The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (17 page)

We drive to the police station. Mr. Smiley is sitting on a bench outside whistling through his big mustache. As soon as he sees the Smileywagon, he indicates that we should park. Devon parks, we get out, and Mr. S. leads us to a cruiser secured for the mission. I get in the back, an act that brings on the beginnings of another claustrophobic panic attack. Before I freak too much, we are on the road, moving quickly. Mr. S. even turns on the siren (or so Devon tells me, turning around and signing happily through the Plexiglas) so we don’t have to wait in traffic.

After a brisk drive, we are at the mine, revisiting the place that just a few days ago was the scene of such chaos but now stands as silent as a tomb. Or so I surmise. The news vehicles have moved on to a fresher tragedy. The large parking lot is empty, with the exception of three vehicles. One, a van painted with ads for Happy Memory Coal Mine, obviously belongs to the manager. Another is just like ours—a police cruiser from the same department. The third is a sleek, black, official-looking vehicle with darkened windows. As Mr. S. parks the cruiser and we head toward the door, I check out the license plate. It identifies the black car as belonging to an employee of the federal government.

I jab Devon with my elbow and point toward it. He makes a
stunned face and then says something to his dad. Mr. S. says something back, and then Devon turns to me and finger-spells out the three letters I had already suspected: “F-B-I.”

So the feds have shown up in our sleepy little town. Is this because Pat’s dad is a powerful man with powerful friends? And powerful enemies? Could there really be something to the idea that Pat’s death was somehow connected to the scandals in Congress? Was his dad going to rat somebody out? Were these powerful people scared enough that they would kill a high school kid to silence Mr. Chambers? Was a hired hit man really involved? I have to remind myself that the people on TheTruthIsNot.com also believed that pennies are still in circulation only because they each contain tiny radio-frequency-identification chips that allow the government to track the movements of every citizen. Of course, the reason they believed that was because
someone
planted that rumor in their “talkback” forum, but still …

Devon, Mr. S., and I approach the front entrance to the mine, where the giant fake rat leers at us with its yellow eyes. Mr. S. knocks on the closed door. When no one answers, he just lets himself in. We see the manager of the mine—that Albert Fitzsimmons—first. I recognize Fitzsimmons as one of the mine employees who was running around the parking lot in a blithering panic. Fitzsimmons is a beefy man with a shiny head and an unusual row of glittering earrings in his left ear. He is obviously deep in conversation. One of the men with whom he is speaking is Detective Hawley, and the third guy is clearly FBI. Tall and wrapped in a dark black coat, which bulges menacingly around a
belt that presumably holds all manner of deadly weapons, he stares down at Fitzsimmons with an unblinking intensity. His tightly cropped mustache slowly rises and falls as his jaws intently work over a piece of gum like a relentlessly grilled suspect.

Mr. S., who has apparently decided to just go for it, barges right in. I watch his lips, curious as to what he is going to say.

“Fitzy?” he asks the seated manager. “Smiley here. County P.D. And these boys here are helping me look into a few things. We
(something something)
on the phone?”

Hawley looks furious. Mr. Smiley gives no sign of even recognizing that he is there. Fitzsimmons is momentarily baffled. His eyes narrow and his head shakes, setting off a rippling cascade of neck fat. And then he breaks into a huge smile. I can’t see his response, but he is obviously pleased Mr. Smiley has given him some sort of way to get out of being interrogated by the scary FBI guy. The scary FBI guy, on the other hand, looks tightly peeved. Very tightly peeved. He has words with Hawley, then comes over to us, grabs Mr. Smiley by the elbow—not in a mean way, but still aggressively—and whispers something into his ear.

“Well, I guess we’ll be going then,” says Mr. Smiley (or something like that), and turns to the door.

Devon is furious.

“Dad!” he says. “We came all the way out here. Just please let us
(something something)
for a few minutes!”

“Sorry, son, but the nice agent here has some business with Mr. Fitzsimmons. And this is still a crime scene. Or, uh, a
(something something)
scene of a possible crime. And, yeah, well, uh, (
something something)
.”

Mr. Smiley turns to the door. Devon looks at me with a strange expression. Then he winks. And starts to cry.

