by Cindy Myers
“Did you get everything worked out?” Lucille asked.
“I’m going to do a special project,” he said. “On mining in the Eureka district. I’ll present it to the class when school starts next fall.”
At his age, Lucille would have seen classwork over the summer as punishment, but Lucas seemed pleased with the idea. “Whose idea was this?” she asked.
“Mr. Brewster suggested it. He thought since I was so interested in the subject, I should share my knowledge with the class.”
“Did you apologize to him?” Lucille asked.
“I said I was sorry I called him out in front of the class. We agreed next time I thought he was wrong about something, I’d talk to him after class. Man-to-man.”
She glanced at the teacher again, who was engrossed in conversation with Olivia, both of them smiling, eyes locked together. He might look like a boy to her, but he’d figured out a way to reason with her obstinate grandson.
Lucas shouldered the backpack. “I have to get to English,” he said.
“I’ll see you tonight, then.” Lucille patted his shoulder awkwardly, then watched him shuffle out the door. He was still thin and long-limbed, but not really as odd looking as she’d thought when they’d first met.
“Are you ready to go?”
Lucille turned and found Olivia next to her, jiggling her keys. “Where’s Mr. Brewster?” Lucille asked.
“He had to get back to class.” Her lips curved in a sly smile, showing no teeth. “He’s coming to take me to dinner later.”
“To talk about Lucas?”
Olivia’s smile broadened. “I’m hoping he’d rather talk about me.”
Chapter 11
Maggie struggled into consciousness, wondering if she was back in college, awakening after a night of partying at the sorority house. Her head throbbed like a sore thumb, and her mouth tasted like a wet doormat. She rolled over and looked at Barb, who laid like a corpse on the other side of the king-size bed, on her back with her arms folded across her stomach, a pink satin sleep mask over her eyes. She looked entirely too serene for a woman who had drunk more than her share of two bottles of wine the night before.
Maggie crawled over and poked Barb in the ribs. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she said.
Barb groaned. “Go away,” she mumbled.
Maggie prodded harder. “Wake up,” she said louder.
“Not now, Jimmy. You know I’m not in the mood before I’ve had my coffee.”
“I love you, Barb, but not in that way.” Maggie shoved her again. “Wake up.”
Barb lifted one corner of the sleep mask and glowered at Maggie with one bloodshot eye. “You look like hell,” she said.
“You look like you’re laid out for the undertaker.”
“God, how much did we drink last night?” Barb draped one arm over her eyes.
“Too much.” Maggie lay back on the pillow, but the room spun dangerously, so she opened her eyes and forced herself up onto her elbows, jaw clenched, fighting nausea.
“It must the altitude,” Barb moaned. “I never get sick when I drink.”
“So it had nothing to do with the two bottles of wine.”
“We should call that handsome Jameso and ask him to bring us coffee.”
“We don’t have a phone, and the last thing I want is for Jameso to see me looking like this.”
“See, you really do care about him.”
“It’s a small town, Barb. If Jameso came up here and found us in bed together looking like something the dog threw up, he could start all kinds of awful rumors.”
“Which do you think would be worse: the rumor about us being lesbian lovers or about looking like something the dog threw up?”
“I’m getting up now. If you don’t come down soon, I won’t save you any coffee.”
Holding on to the stair railing for support, Maggie dragged herself down the stairs to the restroom just in time to lose last night’s dinner in the toilet. Stripping off the old T-shirt and jeans in which she’d slept, she turned on the shower full force and stepped under the scalding flow. Maybe Barb was right and the altitude did make a hangover worse. She hadn’t felt this bad in at least two decades. Even her divorce hadn’t seemed worth working herself into such misery.
Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from the shower feeling slightly more human. She dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that had belonged to her father and thick cotton socks. By the time she had the coffee brewed, Barb had crept down the stairs.
“I can’t believe this is how you repay me for going to all the trouble to come visit,” Barb moaned. Holding her head with both hands as if she feared at any moment it might fall off, she carefully lowered herself into a chair at the table.
“What are you talking about?” Maggie asked. “Repay you how?”
“I drive all the way up here and you get me drunk.” Barb’s voice was wet, as if with tears.
“It was your wine.” Maggie set a cup of coffee and two aspirin in front of her. “Drink that. You’ll feel better.”
Two cups of coffee later, Barb did seem to feel better. She stared out the window across the living room. “This must be what it’s like to go hang gliding,” she said. “Without all the wind and cold and the danger part of it.”
“Other than that, it must be just like it,” Maggie said.
“Oh, sure, be all blasé about it,” Barb said. “For a flatlander like me, it’s really something.”
“It’s really something for a flatlander like me, too,” Maggie said.
Barb turned back to her. “I meant what I said yesterday. You look great. You look . . . happier.”
“I’m not unhappy. I guess you were right. It was good to get away from Houston and Carter and all the memories. This has been a good distraction.”
“Have your learned a lot of good stuff about your dad? Do you know what he was up to for the last forty years?”
“He came to Eureka seven years ago,” Maggie said. “I’ve learned some things about his life since then, but nothing about the time before that. He apparently never talked about it, and there aren’t many clues.”
