TWELVE DAYS BEFORE
Matthew Annan drove up the crumbling switchback road on the side of the mountain in a light rain. It was dusk. On the top of the highest peak within his sight was the statue of the Virgin Mary called Our Lady of the Rockies. The ninety-foot statue was bathed in orange from a last-gasp sun and it looked like a bizarre highway cone set against a darkening sky.
The city lights of Butte were blinking on in the distance in the valley below him. The air was fresh and cool and it got cooler the higher he climbed. It wasn’t a downpour—yet. If that happened he feared driving back down the mountain on the rain-slick road.
But he’d deal with that possibility when and if it happened. Tonight, he had a job to do that couldn’t wait much longer.
Annan was a calm and confident mountain driver. He knew when to gear down when ascending and how to slow down on blind corners. And he knew that if he got into trouble on a slick ascent on a muddy road he should do the counterintuitive thing and speed up. Sliding backward could be a disaster all around.
He’d made sure before he left that the motor and tires of the 1995 Dodge Ram 2500 long-bed pickup were in good shape for the drive. He’d borrowed the vehicle because he didn’t want to be seen in his own SUV on the side of the mountain. The Dodge Ram didn’t stand out and if it was seen it would likely be assumed that the driver was out four-wheeling or scouting game. It was a workingman’s truck.
To look the part, he wore an old flannel shirt with a hole in the elbow and an oil-stained Montana State Bobcats cap pulled down low.
Annan was tall and rangy and he was proud of the fact that at fifty he could still wear the same-sized jeans he had worn in college. He kept himself fit and he credited his workout regimen, his diet, and his genes for making his features appear younger than he was and cheerier than he felt. His light blue eyes, without a wrinkle around them at all, winked back at him in the rearview mirror.
He saw mule deer ghosting through the tall mountain juniper at the lower elevations and now he saw a cow and calf elk running away from his vehicle in the trees, their half-moon-shaped white rumps bobbing like Ping-Pong balls.
He kept on.
Annan knew all the old roads up there. He’d grown up exploring them. And there were old roads everywhere. It was notable, though, how the mountains were starting to reclaim their own from century-old rapacious exploitation. Many of the old roads were breaking apart and washing out. Mineshafts dug a hundred years before or more were collapsing in on themselves or filling with poisoned water. Once impressive wooden structures were bleaching out and falling down on themselves, and metal tools and implements long left behind were rusting into the soil.
Someday, he thought, the mountains would be wild again. He just wouldn’t live to see it.
The road leveled before it reached the top of the summit and the trees encroached on both sides. Annan could see there were no tire tracks before him in the moist surface of the two-track road. That was a good sign.
He slowed as he entered the grove of trees. They’d overgrown to the point that they scraped the sides of the pickup and slapped at the outside mirrors as he passed through. After a few minutes, he sensed the turnoff before he saw it.
There was an opening in the trees to the left and he squeezed the pickup into it. Weeds scraped at the undercarriage of the vehicle.
Then, about two hundred yards from the feeder road, he found what he was looking for.
Annan killed the motor and got out. He loved the smell of the mountains when it rained. It was almost sensory overload.
He walked down the cutoff trail where he’d driven moments before. His pant legs got wet as he walked through the beaded grass. When he got close to the feeder road he ducked into the trees and underbrush and waited.
Within the next half hour, the gray Chevy Malibu was scheduled to appear. The Idaho plates had been removed and destroyed, and all the identifying VIN numbers and other serial numbers on the dash, doors, and inside the motor itself had been ground away.
Since his drive up the mountain had gone easily, he saw no reason that the Chevy couldn’t accomplish the same thing. The sky was clearing and it was unlikely there would be more rain, he thought. The drive down the mountain in the pickup should be smooth.
Annan heard it coming long before he saw it: the hum of the motor and popping of small stones beneath the tires as it approached. Then the glimpse of the chrome bumper strobing through the openings of the trees. Once he saw the gray Malibu come slowly down the overgrown feeder road he stepped out and waved.
The Malibu had two men inside. The passenger, Tim White, waved back. Doug Duplisea raised two fingers from the wheel in a “Butte Salute.”
Annan took a step back as the Malibu came to a stop next to him and the driver’s side window whirred down.
