But maybe having been through what she’d experienced in Legend had given her courage, because Kady didn’t waste time fretting over her unknown future. Instead, she made a few calls to former classmates, asked some questions, then tried to make a list of the places she thought she could work. It had taken her a while to prepare a résumé, get it copied, then find the addresses of the hotels and restaurants. But now she had everything ready, and with a confident smile, she dropped the letters into a small shopping bag to carry them to the mailbox.
As there were every day, flowers from Gregory were outside her door. She stepped out, picked them up, put them inside the door, took the card, and locked the door behind her. “Wonder what he has to say today?” she murmured, opening the card as she walked out of her building, smiling as she scanned the note. “Love you . . . miss you . . . come for a visit? . . . sending Mother to Florida . . .” Smiling even more broadly, Kady dropped the note into a trash receptacle as she passed. She wasn’t tempted by Gregory’s pleas or his talk of love and sending-Mother-to-Florida. Maybe if he sent the deed to Onions, she might be tempted, but, then again, she might not.
By the time she neared the mailbox, she was almost skipping, and it seemed part of her euphoria that the display inside the big window of a bookstore she was passing should be draped in gold lamé. Is there a gold mine in your future? was written on a banner above the several books displayed below.
Thinking of Legend, Kady drew nearer and began to read the descriptions on the covers of the books. “Find the mine of the Flying Dutchman,” one read. “New information on the Triple Star Mine,” said another. “The Lost Maiden Mine could be yours,” said another.
“The Lost Maiden Mine?” Kady said aloud. “Boy! those books are out of date!”
Turning away from the window, she started down the street toward the mailbox but stopped when she reached the door of the bookstore. On impulse, she went inside. Near the door was a table spread with at least twenty different books, all on the same theme of lost treasure. There were books on mines, ghost towns, ships that had sunk, curses, hauntings; the variety seemed endless.
Idly, as though it meant nothing to her, Kady picked up a book about lost mines in the western U.S. and looked up the Lost Maiden Mine. Expecting to see a recounting of what had been found in the mine back in 1982, she was puzzled to see that every book on the table read as though the mine had yet to be found. Surely, they couldn’t all be out-of-date, could they? she wondered.
She stopped a clerk and asked where she could find books on the Lost Maiden Mine by itself. Kady seemed to remember that when the mine had been found, the stands were covered with produced-in-a-minute books about every aspect imaginable about the mine. Impatiently, the clerk said, “What we have is on the table,” and moved on, too busy to bother with something as unimportant as a customer.
Still puzzled, Kady walked back to her apartment. Maybe those books on the mine had a short life span and were only of interest for a few months, she thought, and that’s why there were no more copies of them. Not noticing that she hadn’t mailed her résumés, she dropped the bag on the floor by the door, put Gregory’s flowers next to the other six arrangements on the dining table, then called Jane.
It was the first time Kady had called her friend since they had parted with so much coolness between them a few weeks before. Kady knew she should have called her friend earlier and told her of her breakup with Gregory, but Kady had postponed it because she knew what every woman knows when she breaks up with her boyfriend: she was going to have to hear how horrible he was.
Jane’s tirade lasted a full fifteen minutes, but Kady thought she got off cheaply. “You should have seen how he came on to Debbie after you went to bed that night! He was really too handsome for his own good, and I never trusted him. And furthermore—”
“Jane,” Kady said sharply, “what do you remember about the Lost Maiden Mine?”
“What’s to remember? I’ve heard of it, I think, but I don’t remember much. Kady, what are you going to do now? I know Gregory and that mother of his never paid you much, so you couldn’t have much to live on, so—”
“Don’t you remember when the Lost Maiden Mine was found and the whole country went wild about the romance and the court case and everything else?”
Jane’s silent pause was Kady’s answer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jane said suspiciously, “but I’d like to be told what’s going on.”
At that Kady got off the phone fast. There was no one on earth more perceptive than Jane, and Kady wasn’t about to start talking and maybe mention things she didn’t want to tell anyone about.
