Bone Rattle

by Marc Cameron

  “I’m okay with spiders,” Maycomb said. “It’s crawling around in tight spaces that creeps me out.”

  “Sorry,” Horning said. “There can be more than a little of that.”

  Horning steadied Kat, the toffee-colored dog, in his lap as he spun the chair to access his computer. A couple of clicks of the mouse brought up a sectional map of a large mine. Viewed from the sides, the multiple layers, connected by up-and-down shafts, resembled a maze.

  “By far, most places are big enough to stand up and walk in,” he said. “But some, especially if you want to hide, might mean getting down on your hands and knees.” He clicked through a couple of photos, stopping on one that showed a rock face at the end of a tunnel. A closer look revealed a two-foot gap at the bottom of the wall. “This used to be open to shoulder height,” he said. “But there was some shifting over the last couple of years and now it’s all but blocked. There’s a big stope on the other side, but you have to belly crawl to get there.”

  Maycomb squinted, scrunching up her face, looking like she might be sick to her stomach. “That’s… groovy…”

  Cutter leaned forward to get a better look at the screen. “A stope?”

  “Open room where the ore body widened out,” Horning said. “There’s a big one on the mountain above the old hatchery you’re talking about. You have to rappel over a hundred feet to get into it. You could easily fit four or five of these houses inside that one.”

  “Those tailings should be fairly easy to locate,” Cutter said.

  “I’ve got maps,” Horning said, tapping the side of his head. “Up here, but also on my iPad. I’ll drop them to your phone if you want.”

  “Thanks,” Cutter said. “That will give us a start anyway.”

  Horning rubbed his pup behind the ears and gave the computer mouse a click, bringing up a video. “Here’s what you can expect.”

  Both Cutter and Maycomb crowded closer to the monitor. Cutter took more mental notes of the slide-prone earth around the entry, the old timbers, low-hanging rock, the dripping water, and the complete darkness at the edges of the headlamp’s beam. This particular mine – Horning called it an adit – was a simple tunnel, head high in most places, that ran straight into the mountain. “What are these pockets in the wall?” Cutter asked.

  “Looking for other veins of gold?” Maycomb said.

  “Good guess,” Horning said. “But those are where miners would stand to get out of the way of the blast when they were blowing more rock.”

  “Are you kidding?” Maycomb gasped. “They’re what? Three or four feet deep?”

  “Not kidding,” Horning said. “Remember, we’re talking the turn of the last century, the nineteen hundreds. Guess they weren’t too savvy about overpressure dangers to your innards. They just wanted out of the way of flying rock.”

  “Is this one behind the hatchery?” Cutter asked.

  “No,” Horning said. “This is up Perseverance Creek. I’ll drop you the maps of the ones behind the hatchery too.”

  “Thank you,” Cutter said. “If you have a paper map as well, I’d pay you for it. Sort of a sailing thing. I navigate with GPS, but like to have paper charts.”

  “Smart,” Horning said, startling the dog as he gave the side of his plaster cast an impatient smack. “I wish to hell I was going with you. I know every inch of those mines. There are two or three there that would make for good hideouts, I think.” He looked up, seized with a sudden thought. “You’ll need gear. I’m happy to loan you some if you want. From the sound of it, you’re a two- or three-light guy.”

  “Or more,” Maycomb said.

  Horning shooed the dog out of his lap and got up to putter around the room. “I like to carry at least two headlamps and a handheld flashlight.” He began to gather helmets, lamps, and climbing rope. “You ever rappel?” he asked Cutter.

  Cutter gave him a thumbs-up. “Army Ranger. I taught high-angle tactics for a bit.”

  “Good enough for me,” Horning said. He handed them each a climbing harness to try on and then looked through a box on his desk until he came up with a carbon monoxide detector and an O2 meter.

  “You have to remember,” Horning continued, “it’s a kinetic environment down below. You’d think solid as rock – but things are always moving. ASAR – Alaska Search and Rescue – will come and get you off a mountain, but they don’t do mines. PD, fire department, the Troopers, Forest Service – none of them train to do mines rescue.”