“You made it,” he said.
“I’ll admit I got a little worried a couple of times back there, especially on that steep part,” Duplisea said. “Tim was shitting his pants.”
“Oh, I was not,” Tim said. He didn’t enjoy being ridiculed in front of Annan.
“The weight in the trunk helped, I think,” Duplisea said. “But it’s starting to stink.”
“That’s why we had to do this now,” Annan said. He could smell it as well. “Another day or two and it would really be noticeable.”
“I feel like gagging,” Tim said.
“Then get out,” Annan said. “Get some air. The mineshaft is down the trail. It’s right where I remembered it was.”
Tim and Doug followed Annan along the grassy trail past Annan’s pickup. Annan asked over his shoulder, “Did anyone see you drive up?”
“Nada,” Duplisea said.
“Good. I didn’t see anyone, either. And there weren’t any tire tracks up here on the road before me.”
Annan had grown up with both Doug and Tim. They’d lived blocks apart; walked to school together; played on the same baseball, basketball, and football teams; and sometimes triple-dated at the drive-in movie theater. College had split them up since Annan went and his two friends didn’t, opting instead to work in the mines and make real money. Until the mines shut down, anyway.
Even though they were the same age, Annan thought, it was remarkable how different they looked. Both of his friends appeared rougher and much older than Annan. Tim was skeletal, with missing teeth and hollowed-out cheeks. His eyes were rheumy and he walked with a limp. Although he tried to hide it from Annan by keeping his hands out of sight, he shook when he wasn’t drinking. And he drank a lot.
Tim had been in and out of rehab during the last fifteen years. He’d just recently gotten his driver’s license back.
Duplisea was stout and although he was starting to stoop, he was still intimidating to most. Black Irish with a volatile temper and full-sleeve tattoos, Duplisea had jet-black hair sprinkled with gray and dark, close-set eyes. His fists were the size of small hams and his knuckles were scarred from bar fights.
“Does the key work?” Duplisea asked Annan.
“We’ll find out. Did you bring the WD-40?”
“Tim?” Duplisea asked Tim.
“I got it,” Tim answered.
The old mineshaft opening, which was twelve feet high and fourteen feet across, was set into a solid rock wall. The opening was blocked by iron gates that looked almost medieval. They were held closed by a heavy chain secured by a substantial padlock. Both the chain and the lock were covered in rust.
There were hundreds of abandoned mineshafts in the county, and scores of underground tunnels. Every year, it seemed, a tunnel collapsed or the ground opened up to reveal a deep chasm.
Annan dug in his pocket and came out with a key. He said, “One of you guys have a flashlight?”
“On my phone,” Duplisea said. He found it and turned the light on as Annan tried to fit the key into the lock. It wouldn’t insert all the way.
“Give me that spray,” Annan said.
Tim handed it to him. Before he took it he paused and noted Tim’s trembling hand. Duplisea saw it too. Annan took the can without comment and shot the fluid into the locking mechanism and into the holes of the U-shaped shackle.
While they waited for the WD-40 to dissolve the rust, Annan said, “I remember being up here thirty years ago. I think you guys were with me, right?”
“Probably,” Tim said.
“Yeah, I remember it,” Duplisea said.
Annan said, “I remember thinking that if I fell into this shaft no one would ever find my body. It goes straight down. Do you remember when we stole the key from that old guy down the street who used to be a safety engineer? It was in his shed out back.”
Duplisea said with a chuckle, “If I remember, we were looking for his stash of booze. We came out of that shack with half a bottle of Old Crow and his key ring.”
“Who’d have thought I’d keep that key ring all these years?” Annan asked. “But I did.”
Duplisea turned to Tim. “You don’t remember any of this, do you?”
“I didn’t say that,” Tim responded. But it was obvious that he didn’t.
“Okay,” Annan said. “I need the light again.”
He worked the key into the lock and was able to turn it this time but the shackle didn’t release.
“Here,” Duplisea said, stepping in. He grasped the lock and jerked it down hard. The shackle snapped open.
“Good work,” Annan said. He moved to the side and doused the metal hinges of the gates with WD-40. Then: “Let’s open it up.”
The gates moaned loudly as they were swung back revealing an inky black maw. Annan got his own phone out and turned on the flashlight and shone it down.
