Through the patchwork metal roof he saw six motor-driven wires attached to the top of the cage. To the sides, guide rails ran the length of the shaft. They kept the car and counterweights from swaying during descending and ascending. It was the coal miner’s lifeline. Formichelli would have to trust it.
“Just get us down in one piece,” he added.
The ride took six minutes before the elevator stopped at the foot of the main shaft, Central Link. Like all the tunnels it was named after roads in Cardiff. Dwyer lifted the bar to the elevator gate and said without an ounce of real concern, “Mind your head.” The overhead support beams were difficult to see in the spotty lamp light. “You can stand most of the way. But then again, you better be ready to duck some. How’s your back?”
“The last thing you need to do is worry about me.”
Dwyer was struck by the ominous tone.
They followed the gradual slope downward. At the tunnel’s highest, they barely had a few inches of headroom. But it quickly got lower, much lower, making them crouch. That’s when they cut far left into the passageway called Lloyd George. The farther they walked, the narrower it got, sometimes barely wide enough for wheelbarrows.
Formichelli had seen how tunnels branched off into networks of rooms where chronically coughing miners, as young as nine, dug, shoveled, and removed the coal by the light of dim electric bulbs, oil lamps, and brass Justrite carbide head lamps.
This was the process every day except on Sundays. The Lord’s day.
“Halfway,” Dwyer said after twelve minutes. “Need a break?”
“No.”
The breeze that had been at their backs from outside air pushing down the main shaft was now gone. The air was stale and full of coal dust. Formichelli wrapped a scarf around his nose and mouth. Dwyer didn’t.
After another grueling six minutes they stopped at the end of the electric wing. They lit hand- held lamps now. “The rest of the way we’re on our hands and knees. Follow me.”
The colliery’s chief led the way. Though miners hadn’t extracted any coal from the new vein yet, the air was still heavy with coal dust.
“No other ventilation?” Formichelli asked.
“No,” Dwyer said through a phlegm-filled cough. “You’ll feel some fresher air, though.”
They continued another two minutes through the claustrophobic space, at times on all fours then upright again.
“Here’s what you wanted to see,” Dwyer said with annoyance. He pointed to the far end of the excavation.
“Where?”
“There,” Dwyer said. He brought his lamp closer to the rock. But it wasn’t rock. It was a wall. But not a wall. A surface that was there, but wasn’t there. A black wall.
“Some sort of metal,” Dwyer said trying to sound smart for the company man. “At first, we thought it was silver; a black silver. Now I don’t know. Gotta get some work crews down here. Fact of the matter is if it’s not coal, and we’re in the business of coal, then it’s not my job to figure it out.”
But it did matter.
“How’d you say you heard about this?” Dwyer said, now curious.
“I didn’t.”
Formichelli turned in a slow circle, finally settling on the blacker-than-black surface, about eight feet wide and more than ten feet tall. He touched it. Not a spec of dirt.
“What do you think?” the miner asked. “Must have been buffed by millions of years of water, the way a waterfall polishes boulders,” Dwyer said.
The visitor continued to glide his fingers along the metal where it met the rock.
The mining manager had had enough. “Can we leave now?”
Formichelli ignored him.
“Like I said up above, no coal. Nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing to Formichelli. He smiled. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. I can leave now.”
The word I was different than we. Dwyer missed the distinction. He also missed seeing Formichelli remove a knife from his bag and raise it to neck level. Had Dwyer seen it, he wouldn’t have been able to defend himself.
Dwyer died without knowing why. That was Formichelli’s way.
Now the killer retraced his steps, stopping fifteen meters away. He set the first of the long fuses to the dynamite he’d carried into the tunnel. The length of the fuse would buy him fifteen minutes. On the way back to the lift he lit five more fuses at strategic points.
It wouldn’t be the first coal mine explosion in Wales. The newspaper would report that the mine’s general manager had died on a survey. The probable cause: an explosion due to a faulty lamp station. Eventually the accident was all but forgotten because of another Universal Colliery explosion barely six months later. That event became the worst in the history of the British Isles. Anthony Formichelli also witnessed that first-hand.
Eight
“Insurance certificates are in the yellow file. State and park permits in the green. Your travel is in blue and emergency…”
“I know, I know,” McCauley said.
DeMeo grimaced. His boss still hadn’t made a final decision on the site, so the graduate teaching assistant had to clear two. That would be the next order of business. “Now please, doc, pay attention.”
“I am.”
It didn’t look like he was. The Yale paleontologist crisscrossed his office, throwing files of his own into a large Fed Ex box. “Keep going.”
“The purple file has contacts for your students. Black is for emergencies. Brown has my trip info. I’ve emailed PDFs of everything so you should have it on your iPhone, iPad, and laptop.”
DeMeo mastered organization years ago, a lesson learned at the foot of his mother, a school teacher. She told the young Peter DeMeo that everything comes down to collating and stapling. It was true then. It was true now.
“Got it. Yellow, green, blue. You’re yellow, travel is blue, insurance permits green.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong. What about black?” DeMeo asked.
“Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” McCauley said, citing the traditional Appalachian folk song
“Wrong again. You have no true love. It’s emergency contacts. Actually, I’ll put it in a red folder. Just read the damn labels and you’ll be okay. And please, don’t call me.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“Thank you. Now, can we finally decide where the fuck you’re going given you’ve already lied to the department?”
DeMeo laid out information on the remaining two sites. McCauley read the tab on the top file. Makoshika State Park History. He perused DeMeo’s extracts, though he didn’t have to. He’d passed on the site before. He thought it might be too touristy. But this year? Makoshika. The name called out to him. “Makoshika.”
“Interesting translation,” DeMeo noted.
“Yes. In the language of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples, it means bad earth or pitiful earth.” He paused for thought. “Bad earth. Yes, bad earth. Maybe this is the year for bad earth.”
He considered some of the bullet points in the packet.
Largest of Montana’s state parks
More than 11,000 acres
Freshwater shale, sandstone; evidence of mineral rich groundwater
Carbonized wood
Interlaced coal
Smooth agates and towering cap rocks
Fossilized coral
The file contained eerie photographs that could have been shot on an alien landscape except for the identifiable home grown vegetation that survived the bad earth. In one direction, knolls rose above the landscape. Another revealed a layered landscape with sedimentary rocks.