Relic Page 7

  There was something with you in the mine.

  I shake my head, ignoring the voice. No, there was nothing down there. It was just my imagination.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Annie!” Sonya cries from the deck of the houseboat, and then bursts into uncontrollable sobbing. “I thought . . . you were dead . . . we were all . . . dead.”

  “Some of us still might be,” Rob says. His flippancy is countered by the tremor in his voice.

  “That’s not funny!” Sonya shouts.

  “Okay, calm down.” Despite my fatigue and fear, my brain leaps into crisis-management mode. I climb up the ladder and head for the pilot’s chair. “We need to call for help. Get a search party out here and—”

  “We tried,” Rob says.

  “Tried?”

  From the ladder, Jack glances at Rob. “The radio isn’t working.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask. No rental office would send out a boat with a faulty radio. Between the fines from the state and the inevitable lawsuit, that would be commercial suicide.

  “Someone cut the wires,” Rob says through clenched teeth.

  “What?”

  “Clean through. On purpose.”

  “We don’t know that.” Jack glares at him. “It was probably just an accident.”

  Rob rolls his eyes. “Are you kidding me? Dude on the dock tested it before we left. Right in front of me. Showed me how it worked and, trust me, there were no dangling wires. Someone took a fucking knife to that thing.” I can see the wild look in Rob’s eyes, and I realize with a start that I’ve never seen him scared before.

  “The fisherman,” I say, naming the one person who might be responsible for sabotaging our radio. “He could have done it.”

  “When?” Rob asks.

  I shrug. “When we were searching the island last night? I mean, we never did find him. He probably didn’t want us calling the incident in to Lake Patrol.”

  “That makes total sense,” Jack says, even though I’m not sure it does.

  Rob shakes his head. “If you say so.”

  “What about cell phones?” I ask.

  “No service out here,” Rob says. “We’ve all tried.”

  Sonya clings to me, as if she’s afraid I might disappear. “We should go for help.”

  “Where?” Rob asks, his tone steely.

  “There’s a Lake Patrol station near the dam,” she continues, speaking quickly. Her pitch rises with each word. “We could take the boat and be there in an hour.”

  “And what if our friends come back while we’re gone? We’re just supposed to abandon them?”

  “What if they never come back at all?”

  “Stop!” I cry, holding my hands up between them. This isn’t helping. “We should wait here another hour, maybe two, and see if everyone makes it back.”

  “We can build a fire,” Jack says. “On the rocks. A beacon.”

  This is why I love him. “Good idea.”

  Jack glances at his watch. “And if everyone isn’t back by eight, we’ll head for the dam. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  FOURTEEN

  IT’S SEVEN FIFTEEN WHEN GRAHAM STUMBLES OUT OF THE woods, his face dirty and slick with a layer of sweat. He’s the last of us, and like everyone else, he’s shaken and exhausted, but otherwise unharmed.

  From our makeshift campsite on the rocky beach, Greer shrieks when she sees him. “You’re alive!”

  Graham smiles off-kilter, and laughs through his nose. “Last I checked.”

  I have to appreciate his ability to maintain his sense of humor.

  “What took you so long?” Frankie asks. She sits away from the fire, both legs hugged to her chest.

  It isn’t cutesy or flirty; her voice is hard and she doesn’t even look at him when she says it, just continues to stare up the hill where the entrance to Bull Valley Mine looms in the darkness.

  “Oh, you know,” Graham says, lumbering over to her. “Popped into the club, had bottle service. The usual.”

  Frankie rolls her eyes. “Ew.”

  “Seriously, dude,” Terrence says. “Put your cock back in your pants.” He’s barely spoken in the twenty minutes since he returned, and as he faces us, his angular features are gaunt and drawn, his happy-go-luckiness completely evaporated. “We need to discuss what the fuck just happened.”

  Sonya releases a long breath. “Yes, we do.”

  “Fine.” Frankie hauls herself to her feet and glares at Rob. “Why did you abandon me down there, asshole?”

