Were- Read online

  “We’re all very grateful,” MacDougal said from behind him. “We’re still trying to find out what happened; nobody wants this to happen again. Mr. Norris has been trying to discover what’s behind this.” He started to say something else, Mitchell thought, but Gillings made a sudden movement and MacDougal fell silent.

  “We’d like to make a little presentation,” Gillings said, still smiling. “The Board has decided that we should show our appreciation for your courage in recent events.”

  Mitchell looked around. The Board was nodding and smiling. Norris was still holding out his hand.

  Mitchell waited a second before taking it. He could feel some calluses, but they weren’t from handling a shovel or pickaxe. Evidently men from the Bureau of Mines did not actually work in mines very often. The grip was not soft, though. It was the grip of a man who was sure of himself, and Mitchell thought he liked Norris, soft or not.

  “I wasn’t the only one digging,” Mitchell said directly to Gillings. “Aren’t you going to call the rest of them in?”

  Gillings laughed, taken aback. “Well. It was you who led them, Mac tells us. So we’re going to make our presentation, our thanks to you, and we’ll count on you to convey it to the rest of the…men. And of course you can share this with them, as you see fit.” He had turned back to his desk, picked up an envelope, and now offered it to him.

  “As I see fit,” Mitchell said flatly. The news would be all over Silverfield, of course. “You can’t give each of them an award, can you.” He had not taken the envelope.

  “Well.” Gillings laughed again. The Board members looked at each other. Mitchell had the feeling that this was a surprise to them, too. “That would be pretty expensive. And we’re really not sure just how many of you there were, of course. We wouldn’t want to overlook anyone.”

  “Of course.”

  “What we really want,” Norris said, “is to find out exactly what happened. That’s why I was here. I’ve been investigating the recent explosions at the Tolliver mines. I’d like to talk to you about that—”

  “So you were spying on us?” Mitchell asked, his voice carefully neutral. “What were you looking for?”

  “Spying? No, not at all. I was investigating. We’ve been trying to find out what’s behind this series of mine explosions.”

  “Really.” Mitchell smiled suddenly, showing teeth. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Norris. I’m glad to see you, too. Very glad. Because I think I’ve got some answers to your questions.”

  The Board members stirred and looked at each other. Gillings, still holding on to the envelope, went back around behind his desk and stood, holding the back of the desk chair. His smile was still frozen in place.

  “Really, Mr. Norris, it’s very unlikely Mr. Mitchell can give you any help on this. He’s a brave man, of course, that’s why he’s here, but he’s just a miner. And I’ve been trying to explain, sometimes accidents happen. It’s unfortunate, really terrible, but these things are unpredictable at best. Human—” he paused just an instant too long after the word— “error, gas pockets, any number of things can cause—”

  “Or bad dynamite,” Mitchell said quietly. “Maybe you should be looking at that, Mr. Norris.”

  Norris raised an eyebrow. “Really? Tell me more.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Gillings snapped. “There’s no bad dynamite in my mines!” The smile had finally, finally disappeared.

  Tom Mitchell looked around at the group of men, Stills every one of them, staring at him as if he’d Flicked and a badger stood before them, talking.

  “We lost three men in this last accident at Tolliver One,” he said. “Three of them didn’t make it.”

  “Three Flicks,” Gillings interposed. “A tragedy, of course,” he hastened to add as one by one the directors looked at him.

  “Three men,” Mitchell repeated. “I’m a miner, Mr. Norris. I don’t know the legal ins and outs. But it seems to me that if somebody tries to hide something, he must have a reason. And our Mr. Gillings here, he’s been hiding something.

  “He’s careful with his coin, is our Mr. Gillings,” he went on. “Just you look at the charges in the company store. Or what our families are paying to bury their dead. He’ll even save money on the coffins.” Or on “rewards” and “recognition”, he did not add.

  “That’s not what you’re here for,” Gillings said harshly, coming around his desk. “You ungrateful Flick, you show some respect...” His voice trailed off as Norris raised one hand.

