When the Wind Blows (34 page)

Matt Crowley had decided to accept Edna Amber’s job offer for several reasons, not the least of them being that he needed the money. Furthermore, he and Joyce had decided that if the mine and its ever-present threat were gone, Amberton would be able to get back to normal. He’d talked it over with Dan Gurley, and the two of them had decided to make the explosion an event for the whole town. Today, five days after the picnic, he was going to begin the job.

He parked his pickup near the entrance to the mine and got out. He stood for a few minutes, enjoying the summer sun, then walked slowly toward the black hole that yawned in the hillside. Reluctantly he went inside.

Nothing really had changed since the last time he had been there, except that now as he stood in the gloom, waiting for his eyes to adjust, he had a feeling of unease. Three people had died there in the last few weeks, and Matt found that he was no longer as confident about the mine as he once had been.

Today he was going to plant the dynamite that would destroy the mine.

He found the switch box, opened it, and turned on the electricity. A soft glow lit up the tunnel. Carrying a case of dynamite, Matt began walking back toward the elevator. He paused only to find a miner’s helmet and switched on its light as he loaded the explosives into the elevator.

He was about to press the button that would start the little car on its long descent into the depths of the mine when he remembered one of Elliot Lyons’s prime rules. Never, under any circumstances, go down into a mine alone. That, as far as anyone knew, was what Elliot Lyons had done. And Elliot was dead.

Matt stepped out of the elevator and walked out of the mine.

He knew he should go back to Amberton and find someone—Dan Gurley, perhaps—to help him. With two of them working they could plant the dynamite in only a few hours. But today Matt wanted to work by himself. It was quiet on the hillside, and the afternoon was warm, and there was really no rush.

He decided to leave the dynamite where it was and prowl the hillside around the mine, looking for fissures and sinkholes that would indicate the beginnings of cave-ins. When the mine went, there was going to be a major hole in the local scenery, and the more he knew about the weak spots below, the more effectively he could place the explosives.

He followed an overgrown trail that threaded up the hill from the mine entrance. He walked slowly, examining the ground carefully, searching for the depressions that would tell him that just below the surface the earth had fallen away.

An hour later, having found nothing, he lowered himself to the ground and leaned back against a rock. He glanced around, not really looking for anything—which was probably why he found it.

He had been looking for depressions in the ground.

What he found was a cleft in the hillside.

A tangle of brush nearly covered the hole, and Matt had to break most of it away before he could get inside. Even then he had to stoop over, for the crevice was no more than five feet high. By the time he was ten feet in, the blackness had surrounded him, and he began to have a sensation of being suspended in a
vacuum, even though he could easily touch the walls on both sides of the tunnel.

He called out and listened to his voice echoing around him. The shaft went a long way, and if he was going to explore it further, he’d need a light.

He left the cave and scrambled back down the hillside to the mine, picked up his helmet, then returned.

It seemed to be a natural formation. There were no pick marks on the walls, and the floor was covered with the bones of small animals. Over the years it must have been used as a den by some sort of predator. Though wolves and cougar had once been common enough in that part of the country, none had been sighted for years. Perhaps a coyote had used the cave.

Matt shined his light into the depths of the tunnel and called out once more. Though he knew it wasn’t possible, the light seemed to reduce the echo of his voice. He began walking along the shaft, testing the floor with each step before he put his weight down.

Forty yards in, the floor dropped away.

Matt stretched out on his belly and edged carefully forward. He moved his head out over the precipice.

Far below, the light caught something.

At the bottom of the vertical shaft there was water. Its surface was perfectly still and almost invisible. And beneath the surface there was something else.

Bones.

The pond seemed to be filled with tiny bones, heaped together in a jumble.

Matt’s stomach turned as he began to suspect that what he was looking at was a watery grave filled with the bodies of infants.

In a cold sweat he backed away from the lip of the shaft, stood up, and made his way once more into the daylight.

For a long time he stared at the hole in the hillside.

He shuddered as he realized what it had to be.

The story his son had told him about the water babies. He had a sick feeling that he had just stumbled onto the source of that story.

   Edna Amber herself opened the door, and when she saw who it was, she stepped back to let Matt in. She led him to the kitchen and offered him a cup of coffee.

“You don’t happen to have a beer, do you, Miss Edna?”

“There hasn’t been beer in this house since my husband died. A drink?” she suggested. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to fix it yourself.”

“Coffee’ll be fine,” Matt told her. As she found him a cup Matt noted that the old woman had aged in the last week.

“Are you all right, Miss Edna?” he asked as she brought him his coffee.

She smiled at him, but there was a sadness in her eyes that Matt had never seen before. Always, before, there had been a spark in those blue eyes, a spark that could ignite into anger at any moment. But today, the fire was gone.

“I’m just getting old,” she said. She lowered herself into the chair opposite him and folded her hands on the table. “You’ve been up to the mine. I gather you’re going to do as I asked.”

Matt hesitated, then nodded. “I’m going to try.”

“What do you mean, you’re going to try?” Edna asked, a bit of spirit returning to her voice. “Either you’re going to do it or you’re not.”

“Well, it might not be that simple. I found something today that I don’t understand. Did you know there’s a cave on that mountain?”

“It’s riddled with shafts, as we all know,” Edna said.

“No, I don’t mean the mine. Outside. Farther up the hill and off to the left. A natural cave.” For the moment,
he decided, there was no point in telling Miss Edna what he’d found in the cave.

Edna frowned. “I’ve never heard of one.”

