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“Hank’s gone down into the old mine,” said Phyliss on the other end of the line.
“What? Why? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Phyliss said. “Hank snuck out right after supper while I was taking a bath. He left a note saying he was going up to the mine to try out his new contraption.”
“But why would he go up to the old mine at this time of night?”
“It’s always dark down in the mine,” Phyliss pointed out.
“Is Hank looking for amethysts?” I asked. “According to the brochure Mr. Popov had printed up, that’s a diamond detector they’ve been foisting on the unsuspecting public and should be no good at finding amethysts.”
“He is looking for diamonds,” said Phyliss. “He got it into his head that the Lost Jewels of Ireland are down there in the mine. That Popov probably planted the idea that somebody stashed the jewels down there.”
While my impulse was also to blame Mr. Popov, it seemed more likely that Hank’s old map of the mine—which he’d likely possessed long before Rex Popov had entered the scene—had far more to do with it.
An old map with indistinct and contradictory notations combined with the powerful catalyst of Hank’s overactive imagination would have been enough on its own. Not that Mr. Popov hadn’t likely helped the ill-advised notion along.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the Irish Republican Brotherhood had been brought into it. I was guessing that when Rex had researched the Lost Crown Jewels, he’d read the same articles I had.
Logically, it would make more sense for someone to bury the jewels in the ground and roll a boulder over the spot than to bother with dark and dangerous mine shafts, but I feared logic had never been Hank’s strong point. I imagined that reduced capacity for logical thinking was the quality that had drawn Rex Popov to Hank like a moth is drawn to a flame in the first place.
“Did Mr. Popov go with Hank?” I asked.
“Rex left this morning,” said Phyliss.
“Rex Popov is gone?”
“Rex told Hank he was going somewhere for a while and that he’ll be back, but I’ll be surprised if we ever see that man again.”
“Where did Rex go?”
“Hank didn’t seem to want to say,” said Phyliss.
That didn’t bode well.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Rex probably is gone with the wind. Is anyone out looking for Hank yet?”
“Ledbetter is headed up to the mine on his bike with Morticia to try and stop Hank from going in too far. For some reason, Morticia seems to think it’s all her fault.”
“Why in the world would she think that?”
“She told me she’d explain later.”
Hank couldn’t have been gone long; it would take him half an hour just to get up to the mouth of the mine in his old pickup. Ledbetter might easily catch up with Hank before he even got to the mine, so I decided it was premature to worry too much. Not that Ledbetter or Morticia was guaranteed success in stopping Hank from venturing into the mine with his new gadget.
“Nancy is making a few calls,” said Phyliss. “She’ll have some extra hands up there to help in not long. Just in case.”
Nancy Flynn is good at getting up a posse at short notice, although I wasn’t quite sure what good having more people chasing Hank down would do.
It was no use asking Phyliss if she’d called Hank and pleaded with him not to take his old, broken-down body down into an old, broken-down mineshaft. Hank doesn’t carry a cell phone. He doesn’t even own one. If one wants to get ahold of Hank, one has to call the Curio Shop and hope Hank can locate the old rotary phone underneath the piles of tchotchkes, donut boxes, and old newspapers before it stops ringing.
“Jason’s here with me,” I told Phyliss. “I’ll ask him to drive me up to the mine in his Rover. Do you want to come with us?”
“I think I’ll stay here, for now, in case Hank comes back on his own. Georgia will come over if need be.”
Phyliss’s unspoken qualifier was that Georgia would come over if something happened to Hank. If Ledbetter and Morticia managed to stop Hank before he went down that mine shaft, nothing would, but if they didn’t arrive in time—well, I didn’t like to think about what could happen with Hank stumbling down a dark and damp shaft with collapsed timbers, and holes that opened up at random to access vertical shafts. I hadn’t seen it for myself, but I’d been told that there were places where the ground literally dropped away under one’s feet.
It was not a safe place for Hank; it wasn’t a safe place for anyone.
By the time I’d searched around for my only flashlight and Jason and I had made the bumpy drive up to the old mine in his Range Rover, Morticia was the only one remaining at the opening of the main shaft.
“There didn’t seem any point in me going in, too,” she said. “I figured somebody ought to be on hand to call for help.”
“How long ago did Ledbetter go inside?” I asked.
“About ten minutes,” Morticia told me as she motioned to Hank’s old pickup parked precariously with two wheels up on a couple of rocks. “Hank can’t have gotten far. The hood on his truck is still hot.”
“Do you have any idea how Hank got it into his head to go down in the mine?” I asked.
“I’m afraid it might be my fault,” said Morticia.
“What do you mean?”
“I gave him a reading.”
Morticia is our resident psychic. She operates out of her blinged-out vintage Winnebago parked in a prominent spot in the trailer court so as to be visible from the highway. The side of the RV that serves as both Morticia’s home and business premise is painted with a large, vaguely menacing eye and the words: Tarot. Your Future Foretold. Free 10 Minute Readings.
Morticia recently started gluing glass beads and small mirrored fragments to the paint job in order to make it even more eye-catching. I was uncertain just how many additional customers her efforts had attracted, but apparently, she’d managed to attract Hank.
“Did Hank ask you for a reading?” I asked.
“Well—” was all she had to say for herself.
Up until a few months ago, when Morticia had managed to convince Hank that his dead mother was attempting to contact him through the cross-word puzzle in the local paper, he’d had little use for paranormal phenomena.
Not that any paranormal activity had actually been involved. The whole time, of course, it had been Morticia pulling the strings. Her heart was in the right place. Morticia’s mother is best friends with Phyliss, and the entire charade had been carried out in an effort to get Hank to heed his late mother’s (presumed) wishes and finally marry his long-time lady love.