  “Mr. Gillings, here, found a cache of old dynamite and decided to use that in the mines instead, even after the frost we’ve been having,” Mitchell went on, ignoring the owner. “Instead of blowing it up in place, he slapped new labels on it. Smitty saw the bugs.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Gillings yelled. Layers of composure were falling away, like earth sliding from a cave wall. “What kind of nonsense—”

  “Now, Gillings, let the man talk,” said the oldest of the directors, pointing a half-smoked cigar at the other man. “This is interesting. I want to hear more.”

  “So do I,” Norris said, stepping back to give him room, to let everyone see him. “Old dynamite? Why was the frost important?”

  “Dynamite’s tricky stuff, Mr. Norris. Especially old dynamite. It goes unstable pretty easy when the temperature changes. Starts sweating nitro. Tastes greasy, that stuff.

  “If it wasn’t old, it might not have mattered so much. Gillings here, he likes to save every penny. Makes him look good to these gentlemen, I’m sure. He thought he’d save money buying older explosives, and it might have worked for a while. But then the freeze hit.”

  “That’s ridiculous. It’s my job to watch costs, keep them under control. That’s what they pay me for, to run this place at a profit. You can’t prove it was old,” Gillings sputtered. He was directing his words as much to the directors as to Norris. “I’ve been buying all along. It’s in my monthly reports. If I got old stuff, I didn’t know. It was labelled, dated. You saw the dates on the boxes.”

  “New labels, pasted over old ones, in case anybody checked,” Mitchell riposted. “Look for yourself, if you want to take the risk. We knew the old labels were there. Like I said, Smitty Katangazu saw the bugs. He’s a pangolin. He knows bugs.”

  “What bugs?” Norris was trying to follow, laboring to keep up.

  “The little silver ones, the ones that go after the glue on the labels. Those bugs like the old glue, and he tasted them, but the labels were fresh. If the bugs were there, those fresh labels had to be pasted over old ones, ones that had old glue.”

  “You can’t prove it!” Gillings yelled. “You can’t take the word of, of an animal!” His face was almost as red as his hair, Mitchell thought. Mitchell bared his teeth in a badger’s grin.

  “That’s what we thought you’d say,” Mitchell replied. “Knowing how you feel about us. So a couple of nights ago, a bunch of us went to the records room. You’ve got Flicks guarding the warehouse, Mr. Gillings. Did you know that?

  “We found the books,” he said, his lip curled. “We found your monthly reports, and we matched all those expenses you carefully recorded for the company’s Board of Directors.” He gave the seated directors a nod. “But we found no entries for dynamite in the books, not for the last six months.” He dug into his pocket. “You haven’t been buying explosives recently.

  “But we did find an order to the printers, and their invoice.” He held up a piece of paper. “You made yourself a private deal. You ordered a new set of labels, with new dates, and pasted the new labels on your old boxes. It was all in your records, your papers. You never throw anything away. Too cheap.”

  “I didn’t do it!” Gillings shouted. “It was all—MacDougal handles all that! He did it!”

  Behind him, Mitchell could hear MacDougal take an indignant breath. Norris was looking at the invoice, and back at Gillings. One of the directors held out a hand for it.

  “
Yeah, Mac handles your orders and your invoices. We could tell, you see, because we could smell it. His scent was all over them. But not on this one.” The Flick had to swallow back a snarl, and the urge to swipe the look off the other man’s face. “He never touched that order. Or this invoice, either. The only scent on it from this end is yours, Gillings. You handled this deal all by yourself. You found a way to save some money, and to hell with the risk to the men. Even after the dynamite started exploding off schedule, causing cave-ins.”

  “It’s a lie,” Gillings said. He looked around at the directors. “You can’t believe him.”

  They had passed the invoice around. They looked at him stonily.

  “I think I’ll pass on your reward, Mr. Gillings,” Mitchell added. “Maybe the directors can find a better use for it.”

  “How did you find it all?” Norris asked, as his deputies led Gillings away in handcuffs. “I’ve been in there. There are thousands of invoices and records in that warehouse. It must have taken you—”

  “I’m a badger, Mr. Norris,” Tom Mitchell said, showing sharp teeth again. “We follow our noses. And we dig.”