With the phone still in her hand, Kady turned and looked at the flowers on the table. If the Lost Maiden Mine had never been found, then maybe Cole found it. And if Cole found it, it was because she had told him where it was. And if Kady had told him, that meant Cole had lived past nine years old.
Grabbing her keys, Kady ran out of the apartment and into the nearest library.
Leaning back against the ugly couch in her apartment, Kady rubbed her eyes. What time was it now? Three A.M.? Turning, she saw that the clock read five; it would soon be daylight.
It had been a week since she started out to the mailbox with those résumés, and now they still sat in the little shopping bag on the floor by the door. The flowers that had covered the dining room table were on the floor, dying, dried up, unnoticed. The dining table and every other surface in the apartment was covered with books, faxed sheets, photocopies, and pages covered in Kady’s handwriting. For a week now she had been researching what had happened in Legend, Colorado.
The first thing she had done was research the Lost Maiden Mine. She had looked at three years of covers
of back issues of Time magazine because she distinctly remembered seeing the mine on the cover of that magazine. But there was no mention of the finding of the mine in that magazine or in any other. Nor was it in any newspaper or in the memory of anyone Kady asked.
As far as she could tell, she was the only person on the face of the earth who remembered something that had swept across America like a tornado. The get-rich-quick idea always appealed to Americans, and the idea of finding millions in gold just lying there for the taking was an American fairy tale. There had been Maiden clothes, Maiden shoes, Maiden hair. And the TV was full of specials, one-, two-, and four-hour reenactments of the romantic story of a man who loved a ghost and had died holding her hand.
A year later, after the romance had faded, came another kind of show Americans love: exploding myths. It wasn’t love that had caused the miner to stay with the woman’s skeleton; both his legs had been crushed when gold fell on them and he had been trapped. As for holding the hand of the other skeleton, it was speculated that the dying miner had been reaching for the knife by her side. What was he going to do with the knife? Kill himself to put himself out of his misery? He had died of thirst within days, surrounded by millions in gold. As with every other such story, it was concluded that the gold was cursed, and this was proven by the bad luck of everyone who had touched the money. “Caused by their greed,” Kady had said at the time and still believed.
After Kady had proven to herself that the Lost Maiden Mine had not been found, she started to look into what she could find out about Legend itself. This had been more difficult, and she’d had to take the Metro into DC to haunt the Library of Congress to plow through miles of microfilmed newspapers.
Everything she found showed that Ruth had told the truth. There was a short but poignant article about the tragedy in Legend that had left so many adults and children dead. However, there was no mention that the residents of Legend had been the killers, not the bank robbers.
Later, there was a tiny notice that Mrs. Jordan and her widowed daughter-in-law had moved to Denver, and eight and a half months after that was a notice that Mrs. Jordan had given birth to a nine-pound baby boy, who was named Cole Tarik Jordan.
Kady went through three years of curled-up microfilmed newspapers until she found a mention of a kidnap attempt on Mrs. Ruth Jordan’s young son. The reporter, who was obviously on the side of the residents of Legend, almost brushed aside the nearly successful kidnaping as though it were justified after what Ruth had done to the people of Legend. Kady’s stomach turned as the reporter went on and on about how Ruth had had the mines blown up and how she’d thrown people out of their house into the storms (it had been summer, but that didn’t seem to matter to him). He went on to hint that Ruth had somehow brought on the attack of cholera that killed so many people who had once lived in Legend.
Days went by while Kady searched the archives, but she could find nothing else about the Jordan family. Then in 1897, she found the article that Ruth had shown her, the one that said that a Mr. Smith had been found murdered in his home in Denver and he’d willed his entire estate to be used to build orphanages. This was the man Ruth thought Cole had killed while Kady had cooked.
In the next year, 1898, Kady found Ruth Jordan’s obituary. It said that she was survived by one son, C. T. Jordan of New York City, but unfortunately, urgent business had prevented Mr. Jordan from attending the funeral.