How the hell had Trevor moved practically next door to a Superfund site where alarms sounded to chase away passing waterfowl? He’d staggered home, and used the Google-fu he should have exercised a lot earlier. Damn Antony to hell for making him so crazy he’d fled to the first place with a cheap, charming house to write out his misery!
Location, location, location, right. No wonder he’d picked up such a bargain. The sellers were probably laughing their asses off from somewhere safer, like Chernobyl.
Damn it, he was stuck. Well, not stuck stuck, but he’d have to find a greater fool to offload the house on, or eat the payments, or take the hit to his credit rating, or...
Or maybe quit running around like a bird who’d landed in this mysterious inland sea and corroded his brain out. Ask some questions, find out what he’d really gotten himself in for.
So, who could he call? He wasn’t inclined to trust anything Megan told him: shouldn’t she have mentioned Lake Toxin while he was still inquiring about the availability of the adorable Craftsman house with the original paneling? Or had he rolled over anything she might have said with his insistence on this house? Was she struck speechless in the presence of waving money?
Gayla the checkout lady might tell him if he went through her line often enough, but he’d have to buy one potato chip at a time to get the whole story. The guys who’d delivered the new mattress and other furniture had communicated in grunts and winks, which could be their opinions on a new mattress and its possible uses, or their baseline in language skills.
And that left Don Harper, who so far had been a rock of reliability and was currently chin deep in a stack of erotic romances. Would he even answer the phone?
The author in Trevor hoped Harper was much too engrossed in reading to pick up the phone, and the panicked homebuyer in him wished the words would blow off the pages in a cloud of ink dust. He dialed.
Oh damn, Trevor was probably interrupting a wank, but he let the phone ring. Half a ring before he could hang up, Harper answered.
“This is going to sound like the stupidest question ever, but—what is that gigantic hole in the earth four blocks over?” Trevor blurted.
Harper sounded a little winded. “That’s the Emporia Pit. They stopped mining there about the time I was born.”
“And the water? Water isn’t supposed to be that color! I mean, those colors!” An evil rainbow coruscated there in the pit. “And why is there so much of it?”
“You dig a hole in the ground, you get water, sooner or later. Like a well. You want to mine, you pump it out.”
That explanation comforted Trevor not at all. “When you said my house was ‘close to the mines’ I had no idea you meant this!” That came out in a high-pitched shriek.
“What did you think I meant?” Harper asked.
“I don’t know. Something with a hole in the ground and a head frame, I guess. And ore carts.” Trevor’s idea of mining was pretty vague even after the bits and pieces of explanation and a hideous discovery.
“First off, don’t panic. It’s not going to swallow your house. Or poison you, unless you drink it,” Harper explained patiently.
“I won’t drink it,” Trevor promised fervently. His small mentor had described the fate of the paddling geese in vivid detail. Trevor was ready to stand at the water’s edge and yell “Ah-Oo-Gah!” himself. “But what do we do about it?”
“Right now, we don’t do a blessed thing. Don’t know if you looked at the sky lately, but that white stuff coming down will keep coming down for another foot and a half, two feet, before it stops. I’m gonna have to plow the drive before I can get out of here, and it’s dark anyway. I can take you out and show you what the pit is about, and maybe you can relax a little, but not until tomorrow at the earliest, and probably Sunday. It ain’t going anywheres and neither are you.”
Wrong, wrong, Trevor could load Sabrina in the Bronco and be back in California by Sunday, snow or not. Where he could explain to the scoffers he’d let the Emporia Pit chase him away. And when asked why, it would come out that he didn’t know the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground. “Right. Not going anywhere.”
“Okay, figure Sunday afternoon. You got a computer and a house full of books, plenty of firewood. You’ll be fine.” Harper chuckled. “And me too, ‘cept the computer. I’m on page forty- eight of this one and it’s getting real good.”
A real live human had been abandoned for a book. And some logistics, but Trevor was pretty sure the snow wasn’t as important as the book. He recalled quite well what he’d piled Harper’s arms with, and if Harper thought page forty-eight was real good, his hair might be on fire come page fifty-one. No wonder he wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ve created a monster,” Trevor informed Sabrina.