Summer Searcher

by M K Dymock

  Once Sol pried the opening big enough, she slipped through. He grabbed her shoulder. “Wait, I’ll go first.”

  She took a quick step out of his grasp and couldn’t help but smirk. “Who knows caves better?” Hylia left him at the entrance sputtering as she ventured forward. A snap of metal proved he wouldn’t be long behind her. If her family had been here, she wanted a few minutes alone to gather—or hide—what she could. She still had Link to protect.

  Without the bright July sun, the air turned cold and dank almost immediately. She didn’t expect to find much here. If they’d used this populous place, it would have been because they were in a pinch. But the place had been in the book, and maybe it would have some clues.

  She shined her light up in the high corners of the mine. If they used this place to stock supplies, it wouldn’t be out in the open. Another metal bar snapped behind her; she moved faster.

  The cave came to a split—one tunnel went down, and one went up. The down tunnel was lined with beams to hold up the hole. She used one to brace herself as she climbed over the jagged rocks. It was moist to the touch; whatever support it had once offered had weakened over the past hundred years. A good enough reason to keep it locked away from the public.

  The cave narrowed, and her backpack scraped across the ceiling. A haze of dust filled her headlamp’s beam. Her breath became gasps—was it the air or her memories? Either way she wouldn’t stay much longer. The mine opened up from the wedge she slipped out of. She sat on the rock and peered around her—the light casted shadows over everything.

  She scanned the room once and then again until her headlamp landed on a piece of canvas hanging from a shelf above. Ha, she thought, you can’t hide from me. She slipped off her pack and scanned the walls for the easiest climb up the fifteen feet or so.

  Her ability to scramble up anything had outpaced Link’s, and she still felt a strange sense of pride about that. If he’d made it up there, it would be no problem for her.

  Hylia latched onto a wall and the vaguest resemblance of a handhold and pulled herself up. It took only a few minutes to scale, and she finished it with a smile at winning the imaginary competition with her little brother. “I beat–”

  The small amount of joy drained out of her and puddled on the rock beneath. The cave smothered her very existence with its rank smell. How had she not noticed before? She forced herself to reach out and touch the canvas and its contents. With a shaking finger, she pulled it back and saw a boot and then a leg . . .

  She slid down the rock, oblivious to the shards scraping across her body. Her feet found ground, but not with enough support to stand. She scooted to the back wall as if a demon was chasing her. “Sol,” she yelled. “Sol!”

  34

  Sol had somehow managed to dig himself into an even deeper hole. He was used to being in control, being the one who saved the day and had all the answers. But from the moment, he got a hold of that stuffed toy it had been one misstep after another.

  His attention never left the woman who sat perched on a rock at the edge of the cave, her body trembling but her face resolute. He recognized the symptoms of shock but could not convince her to leave the area and could not carry her down.

  He’d found her in a heap on the cave floor, muttering, “It’s not him; it’s not him.” Sol climbed up to view what she’d discovered. The shelf allowed him barely enough space to kneel next to the canvas-covered something. He pulled back the tarp to reveal a pair of snow boots still in decent condition with enough tread for a few seasons.

  The lack of oxygen would slow down decomposition like it had with the other body. With gloved hands and a gentle touch, he pulled back the tarp on the top half.

  While the face had sunk in on itself, a full head of sandy hair remained. The shorn hair with jagged ends raised the possibility of the body being male. Age would be impossible to narrow down without a more thorough examination, but no gray showed through the strands.

  The skin had sunken from the teeth, which remained in good condition. One front tooth was twisted almost perpendicular to its mate. He thought back to Link Hayes’s six-year-old school photo. His front teeth must’ve recently grown in as they were twice the size of the rest of his teeth. One had grown in at an angle.

  Something that could easily be fixed by braces eventually—if the boy ever had access to a dentist.

  Sol replaced the blanket, taking in the scene and making sure nothing else had been disturbed. He would take no photos and leave no evidence he’d been here. They’d not come in legally.

  He slid back to the mine floor and sat next to the next-of-kin. “Hylia, we need to leave.”

  She shook her head and buried it in her knees, which she drew to her.

  He wrapped his arm around her. “Let’s just get into fresh air and figure out our next move. We can’t stay here long.” The poisoned air of the mine coated his lungs. They needed oxygen. Her body slumped into his, and he helped her to her feet.

  Once out of the mine, she showed no signs of leaving, so Sol grabbed a jacket out of his pack and wrapped it around her shoulders. They were lucky no one else had come up the trail, but that wouldn’t last long as evening set in. The public official inside him couldn’t leave behind a death trap for unsuspecting teens or evidence of what they’d done. He took out a roll of wire in his pack, kept on hand to fix the occasional fence damaged by hikers or wildlife. Luckily, he hadn’t cut the bars clean off. He bent them back and wired them closed.

  Come morning he would report the vandalism. The state would have to send out someone, and the body would be found properly. He didn’t dare call it in as he’d accessed it illegally—and with a civilian no less.

