“Raines,” Travis said. He’d always intended to ask her about the man, but only after checking the basement. It would’ve been one thing too many to stuff into the first conversation.
“Yeah, I knew him,” Jeannie said. “Everyone knows everyone here. You people, we don’t know, which is why we’re not talking to you about him. And putting on street clothes and acting casual isn’t going to change that.”
“We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”
She didn’t buy it.
“Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”
“Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.
For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.
Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.
“We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”
She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”
“And what time was President Garner killed?”
She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.
“This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”
For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.
Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.
Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”
“Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.
Jeannie waved her off.
“You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”
Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.
“I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s . . . something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”
“Raines’s house,” Travis said.
She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and . . . did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”