Chapter 17 #2
“Keep looking, Iago.” Gent pressed a hand to his shoulder as he went by. “I think we’re getting really close.”
His email binged, and he glanced at it, tickled to find it was Jesse from the Secret Springs Historical Society.
“Excellent!”
He opened the email, and it simply said,
Hey, I’ve been trying to digitize everything from the Historical Society anyway. The name rang a bell from some work I did last month. I found a diary from your Helena L.
“No shit!”
“Iago,” Gent snapped.
“Sorry, but there’s a diary here from Helena. A member of the Historical Society down in Secret Springs had just digitized it.”
“Well, that’s a weird coincidence,” Dr. Duke muttered under his breath, and Colton cracked up.
“I don’t believe in weird coincidences,” Gent said.
Neither did Iago. He opened the attachment and started flipping through the ‘pages’.
Some of them weren’t legible anymore, but they talked about how Helena had come to town with her family from Denver, and how she found it lonely but wildly beautiful.
Pretty boring stuff until she mentioned she’d fallen in love with the sheriff.
“This is totally her.”
Gent came over to him, looking over his shoulder. “Is there anything here about the house? About the sheriff?”
“She was in love with him, and vice versa. They were engaged to be married. She even had a dress.” He flipped and flipped. “Whoa.”
“Whoa? What whoa?”
“The people who had lived in this house before? The McLellans? Apparently, the man who was here got into this wild fight with the owner of the mine, Jakob Jewell. Suddenly McLellan was broke and ended up in a tiny cabin on the edge of the mountain, while Jewell gave McLellan’s house to Sheriff Lefty. ”
Law blinked up into the camera, face sheened with sweat from prying up the stone. “That’s wild.”
“It gets worse,” Gent muttered.
Colton groaned. “Worse.”
Iago just kept reading. “Yeah. Way. McLellan kind of went crazy with cabin fever and murdered his wife and family. He and the sheriff ended up in a gunfight where McLellan and Sheriff Lefty both disappeared. All there was left over was a bunch of blood, and the Sherrif’s tin star, she says.
Jewell gave it to her, and thankfully for her, Sheriff Lefty had left her the house. Wow.”
“Holy moly!” Mason had this whole not cursing thing down. “The EMF Meter just went crazy.”
“Everybody be cautious,” Colton warned. “We don’t want anybody getting hurt. Things can get out of hand, and you know it.”
Iago brought up a second screen on the freestanding monitor Law had set up for him. He wanted to be able to watch the action at a higher resolution so he could keep an eye out for things that might be invisible to the guys who were down there in the dark.
“So they disappeared?” Colton asked. “That’s it?”
Iago kept reading. “Yeah. The rest of this is all about how she missed him, and she loved him, and she waited for him to come back, maybe, and he never did. She feels like he was close, but she never could find his body.”
Gent leaned closer. “And they never found McClellan?”
“No, but think about it. How easy was it to just become somebody else, back then especially? You just say you’re somebody else.”
“Wow, that’s crazy.”
He nodded to Colton. “It’s awful, is what it is. Poor Helena, I’m really sorry this happened to you,” he called.
For a second, he swore he could see a hawk-faced lady, severe, with her hair pulled back, her expression sad. She wore a plain dark brown patterned dress, a corset giving her a defined waist. “Gent, man, do you see—”
Suddenly there was a crash in the mine; the fact that it came with whoops of triumph and not shouts for help was probably a good thing. Still he and Gent were glued to the monitor watching what was going on.
“We got it! We got the plate! It’s like a thin sheet of rock that was put over some really good hard wood and then totally counter-weighted. All it took was a fulcrum.”
“Holy crap, you guys. Good thing we set up the ropes to be longer. There’s a whole ‘nother level down there.” Mason shone a light down so Law could pan the camera across the bottom of the shaft floor below them.
It was dark and deep but sitting there, just right there, was a human skeleton in the bare remnants of a vest and boots, shreds of other fabric and a tuft of hair clinging to it.
“Dude.”
Suddenly the figure beside him — who he’d forgotten all about with the noise — began to scream, her head thrown back, and her face in a rictus of pain.
“Oh. Oh, no. I’m so sorry, Helena. I’m so sorry.”
Gent had clapped his hands over his ears as if he could actually hear it. “Call Mark. Now. No one touch anything!”
Colton drew Dr. Duke back from the opening. “We know the drill, Gent. We have to wait for the police, Doc. In fact, we should really see if we can close it back up temporarily and go back up.”
Iago had texted Mark, and he held up his phone. He couldn’t hear Helena screaming, but now she was slumped over, sobbing. “He says he can be here in ten. He was at the hotel for some reason.”
“Then send us down a water.”
The front door opened, Xander and Xavi charging in holding big baskets. “So what’s going on?”
Xander stopped, staring at Helena, then put the basket down, stepping closer. “Oh, honey, are you okay?”
“We found her fiancé. The sheriff. He’s down there in the mine. There was a murder and a family annihilator, and it was all awful.”
Expression crumbling, Xander held his arms open. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry, lady. That sucks so hard.”
She ran into his embrace and cried while the camera rolled, taking it all in.
Iago had never been more in love.