  Rob looks genuinely taken aback. “What are you talking about? You ran away from me.”

  “You were in front of me,” Frankie snaps. “Then all of a sudden you took off.”

  Rob laughs, dry and mocking. “Whatever. I turned around to tell you to watch your head and you were gone. At least you found the main entrance. I came out on the other side of the goddamn mountain.”

  “Me too,” Graham adds.

  Terrence nods. “Me three.”

  Frankie narrows her eyes at Rob. “And yet you got back an hour before me.”

  None of this makes sense. “Who came out the way we went in?”

  Only Frankie raises her hand.

  “I found an abandoned shaft near the top of the mountain,” I continue. “Anyone else come that way?”

  Terrence shakes his head. “I hit an old drainage tunnel. Popped out about two miles upstream, right near the water.”

  “I found a ventilation shaft, I think,” Graham says. “Blocked up with those weird pink stones. I broke through and it dumped me in a valley way north of here.”

  “Halite?” Terrence says. “The drainage tunnel had them too.”

  “And the hole I crawled out of,” I added.

  Sonya stares into the dying embers of our fire. “I retraced my steps after I lost Terrence. I found the big cavern but”—she swallows—“guys, there was only one other tunnel leading from it. I walked the entire perimeter twice to make sure. The other tunnels? They’d just vanished.”

  “It must have been a different cavern,” Jack says.

  “I don’t think so.” Terrence crouches beside Sonya and slips his arm around her waist. She doesn’t even flinch. “Same thing happened to me. I’d come to a fork in a tunnel, choose one route, and then backtrack to find the other option was gone.”

  Jack is unconvinced. “That’s impossible.”

  “And how do you explain the time loss?” Terrence continues, undeterred. “I could have sworn I was underground an hour max, but when I finally escaped, the sun was setting.”

  Rob folds his arms across his chest, defiant. “We were disoriented. That would account for the time loss.”

  “Nah, man,” Terrence says, shaking his head slowly. “That whole mine was alive. And messing with us.”

  “Enough!” Greer erupts. She storms up to Terrence, face red, fists balled at her side. “We’ve had enough of your conspiracy theory, pseudoscience bullshit, okay? There’s no magical man haunting the forest, no monsters in the lake, and the fucking mine is not alive. So cut it out.”

  I’ve never seen her this worked up before; Greer’s usually pretty mellow.

  Terrence stands his ground, calm and collected. “Did anyone else see the shadows?”

  I catch my breath. So I’m not the only one? I’m not sure if I find that comforting or really, really disturbing. “I think the question we should ask is, who didn’t see the shadows?” I gaze around the circle. No one says a word, and the look on each and every face speaks volumes. Whatever I saw in Bull Valley Mine, everyone else saw it too.

  “We should tell someone,” Sonya says, looking at me. “That mine is dangerous.”

  “Yeah,” Rob snorts. “Which is why it’s off-limits. Are you forgetting the fact that what we did was super fucking illegal?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Someone needs to seal it off.”

  “Oh yeah? And what are we going to tell them?” Rob counters. “We got lost? Saw
shadows? They’ll just think we were high or something.”

  Jack nods. “And then they’ll bust us for controlled substances and trespassing.” He glances at me. “I’m pretty sure your dad would kill me at that point.”

  “Take a number,” I say, “and get in line.” I can only imagine my dad’s reaction if he found out I’d (a) lied to him about going to Sacramento, (b) bought booze and rented a houseboat with a fake ID, and (c) voluntarily explored a mine that is explicitly restricted.

  “What about an anonymous phone call?” Jack suggests. “To tell the Lake Patrol that we saw something weird down in the mine. We wouldn’t even have to say what it was.”

  “Dude,” Terrence says, glancing up at the purplish sky. “Nothing is anonymous with those satellites overhead.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “They’re watching.”

  “Telling the po-po isn’t going to help,” Rob says. “They’ll never believe us.”

  “Then what do you suggest we do?” Frankie asks. She’s been oddly quiet throughout this conversation; I’d almost forgotten she was there. “Just drive the boat away and pretend none of this ever happened?”

