His ears perked. “Where is the crater? If this museum’s on the old mine site, it must be nearby …?”
“It’s on the other side of the parking lot. You know what? Forget this coffee. It’s terrible.” She rose suddenly and tossed the cooled contents of her cup into the nearby sink. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Out the door she went, past a wooden rack stuffed with local-attraction brochures—for a relative value of “local.” He tagged along in her wake.
She was nearly at a run. She wanted to get this over with.
Her boots crunched and scuffed across the unpaved lot, and she paused beside a big metal cage that had once lowered miners three thousand feet down the shaft in search of copper. She turned then, and her hair billowed wildly as the wind rushed up the crest behind her. She raised her voice to be heard, almost shouting as she pointed off to the north.
“That’s where the plant used to be, right over there—facing the hoist house, on the ridge’s natural peak! Used to be, they had a set of tracks that ran ore buckets overhead between them!” She turned around, and now her hair was a halo, vast and golden, wilder than Medusa’s. It looked for all the world like she stood at the edge of a cliff and was prepared to jump.
She said something else but Kilgore couldn’t hear her; she was speaking into the wind and the words were lost. But when he joined her, he understood.
More quietly now, she told him, “The mine caved in years ago, but by then, they weren’t digging copper hardly at alclass="underline" They made more money on sulfuric acid, generated from sulfur dioxide as part of the smelting process—you know, the same stuff that denuded this whole corner of the Smokies. But anyway, there it is. There’s the lake where my friends drowned.”
Beyond the miner cage, all the way down the far side of the sharp, ragged ridge, waited a great crater full of bright blue water surrounded by stiff green trees. It looked like someone’d pulled a plug and the landscape had sloughed down the drain, leaving only this cerulean pool, shimmering at the very bottom of the world.
Kilgore resisted the urge to call the scene “beautiful.” Instead he drew Bethany back away from the edge, stepping down out of the wind.
When they were standing again in the gravel lot, she said, “That’s where they died. Adam first—two days after we got here. A freak accident, that’s what they said. He fell in and … forgot how to swim, or some bullshit like that.”
“Did they send his body back home? I don’t expect they have the facilities out here for an autopsy.”
“Yeah, he’s home by now. Greg, though—he died two days after that, and he’s at the Copper Basin Medical Facility, unless they released his body and no one told me, which is possible. Nobody out here tells me a damn thing. Ammaw Pete thinks I’m an uppity little city bitch, like Knoxville is New York, and I’m carpetbagging for the ages. She doesn’t know I heard her say it, but she probably wouldn’t care if she did.” She looked at Kilgore with something new in her eyes, something cunning. “Maybe they’ll talk to you.”
“I try my best to be a sociable man … but in my experience, people open up faster to a pretty woman like you than a guy like me.”
She shrugged. “Not here. They don’t like me. They don’t trust me. They put me in the same category as the lawyers and environmentalists who closed down the mine and put the whole town out of work. If you’re not for the copper, you’re against it. Like all the life we’re bringing back to this place isn’t worth a damn thing.”
Kilgore Jones made noises of polite protest, but she didn’t respond. She only stared over the ridge, toward that bright blue hole in the pale red dirt, surrounded by all the defiant trees, roots clinging to the steep crater walls, twisted and anchored and still alive—like a big “fuck you” to history.
But she still hadn’t said what he needed to hear, so he prodded her again, friendly but firm. “Tell me what you saw that night, when Greg went under.”
Slowly, she nodded. Not to him, but herself. “Something came up, almost out of the water but not quite. It whispered to Greg,” she said, hardly any louder than the whisper she described. “It called him. Lured him. And when he wouldn’t follow it, it grabbed him—and it dragged him right into the lake.”
“Describe it—the thing you saw.”
“I … I can’t.”
“You’d better, because I’m shit when it comes to mind reading. Bethany,” he said, urgently if not impatiently. “You sent for help. Now talk to me.”
She swallowed and crossed her arms over her stomach, drawing her oversized sweater tighter around her body. “It looked like a man, but it wasn’t. It looked like a miner—one of the old miners, from the eighteen hundreds. But not exactly.” Her eyebrows crunched together. “Do you think it was a ghost?”
This was more comfortable turf for Kilgore, if not for the grad student. “Ghosts are mostly made of memories and imagination—their own, and everyone else’s. Once in a blue moon one’ll have the strength to make a ripple in the real world, but I’ve never heard of one tough enough to drown a grown man.”
She burrowed her hands deeply into her sleeves, then stuffed them under her arms. “This thing … whatever it was, it wasn’t a memory. It was really there. So if it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?”
“I don’t know yet.” He didn’t give her any guesses because they’d only frighten her. He needed more information, and that meant he needed a local. All his polite protests aside, Bethany wasn’t one, and everyone in the county knew it.
Kilgore wasn’t local either, and Chattanooga wasn’t any more rural than Knoxville—but there was more to being local than your starting address.
He left Bethany on the museum steps. He shook her hand and made her promise to be in touch and stay away from the crater. She agreed to these terms, but he didn’t know how much that meant. Her abject horror at watching her fellow student drown might be nothing compared to the siren song of an otherworldly creature, or even her simple curiosity.
Siren.
The word floated to the surface of his brain and refused to sink back down. He made a mental note of it because there was no sense in denying the overlap. Sirens were water elementals, of a fashion; they called, lured, and killed—though they usually came in a prettier package than that of an old miner. “There’s a first time for everything. Then again,” he mumbled, as he yanked the Eldorado’s bum door and settled back inside the car, “it talked to Greg, and Greg didn’t listen. So it resorted to force.”
He gazed up at the silver crucifix that hung from the rearview mirror, trembling and bobbing like a pendulum. It’d been a gift, from someone who wouldn’t speak to him anymore—a man he’d come to view as a father, at the third church that threw him out. The last church. The one he drove past sometimes, still not quite finished with that argument but knowing better than to go inside.
They’d disinvited him, like he was some kind of goddamned vampire who knew better than to cross the threshold.
He stayed away anyhow. He knew where he wasn’t wanted, and no amount of wishing or praying would change that. Apparently.
He sighed because he sure could’ve used the help right about now; but he sucked it up, withdrew his small notebook from his pocket, and added what he’d learned. Then he flipped to the back page—where two addresses were written down: One was the local watering hole, a joint that went by the uninspiring legend of “Ed’s,” and the other belonged to the woman either named or called “Ammaw Pete,” who volunteered at the museum and allegedly didn’t think much of poor Miss Huesman.