by Ben Farthing
Through the pines, the woods thinned out. She leaned on a tree to catch her breath.
Behind her, a wall of undergrowth in either direction. Up the mountain, it turned with the next trail switchback, and continued on. But around her, the undergrowth was more what she remembered from her teenage years. Greenbrier thorn bushes here and there, the occasional young tree extending thin branches in every direction, desperate for a meager swallow of sunlight, and various other plants that would tug at the ankles and scratch at the face of the rough hiker. She might have to search for a comfortable way through, but there always was one.
Not like the barrier that lined the trail. You’d need a machete to fight through that without getting scratched up. She snapped a photo with her phone.
Cessy tried to imagine what could cause such bizarre growth. Extra water from the trail serving as a stream during rain. Extra sunlight from the thin sliver of sky created above the trail. An overeager park ranger scattering MiracleGrow as he skipped up the trail.
All those explanations stank of bullshit.
Still, Cessy couldn’t think of a rational reason for why undergrowth surrounded the trails as if the forest was trying to restrict the trails. Or maybe swallow them.
She made a wide loop around the point she’d started from, looking to the three trees she’d memorized to keep her bearings.
The swarming specs came back into view. At least she wasn’t lost.
She climbed over a buried boulder with an exposed face the size of a refrigerator. Only moss grew within five feet.
Cessy scratched at the sap on her cheek, then picked it out from under her fingernails. She tried not to think of discount “woodsy” cologne.
A hawk screeched in the sky, out of sight above the green canopy.
Cessy checked her landmarks to keep track of the trail, then laughed at herself. The eight-foot wall of bushes and vines ensured she’d never lose the trail home.
She hiked through knee-high blueberry bushes, angling back to the trail, planning on extending her circle to the other side of the trial. Ahead, past a twisting sycamore, the ground dropped out of sight. She climbed the small ridge.
Below, in a culvert between the sycamore and a moss-covered boulder, was one of many mouths of the coal mine.
Six-by-six timber held open the entrance, older than Cessy but still solid. Hairline cracks punctuated the grain of the top beam.
Instead of a chainlink fence, or a steel wall, or even a collapsed pile of rock, the only thing blocking access to the mine was sticks leaned against it halfway across, then covered in many-armed branches.
Something crunched leaves behind her. Cessy looked over her shoulder. Nothing but empty woods. She turned her attention back to the anomaly in front of her.
So many things about this didn’t make sense. First off, all entrances to the coal mine should have been sealed. The West Virginia state legislature made very clear that closed mines be sealed with heavy lock and key, or intentional collapse.
Secondly, they had been closed off. As a rebellious teenager, of course Cessy went looking for access to the mine. She knew of three entrances to the belly of Black Gold Peak. Two were collapsed, one was so tightly boarded up you’d need a chainsaw to get through. She’d never heard mention of an entrance this close to the trails.
Thirdly, this was a nonsense location for an entrance. Not accessible by truck, and no evidence that it ever had been--even a 100-years-abandoned road left an indentation in the mountain.
She knew mines needed ventilation shafts, but even if this were one--which it wasn’t--it didn’t explain how she’d never known of it before.
The best explanation was that it had been built in the past twenty years. But the ancient beams--the thick roots growing tight around them--said that wasn’t the case.
With a glance back at the weird wall of undergrowth, Cessy stepped towards the equally discomforting mine entrance.
A drip of water plopped into a puddle. A faint echo down the tunnel.
Cessy walked to it.
The sticks leaning on the crossbeam covered half the entrance. They were fresh, still flexible and with yellow innards. Someone had built this within the past week. Cessy peered past the makeshift barrier, into the tunnel.
Mud and puddles on the ground. Dirt and roots made up the walls. Ten feet inside, another frame of decaying six-by-sixes. Beyond, daylight gave way to shadow black as the coal ripped out of the mountain’s bowels.
Cessy stepped over the puddle in the entrance. “Hello?”
