I don’t know how much time passed—minutes or hours. But then Lucy stopped again, and before I could urge her forward, she said, “There’s daylight.”
I pushed off my goggles and squinted past her. Wan, gray light trickled into the passageway, and with it came the faint scents of rain and grass.
“Keep going, Lucy. Keep going. We’re almost there.”
The tunnel widened, then ended sharply in a small space that led to a vertical shaft. Clyde squirmed free of the tunnel, and Lucy followed him. The smells of rain and grass grew stronger, overriding the stink of wet earth. A ladder, a twin to the tunnel beneath the cement factory, led to the surface.
And, high above, through the round opening, a pearl-gray disc shone—the coming dawn.
TWO WEEKS LATER
CHAPTER 32
Every person’s life is a struggle against a world filled with resistance. That resistance may defeat us or warp us or crush us.
But sometimes, we find a strength we didn’t know we had. And with that newly recognized strength, we move past the hard times. And we become a little stronger for the next round.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
The funeral for Samantha Davenport and her two sons was held on a brilliant Colorado afternoon in August—a day that was sunny, dry, and warm. The only clouds were high and thin—wisps of cotton stretched across the azure blue. The rains, after causing record flooding across Colorado, had moved on. The ground had responded to the unprecedented moisture with a luxurious tide of green that spread across lawns and parks and open spaces. Denver looked like a city reborn.
At the service, Clyde and I stood close together in the shade of a copse of trees, watching from a distance as the mourners gathered by the graves. Neither of us were ready to be so near the dead. I’d already said what I needed to say to Ben. And to Lucy. We’d come to pay our respects, but no one needed to know we were there.
Even across the roll of green lawn, I could make out the tall figure of Ben Davenport, his face pale but his bearing military erect. He wore his army dress blues uniform and held a cane he refused to lean on.
The nurses told me that he had awoken in the early morning hours while we were hunting for Lucy. It was as if her need for him had reached the place where he dreamed. As if he knew how much she would need him when she returned home.
As if God knew exactly what the two of them could handle and had given them that much and no more.
The doctors said it would take months of therapy for Ben to relearn skills he’d once taken for granted. But the brain was amazingly elastic, and he was expected to make a good recovery. Probably he would never be quite as he had been, the doctors said. He needed to be prepared for that. But he’d been a different man since the war, anyway. I was confident that Ben wasn’t someone you should underestimate. Whatever the future held, he would adapt.
And maybe the same could be said for Lucy, who, while physically unharmed, had memories no one should carry. But I didn’t underestimate her, either.
She stood beside him now, dressed in a pink dress and white sweater, her hair neatly braided. Her hand was in his, and their eyes sought each other continually during the service. At some point, Ben loosed her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him.
They had each other.
My hand slipped into my pocket and—as I had done so many times—I ran my thumb across the photo of the Iraqi boy, Malik. We should never quit fighting for what we believe in. Or what we love.
Beside me, Clyde wagged his tail, and I turned to see Mac McConnell approaching across the grass. The bullet from Roman’s gun had taken out a chunk of muscle and resulted in copious blood loss from a lacerated femoral vein. The wound had then become infected after being dragged through the mud. Mac had undergone immediate surgery and was still in physical therapy. But she’d discharged herself early from the hospital and refused the wheelchair ride to the car, insisting that recovery would come faster if she didn’t baby the leg. The doctors told her she was apt to do more harm than good if she wasn’t careful. She waved them off and laughed, and now there was another reason for people to call her Mad Mac.
“It’s good to finally see the sky again,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure we would.”
We’d talked about those hours we’d spent under the ground. Mac had gotten my message loud and clear, but it had taken her a while to get to the cement factory. She still beat Cohen and most of the police there. The young officer who arrived before she did had been content to stand guard at the entrance to the mining shaft while she descended. Officer Ketz, she’d told me later, is a boy who needs to grow bigger britches.
Ketz was the officer who’d arrived at the accident when all of this started. Maybe getting knocked down a peg or two wouldn’t be all bad. He’d rebound.
Mac’s story was straightforward. She’d followed the trail I’d marked with the Silly String and been—she noted drily—particularly appreciative of the strands hanging off the trip wires. But the water had been rising fast as she went through the tunnel, and she’d known we had little chance of returning that way. She’d come after me anyway. You really are crazy, I’d told her. Crazy enough, she’d responded, that God has learned not to argue.
When the earth collapsed, only one cop had been in the tunnel. Detective Michael Cohen. He’d descended the ladder and was thirty feet in when the walls started to buckle. He’d scrambled back to the ladder and barely made it out, then spent the next two hours yelling at the engineers to find another way in. When we finally emerged, Cohen’s level of enthusiasm for us was as great as Clyde’s at seeing him—it was like being around a pair of two-year-olds.
Now I smiled at Mac as she propped herself against a tree and removed her sunglasses. The black eye was a faded yellow, almost gone.
“Smart move,” she said, “filing your application. You’ll make a great FBI agent.”
“I started the process, Mac. But I’m still not sure.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “It’ll be great.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d also been approached by Cohen’s boss, Lieutenant Engel, who thought I’d make a solid addition to Major Crimes. He wanted me to make a lateral move from railroads to Denver PD. Six months with a training officer would teach me everything I needed to know about rules and forms and regulations. Then I’d be invited to join the Homicide/Robbery Bureau because of my “talent and experience.” The golden girl on the fast track.
Mauer and Cohen thought it was a great idea. I’d told Cohen he’d be sick of me by the end of the first day. But I promised to think about it.
“I’m meeting a few people at Joe’s Tavern,” Mac said. “Why don’t you join us there?”
“You claiming territory on my turf?”
“Why not, when it’s good turf? Meet us there in thirty.”
But I shook my head. “I’m heading over to the cement factory.”
“Why the hell would you want to do that?”