Matt moved to the middle of the kitchen floor and sat next to her. He put his arms around her. “We don’t know that,” he said quietly. You know how kids shoot their mouths off, trying to look cool in front of their friends. The old mine is just one possibility, and the cops are heading out there right now to check it out. They say it’s sealed up tight, anyway, that there’s no way anyone break into it and fall into a shaft, especially one twelve year old boy. They’re going to call as soon as they know anything. Let’s wait and see what they say.”
“I’m not waiting for anything,” she said. She pushed herself up off the floor. “We’re going out there right now.”
Julie could not believe the ruggedness of the terrain. Matt’s four wheel drive Jeep bounced and skidded, navigating the abandoned road leading to the old mine agonizingly slowly. She wanted to shout at him to step on it, that she needed to get to her baby, but she knew he was doing the best he could. Any faster and the truck would probably just ricochet off the rutted, overgrown path into a tree, or break an axle or something, and then where would they be?
So she held her tongue, and her breath, and finally the Jeep rounded a corner and the woods opened up into a massive clearing and they were there. A chain-link fence, rusted and bent, surrounded the site of the old mine, its front gate standing open. Two police vehicles, a four wheel drive pickup truck and a four wheel drive SUV, were parked in front of a dilapidated shack roughly in the middle of the clearing, their hazard lights flashing busily, the officers nowhere to be seen.
Clouds boiled overhead, dark and threatening, a blackish-purple smear hanging low over the scene. Matt gunned the engine and the Jeep shot through the open gate, the ground at last flat and relatively clear. He rolled up next to the two police vehicles and Julie leapt out the passenger door before the truck had even stopped moving.
She pounded up to the ramshackle door, vaguely aware of Matt following behind telling her to slow down. “Be careful,” he said. “You won’t be doing Tim any favors if the building falls on you and you have to be taken out of here in an ambulance.” She ignored him. Her baby was here, she just knew it, and he needed her.
She pushed through the doorway and into the building’s nearly empty interior. Her attention was immediately drawn to the far side of what had clearly once been an office, or a base building of some sort. Through a pair of windows filthy with grime and crud she could just barely make out the two policemen standing together, maybe fifty feet behind the building. They seemed to be staring at a rise in the earth, and one of them was talking into what looked like a walkie-talkie or some type of radio.
Julie clapped a hand to her mouth, terrified, and ran out the half-open rear door. Once again, she could hear Matt behind her telling her to slow down, and once again she ignored him. “Is it him?” she cried as she ran. “Did you find him? Is he okay?”
The two officers jumped in surprise and looked up, the one with the radio reaching toward the weapon at his hip. Julie didn’t care. She kept running; it wasn’t like they were going to shoot her just because she had surprised them.
She stopped right behind the two policemen. They were standing in front of what was clearly the mine’s entrance. It had been dug into a small hill, maybe six feet high, and capped with a big concrete block, probably way back when the mine was shut down. Now the block was destroyed, half of it in pieces on the ground, the other half pulled partly away from the big wooden beams to which it had been bolted.
It didn’t seem possible that a twelve year old boy — and a small one, at that — could have smashed the concrete apart, but Julie knew immediately Tim had done exactly that. He had broken the seal to the old mine shafts and was now trapped underground, lost inside a maze of tunnels and warrens, some of them over one hundred fifty years old.
“We’ll find him,” the cop with the radio told her, understanding immediately she must be the lost child’s mother. “We’ve already called out a search and rescue team, with dogs and plenty of men. He can’t have gotten far. We’ll find him,” he said again, although more quietly.
Julie whimpered helplessly, staring at the ground in front of the tunnel as Matt finally caught up to her and curled an arm around her waist. Scattered among the rubble of the broken mine seal were the tools Tim must have used to smash the concrete: a heavy hammer and a gigantic screwdriver, as well as his backpack, filled with water bottles and snacks. Lying a few feet away was his flashlight, still switched on.
Tears spilled from her eyes. His flashlight was on the ground. Tim would never have voluntarily entered a pitch-black tunnel all by himself without a flashlight.
But his flashlight was right here.
On the ground.
And Tim was nowhere in sight.
Julie was exhausted. She felt as though she had searched the entire Tonopah Mine herself, tramping through miles of confusing underground pathways, none of which had seen human beings for nearly a century.
And she would have done it, too, had the search and rescue team allowed it, but instead she had been forced to cool her heels outside the entrance, pacing back and forth on the dusty ground, waiting for word of her missing son’s fate. Praying. Dozens of men had come, with dogs as promised, and disappeared inside the old mine, toting flashlights and survival gear and GPS units.
And weapons.
“Why do they need guns to look for a twelve year old boy?” she asked, and no one looked her in the eye. No one answered, either. Julie McKenna had lived in town less than a year, but she had heard the stories — whispered rumors, really — of the supposedly haunted Tonopah Mine, the one from which grown men had disappeared, never to be heard from again.
She had heard the stories, and she had scoffed at them. This was the twenty-first century, a time of reason, with instantaneous worldwide electronic communication and earth-shattering scientific advances being made almost daily. Nobody believed in ghosts and boogiemen anymore; at least no one with half a serving of common sense.
But that was two days ago, back when things made sense. That was before her trustworthy young son lied to her face, faking illness so he could go traipsing into a long-abandoned pit hundreds, if not thousands, of feet deep in the earth, abandoning his flashlight before entering the tunnel.
That was before seeing tough, burly outdoorsmen filing into the mine shaft, faces pale and drawn, packing weapons along with water and survival gear while searching for her little boy.
Seeing these things made the possibility of ghosts and boogiemen seem, if not likely, at least possible, to Julie McKenna. Because she knew one thing as surely as she knew her own name: Tim would not have entered that mine shaft without his flashlight.
So she paced in front of the mine’s entrance — back and forth, back and forth — just as she done inside her kitchen. Trying to stay out of the way, not wanting to be a distraction but unable to force herself to move more than fifteen or twenty feet from that awful black gaping maw, that hole in the earth with the smashed concrete and the grim-faced men filing in and out.
Finally, after several endless hours with no clue as to her son’s whereabouts, the search and rescue leader had prevailed upon her to go home. “We’re going to find him,” the man had said — Julie was so stressed and upset she never even asked him his name—“and when we find him, you’re going to have to be able to take care of him. You won’t be able to do that if you’re exhausted. Go get some rest; we’ll call you the minute we know anything.”