The Midwife and the Lawman

by Marisa Carroll

  The Silver Jacks mine had never been large or profitable, and Silverton had flourished as a community for only twenty years or so. It didn’t exist on any maps, and few tourists found their way up here. Even most of Enchantment’s teenagers tended to stay away. It was too far from town to be convenient for a lovers’ lane, and since the way in was the only way out, it was even more inconvenient as a place for underage teens to drink beer or smoke marijuana. The thrill wasn’t worth the price of getting caught.

  A mile or so past the turnoff she rounded a big outcropping of rock and saw the narrow valley that housed what was left of the town. The creek ran along one side of what had once been a street, and dilapidated wooden buildings lined the other side. Here and there one-and two-room cabins with caved-in roofs rose out of the tall grass and young aspens that had grown up around them. Above the town she could see the dark opening of the Silver Jacks mine.

  Devon parked the Blazer off to one side of the track, reached behind her and pulled a small collapsible cooler from the back seat. She lifted the hatch and dug a flashlight out of her midwife’s kit. She would need it if she wanted to look inside the mine entrance. She walked over to the porch of one of the derelict false-fronted buildings and sat in the shade. The sun was warm on her jean-clad legs, and she could smell the scents of dry grass and pine resin in the cool, thin air. She leaned gingerly back against the weather-beaten porch post, testing its strength.

  She listened to the water dance over the stones in the creek bed, watched the sunlight filter through the branches of the cottonwoods that lined its banks and felt a measure of peace. She remembered coming here the summer she was eighteen, trying desperately to understand the dark changes that had come over Miguel when he returned from duty in Somalia. Now, more than ten years later, she understood those changes, what war and death could do to a man. But then she hadn’t been wise, only desperately in love, and his withdrawal had broken her heart.

  She slipped the cooler strap off her shoulder, deciding she’d eat after she explored a little, picked up the flashlight and started walking along the faint path that led to the mine entrance. She wouldn’t go inside, of course—it wasn’t safe—but with the beam of the flashlight she could see well into the interior. She wondered if it was still the same as it had been a dozen years ago, a mine entrance straight out of a Wild West movie, wooden supports framing a narrow, gaping hole in the ground that somewhere not too far inside, ended in a deep drop-off where Teague Ellis had died.

  Devon stopped walking. A cloud had passed over the sun, darkening the little valley, reminding her that daylight ended early here even in the summer and that dangerous strangers might be close by. The sun came out again, colors regained their brightness and the birds their songs. She turned away from the creek toward the mine, letting her curiosity override her caution. The ground before the entrance was devoid of vegetation. Odd bits and pieces of rusted metal lay half buried in the stony ground. A few old barrel staves stuck up out of the dirt like the rib cages of dead animals. Anything of value, including the silver, was long gone.

  Someone had put up a barrier to deter the curious from entering the mine since the last time she was here. A screen of metal mesh, the sort used for a dog run or a schoolyard fence, had been stretched across the opening and secured with heavy wooden two-by-fours nailed to the mine’s supporting posts. But one of the two-by-fours had been pulled away at the bottom corner, and the wire mesh bulged out, leaving an opening big enough for a small person or a large animal to crawl through.

  Had a coyote made the old mine its den?

  Or perhaps a Coyote of the human kind?

  Devon looked down and saw footprints leading into the mine. She stopped moving, stopped breathing. This would probably be a good time to turn around, get back in her car and drive away. Then she heard it. A sound like a dry, racking cough followed by faint sobbing, as though a child were crying, weak and fearful. She looked down at the footprints once more. They were very small.

  Devon refused to listen to the voice of reason that was telling her only a fool would step foot inside that mine with simply a flashlight to defend herself. But she couldn’t ignore a child crying. She jerked on the wire mesh and it moved grudgingly outward, enlarging the opening enough for her to get through without crawling on her hands and knees. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness beyond the oblong area of sunlight just within the opening. A small flurry of movement ahead and a little to the left attracted her attention. “Hello? Who’s there?” The crying stopped, but another bout of coughing broke the quiet. “I won’t hurt you. It’s all right. I’m here to help.”