It was as he remembered it. There was a solid rock shelf fifteen feet into the hole that led to an opening that went straight down. The top of an iron ladder stuck up a few inches from the rim.
Annan entered the mineshaft and went as far as the edge. He shined his light down. The reflection of his beam on a pool of brackish still water was at least thirty feet down. The ladder vanished into the black water.
He recalled seeing old photos in the local museum of trussed-up mules being lowered into the mines with ropes and cables. The mules were there to labor and they were not brought to the surface again until they eventually died. The animals were sometimes blinded so they wouldn’t get any ideas and try to bolt toward the light.
Mining in those days was unspeakably cruel, Annan thought. Miners weren’t treated much better than the mules.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go get the Malibu.”
Duplisea drove the car to the mouth of the opening and got out. He put the transmission in neutral. Annan found a football-sized rock and threw it through the back window.
“Why’d you do that?” Tim asked.
“So the air can escape, douche,” Duplisea explained.
The three of them got behind the Malibu and pushed. It rolled slowly at first and Annan got a grotesque whiff of the smell from the body in the trunk as he pushed the car.
“Push it all the way in,” Annan said, “but don’t follow it.”
“Gotcha,” Duplisea said.
It rolled more freely when the front wheels hit the stone shelf.
“One, two, three…” Annan said. “Now!”
They gave it a hard shove and backed off. The Malibu rolled toward the lip of the shaft and seemed to dive straight in. Annan caught a glimpse of its undercarriage as it pitched forward and dropped.
A second and a half later there was a tremendous splash that reverberated in the mine like thunder. The disturbance also released an invisible cloud of fetid stench.
The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder on the lip of the shaft. Annan and Duplisea held their hands over their mouths and noses against the smell. Tim winced and fidgeted.
Annan could hear the car sink slowly into the water. Air from the interior of the vehicle whooshed out through the hole in the back window. When the car was fully submerged the surface of the water appeared to be boiling with released gases from inside the vehicle.
Then Duplisea stepped back and shoved Tim hard in the back with both hands, sending him headfirst into the hole. Tim’s arms windmilled as he flew. It was such a powerful shove that Tim’s head hit the rock wall on the other side of the shaft with a sickening pock sound before he plunged lifelessly into the water behind the Malibu. Tim didn’t get a chance to cry out.
The body was spread-eagled and it sunk out of sight. They waited for a minute in silence to make sure he wouldn’t struggle to the surface. He didn’t.
Annan asked, “Do you think he knew it was coming?”
“I think he had an idea,” Duplisea said. “He was pretty quiet on the way up. You know how unusual that is with Tim. He knew he fucked up.”
“If he could have only kept his mouth shut,” Annan said.
“He never could when he was drinking,” Duplisea said. “Fucking motormouth was what he was. He couldn’t help himself.”
“I worry about Karen,” Annan said. “What’s she going to do?”
“Don’t worry about her,” Duplisea said. “Tim had life insurance. She’ll be okay. She’ll probably be a little relieved when he doesn’t come home, if you know what I mean.”
“Still, he was our buddy for a lot of years.”
“He was,” Duplisea said. “We had some good times together, man. But he was always self-destructive and he was getting worse the older he got. It was like his filter was removed. We flat couldn’t risk it anymore.”
“Yeah, I know. But still…”
“You didn’t push him,” Duplisea said. “I did. And I can live with it.”
A particular feature of Doug Duplisea was his complete lack of remorse. What was done was done as far as he was concerned. He’d always been like that. Annan recalled Duplisea’s reaction when he learned that the teenage daughter he’d thrown out of the house in the winter died of exposure: a shrug.
Annan sighed. “Yeah, well. Let’s get this gate locked back up and get out of here. I’ll drive.”
“Maybe we should stop and get a beer and a shot at the club,” Duplisea said. “You know, to honor Tim’s memory.”
The Club Moderne was one of Tim’s favorite watering holes.
“Let’s not,” Annan said. “Someone will notice that we’re there without him. That might get some tongues wagging when he turns up missing.”
Duplisea grunted, which was his way of agreeing halfheartedly. “What if someone asks us where we were tonight?”
Annan waved it off. “We’ll work up an alibi on the way down the mountain. Don’t worry about it.”