The other part of the silo was located through a tunnel on the bottom floor of the restaurant. It was a round tunnel that led horizontally through the ground to the actual launching site. The missiles, of course, were long gone. It was a deep silo, approximately 130 feet down and 60 feet across, and debris had been left at the bottom. The stairs were rusting and the entire place smelled like someone’s unwashed laundry.
In a group of six people including Penelope, Rob was their tour guide and said, “We have to pump this place out once a year because the groundwater seeps in. That’s why it’s all muck and crud at the bottom.”
“Do most of the other silos look like this one?” Penelope asked determinedly.
Rob scratched one pit and adjusted his jeans accordingly. “Well, now. One’s a diving park. That’s Valhalla. Ain’t much left there except water. I hear the divers like it just fine, though. Then there’s one that one fella made into his house. I don’t rightly know what he did with the missile part of the facility. Then there’s Mr. Gumbrell, who lives about twenty miles from here and he’s got one on his property, although the missus said something about him up and selling the place.” Rob suddenly looked troubled. “I sure as hell hope the new owners don’t want to make it into a restaurant.”
“Sold it when?” Penelope said, troubled for another reason.
Rob scratched again. Apparently the act helped him think more coherently. “A month, maybe two. Could have been as early as April, I guess. Ain’t no one knows what goes on there now.” His voice lowered. “They say they see dark-colored SUV’s coming and going. So I guess it’s the gov’ment and they done forgot something in that silo.”
Penelope’s eyes went big. But she couldn’t help the comment from spilling out of her mouth. “So I guess they won’t be turning it into a restaurant, huh?”
Rob stared at Penelope as if she had sprouted a second head. Instead of answering her, he pointed out some inane feature of the silo before moving on. Most notably there was the mention of the massive ventilation system that was necessary to keep the air flowing through the silo. He pointed out two of them and said, “There’s five of them that come down here. Every six months or so I gots to go and clear the brush out from around them so that it don’t get clogged up.”
And most important about the extraordinary basement of Missile Rob’s Eats and Treats was that there wasn’t anyone around who remotely resembled Anthony, a seatco, or any of the shadow people. On the four hour drive to the Abilene area, she had come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be more than a day before Anthony noticed his witch’s continued absence. Jessica Quick might suffer as a result of it.
As Jacob had often said, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Or woman.
Penelope had started with the missile silo restaurant because she suspected that it would be more likely to be the place that Anthony was interested in. But clearly there wasn’t anything suspicious around Missile Rob’s.
“So what’s your name, sweetie,” Rob asked as they climbed back up the stairs to the second floor access tunnel. “You don’t seem like the average tourist.”
“Catherine Eddowes,” Penelope answered promptly.
“Eddowes,” Rob repeated doubtfully. “What kind of name is that?”
“English,” she said. “I was named after a great-great-grandmother who died in 1888.”
“Oh,” Rob said. “What’s your interest in silos? You a missile bunny?”
Penelope didn’t laugh. “You have any strange people come through in the last few months, Rob? Someone who really sticks out? Maybe someone who asked a lot of questions about how they dug out the silo?”
Rob took a deep breath as he thought about her question.
“A woman with long black hair and hazel eyes?” Penelope prompted.
“Oh, hell yes,” Rob said. “I remember her real well. I sure hope she ain’t a friend of yours. That woman’s got frost in her veins. She drinks boiling water and pees Frosty’s.”
“But they weren’t interested in your silo, were they?” Penelope persisted.
Rob shook his head. “No, they just asked questions. Weird questions. Shit I didn’t know the answer to and I still don’t. Have I seen anything strange around at night? Have I picked up any funny colored rocks from around the property?” He looked at her suspiciously.
“There was a man with her, who had long black hair, but he wasn’t quite the same,” Penelope said. She glanced up the stairs and saw that the other people in the group had reached the second floor level and were waiting for Rob and Penelope.
“Yeah,” Rob said slowly. “Cold fella. But not like her. God Almighty. I ain’t ashamed to say that woman done scared the pecker out of my peckerwood.”
“How long ago?”
“A month or three,” he said. Rob scratched at an armpit again. “I reckon it was around the time that my wife said George Gumbrell sold his place.” A brilliantly lit light bulb appearing above Rob’s head couldn’t have made his sudden comprehension more obvious. “Hey, you think they bought George’s place?”
Penelope shrugged. She took a moment of pity for the obnoxious man. “And I’m pretty sure they’re not going to open a restaurant.”
Rob sighed with relief and continued up the stairs. “Well, thank Jesus H. Christ for that.”
*
The Gumbrell ranch had been owned by the Gumbrell family for eighty-five years. Located some forty miles east and slightly north of Abilene, it was a sprawling piece of property with three cow ponds, an artesian spring, and an abundance of scrub brush. Trees and big hills were not a part of the ranch. There was the main house, three barns, and ranch hands’ quarters. All were in good condition, and it had been a working ranch, raising and selling cattle until Mr. George Gumbrell had sold it to a corporation. The cattle had been sold off en masse, and as far as the residents of the nearest wide spot in the road could tell, nothing much was going on there.