  She switched on the flashlight and took several steps, almost tripping on a bundle of thin blankets spread over what appeared to be an old mattress. She looked around. The flashlight beam picked out a lawn chair by the mattress, one of the aluminum ones with plastic webbing that folded flat, in the same green-and-white pattern as the one she’d been sitting on at Daniel’s place. Beside it sat a rusty camping lantern and a couple of plastic plates and foam cups. Next to those were two plastic, gallon milk jugs filled with water. A fire pit had been made in a natural depression in the mine floor.

  The sniffling sound came again, followed by a hushed whisper. Devon couldn’t make out the words. She thought they might be Spanish, though. “Please come out,” she said in that language. “I won’t hurt you.” More rustling, as though someone was trying to crawl away. She narrowed her eyes. An area of darker shadows loomed on the mine wall. She moved a little more to her right and realized it was an opening to a smaller tunnel branching off the one she was in. Cool air brushed across her face and breasts. Perhaps it wasn’t a tunnel, but an air shaft, maybe even the one Teague Ellis had fallen to his death in. Devon dropped to her knees and trained the flashlight on the hole.

  Two sets of dark eyes stared back at her from frightened faces. They were indeed children. Girls. Sisters, probably, from the similarity of their facial features. The elder held the younger cradled in her arms. “Go away,” she said in Spanish. “Leave us alone.”

  One look at the little girl told Devon she was the source of the coughing. She was wearing jeans and a dirty Scooby Doo T-shirt. Her face was flushed with fever, her eyes glittering with tears. Her hair, black as night, was a filthy tangle around her face. The older girl’s hair was not quite as tangled, but just as dirty. She was wearing a thin, shapeless cotton dress and cheap sneakers.

  And she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Even holding the smaller child close to her body couldn’t hide that.

  Were the children illegal aliens hiding out from the authorities as they made their way north? Were the men that had brought them here still around? She hoped not. The child coughed again and she banished thoughts of Coyotes. “Soy una enfermera.” Devon’s Spanish was not as good as she needed it to be. She switched to English. “I’m a nurse. Let me help you.”

  No response. Devon balanced the flashlight on a ridge of rock beside her, then hunkered down and held out her arms for the younger child. Suddenly she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and froze. Had she guessed wrong? Was the girls’ Coyote still here, after all?

  “Jesse,” the little girl whispered.

  Devon turned her head. A boy, as ragged and dirty as the girls, stood over her. He looked to be about fifteen, not yet a man, but almost. He was thin to the point of emaciation. He wore jeans and a faded red windbreaker over a ragged Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. Her little cooler was slung over his left shoulder, as were the two fleece blankets she’d left folded in the back of her truck.

  “Get up,” he said in English.

  Devon stood, her heart beating hard. He held a length of two-by-four like a baseball bat. He could kill her with a single blow and they both knew it.

  “I’m a nurse. I—”

  “Get away from my sisters,” he shouted. “I’ll take care of them. Just leave the flashlight and go. Get out and don’t come back!”

  CHAPTER FOURr />
  DEVON HAD NOTHING to defend herself with but the flashlight, and it would be no protection against the two-by-four.

  “Get out of here,” the boy repeated.

  “Your sister needs help. She’s ill.”

  “I’ll take care of her.” He swayed on his feet.

  Devon spoke with all the authority she could muster. “Sit down before you fall down.” She reached out and grabbed the two-by-four from his hands. The unexpected movement and the strength of her grip surprised the boy enough that he let go, stumbling backward over the thin mattress and sitting down hard.

  Devon rocked backward, too, but didn’t fall. She trained her flashlight on the two girls, still huddled in the darkness of the smaller opening. “It’s okay. You can come out now.”