  “So,” Maycomb said. “Who do people call when they get in trouble – say, if someone is overdue from going into a mine?”

  Thomas Horning rubbed a hand through his beard and then gave his dog another scratch behind the ears.

  “Me.”

  Chapter 41

  Donita Willets played the beam of her headlamp across empty tin cans, half-melted candles, and rotting dynamite crates – all of it over a century old. She couldn’t help wondering if her bones might stay in this same dark hole until they, too, would be considered antique.

  Levi had taken her to explore a couple of the other old mines above the hatchery, but never this place. He called it the Great Hall, and even he rarely came here. He’d always said he wanted to keep it secret, between himself and the few others who already knew about it. Too many trips to the opening would beat a trail into the fragile vegetation, and then everyone would be able to locate the otherwise unremarkable hole behind the unremarkable rock on the side of the mountain.

  She’d thought him a little paranoid. This was too tough a hike for most vandals or the sort of people who dropped McDonald’s cups and beer cans on the ground. But now she was glad he’d left the place hidden.

  Levi had tearfully gotten her settled before shimmying back up the rope, alternately sliding each ascender, and using the attached loops to slide step by step. He seemed to dangle there forever, but each foot upward left her feeling more and more alone, a tiny and insignificant dot at the bottom of this enormous space. He’d lowered another case of water down – she’d need that – and left the rope and ascenders hanging in place, in case she needed to get out.

  Being stuck here terrified her, but it was better than the alternative.

  Donita Willets wasn’t a large person to begin with, barely five feet tall. A hundred five pounds after a big breakfast. But the cavernous rock stope made her feel miniscule. As a child, she’d imagined mines would be quiet, tomb-like. In reality, they were a riot of noise – if you took the time to be still. Rocks fell from the ceilings and skittered down ledges at a near-constant pace, clattering to the piles of other rocks that had fallen before them. Water oozed from cracks and pores in the ceiling, tapping against wet stone or dripping into black pools. Once in a while, the mountain itself groaned, quietly, like it didn’t really want to bother her, but needed to crack its back or move a leg or something.

  Donita wore her raingear, slept with the rock helmet on her head, and hummed songs her grandmother had taught her in order to stay relatively sane. Water dropping into puddles sounded like Raven’s call. Donita’s mother had been Raven moiety, so Donita was Raven, and she found the sound comforting.

  The beam of her headlamp was powerful enough to cast shadows over the bumpy stone walls, but the black around the edges swallowed the light. She’d walked the entire cavern as soon as Levi yelled goodbye, noting the old shovels, ladders, buckets, and other equipment the miners had simply abandoned in the hole when they quit digging. It was incredibly interesting, an underground museum from 1908, but mainly, she wanted to make certain she was the only one down there.

  In the dark.

  It was easy to see why Levi called it the Great Hall. All the mines he’d taken her to before had been relatively straight tunnels in the rock. What people thought of when they pictured a mine, something out of a movie with timber supports on the low-hanging ceilings and a stope that was maybe the size of a large bedroom. The Great Hall looked bigger than all those other mines put together. It had taken over half of thei
r 150-foot rope to rappel in. There was a small ledge about fifteen feet below the entrance, and then an undercut that left them dangling on a free rappel with no place to put their feet for the last fifty until they reached a pile of clattering shale that gradually sloped another twenty feet to the relatively flat floor. Levi described the shape of the Great Hall as looking like a semitruck and trailer. Donita thought of it more as a gigantic dung beetle, like she’d seen in National Geographic, with the arched ceilings and sloping walls of the ovular Great Hall forming the largest part of its body. A relatively smaller bubble comprising the beetle’s head was opposite the end from where they’d rappelled down. The larger space was an open cavern over a hundred feet at its tallest point, half again as long, and ninety feet wide. A rough, oblong dome, it relied on its shape for support. The twenty-foot ceilings of the beetle’s head had four support stone columns evenly spaced in the forty-by-forty-foot room. These columns had once been more robust, thicker, but greedy miners had chipped away at the gold-bearing diorite, “robbing” the very rock that kept the roof from caving down on their heads, leaving the remaining columns small enough now that Donita could almost get her arms around them.

