Home for the Holidays

by Terry Spear

  * * *

  Deeper into the mine, Meghan saw two men sitting on some timber, watching them approach, with lanterns and pickaxes sitting nearby. They were wearing old jeans and suspenders, wool plaid shirts, and boots, their clothes and bearded faces covered in dust. One was wearing a torn piece of bloodstained cloth around his head.

  They looked perfectly real and not like spectral beings. She assumed they were two of the miners’ ghosts. “Are either of you Alvin?” she asked, forgetting that most likely neither Peter nor CJ could see the spirits. Maybe CJ could.

  They glanced at her and then in the direction she was looking.

  “I am.” The fairer man with the bandage wrapped around his head frowned. “You can see us? And hear us?”

  “Alvin?” Meghan’s heart raced, and she hoped this was Chrissy’s former boyfriend.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m Meghan. My sisters and I have renovated the Silver Town Inn. Chrissy was working there.”

  Alvin’s jaw dropped. “She died.” He said the words as if he expected Meghan to say he was mistaken. “I went to her funeral.”

  “Yes. But like you are trapped in the mine, she’s trapped at the inn. She wants to…hear from you.” Meghan caught herself before she said “see” him. She was excited to see Alvin and sorry that the men’s spirits were stuck down here.

  “You’re the first person who’s seen us,” the darker-bearded man said. “The first. I’m Oliver Fraser.” Oliver’s arm was in a makeshift sling, and he favored it as if his arm still hurt.

  “I’m sorry this happened to both of you.” To Alvin, she said, “If I can, I’d like to help you somehow connect with Chrissy. Then maybe you’ll find your final resting place.”

  Oliver snorted. “We ain’t leaving this place, sister. We’ve tried. We don’t know for how long, but we’ve tried every day now. The two of us got stuck here. The others left, but later there was another cave-in. Fifteen more men died. They visited with us, and we got to catch up on what was going on in the wolf pack. Though a couple of them weren’t wolves.” He smiled a little evilly. “They finally believed we could shift.”

  “Do you? Shift?” Sometimes Meghan and her sisters saw ghostly wolves, but mostly the ghosts they saw were in human form or strictly human.

  “Had to. We would’ve never proved to them we’re lupus garous otherwise. Besides, running as a wolf is in our blood. We scared them to pieces, but we would never have convinced them if we hadn’t. Then they all left.” Oliver let out his breath with frustration. “We’ll never get out of here.”

  “I’d do anything to see Chrissy again,” Alvin said, getting back on point.

  “What would you like to tell Chrissy?” Meghan asked him.

  “I want to tell her how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for her at the very end. That I hadn’t mated her beforehand. I love her, and I never felt that way about anyone else. I was going to ask her to mate me on Christmas Eve. I…I wish I had mated her. I will never stop loving her. It would be my fondest wish if I could see her again.”

  “If you have something you were going to give her, maybe for Christmas, I can tell her what it was.” Meghan had no idea how she could get them together, but maybe she and her sisters could come up with some kind of plan.

  “I bought Chrissy a silver locket with a small sapphire,” Alvin told her. “She’d been admiring it at a shop. I had the shopkeeper put it on layaway for me afterward, and I was paying on it every month. Chrissy had the prettiest blue dress, and it was the same color. She wore the dress when I took her to the tavern for dinner one night.”

  “I’ll tell her you planned to give the locket to her for Christmas.”

  He gave a sad kind of smile. “She died before I could give it to her. She wore it and her blue dress when they placed her in the coffin.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Meghan said. It was so difficult seeing ghosts who could still feel angst for losing their loved ones. It was like being stuck in a rabbit’s hole.

  “My parents were already gone when the accident happened,” Alvin said. “Tell Chrissy I want to join her. To be with her however I can.”

  “I will,” Meghan said.

  “We wondered why all of you were down here wandering around. We hoped you’d come to help us out, but there’s been no help for us in the past. We even saw Scrapper,” Alvin said.