  All of this allowed him to distract himself from what he had to do but really didn’t want to. He knelt in front of Hylia. Her hazel eyes lifted to meet his, pleading with him not to say what he needed to.

  “Link’s teeth.” He hesitated, not sure how to do this. “Was the front tooth twisted around?”

  Her face sank in on itself. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  He reached out and cupped her knees, trying to tether her to some support. “I think so.”

  Hylia didn’t cry. Shock had wound itself through all her emotions. “It was my job to take care of him.”

  “And you did. You raised a kid in the wilderness when you were still a kid. But he was a man, and he had to take care of himself. You couldn’t prevent this.”

  She opened her mouth but no words came out. She could only shake her head.

  “Come on. We have to get down the mountain. It’s Friday night, and people will be coming.”

  She glanced up with vague look of concern. “People are coming?”

  Once he got her on her feet, inertia took over, and she plodded down the trail on his heels. How many times had she been forced to flee in bad shape? She closed her eyes as soon as she sat in the passenger seat of the truck. He wished she would show some degree of emotion.

  He passed the sheriff’s office, but hit the pedal harder. He had told too many lies to face Clint. He needed to come up with a better story; something that would get them in the cave to discover the body sooner.

  As if sensing his thoughts, Hylia stirred. “Can we leave him there?”

  “Not if we want to find out how he died.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her voice faded under the engine and he took his foot off the accelerator to hear her better.

  “It does matter. We have to know if he was killed or if he died of natural causes.”

  “He’ll still be dead.” She sat up and stared at the mountains and the lowering sun. “All that matters is finding my niece. Murderer or no, we can’t leave her with my father. If he finds out more feds are buzzing around the mines, it will send him deeper into hiding.” She turned to face him, her voice filling the void. “We will never find them.”

  She was right. Her father would run if he saw them coming. “What now?” he asked.

  35

&nb
sp; When Hylia’s father had cut off her frostbitten toes, the pain wasn’t as excruciating as she’d expected. What she didn’t know then, but would soon, was that the agony would come, and, when it did, it would topple her.

  She realized the same thing now. She only had a short time while the numbness protected her from grief to save Link’s daughter.

  Once they got back to Sol’s house, she pulled out the notebooks filled with her rough translation of the Zelda books and hoped she’d choose the path that would save her niece.

  “Is that Welsh?” Sol squinted at one of the original lines.

  “Can you read it?”

  “No, just recognize it. It’s a distinct looking language. A lot of the miners came over from Wales and Scotland, and every once in a while, I see it on an old sign. Part of my family came up from Mexico when the mines were starting to die out. We didn’t have good timing.” He flipped through the book. “Have you translated all of it?”

  “No.” She peered over his shoulder. She’d managed to translate several of the phrases, but half of them still eluded her. “The little reading we did was not nearly this complex.” Not to mention, because she didn’t, her father’s code key had changed as well.

  He set down the book. “I know someone who can.”

  “No.” Did he not understand how hard it was to let him in, let alone someone else?

  “What’s left to lose, Hylia? I agree with you about not calling in the big guns. We tell Clint, he’ll tell the feds, and the mountain will be swarming with agents who can’t tell a footprint from a bear trap. But this person won’t have to know anything, only that we’re looking for old mines.”

  I only have one thing left to lose; that’s the problem. Her father’s words echoed back to her. He countered every argument she had about leaving with the simple words, I can’t lose you and your brother; you’re all I have.

  She needed a new path. “Okay. I’ll trust you on this.”

  Catherine Kessler was so excited to meet someone who knew the ins and outs of Lucky Star and the new tunnel that she sped over in her car. “Fifty-six miles per hour.” She bragged like an eighteen-year-old taking her first sip of beer as she walked through the front door.

  “What’s the speed limit?” Hylia asked.

  “Fifty-five.”

  Hylia offered a polite laugh at the bad joke, but paused when she realized Catherine was completely serious.

  Catherine continued in her awkward voice. “Sol says you know the mine we went in up by the Lucky Star.”

  Hylia looked at Sol and back at Catherine, weighing her words and choosing an easy one. “Yes.”

  Sol shut the still-open front door behind Catherine, who hadn’t waited more than five seconds to launch into her questions. “How did you find it? How far have you explored it? Who mined it?”

  Not one question about why they’d gone. Sol was right that this woman wouldn’t be interested in anything that wasn’t mine related.

  Sol interrupted the barrage. “Let’s go into the kitchen, where we can sit.” His living room held only a recliner and a space heater.

  On the card table, he’d laid out a new mining map, marking all the known mines.

  Catherine stepped up to it and shook her head. “This won’t do at all. It’s at least three years out of date.”

  “I don’t think mining has changed much in three years.”

  Hylia swallowed a smirk at Sol’s pricked pride. This was a man who loved his maps.

  “The knowledge has changed. After all, I came here eighteen months ago.”

  “A year and a half doesn’t make–” Hylia jabbed him with an elbow, and he visibly swallowed that argument and folded up his map.