  There was a crystalline-blue pond at the far end of the beetle’s head. Roughly twenty feet in diameter, a narrow ledge ran around the far end, where the beetle’s mouth would be. Even with her powerful headlamp Donita couldn’t see the bottom of the pool. She could tell it was a flooded tunnel, leading to God knew what labyrinth of other shafts and stopes. The water looked pure enough to drink, but she didn’t dare risk the cyanide, arsenic, and other toxic minerals.

  She’d brought plenty of batteries, a small gas stove, toilet paper, a lightweight cot to keep her off the rocks, a sleeping bag, some books, drawing materials – she loved to draw – and enough water for two weeks if she was careful. Her food would last twice that with her present appetite, which was basically nonexistent.

  It was hard to think about eating with men like Ephraim Dollarhyde and his musclebound stooge, Childers, hunting you. She’d seen them around Levi’s dad before, along with Harold Grimsson. That guy was evil, but he was money evil. Linking up with drug cartels evil. Pushing heroin on the streets of Juneau evil. He hurt people who got in his way, or who could rat on him – but it was always a business deal. Dollarhyde and Childers had that look in their eye like they would hurt you for the fun of it, just to listen to you squeal.

  Levi didn’t admit it, but his dad had been strung out on pills most of the time since Levi’s mom died – stressed from politics and the secrets that went with it. The senator hardly ever noticed when Donita hung out up in Levi’s room, waiting for him to come home from work or run to the store. Their house was nice, more comfortable than her little apartment, and Levi’s dad was rarely ever there. But then she’d overheard him talking to Dollarhyde and his creepy pal Childers. The conversation had been about heroin and the drug trial that was all over the news. That had roused her curiosity enough that she did some snooping in the senator’s office after he left the house. She’d listened in on a couple of calls between him and Grimsson, all about some road project he’d pushed through the process, and that Grimsson was the money behind the heroin in the Hernandez brothers’ boat. Levi’s dad must have wanted leverage, because she caught him spouting stuff on his voice recorder after the call with Grimsson that no self-respecting politician would ever want put on any kind of record.

  Donita thought of going to the police, but with Senator Fawsey dirty up to his eyeballs, corrupt cops weren’t exactly out of the realm of possibility. That’s why she tried to talk to Lori Maycomb, that reporter she’d met at a couple of AA meetings with her mother. Maycomb had a pleasant radio-voice. Trustworthy.

  Then Donita had heard Levi’s dad talking to Dollarhyde about a murdered archeologist out at the Valkyrie mine. She’d known from the start it was dangerous, but she didn’t think anyone would get killed. That kind of stuff only happened in the movies, not in sleepy little Juneau. She’d panicked when she couldn’t get through to Maycomb and decided to go straight to the US attorney. He’d be interested in Grimsson’s connection to the guys on trial.

  But someone, probably Childers, had blown the attorney away right before she was supposed to meet him. Donita and Levi had driven up just as the brunette woman had walked out toward the shrine. They’d waited, heard the faint pops of suppressed rifle fire. The cops had kept all the details to themselves, but Donita knew the US attorney and a woman were dead, murdered by shots that had been meant for her.

  She’d wanted to run, to go as far and as fast as they could, but Levi said it was too risky. They’d just come after her. He was a good man, but a horrible liar. She doubted he could pull off the story about her accidental drowning. Best case scenario, the cops would think he murdered her.

  In the end, it seemed better to hide than to run. So she trusted Levi to become a better liar overnight.

  And here she was.

  She’d looked behind every support pillar twice, checked the clear water to make sure there wasn’t something lurking there. Found the small alcove that the miners had used for a privy a hundred years ago. Then, she’d set up her cot in the back of the Great Hall, near where it necked down to the beetle head, on a spot with the fewest chunks of fallen rock.

