"Anything?" Chester asked.
Will moved out onto the pavement in front of the shop.
"Nothing," he replied. "No sign of them."
"We should've called the police, you know."
"And told them what?" Will said. "That we were chased by two weirdos in sunglasses and silly hats and then they just disappeared?"
"Yes, exactly that," Chester said, irritated. "Who knows what they were after?" He suddenly looked up as the thought reoccurred to him. "What if they were the gang that took your dad?"
"Forget it — we don't know that."
"But the police…" Chester said.
"Do you really want to go through all that hassle when we've got work to do?" Will interrupted him sharply, scanning Main Street up and down and feeling more at ease now that more people were around. At least they would be able to call for help if the two men turned up again. "The police would probably think we're just a couple of kids goofing around. It's not as if we've got any witnesses."
"Maybe," Chester agreed grudgingly as they started toward the Burrowses' house. "There's no shortage of nuts around here," he said, looking back at the Clarke brothers' shop, "that's for sure."
"It's safe now, anyway. They're gone, and if they do come back, we'll be ready," Will said confidently.
Strangely enough, the incident had not deterred him in the slightest. As he thought about it, quite the opposite was true: It confirmed to him that his father had been onto something, and now he was on the right track. Although he didn't mention any of this to Chester, his resolve to continue with the tunnel and his investigations hardened even further.
Will had begun to pick at the grapes in the garish basket, and the pink ribbon, now undone, flapped in the breeze behind him. Chester appeared to have gotten over his misgivings and was looking expectantly at the basket, his hand poised to help himself.
"So do you want to bail? Or are you still going to help me?" Will quizzed him in a teasing voice, moving the basket tantalizingly out of his reach.
"Oh, all right, then, hand me a banana," his friend replied with a smile.
16
"All this evidence points to a deliberate dismantling," Will said, squatting next to Chester on a pile of rubble in the cramped confines of the workface.
They had now reclaimed about twenty feet of the tunnel, which had begun to dip down in a sharp decline, and found they were running critically short of timber. Will had hoped they would be able to salvage some of the original props and planking from the tunnel itself. What confounded them both was that very little of it was still there, and that much of the timber they did find was damaged beyond use. They had already stripped out every last piece they could from the other tunnel over at the Forty Pits, as well as removing the Stillson props, without bringing the whole excavation crashing down.
Will patted the work face, looking at it with a frown. "I just don't get it," he said.
"So what do you really think happened? That your dad pulled it in behind him?" Chester asked as he, too, looked at the plug of soil and solidly compacted rock that they had yet to remove.
"Backfilled it? No, that's impossible. And even if somehow he had, where are the struts? We'd have found more of them. No, none of this makes any sense," Will said. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of gravel. "Most of this is virgin infill. It's all been lugged here from somewhere else — precisely the same thing that happened at the Pits."
"But why go to all the trouble of filling it in when you could simply collapse the whole thing?" Chester asked, still mystified.
"Because then you'd have trenches opening up under people's houses or across their yards," Will replied despairingly.
"Oh, right," Chester agreed.
They were both exhausted. The last section had been particularly hard going, made up mostly of sizable chunks of rock, some of which even Chester found difficult to manhandle into the wheelbarrow by himself.
"I just hope we haven't got far to go," Chester sighed. "It's really beginning to get to me."
"Tell me about it." Will rested his head in his hands, staring. So they sat there in silence, deep in their own thoughts, and after a while Will spoke. "What was Dad thinking, doing all this and not telling us what he was up to? Me, especially," he said, with a look of sheer exasperation. "Why would he do that?"
"He must have had a good reason," Chester offered.
"But all the secrecy; keeping a secret journal. I don't understand it. We were never a family that kept things… important things… from each other like that. So why wouldn't he have told me what he was up to?"
"Well, you had the Pits tunnel," Chester interjected.
"Dad knew about that. But you're right. I never bothered to tell Mum, because she's just not interested. I mean, we weren't exactly a…" Will hesitated, searching for the right word. "…perfect family, but we all got along and everyone sort of knew what everyone else was up to. Now everything's so messed up."
Chester rubbed some soil out of his ear. He looked at Will thoughtfully. "My mum thinks people shouldn't keep secrets from each other. She says they always have a way of coming out and causing nothing but trouble. She says a secret's just the same as a lie. That's what she tells my dad, anyway."
"And now I'm doing exactly that to Mum and Rebecca," Will said, bowing his head.
After Chester had gone and Will finally emerged from the cellar, he made straight for the kitchen, as he always did. Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table opening the mail. Will noticed right away that his father's hoard of empty coffee jars, which had cluttered up the table for months, had vanished.
"What've you done with them?" he demanded, looking around the room. "With Dad's jars?"
Rebecca studiously ignored him as she scrutinized the postmark on an envelope.
"You threw them out, didn't you?" he said. "How could you do that?"
She glanced up at him briefly, as if he were nothing more than a tiresome gnat that she couldn't quite be bothered to swat, and then continued with the mail.
"I'm starving. Anything to eat?" he said, deciding it wasn't wise to ruffle her feathers by pursuing the matter, not so close to mealtime. As he passed her on the way to the fridge, he stopped to examine something lying to the side. "What's this?"
It was a package neatly wrapped in brown paper.
"It's addressed to Dad. I think we should open it," he said without a moment's hesitation, snatching up a dirty butter knife left on a plate by the sink. Cutting into the brown paper, he excitedly tore open the cardboard box inside, then ripped away a cocoon of bubble wrap to reveal a luminous sphere, glowing from its time in the darkness.
He held it up before him, his eyes sparkling with both excitement and the waning light emanating from the sphere. It was the object he'd read about in his father's journal.
Rebecca had stopped reading the telephone bill and had risen to her feet. She was looking at the sphere intently.
"There's a letter in here as well," Will said, reaching into the ravaged cardboard box.
"Here, let me see it," Rebecca said, her hand snaking toward the box. Will took a step back, holding the sphere in one hand while he shook open the letter with the other. Rebecca withdrew her hand and sat back down, watching her brother's face carefully as he leaned on the counter by the sink and began to read the letter aloud. It was from University College 's physics department.
Dear Roger,
It was wonderful to hear from you again after all these years — it brought back warm memories of our time together at college. It was also good to catch up on your news — Steph and I would love to visit when convenient.