The wide spot was called Flute and the proprietor of the largest store in town, a gas station/convenience store/rock shop, happily told Penelope that the town was named was after a man’s beloved pet armadillo.
Penelope wasn’t impressed but smiled prettily. “And you can give me directions to the Gumbrell place?”
“Sure,” said the proprietor leeringly, who was a man named Jack Bryne and almost fifty years older than she. “Anything for a perty young thing like you. Say, you looking to get a peep at that missile silo? George once told me that the military done screwed his daddy good when he made that deal. They dug the hell out of the place, even though there was a perfectly good crater there already. They put berms up and all kinds of stuff they said they needed.”
Penelope perked up. “A crater?”
Jack grinned, showing a wealth of tobacco-stained teeth. “Yep. Some folks say it was a meteorite crater. It kind of looked like one. Pretty deep too. I saw it once when I was in my twenties. We used to ride out there in an old Chevy truck and scare the girls.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “That crater was supposed to have haunts out there.”
It suddenly made sense to Penelope. Why did the military need to dig a hole when there was already one on the property they wanted to use? It saved time and money using the crater as the basis for their silo. All they had to do was to fill it up from around the sides with dirt obtained at the site. The government didn’t care about the geological significance of a meteorite impact site. They wanted a missile silo, so they made a deal with George Gumbrell’s father.
Anthony, she realized with sudden clarity, must have been tracking down sites for years. He probably had spoken with geologists and listened to rural legends for clues to the whereabouts of the Tears of the Spirit’s place of origin. He had the analysis of the beads of Nahkeeta’s necklace to narrow down the search and he had. “You ever see anything spooky out there, Jack?” she said.
Jack laughed. “All I ever saw was beer and a whole lot of no’s from the young ladies.”
Penelope nodded with
a tired smile. Then Jack added, “John Rife said he saw things with eyes that glowed in the dark, though.”
“John Rife?”
“That’s the rancher down the way from Gumbrell’s place,” Jack answered. “Tells a story about the Gumbrell place. He came here in the sixties with the Air Force, stationed at that missile silo. He married up with one of the Blanchett girls and stayed put. Said he saw stuff that would make a man’s pubic hair go white.”
Yep. That sounds like the right place, said Penelope’s inner voice. Scary as hell.
“I’m a writer,” Penelope said sweetly, trying to flutter her eyelashes but not too obviously, “writing about old missile silos. So if you wouldn’t mind, could you give me directions?”
Jack pulled out a pad and a pen and said, “Sure ‘nough. I’ll give you directions to John Rife’s place, too. Tell him I sent you. Might get you through the gate.”
“So what happened to George Gumbrell?” she asked while Jack wrote judiciously.
“Went down to Florida to be with his grandchildren. Bought a condo in Palm Beach,” Jack said and added unkindly, “Lucky bastard got a bucketful of money from that company. Rotten bastard. He don’t call. He don’t write. Cashola makes a man uppity.”
*
Two hours later, Penelope was surveying the former Gumbrell property from a ridge she had found by the judicious “try and try again” method. There were dozens of dirt tracks leading off the main stretch of road that Jack had indicated, and some were little more than places where the barbed wire fence had been yanked aside and the brush roughly driven over.
Finally she found a track that led in the right direction and toward a gentle ridge that looked like it would oversee for miles. The sun was headed westward and appeared as though it would give her another two or three hours. Penelope wasn’t happy with the situation but seeing as there weren’t blueprints available from the city planner’s office or a detailed map drawn by a paid informant who had worked in the place for umpteen years, she had to make due.
The silo was located about five miles away from the ranch house and the barns. Briefly she wondered if the senior George Gumbrell had realized what that would have meant to the continued wellbeing of his property if the Atlas had, in fact, been launched from this location.
Dismissing the unnecessary and far too moralistic thought, Penelope studied her objective using binoculars she had brought specifically for that purpose. It didn’t look like much. It sure didn’t look like an ICBM from the Cold War that would have killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet comrades if it had successfully reached its target. As a matter of fact, it looked like one small gray building in the middle of a fenced-off area with a bunch of rusting concertina wire on top of the fence. Two black Suburbans sat off to one side of the fenced-in area. Long berms dotted with sagebrush, and haphazardly growing grasses protected the segment by virtue of their presence. The section had the appearance of something that had been put in decades before and forgotten by nearly everyone.
However, the overgrown berms had been recently dug into, leaving behind the evidence of a reckless shovel. Splotches of dark, freshly turned soil contrasted against the sun-dried earth. Test holes dotted the protective feature like the back of a Dalmatian. Penelope lowered the binoculars for a moment. Why dig there? Why not in the bottom of the silo?
Because the Air Force hadn’t stopped to see what was in the bottom of their ready-made hole. They had enlarged it so they could emplace metal supports and pour concrete where they would. However, it had left a mountain of dirt, and they hadn’t wanted an obvious sign that pointed to their newly constructed nuclear weapon site. So they took the dirt and created protective berms.
And into the berms went the remnants of the meteorite, included in all of the surplus earth. No one had probably looked twice at the fragments. After all, how likely would it have been to have a budding rock hound digging through the bits and pieces?