Her voice echoed back, distorted an octave lower.
A cool breeze blew past her, into the tunnel. A warm, humid wind returned, moist and clammy on her cheeks.
Cessy invented another scenario. If Kate had met Jackson in the trailhead lot, and then changed her mind, Jackson would be furious. Kate might flee up the trails, and find a hiding place off the trail.
Cessy stepped deeper inside.
She thought the air in the tunnel would be cooler than the August day outside, but the temperature stayed the same, and the humidity increased. Not to D.C. intensity, but with a more organic scent to it, like freshly fertilized dirt from a garden.
She should have thought to bring a flashlight.
She leaned on the dirt wall to pull out her phone. The dirt was warm. She turned on the phone’s flashlight.
It supplemented the meager daylight with bright white LED. But it didn’t reach any farther than the daylight.
She took a few steps deeper.
The limit of the light stayed the same, its reach shrinking to end at the same point: ten feet in where the second timber support held up the mountain.
Cessy reminded herself that she’d kicked down doors to arrest heavily armed bank robbers. Shadows didn’t scare her. She took another step.
The frame loomed like a closet door in a trembling child’s bedroom. Who could say what horrors waited on the other side?
“Hello?” she called again.
No echo.
She held her phone out, reaching forward with the flashlight’s perfect circle of light.
As the LED bulb drew closer to the hanging sheet of blackness, the light it gave off still died at the barrier.
Cessy pulled the light away.
That couldn’t have been what she’d seen. Light didn’t behave that way. Flashlights on smartphones weren’t meant for distance, that was all.
Thudding in her chest. Cessy had kicked down doors with armed bank robbers on the other side. She wasn’t afraid of the dark.
Except, the way she dealt with fear was acknowledging it, and this impossible wall of darkness was disconcerting.
Cessy reached out with the flashlight. The LED cone died at the curtain of black.
Maybe Kate had hung up a blackout curtain to hide behind. That was nonsense, but it was enough to let Cessy’s frozen feet move forward.
The black curtain swallowed light even as Cessy approached. The light dimmed at her feet and against the walls around her, too.
Before she let herself doubt the decision, Cessy reached through the blackness.
This far away from the sunlight--and without the flashlight’s glow--the shadows blurred any harsh lines. Cessy’s arm disappeared up the wrist.
It was like reaching into a silty river rapid, but her hand stayed dry.
Cessy jerked her hand back to inspect it with the light. Red, inflamed.
“What the...” she whispered.
Some kind of vent blowing thick dust across the tunnel, somehow keeping a flat surface. Cessy reached into the darkness against either wall, but felt only the dirt and timber supports of the walls themselves.
It’d be easier to go down the mountain to start following leads to find Kate, but Cessy had seen Kate’s rental car, and seen her hat. She should search this tunnel. At least behind the obvious hiding place.
As a barrier, the curtain of dust wasn’t effective.
Cessy squeezed her eyes shut, leaned forward, and
plunged in.
The curtain sandblasted her cheek and bare arms.
Not three steps in, her knees slammed into something hard. She tripped forward onto a slope of dirt and rocks. Cessy felt around.
The mine was blocked off. Collapsed.
Her arms and face stung from the rushing dust. She kept her eyes tight, felt around the collapse. It was dry.
If it had collapsed recently, there’d be wet earth.
Kate wasn’t in here.
Cessy made certain there wasn’t a way through that she’d missed, then staggered back out from the rushing blackness.
Her phone’s LED lit up the tunnel again. She inspected the rushing curtain. No evidence of where she’d entered or exited.
It was a relief and a worry that Kate wasn’t here. A relief that Cessy hadn’t found a corpse, and that Kate wasn’t trapped somewhere inside the mountain. A worry that her rental car was still parked at the trailhead. She’d been here, and Cessy didn’t know where she’d headed next.
Cessy walked back to the entrance of the mine. Muddy water soaked into her sneakers.