  She tried to read, lit a candle for emotional comfort – and to make sure she still had plenty of oxygen – but her mind began to play tricks on her. Her grandmother had told her too many stories of demons and witches and wily shape-shifting land otters and frogs who kidnapped young girls and took them to their underwater homes. The first time Levi had taken her to a mine he’d told her about Tommy knockers, little green goblins who lived deep in recesses of the mountain, sometimes evil, sometimes nice. Sitting there on her cot, a tiny dot in a massive man-made cave, it was hard to believe anyone who lived in this oppressive darkness could be anything but evil.

  She sat on the edge of her cot, clutching her knees to her chest, sobbing, quietly, because she didn’t want to disturb the mountain any more than it wanted to disturb her.

  She might eventually lose her mind in this self-imposed solitary confinement, but consoled herself that her cell was big and not some cramped hole where she had to crawl around on her hands and knees. The entrance was well hidden. As long as they didn’t know she was down here, she was safe.

  If Ephraim Dollarhyde ever figured out where she was hiding, he wouldn’t have to waste time and energy rappelling down to look for her. All he had to do was drop the rope and leave her stranded until she starved to death – or blow the entrance and shut her up for good.

  Chapter 42

  Cutter called USFS LEO Bobby Tarrant as soon as he left Tom Horning’s driveway. The hatchery where Fawsey had worked was in Berners Bay. Almost forty miles north by boat from Auke Bay Marina, it was only seven miles from the northern end of the Glacier Highway, the road that led out of Juneau. Cutter hoped to have someone with a Forest Service boat meet him with a skiff at the terminus instead of wasting the time to drive all the way into Juneau.

  Rather than call and argue with Special Agent Beason while he waited for Tarrant to work out the logistics, Cutter contacted Lola and asked her to pass along what he planned to do. UNODIR – Unless Otherwise Directed – he planned to go straight to the abandoned hatchery and see if he could pick up Levi Fawsey’s tracks. UNODIR meant he was informing FBI task force command, but due to exigency, moving forward without permission. There was no time to sit around and debate this. Much better to err on the side of doing something.

  Tarrant came through. A white pickup pulling an aluminum skiff rattled through the trees at the Echo Cove boat launch twenty minutes after Cutter and Maycomb got there. USFS Ranger Karen Sakamoto didn’t park, but made a wide U-turn and expertly backed the fifteen-foot Smoker Craft down the ramp in one shot, stopping just short of the water.

  “Sorry I couldn’t get you anything larger,” Sakamoto said, a hint of an East Coast accent in her voice. S
he went around to the back of the skiff, inserted the drain plug in the transom, and detached the metal motor brace that kept the 30-horse outboard from bouncing on the trailer. “This one’s hell-for-stout though, and the little Honda should do well over twenty knots with both of you. You know how to drive a boat?”

  “I do.” Cutter threw his gear over the side. “I appreciate you getting here so fast. Do I need to sign a Forest Service receipt or anything?”

  “Nope,” the ranger said. “This is my personal Smoker Craft. Bobby said you were in a hurry. I already had her hooked up to go fishing later.” She jumped back in her pickup and put the boat in the water. Maycomb held the bowline from the side of the ramp while the boat floated off the trailer.

  Cutter thanked Sakamoto and left immediately, taking the little skiff north along the low, tree-covered hills of Echo Bay. He lost cell service five minutes later, making any further orders from Charles Beason moot. The satellite phone would allow Cutter to communicate, but he’d keep that turned off until he needed it.

  Lola was likely already at Tom Horning’s with Van Dyke, picking up more lights, helmets, and rope. Not the sort of partner to let Cutter twist in the wind, she would follow, whether Beason approved it or not. And anyway, the chief would back whatever they did when she knew there was a life in danger.

  A brisk sea breeze held the rain at bay for the time being, but low clouds still boiled over the mountains. Cutter sat at the back of the skiff, hand on the tiller of the little thirty-horse outboard. The GPS said they were making a solid twenty-one knots with the two of them and minimal gear, which felt even faster in the chop. Enough spray flew over the bow as they raced across the waves that it might as well have been raining. Cutter didn’t care. They were moving forward. That’s what mattered.