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“Okay.” She turns from him, but not before tears are visible. “I’ll find Santos. I’ll ask to go along with the night team.” The weariness exuding from her reached all the way to her voice.
“No. You sleep. I’ll go.” He waves away her protests before she can mount them. “They’ll let me.” Before she can argue, he adds, “I don’t plan to give them a choice.”
Squaring his shoulders, he makes a beeline for the com van. No more poor decisions. No more waiting for his fate. If high school Silas could see him now, he wouldn’t know what hit him.
20
MEG
One month prior to Howard search
July 2003
Feather River hosted its Old-Fashioned Fourth on the first Friday of July. Usually Meg and Danny found a spot on the curb to watch the parade crawl down Main Street, but this year, Silas declared a day of independence to be the perfect moment to finally find the Long Lake mine.
Meg looked at Danny, who shrugged.
“If it will finally get this quest out of your system,” he told Silas, “sure. Why not?”
But then he got roped into working the hot-dog booth hosted by the firefighter association at the end of the parade route. No way could Silas’s mine trek compete with the chance to hang out with bona fide firefighters all day, even if it did mean he’d be stuck behind a grill in ninety-degree temps.
“You guys should still go,” he told her, though not very convincingly.
Megdidstill want to go. She wanted to test herself on this uncharted terrain Silas had in mind, wanted to see inside this mine. Soon Silaswould leave Marble Lake forever, and what if he took Meg’s new adventuring spirit with him?
But he might cancel anyway, now that Danny was busy. Meg had noticed he did that lately. Often, actually, since Danny was busy almost all the time now. A new, unwelcome thought occurred to her. Had Danny told Silas he wasn’t cool with him spending time with Meg without Jessica in the mix?
“You don’t mind?” Meg asked him now. Just to check. With her plans still in the air, things felt perpetually off between them.
But Danny’s attention had shifted to ironing a new patch onto his junior-volunteer-fire uniform. “Does this look even to you?” he asked, lifting the patched shirt up to her face.
So she called Silas to make sure they were still on. And she made sure to mention that it would just be her, that Danny had been pressed into service at the booth. And Silas had paused for what had felt like a long time for someone who had been given every out, and then he’d said he’d pick her up at 8:00 a.m. sharp.
“You brought the Jeep,” she said with surprise, climbing into the seat the next morning.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said, as if he hadn’t stashed it back in the maintenance shed at the lodge for the last three months.
Meg decided to let this go. “At least we’ll beat the parade traffic at this hour.”
Silas started the engine. “And with the entire Forest Service volunteer corps marching behind the Rotary float, no one will be around to chase us out of the mine.”
Was this a serious concern? Meg couldn’t tell, without Silas adding his usual swagger to every conversation. She said simply, “If we find it.”
Silas scoffed as he turned onto the highway, which was a little more like him. “We’ll find it. And besides, it’s only Danny who keeps going on about trespassing rules and USFS regulations.”
He had a point. She visualized the US Geological Survey map Silas always studied. According to him, multiple caches of abandoned mines—vestiges of the region’s gold-mining heyday—dotted the Sierra Nevada landscape. Dense enough in some places to resemble the puckered surface of honeycomb, most had long since been filled in and sealed in the name of public safety by the Forest Service, their locations wiped from the grid forever, but a few remained, tucked into low slopes and rocky outcroppings ... and plotted by the USGS for anyone to find. On his map, Silas had circled the ridge he sought beyond the far shore of Long Lake.
“I already cross-referenced the topographical coordinates by compass degree,” he told her once they’d parked by the lodge. He leaned over her with his Silva Ranger in hand, pointing out the marked mine shafts and deciding where, exactly, along the circumference of the lakeshore they’d need to veer off trail, while Meg fully visualized, for the first time since agreeing to this venture, crawling into some dark, rotting, enclosed space with nothing but a flashlight.
She didn’t let it deter her. Twenty minutes later, the sun already felt hot on the backs of their necks as they hiked, the sky a wide-open blue in the stretches of trail between the trees. The trace of tension she’d felt between them in the Jeep faded as they put the miles in, and at the shore of Long Lake, Meg took off her boots and waded into the chilled water until the ripples splashed the hem of her shorts. “Come in!” she called, as Silas eyeballed their destination across the lake. “The water’s fine!”
“No, it’s snowmelt,” Silas countered, mimicking a shiver of cold. “Help me out, will you?”
He instructed her to hold the map flat so he could lay his compass carefully on top of it. He drew his finger across the page to the marked mines, lined the compass dial up with North, and then traced one finger back from the mines to an exact declination mark on the dial.
“Eighty degrees northwest,” he said triumphantly. “Remember that, Cass.”
And instantly that tension was back, Meg responding to that single syllable like Silas had lit a sparkler under her skin.
