“You figured all that out just by watching a dog run off with a sack?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose they’re gone, Raymond?” Her voice was gentler, sympathetic, not angry.
He dropped her off in the lot without answering that. After she left he just sat, hands on the wheel, staring fiercely at the lodge.
They’re still in the valley, he thought over and over. If they were gone, Moon would be, too. He could convince himself of that if he tried hard enough.
9
For several minutes Jack Helder watched John Moon stand at the edge of the woods, whistling into them as though there were something in there to hear him. He had spent the morning trying to think up tactful ways to fire the Indian. Moon’s war and medical record had shaken him up badly. He imagined the Indian turning on the guests as though they were Viet Cong.
Hesitantly Helder walked toward him. The Indian was covered with leaves and twigs. “Mr. Moon?” he said in a voice laced with steel.
The Indian looked slowly back at him. Helder’s courage shrank. “Yes, sir.”
“Unless my watch is fast, you should be at the archery range now.”
“They’re eating lunch, Mr. Helder. I told them I’d be ready in an hour.”
“I’m a little confused, Moon. Why aren’t you ready?”
“’Cause I can’t find my dog.”
Among Moon’s weird talents was an ability to make Helder feel like an oaf. As if Moon was sane and everybody else in the world was crazy. “Where did he go?”
Moon answered sweetly, “If I knew that, Mr. Helder, I’d know where to find him.”
“You don’t need your dog to shoot bows and arrows.”
“I need him. He didn’t come back last night.”
“Moon, I like dogs as much as anybody. But it’s not a question of when we’re ready for guests at Colby, it’s a question of when they’re ready for us. And they’re ready now. I want you back at the range. Your dog can find his own way home.”
Moon stirred a pebble with his shoe. “He ain’t really my dog, when you come down to it. I should have remembered that.” He was obviously talking to himself, not Helder.
Helder chose to ignore it. “And look at your clothes! They were brand-new yesterday. What happened?”
“Nothing. I slept in the woods last night.”
Moon turned on his heel and walked toward the archery range. Helder decided he’d wait until he had help before firing Moon. Get a couple of brawny kitchen waiters, in case his temper went off.
Jack Helder mopped his head with a white handkerchief. He turned to see two Ranger trucks ascending the Oharaville road. Drake was in the lead one, next to another man. The second truck carried several sawhorses with blinker lights. They drove fast, leaving a thin trail of dust behind them.
Now what!
On the smooth ground before the mine entrance, the Rangers pounded in DANGER SINKHOLES signs and bounded the area with a wire fence. Drake sat in the truck, listening to the staticky blare of walkie-talkie voices. Wallace, Jones, and Taylor, who had been filled in on the whole bizarre story, were in the mine, and they were nervous as cats.
They found the food. Jones expostulated over the walkie-talkie, “Jesus, boss, he was right about that. There must be a ton of the stuff. And bones, too! It’s full of bones!”
Drake paused while eating his sandwich. Score one for Raymond Jason. A breath of wind creaked a board in Oharaville, and he looked back at it. “Okay. Look for prints. And be careful.”
They checked out the other junction and found that it branched off into ancillary shafts not noted on the charts. It was not a dead end after all. In one of the shafts Wallace found a second neat pile of bones next to a rockfall which blocked off the tunnel. It took them an hour to go carefully through the remaining tunnels. All were blocked.
At five o’clock they filed out, blinking at the sunlight, slimy up to their knees with mud. They had marked off the shafts on paper, which was crumpled by their nervous fingers. Jones wound up his rope and said, “A thousand feet is as far as you can go in there in any tunnel. The one with the leaves and stuff is the closest to an open one.” He popped a ring tab off a can of beer and took three heavy gulps.
“Any prints?” asked Drake.
They all shook their heads.
“So it could have been anything. It could have been people.”
They shifted weight from one foot to the other. Then Jones said, “If you ask me, those shafts were blocked off deliberately. Those rockfalls fill them up completely.”
Taylor chimed in, “And I bet they’re keeping meat in there and smoking it.”
The other two groaned. Drake said, “What’s he talking about?”
“Taylor says he smelled smoke inside,” said Wallace. “We didn’t smell anything.”
“They’d put it in one of the higher shafts,” said Taylor stubbornly. “So the smoke would escape through the tunnels. That way nobody would notice like they would if it came out of one hole.”
Wallace squashed his empty beer can in his hand. “It’s just nuts, if you ask me. Man or beast, it’s so dark in there you’d go blind in an hour. The only thing that can see in there is a bat.”
Which had occurred to Drake. Nocturnal or not, human or not, nobody could live forever in the mine in total darkness. Were it not for the vegetation, that would have been grounds for dismissing Jason’s story. “What about the bones?”
“Just bones. Nothing.” Jones did not elaborate, which meant that Jameson’s bones were not in the pile. For that small grace, Wallace was grateful. “Them bones, them bones, them dry bones . . .” Jones beat time with his knees, trying to discharge his tension.
“Boss, all that vegetation is sea-level stuff. Whoever did it has been foraging all over the county.”
Drake said, “Well, I’d like to know how they got it in there without leaving prints.”
“It was packed in from the other side. Had to be. Which means . . .”
“Yeah,” Drake retorted. “I know what it means.” It meant there had to be another entrance to the mine somewhere on the mountain. He looked at the useless charts. He had asked the state bureau for more recent ones after Jason and Martha left that morning. Which meant they should be here between now and Judgment Day, depending on how good secretaries were at rummaging through filing cabinets.
Somebody must have seen them! To Drake it was simply inconceivable that they could have been up here unnoticed all these years. Well, what would a Bigfoot look like from a distance anyway? A man in a fur coat. Maybe they’d been seen all along and no one had realized it. Living up here without leaving trails even, not even a speck of shit, not anything!
Drake stood up, stashing his chart in the truck. “I think we better start combing these mountains before the charts get here. I think we better find out where the food is coming from and how they got it in. We’ll look for stripped bushes and trees and holes where seeds were dug up and everything like that. Jason said they may have left in the past couple of days. If we find any sign they’re still here we mount a hunt of some kind. I don’t want anybody talking about this—not even to your wives—and I don’t want anybody running after them at night, okay?”
“Why don’t we close the lodge down now?”
Which Drake could have done with no trouble, but it was not quite as easy as that. Much as he disliked Colby Lodge, jobs were scarce in Garrison. Augusta County was what is euphemistically called a depressed area, and that was why Helder had been allowed to build in the first place. Drake would not like being responsible for driving Helder out of business on the basis of Raymond Jason’s story, especially if the Bigfoot were gone already. “We can always do that. Let’s give it a couple of more days first and see where we’re at when the storm gets here.”
They were blocking the road with sawhorses when Helder’s Cadillac drove up. Usually the sight of the huge machine bouncing over back roads like a yacht in a bird-bath amused Drake. Today he did not smile at anything.