Chapter 12
The rain fell solidly for a day, and the smelter fire was finally put out. Robert, Lucy, and Troy returned from their trip to San Antonio. Troy rushed into his house to see his wife and twin babies, leaving Lucy and Robert to inspect the damage of the smelter.
Gathering his men, Ethan joined them, returning to the ruins to see if they could find any clue as to what had been the starting point of the inferno. What had Curtis and his two friends done to start such an intense fire? That was what Ethan wanted to know.
After he attacked Diane, she made no more protestations about how he had been treated. Perhaps his attempt to kill her had changed her mind on the subject. He didn’t want to ask. It was all so fresh.
“There were explosions and then the fire?” Robert asked as they stood outside what had been the smelter and took in the damage.
“That’s how it happened,” Ethan said.
“Mmm,” Robert said, rubbing his chin with his hand. “I think the real question here is why. Why set the explosives to go off in the smelter? Why not detonate them in the mine if this Mr. Perez wants to shut us down?”
“It’s a foolish crime,” Lucy said, looking thoughtful. As the sheriff’s wife and a full-fledged detective, she had a sharp mind for such things. Ethan was keen to see what she would come up with.
“There are a lot of things we don’t understand about it, I’m sure,” Ethan said. “That’s why we want to go in there and take a look around.”
Robert nodded. “Okay. I think we’re going to go and speak to Andrew and Michael. Maybe there’s more that Curtis told them.”
Ethan shrugged. “Good luck.”
Lucy smiled. “You too. Be careful in there.”
Ethan planned to be.
The building had been made of stone and wood.
Of course, all the wood was burned to ash, but the stone foundation was still fine.
However, knowing that burned-out husks of buildings were inherently unsafe, Diane and Julie were on standby at their offices, and there was a buckboard waiting close by. He hoped he had thought of everything.
Poking the floor with a sturdy walking stick before putting his weight on it, Ethan made his way into the place he had worked in for a long time now. He had been running this smelter for years, and now it was gone.
It was odd to see the place as it now stood, all hollowed out and decrepit.
Things had melted, turning the once-familiar space into something alien and strange beyond words.
Metal had melted, oozing to the floor, where it made oddly shaped and colored pools that had now cooled and hardened.
The walls that remained were blackened and burned, and the roof had caved in in places, crushing whatever was beneath it.
But some places were hardly touched, which showed the mercurial nature of fire and how it seemed to pick and choose what to destroy.
Ethan’s office was soot-blackened and wet from the rain, but it wasn’t ruined. His desk still stood, with only a lick here and there of flame damage. His papers had burned off the desk, blown to the floor and consumed until they were ash, but little else was burned up.
The chemical storeroom was completely gone.
Most of the chemicals came in metal drums, being too caustic for wood.
They had been properly stored, but it seemed that Curtis and his friends had moved them to use them in the fire.
It certainly explained a lot about how the fire had managed to burn so hot so quickly.
Thomas, Darren, and the others spread out, moving around the place slowly and carefully, testing their steps before putting weight onto the floor.
Ethan watched them go, talking softly among themselves. The topic was how the fire started. Michael and Andrew had asked Ethan not to tell anyone anything for now. They wanted confirmation, and they didn’t want word getting back to Mr. Rossi.
“That man will write up the most damning report he can,” Andrew had told Ethan. “We have to keep the attack quiet until we can build a body of evidence and follow all the clues.”
“Why? Surely this would help us,” Ethan had pointed out.
Andrew had shaken his head. “Not if we have a spy in our midst,” he said. “How else would two or three men from outside Unity get in here to set the explosives? You tell me. We can’t spread this news around until we have the spy in custody.”
And that was it. Ethan couldn’t tell his workers anything but had to let them discover the answers for themselves, pretending he was discovering them too. Who knew; maybe they would learn something new, something that would help Michael, Andrew, and now Robert track down Mr. Perez and arrest him.
“I think I might have something here,” Darren called.
He was at the far wall, where they usually kept the firewood. Ethan hurried as quickly as he could to where Darren stood and waved for the other men to stay back.
Too much weight on the compromised floor could cause a break.
Ethan took in the area as he arrived. Piles of wood had stood there not so long ago. Of course, the wood was mostly gone, but some slightly burned logs were left, once again showing the capricious nature of fire.
