“I figured,” Bo said. “This is the corpse we’ve been looking for, I’d wager.”
I struggled to clear my mind. But yes, he was right. Victoria Lear had died because she had discovered the Eurydice was worthless. Albert had disappeared, ostensibly with all the money from the Prospect account. A bank teller who could have identified someone had been strangled. Marla had been accused of the murder 9f Tony Royce. But in discovering Albert Lipscomb, we’d found the main corpse, the key to unraveling the bizarre happenings of the last week.
His body did not float. This was Colorado, not Florida. As Tom had told me several times, it takes a month in forty-degree water for a corpse in a lake to come to the surface. Underwater, Lipscomb’s narrow, surprised face had a waxy, bluish appearance. His skin was shriveled. His long fingers, splayed outward, looked like those of a person too long in the bath. I didn’t remember him having age spots on the backs of his hands. I blinked and focused on the dark, round marks. They looked suspiciously like burns. As if someone had tortured him ?
“No, no!” cried Arch. He’d unfastened the leather lead. “Jake, come back!” But even as Arch called frantically, Jake trotted away. Apparently his powerful nose was telling him to go back down the track in the direction we’d come. Or perhaps he was again confused by the pool scent. Or maybe, like me, he desperately wanted to get as far away as possible from the presence of death. Arch took off after his pet, but the general was faster, bounding off the sump steps and racing nimbly down the rails with the same stamina I’d come to expect from him. Arch tripped and made a spectacular spill in the mud. As I stumbled after my son, a gunshot cracked loudly down the close space of the tunnel.
“Arch!” I yelled. Sprawled on the earth, he didn’t move. “Arch! Arch, tell me you’re all right!” He did not appear to hear me. “Arch, please!”
Finally, he sat up and shook himself dazedly. “It’s okay, Mom. I just fell. I have to go get Jake!” He scrambled to his feet, heedless of the danger behind us.
In the distance, Jake howled. The general was nowhere in sight. I heard Marla scream. “No! No! Damn it! Damn you!” And then another gunshot exploded. I grabbed Arch and shoved him against the rock wall, out of harm’s way. After a breathless moment, we heard the general’s voice bellow down the dark passageway:
“Arch! Goldy! Get down! Go back! Back where you ? “
Light burst from the main tunnel like a blinding photo flash. A deafening boom flung us backward. In that instant, I somehow registered that all the light bulbs along the mine’s ribs were shattering. Then it was like a flame suddenly snuffed in a blackout. Darkness abruptly engulfed us. My nostrils picked up the faintly acrid smell of smoke.
I don’t know how long I lay, stunned, on the cold, moist stone before I tried to use my voice. “Arch,” I said into the blackness. “Arch, please, please, where are you?”
The darkness was ominously silent. Then, to my immense relief I heard a cough.
“Here,” Arch called hoarsely. I struggled to my feet, but could see nothing: There was no light whatsoever. “Sorry, Mom.” Arch’s voice was close. “I don’t know where here is. What was that? Do you know where Jake is?” As usual, his first concern was for his dog.
“I don’t have a clue.” Get your bearings, get your bearings! I ordered myself. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s not safe. I held my arms out in both directions. But there was nothing to get bearings from. The dark was absolute, unyielding.
“Mom.?
I strained my eyes into the blackness. I squatted and felt along the damp floor. No Arch. Then my fingers fumbled against a metal chain, and thick leather: Jake’s leash. I crammed it into my jacket pocket.
“Arch? Where are you?”
“Here.” Two feet away? My son drew in his breath sharply. “Jake, Mom! What happened to Jake? Is Jake okay? Oh, Mom!” he cried. In the dark, I heard him fumbling, then the scrape of his footsteps on the damp stone floor. “Hey! Jake! Jake!”
There was no response to his calls.
Suddenly, Arch pulled off a miracle. He switched on his cap lamp. Tucked in his belt, the bulb had somehow survived the explosion. I blinked in astonishment to see that he was only a few feet away from me. In the distance, I heard the general’s voice calling to us. Are you in there? I fought off panic. Bo’s voice was impossibly faint, as if he were miles away. Goldy? Can you hear me? Are you all right? There was an explosion. . ” Goldy?