  Catherine laid out her own map. Other than lines outlining the mountains and roads, most of it had been hand drawn with intricate detail. Mines, trails, drainages, were all highlighted in differing colors and labeled with capital letters.

  Catherine turned her attention to Hylia. “How splendid about finding a new mine.” Catherine spoke like a professor in a movie. “Please, tell me everything.”

  Hylia took a step back, and Sol stepped in. “Hylia went in as a child with a family member who’s since passed. She won’t know much.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.” Hylia suspected she referred not to the family member dying but her own lack of knowledge. “Wait, that wasn’t the body we found, was it?”

  “No, of course not,” Sol said. “I meant years ago.”

  “That’s odd that two separate people would know about the abandoned mine but not me. Hylia, do you think the body is related to someone in your family? A missing relative perhaps?”

  “No.” Hylia’s glare at Sol could’ve taken down a charging bear. He’d promised her Catherine’s interest wouldn’t extend beyond the cave.

  “What we were hoping is that you could help us find some other mines that may have been abandoned.”

  She gestured to the table. “Everything I know is there. I call it my brain.”

  Both he and Hylia stepped up to the table. “Here,” he said, pointing to the far right. “This is where the offshoot of Lucky Star is.”

  Hylia examined it without a word for a full minute. “There’s a meadow here where some of the mine’s tailings were. We camped there in the summer. I don’t recall another cave in the vicinity.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Tell me all the history you know about the mine,” Catherine said.

  “I don’t know much about the original miner. He worked the Lucky Star and discovered a vein. He did what he was supposed to do and reported it, but they didn’t think it was worth the cost of extracting it.”

  “He went after it?”

  “They closed that branch after a cave-in. Of course, he caused the cave-in.”

  Catherine’s eyes widened. “Do you know the year?”

  “No, why?”

  “That mine had two significant cave-ins that resulted in closures. One resulted in five deaths. They never found the bodies.”

  Hylia shrugged. She was more concerned with present bodies than past ones. “He went up the canyon opposite the main entrance and bored in from that side. The rooms you saw already existed as an overhang.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “Just a whole lot of death. If he did kill those other miners, he got his.” As did everyone else who dared call that hellhole home.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “I’m not sure. My grandfather knew about him and the mine, and he took up the search. It didn’t lead him to riches either.” Hylia had never met the man. Even her father barely knew him. He’d spent a few summers with him when money grew tight and his mom had to take on more jobs. He’d died when her dad was only seventeen.

  Catherine looked from Sol to Hylia. “What do you want from me? It appears you know more about the mine than me.”

  Hylia tried to ignore Sol’s gaze. She knew he was asking her to take the lead, to trust. “There are others they mined, but we don’t know their exact location.”

  Catherine’s eyes brightened. Her interest made Hylia both deeply uncomfortable and a little hopeful. “And you need help finding them?”

  Hylia fished out the notebook and found the pages she’d struggled with the most. She’d put the words in order, but they still didn’t make sense.

  “It’s Welsh,” Catherine said in an instant. “Is this from the miner?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It has to be,” she said more to herself. “But it’s rough sounding.” She turned a page and began reading out loud. “There’s random sentences with no connection to each other.”

  Sol’s phone range. Hylia jumped at the still unfamiliar noise, but Catherine didn’t look up from the folding chair she’d placed herself in.

  He picked it up on first ring and took it in other room. His first words lingered in the kitchen. “What’s he doing here?”

  36

  Sol left the women, who apparently did n
ot require his help, at his house. He’d never been outdone as much as he had in the last two weeks by those two.

  When Clint called wanting to talk to him, Sol took all of about thirty seconds to jump in his truck and head to the sheriff’s office. He did not need law enforcement showing up at his house.

  He pulled into the gravel driveway, spinning more than a few rocks. His driving reflected his mood. Clint would pick up on that like the sensitive guy he was. He could always tell you the temperature of a lake with one toe in the water. As if on cue, Clint swung open the door and strode to the truck before Sol could put one foot on the ground.

  “You didn’t tell me about the Seattle detective.”

  “He’s here?” Sol jumped out. He’d honestly forgotten he’d called Shea, since he’d been so preoccupied with deliberately keeping Clint in the dark.

  “You didn’t invite him?”

  “No, I called him for background, but he didn’t offer much.”

  “Want to catch me up? As far as I, the sheriff, know, we have no investigation in Washington.”

  “Where’s the detective now?”

  “I sent him off to the hotel with the promise you’d go over immediately, but first, you will catch me up.”

  Sol took a breath to buy some time. “Why don’t you make a bad cup of coffee, and I’ll get you up to speed.”

  They sat on a couple of lawn chairs someone had put out behind the office long enough ago they were more rust than chair. The office didn’t have an air conditioner, which didn’t matter most days, but occasionally the heat forced them out.

  “That APB I put out on your Hylia brought back some information.” Clint would be mighty surprised to find out exactly where that woman was at that moment.

  Sol shifted uncomfortably on the metal chair in a way that had nothing to do with its lack of padding. “Find anything?”