Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

Donita wore her raingear, slept with the rock helmet on her head, and hummed songs her grandmother had taught her in order to stay relatively sane. Water dropping into puddles sounded like Raven’s call. Donita’s mother had been Raven moiety, so Donita was Raven, and she found the sound comforting.

The beam of her headlamp was powerful enough to cast shadows over the bumpy stone walls, but the black around the edges swallowed the light. She’d walked the entire cavern as soon as Levi yelled goodbye, noting the old shovels, ladders, buckets, and other equipment the miners had simply abandoned in the hole when they quit digging. It was incredibly interesting, an underground museum from 1908, but mainly, she wanted to make certain she was the only one down there.

In the dark.

It was easy to see why Levi called it the Great Hall. All the mines he’d taken her to before had been relatively straight tunnels in the rock. What people thought of when they pictured a mine, something out of a movie with timber supports on the low-hanging ceilings and a stope that was maybe the size of a large bedroom. The Great Hall looked bigger than all those other mines put together. It had taken over half of their 150-foot rope to rappel in. There was a small ledge about fifteen feet below the entrance, and then an undercut that left them dangling on a free rappel with no place to put their feet for the last fifty until they reached a pile of clattering shale that gradually sloped another twenty feet to the relatively flat floor. Levi described the shape of the Great Hall as looking like a semitruck and trailer. Donita thought of it more as a gigantic dung beetle, like she’d seen in National Geographic, with the arched ceilings and sloping walls of the ovular Great Hall forming the largest part of its body. A relatively smaller bubble comprising the beetle’s head was opposite the end from where they’d rappelled down. The larger space was an open cavern over a hundred feet at its tallest point, half again as long, and ninety feet wide. A rough, oblong dome, it relied on its shape for support. The twenty-foot ceilings of the beetle’s head had four support stone columns evenly spaced in the forty-by-forty-foot room. These columns had once been more robust, thicker, but greedy miners had chipped away at the gold-bearing diorite, “robbing” the very rock that kept the roof from caving down on their heads, leaving the remaining columns small enough now that Donita could almost get her arms around them.

There was a crystalline-blue pond at the far end of the beetle’s head. Roughly twenty feet in diameter, a narrow ledge ran around the far end, where the beetle’s mouth would be. Even with her powerful headlamp Donita couldn’t see the bottom of the pool. She could tell it was a flooded tunnel, leading to God knew what labyrinth of other shafts and stopes. The water looked pure enough to drink, but she didn’t dare risk the cyanide, arsenic, and other toxic minerals.

She’d brought plenty of batteries, a small gas stove, toilet paper, a lightweight cot to keep her off the rocks, a sleeping bag, some books, drawing materials – she loved to draw – and enough water for two weeks if she was careful. Her food would last twice that with her present appetite, which was basically nonexistent.

It was hard to think about eating with men like Ephraim Dollarhyde and his musclebound stooge, Childers, hunting you. She’d seen them around Levi’s dad before, along with Harold Grimsson. That guy was evil, but he was money evil. Linking up with drug cartels evil. Pushing heroin on the streets of Juneau evil. He hurt people who got in his way, or who could rat on him – but it was always a business deal. Dollarhyde and Childers had that look in their eye like they would hurt you for the fun of it, just to listen to you squeal.

Levi didn’t admit it, but his dad had been strung out on pills most of the time since Levi’s mom died – stressed from politics and the secrets that went with it. The senator hardly ever noticed when Donita hung out up in Levi’s room, waiting for him to come home from work or run to the store. Their house was nice, more comfortable than her little apartment, and Levi’s dad was rarely ever there. But then she’d overheard him talking to Dollarhyde and his creepy pal Childers. The conversation had been about heroin and the drug trial that was all over the news. That had roused her curiosity enough that she did some snooping in the senator’s office after he left the house. She’d listened in on a couple of calls between him and Grimsson, all about some road project he’d pushed through the process, and that Grimsson was the money behind the heroin in the Hernandez brothers’ boat. Levi’s dad must have wanted leverage, because she caught him spouting stuff on his voice recorder after the call with Grimsson that no self-respecting politician would ever want put on any kind of record.

Donita thought of going to the police, but with Senator Fawsey dirty up to his eyeballs, corrupt cops weren’t exactly out of the realm of possibility. That’s why she tried to talk to Lori Maycomb, that reporter she’d met at a couple of AA meetings with her mother. Maycomb had a pleasant radio-voice. Trustworthy.

Then Donita had heard Levi’s dad talking to Dollarhyde about a murdered archeologist out at the Valkyrie mine. She’d known from the start it was dangerous, but she didn’t think anyone would get killed. That kind of stuff only happened in the movies, not in sleepy little Juneau. She’d panicked when she couldn’t get through to Maycomb and decided to go straight to the US attorney. He’d be interested in Grimsson’s connection to the guys on trial.

But someone, probably