Penelope was suddenly and perversely glad that Anthony’s search hadn’t simply ended at the point where he had found the locale of the meteor strike. After all, bad guys seemed to always have it so easy.
And what are you? asked her inner voice, Little Bo Peep looking for her lost sheep?
Shrugging, Penelope looked again. Her astute eyes found one air vent and then a second. Both were grossly overgrown with trees and shrubs.
Then she heard something she really didn’t like. It was the sound of someone cranking a round into the chamber of a shotgun. And the someone was standing directly behind her.
*
Jessica Quick came awake with the alacrity of someone who knows her position was precarious. As usual, all was black and nothing particularly made sense. It smelled as though someone had died, but the children had assured her that nothing decaying was in the room. Through the use of a weak electric light bulb strung from the ceiling, one of the children described the room as a large muddy space larger than their playground, constructed of concrete and concrete blocks. The echoes of their voices came back to them as if they were in a cave. There were no windows and no other doors in this room. There was only a rusting miscellany of boxes and long forgotten tools. Besides the lingering smell of decay, there was a certain indication that they were underground, hence all the steps they had initially gone down and had not since ascended again.
Several moth-eaten cots had been placed in the room, and all of the children were sleeping on those while Jessica snoozed with her back against a cold wall. There was a chemical toilet in the back. She had put up a protective blanket the previous day because one of the little boys had a severe case of stage fright. When she had been alone it had hardly mattered.
However, the children had been taken sometime on Monday by two people they had described to Jessica in detail. Clearly, one was the cold woman who had tossed Freddy about as if he were a piece of fluff on her shoulder. The other was a tall man who wore a mask and badly needed some deodorant. Then they had briefly met a third man and some others the children said that their eyes glowed in the darkness like those of cats.
The children, all four of them, Jessica decided, were hysterical. She had done her best to calm them, and eventually they slept.
Someone was fiddling with the door’s locks. Jessica sat up and brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt. She couldn’t see that she had any, but she would make sure that she didn’t. She straightened her hair and composed her face into neutrality. Kidnapped or otherwise, it wouldn’t do to antagonize her captors if she could help it. Common-sense talk often helped a situation. Unquestionably she had talked her deceased husband out of several of his wilder ideas when he was younger. Jessica felt certain that she had often prevented his incarceration.
The door opened, and Jessica felt a cool breeze cross her face. The breeze was inundated with a fresh stomach-wrenching whiff of decomposition. Whatever was dead wasn’t in the room with her and the children. It was outside the room. Jessica would have winced but she deliberately kept herself still.
“We need fresh water,” she said stolidly before the other person could speak. “Fresh water and vegetables for the children. Something with Vitamin C, I think. Perhaps fortified milk. You can’t keep a child in a pit like this and not expect them to suffer as a consequence.”
A strong voice cut her off. She knew that the person who had entered the room was standing in front of her, looking down at her. She also knew that someone else had come into the room. The air of decay was like a stinking wall of death, loitering where the other person was standing. But the one who was watching her so closely ignored her words and said, “You’re very much like your daughter.”
Penelope, Jessica thought. Someone didn’t just happen to grab a blind woman from a casino in Atlantic City and fly her back to Texas. She had rapidly come to that conclusion long before. However, she couldn’t quite understand what her attraction to her captors would be. After all, Jacob had died a long time before, and anyone with a brain could see that money was lacking in the Q
uick household. The only one with any money was…
Penelope. Jessica knew that her daughter had been trained by her husband. She hoped that Penelope would have enough of her mother’s common sense to get out of the risky business of being a thief, but Penelope was good at what she did. And she had her mother to support. Jessica didn’t like that part but hoped that living in a cut-rate community would be less stressful on her daughter’s checkbook. Gradually, Jessica came to realize that Cedars on the Ridge was far from being a cut-rate community. On the contrary, it was one of the most expensive, and Jessica cringed inwardly every time she thought of how her only child was obtaining the money to keep her there. The older woman had begun making plans to leave as soon as possible.
Even Freddy wanted Penelope out of the business. God bless him. Jessica hoped that he hadn’t been hurt too badly. “My daughter,” she said presently.
A chilled finger touched the curve of her cheek. Jessica did flinch then but forced herself motionless. “She has her mother’s looks and her mother’s backbone.”
Her daughter, the thief, had taken something from this man with his impenetrable manner and his stiff words. Something that was very valuable to him, and he was doing what he thought he had to do in order to get it back. Jessica would have glanced at the four sleeping children if she could have, but as she was blind, it would have been a silly thing to do. Instead she said, “Your friend could use a bath.”
“A bath,” sputtered the man almost good-naturedly.
Jessica could sense his movement. He turned to glance at the person standing near the open doorway.
“Tell me, Mrs. Quick,” the man said, looking back at her, “how much does your daughter love you?”
Jessica’s heart dropped. Oh, Penelope. What have you gotten yourself into?
Chapter Thirty-Three
Wednesday, July 16th - Thursday, July 17th
Pinto (slang, origin unknown, probably 1930s American) - a coffin.
“You’re trespassing,” said a forceful voice.
Shadow People Page 31