  Sonya’s head snaps up, and I can see the panic in her eyes. “But what if someone else goes down there? What if they get lost and never come out? It would be our fault.”

  “Frankie’s got the right idea,” Jack says slowly. Then he turns to me. “What do you think, Annie?”

  He’s suggesting we just walk away from the mine, and he’s right—it’s probably the best option. Yet the sheriff’s daughter in me bristles at the idea of not telling anyone what we saw down there. I glance at Sonya, who’s gnawing at the nail on her pinky finger. It’s my fault she’s even here, my fault she’s in this situation. What if we get busted and she loses her scholarship to Brown? What if this one stupid weekend ruins her life and it’s all because of me?

  I can’t let that happen. “No one’s hurt, right?”

  Sonya gasps. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that we get back on the boat, return it tonight as planned . . .” I take a deep breath. “And then we never talk about it again.”

  “But what about Deputy Weller?” Sonya asks, her pitch rising with every syllable. “What if he finds out we were here?”

  “He won’t,” I say.

  She presses, rising to her feet. “But what if he does?”

  I take a deep breath. “Then I’ll take responsibility. I’ll say that I went into the mine, alone, without anyone knowing.”

  Jack grabs my arm. “Annie, I can’t let you do that.”

  “It’s the best plan,” I say. “My dad’s the sheriff, which means I have a get-out-of-jail-free card. If the shit hits the fan, I’ve got the best chance of coming out clean.”

  Maybe.

  Sonya opens her mouth to protest, then closes it again. Even she can’t produce a logical argument against my plan. Instead, she stares at the ground. “Okay.”

  A murmured round of “yeah” and “fine,” then everyone falls silent.

  “And as far as I’m concerned,” I say, turning toward the boat, “none of this ever happened.”

  FIFTEEN

  IT’S LATE BY THE TIME SONYA PULLS HER MOM’S MINIVAN INTO my driveway. In order to maintain our cover story, I couldn’t let Jack drive me home from Rob’s, and I’ve been dreading the trip all day. I was the one who talked Sonya into going. I was the one who was thinking of myself—and my boyfriend—first, not my best friend. I told myself that this trip was for Sonya’s own good, that she needed to learn to live a little bit before her free-floating life anxiety swallowed her whole, but I wasn’t thinking of her when I agreed to go into the mine last night. This whole trip has been an unmitigated disaster, from Frankie to the Lake Patrol to Bull Valley, and now in addition to lying about where we were, I’m asking her to pretend like none of it ever happened.

  Friend of the Year I am not.

  I half expected her to erupt into a flurry of nervous conversation the moment we pulled away from Rob’s house, but she hasn’t said a word during the entire drive home, and I’ve been too chickenshit to break the silence. I don’t know what to say, or how to fix this.

  Sonya puts the van in park but keeps the engine running. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, but she avoids looking at me. This is ridiculous. I can’t just get out of the car in total silence.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. It’s totally lame and completely insufficient, but it’s a start.

  “For what?”

  I snort. “Gee, I don’t know, for almost getting you killed? For dragging you on this trip?”

  “If I didn’t want to come, I wouldn’t have.”

  She seems different. Weirdly Zen in a way I’ve never seen. She’s usually this tornado of nervous twittering, but suddenly she’s still and strangely prepossessed. It’s like she’s a totally different person.

  “What happened to you down there?” I blurt out. I don’t mean to bring it up so suddenly, but Sonya hasn’t said a word about what she saw in the mine.

  She eyes the house. “Your dad’s going to wonder why you aren’t coming inside.”

  “He’s working the graveyard,” I lie. My dad has Mondays and Tuesdays off, which means by nine o’clock he’s already downed a fifth of whiskey and is passed out in bed. But I’ve been lying about that to Sonya for so long it just comes naturally.

