Wisdom Spring (27 page)

Still creeping along, the road began to level off and we were approaching the official start of the town. We could now see the buildings up close. Being brick, they hadn’t suffered as much as the houses. The first building on the left was missing its sign, but could have been the mine office. Attached to that was a much smaller building that housed the jail. This had been a mining town, after all, and a jail was probably needed, especially on payday. The reason for the jail lay next door. A sign over the door read “Spring Bar,” and the door and large picture window were very much intact. I could see through the window a standard bar to the right and a few tables to the left. There were some bottles behind the bar. Did they still have alcohol? Did the security guards use this in their down time?

On the right hand side of the street was a general store with half its sign still attached, followed by a drugstore, a clothing store, and a restaurant. Across from the restaurant and set a little bit away from the bar was a hotel. The Jeeps were parked in front, obviously their base of operation. Beyond the hotel and set further back was the nondescript building that Carl Jenkins had assumed was a school. He was probably right.

No one had stopped us yet, so we continued on. Where were they? If there had been only one guard, like Carl had encountered, I could understand. He might be in the kitchen eating. But there were three Jeeps, which to me meant the possibility of as many as six men, two to a Jeep. You’d think someone would be watching. But then again, how many visitors did they actually get here? One a week? One a month? It would be so easy for them to become lazy and careless.

The main street rounded a bend and continued down through a copse of trees. From up above I hadn’t been able to see where the road went because of the trees. As it emerged from the copse, it dropped another hundred feet to a plateau. From there I could see the road wind around the corner of the mountain.

We realized that we were both holding our breath, and had been from the moment we entered the town. Out of sight of the buildings, we exhaled.

“We made it through stage one anyway,” I said.

“Can you imagine growing up here? It’s depressing,” remarked Jess. “It’s one thing to choose a life in the mines, but at least in places like West Virginia they are near real towns. They are not so cut off from civilization. This seems like the end of the earth.”

“I can better understand the early days of the town when it was all about getting the mine up and running,” I said, “but I don’t understand the more recent incarnation, the one Carl saw with all of the children. I can see his assumption that it was some cult that had taken over the town.”

“And maybe he was right.”

After five minutes of driving, we arrived at the mine entrance and were immediately disappointed. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but I had assumed that the mine played a part in the story. It was time to change my thinking. Littering the perimeter were a half a dozen rusted hulks. Knowing nothing about mining, I had no idea what some of them were for, although there were a couple of long-deceased trucks in the mess. I could still read the words “Wisdom Spring Mining Company” on the side of one. A couple more years and that would be unreadable.

The entrance to the mine was a mess. There was an iron gate that hadn’t been opened in years, with a rusted padlock securing it in place. But even if the gate were gone, we wouldn’t have been able to see anything. The whole front of the mine was caved in, making it impassable.

We looked at each other, the dismay showing in our faces. Had we come all this way for nothing?

Chapter 31

We hadn’t.

The security guards convinced us of that.

Not knowing what was going on with Scott and Joe, we decided to make our way back to the town. If we were lucky enough to make it through unseen, we could pick up the two others—three including Max—and head back to the motel to regroup. But being lucky twice in a row was a little much to expect.

As we came out of the trees heading back into the downtown, a guy was standing outside the hotel smoking. He looked up, saw us, and his jaw dropped. His cigarette fell to the ground. He stepped out into the street and motioned for us to stop, saying something over his shoulder to his partners in the hotel. I could see a holster on his belt. I slowed down and rolled down my window.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he demanded.

“Hey,” I replied with a wide smile. “Name’s Larry. This is my wife Marie.” I held out my right hand to shake, having transferred the Sig to my left.

He ignored my hand. Meanwhile, five others had piled out of the building, all with the same confused expression, probably thinking, how could we have possibly made it past them?

“You know this is private property, right?” asked the first man.

“Golly, no,” I answered in my best hick voice. “The wife and I are checkin’ out Alaska ghost towns. I knew there was one around here someplace. Had no idea it was private property. We’ll get out of your way.”