“Yes!” I called, but my voice, too, was swallowed by the impenetrable rock that surrounded us.
“Mom?” Arch wailed. “Oh, Mom, I have to get Jake.”
“Arch,” I said, forcing my voice to sound calm, “hold my hand.” I reached for his gritty fingers, then clasped them tightly. Perhaps too tightly. He’s okay, I told myself. He’s not hurt. We’ll get out of this.
Arch turned his head toward the sump, then swept his light across the rib of the mine. “That’s the way out. Without the light bulbs along the sides, we’re going to have to go carefully, Mom.”
The smoke stung my eyes and made me cough. Was it getting thicker? Hard to tell. I called again to the general: “Yes! Yes! We’re coming!”
“Do you have Jake?” Arch shouted.
But neither Bo nor Marla answered. Cautiously, holding hands, my son and I started back up the tracks. Arch kept his lamp beam down, focused on the rails. Had we heard one gunshot or two? Two. And then the general had shouted his warning, and the blast had rocked the mine. But why? Why a blast? I shook my head. My thoughts were whirling too fast.
I trod carefully, holding Arch’s hand tightly in mine, determined to get us out of this claustrophobic hell. ! The smoke was indeed becoming thicker as we approached the bend. We made the turn. Arch lifted his beam toward the portal… or to where the portal should have been.
When he swept the light of his cap lamp down the tracks, all we could see was darkness and coils of smoke. My hopes plummeted. There were two explanations for our predicament: The blast had brought down massive quantities of rock, and a wall of heavy boulders now barred our way to safety. Or we were lost, and we weren’t anywhere near the mine’s entrance. I refused to contemplate that possibility. It also seemed to me that the smoke was not coming from the source of the explosion. Something was on fire ? probably the timbers. Arch started to hack.
“Mom! Mom! Put on your respirator!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, floundering along my belt. The more I tried to catch my breath, the more smoke I inhaled. In front of me, the tiny light on Arch’s head began to wobble and fade. Don’t let me pass out, I prayed. I must get Arch out of here.
I wrenched the self-rescuer out of the loop on my belt and tore off its cloth cover. To Arch, I said, “Do … you… have yours on??
For a long moment he was silent, then, “Yes,” came his nasal reply. “Need light?”
“No.” I pulled up on the tether holding the nose clip, clamped my nostrils shut with it, and tentatively bit on the lug of the mouthpiece. I breathed. To my surprise, the carbon dioxide burned ravenously down my lungs. Disgusted, I let go of the lug. “I can’t,” I croaked into the increasingly smoky darkness. “The gas is too ? “
“You have to, Mom!” Arch’s voice was sharply adult. “Now breathe with that thing and let’s find a raise back in the other direction! I have to find Jake!”
His gentle squeeze on the fingers of my free hand belied the harshness in his voice. I bit on the lug and breathed. It was like inhaling paint. Tears stung my cheeks as we turned and retraced our steps. Arch pulled on my hand just as Jake had tugged on the leash, up the tracks, back into the darkness.
After an eternity, we rounded the bend. Our footsteps grated over wet gravel as we passed the sump. Yes, there were shafts-technically called raises ? -for ventilation. This much I knew. But where were they? And what was at the top of them? A fan? Another locked grate? Wasn’t there some law in Colorado about not having openings to mines, so people couldn’t fall down them? And if we did somehow succeed in climbing the ladder of a raise, how on earth would we ever move a fan, if we encountered one?
Down, down the tracks we went, deeper into the dark bowels of the earth. I breathed smoke and cursed Tony Royce. And I cursed my own inability to see that he was the one who had caused the terrible problems which plagued us. Tony had somehow deceived his ever-hopeful partner, of that much I was now certain. And he had deceived us. Of course, the impact of Tony’s wrongdoing had been compounded by the idiotic arrogance of Shockley’s storm troopers, De Groot and Hersey. Their arrest of Marla had provoked our current disastrous situation. But most of all, I cursed my own stupidity for allowing Arch to track Tony on this ill-fated trip into the