  “Damn his soul,” Oliver said. “He came through here a while ago, and Alvin and me said a few choice words to him, but he walked right past us without saying a word.”

  Alvin said, “We did, on account of he set the blast that sealed us in.”

  Meghan frowned. “On purpose? Or by accident?”

  “He did it on purpose. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t,” Alvin said.

  Meghan was shocked to learn the mining accident might not have been accidental. No one in the pack had ever called it anything but an accident, as far as she knew. She was certain there’d be hard feelings if they learned someone had sabotaged the mine and killed the men.

  “So Scrapper is down here with the two of you?” If he was and he had collapsed the mine on purpose, it would serve him right to have died and be stuck here.

  “No, ma’am. He made it out. I ran toward Scrapper to stop him, but the kid threw a wrench at me and it struck me in the head. I collapsed. Before I could shake off the injury, Scrapper set off the explosion. We’d hoped he’d perished too. We had no way of knowing. Though neither of us has seen him down here in all this time, stuck like us. Unless the Lord above took him in. I can’t imagine why he would have, though.”

  Meghan asked Peter and CJ if they knew a man named Scrapper who’d been a pack member. What if he was still a member of the pack, and no one had ever known he wasn’t just a survivor but a murderer?

  “I don’t know anyone named Scrapper,” Peter said.

  CJ didn’t either.

  “His real name was Ralph Rollins, if that helps,” Oliver said.

  Meghan’s heart raced, and she felt a little light-headed. “Ohmigod. He’s the one we’re looking for. Did he come through here recently?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” Oliver said.

  Meghan turned to Peter. “Do you have a picture handy of Rollins’s mug shot?”

  “Yeah, here.” Peter pulled out his phone, found the picture, and handed her the phone.

  She offered it to the two ghosts to view.

  The men stared at the phone. “That’s some kind of a new contraption. But yeah, that’s him. I mean, when we first seen him come through here, we weren’t sure. He’s aged a lot, and he’s wearing a heavy beard. He was sixteen and barely had any whiskers last time we seen him. He’d been grumbling under his breath about having to return here. Hell, pardon my language, miss, but he should have died here like the rest of us,” Alvin said.

  Oliver agreed with him.

  “They identified Rollins. He came this way,” Meghan told Peter, her heart pounding. “And he was from your pack.”

  “Hell, I don’t remember this guy at all.” Peter looked at the mug shot again.

  CJ looked at it too. “Couldn’t say that I do either.”

  “He lived out a way and had a stepfather who abused his mother and died mysteriously. Some say it was a human hunting accident. Some say his wife finally had enough of his beatings and shot and killed him,” Oliver said.

  Meghan told Peter and CJ what Oliver had shared with her. “Maybe that’s why Rollins is abusive to women, because his stepfather had abused his mother and that’s all Rollins knew.”

  “Hell,” both Peter and CJ said at the same time.

  “No one really knew the kid that well. He had a chip on his shoulder as big as the state of Alaska, kept picking fights as if he wanted to prove he could fight like his stepdad. It’s one thing to fight men like us, another to fight a woman. Anyway, I live
d in a cabin a mile beyond his, so I knew the situation. I told him if he wanted to fight someone, he should take on his old man and end it. He needed to protect his ma,” Oliver said. “No one would have faulted him for it.”

  “What did Rollins say to that?” Meghan asked.

  “He said she deserved all the beatings she got. Scrapper was an ornery bugger. I’ll give him that. He was only sixteen, but he was a hard worker or the boss would have canned his…um, fired him.”

  How awful. She was glad at least the stepdad had been stopped.

  “I don’t remember any Rollins family,” Peter said.

  “I don’t either,” CJ agreed. He was looking on his phone for something.

  “They didn’t get involved in any pack functions. They kept to themselves,” Oliver said. “His biological father was a drinker, and he froze to death out in the wilderness one night when he’d drunk too much and was checking his traps, so the story goes. None of them had been with the pack earlier on. She and the boy moved into the area after his father had died, and then she picked up the new wolf, a drifter, when Scrapper was around ten. The stepfather was just as abusive as her first mate. He was a hunter and trapper too. Seemed she couldn’t find a decent wolf to be with.”

