I snatched down the receiver,
“Yes!” I cried. “Hello!’”
“Marie. I want Marie.” The voice was far and crackling,
“You tell Marie I gotta talk to her.”
I called Marie and left her to her conversation and went out on the porch. Back and forth, back and forth I paced, Marie’s voice swelling and fading as I passed.
“… well, I expected it a long time ago. A crazy girl like that-“
“Lucine!” I shouted and rushed indoors. “What happened?”
“Lucine?” Marie frowned from the telephone. “‘What’s Lucine gotta do with it? Marson’s daughter ran off last night with the hoistman at the Golden Turkey. He’s fifty if he’s a day and she’s just turned sixteen.” She turned back to the phone. “Yah, yah, yah?” Her eyes gleamed avidly.
I just got back to the door in time to see the car stop at the gate. I grabbed my coat and was down the steps as the car door swung open.
“Lucine?” I gasped.
“Yes.” The sheriff opened the back door for me, his deputy goggle-eyed with the swiftness of events. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What happened?”
“She got mad on the way home.” The car spurted away from the hotel. “She picked Petie up by the heels and bashed him against a boulder. She chased the other kids away with rocks and went back and started to work on Petie. He’s still alive, but Doc lost count of the stitches and they’re transfusing like crazy. Mrs. Kanz says you likely know where she is.”
“No.” I shut my eyes and swallowed. “But we’ll find her. Get Low first.”
The shift bus was just pulling in at the service station. Low was out of it and into the sheriff’s car before a word could be spoken. I saw my anxiety mirrored on his face before we clasped hands.
For the next two hours we drove the roads around Kruper. We went to all the places we thought Lucine might have run to, but nowhere, nowhere in all the scrub-covered foothills or the pine-pointed mountains, could I sense Lucine.
“We’ll take one more sweep-through Poland Canyon. Then if it’s no dice we’ll hafta get a posse and Claude’s hounds.” The sheriff gunned for the steep rise at the canyon entrance.
“Beats me how a kid could get so gone so fast.”
“You haven’t seen her really run,” Low said. “She never can when she’s around other people. She’s just a little slower than a plane and she can run me into the ground any time. She just shifts her breathing into overdrive and takes off. She could beat Claude’s hounds without trying, if it ever came to a run-down.”
“Stop!” I grabbed the back of the seat. “Stop the car!”
The car had brakes. We untangled ourselves and got out.
“Over there,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” We stared at the brush-matted hillside across the canyon.
“Gaw-dang!” the sheriff moaned. “Not in Cleo II! That there hell hole’s been nothing but a jinx since they sunk the first shaft. Water and gas and cave-in sand, every gaw-dang thing in the calendar. I’ve lugged my share of dead men out of there-me and my dad before me. What makes you think she’s in there, Teacher? Yuh see something?”
“I know she’s somewhere over there,” I evaded. “Maybe not in the mine but she’s there.”
“Let’s get looking,” the sheriff sighed. “I’d give a pretty to know how you saw her clear from the other side of the car.” He edged out of the car and lifted a shotgun after him.
“A gun?” I gasped. “‘For Lucine?”
“You didn’t see Petie, did you?” he said. “I did. I go animal hunting with guns.”
“No!” I cried. “She’ll come for us.”
“Might be,” he spat reflectively. “Or maybe not.”
We crossed the road and plunged into the canyon before the climb.
“Are you sure, Dita?” Low whispered. “I don’t reach her at all. Only some predator-“
“That’s Lucine,” I choked. “That’s Lucine.”
I felt Low’s recoil. “That-that animal?”
“That animal. Did we do it? Maybe we should have left her alone.”
“I don’t know.” I ached with his distress. “God help me, I don’t know.”
She was in Cleo II.
Over our tense silence we could hear the rattling of rocks inside as she moved. I was almost physically sick.
“Lucine,” I called into the darkness of the drift. “Lucine, come on out. It’s time to go home.”
A fist-sized rock sent me reeling, and I nursed my bruised shoulder with my hand.
“Lucine!” Low’s voice was commanding and spread all over the band. An inarticulate snarl answered him.
“Well?” The sheriff looked at us.
“She’s completely crazy,” Low said. “We can’t reach her at all.”
“Gaw-dang,” the sheriff said. “How we gonna get her out?”
No one had an answer, and we stood around awkwardly while the late-afternoon sun hummed against our backs and puddled softly in the mine entrance. There was a sudden flurry of rocks that rattled all about us, thudding on the bare ground and crackling in the brush-then a low guttural wail that hurt my bones and whitened the sheriff’s face.
“I’m gonna shoot,” he said, thinly. “I’m gonna shoot it daid” He hefted the shotgun and shuffled his feet.
“No!” I cried. “‘A child! A little girl!”
His eyes turned to me and his mouth twisted.
“That?” he asked and spat.
His deputy tugged at his sleeve and took him to one side and muttered rapidly. I looked uneasily at Low. He was groping for Lucine, his eyes closed, his face tense.
The two men set about gathering up a supply of small-sized rocks. They stacked them ready-to-hand near the mine entrance. Then, taking simultaneous deep breaths, they started a steady bombardment into the drift. For a while there was an answering shower from the mine, then an outraged squall that faded as Lucine retreated farther into the darkness.
“Gotter!” The two men redoubled their efforts, stepping closer to the entrance, and Low’s hand on my arm stopped me from following.
“There’s a drop-off in there,” he said. “They’re trying to drive her into it. I dropped a rock in it once and never heard it land.”
“It’s murder!” I cried, jerking away, grabbing the sheriff’s arm. “Stop it!”
“You can’t get her any other way,” the sheriff grunted, his muscles rippling under my restraining hand. “Better her dead than Petie and all the rest of us. She’s fixing to kill.”
“I’ll get her,” I cried, dropping to my knees and hiding my face in my hands. “I’ll get her. Give me a minute.” I concentrated as I had never concentrated before. I sent myself stumbling out of me into the darkness of the mine, into a heavier deeper uglier darkness, and I struggled with the darkness in Lucine until I felt it surging uncontrollably into my own mind. Stubbornly I persisted, trying to flick a fingernail of reason under the edge of this angry unreason to let a little sanity in. Low reached me just before the flood engulfed me. He reached me and held me until I could shudder myself back from hell.
Suddenly there was a rumble from inside the hill-a cracking crash and a yellow billow of dust from the entrance.
There was an animal howl that cut off sharply and then a scream of pure pain and terror-a child’s terrified cry, a horrified awakening in the darkness, a cry for help-for light!
“It’s Lucine!” I half sobbed. “She’s back. What happened?”
“Cave-in!” the sheriff said, his jaws working. “Shoring gone-rotted out years ago. Gotter for sure now, I guess.”
“But it’s Lucine again,” Low said. “We’ve got to get her out.”