“I’m…what?”
“At dropping lines,” Kerri explained, bringing her legs on the bed. “Peter asked me out.”
“What?” Andy repeated. “He…when?”
“That last summer. He was thirteen, you know. Puberty kicking in. It’s all biology.”
“You rejected him?”
“Hmm, no…not explicitly. We never really talked about it. I didn’t think of him that way; I didn’t think of anyone that way yet. And he was nice enough not to push it. Then…” Her hands tried to communicate something very emphatically. “You know, the Sleepy Lake case happened, and we never really talked about that summer at all, ever. But he was interested. He wrote me letters. Look.”
She sprang off the bed and switched on the orange-shaded lamp on the diminutive desk, where her neatly ordered compass and magnifying lens and pocket dictionaries waited eagerly to assist in the case. She opened the first drawer, filled with postcards and colored envelopes and lined sheets of her own round junior-high handwriting shrieking for attention, and retrieved an envelope with a U.S. Bicentennial stamp.
“After spring break he mailed me a few notes to Portland, and then when I got here in June I found this waiting for me.”
She held it out to Andy, who didn’t take it. “I…I guess it’s private.”
“It’s nothing scandalous. He was a very sweet kid.”
“I know. I’d just…rather not,” Andy declined. As much as she wanted to escape the subject, she suddenly remembered: “The call. You said he phoned you the day before he…”
“Yeah.” Kerri’s eyes, weighed down by the memory, lowered to the carpet. “He probably needed to…talk.”
Andy swallowed, noticed a bad taste in her mouth. Even for this bedroom, that was a moment a little too bitter to help it go down.
Tim approached the ajar door, anticipating the next character entrance. Nate knocked.
“Sorry,” he said. “Club meeting, please?”
Kerri seized the chance: “Yeah, okay. Club meeting.”
She slid the letter in the back of her jeans and they sat cross-legged on the carpet. The low-key orange lighting in the bunker infused the scene with an extra air of secrecy. Andy felt solace in it. She made sure to take it in before inaugurating the session.
“Okay. So. New development in the Sleepy Lake case: turns out there was a Sleepy Lake creature.”
“There were many Sleepy Lake creatures,” Kerri acknowledged darkly.
“Not to mention a former pirate, mining tycoon, and part-time necromancer back in Debo?n Mansion,” Nate added.
“We don’t know that,” said Kerri.
“Well, we should consider the possibility.”
“Yeah, and let’s also factor in the chance the sky’s made of jelly!”
“Why do you always—” Nate started but scrapped, too angry. “Christ, do I look like a scared kid to you now?! I was in the attic, with a book on a lectern, in a pentacle in the middle of the room—”
“It was staged!”
“It was a trap!” Nate cried. “I felt it when I read the words; I saw smoke coming from an urn! I did that!”
“Nate, we can’t trust what we saw thirteen years ago; that’s why we came back!” Kerri raised her hands, stopping an objection from Nate before it came out. “Tell me, with your hand on your heart, that you can absolutely trust everything you see or hear.”
“Ha!” went Peter, standing up. “What a ridiculous question! Of course he can trust anything he sees—tell her, Nate.”
Nate sat still, painfully struggling to avoid eye contact with him.
“Nate? Come on. Of course you can— (To Kerri.) Course he can trust everything he sees and hears! Nate! C’mon, tell her!”
Tim laid his head down again after a brief access of interest.
Peter, unanimously ignored, dropped his arms.
“Okay, fuck you all. (Going for the door.) I’ll be in the actual men’s dorm.”
Nate sighed, nodded, surrendered the point, and lay back, exhausted, Tim promptly coming to lick his face.
Kerri went on: “And Dunia, by her own admission, was a scared child. We can’t trust her testimony. Shit, we don’t need to—there’s enough on our plate.”
“The wheezers,” Andy interpreted.
“Yes. Those,” Kerri said, not really fond of the new name. “But you don’t need a sorcerer to unearth those things; Copperseed and I discussed this. If they come from caverns under the hills, and they have been there for thousands of years…which is saying a lot, but I may accept it because I haven’t found evidence that they actually need any food or air…they weren’t set loose through magic. We’ve been mining these hills for a century; we just dug too deep.”
“And whose idea was it to dig here in the first place?” Nate pointed out, jumping back in. “Come on, a guy comes west during the California Gold Rush, stumbles into Oregon, finds a lake, finds a one-acre isle on the lake, and starts digging for gold there? Isn’t it possible he was looking for something else?”
“But he did find gold,” Andy intervened.
“Did he? Or was he just carrying the gold from his swashbuckling days?” He paused, then switched to Kerri. “Consider this: How long have the sightings been going on?”
“According to Copperseed, since the early fifties.”
“Go one year further back: What happened in nineteen forty-nine?”
The date came to their minds in the heavy slab print of the Pennaquick Telegraph.
“The fire in Debo?n Mansion,” Andy stated.
“?‘A freak accident,’?” Nate quoted from Dunia. “I think the accident was old Debo?n waking up the wrong guys.”
The room, dark enough, went a little darker with the picture those words suggested: a vague sketch of eyeless creatures stumbling upstairs in the dark, and screams; a fight, and an explosion; a puff over the quiet lake.
“Okay, let’s say it’s true,” Kerri said, shaking her hair awake. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Well, if we know the wheezers live underground, and that they came out through the mines…then we need to do exactly what we were doing,” he concluded, pointing at an off-guard Andy. “Retrace our steps. When we returned to the lake with Al, we found the footprints leading into the abandoned mines, and a few days later Al took us to the mines. That’s what we should do now.”
“The mines?” Kerri said in high pitch. “We go right to the wheezers?”
“Technically, we could’ve stumbled upon them last time, but we didn’t. We found more footprints, but those could’ve been Wickley as well. We’d be able to tell now. If the wheezers are using the mines to come to the surface, all we’d have to do is blow up the tunnels.”
“It’s way too dangerous!” Kerri complained. “Guys, come on, can’t we just…call the police?”