He turned on the engine and drove away. From now on, he would keep an eye on the house from a distance, driving by every half hour or so. But in a dumpy little town like Borrego, he didn’t really think there was much likelihood that the Sheffield woman would be going anywhere that night.
The three of them were sitting in the small living room, Jed and Gina side by side on the sofa, Judith in Frank’s big easy chair. Almost half an hour had gone by since Jed had brought Gina into the house, and as the minutes had ticked away, Judith had become more and more frightened.
Everything about Gina seemed to have changed Gone were her expressive voice and animated gestures.
Her eyes, always sparkling with interest in everything around her, had lost their luster, as well as their movement. Her gaze seemed to fasten on objects from time to time, but Judith had a strange feeling that Gina wasn’t truly seeing whatever she was looking at. It was as if her whole mind had simply gone into neutral. For the most part she sat silently next to Jed, answering questions only when they were directed specifically to her, seeming lost in some private world of her own.
Except Judith had the eerie feeling that there was nothing whatsoever in that world. The girl seemed to be existing in a void.
“Gina,” Judith said, leaning forward in her chair, her voice rising, as if she were speaking to a deaf person. “I want you to tell me if anything happened Saturday night. Anything strange, or out of the ordinary.”
Gina shook her head.
But what if she doesn’t think whatever happened was strange? Judith suddenly thought.
“All right, let’s try it another way. What time did you go to bed?”
Gina frowned. “About ten o’clock, I guess.”
Judith nodded encouragingly. “All right. Now, did you go right to sleep or did you read for a while? Maybe listen to the radio?”
“I read,” Gina said. “I was trying to read The Deerslayer, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. And I fell asleep.”
“Okay,” Judith said. “And did you sleep all night?”
“No. I woke up when the fire truck went by, and I went to look out the window. Then I tried to read some more.”
She fell silent again, and Judith began to feel like an inquisitor, painfully dragging information out of a subject, bit by bit. “How much longer did you read?”
Gina shrugged. “Not much. I kept sort of drifting off.”
“But you didn’t actually go back to sleep?”
There was a silence while Gina seemed to think. “No,” she said finally. “That’s when I started to smell something.”
Judith cocked her head. “Smell something? Like what?”
“I—I’m not sure,” Gina stammered. Then: “It smelled bad. Like garbage.”
“And it woke you up?”
Gina nodded. Her nose screwed up as she remembered the odor. “It was really bad.”
In her mind Judith heard an echo of Reba Tucker’s voice, barely audible, croaking out words one by one: “Smells … bad. See things … bad.”
“Gina,” Judith said, her voice quavering, “I want you to think very carefully. When the smell came, did you see anything? Anything at all?”
Gina’s eyes narrowed and her brows furrowed as she concentrated. Finally she nodded. “There were colors,” she said. “And something else. There were things around me. I couldn’t quite see them, but they were there.”
Judith felt her heart beating faster. “All right. Anything else? Did you feel anything?”
Gina thought again, then slowly nodded. “Something funny. It was one of those spasms, you know? Like when you’re just about to go to sleep, and your whole body jerks?”
Judith nodded. “That happened Saturday night too?”
“Just as I was going back to sleep. But it was funny. Usually when that happens to me, I’m wide awake again. But Saturday, after it happened, I just felt real relaxed and went right to sleep.”
“Okay,” Judith told her. “That’s very good, Gina. And yesterday and this morning, you woke up feeling fine. Is that right?”
Gina nodded.
“Now, I want you to think once more, Gina. I want you to try to remember what time all this happened. We know it was after you heard the fire truck, which was around eleven-thirty.”
“Well, it had to have happened before twelve-thirty, because that’s what time Mom gets home. And it seemed like I tried to read for about half an hour after I heard the sirens.”
Judith’s whole body tensed.
Midnight.
Whatever had happened to Gina Saturday night had happened at the same time that Frank had had his stroke the night before.
And Reba Tucker had had her seizure.
An hour later, when Jed came back to the house after driving Gina home, he found Judith sitting pensively at the kitchen table, staring at a piece of paper. Jed slid into the chair opposite her, then turned the sheet around to look at it.
It was a list of names, starting with his father’s and Reba Tucker’s.
Below that were more names.
Max Moreland
Gina Alvarez
Randy Sparks
JoAnna Garcia
Jeff Hankins
Heather Fredericks
There were three more names, but Jed skipped over them, for at the bottom of the list a single name jumped out at him.
His own.
And next to his name, Judith had placed a large question mark, underlined twice. After a few seconds his eyes left the sheet of paper and he looked questioningly at her.
“I’m trying to find a common denominator,” Judith said. “There has to be a pattern.”
Jed’s eyes scanned the list again, and suddenly he thought he saw it. “It’s the company,” he said. “All these kids? Every one of them has a parent who works for Borrego Oil.”
Judith frowned. “Gina? Her father’s gone, and her mother works at the café.”
“Her uncle,” Jed replied. “Carlos.”
“But what about Reba Tucker?”
