Dig Too Deep (20 page)

Forty

Back at Granny's, I attempt to do homework but end up staring at my calculus book, trying to envision what's happening at the mine right now, and getting a good start on an ulcer.

“Anything I can help with?” MFM asks.

“No.”

“Calculus, huh?”

I look up at her, frowning. “What do you want?”

“I just …” She looks around, waves her hands, shrugs. “I don't know what to do with myself.”

“Not my problem.” I go back to calculus.

“I'm not used to just sitting around the house.”

That's because you were never home
, I think.

She looks down the hall, to the room where Granny's sleeping fitfully. The morphine's not quite enough to dull the pain for very long, and we can hear her soft groans. “I wish I could do something.”

“You could go blow something up.” I meant it as a dig, but now that I've said it, I kinda like the idea. I'd much rather see
her
in prison than Dobber or his dad. “That's the kind of stuff you do, right? Only this time, you can help people you care about for a change, instead of complete strangers.”

She gives me an exasperated look. “That's not funny.”

“I wasn't joking,” I mutter as she wanders off to take a bath. Minutes later, opera music from her iPod floats out of the bathroom, accompanied by her horrible singing. Apparently tone-deafness is genetic.

I plug my ears against the sound, debating what to do. My moral pendulum is swinging between (a) praying the Dobbers get safely out of the mine with the explosives, and (b) calling the cops and getting them arrested before they can go through with their plan. I'm wondering if I'll be considered an accomplice when I hear a rattle at the front door.

I look up just in time to see it swing open, and before I can scream, Dobber and his dad rush through.

I'm relieved and pissed all in the same heartbeat. Then I see Dobber's face. His eye is purple and swollen nearly shut. His right hand is bleeding, and he's holding his left on the back of his head. They're both red-faced, and Mr. Dobber's breathing like there's not enough oxygen in the world.

“What happened?”

“They caught us. Leaving the mine.” Dobber eases himself gently onto the couch. Mr. Dobber stands by the door. “Two guards.”

I tilt Dobber's face toward the light. “They did this?” His black eye makes the one I gave Cole look like a tiny bruise.

“I let 'em catch me so Daddy could get the explosives to the car.”

My heart sinks. “You got the explosives?”

Dobber's smile is grotesque, stretched out of place by the swelling in his cheek and his split lip. “Damn straight.”

“Where are they?” I ask casually. I'll take them and hide them or cut them up into pieces or—

“Someplace safe.”

Damn. Dobber's smarter than I give him credit for. “Please don't do this.”

“Lib, I know you want to do this all legal. But Peabody lives outside the law. He buys cops, bribes the county, kills dogs. You seen it. He don't follow nobody's rules.”

“That doesn't mean we have to stoop to his level,” I argue. The opera music floats on the air like a sound track. “We have to be better than him. Otherwise, we're the same.”

He just shakes his head. “You gotta fight fire with fire.”

I'm saved the effort of replying by a loud knock on the door. Mr. Dobber jumps a foot before turning to check the peephole. “Looks like trouble,” he says.

He opens the door a crack. Cole pushes his way in and slams it shut.

“What are
you
doing here?” Dobber asks.

Cole's hair is drenched with sweat like he ran all the way from town. His black eye is nearly gone, but the dark circles under his eyes are just as bad. It looks like he hasn't slept in days. “They're coming.”

“Who's coming?” I ask.

“Peabody's guys,” he says. “They know you broke into the mine.”

“They're coming
here
?” I think about Granny. And stupid MFM, completely oblivious in her opera-laced bath.

“Not here,” Cole says. “They're headed to the Dobber's.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“Are they watching this place?” Dobber interrupts.

“Not sure,” Cole says. “But they'll check here eventually, and your car out front's a dead giveaway. Y'all gotta get out of here.”

“Leave Liberty and her granny here alone?” Dobber scowls, wincing when his lip opens up again.

I never got a chance to tell Dobber about MFM's arrival. They don't even know she's here.

“They're not after Liberty. They're after you. Dobber …” Cole stares him in the eye. “They have guns.”

My mouth drops open. This can't be happening. No. No way.

The ominous chanting of “O Fortuna” floats down the hall.

Mr. Dobber steps forward and presses something into Cole's hand. “Hide it. Wreck it. Whatever. Just get it off this property. I don't want nothing happenin' to Kat 'cause of us.”

Cole looks at his palm, where the keys to Dobber's car lay. He closes his fingers around them and nods. Somehow, the sacrifice of Dobber's car makes it all real. People are coming to kill Dobber and his dad. To shoot them, in cold blood. All because of some black rocks that burn nice.

“You better go,” Dobber says. “If they find you here, your daddy won't have that job no more.”

“I don't care.” Cole heads for the door. “I'm sick of this shit.”

“Hey, man,” Dobber says. Cole stops, his hand on the doorknob. “Thanks.”

Cole looks like he's about to tear up, but instead he just says, “Don't let them get you, Dob.” Then he heads out into the night.