“What are the clues?” Barb asked. “I love a good mystery.”
“I have a letter from my mom in which she hints that he came to the mountains because Houston reminded him too much of the jungle. The jungles of Vietnam, I guess.”
“What else?”
“That’s really about it. Something happened in the war to upset him or change him so that he felt he couldn’t be a husband and a father anymore.”
“And you have no idea what that was.”
“No idea.”
“What about his life in Eureka? What do you know about that?”
“He made a lot of friends and a few enemies. He could be a great guy and a real son of a bitch. He made his own rules and broke some others. He had money in the bank that no one knows the source of.”
“Oh my gosh. This is so exciting.”
“No, it’s confusing. I don’t know what to think about him.”
“Do you have to think anything? Can’t he just be an interesting character you know a lot of stories about?”
“It would be easier if he could, but he can’t.”
“Because he’s your dad.”
Maggie sighed. “Yeah, because he’s my dad.” She traced one finger around the rim of her coffee cup, around and around, wondering if her dad had drunk from this same cup. In the picture Danielle had had at the memorial, he had a moustache. Carter never had much of a beard and remained clean shaven throughout their marriage. She had no idea what it would feel like to have a man with a moustache kiss her cheek, as a father might have done to say hello or good-bye.
“When I was a little girl, I spent hours and hours imagining what my dad was like,” she said. “What he looked like, what he sounded like, what he’d say to me if he were there. I’d have imaginary conversations with him and tell him about my day, and he’d push me on the swing or take me riding in his C
adillac and buy me hot fudge sundaes from Dairy Queen.”
“A Cadillac?”
She nodded. “A Cadillac. My friend Celia’s grandfather had one and I thought it was the most wonderful car I’d ever seen. So, of course, my father drove one. “
“And bought you hot fudge sundaes.”
“Of course. And gave me silver dollars for my allowance and rode with me on the roller coaster at the fair and walked me down the aisle at my wedding.”
“He did all the things a father is supposed to do for his daughter,” Barb said.
“Yes, and he was perfect.” She glanced at her friend. “I knew reality wouldn’t be perfect, but I didn’t realize the truth could be so unsettling. The more I know about my father, the more I see his flaws. And that makes me wonder which of those flaws he passed down to me.”
“Sweetheart, I understand the arguments for nature versus nurture, but you can’t honestly believe your father passed on a tendency to break rules or get into fights or any of the other unsavory things you’ve learned about him.”
“No, but maybe I do have some of those traits, only they manifest in other ways. He ran away from a marriage and I ran away from my divorce.”
“You didn’t run away from a divorce. You made a fresh start.”
“I spent my whole marriage letting Carter make all the decisions. I almost never spoke up.”
“Which sounds like the opposite of your father, who apparently wasn’t ever afraid to express an opinion.”
“They’re both ways of avoiding responsibility,” Maggie said. “If Carter made all the decisions, it was never my fault when things went wrong. If my dad talked loud enough about how he didn’t like the way things were being done, he divorced himself from the responsibility for the outcome, too. He could stand back later and say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Barb put a hand on Maggie’s arm. “I think all that wine you drank last night hasn’t worn off yet. You are way overthinking this. So let’s start over. What are we going to do this morning?”
Maggie took a deep breath. Barb was right. She was getting worked up over nothing. Her friend was here. It was a beautiful day. She should stop worrying about her father and focus on Barb. “What would you like to do?” she asked.
“I want to see the town,” Barb said. “But first I want to see the French Mistress Mine.”
Maggie blinked at Barb’s pronouncement. “You do know mines are cold, dirty, and underground,” she said. She studied the Michael Kors ensemble her friend had chosen for this morning, complete with matching kitten heels. She tried to picture Barb crawling through some filthy mine tunnel, but it was impossible.
“I’ll change into old clothes,” Barb said. “You must have something I can borrow.”
“There’s a locked gate over the mine entrance. I’m not even sure we can get in.”
“Don’t you have the key?”
“I have a whole bunch of keys. I just don’t know which one opens the lock on the gate.”
“We’ll try them all. And if that doesn’t work, bring a hacksaw.”
Maggie couldn’t hold back a laugh. “I never saw you so anxious to get dirty.”
“I’ve never had a chance to see gold up close and in its natural state.” Barb fingered the gold hoops in her ears. “Maybe you’ll let me chip out a few nuggets, as a souvenir.”
“We don’t even know if there’s gold left in the mine. There probably isn’t.”
“Don’t you want to find out? I’d think you’d be dying to know. Instead, you’re doing your best to talk me—and yourself—out of looking.”
Maggie pressed her lips together. “I just get, I don’t know, nervous whenever I think about it.”
Barb put a comforting hand on her arm. “What are you afraid of? We’re just going to take a look. We won’t do anything dangerous.”
That fear thing again. Maggie took a deep breath. “I guess I’m afraid of being disappointed.” God knows she’d had enough of that emotion to last the rest of her life. “That there won’t be anything of value in the mine and I’ll be the proud owner of a big empty hole in the side of a mountain.”