  The older girl did as she was told, pulling the younger with her. Devon moved a few steps away so they could go to their brother. “Put your head between your knees if you feel faint,” she told him.

  “I don’t feel faint,” he said, sneering.

  “Well, you look faint. Go on, do as I said.”

  “No.” But the defiant word ended on a moan and he dropped his head between his upthrust knees.

  The older girl lowered herself awkwardly by his side and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Jesse, are you sick, too?” She spoke in English so Devon responded in the same language.

  “I think he’s just hungry. When was the last time you had something to eat?”

  Jesse didn’t answer. The girl looked at Devon and shrugged thin shoulders. “It has been two days for my brother. Yesterday Maria and I ate the last of the chick…the food.”

  So that was what happened to Daniel Elkhorn’s stolen chicken. “Your brother needs to eat. There’s fruit and a peanut-butter sandwich in the bag on his shoulder.”

  “Sylvia,” the child, Maria, whispered. “Tengo hambre.”

  So now she knew their names, Jesse, Sylvia and Maria.

  “Quiero plátano.”

  “There’s a banana. And grapes and an apple.”

  Jesse was upright once more, still pale, his mouth set in a tight line. Sylvia tugged the strap of the cooler off his arm, removed the lid and held out half the peanut-butter sandwich to him. He waved her away. “You two eat the sandwich. Just give me some water.”

  Sylvia bent forward to whisper in his ear, her gaze skittering over Devon before she lowered her head, and when she was done he devoured his small portion in two bites. Devon hadn’t heard what she said, but had no trouble guessing she had urged him to eat to keep up his strength so that they could escape as quickly as possible.

  She wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Maria held out her half-eaten banana. “My throat hurts.” Again she spoke in Spanish, the language she was obviously most comfortable with.

  “I know, sweetie. I have medicine in my car that will help her feel better.” Devon directed her words to Sylvia and Jesse equally. Brother and sister glanced at each other and then Jesse nodded slowly.

  “You can help her.” He used both hands to lever himself up off the old mattress. Devon wondered if it, too, like the chicken and probably the lawn chair, had been stolen from Miguel’s grandfather.

  Devon held out her hand to the little girl.

  Jesse put himself between them. “We’ll all go,” he said.

  Devon nodded. “Okay.”

  She moved toward the opening of the mine shaft, half expecting to turn around at the entrance and find they’d all disappeared again. But they followed her in silence through the wire screening and down the path to her truck.

  Devon lifted the hatch on the Blazer and opened the combination lock on her midwife’s box. The box contained everything she needed for a delivery—oxygen, masks for the mother and baby, suction equipment, a laryngoscope to open an airway for the baby if necessary. A second smaller box held her anti-hemorrhage drugs and the equipment she needed to do the necessary newborn tests. She handed Sylvia a sack of hard candy from one of the top compartments and another bottle of apple juice.

  Sylvia nearly snatched the sack from her hand but murmured, “Gracias,” as she did so. Devon held out her hands to Maria, showing her a bottle of Tylenol. “This will help you feel better.”

  Maria looked at her brother. Jesse narrowed his dark eyes but nodded permission. The little girl came forward and Devon gave her a Tylenol to swallow with the juice Sylvia handed her. Then Devon lifted the little girl onto the tailgate. She weighed next to nothing. “I’m going to listen to your lungs,” Devon explained. She glanced back at Jesse. “Does she understand English?”

  He nodded. “Yes. But she doesn’t speak it very well yet.”

  “She was going to be in special English classes in first grade but—” A sharp word from Jesse cut short what Sylvia might have revealed.

  Devon pretended not to notice. She’d already come to the conclusion that the children must have spent considerable time in the States, for both Jesse and Sylvia spoke with little accent. She put the tabs of her stethoscope in her ears and put the disk against Maria’s chest. “Take a deep breath.” The little girl pulled in air, but the breath ended in another cough. Devon moved the stethoscope to the right side and repeated the directive, then she straightened, draping the stethoscope around her neck. The little girl was congested, but not dangerously so. With rest and food she would be fine in a couple of days.