“Frank, hold on,” one of the other guards said to the man on my side. “I think it’s her.”

Two of the guards had wandered over to my side, which made me happy. I didn’t want them all on Jess’s side of the car.

“You think?” said one of the others.

“Positive.”

“Do you mind getting out of the car?” asked Frank.

“Kind of,” I answered, making a face. “Look, I don’t know who you think she is, but she’s my wife, Marie.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the other man shake his head no, to indicate that I was lying. Two of the men were carrying rifles, and two had their hands on their gun butts, ready to pull them out of the holsters.

Frank reached down for his and I said, not in a hick voice, “I wouldn’t suggest you do that.” I brought my gun up and pointed it at him. He froze. The one next to him, however, didn’t. He raised his rifle and I shot him in the chest.

Chaos ensued. I heard Jess snap off three quick shots, heard the boom of Scott’s shotgun, and looked back at Frank, but he had disappeared. The third man on my side, however, was raising his pistol toward me when I heard a different boom. It was Joe. He had climbed down much closer to the town, and was right in front of the general store. The man on my side flew five feet before landing crumpled in the road. Two more shots from Jess and another shotgun blast and it was over.

Not quite. I heard a Jeep start up. Somehow Frank had made it over to the vehicles in the confusion of the gunfire. The Jeep peeled out in reverse, then I heard him jam it into gear and he took off down the road in a cloud of dust. We all took shots at him and missed.

“Should we go after him?” I asked.

“Waste of time and too risky,” said Joe. “He’ll make it to the highway before we can catch him, then what? A high-speed chase? I don’t think so. Once he gets closer to Delta Junction or Fairbanks and has cell phone coverage he’ll put in a call for reinforcements, but I can’t imagine that they are anywhere close. I’d guess that we have a few hours, so we’d better make the most of it.”

I looked over at Jess. “You okay?”

“Surprisingly, I’m fine. Second time I’ve killed someone, and I’m fine.”

She actually looked fine.

Scott stepped out into the street from the corner of the building. He had accounted for two of the hits, obvious from the state of the bodies. I think I was the only one shaking.

We dragged the bodies from the street and hid them behind one of the buildings. Eventually they’d become bear or wolf food.

“So, what’s our plan?” asked Scott.

“Why don’t we work in teams,” I answered. “Jess and I will start with the school—if that’s what it is—while you and Joe check out the hotel. Then we’ll just keep on going through the buildings until we find something. I don’t know what we’re looking for. Go through everything you can. Basically we need to discover what this town was used for and some answer as to what is going on. What’s the story behind Hillstrom and who’s behind the story.”

Jess and I walked over to the large building and found it secured with a padlock on a chain. The windows had been boarded up. After some searching, I came up with a metal bar and used it to break the chain. The door opened with a screech. The hinges hadn’t been oiled in a few decades. Second nature caused me to flick the light switch. Much to our surprise, the lights went on—a few of them anyway.

I looked at Jess and cocked my head. “How much sense does that make?” I asked. “It means they have some major generator someplace powering this town.”

“But why this building?” asked Jess. “It’s obvious that it hasn’t been used, or even entered for that matter, in many years. Why not disconnect it?”

It definitely was a school. Desks were still in place and blackboards were still attached to the wall. Anything that could provide information was missing, however. No papers, no books, nothing written on the blackboard.

The school had four classrooms, a small gym, a small cafeteria and restrooms for each sex. We spent forty-five minutes searching every nook and cranny. Our only success was the discovery in the boys’ room of “Ben F” written on the wall of a stall.

“Ben Fremont?” I asked.

“That would be my guess,” said Jess.

“Then we can be pretty sure he was here.”

Other than that, the school held no clues. We were about to head out the front door when Jess stopped. She put her hand to her head, as if she had a headache.

“We’re not done here,” she said.

“Do you know what we’re looking for?”

“Nope. Just that there is something here to find.”

I squatted, leaning against the wall and just stared down the hallway.

Five minutes of staring and it came to me.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “It’s right in front of our faces. Do you remember what the population of Wisdom Spring was in 1980, around the time Ben was here?”