From inside the mine, the puddle under the entrance reflected the treetops outside. If she stood at precisely the right angle, she could see the swarming, formless insects on the underside of the oak branch, even more distorted through the puddle’s reflection.
She pointed her phone’s light once more at the support frame ten feet into the tunnel. The darkness beyond swallowed it.
Natural phenomenon, stupid science experiment, or weird destruction left by coal mining. Cessy didn’t know.
Even still, a locked door hiding an armed bank robber would be less disconcerting.
Cessy headed back downhill. She’d talk to Jackson’s father, and any other leads she could. But if this trailhead was the last evidence she had of Kate, she’d have to organize a search party to comb the mountain, and maybe other entrances to mine.
Leaves crunched under Cessy’s retreat as she left behind one of the mountain’s many mouths.
16
On her way back to the trail, Cessy texted Landis to catch him up.
“I’ve found Kate’s rental car. She’s here. Going to question Jackson’s dad now.”
Before she could decide whether to include the unnatural curtain of dust, her feet caught. She stumbled, caught herself on a toppled tree trunk. The bark scraped her palms.
She turned around for a closer look at what’d tripped her.
It was a wire as thick as her little finger, encased in black rubber and coated in dirt. It was pulled taught above the ground, lifted up by a root of the fallen tree. One end disappeared back under the ground, heading towards the wall of undergrowth that surrounded the hiking trail. The other sank back under the ground in the patch of blueberry bushes.
Her phone buzzed, but she ignored it to follow the wire back uphill to the wild berry bushes. She tugged at it to pull more out of the ground. Another foot of wire emerged from the dirt. It brought along spindly threads of root. Then it went taught.
Judging from the sharp angle at which the wire pierced the earth, it ran two or three feet underground.
If the wire continued straight on its path up the mountain, then it went to the mine entrance. Or passed nearby, at least.
She hiked the forty feet back up.
She avoided looking down the tunnel, instead carving at the dirt around the entrance with the toe of her sneaker. She didn’t find any wire, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t buried deeper.
Cessy had once helped Detective Landis run power to his shed, twenty feet behind his house. Even that short ditch had been a pain to dig. Roots slowed them down every other foot. It had taken all Saturday.
She couldn’t imagine how long it’d take to bury a wire through twenty feet of Appalachian woods, let alone however far this wire ran.
Even with an excavator that’d be a huge operation.
And why?
What was down this tunnel?
On her way back down, Cessy pulled out her phone to snap a photo of the surfaced wire.
Landis had texted back. “I got Kate’s computer. I can’t get into her email, but in Recent Downloads I found two audio files from two weeks ago. Weird radio shows. Could be why Jackson asked if she ‘heard’ the emails.”
That had to be radio programs that her parents and Sheriff Miller were listening to. Why would Jackson send that? The better question, was why would Kate care?
One more question to ask Gordon Wilder.
17
Cessy drove back down the mountain road, momentarily leaving the cover of thick forest into unimpeded sunlight.
She appreciated the warmth through the truck windows after the lurid shade of the forest, and the impossible blackness of the mine. It was frustrating, finding the rental car and then not finding Kate.
Cessy squinted at the sunlight, then turned onto Ulton Ridge Road, off of Black Gold Peak and onto Goat’s Jaunt.
She tried to stay positive. She’d found a rental car. She knew that Kate had come to Hamlin. Was most likely still here. She had a thread to follow--Jackson. And she was confident that when she pulled that thread, he’d lead her to Kate.
Just another day in the office.
The next yank on the thread would be finding out from Gordon Wilder where his son was.
The 4Runner bumped over a pothole. Her toolbox rattled in the back. Ahead, the wealthiest development in Hamlin.
Mailboxes and driveways interrupted the trees every hundred feet. The lots in Ulton Ridge were five acres each, most wooded with a clearing for the house that allowed the few wealthy inhabitants of Hamlin to look down at the town.