Dobber looks at his dad. “We better go too.”

“Go?” I say. “You can't go. They'll find you.”

“More likely to find us if we stay,” says Dobber.

“And y'all ain't safe if we're here,” Mr. Dobber adds. He takes some papers out of his coat pocket and hands them to me. “These are for you.”

“You can't leave!” I understand how them being here puts us in danger, but the idea of not having Dobber around … I don't know. I can't bear it. It's like the last straw. The one thing I refuse to give up.

“Lib, don't be stupid,” Dobber says. “Even if my car ain't here, they're gonna be watching the house.”

“I know that, but … but …” I'm racking my brain for some way to keep Dobber near. To keep him safe. That's when it hits me. “The springhouse!”

“What about it?”

“You can stay there,” I say. “Nobody knows it's there except us.”

Mr. Dobber's rubbing his chin. “Might be good to hole up somewheres. We try to run, we'll be out in the open.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Hole up. Disappear. Let Peabody think you left town.” My brain unhelpfully points out that they can't live in a rock hut forever, but I can't think about that right now. Right now, I just want to have Dobber here. To know he's safe.

I grab some old quilts from the hall closet. After turning off the lights, we head out the back door. Mr. Dobber creeps around the house to make sure no one's lurking before we leave.

I feel like I've fallen into an old Wild West show. Blowing people up. Shooting them. “They wouldn't have actually killed you, right?”

“Why not?” Dobber's crouched next to me beside the back porch. “Daddy's a meth addict and I ain't nothing special. Who's gonna care?”

I feel a little sick when I realize he's right. Nobody in Ebbottsville would be too sad to see them gone. Not Mr. Dobber, anyway.

“Besides, Peabody's killing people all the time,” Dobber says. “That mine's like a weapon of mass destruction.”

That hits me, hard. It's a perfect analogy. I stare into the dark, listening and thinking how much like a terrorist attack that poisonous water is.

“Only one way to stop a weapon like that,” Dobber says.

“What's that?”

“Kill the terrorist.”

Forty-One

Midnight. I lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I hate Peabody. Hate him for what he's done to Granny, to the people, and to the land. I can see how him being dead would be a good thing for this valley. But I can't wish that on anybody, not even him.

But Dobber and his dad are sleeping in our springhouse right now because Peabody's trying to kill them. That's just as wrong. Maybe wronger. If I were some kind of God, dealing out death and judgment, I'd say the Dobbers deserve to live a lot more than Robert Peabody.

Granny groans in the other room. The door on MFR (my former room) is closed, so I doubt MFM can hear her. I creep down the hall and peek in. Granny's trying to get the lid off a bottle of water.

I cross the room quietly. “Let me help you.”

“Thank you, sugarplum.”

I twist off the top and hand it back to her.

She takes a drink and rests the bottle next to her. “You're up awful late. Something wrong?”

Her eyelids are already falling. As much as I'd like to tell her everything, she'd be asleep before I was halfway through. “Nothing,” I say.

“She loves you,” she says. “Y'all's just too much alike.”

She drifts off as I realize she's talking about MFM.

“You're wrong,” I say. “On both counts.”

I pull the covers up over her arms and watch her face. Because of the cancer, she's aged so fast, but I can see traces of MFM's face in hers still. And I can see what MFM will look like when she's old. Me too, actually. Like Granny says, we're soup from the same pot.

As much as I hate to admit it, there's some truth to that. All three of us are stubborn and outspoken. We're fighters to the death, whether it's a political argument or a Clue game. And if I'm honest with myself, my quest for fairness and justice is just as strong as my mom's. My former mom's, I mean.

The difference is I'd never forget I had a kid to take care of. I'd never ignore my responsibilities just to take up some banner for strangers in China. And I'd never get involved with a political bombing and end up in prison.

Oh no. Never.

And there it is. The sickening, disgusting proof to what Granny keeps saying. We
are
alike, my mother and I. Sure, I'm fighting for Granny and people I know instead of Chinese workers I've never met or seen. And I realize MFM never intended to hurt anyone, just to get those government officials to hear what she was saying. But for whatever reason, we both ended up behind a bomb.

I stare out the window at the blackness beyond. My mother's face stares back in my reflection. I'm so much like her, people think we're sisters.
Too much alike
, Granny said.
She sounds a lot like you
,
Dobber said. I know they're right. I can see it, literally, in the mirror. But I don't want to be her. I don't want to make her mistakes. Watching myself in the window, I whisper one quiet question to the night.

“How am I different?”

The reflection offers no answers and Granny's asleep, so I wander back to the living room and sink onto the lounge chair. Something crinkles when I hit the seat. Reaching under me, I pull out the stack of papers Mr. Dobber handed me. In the rush to get to the springhouse, I'd forgotten about them.

Curious, I turn on the lamp and stare at the first page. I know what it is immediately. I've seen it before, or at least one like it. It's a water quality report. This particular one is for a property on Highway 52, near the Dobbers' house, but there must be forty reports in the stack.