“Something like 110,” said Jess.

“Let’s count the desks in the classrooms.”

We came up with sixty desks.

“Doesn’t it strike you odd that a town with 110 people would have a school this size?” I asked. “We have to assume that if they had fifteen desks in each room, chances are most of them were being used. Sixty children in a town with just over a hundred residents? Either those women were really fertile or the children in this school didn’t belong to the adults in the town. I think this whole town was a school of some sort. But for what?”

As we started back out the door, I asked, “Was that what we were supposed to find?”

Jess stopped and closed her eyes, then nodded. “I think so.”

We could hear Scott and Joe in the hotel, so we hit up the other side of the street, starting with the diner, which took about ten minutes. Other than few discarded kitchen machines and the tables, chairs and counter, indicating that it had, indeed, been a diner, there was nothing of interest. The same was true of the clothing store, with one exception.

The store had been cleaned out of all of its stock and nothing was left on the shelves. However, Jess discovered the one clue that remained.

“Do you notice something odd in here?” she asked.

“Not really,” I answered.

“No, of course not,” she said. “You’re a guy. I wouldn’t expect that you would.”

“I will ignore the insult. What am I not seeing?”

“The shelves still have the shelf markers indicating clothing size. Other than a small section of men’s clothes and an even smaller section of women’s, ninety percent of this store was devoted to kids’ clothes. I’d say about five years old to early teens. That fits with what we came up with in the school.”

The same theme presented itself in the general store, an inordinately large amount of space devoted to candy and toys. From what we could determine from the remaining shelf markers, the toys were simple ones—balls, dolls, jigsaw puzzles, and games. The store had a back room with a faded sign that read “Mining Supplies.” Like the rest of the store, it was empty.

We walked outside and sat down on the edge of the raised sidewalk. We could hear the two others now in the building we assumed was the mine office across the street.

“Something I don’t get,” said Jess. “Let’s work on the assumption that the whole town was some sort of school, based on the ratio of kids to adults. So there is no way the adults could have been the real parents to all these kids. That would tell me that the adults were here to do a job, that of raising the kids. If that were the case, why would they need stores? Wouldn’t everything be supplied to them?”

“One would think. Maybe for appearances? After all, this was a town. If people like Carl Jenkins could just show up, why couldn’t other people? It would make visitors suspicious if they couldn’t buy something in the store.”

Scott and Joe emerged from the mine office and walked across the street to where we were sitting. They sank down next to us.

“Well we found a few interesting things, but not the smoking gun you were hoping for,” said Scott.

“So did we,” I said. Jess and I proceeded to tell them our theory.

“That theory might answer one question we had,” said Joe. “Follow us.”

They led us over to the jail. While it looked small from the outside, it extended further back than it appeared. The front entrance gave way to a small outer office, which was connected to the jail area by a door. The jail consisted of twelve cells, although I hesitated calling them that. These were not cells separated by bars, but were individual rooms not much bigger than a closet. I opened the first one and was appalled by the lack of space. “Closet” might have been generous. The cell was three feet wide and five feet deep, with a ceiling only five feet high.

“A man would be seriously cramped in there,” I said. “And why so many?”

Jess’s eyes became wide and her mouth dropped open. She grabbed my arm. “Oh my God! They weren’t meant for men. They put kids in here!”

Chapter 32

After I had gotten over my shock, I asked Scott, “What else did you find?”

“Nothing related to kids,” he replied, “but a couple of interesting things and one pretty significant thing, we think. I’ll save that for last. The building next door, the one you think was the mine office, was completely cleaned out. The bar really was a bar. The bottles you saw through the window were empty, but we did find a few—more recent—bottles of the hard stuff, as well as a lot of bottled beer. I get the feeling that these guys were pretty bored here and had brought in their own liquor. Probably kept it there and not in the hotel because they just liked the idea of sitting in a bar. They had cleaned it up pretty well. The hotel was where we found the significant item, but the hotel was also kind of interesting mainly for what wasn’t there.”