When the Wind Blows (40 page)

At her feet was the blasting machine. Wires leading away to the depths of the mine were attached to its terminals.

“Jesus,” Dan said softly to himself. “Miss Edna …?”

“Go away Daniel,” the old woman said again. “Please.”

She leaned down and grasped the plunger of the blasting machine with both hands.

As she began putting her weight on it, Dan Gurley turned and fled.

   Eddie Whitefawn felt the first rumblings of the explosion as he reached the top of the slag heap. He saw Esperanza Rodriguez standing in front of the mine entrance and called to her, but she seemed not to hear him.

And then he saw the marshal charging out of the mine.

“Run!” Dan bellowed. Eddie froze for a moment, then started scrambling back down the tailing, Dan Gurley at his heels.

The earth shook beneath their feet, and the explosion burst from the mine entrance, belching black filth mixed with fire and the acrid fumes of dynamite.

Esperanza Rodriguez did not move from where she stood.

As the force of the explosion moved toward her, and the ground quivered beneath her feet, she began praying softly for the souls of the lost children.

As the entrance of the mine crumbled in front of her, a boulder came loose and rolled toward her. Even if she had tried, she would not have been able to get out of its way.

In the cabin, Bill Henry heard Dan Gurley scream, and felt the explosion. He decided it would be safer to stay where he was.

Christie Lyons, her chest heaving, was beginning to wake up. Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked up at Bill.

“Mama?” she whispered. “Where’s my mama?”

“It’s all right,” Bill whispered to her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

But as rocks and debris from the mine rained down on the roof of the cabin, and Christie—fear etched deeply into her face—began to cry, Bill wondered if anything would ever be right for her again.

Only when the last echoes of the explosion had faded away, and silence hung over the night, did he pick Christie up and carry her outside.

   By dawn, all the people of Amberton had gathered at the mine. They stayed there long into the morning, clustered in small groups, murmuring among themselves. Over and over again Eddie Whitefawn told what had happened to him, and over and over again Bill Henry tried to explain Diana Amber’s strange sickness. The townspeople put the story together as best they could, but in the end they could only agree on one thing.

Everything had begun and ended with the mine, and now the mine was gone.

And the Ambers, who had started everything so many years ago, were gone, too.

At last there would be an end to tragedy, and the people of Amberton could put their fears away.

Epilogue

Christie Lyons was twenty-nine when she came back to Amberton.

As she drove into town she realized that little had changed. It was as neat and tidy as ever, frozen in time like a tintype from the past. Penrose’s Dry Goods, its sign freshly painted, was still open for business, and Christie thought she recognized Steve Penrose’s father leaning against the door, chatting with a woman whom she was almost sure was Susan Gillespie’s mother.

The people, like the town, had an eternal quality to them. They looked not much different from the way they had looked twenty years ago. It was as if Amberton were a play, and as the set remained the same, so also did the cast.

In a way, Christie was glad the place still looked familiar, but in another way, it saddened her. It brought back those strange weeks twenty years before, when her life had suddenly come apart at the seams.

She hadn’t realized it then, of course, but now she knew that what had happened to her then had damaged her permanently, and that the scars engraved on her personality would never heal.

That was why she had returned to Amberton—to try to erase those scars.

She smiled at the little girl who sat beside her.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

Her daughter, whom she had named Carole, for Christie’s own mother, looked around without interest. “I want to go back to Los Angeles,” she said, her voice sullen.

In some ways, Christie shared her daughter’s feelings. She had liked Los Angeles, liked the bigness of it, and the way no one there ever noticed her. But as Carole began to grow up, and Christie began to think about what might happen to her in the schools, she had come to a decision.

Christie wanted her little girl to grow up normally. She didn’t want to come home one day and find Carole staring blankly at the television screen, her eyes glazed over from an afternoon of pills and grass.

It had happened to a friend of hers only a month ago, and it had frightened Christie.

She had known since Carole was born that one day she would leave Los Angeles and come back to Amberton. But when Carole was a baby, there would have been too many questions and not enough money.

Now there would be no reason for anyone to question her story of a divorce—no one need ever know that she had never married Carole’s father at all.

Now there was enough money, and she wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job as well as taking care of the ranch. She had saved scrupulously, and she had enough to get by for a year. By then the mine, leased out to one of the oil companies, would be producing again.

The ranch, left to her by Edna Amber, had been held in trust for her, the taxes paid by leasing the grazing rights to the land. When she was twenty-one, it had been turned over to her, and she had continued leasing it, but always, in the back of her mind, she had believed that one day she would come back.

Today was that day.

She passed Bill Henry’s office but didn’t stop. She was in a hurry to get out to the ranch, to see the house
in which she had lived for only a few weeks, but which held so many memories for her.

Painful memories that she knew she had to confront.

She left the town behind and drove along the bumpy road that led to the Amber ranch.

No, she said to herself. The
Lyons
ranch. The Ambers are gone, and it’s mine now.

“Is that our house?” Carole said, interrupting her thoughts.

The house stood bleakly against the hills, its paint long ago scrubbed away by wind and rain. Christie had a sudden urge to turn the car around and drive away, but she knew she couldn’t run away anymore.

She parked in the driveway and, taking Carole by the hand, led her up the steps to the front door. She fished in her purse and found the key that had been sent to her by the last tenant, who had moved out a month ago.

The house smelled musty, and as her daughter looked around curiously, Christie hurried to open the windows. She wished, fleetingly, that the wind would blow and flush the stale air from the house.