Jackson’s father owned four car dealerships. He’d sold the dealership in Hamlin fifteen years after the mine closed. The new owner scraped by another five years before Hamlin’s lack of income starved him out. Now it was an empty lot just east of the High School.
But Gordon’s other dealerships let him continue on fine. Last Cessy had heard, the man worked three days a month, and let his managers handle everything.
She spotted the mailbox with “Wilder” in reflective letters on the side. She turned up the paved driveway, drove through a claustrophobic tunnel of oaks and pines. Greens and grays surrounded her.
The drive opened up to a sloped, well-kept yard. Grass uniform in height, species, and shade of green. In the center of the circular driveway, a spotless white gazebo.
The house itself rose like a Victorian castle out of the mountainside. Black slate roof over red brick walls. Windows with wrought iron trim. Turrets with floor-to-ceiling windows, where residents could stare over the valley. A porthole window out of an attic eave.
A detached garage to the side of the house, three doors, with two open.
Gordon Wilder piddled about inside.
Cessy parked and walked over.
The view up here was spectacular. Whether it was worth the price tag of the home, she couldn’t say. She could see everything from the high school, to Main Street, to her parents’ neighborhood, and the Church of the Morningstar on the far side of the valley.
Viewed from this distance, Hamlin was pleasant. She couldn’t see the decaying siding and boarded-up windows.
Cessy could almost feel comfortable here, if she hadn’t burnt so many bridges as a teenager.
Inside the garage, an old radio with a three-foot antennae sat on a shelf near the open door. The angry radio host--Lockler, according to Betty--had grown raspy from shouting. “Why is the diner getting emptier each night? Are the true citizens of Hamlin getting fewer in number? If you suspect your neighbors are having doubts about our great town, step up and lend a hand. If you wait too long, you’ll miss your chance to-”
A tool motor screamed to life, drowning out the radio. The air smelled of sawdust and burnt cinnamon.
The garage housed a furniture workshop. This had to be where Dad’s coffee table came from.
A table saw, wide as a sheet of plywood, occupied the cent
er of the shop. Along the short wall sat a miter saw atop low cabinets. A drill press sat in the corner. Those were the only tools Cessy knew the names or functions of. Another dozen floor-standing industrial machines filled the nine-car garage. The back wall held shelves stacked with lumber.
Gordon Wilder hunched over a machine that looked like a pizza oven with a conveyor belt going through it. He flipped a switch. A belt slipped, screeched, and then grabbed hold, and the machine roared to life. Gordon slid a wide board into the machine. The roar jerked to a noise that was a mix between a saw and a grinder.
Wood chips shot into a clear plastic tube, towards a vacuum in the corner that looked like a rocket ship. Sawdust burst into the air, illuminated by sunlight through a window.
The board slid out the other side, popped loose once it moved free from the rollers.
Gordon switched off the machine, scuttled around to his board. He wore a facemask and goggles, with big earmuff hearing protection. Thick white hair atop his head, wild from the earmuffs. Sweat gleamed on his round cheeks. The heat was bearable, but the protective gear probably raised body temperature a few degrees.
He wore a John Deere t-shirt, covered in dark sawdust.
Another motor continued, a six-foot vacuum in the corner, and then switched off on its own.
The radio host continued his ranting. “Let’s make lunch tomorrow a meal to remember. Make sure all your neighbors are coming. I hear Sally Carter will be bringing some homemade cinnamon rolls.”
“Hello,” Cessy called over the radio.
Gordon ran his hand along the board’s face. “Hardly don’t even need sanding.” The mask muffled his voice.
Cessy tried again. Waving this time. “Gordon?”
His head popped up and he looked around like a bird until spotting the source of the noise, and confirming that--yes--he had heard something. He removed his earmuffs and mask. Wiped sweat from his brow and turned off the radio. “Yes? What can I do for you?”
He didn’t recognize her yet. “My name’s Cessy Timms.” She resisted the impulse to say Detective Timms. “You know my folks. Do you have a minute?”
