Abel’s sore neck muscles contracted violently, jerking his head up from the paper. “Liz is alive?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
The town’s founder glared at Bobcat, a look of utter astonishment across his face. “She did make it out of Yellowstone, then.”
“Apparently.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know, man. All I could find was this list. I couldn’t come up with anything else, not yet anyway.”
“Well, did you try the airline?”
“I did. I found out she had been released from a hospital in Calgary, Canada. That’s as far as I got.”
“Calgary? A look of pure puzzlement settled over his features. “She never reached Denver?”
“No. She must have survived some sort of emergency situation. It’s been months now, though. No one seems to know anything about her whereabouts, or that of quite a few others.”
Abel glanced up the stairway. “Look, I’ve got to tell Pelee. I’ll show her this. Can you go see what else you can find?”
“Sure, if the communication lines stay up for more than a minute or two.” Bobcat turned toward the door. “I’ll see you later.”
“Thanks, old friend.”
Bobcat exited the cabin as Abel mounted the stairs in a few bounds. He flipped the latch on his daughter’s small room, entered and took a seat on the child’s bed next to his daughter.
“Pelee. Are you going to sleep until tomorrow, missy?” Father shook his daughter gently. “Pelee.”
“Mmmm, go ‘way.” The youngster tightened her eyelids and buried her head in her pillow.
“I brought you a gift, missy.”
“No, you didn’t.” An eye opened and peeked out from the pillow.
“I did, a marvelous gift just for you. Here, you may have it.”
Pelee rolled in her covers and looked squarely upon her father. Abel presented Bobcat’s printout. The youngster lifted it from his hands.
“Oh, Pop,” Pelee grumbled, “just what I always wanted, a piece of paper. Poo!”
“You should read it. Then your present will appear.”
The child studied the type. “There are just names, Pop.”
“Not just any names, Pelee.”
The youngster scanned the sheet hurriedly, exaggerating head movements to show discontent with her father’s little ruse. She stopped still. “No.”
Pelee exploded from her covers, settling on her knees. She rammed a finger at the list. “There’s mom’s name. There it is.” She waved the paper at the ceiling. “What is this?”
Abel swept his daughter up in his arms and turned revolutions on the floorboards, Pelee’s legs and feet swinging arcs. “Your mother is alive, Pelee.”
Chapter Eighty-Six
Oleg hammered loudly on the exterior doorframe of Abel’s bungalow. Father and daughter, in mid-twirl, stopped gyrating. Pelee pushed away from her father, raced from her room and jumped down the cabin stairs. She unlatched the door, took one look at the farm manager, and jumped off the floor into his muscular arms. The farm manager, rocked off his feet by the lunging youngster, managed to grab the doorframe and pull the both of them inside.
“Mom’s alive, mom’s alive,” the child yelled into Oleg’s heavy red beard.
“What now, miss?”
“She is, she is.”
“Glad you’re up, Abel,” croaked Oleg, giving Pelee a bear hug as Abel padded down the stairs.
“Morning, Oleg.”
“What’s this your Pelee is telling me?”
“Her mother. She’s listed on a manifest as a survivor.”
“You mean….”
“Yes. She apparently survived the Yellowstone blow-up.”
“Well,” smiled Oleg through his beard, “that would be cause for celebration, eh, Pelee?”
“Yes.”
“But we’ve some things to attend to right now,” the farm manager said, a stern wrinkle across his brow. “We’ve got a serious situation, Abel. Did Pelee tell you?”
“Oleg told me yesterday there was trouble, Pop.”
Abel flinched and rubbed his eyes to clear them of morning encrustation. “How serious?”
“Someone took two goats from the barn,” noted Oleg. “They’re gone.”
Abel moaned and took a seat on the bottom stairs. “We lost two milking goats?”
“Yes, but that’s not the whole of it.”
Abel’s face stretched toward the floor. “What else?”
“In the caves, now. You ought to have a look.”
Pelee insisted on joining the men on their sojourn across the town. Abel told her to hurry, dress warmly, and come along. Joyous occasion or tribulation, Abel insisted his daughter experience every aspect of community life.
The trio stepped into an armored morning, cut through with limp violet shadows on a crust of new snow.
Beneath the ridgeline of Prospect Bluffs, where slopes leveled out at the base of a raw glacier-cut wound along the northwest flank stood a stonework portal, a graceful arch of native rock and mortar. At the center of entrance were heavy plank doors that could be opened wide enough to allow a pickup truck to back in and a second entry, a small insulated door. It had been left ajar.
Beyond the stonework, the little band stepped into the deep past, when glacier ice scoured the Minnesota lake country to dust and rubble and fractured and cleaved huge slabs of rock away from their stony cradles. At Prospect Bluffs, ice sheared sheets of rock from bony ridges of stone protruding from the prairie. Beneath the ice mantle, the rock leaves slowly piled into the region to come to rest at angles at the base of the newly forming glacial moraines, kames and drumlins. The angled rock formed narrow hollows at Prospect Bluffs, running in a continuous line in excess of 500 feet. Glacial till and forest duff had, over millennia, covered the slabs, sealing the caves off completely from the outside world, save a ragged, triangular entrance. In the first days of the existence of Independency, the deep secret of the bluff country was discovered, and the early colonists put the cave to good use as a cold storage chamber and, more recently, as a vast mushroom nursery.
Oleg threw a light switch and strings of bulbs illuminated the granite sheaths that formed the linear vault. Thirty feet into the cave, the farm lane ended at a small loading dock. A few dozen feet beyond, loaded crates of carrots, parsnips, beets, salsify, turnips and rutabaga stood side by side. In the deepest recesses, the community members stored apples and pears. Overhead and hanging by their roots from wire lines were hundreds of heads of cabbage. On the opposite side of the skid, across from the root crops in storage, stood five-foot log butts, bolt upright every one, a battalion of wooden soldiers in marching formation. Into the depths of the rock chamber coursed the logs until the uneven walls of the cave hid the remainder from view. Each length of wood shouldered a burden of growth, umber or buff in tone, ragged, fluted and fan shaped, all the multitudinous organic forms of shitake and morel mushrooms.
Pelee, skipping and dancing, led the way into the cavern to a rock masonry wall, similar to the entrance but standing to one side and sealing off a deformation in the rock cavity. Oleg pointed the way through a heavy door, found yet another light switch, and illuminated the interior. The locker was little more in square feet than a large suburban living room, but the entire space was given over to painted wood slat shelving. Most of the racks were burdened with weighty wheels of goat cheddar, edam, gouda and Swiss and tawny cubes of sweet gjetost. Intermingled were rounds of cheeses curried from cow’s milk, bartered for and bought many months before.
The cheese stocks were methodically inventoried; at any one time the keepers of the cave’s cheese locker knew to the pound how much was on hand. That was just the problem. Hundreds of pounds of cheese were unaccounted for.