  Sonya continues to stare at the gaudy seventies table lamp of yellow stained glass and beading that sits in our living room window—a hand-me-down from some great-aunt or other, which has burned brightly from four forty-five p.m. until midnight every night for my entire life. Its tinted light is inviting, cozy, and reminds me of the days when Sonya and I would curl up on the worn carpet in our sleeping bags and watch Pride and Prejudice ad nauseam, then chatter excitedly in hushed voices about our ideal Mr. Darcys until my mom popped her head out of her room and told us to go the hell to sleep.

  I’m not sure if Sonya is remembering those days while she stares at the front of my house, but suddenly she sighs and swings her head toward me. “I don’t know what happened in the mine, but whatever it was, it defied science. And that’s . . .” Her eyes widen. “That’s not possible.”

  “I know.”

  “But it happened. To all of us. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

  “Try to get some sleep,” I say, swinging open the door. It feels impossible right now. I’m exhausted yet completely wired. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

  A blaring siren wakes me up. In the haze of early morning, I think it’s deputies Weller and Flynn from the Lake Patrol, who have hunted me down and are going to arrest me for trespassing, possession, lying to a police officer, and ten other counts that will get me fifteen to twenty in a state correctional facility or grounded for the rest of the summer. I’m not exactly sure which is worse.

  I sit straight up in bed, contemplating an escape route, when I realize that the noise is coming from about a foot away. My alarm clock.

  It must have gone off for hours yesterday morning. I wonder if my dad was too hungover to even hear it?

  Whatever. I slap the screeching hell siren into silence and collapse back into my pillows, desperately trying to reclaim my pulse rate from the red zone. Thoughts from our trip come flooding back: shadows in the mine, moving walls of rocks, the bones. I push them from my mind. Maybe I can just slip back to sleep?

  A quick knock at my bedroom door signals that further sleep isn’t going to happen. “You awake, Annie Bananie?” my dad says, using his favorite nickname, which I acquired due to an affinity for the “Name Game” song when I was still in diapers.

  “No.”

  “Good.” He cracks open my door and sticks his head inside. His face is clean-shaven, dark blond hair shellacked into place with gel. Neat and tidy, he looks more like the playful dad I remember from my childhood, who used to swing me around by my arms in the backyard while I squealed with joy, and who always had a smile and a hug for his onl
y child even after an eighteen-hour shift. A far cry from the sweaty, snoring mess I found passed out when I came home last night, old photo albums strewn across his bed, showing my parents in various stages of their marriage. Was he lonely? Supremely unhappy at the loss of my mom? Or was he racked with guilt over what he did to her those last months of her life, running around with that skanky bartender from the Cock and Bull Tavern?

  I mostly hope it’s the latter.

  He smiles, exposing the deep laugh lines grooved into his tanned skin, and though his lips are curled into the familiar shape, the eyes are anything but happy. That’s how he always looks at me these days, unable to see his daughter beneath the mane of red hair and veil of freckles that I inherited from my mom. Unable to think of either of us without the guilt.

  “How was the conference?” he asks. Is it my imagination or does he lay special emphasis on “conference”? As if he’s making mental air quotes while he says it?

  “It was just a mixer.” I snuggle into the covers and yawn, trying to sound casual. “Exhausting. Barely slept.” Well, technically that isn’t a lie.

  “I’m glad you had a good time,” he says, interpreting. “Wanted to check in to make sure you’re okay before I head out. Might be a late night.”

  At the bar. “Work?”

  He nods.

  “Isn’t it your day off?” I ask, trying to make it sound like an innocent question rather than an attempt to catch him in a lie. My dad only ever goes into work on his days off if there’s some kind of disaster, like the fire that threatened to wipe out some farms in Millville last year, or when two inmates escaped from the state prison up in Pelican Bay.

  He steps into the room and I notice that he’s in uniform, sidearm and all. Well, at least he’s not lying about work. “It’s an old missing persons investigation.”

  That doesn’t sound important enough to call the sheriff to the scene. “Can’t Ned handle it?”

  “He’s the one who called me,” Dad says. He sighs, dropping his forced smile, and instantly he looks ten years older. “The local news station caught wind of this, and now we’ve got the media all over us.”