LITMIR.BIZ

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Samuel cried.

      Chuck continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Reach up my back, grab hold of my belt. Give it everything you’ve got.”

      “No!” Samuel gasped.

      “On the count of one.” Chuck didn’t pause. “One.”

      Chuck slid his right hand free of Samuel’s grasp, keeping his left hand wrapped around Samuel’s other wrist. Samuel swung free, locked to Chuck by only one hand. Calling upon what must have been his last reservoir of strength, Samuel clambered monkey-like up Chuck’s body from his belt to the hammer loop on the leg of his canvas work jeans to the lip of the hole and out.

      Freed of Samuel’s weight, Clarence and the team pulled hard on Chuck’s ankles, bringing Chuck up a few inches, their heaving breaths echoing in the chamber as they struggled with the awkward angle.

      “No…leverage,” Clarence panted.

      Chuck ran his hands across the face of the wall. It was wet and slick. He found a protruding nubbin of rock, but as soon as he leaned into it, his hand slipped.

      He twisted sideways and stretched out a hand toward the lip of the hole.

      “Have to switch,” he gasped.

      Hands reached into the pit, seizing Chuck’s wrist.

      Chuck twisted farther, reaching upward with his other hand till at last someone grasped it.

      He hung sideways in the hole, bent like a pretzel, before hands, now clutching his wrists as well as his ankles, hauled him up and out.

      Chuck collapsed on his back in the tunnel, his heart thumping. Clarence sat beside Chuck with his head between his knees. The students gathered on the far side of the floodlights, well away from the hole.

      Chuck sat up when he caught his breath. “Everybody okay?” he asked the students.

      Samuel bent to give Chuck an awkward hug. “You saved my life,” he said, choking back tears.

      “I did my job.” Chuck rose and looked around at the other students. “Everybody did.”

      “This is so not what I signed up for,” Jeremy declared. “I’m gonna call a lawyer soon as we get back to town.”

      Chuck stepped in front of him. “And claim what?”

      “Pain and suffering.”

      “Show me your cuts and bruises.”

      “My what?”

      “Show me your pain, your suffering.”

      Silence filled the tunnel.

      Chuck shifted his gaze to Samuel.

      “Don’t look at me,” Samuel said. “I’m alive. I’m fine.”

      Jeremy stared at his feet.

      Chuck clamped his hand on Samuel’s elbow. “What say we get out of here?”

      He followed the team members and Clarence down the tunnel, exhausted by Samuel’s rescue on the heels of his sleepless night, eager only to get back to the cabin and curl up in Janelle’s arms.

      He squinted past the students at the rectangle of light marking the mouth of the mine a hundred feet ahead. He would give the students the rest of the day off. Let them spend the afternoon texting and tweeting all they wanted.

      Why not, in fact, have the students spend the remainder of the week at Raven House? There really was no need for them to return to the mine site. Instead, they could spend the last days of the field school sorting and cataloging the many items they’d discovered beneath the collapsed cabin.

      If they headed for Trail Ridge Road as soon as they emerged from the tunnel, he’d be back at the cabin in less than two hours to make sure Rosie was still on the mend.

      He warmed at the thought of the long, contented summer evenings he’d spent at the cabin with Janelle and the girls these last seven weeks—right up until Rosie’s seizure and trip to the emergency room last night. To assure another field school directorship with Sartore next year—and another summer with Janelle and the girls—Chuck had simply to explain away the mine-floor collapse to the professor as the fluke it was, play down the discovery of the blood by the police, and make sure nothing else got in the way of bringing the field school to a problem-free close on Friday.

      He followed Clarence and the members of Team Nugget out of the tunnel to find Officer Jim Hemphill of the Estes Park Police Department standing in the glaring sunlight, holding out a five-by-seven-inch color photograph.

      “Anyone recognize this?” Hemphill asked.

      Chuck shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the picture. His brain registered three colors: brown, red, and gray. The brown was the background color of the photograph, consisting of dirt and dry grass. The red was a smear of liquid—blood, presumably—on the pictured object lying on the ground between tufts of grass. And the gray was the object itself, an open pocketknife with a four-inch tungsten handle.

      Chuck recognized the knife immediately.

      It belonged to Clarence.

SEVEN

      Hemphill waited, the photograph outstretched. Chuck held his breath and waited, too.

      Hemphill cleared his throat. “I told you we might need to check in with you again.”

      Chuck inclined his head. The members of Team Nugget edged away from the officer to stand with Kirina and Team Paydirt near the collapsed cabin. Clarence remained at Chuck’s side, the mountain rising behind them.

      Officer Hemphill, in his early thirties, stood a tad under six feet in his black leather sneakers. His large front teeth, pillowy cheeks, and flared nostrils gave him the inquisitive appearance of a squirrel.

      Hemphill’s pant legs were dusty from his hike to the mine. A pair of sunglasses hung from the front pocket of his creased shirt below his brass badge, and a department-issue windbreaker was draped over his arm. A baseball cap rode low on his forehead, the cap’s crown embroidered with the gold letters EPPD. Hemphill jiggled the photograph, causing sunlight to glint off its glossy coating. “I’m hoping you’ll recognize this. We asked the workers in Falcon House, but none of them claimed it.”

      “Where was it?” Chuck asked.

      “Outside the back door to Raven House.”

      Chuck’s chest constricted. Should he cover for Clarence? No. Lying to Hemphill would lead to no good. Besides, everybody—the residents of Falcon House included—knew who the knife belonged to.

      Over the summer, Clarence had spent many of his evenings whittling with his knife while he hung out on the front steps of Raven House, visiting with the field school students and the international workers from Falcon House next door. He made no secret of storing the knife in his backpack, which he left stacked with the rest of the students’ packs in the unlocked Raven House common room each evening, ready to be stowed in the van first thing in the morning for the drive to the mine site.

      Clarence spoke at Chuck’s side. “That’s my knife.”

      Hemphill showed no surprise. He lowered the picture. “Can you tell me why we found it on the ground behind your dormitory with blood all over it?”

      Clarence looked straight at Hemphill. “I don’t know how it ended up where you found it, and I have no idea how it got blood on it, either.”

      The officer tapped the photograph against the side of his leg. “But you say it’s yours.”

      “I’m saying it’s mine because it is mine, or one that’s identical to it, anyway.”

      “Where’d you last see it?”

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