Chapter 4 - THE TOWN UNDER THE TOWN
Clara did not sleep.
At dawn she found Jeb outside chopping wood.
He had removed his shirt despite the cold.
Scars crossed his back.
Not animal scars.
Whip marks.
Clara stopped.
Jeb sensed her.
He pulled his shirt on.
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Then this conversation will be unpleasant.”
“It already is.”
She held up the map.
“Eight hundred and twelve people.”
Jeb buried the axe in the block.
“The Black Vein Company discovered silver beneath Bitter Creek in 1861.”
“People know there are mines.”
“Not those mines.”
He pointed toward the mountain.
“Chinese laborers. Irish immigrants. Orphans bought from workhouses. Prisoners leased from territories that never recorded them.”
Clara stared.
“Slaves.”
“Yes.”
“After the war?”
“Slavery changes its coat more often than it dies.”
The sentence stayed with her.
Jeb continued.
“The company built tunnels beneath the town. Silas kept their books.”
“My uncle?”
“He thought it was ordinary mining.”
“And you?”
“Company doctor.”
Clara looked at him.
Doctor.
The books.
The piano.
The careful speech beneath the roughness.
“You were a physician.”
“Once.”
“Jeb Lawson isn’t your name.”
“No.”
“What is?”
He looked toward the trees.
“Jacob Laurent.”
Clara almost laughed from sheer disbelief.
“You’re French?”
“My mother was.”
“And the mountain-man performance?”
“People ask fewer questions of a savage.”
She stared at the beard.
“You deliberately look terrifying?”
“It helps.”
“It is excessive.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The humor disappeared quickly.
“What happened to the workers?”
“Disease started underground. Typhus. The company refused to close the mine.”
Clara felt cold.
“I found out. Silas helped me copy the payrolls.”
“Evidence.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Company guards discovered us.”
He looked toward his scarred hands.
“They locked Shaft Seven with everyone inside.”
Clara stopped breathing.
“Eight hundred people?”
“Eight hundred and twelve.”
“Alive?”
Jeb said nothing.
She turned away and vomited into the snow.
He did not touch her.
He simply waited.
When she finished, he offered water.
She rinsed her mouth.
“My uncle lived with that?”
“For seventeen years.”
“No wonder he woke screaming.”
Jeb looked at her.
“He did?”
“Every winter.”
She remembered Silas sitting beside the stove.
Never letting the fire die.
She had thought it was age.
It had been memory.
“Why wasn’t anyone prosecuted?”
“Because the Black Vein Company became something else.”
“What?”
Jeb looked directly at her.
“The Western Continental Railroad.”
Clara knew that name.
Everyone did.
It owned tracks from Chicago to California.
Senators invested in it.
Governors traveled in its private cars.
“And Bitter Creek?”
“Built over the evidence.”
Clara understood.
“The missing half of town.”
“Burned. Records rewritten. Families paid or threatened.”
“Why are they hunting me now?”
“Because Silas stole the master ledger.”
“The key opens it?”
“Probably.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
Clara studied the map.
Then understood.
“Shaft Seven.”
Jeb’s silence confirmed it.
The ledger was underground.
With the dead.
They found the entrance behind the cabin.
Jeb had covered it with stacked firewood.
Clara stared at the iron door embedded in the hillside.
The symbol on her key matched the lock.
“No.”
Jeb stood between her and it.
“You just spent an hour explaining why everyone wants this.”
“Which is why you’re not opening it.”
“Move.”
“No.”
“Business arrangement, remember?”
“This isn’t cooking.”
“Excellent observation.”
“Clara.”
“Jacob.”
He flinched.
Interesting.
She moved around him.
He blocked her.
“You don’t get to decide.”
“There may be gas.”
“Then use your medical knowledge.”
“Medicine doesn’t negotiate with methane.”
“Neither do I.”
They glared at each other.
Finally Jeb muttered, “God help me.”
“Unlikely.”
He almost smiled.
They opened Shaft Seven.
Cold air breathed from the mountain.
Not stale.
Moving.
“There’s another entrance,” Jeb whispered.
Someone had reopened the tunnels.
Recently.
They descended.
Clara carried a lantern.
Jeb carried his rifle.
The tunnel narrowed.
Old rails disappeared beneath mud.
Then Clara saw the first shoe.
Small.
A child’s.
She stopped.
Jeb did not explain.
He didn’t need to.
Farther in, bones appeared.
Hundreds.
Clara cried silently.
Not theatrically.
No collapse.
Just tears moving down her face while she walked among people whose existence had been erased because wealthy men found forgetting profitable.
Then she saw writing scratched into the wall.
Names.
Workers had written their names before dying.
Jeb touched one.
MARGARET LAWSON.
Clara looked at him.
“Your wife?”
He nodded.
“She was a nurse.”
“You said she disappeared.”
“I said she died.”
“You were here?”
“Outside.”
His voice cracked.
“The guards chained me to a tree and made me listen.”
Clara finally understood the man.
The isolation.
The traps.
The silence.
He had built his cabin over a grave because leaving would feel like abandoning them.
She reached for his hand.
Jeb recoiled.
Not from dislike.
From terror.
Tenderness frightened him more than bullets.
Clara let her hand fall.
Then they heard metal strike stone.
Someone else was underground.
Jeb extinguished the lantern.
Voices.
Three men.
“…Sutton said the woman left with Lawson.”
Wyatt.
Clara felt rage.
Another voice:
“Find the ledger. Kill Lawson. Bring the woman alive.”
Jeb leaned toward her ear.
“When I move, run uphill.”
“No.”
“Clara.”
“I am tired of men designing my movements.”
“This is not the moment for philosophy.”
A lantern appeared around the bend.
Jeb pushed Clara behind an ore cart.
Gunfire exploded.
The tunnel became thunder.
Jeb fired once.
A man screamed.
Clara saw another rushing from the darkness.
She grabbed the nearest object.
A mining shovel.
She swung.
The flat iron blade struck his face.
He collapsed.
Clara stared at him.
Jeb stared at her.
“What?”
“You hit him.”
“He was irritating me.”
Another shot.
They ran.
But instead of climbing, Clara saw something in the fallen man’s coat.
A silver badge.
She snatched it.
Outside, beneath daylight, she read the engraving.
U.S. MARSHAL.
Jeb went still.
Clara looked toward him.
“The law is hunting us?”
“No.”
Jeb examined the badge.
His expression darkened.
“The law is working for them.”
Then Clara turned the badge over.
May you like
Three words had been scratched into the back.
TRUST THE BRIDE.
