Blowback(45)

All right. The sketch might have been of the abandoned mine. But what made it worth stealing and/or destroying? Something to do with the mine itself?

I stood motionless in the hot sun, peering at the hillside. Then I glanced at my watch, and the time was eleven twenty-five; still an hour and a half before the Jerrolds were due to leave Eden Lake. I hesitated for another fifteen or twenty seconds, but there was not any doubt about what I was going to do, not this time.

I got back into the car and went looking for the way up there.





Sixteen




A little ways beyond the shelf was a circular area, like a roadside turnaround, and then a steepening rise; between a series of outcroppings on one side and a man-made limestone cutbank on the other-if you looked closely-the eroded and grass-choked remains of a wagon road wound upward in a loose S. I swung the car onto the circular area and took it up to the cutbank. The road looked passable enough; some of the brown grass and underbrush had a crushed appearance, as though another car had come up it not too long ago.

I put the transmission into low gear and went up the trail at a crawl, tires thudding into deep ruts, springs complaining. The road ended pretty soon at a shallow, natural fiat. The weather-beaten building sat there, off on my left, and the mine entrance was at the far end and fifty feet above on sloping ground, like a broken doorway into the hillside. The rusted ruins of what had once been a steel-railed ore track came out of the shaft and down to the right, at a sharp angle, and terminated at the edge of the flat; there had at one time been a cut or incline below there, but it was filled now with tailings from the mine, half-reclaimed already by the forest

I let the car drift to a stop near the building and shut off the ignition and stepped out. The sun's glare up here was intense; mica particles glittered and winked in the rocks, almost blindingly in some places, and every piece of shade seemed to have a knife edge. It was so still I found myself straining to hear some kind of sound.

The palms of my hands were damp, and I wiped them on my trouser legs as I walked away from the car and alongside the building. Decaying timbers and strips of iron banding littered patches of grass and Indian paintbrush. There were huge gaps in the structure's walls, a jagged hole near the back where a window might once have been. I picked my way carefully up to the hole and peered inside. More debris, eerily displayed in a mosaic of dusky sunlight and shadow; from the look of it, the place had been a combination workroom and living quarters. One of the crossbeams for the roof hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and I thought that it would not be long before the whole thing collapsed. This, maybe, was the last summer of its existence.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, and I turned away finally and walked a few more paces. Another building squatted behind the larger one-a shed of some kind, probably, hidden from sight of the wagon trail and the county road below. One side of it had folded in, giving it an oddly triangular shape, like a partially collapsed house of cards. I made a circle of it, looked inside along the one wall still erect. Nothing to see there either.

Turning, I looked up the slope at the mine entrance. Then I ran my tongue over dry Lips and went back to the car and got my flashlight out of the glove compartment. I crossed to the slope, climbed it past the skeletal remains of an ore cart-shoes sliding on the hard rock, stirring up small puffs of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind me, mistlike. When I got up in front of the entrance I stopped and stared at a large metal sign that somebody had wired to one of the framing timbers. It said: WARNING! DANGEROUS PREMISES-DO NOT ENTER.

I hesitated, and then moved forward cautiously until I was standing just outside the entrance. The wood frame was rotted and insect-ridden, one of the vertical supports half-splintered out in the middle so that the horizontal beam above was canted at a lopsided angle. When I extended my arm inside and clicked on the flashlight, the beam penetrated far enough to let me see small mounds of fallen earth and rock, two or three collapsed timbers scattered across the floor. Ceiling supports tilted downward in places, a wall support leaned drunkenly toward the tunnel's center.

Unsafe, all right, I thought. You're a damned fool if you go in there.

But I kept on standing where I was, moving the flashlight up and down, from side to side. Bits of mica-or maybe bits of gold-gleamed dully in the rock. Within the range of my light, I saw nothing you would not expect to find in an abandoned mine shaft.

And yet there was an odd sour musty smell in there; part of it was dust and dry rot and animal or bird droppings, but there was something else, too, that I could not quite define. I dried my palms again, switching the flash from hand to hand.