In just a minute, he has whipped up a tornado of full-on tears, sputtering and spitting like a baby at a funeral. I can’t quite see the words, but I think he says “best friend” in there somewhere. Is he claiming that Pat was his best friend? And that he needs to go visit the death site because of his grief? He pulls a flower—one of my mom’s crumpled mums—from his pocket and says, “I have to mark the place where my friend perished.” Man, is this effective! Mr. Smiley, Albert Fitzsimmons, and even the tough FBI guy and the evil Detective Hawley all look crushed. It is like they are dealing with a whimpering puppy. While the adults have a little discussion about how exactly to get Devon to stop his weeping, Devon starts signing to me with his right hand while his left hand holds the flower and wipes away torrents of tears.

“
D-O-N-T J-U-D-G-E M-E, M-Y G-O-O-D M-A-N. B-U-T I K-N-E-W T-H-I-S W-O-U-L-D W-O-R-K
.“

It does. Mr. Fitzsimmons gives us some of those lantern hats out of the bin and has some words with Mr. Smiley while the other two men sulk. I don’t see what Fitzy has to say, but he seems to be pointing out the areas we are allowed into and the spots that are absolutely off-limits. He then shows us the way down the tracks back to where we had taken our tour. Fitzy and the FBI guy return to their tense conversation while Hawley looks like a volcano ready to blow. Mr. S. follows Devon looking bemused. Devon practically skips down the dusty path.

I am so impressed with Devon’s performance and so
weirded out by this strange scene that I momentarily forget to wonder what exactly we are doing here in the first place. All Devon had said was that we were going to look for clues. But what could we hope to find that everyone else had missed? Surely every inch of the old mine has been combed and examined with the highest-tech devices available? All Devon and I have is our little notebooks and my so-called super-vision. Some deaf people do have extrakeen vision, it is true, but I am not going to pick up anything the experts had missed with their zoom lenses and laser scanner things.

Devon pretends that he is going to place the flower at the area where Pat had died, steering clear of the area still outlined in police tape, which the FBI guy had warned us about. He signs to me that I should “look for” clues. He does the actual sign for “look for,” which is a funny gesture almost like you’re peering through an imaginary telescope. Impressive. It seems that the thing Devon wants to do most is to take measurements (yes, he brought a protractor) to calculate the angle at which Pat fell. But why is he wasting our time trying to prove that Pat had been pushed? The professionals had already determined that! I get sick of watching him squint and calculate, so I cruise back up the path.

I walk to a spot where I can watch Detective Hawley and Mr. Smiley arguing. Hawley looks like his head might explode, while Mr. S. just holds his palms up to the ceiling and grins an annoying grin.

After walking just a little farther, I realize I am right near the spot where Miner Carl mentioned Dummy Halpin. I had
taken that to mean that we were very close to the place where Dummy had perished. On the field trip, I was too distracted to think about what Miner Carl really meant. But this is … the spot.
The
spot. I am glad I am alone, free of my classmates and Devon and everyone else. So what am I feeling? A connection? Could there be an electric aura passed through the years, some feeling of the germ that became the virus of my life?

I am zoning out and feeling sorry for myself, feeling sad for Dummy and everything, looking at nothing in particular, when my eyes fall on something. A few feet up in the wall of solid rock is a rough outline that looks like nothing so much as a door. Not a real door—-just a natural displacement of rock making the mouth of an entrance to someplace. To where? I check to see if Devon or Mr. Smiley or anyone is looking. Nope. It isn’t easy to see—the rock wall is covered by a shadow—but if you skip across like an agile mountain goat (or like a semiagile walrus), you are suddenly in a little passage. I stick my head into the mouth of the pitch-black entrance.

I flip on the light of my miner’s hat and see, to my surprise, what looks like a shadowy tunnel. I pull myself in. And therein recur both the panic of claustrophobia and the thrill of discovery. A secret passage! And something tells me, an instinct, that many years ago my ancestor, the original Will Halpin, had been in this exact spot.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is these words, clawed into the rock:
DUMMY WAS HERE
.

I rub my eyes
. Still there. I rub my eyes again. Yep. I slap myself a few times with the palm of my dirty hand, close my eyes tight, and then open them again. Still there, and now my face stings.