“What were you up to, Morticia?” I said. “You didn’t claim to be channeling Hank’s mother again, did you?”
“I didn’t,” said Morticia. “I just gave him a normal, run-of-the-mill reading.”
“Oh?”
“I may have tweaked it a little bit.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Well, Phyliss has been worried about Hank.”
“So I imagine.”
“Phyliss believes Hank’s given money to that Popov fellow.”
Phyliss didn’t know the half of it, and neither did Morticia, but I was sworn to secrecy.
“What does that have to do with the reading you gave him?” I asked.
“Well, I stacked the deck,” said Morticia. “I showed him an upright Moon.”
“Which means?”
“Double-dealing duplicity. I meant for him to understand that it was referring to Mr. Popov, but he must not have gotten the message.”
“What else did you show him?”
“It was supposed to be a reversed Ace of Wands, but I drew it upright.”
“What does a reversed Ace of Wands mean?”
“Selfishness and setbacks,” said Morticia. “I intended for him to understand that he was being selfish to plunge into something Phyliss was so set against, and it would come to no good.”
I had a feeling that Morticia may have been a little too subtle. Hank’s mental processes are not attuned to subtlety.
“What does the upright Ace of Wands mean?” Jason asked.
“A profitable journey or an inheritance.”
“And that’s what you told him?”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Morticia. “It was the force of habit. I go into the zone. It's hard to read the cards wrong when you’ve read them right thousands of times.”
“What happened after that?” I asked.
“Hank got very excited. He started going on about how Jimmy wasn’t going to beat him to it.”
“It? What did Hank mean by it?”
“Isn’t it obvious,” Morticia said, gesturing helplessly at the mouth of the cave.
“Hank did say something to me about Jimmy stealing a map from him,” I said. “I suppose Hank must be down there trying to locate the Lost Jewels of Ireland.”
“He won’t find them,” said Morticia. “And I haven’t told you about the last card. I don’t know where it came from.”
“What was it?”
“The death card.”
Morticia always has a slight tinge of the creepy about her, but as she stood under the moonlit sky, dressed all in black, as she invariably is, she made a rather spooky figure.
“I’m sure Hank will be fine,” I said, but my voice sounded a little quivery.
We stood around waiting in the cool night air of the desert, staring at the hole going into the side of the hill. The headlight on Ledbetter’s bike was still illuminated, and it cast a strong beam of light onto the opening of the main shaft, although I was certain the light couldn’t penetrate far into its murky depths.
“What kind of light does Ledbetter have with him?” Jason asked.
“He has a headlamp,” said Morticia. “It’s pretty bright.”
I wasn’t so optimistic about the quality of the light Hank had carried with him into the mine.
“I’m just going to have a look inside,” I said. “See if I can still see Ledbetter’s light.”
“You won’t be able to see it,” said Morticia. “The main shaft takes a dog-leg right inside the entrance.”
“I can’t just stand here.”
“Well, if you insist,” Morticia said darkly, “but keep a close eye on your feet. The shaft is pretty wide at the entrance, but about twenty yards in, there’s a hole in the middle of the floor where a vertical shaft takes off.”
“How deep does that vertical shaft go?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Morticia. “When I saw Hank a couple of days ago with a homemade map of the mine spread out on one of the display cases in the Curio Shop, I wish I’d asked a lot more questions.”
“Where did Hank get that map of the mine?” Jason asked.
“No idea,” said Morticia. “He’s probably had it for years. It looked like an old-fashioned mimeograph of a hand-drawn map that had been copied in sections and taped together with Scotch tape. The tape was yellow, so it was an old copy. Before I could get a good look at it, Hank put it away.”
“Do you think Phyliss knew about the map?”
“I doubt it,” Morticia said. “I imagine Hank knew she’d try and stop him from going down into the mine, so he didn’t tell her what he was planning.”
“Well, I’m going in,” I said.
“Be careful,” said Morticia.
“I’m coming with you,” said Jason.
“You’ll ruin your shoes,” I said over my shoulder as I headed over the rock-strewn ground towards the entrance, flashlight in hand.
“What do you take me for?” I heard Jason say behind me.
“Someone with expensive taste in shoes.”
“If they get ruined, I’ll just buy another pair,” Jason insisted as he tried to wrest the flashlight out of my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking the flashlight so you can’t run off without me.”
“I wouldn’t think of running off without you.”
“You just did,” said Jason as he took control of the flashlight.
“What if you run off without me?” I asked.
“I won’t.”
We were inside the entrance to the shaft now, and the bright beam of the headlight threw our shadows against the angled wall inside.
As Morticia had instructed, Jason kept our flashlight trained on the damp floor of the shaft just in case.
I would have liked to have had a look at that map of Hank’s, although there was no way of knowing how accurate it was.
We didn’t get far, however, before we met Ledbetter coming out. I’d have expected Ledbetter to be dragging Hank out over the old geezer’s vehement objections, but this was not the case.
“I found Hank,” Ledbetter said.
“I don’t see him.”
“He slid down an incline and is now stuck.” My heart tumbled into my shoes before Ledbetter continued. “He’s not badly hurt; I think he’s madder than anything, but he’s stranded about six feet down on a ledge. Who knows how far the shaft goes down below that. We’ll need a rope to get him out.”
We stood there in silence for several seconds, not saying out loud how lucky Hank was not to have fallen to the bottom, wherever that was.
“Nancy’s coming with reinforcements,” I finally said. “Surely one of them will have something we can use to get Hank out.”
“Possibly,” Morticia said. “But shouldn’t we call for help anyway?”
I reached for the phone in my pocket, but Ledbetter already had his phone to his ear.