“Then maybe you can use it to grow mushrooms or raise bats or something.”
“Raise bats?”
Barb shrugged. “I read an article about some guy in Texas who made a fortune selling bat guano out of caves for fertilizer.”
“Bat guano?”
Barb grinned. “Just think. You could be the bat-shit queen.”
Laughter bubbled up despite Maggie’s best efforts to suppress it. “The bat-shit queen!” she repeated between guffaws. “Then Carter could tell everyone his ex-wife was truly bat shit.” As crazy as her life had been lately, it was almost appropriate.
“Gold or guano, what difference does it make if you end up rich?” Barb said.
“Or it could just be an empty hole,” Maggie said, sobering.
“Why would someone bother putting a locked gate over an empty hole?”
“Because it’s dangerous. I’m sure there’s all kinds of liability issues if a hiker or someone got trapped in there.” Maggie shuddered. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes.” Barb gave her a gentle shove. “Now find me some old clothes.”
Half an hour later, the two women started out. Barb wore Maggie’s oldest jeans while Maggie donned a pair of coveralls that had belonged to her father. She had to roll the sleeves and the pant legs up, and had cinched a belt around her waist to gather in all the extra fabric. “All that’s missing is a pair of big shoes and a red nose,” Barb said, surveying her. “You could be the clown at the circus.”
“And you could be the ring leader. I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. I just hope to God no one else I know sees me like this.”
“No one will care how you dress when you’re a millionaire.” Barb picked up the foot-long flashlight Maggie had given her. “Let’s go.”
They started toward the door, but on the porch Maggie turned back.
“What now?” Barb called after her.
“I forgot Winston’s cookies.” She crammed half a dozen Lorna Doones in the pockets of the coveralls. “If he sees us and decides he wants cookies, we’ll have to bribe him to let us pass.”
“And you’re worried being seen in baggie pants will harm your reputation?”
“Winston is my father’s doing, not mine.” Maggie marched past her down the steps.
“And those are your father’s pants,” Barb hurried to catch up with her. “If anyone accuses you of being eccentric, you can tell them it’s in your jeans.”
Maggie groaned. “If you’re going to subject me to bad puns all morning, we can turn around now.”
“It’s almost afternoon,” Barb pointed out. “So get a move on. I want to have a few gold nuggets in time for cocktails.”
As they hiked along the path to the mine, Maggie began to feel a little better. The morning was crisp, but not too cold, and as always the view captivated her. “The tallest peak there is Mount Winston.” She pointed the peak out to her friend. “My dad’s ashes are scattered there.”
“So he’s still watching over you,” Barb said.
A chill breeze blew Maggie’s hair across her face. She turned away from it and raked hair out of her eyes. “He never watched over me in the first place, remember?” she said.
“Have you found any clues as to why he never got in touch?” Barb asked.
“Not really. Maybe he didn’t think he was cut out to be a father.”
They hiked in silence the rest of the way. Maggie began to feel better about the expedition. It would have been foolish to go into the mine by herself, but with Barb things would be all right. As soon as the situation got the least bit uncomfortable, she could count on Barb to want to leave. Maybe later Maggie would hire someone to investigate the mine for her. Someone who knew what they were doing. Someone with more guts than she had.
They stopped in front of the gate. “No trespassing. Violato
rs will be shot. Survivors will be shot again,” Barb read the sign and laughed. “Who is Bob?”
“I told you about him. He’s the old guy who thinks there’s gold in the mine.” She searched through the keys on the ring she’d found in a kitchen drawer. “Which one of these keys do you think is the right one?”
“Just start trying them.” Barb practically vibrated with impatience, rocking back and forth on her heels.
Maggie inserted the first key into the lock. No luck. She repeated the process until the fifth key she tried slid smoothly in. “Houston, we have liftoff!” Barb cried, and grabbed hold of the gate as soon as Maggie slipped the lock from its hasp.
The gate was heavy. It took both women to pull it open, but it swung out quietly, with no ominous creaks and groans. Maggie stared into the opening. A tunnel a little taller than Barb with a smooth, narrow path extended into the darkness.
“This doesn’t look bad at all,” Barb said, playing the beam of the flashlight along the gray rock walls. “No gold, though. It must be farther inside.” She led the way into the tunnel.
Maggie reluctantly followed. She thought of the tourist cave she’d visited near San Antonio a few years ago. She’d been nervous at first about that, too, but had gotten so caught up in admiring the fanciful formations on the walls, ceiling, and floor that she’d forgotten her fright. Maybe this wouldn’t be much different. She didn’t think mining tunnels had formations to look at, but she could distract herself by thinking about her father. He must have spent a lot of time here. What did he see in this mine? What had he discovered here? Was this the source of those mysterious bank deposits?
The tunnel began to slope downward. It also grew narrower, the ceiling lower so that first Barb, then Maggie had to stoop. “My dad must have had to double over to get in here,” Maggie said. She began to feel queasy, her breath coming in short, rapid gasps. Was this what claustrophobia felt like?
They turned a sharp corner. “Watch out,” Barb called. “There’s water on the floor. It’s a little slippery.”