  EYES LIKE PEARLS

  Susan Jett

  Mara looked around her room at the scatter of pebbles and bits of dried kelp littering the windowsill. She wanted to bring it all home, every broken seashell and grit of sand, because it had been a perfect summer, despite this afternoon’s fishing fiasco. Tomorrow morning, just before they left, she’d sweep everything into a suitcase. She didn’t want to risk leaving anything behind and her mom could just wash the sand out of everything when they got back home.

  Ugh. Home.

  Today her dad had laughed when she asked if they could just move here, and she’d smiled obligingly because he’d obviously thought she was kidding. But she hadn’t been. They’d spent almost a month in the sandy little beach town where her mom grew up, and Mara had expected to hate it. But then she’d met some of the other summer kids. She’d met Garrett, who lived in town, and decided this spot was the most beautiful place in the world. Her best friend Kyla was going to be so jealous.

  Mara glanced over at the clock by her bed. 8:30. She’d already missed moonrise. Garrett would tell her all about it though, if she asked him, and she couldn’t leave until after her parents came to check on her. They wouldn’t bother her after that. Mara heard her dad limping around the tiny family room, his prosthetic leg thumping loudly. He was probably trying to dance and doing it badly for effect, since her mother was laughing fondly. In her bedroom, Mara rolled her eyes. Her parents were such enormous losers.

  Her mom had flat-out refused to go deep-sea fishing this morning, but her dad had bribed Mara with a trip to the mall when they got home. It had been kind of fun sneaking away, like they were getting away with something. But being seasick hadn’t been fun, and being attacked by a giant fish hadn’t been fun either. The barracuda’s blood had been pink and watery where it pooled on the deck, and hers was red and disgustingly viscous where it dripped onto the fish’s silvery scales. Stupid fish. Its teeth had grazed her knuckles when her dad dragged it over the side while she was puking. When she’d yelped and lurched away, her father hadn’t even asked if she was ok, just started whacking it with his cane until the captain of the little charter boat had intervened, scooping the long body up and dumping it into a freezer on the deck. “Keep on like that, sir, and it aint gonna be good for anything but chum.”

  The memory made Mara want to vomit again. And seven hours later, Dad was still acting like clubbing a fish to death had been the high point of his summer, maybe his life. He’d even served the dead fish for dinner tonight, like they didn’t sell perfectly good fillets at the Piggly Wiggly.

  “It doesn’t work that way, you know.” Mara’s mother had bitten off the words between her tiny, perfect teeth as she stared at her daughter’s bandaged hand. “It’s not like you can scare it out of her.”

  “It was an accident. You know I didn’t mean for her to get hurt.”

  “I know you were so busy trying to punish me—again—that you didn’t much care what happened to anyone else. Even our daughter.” Her mother had stared at him, her black eyes unblinking, then she’d pushed away from the table, her dinner untouched. Mara watched her go and then she and her dad traded embarrassed looks. Still hungry—though not really for clubbed-to-death fish—Mara went to her room soon after, annoyed with them both. Everyone thought their parents were the most embarrassing humans alive, but surely hers really were.

  The bandage itched and Mara rubbed it irritably. At least Mom had been outraged on her behalf this afternoon. Usually it was Mara who made her angry. They’d been clashing more and more this last year, with her mom demanding to know her whereabouts every minute of the day. At least just now it was Dad being scolded like a kid, even if the only real danger Mara had been in was from puking her guts out. If she hadn’t been so sick, she certainly could have gotten out of the fish’s way, no matter how toothy it was—and it really had possessed far too many teeth for a normal fish, she thought. Trust dad to find a mutant fish to kill. Not that she’d seen many live fish to compare it to. The mountain town they lived in was about as far away from the ocean as you could get on the East Coast.

