“Damn!” she realized. “I gotta do that wall all over again on the way back.”
Putting that challenge aside for the moment, she looked ahead and down where the lights still led.
“Doesn’t this ever stop?” she wondered.
She forged on, although more slowly and carefully watching the ground in front of her. She also noticed something else: she was now seeing miscellaneous holes that had been drilled into the walls that she hadn’t seen before. Each hole was circular and about two inches in diameter. She knew they were relatively new because there were little mounds of loose dirt from the holes on the tunnel floor. After another five minutes, the tunnel and lights finally came to an end. The end of the tunnel had no less than six drilled holes in it, spread out from ceiling to floor. And there was a big red X painted on the rocks.
“Finally,” she said to herself, now starting to feel lightheaded from the cold and lack of air. “X marks the spot,” she muttered. “And unlike the white tunnel numbers, it’s new paint. Meaning, somebody wants to resurrect Maynard tunnel 22.”
She still didn’t have all the answers, but she figured she had at least a piece to her puzzle.
It was several more minutes before Father Fitzsimmons, sitting on the edge of an old water trough for horses and holding a rosary in his hand, saw Goldie emerge from the small square opening of the main entrance. He rose, looked at his wristwatch, then slipped his rosary into his trouser pocket.
“Twenty-eight minutes,” he announced, unhappily. “At thirty minutes, I was going into town for help.”
Goldie didn’t answer. Instead, she sank to the ground on her hands and knees and took several deep breaths of fresh air. The stale air deep inside and scaling Tunnel 22’s side wall twice had really gotten to her.
Concerned, the priest hurried over.
“Goldie! Are you okay? Tell me what’s happening?”
“J-j-just gimmie a minute,” she said breathlessly. “Lemme rest here while you go turn off the generator.”
“Right… okay,” Father agreed.
He was gone about sixty seconds while she stayed motionless on her hands and knees and waited for the dizziness in her head to cease. When he returned, the clergyman helped her to her feet.
“Where the heck did you go?” he asked.
“I-I don’t know,” she replied. “A long way down the main shaft. Th-then there was a connecting tunnel where the lights turned left and kept going. There must’ve been hundreds of light bulbs in total. It had to have taken a long time to string ‘em all up.”
Father Fitz looked at the mine. “The main entrance faces east. Did you go in a straight line?”
“Yeah. There were other tunnels on either side, but I followed the main shaft until the lights changed direction.”
He looked to his left. “Then, you must’ve been traveling north when you turned.”
“I don’t know. The incline of the tunnel floor just kept going down. Not sharp, but gradual and steady. After I turned, I eventually passed some water running down the tunnel walls and a puddle on the ground.”
Father looked to his left again. “Holy cow. You must’ve gone right underneath the river!”
Goldie looked in the same direction. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe I did. But there was a lot more tunnel after that. All in a straight, descending line. Then the tunnel ended with a solid rock wall and a big red X painted on it.”
“You had to have been heading straight north,” he repeated.
“Okay… so, what’s north of here?”
“Depends on how far you went down before you turned,” Father replied. He paused, thinking. “Let’s see… from where we are, St. Mark’s is north. The mayor’s house is, too, but that would really be more like northeast… oh, and Falcon Drive is north.”
Goldie’s eyes suddenly widened.
“Falcon Drive? Where Martha Eggleston lives?”
“Yes,” Father said. Then he second-guessed himself and looked around to check the position of the sun. “At least, I think so. Yes… yes, I’m sure it is.”
Fourteen
PENANCE
