ring. “Hello, Sheriff.” She took a breath. “Apologies, is it deputy or perhaps chief?”
“Just call me Sol.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to diminish your–”
“I was hoping to ask you for a favor. I know you’ve been mapping a lot of the mines.”
“All of them.”
“Huh?”
“My goal is to map all of them. I won’t feel my thesis is complete until that’s done.”
Good luck with that. “That’s great, but I’m only interested in one.”
“Which one?”
“That’s the problem. It’s unmarked. I’ve looked at a few of the old maps, and I can’t pinpoint it. It’s in the Lucky Star vicinity and may even connect to it, but I can’t say for sure.”
“Hold on.” Papers rustled into the muffled phone. “Lucky Star closed down in the 1920s. The owners, Argus Co., knew there was still silver in there but decided the cost of mining it wasn’t worth the price they would get. The next closest mine is more than three miles away.”
“That you know of?”
“Argus was a major player in the late nineteenth century. They pushed or bought out most small competitors. I can’t imagine anyone mining right under their nose. Perhaps you found an abandoned tunnel. There were several cave-ins over the years.”
“You have those mapped?”
“Yes, of course.”
Sol squinted at his own map where he’d highlighted the cave’s entrance with the hidden rooms. “Do any of them exit into the Willis Creek draw? Willis is about a mile past–”
“I know that area. And there are no tunnels that far off the mainline.”
“So, you don’t know anything about it?”
“No, but I will. When are you going in?”
He hated asking for her help. This was a crime investigation that she had no place in, but those caves weren’t anywhere to screw around in.
“You can’t go in there alone,” Catherine continued. “Some of the tunnels are large from blasts, but others shrink in an instant, forcing you into a corkscrew you can’t get out of. Plus, the old mines’ support beams are falling apart in spots.”
His ribs ached in protest even as he said, “We’ll go in tomorrow.”
When Sol first met Catherine, she’d been wearing a tweed blazer and slacks. He’d given her a month before she’d give up and go home. She looked eighteen, although he’d come to find out his guess was off by several years. He’d cursed her unknown parents for letting their daughter go on such a foolish adventure.
He’d been wrong about her. He was wrong about most women he had come to find out.
She climbed out of her old Camry at the trailhead, and he barely saw the original girl. Although she still looked young, she’d replaced the blazers and slacks with a brand-new Columbia flannel shirt and hiking pants. She still looked young with her hair cut short around her petite face.
They headed up the trail, but her height didn’t allow for a fast hike to the cave, and he swallowed a “hurry up” for the twentieth time. She caught his eye when he turned around to see how far back she’d fallen. “Don’t worry,” she gasped, “you’ll be glad for my short legs in the cave.”
Sol considered the tight tunnel, and his pulse quickened at the memory. “You’re welcome to go first in there.” He slowed his pace.
“You didn’t say how you found the cave?”
“I didn’t. A missing kid I rescued stumbled into it in a storm.”
“Why are you the one who does all the searching?” she asked between inhales. “I’ve heard people say that about you.”
Anyone else and he would’ve gone the “aw shucks” routine, but Sol knew Catherine would require a blunt answer. “Because I’m the only one who can.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” He turned to stare at her oblivious face as she continued on. “There’s the sheriff, those other deputies, other mountain people.”
He ignored her as she listed those people who could replace him. It wasn’t ego to think he was the best at his job. It was . . . he just was. They walked the rest of the way in silence.
It took some doing to get her up the ledges, but she gasped in delight as she peered in the crack on the side. “It’s marvelous.”
He possessed a lot of adjectives in his vocabulary after years of reading in place of company. Any one of them was a better fit for the hell hole. “There’s an opening on top we can . . .”
She’d already wedged herself half way through the opening. “I can fit here.” Her leg disappeared through the hole. “How amazing.” The cave muffled her voice.
With great reticence, he climbed to the top to follow her down. Expletives replaced adjectives as he dropped back into his almost-grave.
She rushed around the space like a child discovering all their presents on Christmas. “This is all hand-carved. It must’ve taken years.” She stopped to examine a make-shift fireplace. “He could’ve lived in here for months at a time. Maybe that’s why no one spotted him.”
“Let’s go,” he said. “There’s a lot more to see.” Sol had no desire to spend any more time in this claustrophobic place than he had to. They would look around and get out.
After more exclamations at the small exit route, they made their way through to the spot where he fell. It wasn’t near as deep as his ribs remembered—they still ached. With light and advanced notice, they crawled down without trouble. Catherine’s small frame did prove ideal for this place as she moved through with a lot less effort than he did.
She shined a light into the long tunnel, barely piercing its darkness. “This is far too large for a few miners to have blasted.”
“So?”
“So, I think this is a tunnel off the Lucky Star. It must’ve been blasted but then closed up.”
“Why?”
“Multiple reasons, chief among them they didn’t find anything valuable, or they blasted into water collected from the surface. This area is ripe with underground streams and lakes.”
She unzipped her bag, pulled out a small yellow electronic box, and turned it on.
“Is that a GPS unit?”
“No, it’s a gas detector. Sometimes the air can be poisonous with too much carbon dioxide. Eight miners died in seconds over in the Silver Sam mine. The story goes, they had camped out the night before next to the mine and had a campfire. The smoke filled the 100-foot shaft.” She strapped it onto her belt. “When they dropped in, they dropped dead. Rescuers found the bodies stacked one on top of the other.”
Good to know there were a plethora of ways to die in this trap. “How accurate is that thing?”
“Fairly, I calibrate it often.”
“Fairly? We’re hanging our lives on fairly.” Sol was not used to being the most practical one in a situation such as this.
“If you’re nervous, you can always carry my lighter.”
Sol halted as she kept walking and talking.
“If the flame is blue, you know we’re low on oxygen.” She turned and spotted him ten feet back. “It’s alright. You can trust me.”
He now had a new appreciation for the newbies he trained. How many trembling trainees had he talked off a literal ledge with the same words?
“I also have an oxygen mask if the levels dip suddenly. Enough that we can retrace our steps.”
“All right.” He finally acquiesced. He followed her, trying to breathe as little of the dusty air as possible.
They moved at a maddeningly slow pace as her light took in every wall. “Look.” She stopped without warning, causing him to bump into her. He’d wanted to stay as close to the gas detector as possible.
She pointed at a hand-drawn character etched onto a wall next to a small pile of rocks. He moved closer, allowing his headlamp to highlight the illustration. It was similar to the original drawings in the room, but this one was drawn by a more advanced hand. He snapped a few photos to compare.