Tunnels

of one of the windows and peering up and down the street.

'What's all clear?' Mr. Clarke senior sprung up like a deranged jack-in-the-box.

'Papers!' Mr. Clarke junior ordered in the voice of an angry librarian, but his brother remained above the counter.

'Uh… just some kids,' Will lied. 'We were being chased.'

'Boys will be boys!' Mr. Clarke junior giggled. 'Now please do remember me to your dear sister, Miss Rebecca. You know, she really has such a good eye for quality produce. A gifted young lady.'

'I will.' Will nodded and forced a smile. 'And thanks for this, Mr. Clarke.'

'Oh, think nothing of it,' he said.

'We do hope that your father returns home soon,' Mr. Clarke senior said dolefully. 'You shouldn't worry; these things happen from time to time.'

'Well… it's like that Greggson boy… terrible thing, that,' Mr. Clarke junior said with a knowing look and a sigh. 'And then there was the Watkins family…' Will and Chester watched him as he seemed to focus on a point somewhere between the ranks of the carrots and the cucumbers. 'Such nice people, too. No one's seen hide nor hair of them since they—'

'It's not the same thing, not the same at all,' Mr. Clarke senior interrupted his brother sharply, then coughed uneasily. 'I don't think this is the time or place to bring that up, Junior. A little unsympathetic, do you not think, given the situation?'

But «Junior» wasn't listening; he was in full flow now and not to be stopped. Crossing his arms and with his head tilted to one side, he took on the aura of one of the old biddies he habitually gossiped with. 'Like the flippin' lost colony of Roanoke it was, when the police got there. Empty beds, the boys' uniforms all laid out for school the next day, but they were nowhere to be found, none of them. Mrs. W had ordered half a pound of our green beans that very morning, if I recall, and a couple of watermelons. Anyway, no sign of any of them anywhere?'

'What… the watermelons?' Mr. Clarke senior asked in a deadpan voice.

'No, the family, you silly sausage,' Mr. Clarke junior said, rolling his eyes.

In the silence that ensued, Will looked from Mr. Clarke junior to Mr. Clarke senior, who was staring daggers at his wistful sibling. He was beginning to feel as Alice must have when she'd stepped through the looking glass.

'Ho-hum, better get on,' proclaimed Mr. Clarke junior with a last lingering look of sympathy at Will, and he tiptoed back up his stepladder, singing, 'Beetroot to me, mon petit chou…'

Mr. Clarke senior had sunk out of sight once again and the sound of rattling papers resumed, accompanied by the whir of an old-fashioned adding machine. Will and Chester cautiously opened the shop door halfway and peeked nervously into the street.

'Anything?' Chester asked.

Will moved out onto the pavement in front of the shop.

'Nothing,' he replied. 'No sign of them.'

'We should've called the police, you know.'

'And told them what?' Will said. 'That we were chased by two weirdos in sunglasses and silly hats and then they just disappeared?'

'Yes, exactly that,' Chester said, irritated. 'Who knows what they were after?' He suddenly looked up as the thought reoccurred to him. 'What if they were the gang that took your dad?'

'Forget it — we don't know that.'

'But the police…' Chester said.

'Do you really want to go through all that hassle when we've got work to do?' Will interrupted him sharply, scanning Main Street up and down and feeling more at ease now that more people were around. At least they would be able to call for help if the two men turned up again. 'The police would probably think we're just a couple of kids goofing around. It's not as if we've got any witnesses.'

'Maybe,' Chester agreed grudgingly as they started toward the Burrowses' house. 'There's no shortage of nuts around here,' he said, looking back at the Clarke brothers' shop, 'that's for sure.'

'It's safe now, anyway. They're gone, and if they do come back, we'll be ready,' Will said confidently.

Strangely enough, the incident had not deterred him in the slightest. As he thought about it, quite the opposite was true: It confirmed to him that his father had been onto something, and now he was on the right track. Although he didn't mention any of this to Chester, his resolve to continue with the tunnel and his investigations hardened even further.

Will had begun to pick at the grapes in the garish basket, and the pink ribbon, now undone, flapped in the breeze behind him. Chester appeared to have gotten over his misgivings and was looking expectantly at the basket, his hand poised to help himself.

'So do you want to bail? Or are you still going to help me?' Will quizzed him in a teasing voice, moving the basket tantalizingly out of his reach.

'Oh, all right, then, hand me a banana,' his friend replied with a smile.

16

'All this evidence points to a deliberate dismantling,' Will said, squatting next to Chester on a pile of rubble in the cramped confines of the workface.

They had now reclaimed about twenty feet of the tunnel, which had begun to dip down in a sharp decline, and found they were running critically short of timber. Will had hoped they would be able to salvage some of the original props and planking from the tunnel itself. What confounded them both was that very little of it was still there, and that much of the timber they did find was damaged beyond use. They had already stripped out every last piece they could from the other tunnel over at the Forty Pits, as well as removing the Stillson props, without bringing the whole excavation crashing down.

Will patted the work face, looking at it with a frown. 'I just don't get it,' he said.

'So what do you really think happened? That your dad pulled it in behind him?' Chester asked as he, too, looked at the plug of soil and solidly compacted rock that they had yet to remove.

'Backfilled it? No, that's impossible. And even if somehow he had, where are the struts? We'd have found more of them. No, none of this makes any sense,' Will said. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of gravel. 'Most of this is virgin infill. It's all been lugged here from somewhere else — precisely the same thing that happened at the Pits.'

'But why go to all the trouble of filling it in when you could simply collapse the whole thing?' Chester asked, still mystified.

'Because then you'd have trenches opening up under people's houses or across their yards,' Will replied despairingly.

'Oh, right,' Chester agreed.

They were both exhausted. The last section had been particularly hard going, made up mostly of sizable chunks of rock, some of which even Chester found difficult to manhandle into the wheelbarrow by himself.

'I just hope we haven't got far to go,' Chester sighed. 'It's really beginning to get to me.'

'Tell me about it.' Will rested his head in his hands, staring. So they sat there in silence, deep in their own thoughts, and after a while Will spoke. 'What was Dad thinking, doing all this and not telling us what he was up to? Me, especially,' he said, with a look of sheer exasperation. 'Why would he do that?'

'He must have had a good reason,' Chester offered.

'But all the secrecy; keeping a secret journal. I don't understand it. We were never a family that kept things… important things… from each other like that. So why wouldn't he have told me what he was up to?'

'Well, you had the Pits tunnel,' Chester interjected.

'Dad knew about that. But you're right. I never bothered to tell Mum, because she's just not interested. I mean, we weren't exactly a…' Will hesitated, searching for the right word. '…perfect family, but we all got along and everyone sort of knew what everyone else was up to. Now everything's so messed