  That was so sad. Maybe Rollins would have turned out all right if he hadn’t lived through all that he had. “You didn’t report it to the pack leaders?” Meghan asked. That was some of the importance of a pack, to take care of rogue wolves.

  “The old man threatened to kill me and mine if I said anything to anyone about it, the first time I saw his wife all bruised and battered. He said she’d fallen down when she was collecting wood, clumsy as an ox. The next thing I knew, he was dead,” Oliver said. “So there was nothing to be done about it.”

  Alvin nodded.

  Meghan frowned. “So Ralph Rollins—Scrapper, the son—took off and left the area after the mine collapse.”

  Oliver shrugged. “I haven’t been out of the mine since the explosion. He could’ve been living in the area all this time while we’d been stuck down here, for all we know.”

  “Okay.” She explained everything to Peter and CJ.

  “I can’t believe one of our own did this. The pack will be furious over it. I can’t get reception on my cell phone, or I’d let Darien know,” Peter said.

  “Yeah, I was just trying to call out, but mine isn’t working either,” CJ said.

  “When did Rollins come this way, and has he passed back through here?” Meghan asked.

  “Not sure,” Oliver said, scratching his head. “We don’t sit here all the time. We keep looking for a way out. If we could have, we would… Well, I guess we couldn’t do much about it, but I’d sure like to send him down one of them shafts.”

  She was surprised Rollins would want to come back to the territory for fear someone else might recognize him. Then again, if no one knew he’d caused the cave-in, he wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

  “Wouldn’t his name have been included as one of the men who made it out?” Meghan asked Peter and CJ.

  “Yeah. Which makes me suspect he was thought to have died. Maybe they didn’t find his body, and the two men who were rescued didn’t know he’d made it out,” Peter said.

  “Why would he do something like that?” Meghan asked the ghosts.

  “We learned he was being physically abusive to his ma. We figured we’d take care of him. We thought maybe he’d overheard us talking about it,” Oliver said.

  “Take care of him, how?”

  “Send him down a mine shaft. Only, he got the best of us instead. I know we should have told our pack leaders about it, but we take care of one of our own. The miners do, I mean,” Oliver said.

  “Okay.” Meghan told Peter and CJ what Rollins’s motive had been for killing the other miners.

  Both men shook their heads.

  Then she said to the ghosts, “We’ll do everything in our power—my sisters and I, that is—to help you leave this place.”

  The men glanced at each other, but when they faced her, they wore haunted expressions, proving their skepticism.

  Peter was concentrating on the area Meghan was addressing when she reached over and squeezed his hand, hoping he wasn’t feeling left out by what she could do. She wondered if CJ was seeing or hearing any of this, but he didn’t appear to see the men either. He had more ability than anyone else she’d met in Silver Town, though rumors had surfaced that CJ’s cousin Tom had seen Chrissy too.

  But this business about Rollins being a former pack member? She was certain the whole pack would rally together to take him down now that they’d learned he was a rogue who’d taken their own pack members’ lives. At least she hoped they would.

  “Yeah. Scrapper, damn his soul. He came this way. Don’t know how long ago. Time means nothing to us down here. I couldn’t believe it when I saw him, right as rain, except for the bloody claw marks on his cheek. It had to have happened recently, or they would have disappeared by now,” Oliver said.

  “Claw marks? Wolf or human?” she asked.

  “I figured a woman clawed him good. Wouldn’t put it past him to be beating up another woman, and she got a few claw marks in.”

  Meghan worried one of the women who had testified against him at trial had been fighting for her life against Rollins. Or maybe someone else he’d picked up once he was released from prison. Too bad the ghosts couldn’t take care of Rollins themselves. Especially since they had good reason to end his miserable life.