I crawl ahead a little farther—another D.H. scrawled into the wall. And then another. Why did he do this? Was he leaving a trail? For me to follow? And then I had this crazy thought: What if Dummy never died? What if he escaped? Didn’t I read that they never found a body? What if he pulled himself up into this little passageway and let everyone think that he died? But why would he do that?

I follow the path farther, straining to fit down the narrow passageway and trying as hard as I can not to think about what will happen if I get stuck. As I proceed, the passage does get somewhat roomier. I can’t stand up, or even crouch, but I can
get on my hands and knees, which is way preferable to the belly crawl I had been doing. I am moving along with relative ease for probably a hundred feet, following the D.H. markings in the rock, chasing the ghost of Dummy Halpin. And then the passage comes to a fork. Two choices. I can turn to the right into the dark and unknown or to the left into the dark and unknown. Of course, I can also scamper back to safety. But, instead, I sit, hunched, looking from right to left, from left to right. To the left there seems to be the tiniest sliver of light above an incline, while the right is pure blackness. And, just because that’s the kind of guy I am, I go for the black.

I squeeze my bulk down the rightward passage. Will I find something wonderful, like hidden treasure or diamonds? Or something awful—perhaps the skeleton of Dummy Halpin? I crawl for what seems like forever through the choking darkness. And what do I find? Devon Smiley.

Dev isn’t in the passage like I am; he is still hanging out near the ledge taking measurements. But I have taken a path, apparently, from the spot where Dummy had died around to another opening right near where Pat died. I emerge like a turtle, sticking my head out of the cave behind the DO NOT CROSS taped-off area, and see Devon. I am close enough to grab his ponytail. So I do. And I really would have liked to have heard the scream, because, judging from his face, he is scared to the point of involuntary urination.

I get a little scared too, realizing I am sort of near that ledge, so I scooch back, crawling in reverse. Fueled by fear and guided by the blazes of Dummy’s markings illuminated by my
headlamp, I crawl out to where I entered and walk the path back around to where I started. In a minute I am behind Devon, close enough to tap him on the shoulder. He screams again. I laugh.

“What are you?” he writes with a shaking hand on the little whiteboard he had brought so we could converse. “A magic person?” This last part he doesn’t write but signs. The guy really has been practicing his signs. Who (other than Camp Arrowhead alumni) learns compound words like that? (“Magician” is made up of “magic” and “person.”) Impressive indeed.

I nod. And then I write on the whiteboard he had handed me. “I am the Hefty Houdini.”

He laughs but still looks somewhat panicked. “How
did you
get over there?” he writes. Italics in handwriting?

I write it out, and Devon’s eyes light up. Does he share my vague excitement about this twist in the Dummy Halpin ghost story? No. What really gets him buzzing is the discovery of a secret passage.

He scribbles, “It’s just like in the Hardy Boys’
The House on the Cliff!
It was one of the first ones Chet was in!”

“Are you seriously talking Hardy Boys?”

“Well, it is a pretty interesting coincidence.”

“Devon, focus on this: I may have just found some sort of clue that my ancestor—my namesake, the original Will Halpin—maybe didn’t die but found a passage out and escaped!”

“But anyone could have written that,” Devon scribbles. “Maybe they were just honoring him by writing his name near the spot where he died.”

“Yeah, but …,” I start to write. Geezo. I hadn’t thought of
it that way. Why was I so sure Dummy wrote those notes? I am suddenly deflated.

“Perhaps we should also consider,” Devon writes, “that whoever killed Pat could have used that same secret passage.”

True. But maybe …

Mr. Smiley comes back
down the path with the FBI guy and Albert Fitzsimmons. All three wear uneasy and sweaty expressions. Mr. Smiley taps the back of his watch with his index finger, another one of those signs that hearing people do that actually is real sign language. Time to go. We head back up to the mouth of the mine. Fitzsimmons can’t resist trying to get us to spend some money in the gift shop, and Devon can’t resist buying another “future diamond.” Sigh.

As we make our way back through the parking lot, I point to something far off in the distance. When Devon stops to look, I rush to the car so I can get the front seat. We immediately start texting as Mr. Smiley drives toward home.