She put the thought from her mind.

Ever since she was a child, she had had trouble with wind—it brought nightmares, and when the Santa Ana blew in Los Angeles, she would often find herself waking up at night, crying softly and sucking her thumb.

She knew it was connected to what had happened here when she was only nine, and she knew that when the wind roared down out of the mountains, she was going to have bad spells—spells when she wouldn’t remember exactly what had happened.

That, too, was one of the things she was going to have to face. The doctors had told her so—indeed, they had urged her to come back to Amberton years ago to come to grips with the things that had been
erased from her memory. Only when she understood exactly what had happened, they said, would she be all right.

She wandered through the house.

Nothing much had changed—the furniture, more threadbare than ever, seemed on the verge of collapse, and everywhere Christie looked Miss Edna’s presence seemed to loom. It was strange—there was nothing that reminded Christie of Diana; nothing at all. It was as if it were Miss Edna’s house, and Diana, though she had lived there all her life, had left no mark.

Christie heard feet pounding down the stairs, and then Carole appeared.

“Mommy, there’s a room in the attic, and it’s nailed shut. What is it?”

Following her daughter to the third floor, Christie had a feeling of foreboding.

She stopped at the door to the nursery and stared at the nail heads embedded in its surface.

“The nursery,” she whispered. “What on earth—?”

“Let’s open it, Mommy!”

Christie found a hammer in the pantry, then went back upstairs and began prying the nails loose. They resisted her efforts, screeching as she pulled them out, but eventually all of them gave way.

She opened the door.

Except for the rocking chair, the cradle, and a crib standing in one corner, the room was empty. The wallpaper had finally fallen away. Cobwebs dangled in the corners, and dust coated the floor.

“You lived here?” Carole asked, her blue eyes like saucers.

“For a few weeks,” Christie replied, her mind reeling.

Here, in this room, she was finding Diana.

She could feel Diana’s presence, almost hear her voice, calling to her, reaching out to her.

“Let’s go downstairs,” she said. “I don’t like this room. I never did.”

She hurried out of the nursery and went down to the kitchen. She found some coffee in the pantry and made a pot.

A few minutes later Carole joined her, carrying a box.

“I found this in one of the closets,” she said. Inside the box was a pile of album pages, torn to shreds. As she pieced them together Christie recognized her mother, then her father.

“They’re mine,” she said, her voice filled with wonder. “After all these years. Look, honey, these are your grandmother and grandfather.”

Carole looked curiously at the pictures. “What happened to them?” she asked.

“They died,” Christie told her. “When I was a little girl, they died.”

“Were they sick?”

“My mother was,” Christie said. “And after that, Father died in the mine.”

At mention of the mine Carole’s eyes lit up. “Can we go up there?” she asked.

“I suppose so,” Christie told her. “There’s not much to see, though.”

Carole frowned. “Why did Mrs. Amber blow it up?”

“She was an old woman, and she had funny ideas. She thought the mine was evil.”

“How can a mine be evil?” Carole wanted to know. “It’s only a hole in the ground, isn’t it?”

Christie took a deep breath and wondered how to explain what had happened up there. Even she still wasn’t sure.

“Of course it is,” she said. “It’s just a hole, and we’re going to dig it out again.”

“Are we going to be rich?”

Christie laughed and hugged her daughter. “Well, if
it all works out, we’re not going to starve. But I don’t know if we’re going to be rich.”

There was a knock at the back door, and a young man with black hair and brooding brown eyes stuck his head in. He smiled tentatively, then more broadly. “Christie! It’s really you, isn’t it?”

“Eddie? Eddie Whitefawn?” Christie stood up and ran to Eddie, throwing her arms around him.

Eddie hugged her, then winked at Carole. “Hi! I used to know your mother when we were just about your age.”

Christie felt a rush of pleasure at seeing Eddie. Though they hadn’t been good friends, the two of them had survived that last night at the mine.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“I’m going to work on the mine,” he said. “I’ve got a degree in mining engineering.”

“Just like my father,” Christie said. For some reason she suddenly felt uneasy, but didn’t know why. She picked up one of the pictures and offered it to Eddie. “Do you remember him?” she asked.

Eddie nodded.

“Mr. Crowley always thought a lot of him. Said he was the best mine man he ever worked with. In fact, he could never understand what happened to your father.”

Christie’s eyes clouded over, and Eddie wondered if he shouldn’t have mentioned it. He glanced at his watch, then up toward the mountains. “Look, why don’t we have dinner tonight? Catch up on things, okay? I’ve gotta get up to the mine and do a couple of things, and it looks like the wind’s going to blow.”

“Don’t you work when it’s windy?” Carole asked. She’d never heard of such a thing—in Los Angeles everybody ignored the wind.

Eddie looked at the little girl, and the smile faded from his lips.

“Not if I can help it,” he said. “I guess I’m still a believer in my Indian superstitions.”

“About what?” Though Carole asked the question, Christie, too, listened to the answer.

“The children,” Eddie said. “When the wind blows, you can hear the children up there. They’re crying.”

   That night, as Christie lay in Edna Amber’s bed, trying to fall asleep, she listened to the wind. It was howling tonight, battering at the old house, and she could feel the house tremble under its fury.

And mixed with the wind she thought she heard something else.

A child, crying for its mother.

She got out of bed and went across the hall to Diana’s room, where Carole was sleeping.

But Carole wasn’t sleeping.