  Alvin raised his fingers to the bloody spot on his forehead. “He done that to me. Scrapper. If only I’d been quicker, I could’ve stopped him. Some of the ghosts blame me for the cave-in, but it wasn’t me spouting off about killing him for what he was doing to his ma. Not that I didn’t agree with the others, but they should have been quieter about it and just done it. We all figured, after we were stuck down here, that he had overheard some of the talk. If Wendell, another of the men who had been down here that fateful day, had shoved him down a shaft when he had the chance, like he was supposed to, none of us would have died down here. We’d be up there.” He pointed to the ceiling of the mine. “Living among the rest of you.”

  “And Scrapper, the pissant that he was,” Oliver said, “would have been roaming the tunnels instead of us with no one able to hear or see him, except for you. That would have been a good end for a bad wolf.” Oliver frowned. “Is that why all these men are down here? Looking for him?” He seemed to be upset that they weren’t there to save him and the other lost soul.

  “I came to look for Alvin. I didn’t know Rollins had been down here. Rollins attempted to murder a woman, and I called the police on him. Now he wants to kill me for it.”

  Alvin’s blue eyes narrowed. “He’s still a rogue wolf then. I’m not surprised. If I could, I’d send him down one of the shafts without hesitation. See how he likes being dead.”

  She nodded. “He will be…dead, one way or another, as soon as we can catch up to him, before he hurts any more people.”

  “I…I miss my family. Can you let them know I miss them?” Oliver asked.

  This was the really hard part. Telling family members who didn’t believe in ghosts that their departed loved ones wanted to have a word with them. His family might not even be alive.

  “What are their names?”

  “Clementine and Jessup Fraser. My dad was supposed to work in the mine that fateful day, but he was sick. I’m glad. I would’ve hated it if my mom had lost both of us at the same time. I never did see Dad working down here after that.” Oliver frowned. “I hope they’re not gone.”

  “Clementine and Jessup Fraser?” Meghan asked CJ and Peter.

  “They live out of town,” Peter said. “Are you speaking to their son?” He sounded amazed to learn of it.

  “Yes.” She turned her attention to Oliver. “I’ll speak with th
em as soon as I can.” She wanted to resolve Alvin and Chrissy’s issue first, if she could.

  “Can you bring them down here to see me?” Oliver asked.

  “I’ll try. They might not be able to see you, but I can share what you wish to speak with them about. They might not believe that I can see you or that I can hear you.”

  Oliver nodded. “No one sees me. Except for Alvin. And you.”

  “I’ll bring them, if they’ll come.”

  “I want to see them. It’s been my fondest wish, besides getting out of here.”

  That could be the key to releasing his spirit! Bringing his family here to say their goodbyes. If she could convince them to come.

  At times like these, she felt really good about her gift. She shared what she and Oliver had discussed with Peter and CJ, and then she told the ghosts she’d return.

  Afterward, she, Peter, and CJ began to make their way out through the cave-in rubble.

  Peter asked, “Do you want me to take you to the inn now?”

  “Yeah, thanks. If I can get this resolved with Chrissy, I want to see the Frasers afterward.”

  “All right. Oliver’s parents are wolves, naturally, or they wouldn’t still be alive. They may not believe you,” Peter said.

  “We get that all the time. I have to do it for Oliver’s sake, and hopefully his parents will consent to meet with him. It gets really emotional sometimes. They buried him a long time ago. It’s like dredging up the hurt all over again. But it could be the key to setting him free. Did you want to call off dinner?”

  Peter frowned at her. “No way in hell.”

  CJ chuckled.

  Meghan smiled. “Good.”

  Chapter 8

  Peter couldn’t believe Rollins had been one of their own. The miners should have told the pack leaders about the abuse at home. They would have taken care of Rollins’s stepdad so he wouldn’t have hurt anyone any further, and maybe Rollins would have turned out all right. Maybe not, though. But they would have dealt with him before it escalated to the murder of so many men.

  Peter got on his radio to warn the other men in the tunnels about what they had discovered before they left the mine. “Rollins has been down here. And he’s one of ours—a miner who apparently set the explosion causing the cave-in during the first incident. On purpose, not by accident.”