  Mom was right, though, that Dad hadn’t seemed to care when she’d gotten hurt. He’d been too busy pretending to be Ahab. Mara felt a moment of resentment directed at him, too, now. Because no matter how many stupid sharky-looking fish he killed, he was still just a frumpy English teacher who’d lost his leg in a car accident long before Mara was born. She’d seen pictures, and he’d been good-looking once upon a time. But now, between all his scars and his leg, Mara sometimes wondered what her mom saw in him anymore. Mom was drop-dead gorgeous, even now that she was old. Strangers turned to watch when she walked by. And when she could be persuaded to perform, everyone listened as raptly as if they heard angels singing.

  Mom knocked at her door now and Dad asked her to play Monopoly with them. Fat chance. Though having them gang up on her was more comfortable than listening to them fight. But this was her last weekend here, and everyone had been collecting driftwood for days. Not only that, but Garrett was going to bring his guitar to the bonfire. Mara had never heard him sing, but he could practically be a rock star with that hair, and the way his voice sounded when it went low—it made her insides flip around like a school of little fish trapped in a net.

  Which was actually kind of a disgusting comparison.

  But there was no way she was going to miss this. And she could be back again before morning with no one the wiser. Tonight would be hers, and if she was lucky, Garrett would be hers, too. All summer long they’d been circling each other—inching together, then drawing apart. He was older than her, yeah, and maybe back in June he’d thought of her as a little sister, but surely by now he knew better. She’d made him laugh last week, a real out-loud laugh, not a big brother kind of laugh. And while her parents might decide to come back here next summer, they might not. And anything could happen between now and then. Maybe Garrett would find a girlfriend. Maybe he’d move away or something. This might be her last chance, and Mara was willing to risk being grounded for a year in order to make it happen.

  She caught one last look at her reflection in the mirror as she threw one leg over the windowsill and grimaced to check for spinach stuck to her teeth. Her eyes gleamed like pearls and her lips looked dark in the moonlight. She looked older. She looked like her mom. Then she giggled and the illusion was shattered and she was just fifteen again.

  The noise her rubber-soled sneakers made, gritting on the sandy porch, made her cringe, but it certainly wasn’t loud enough to be heard over her dad’s ridiculous laugh. Practically skipping down the worn steps, Mara hurried to the beach, wending her way through the tight-packed little cottages as easily as a clownfish navigated a coral reef.

  The full moon was already up, barely kissing its twin out on the ocean. Faint music came from over by the big pile of rocks, and
she headed that way, following the glow of rising sparks from the fire. She hoped Garrett liked her outfit. She hoped he asked her to go for a walk. She hoped she didn’t embarrass herself somehow, and she especially hoped that he wouldn’t guess she’d never kissed anyone before.

  As she got closer, she heard a boy singing, his voice stretching thin on the high notes. She knew it was him. His guitar playing was more assured than his singing, but she thought he sounded as good as anything she’d ever heard on the radio. Better maybe, because he looked up just as she stepped into the circle of firelight and his whole face lit up when he met her eyes. She felt an answering jolt in her own body, like they were connected by a thin line of electricity. Her hand under the bandage tingled. Maybe it’s the full moon, she thought. Or maybe this is what destiny feels like.

  Picking her way through the crowd, she murmured greetings and accepted a beer some older girl handed her. She sipped absently before remembering how much she didn’t like beer. Garrett smiled again and nodded at the empty spot next to him though he didn’t stop playing. He was finger-picking a song she’d heard her dad play in the car. Her dad’s taste in music suddenly seemed a lot cooler than it had five minutes ago. “I know that one,” she whispered as she sat down and pulled her knees up close.

  His smile warmed her more than the fire. “No one else here seems to know anything cool.”

  She hummed quietly, almost under her breath, but when Garrett smiled, she sang louder, and was rewarded by the look of gratified surprise spreading across his face. One by one, all the whispering kids turned to listen, drifting into silence, their mouths falling open. She’d never felt so powerful, so mature. This must be how her mom felt when she performed. No wonder she loved it. Buoyed by everyone’s obvious admiration, Mara made sure everyone could hear her, drawing them to her as surely as if she held ropes tied around their necks. By the end of her song, Garrett was barely playing, just strumming random notes, as entranced as everyone else. There was an instant of astonished silence when the song ended, then they broke into applause.