Darren was inspecting something. He had a stick in his hand and was prodding at a substance on the ground.
“Look at this; it smells potent,” he said, holding the stick up.
Ethan took it and sniffed. “Any ideas?”
“I think—” Darren began, but stopped when Thomas let out a cry.
He swore loudly, drawing Ethan and Darren around to the side of a metal blob that was more than likely a barrel of something.
Seated on the floor, his legs out in front of him, was what remained of a man. He was clearly dead, an iron bar protruding from what was left of his torso. Oddly, the man’s bottom half was hardly touched by the fire.
Ethan swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat and raised a hand to his nose and mouth. The smell of the body was not pleasant.
“What do you think happened to him?” Thomas asked, a look of horrified fascination on his face.
“I don’t know,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “But there’s something in his back pocket. Can you lift him, and then I’ll?—”
“No!” Thomas said, shocked. “What do you want to do that for?”
Ethan stared at him in disbelief. “He’s a stranger dead in our smelter…” He waited a moment for that to sink into Thomas and Darren’s minds.
“Oh right,” Darren said. “I’ll lift him for you. I don’t mind dead things. My uncle does taxidermy. I helped him out in the summers.” He lifted the man.
There was a loud creaking sound coming from the building. It wasn’t the snap and crackle of a building settling after being terribly hot. It was something else, something breaking.
“Everyone out!” Ethan called, still holding onto the mostly charred body. This might be his only chance to look for clues.
The others hurried for the exit, but Thomas and Darren stayed, trying to help him.
“I almost have it!” Ethan cried. “Almost …” He pulled the little book from the man’s pocket, ripping the fabric in the process, and held it up.
With a loud crash, the floor gave way then beneath them, and Ethan found that he was scrabbling for purchase, his feet finding nothing beneath him.
Tumbling down, he reached out, trying to slow his fall.
Thomas and Darren came sliding down the incline with him, all crying out, flailing their arms in a desperate attempt to stop their slide.
Ethan grabbed something, but it came away in his free hand, the other one still holding the book, grasping it as though it were a lifeline.
With nothing to grab onto, he fell down, down, down into darkness.
Ethan rolled over onto his back. He had landed badly, knocking the wind out of his lungs.
After interminable moments trying to suck air into his lungs, he finally managed a gasping breath and choked on the falling rain of dust. He coughed, retched, and lay back, finally breathing. Around him was an eerie silence.
A tinkling dance of cascading pebbles rolled down a surface, some of them bouncing off the top of his head on their way to the sandy floor beneath him.
It took a moment longer for Ethan’s eyes to adjust to the gloom around him. There was one shaft of light, and it came in through a jagged hole that was plugged with what looked like …
“Debris,” Thomas said.
Relieved that there was another live human being in this dim place with him, Ethan stretched out a hand and found Thomas’s questing fingers.
“Thomas, I am so glad you’re here,” he croaked.
He could hear the smile in Thomas’s words when he spoke despite the hoarseness of his voice. “I’m pretty glad you’re here too. Where is here though?”
“I don’t rightly know,” Ethan admitted. He tried to sit up and found that the world and his stomach were none too stable. He lay back down. “Let’s give it a minute and then we’ll try again.”
“Okay,” Thomas said.
Ethan kept his eyes on the shaft of light. Held it in his vision like a promise of help to come. They needed help. He and Thomas seemed to be in bad shape.
He really wished Diane was there. Not only because of her medical training, which would be great to have, but also because he was suddenly very aware of the fact that he might never see her again. He was lying in a cave and didn’t seem to have the energy or the ability to find a way out.
But that was ridiculous. He had finally found love. He wasn’t going to lie there in the dark and let it slip from his grasp. He would just need a little rest and then he would find his way back up to the surface, to life and love and Diane.
Please, Lord. Help us find our way back to the surface safely.
After a little while, Ethan tried again. It didn’t sound like there was anything happening above them. Perhaps the floor was too unstable, in which case they really had to move. And where was Darren?
With great effort, Ethan sat up slowly. Very, very slowly. That seemed to be the right way to do it because when he sat up and the world didn’t twirl around him like a drunken dancer, he felt his spirits rise a little. He could do this.
“Thomas?”