  But not if she stayed in the damp and dirt of the abandoned mine.

  Maria needed more than a fever reducer and a few ounces of liquid. She needed to be warm and safe. She needed to be where Devon could administer antibiotics if she needed them. “Jesse, your sister needs to be away from this place. Both of your sisters. And you need food and rest, too. Isn’t there someone I can contact to come and help you?” She felt like an idiot as she spoke. Would these children be in the situation she’d found them in if there was anyone who could care for them?

  “We have no one,” Jesse said flatly. He looked more like an old man than a young boy. His dark eyes were sunken into his head, a faint stubble of beard shadowed his chin, and deep lines bracketed the corners of his mouth. “They sent our mother back to Mexico. She died there.”

  They, Devon deduced, meant the INS, la migra. “How did you get here?”

  “We have a truck,” Maria piped up. “But it’s broken.” She pointed in the direction of one of the ruined buildings near the mine shaft.

  “¡Silencio!” Jesse hissed.

  Maria began to sniffle and hung her head. Devon put her arms around her thin shoulders and gave her a reassuring hug.

  “Just leave us some of the pills for Maria’s fever and go away,” the boy said, hostile once more. “We’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t do that. Maria is too ill. She could develop pneumonia. You know what pneumonia is, don’t you?”

  His head came up. “Of course I do.”

  “Let me take Maria to my house and care for her.” Devon tightened her embrace of the child. “She needs rest and care. You all do. Come with me.”

  “No. Like I said, just give us some of those pills and you’ll never see us again.”

  “What about Sylvia? A few pills won’t help her when she has her baby.” Devon was at a loss for any other way to break through his resistance.

  Sylvia looked stricken at the mention of her pregnancy. She crossed her hands over her belly, not in the instinctive, protective contact with her unborn child that was common to women the world around, but in shame and misery. Sylvia’s child was not wanted, had probably been conceived in ignorance or even fear. Had she been raped? Devon hoped with all her heart she had not. Teenage births, especially without prenatal care, could be dangerous for mother and child under the best of circumstances. If the pregnancy was a source of misery and fear compounded by neglect and malnutrition, the outcome could be tragic.

  Devon made up her mind. There was no way in the world she was going to leave the ghost town without the children. But if she made any attempt to contact th
e clinic or Miguel, they would overhear and probably take off running. She had no doubt they’d been hiding in Silverton long enough to have staked out a number of hidey-holes. The ghost town didn’t draw a lot of visitors, but it wasn’t totally isolated. To remain undetected for any length of time, they had to have been clever and resourceful.

  And if she left with the children and then contacted the authorities, what would become of them? Would they be separated? Deported? Or left to the system of overworked, underfunded advocates for whom they would be just one more set of statistics when all was said and done? She made and held eye contact with Jesse’s suspicious gaze. “If you come with me, I won’t speak a word to anyone about the three of you.” She had nothing to convince him of her sincerity but her words.

  Suddenly her radio came to life. “This is Birth Place base to unit two. Devon, are you there?”

  She moved around the fender of the truck to answer Trish Linden’s query. In the side mirror she saw Jesse swing Maria up off the tailgate as Sylvia scooped up the sack of hard candy and the bottle of Tylenol.

  She thumbed the toggle. “I’m here, Trish.” She broke the connection momentarily and held out her hand. “Wait, please.” Jesse had already carried his sister several yards back up the path to the mine, but Sylvia stopped at her plea. “Just for a moment.”

  “Devon?”

  “I’m still here, Trish. What’s up?” Devon hoped her voice sounded normal. Deliberately she turned her back on the three children, praying they wouldn’t run.

  “Are you anywhere near Silverton?”

  “I’m right in the middle of it.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. I’m going to patch you through to Chief Eiden. He wants to talk to you. I don’t do this very often,” Trish continued, “so if I screw up, just hang on, okay?”