“We do.”
“And you, young lady,” he said, waving that finger at Ava. “Go in that fridge and get me the rest of that six-pack.”
She glanced at me, and I said, “You think that’s a smart idea for someone in your condition?”
“What’s it gonna do, kill me?” Jones asked and then laughed. “Nah. A cigarette might kill me, but not a beer.”
It took some doing, but soon we had Detective First Grade Atticus Jones, retired, up front and the oxygen tank in the backseat with Ava. Jones cracked a beer before I even got in the driver’s seat and started calling out directions.
When we were finally heading south on the interstate, I said, “Can you give us the part of the story where we don’t need to know the lay of the land?”
There was no answer for a moment, and then I heard a wheezing noise. Ava laughed softly. I glanced over. The old detective’s eyes were shut, his mouth was hanging open, and he was gently snoring.
I guess two beers will do that to you when you’re pushing eighty and close to death.
CHAPTER
30
ATTICUS JONES SLEPT UNTIL we were a mile shy of Buckhannon, where he seemed to hear some internal alarm clock because he came awake with a loud snort, looked around, and said, “Take Route Twenty south.”
We rolled into the town, and as I turned onto the two-lane highway, I was surprised. I suppose I expected Buckhannon to be some idyllic backwater on a Saturday afternoon, and it was quaint, with older brick buildings and blooming trees everywhere, but the place was also bustling with dump trucks and pickups of every shape and size and crawling with ore rigs loaded with coal.
“There are mines here?” Ava asked.
“You are in Coal Central, young lady,” the old detective replied. “Buckhannon’s the county seat of Upshur County. You throw a stick in Upshur County, and there’s a mine. You shake a dog, and a mining consultant will jump off before the fleas. That Sago Mine where they had the explosion back in 2006? Killed those twelve men? That’s just up the road there. Lot of money coming out of Buckhannon. Lot of black lung too. Killed my father. Killing me.”
“You were a miner here?” I asked, surprised.
“Four years to get the money to go to West Virginia Wesleyan over there on the other side of town,” Jones said. “Hated every minute of the mines but had to do it. Now, south of French Creek Road, you’ll be looking for the signs to the Pig Lick Mine, up that Pig Lick Road. About nine miles out of town.”
We drove past a mine-safety school and then traveled along the Buckhannon River, which looked beautiful in the spring sunshine. We reached Pig Lick Road fifteen minutes later.
There were warning signs about mining trucks and steep grades, and the dirt road had potholes and long stretches of washboard that had us bouncing all over the place even going slow. The enormous, bright yellow Crossfield Mining Company ore trucks laden with tons of coal, however, didn’t seem affected in the least by the road conditions, and they scared the hell out of us as they barreled downhill going sixty-plus. But I managed to keep the sedan well out of their way through a series of switchbacks the Pig Lick Road made as it climbed the ridge.
Just below the top, however, an ore truck came up behind us, real close, and started honking for us to get out of the way.
“Don’t worry,” Jones told me. “You get to the crest there around the next bend and you’ll find a place to pull off where you can see and he can get by.”
The road was wider in the saddle and I did as he said, swinging the car into a pull-off with a guardrail that separated it from a cliff that fell away several hundred feet to a narrow valley floor. The mining truck slowed as it passed. I saw a man in the passenger seat. He wore a blue uniform, sunglasses, and a yellow hard hat. He glowered at me as he went by.
CHAPTER
31
I SHRUGGED THE GUY’S anger off and gazed across the valley to where it looked like some giant had come along and lopped off the entire top of a mountain. The wound was almost a mile long and God only knew how wide. Dust rose off the top of the strip mine, stirred by the breeze and the dozens of trucks moving to and fro.
“Below us, that’s Hog Hollow,” Jones said. “That’s where Thierry came from.”
“The mine?” I asked, confused.
“No, no, that wasn’t around back then,” the old detective said. “But it’s part of the story.”
Jones cracked another bock beer and sipped from it as he explained that Thierry Mulch had been born into a family of pig farmers and moonshiners. Four generations of Mulches had lived in the bottom of Hog Hollow, the narrow valley between us and the present-day Pig Lick Mine.
Kevin “Little Boar” Mulch, Thierry’s father, had gone to school with Atticus Jones but dropped out at fourteen when his father, “Big Boar,” died. The boy had to take over the family’s affairs.
Little Boar married his second cousin Lydia when he was in his twenties and she was no more than sixteen. Lydia was a looker, which made Little Boar obsessively jealous. She was also bookish, which made him angry and resentful.