Jed studied the list again, and then realized that there was something else the names on the list had in common. “Troublemakers,” he breathed. “That’s what it is!”
Judith stared at him quizzically. “Troublemakers?” she echoed.
Jed nodded. “That’s got to be it—look. The kids? Christ, every one of them has been in trouble except Gina, and she hangs out with the rest of us. And you know what Greg Moreland and Otto Kruger think of Dad. Hell, he made life miserable for Kruger, and didn’t want Max to sell the company.”
“But what about Reba?” Judith said again. “I still don’t know how she fits in.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jed replied. “Well, I do. She was making all kinds of trouble at the school. She was always after them to fix the place up and get better equipment. She screamed about the books, the pay, everything. And last spring she got so mad she decided to try to get the teachers to form a union. Christ, she was over here all the time, talking to dad about it.”
Judith stared at him. Could it possibly be true? It seemed so crazy, and yet …
And then she remembered something Frank had told her. UniChem’s put two of its companies into bankruptcy, just to bust the unions. They want everyone to shut up and do their jobs and not make trouble. But it won’t work—they won’t shut me up.
But they had.
And then another thought struck her. Jed.
As far as anyone except the two of them knew, Jed had had one of the shots too. If he was on their list …
And then she knew what had to be done. “You have to do something tomorrow, Jed,” she said. She talked for almost five minutes, telling him what she had in mind. “Can you do it?” she asked at last.
Jed said nothing for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “If I don’t, they might just kill me, like they did Dad.”
Chapter 26
Jed negotiated the dirt track along the canyon’s edge the next mornin
g almost automatically, most of his mind occupied with what Judith Sheffield had told him the night before. After they’d gone to bed, he’d lain in the darkness, wide awake, wondering if he could actually pull it off. Despite what he’d told Judith, he wasn’t sure he could. For a while he’d even considered not showing up for work at all.
Quitting the company now, on his very first day, would be like a red flag to Kendall—for Jed was certain that Paul Kendall was behind whatever was being done as much as Greg Moreland. But he managed to keep himself under control yesterday, about Greg Moreland sending his father to The Cottonwoods, and he’d do it again today, with Kendall watching him.
And so, all night, he’d thought about what he had to do. He remembered Gina, and Randy Sparks, and a few of the other kids he’d seen at school. And he kept in mind that he too was supposed to have gotten one of the murderous shots.
Now, as he parked the truck in the lot above the dam, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He let the muscles of his face go slack, making his features expressionless. Then he let his eyes lose their focus slightly, so they took on the strange, blank look he’d seen in Gina Alvarez’s eyes last night and the night before.
Finally he got out of the truck, picked up his father’s lunch bucket, and slammed the door. As he started down the trail to the dam, he kept his head down, staring only at the path in front of his feet. As he came to the operations office at the end of the dam itself, he paused, steeling himself to show no emotion, no reaction except cooperation, no matter what was said to him.
He stepped into the office. Bill Watkins, busy with some paperwork, glanced up at him. In the inner office, clearly visible through an open door, Otto Kruger was talking to someone on the phone.
“I’ll send them down in groups of four,” he heard Kruger saying. “It looks like everyone’s here today, so there shouldn’t be any problem.” He was silent for a moment, then swung around as if he were about to speak to Bill Watkins, but stopped short when he saw Jed. His eyes narrowed, and Jed had to concentrate hard to keep himself from reacting to the man’s stare. Then Kruger said, “Arnold just came in,” his voice dropping, but still clearly audible. “He looks fine. He’s just standing in Watkins’s office, waiting for his orders.”
He dropped the phone back on its hook, then stood up and came to lounge in the door to his office, his lips twisted in a quizzical half smile. “Hey, Jed,” he said. “How you doing this morning?”
Jed let his head come up, but slowly. “Okay. I feel fine.”
Kruger’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “Sleep okay last night? No problems?”
Jed shrugged. “I’m okay,” he said again.
Kruger’s eyes seemed to bore into him, but then he nodded. “Great,” he said. “Well, don’t just stand around here like an idiot—there’s a lot to be done down below, and we’re going to be shorthanded all day.”
A twinge of anger plucked at Jed as the word “idiot” struck him, but he managed to shunt it aside. Nodding, he turned and walked out of the office, never even looking at Bill Watkins. But when he was gone, Watkins scratched his head pensively. “What’s with Jed?” he asked.
Otto Kruger’s lips twisted into an unpleasant grin. “Maybe he finally decided his old man had the wrong attitude,” he said. “Looks to me like he figured out you’re better off if you just shut up and do what you’re told.”
Watkins grunted. “Well, I wish all the men were like that,” he said. “It’d sure make my job a lot easier.”
Kruger said nothing, but as he went back into the inner office, he smiled to himself. Bill Watkins was going to get his wish a lot sooner than he ever could have imagined.
Jed moved steadily down the spiral staircase that led into the depths of the dam, his steps echoing in a regular rhythm on the metal risers, sending an eerie resonance through the shaft. Finally he reached the bottom and moved slowly along the tight confines of the corridor—lit only by bare bulbs in metal cages hung every twenty-five feet or so—toward the damaged power shaft. As he approached, the crew foreman’s eyes fixed on him.