“Well, that’s the thing, Miss Edna. I don’t know if it’s connected to the mine or not. I don’t think it is—it seems to have water at the bottom, and if it were part of the mine, it would have drained, wouldn’t it?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Telling you, I guess. It seems like before I go blowing things up I better know what I’m doing, and that cave bothers me. You don’t know anything about it?”

“Nothing at all.”

“What about Miss Diana?”

“She’s not here,” Edna replied, and Matt was sure he heard a catch in her voice, as if something was not right. “She’s gone off somewhere with Christie. I don’t know when they’ll be back.”

“Gone off? You mean on a trip?”

“Heavens no! No, they took horses and went off into the hills.” Edna’s voice dropped and her eyes seemed to cloud over. “They’ve done that every day since the Fourth of July. I wish they wouldn’t.” Then her eyes cleared and she looked once more at Matt Crowley. “Didn’t Mr. Lyons know about this cave?”

“If he did, he never mentioned it, and it wasn’t on any of his maps. That’s why I came by—I thought you might have an old map, from back when the mine was first dug.”

Edna shook her head. “I gave Mr. Lyons everything. If it wasn’t on the maps he had, it wasn’t on any of them. What difference does it make?”

Matt shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe none. But if there’s some kind of water system down there, or caves or something, it just seems like we better know about it before we go messing around.”

Edna pondered Matt’s words and finally nodded. “Very well,” she said at last. “You go ahead and do
what you think best, Matthew. But I warn you—that mine must be destroyed before it destroys us.”

As he left the Ambers’ a few minutes later and started toward town, Matt reflected on her words.

The mine was becoming an obsession with the old woman.

That was the trouble with getting old. Things stopped working quite the way they should and you got funny ideas. And Edna Amber was definitely getting funny ideas about the mine.

Or was she? Maybe, sincere though she’d seemed, she knew more than she was telling him. Maybe she did know about the cave and what was inside.

Matt decided he’d better talk to Dan Gurley about it.

   Christie stared nervously at the quarry. “Did we have to come up here?” she asked.

“I thought you liked this place,” Diana said. “I thought we could have a swim and lie in the sun for a while.”

“I don’t know,” Christie said doubtfully. “I don’t like it here anymore. The last time I was here was when Kim …” Her voice trailed off.

“But what happened to Kim doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?” Diana asked. “I thought we’d have a nice swim and then lie in the sun.”

Christie let the matter drop, afraid of what might happen if she pushed too hard. A few minutes later, in the same clearing she and her friends had used, she and Diana put on their bathing suits.

They swam for a while, then climbed out onto one of the rocks. They lay silently for a few minutes, and the heat of the sun drained some of the tension out of Christie. She let her mind drift and thought of her friends, whom she hadn’t seen since the picnic. And that reminded her of the camping trip.

“When are we going on the camp-out?” she asked.

Diana stirred. She hadn’t thought of it for days, and now the very idea of it annoyed her. Still, she’d promised, and if she didn’t follow through, she’d have to come up with a reason. She tried to find one that would work.

She could claim she was ill.

That would only give her mother an excuse to send Christie away.

Suddenly she felt trapped, and it was Christie and Jeff who had trapped her.

Jeff, really. If it were only Christie, the camp-out would be fun.

Yes, she decided, the problem was with Jeff.

Her mind went back to when she was a child.

Her mother hadn’t allowed her to have playmates.

At the time she’d resented it.

Now, though, she understood why.

Her mother had wanted her all to herself.

As she wanted Christie all to herself.

And yet she had promised.

“In a day or so,” she said at last. “We’ll go in a day or so.”

She would have to go through with the trip, but once it was over, things would change. After the camp-out, she would keep Christie home.

And Christie would be all by herself.

As Diana had been all by herself.

24

Though none of it showed in her face, inside, Edna Amber was raging. That Diana—her Diana—could have threatened her was nearly beyond her credibility.
“I’ll kill you,”
Diana had said.
“Do you understand me?”
Even now, days later, Edna was still numb from the shock of it.

She listened helplessly as Diana talked on the telephone to Joyce Crowley. Though she could not hear the other woman’s words, she knew what they were discussing.

Diana was going to take Christie and Jeff on a camping trip.

Edna knew she should try to stop the trip, but how? She couldn’t talk to Joyce Crowley. What would she say? That Diana had become a killer? Never. Even if Mrs. Crowley believed her, all it would mean would be her loss of Diana.

She waited until Diana hung up the phone, then spoke to her, but her voice, the voice that for years had rung through the house—ordering, directing, demanding—had dropped to the feeble whisper of the very old.

“Diana? Are you sure what you’re doing is wise?”

Diana smiled at her mother, taking an odd satisfaction in the uncertain look in the old woman’s eyes, the trembling of her hands, and the tremor in her voice. “It’s none of your concern, Mother. What I do with my
little girl is between the two of us. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Everything has to do with me,” Edna protested, but the coldness of Diana’s stare made her shrink back. “I just—I just don’t think you ought to do it,” she finished lamely.

“What you want no longer concerns me, Mother,” Diana told her.

“So I’m to be thrown away?” Edna asked, a little of the old fire returning to her eyes. “After all the years, after all I’ve done for you, I’m to be discarded?”

“All you’ve done for me? I know what you’ve done for me, Mama. You’ve kept me here, made me a prisoner here. And for what? So you wouldn’t be alone.”

“No …”

“Yes, Mama.”

“It was for you. It was all for you …”

“Don’t say that, Mama. Not anymore. I’ve grown up, and I’m going to
be
grown-up. Don’t try to stop me.”