Chapter 1 - THE WORDS SOPHIE HEARD
Then Sophie lifted her head.
Her face was pale under a streak of mine dust, and one side of her hair was wet with muddy water, but her eyes were terrifyingly focused.
I reached for her with my good arm and stopped when pain bit through my ribs.
"Where are you hurt?"
"My ankle, but I can move it."
She swallowed hard and leaned close enough that her breath warmed my ear.
"Mom, Uncle Daniel said there was going to be a blast."
For a second I thought the impact had scrambled my hearing.
"What blast?"
"Before we walked up the ridge."
She glanced toward the circle of daylight above us as if she expected Daniel's face to return.
"He was behind the truck with Grandpa, and I went back because I left my water bottle in the seat."
I forced myself to stay still and let her speak.
"Uncle Daniel said, 'Four o'clock. Once the old shaft comes down, nobody will ever know where they went.'"
The cold inside the mine seemed to move through my skin and settle around my heart.
I looked at my watch.
The glass was cracked, but the hands still moved.
3:12 p.m.
Forty-eight minutes.
"Did Grandpa say anything?"
Sophie nodded.
"He said, 'Make sure the girl goes with her. If Sophie walks out, the trust stays tied up.'"
I did not understand every legal implication in that moment, but I understood one thing with perfect clarity.
My father had wanted his granddaughter dead because of paperwork.
The knowledge was so ugly that my mind tried to reject it.
Richard Hale had taught Sophie how to fish.
He had mailed her a telescope for Christmas.
He had knelt beside her at my mother's funeral and promised he would always protect her.
Now I could still hear his voice from above the shaft saying I had hit hard.
I could still hear Daniel answering, "Good."
My daughter stared at me, waiting for an adult answer to a problem no child should ever have had to solve.
"We are getting out of here," I whispered.
Sophie looked down at my ribs.
"Can you walk?"
"I can if I have to."
That was a lie, but it was the only answer I was willing to give her.
I pushed myself onto one elbow and nearly blacked out.
A sharp grinding pain spread from my left side into my back.
Sophie grabbed my sleeve.
"Mom."
"I'm okay."
"You made the face you make when you're not okay."
Even then, she sounded like herself, and that almost broke me.
I waited until the dizziness faded and studied the shaft.
The floor was not flat.
We had landed on a steep mound of collapsed earth that sloped toward a narrow timber-framed opening in the rock wall.
Old rails disappeared into darkness beyond it.
A rusted ore cart lay on its side nearby, half buried in mud.
The vertical shaft above us was impossible.
The walls were too smooth, too damp, and too high to climb without equipment.
Our only chance was the tunnel.
I checked my phone.
The screen was shattered and black.
Sophie pulled her small emergency phone from the pocket of her purple jacket.
It had been a birthday gift from me, a basic device with only a few approved contacts.
The display flickered once and died.
"Battery?" I asked.
"It was at sixty percent."
"The fall probably broke it."
She looked like she might cry for the first time since we landed.
"I should have told you when I heard them."
I took her face between my hands.
"No."
She blinked.
"Listen to me. None of this is because you didn't tell me fast enough."
Her lower lip trembled.
"I thought maybe they were talking about rocks."
"Of course you did."
I wanted to say that no eight-year-old should have to imagine her grandfather planning murder, but the word itself felt too poisonous to put into the mine with us.
Instead I pulled her against me and held on until my ribs forced me to let go.
Then a sound came from above.
Gravel scraped against rock.
Sophie froze.
I pulled her down behind the overturned ore cart.
A shadow crossed the mouth of the shaft.
Daniel's voice drifted down.
"Melissa?"
Every muscle in my body locked.
He had come back.
A small stone bounced off the slope six feet from us.
Then another.
Daniel was testing for movement.
Sophie pressed both hands over her mouth.
I could feel her shaking against my shoulder.
"Dad was right," Daniel muttered from above.
His voice was quieter now, probably turned away from the opening.
"Nothing."
My father's answer was too faint to make out.
Daniel spoke again.
"Then let's go. Mercer says the closure crew is already setting up on the south road."
Mercer.
The name struck another nerve.
Sheriff Owen Mercer had gone to high school with my father and still hunted elk with him every fall.
I had known him since I was a child.
If Mercer was part of this, then climbing out would not be the end of our danger.
The footsteps moved away again.
This time I waited five full minutes.
Sophie counted silently on her fingers.
When the ridge was quiet, I crawled toward the tunnel opening.
A wooden sign hung crooked from one nail.
NORTH VENT - LEVEL 3 - CLOSED 1987.
Below the faded lettering, someone had drawn a white arrow decades ago.
It pointed into darkness.
"Do we go in there?" Sophie whispered.
I looked at the broken circle of sky above us.
I looked at the time.
3:21 p.m.
"We don't have another way."
The first twenty feet of tunnel were high enough to stand in if I hunched.
Beyond that, the ceiling dipped and the old support beams leaned at dangerous angles.
Water dripped somewhere deeper inside.
The smell was wet stone, iron, and rotting wood.
I found a rusted metal lunch pail near the rail and kicked it open.
Inside were a coil of stiff wire, two corroded batteries, a torn glove, and a miner's candle sealed in wax paper.
The candle looked ancient, but when I struck my father's souvenir lighter from my coat pocket, the wick caught.
The tiny flame was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Sophie gave a shaky smile.
"Grandpa hates when you smoke."
"I don't smoke."
"Then why do you have his lighter?"
"He gave it to me twenty years ago and forgot."
The irony of surviving because of something my father had once given me was almost unbearable.
We moved into the tunnel.
Every few steps I had to stop for my ribs.
Sophie limped but refused to complain.
At 3:28, we reached a split.
The left tunnel had collapsed into a wall of stone.
The right tunnel disappeared downward.
On the center support post, someone had carved three initials.
E.H.
My mother's initials.
Evelyn Hale.
I stared at them.
My mother had hated Silver Creek.
At least that was what my father always claimed.
He said she refused to come near the mine after my grandfather died.
Yet the initials were deep, old, and unmistakably hers.
Under them was another carving.
A small key.
Sophie touched it with one finger.
"Mom, look."
Beneath the key was a number.
214.
I suddenly remembered a brass key that had fallen out of my mother's sewing box after her funeral.
It was small, tarnished, and stamped with those exact numbers.
214.
I had put it in a kitchen drawer and forgotten about it until two weeks earlier, when my father had shown up at my house asking whether I had found "anything unusual" among Mom's things.
I had lied and said no.
The key was now in the inside zipper pocket of my purse.
My purse was in Daniel's truck.
Or at least I thought it was.
Then Sophie reached into her jacket and held out something that caught the candlelight.
A little brass key.
214.
I stared at her.
"Why do you have that?"
"It fell out of your purse when Uncle Daniel made me move my backpack."
"When?"
"At the gas station."
She looked guilty.
"I put it in my pocket so I wouldn't lose it."
My breath caught for a reason that had nothing to do with my ribs.
My father had brought us to the exact mine where my mother had carved a key symbol into a support beam.
Daniel had expected that key to be with me when I died.
And somewhere inside the mountain, something marked 214 was waiting.
Then the ground trembled.
Dust sifted from the ceiling.
A deep mechanical thump rolled through the tunnel from far away.
Sophie gripped my hand.
"Was that the blast?"
I checked my watch.
3:31.
"No."
Another tremor followed.
This one was closer.
May you like
And from behind us, near the shaft where we had fallen, came the unmistakable scrape of boots on stone.
Someone was climbing down.