“You’ll be working in the pipes today, Arnold,” he said. “There’s a miner’s light and probe waiting for you. All you got to do is look for cracks. When you find ’em, use the probe to open ’em up and clean ’em out as best you can.”
Jed said nothing. He set his lunch bucket on a shelf, took one of the miner’s hard hats off the rack, put it on, then found the probe. It was a piece of thick, hardened metal, its tip bent slightly, attached to a wooden handle. Finally he moved into the base of the power shaft itself.
A conveyor had been rigged up, a tall cranelike object that rose from the base of the shaft all the way to the top. A moving belt was already operating, carrying an endless circle of scoops upward, where their contents would be dumped onto another conveyor that would carry them out and drop them into a chute leading down to a dump truck waiting at the base of the dam itself.
On scaffolding high above, men were already working, chipping away at the damaged concrete of the shaft, dropping pieces of debris into a temporary chute that was designed to let men work at the bottom of the shaft in relative safety. Still, there was a steady rain of tiny fragments of concrete pattering down from above, and the air was thick with dust.
“Up here!” one of the men on the scaffolding called. Jed peered up, seeing the narrow opening of one of the intake pipes.
It might have been the same pipe from which his father had fallen on Friday morning. Taking a deep breath, he began climbing the scaffolding until he came to the platform where the man stood.
He stared into the black hole, no more than two feet in diameter.
A knot of fear formed in his stomach, but he forced it down, telling himself there was nothing to be afraid of.
“Headfirst,” the man told him. “Turn on the light, and keep your head up. The beam’ll give you enough light to work by.” The man glanced down then, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped. “If you start to panic,” he said, “just relax and give me a holler. I’m gonna tie a line around your ankle, and I’ll be able to pull you right out.”
Jed kept his eyes fixed on the hole in the side of the shaft. “I’ll be okay,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice clear of the fear he hadn’t quite been able to rid himself of. “I’ll be fine.”
He reached up and switched on the tiny light fixed to his helmet, then, gripping the probe tightly in his right hand, ducked down and thrust his torso into the hole.
The first thing he noticed was the suffocating heaviness of the air in the pipe. Stale and musty, it threatened to choke him.
The fear in his belly blossomed, and he felt the first fingers of panic reaching out toward him. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the panic to subside, making himself breathe in the dank air.
“You okay?” he heard a voice asking him.
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to open his eyes again. The dim beam of light glowed softly ahead of him, disappearing quickly into the blackness of the pipe. But the panic had eased slightly. “I’m okay,” he managed to say. “I’m fine.”
He crept ahead, using his fingers to explore the concrete tube. A moment later he felt a rough spot and twisted his head slightly so that the light on the helmet shone on the wall. Using the probe, he dug at the crack, scraping mud and algae away from it. A piece of concrete broke loose, then another. He kept at it, chipping away, until finally the probe could pry no more fragments out of the break.
He moved on.
He came to another crack, this one in the top of the shaft.
He tipped his head up, but there wasn’t enough room for the lantern to find the break.
He would have to roll over and lie on his back.
He began twisting his body, working it around in the narrow confines of the pipe.
A moment later he was looking at the top of the tube, only a few inches above his face.
Above it, he realized, were the thousands of tons o
f concrete of which the dam was made. And now, lying on his back, his belly exposed, he felt the full weight of the dam pressing down on him.
Once again panic closed in on him, and this time he couldn’t put it aside.
Instinctively, he tried to sit up, and instantly hit the close confines of the pipe.
He felt it tightening around him, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to scream, wanted to scramble to his feet and begin running.
His muscles contracted as he tried to draw his legs up, and then he felt them jam against the wall of the shaft.
He couldn’t move, but he had to. He struggled for a moment, and the panic threatened to overwhelm him entirely.
A scream of unreasoning terror built in his throat.
And then, just as it was about to burst from his lips, he clamped his mouth closed.
He wouldn’t do it—he wouldn’t give in to the urge to scream, wouldn’t give in to the panic that had seized him. He struggled again, but this time the battle took place within his own mind. He closed his eyes, then forced himself to imagine that he wasn’t in the dam at all.
He was on the mesa, high up above the desert, with nothing around him except clean, dry air.
He imagined the air filling his lungs, washing away the dankness of the pipe.
Slowly the tension in his body eased, and at last he moved again, easing his torso forward to release his legs from the pressure of the pipe. He closed his eyes then and concentrated, as he had in the kiva with his grandfather; as he had alone in his room on Saturday night.
It worked.
Part of him stayed in the pipe, directing his body as it carried out the work he had been told to do.
But most of his mind moved elsewhere, traveling beyond the dam, breathing freely.
The panic—the terror of the pipe, which had overwhelmed his father—could no longer reach him.
After two hours he felt a tug on his ankle. “Take a break, kid,” he heard a voice calling. “Nobody can keep that up all day.”