I get on the floor and spread them all out, looking for Granny's address. Once I find it, I grab my copy from my backpack and lay them next to each other. They're mostly identical: same sample location, same date and time, same collector. But they differ in one major way:

The levels of chemicals in the water are totally different.

Digging through my backpack again, I find the notes I made about safe limits for drinking water. Looking over the new report, I see the levels in every single category—coliform bacteria, pH, iron, sulfate sulfur, chloride, etc.—are outside the acceptable range.

My hand starts to shake. The paper flutters to the floor and I pick up another. And another. Every report I look at shows unsafe drinking water.

Finally, I have the answers I was looking for.

Granny's well water is poison. The testing report that was paid for by the mine said it was safe. Because of that, she drank it. Now she's dying.

Somebody, somewhere falsified that report. And the proof is sitting right here in front of me. Like a bomb just waiting to go off.

Forty-Two

I call Iris at the ungodly hour of 4:00 a.m. As I wait for her to pick up, I look over my plan. Four hours of plotting, and I'm pretty sure I've found a way to take down Peabody without killing anyone or turning into my mother.

“Liberty?”

I can tell from Iris's voice she's already up. Not surprising. Iris sleeps about five hours a night.

“I need your help.” I put the last month into a nutshell. Thankfully, Iris is a journalist, with an ear for the story.

“A mine owner falsifying docs? The AP would be all over that. Mountaintop removal is a powder keg on the Hill.”

“I'm going to overnight a copy of the reports to you,” I say. “You'll have them tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Iris says. “But what exactly do you want me to do with them?”

“Keep them safe,” I say. “I have a few more details to work out, but I'll be in touch.”

“Roger that,” she says. “Are you okay?”

“You know, I actually think I might be.”

“Wake up, sleepyheads,” I call from outside the springhouse. There's some shuffling and groaning inside; then Dobber unfolds his six-and-a-half feet through the tiny wooden door. “Good night?”

His hair is sticking straight up, and he has a zipper mark down one cheek. “I'm alive,” he says. “Cold but alive.”

“Thank God.” Things seem less frightening in the light of day, but I remember they still have a target on their backs. “We have a new plan.”

“
New
plan?” Dobber frowns and starts shaking his head.

“We're not bombing anything,” I say.

“But—”

“No.” My chin juts out in my “don't eff with me” pose. “No bombs.”

Mr. Dobber shuffles to the door and leans against the frame. “You look at them papers?”

“I did. You realize what they are?”

He nods. “I was in charge of coordinating them water tests for the mine,” he says. “When the results came, Peabody told me to pull out any of 'em that didn't meet the limits and put 'em on his desk. So I did.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing. I thought he was gonna make it right for them people whose wells was bad.” He steps out into the sunlight and rubs his arms.

“But he didn't?”

“Naw.” He clears his throat and spits in the dirt. “I knew some of them folks and when their reports come from the county, it said their wells was fine. Even though I seen the report that said clear as day the water weren't no good.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to the county. Told 'em the testing company said some people's water wasn't safe to drink.” For a moment, the only sounds are squirrels rustling through the leaves. Dobber and I wait silently for him to continue. I can tell he's never heard this story either. “Next thing I know, I got three broken ribs, two less teeth, and no job.”

“You've kept those reports all this time?” I ask.

“Naw. I wrote the test company and asked for new copies last week. It occurred to me Mr. Peabody might not'a let them know about my unfortunate job loss.” His smile is peppered with black and missing teeth—scars from his meth addiction that'll last a lifetime. Which reminds me …

“Hey.” I stare at Mr. Dobber's ankle. “No bracelet?”

“My sentence was up two days ago.”

“Good timing, huh?” Dobber slaps him on the back. His dad winces and puts a hand to his chest, and I'm reminded again that he still has cancer. And now, no meth to combat the pain. “Lib, you gonna tell us this plan or not?”

“Listen fast,” I say, glancing at my watch. “I need to get to school and fill Ashleigh in on the new plan. We really need her.” Those words stick a little in my throat.

I go through everything like I did with Iris this morning, and answer the same questions all over again.

At the end, Dobber's smiling. “I had my heart set on blowing something up, but I reckon this'll work too.”

There's a crashing in the bushes near the driveway, and we all freeze. My blood seems to stop in my veins as I watch the shrubs swaying as someone pushes through them. Mr. Dobber stoops down and quietly wraps his hand around a dead branch. Dobber's made fists already. I'm looking around for a weapon when a woman's voice calls, “Liberty? Are you in there?”

MFM.

Dobber heaves an enormous sigh, and his dad drops the branch. I walk around the corner of the springhouse, ready to bitch her out for everything from yelling my name to following me around to her choice in music last night. But she interrupts me, and what she says drives every single one of those thoughts out of my head.

“Liberty.” She's out of breath and her eyes are full of tears. “We need to call the hospice nurse. It's time.”