“Lenny!” Qwilleran shouted back, going out to meet him. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Duluth!”
“I came back. Do you have any food? I’m starved. I spent my last nickel on breakfast.”
“How did you get here? Where’s your truck?”
“Out of gas on the highway. I walked the rest of the way.”
“Come in! Come in! I’ll make a ham and cheese sandwich. What would you like to drink? Beer? Coffee? Cola?”
“Milk, if you’ve got it.”
Qwilleran put a glass and a plastic jug of milk on the snack bar. “Help yourself while I throw the sandwich together. Mustard? Horseradish?”
“Both.”
“Is rye bread okay?”
“Anything.” Lenny gulped a glassful and poured another.
“Do you know what’s been going on here since you left? The stolen pistol? The hijacking?”
“Everything,” the young man said. “Mom phoned my aunt’s house every night.”
“Why did you decide to come home?”
“I’m worried about Boze. I’m afraid he’ll get himself shot. Some trigger-happy clod will see him in the woods and panic. He’ll think he’s shooting him in self-defense.”
“So you think he’s hiding out in the woods,” Qwilleran said. “That’s my hunch, too, although it’s generally thought he’ll steal another vehicle and disappear Down Below…. Here, try this sandwich. I have ice cream in the freezer, too. Don’t talk until you finish eating.” Sitting on a bar stool Qwilleran filled him in with the latest news: “Osmond Hasselrich died… The Mark Twain Festival is postponed… Amanda Goodwinter is running for mayor… Homer Tibbitt celebrated his ninety-eighth… The Sloans are selling their drugstore and moving to Florida.”
Lenny chewed in silence, obviously more interested in his own crisis than in local news. After he had devoured a chocolate sundae, the two of them went to the library area and stretched out in lounge chairs.
Qwilleran said, “Tell me what you propose to do.”
“Get him out of the woods for his own safety. Under normal conditions he could live off the land. He has his jackknife, and now he has a gun, and he has friends out there in backwoods stores who’d sell him ammo and matches and flashlight batteries and chewing gum. They’d even help to hide him. They’re on his side. He’s their own kind. Besides, he’s a hero.”
“Do you think you can get him to come out of the woods and give himself up?”
“He trusted me, or he wouldn’t have told me what happened. Now maybe he thinks I’m a double-crosser, but that’s a chance I’ve got to take. Mr. Barter told me that no Moose County jury would convict a simple country boy duped by a big-city sharpie. I knew she wasn’t that guy’s niece! I’ve been working in hotels since I was sixteen, and I know a bimbo when I see one. She tried to come on to me at the desk, you know, but I wasn’t having any. If only I could have guessed… She’d be in jail, and the old guy would be alive, and Boze would still be a hero.”
Qwilleran stroked his moustache. “What makes you think you can find him?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where he is,” said Lenny, looking wise. “If we can take your van ”
“Wait a minute, Lenny. Are you expecting me to go out there?”
“We gotta.”
Qwilleran considered it a hare-brained mission, although his professional curiosity and sense of adventure were undermining his better judgment. He hesitated.
“Do you have a couple of flashlights?” Lenny asked.
They drove out Chipmunk Road in silence until Qwilleran said, “You mentioned that Boze could buy chewing gum from backwoods stores.”
“Yeah, he’s a chain-chewer. Always has a wad in his mouth. At the inn, where gum-chewing isn’t allowed on the job, the housekeeper found gum-wrappers in the wastebasket behind the desk… and wads of gum stuck under the edge of the counter. It was my job to straighten him out. Not easy.”
“The midnight shift must be dull. What does the night clerk do to pass the time when he isn’t talking to bimbos?”
“On the six-to-midnight I get a chance to study. Boze liked comic books…. All that seems like a long time ago. I’ve lived a year in the past week.”
After a while Qwilleran asked, “Isn’t this the way to the Big B mine?”
“Yep.”
“It was once owned and operated by a woman.”
“Oh?”
Lenny’s mind was somewhere else not on the conversation until the Big B shafthouse came in view, silvery in the moonlight.
“Take the next right,” he said. “It’s a dirt road.”
It paralleled the six-foot chainlink fence that marked the limits of the mine property. Like all other mines the Big B was posted as dangerous, and the fence was topped with three courses of barbed wire.
“Okay, Mr. Q. Stop here. Let’s get out and walk.”
They took the flashlights. Although the moon was bright, the rutted lane was shaded by overhanging tree branches. The leaves had not yet begun to fall. As they walked, all was quiet except for the whine of tires on Chipmunk Road behind them and the occasional scurrying of a small animal in the underbrush. At the northeast corner of the fenced site the lane turned south and became even more primitive.
Lenny said in a hushed voice, “Boze and I used to play around here when we were kids. We knew how to get over the barbed wire without skinning a knee and how to pry a board loose from the shafthouse.”
“You mean you went inside that dilapidated wreck?”
“Crazy, wasn’t it? It was spooky inside all scaffolding and ladders. We could hear the water sloshing in the mineshaft a zillion feet below. There’s a subterranean lake down there.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody says so. All I know is, we threw pebbles down and heard them splash. We’d climb to the top platform with a pocketful of pebbles and sit there and eat a candy bar.”
“Didn’t you realize how dangerous it was? Those timbers are more than a century old.”
“Yeah, but fourteen inches square and put together with handmade spikes a foot long! We climbed around like monkeys. We were only nine years old. Our only fear was that Mom would find out. Once we were dumb enough to try smoking on the top platform. Boze had stolen a cigarette somewhere, and I had book matches. We lit it all right, but it didn’t taste as good as a candy bar. We dropped it down the shaft and heard it fizzle out in the water or imagined we did. That was one of our finer moments.”
“I’ll bet,” Qwilleran said, thinking what a sheltered life he and Arch had lived in Chicago.
“Sh-h-h!” Lenny flashed his light on the ground. “He’s here! There’s a gum-wrapper!” A scrap of foil caught the light.
Qwilleran’s moustache twitched as he remembered Koko’s obsession with the bit of foil under the rug.
“Look, Mr. Q! Here’s where he built a campfire!” There was a charred circle on the ground and some small bones. “He cooked a rabbit! I’ll bet he’s saving the skins to make a blanket!”
Qwilleran looked around uneasily. He felt they were being watched through a knothole in old boards. He could see a pinpoint of light inside. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.
But Lenny began to shout. “Boze! It’s Lenny! Are you all right? We came to help you!”
There was no answer.
“I know he’s in there,” Lenny whispered. “I can see pinpoints of light. Flashlight. Or lantern.”
“This is insane!” Qwilleran hissed.
Lenny shouted again. “Boze! Everything’s gonna be all right! Mr. Q’s here! He’s gonna help you!”
All was quiet again, and then they heard a gunshot from the tower. Qwilleran grabbed Lenny’s upper arm roughly and propelled him back along the primitive road.
There was another shot… then sounds of thumping and crashing and splintering of old wood… a splash… and silence again.