“Big storm coming in tonight,” Bob said. “Even bigger than last night. So we’ll start tomorrow.”
“Perfect,” Jared answered.
“Where did she end up staying last night anyway after we cut her heat?”
“Who knows,” Jared shrugged. “Though I did notice her car was still in the parking lot when we left the bar. Weird. Maybe she went home with someone.”
“So what’s the plan, geniuses?” I asked.
“We keep the same plan,” Bob said. “We’ll bring her down into the mine. Give her a little taste of her daddy’s own medicine.”
Jared laughed maniacally as he took another puff of his joint, then tossed it into the snow.
“Hope she’s not afraid of tight, dark spaces. Like mine shafts.”
Bob crossed his arms and squinted at me. “What’s with you, Shane? You seem less than enthusiastic?”
“Yeah. The fuck has gotten into you? We’re just gonna give her a scare, anyway. Ain’t nobody gonna get hurt.” Jared grinned. “Besides, what’s she gonna do? Call the cops? They’re all McTeelys?”
“Let’s get on with our work, shall we?”
I could feel a psychological wall being put up between us. I wasn’t sincere about the plan anymore and they knew it.
I’d forgotten that although Mr. Toft might have been able to pay off enough judges to bury the dead coal miners law suit, Jared’s cousins had gradually worked their way into dominating the town’s law enforcement.
I needed to tell Natalie she had to get the fuck out of here.
I needed to come clean with her about this mess I’d made. As much as it pained me, it was the only way to make things right.
11
Natalie
“AIN’T NEVER SEEN something like this before,” the heating technician said, laying on his back and looking up at the heater with the flashlight. “Did you mess with this at all?”
I shook my head. “Mess with my own heater? Why would I do that?”
“Well, I don’t know, but a wire to the thermostat has been badly damaged. That usually doesn’t happen unless someone with no idea what they’re doing tries to make a repair and goes drastically wrong.”
“Well I changed the thermostat pretty drastically. But I never touched the wires down here.”
He rolled out from under the heater. “So I’m going to have to order a new part. Might take a few days. Especially with this blizzard coming through tonight.”
“A few days? Are you kidding me?”
“I’m afraid I’m quite serious. Do you have somewhere else you can stay? It’s probably not safe to be here in a snow storm.” He paused, cocking his head. “Are you staying here alone?”
Don’t remind me.
“I don’t like this one bit,” I said, not answering his question. He wasn’t at all creepy, and looked like a gentle giant type, but now I was getting paranoid about being here all alone.
“I’m sorry, Miss. I don’t know what to tell you. Your tube has either been overworked, or stripped.”
Stripped?
That didn’t sound good. But it wasn’t like anyone else had been in here, unless my dad really had a ghost. “Hmm. I guess that’s possible. For a full couple of days, the heater was running nonstop. It was like an oven in here.”
“Yeah, right. Well, I’ll order the part, and then I’ve got to come out and install it. Here’s what the total will be.”
He showed me, and I flinched a little but if it needed to be paid, so be it.
During the rest of the morning and early afternoon, I continued going through my father’s things, when I stumbled onto a box way inside my dad’s closet and to the right.
It was heavy, but I managed to push it out into the middle of his room. When I opened it, I saw stacks of notebooks.
My eyes narrowed as I pulled one out.
On the cover, it was labeled:
July through November 2010
I opened it, and turned to a random page:
September 29
We had our first freeze this morning. It came earlier than usual this year.
It made me think of Natalie (well I know, most things make you think of her) and the first time we saw snow.
I wonder what’s the equivalent of ‘first freeze’ in Florida, since the temperature is always so warm. First hurricane?
That’s mean. I wish she’d end up back here somehow, though. I know it would take a miracle at this point. I’ve been so distracted lately, and it’s affecting my work. My foreman asked me a question I thought I’d already answered yesterday, and I went off on him today. He didn’t deserve it--but that’s the truth.
Tears welled in my eyes reading his inked handwriting. I sifted through a whole bunch of his journals. Most of them were mundane stuff, really. Notes about the mine or people he wanted to call the next day. Stuff about getting together with old friends he’d grown up with a few towns over.
But as I read through a few of them--selecting for right around the divorce, when I was in seventh grade, I realized it wasn’t what he had written that was peculiar, but what he had left out.
While I’d come across a plethora of references to missing me, there wasn’t a single reference to my mother, good or bad.
Why was that?
I scanned through all of the journals to see the earliest year my father had begun to write them. They started the year when I would have been around seven years old. When I found the very earliest one, I opened it and read the first entry.
June 19
Our fancy therapist says I should start keeping a journal. But I’m going to use this to write about things I want to--to clear my head--not our relationship. I’m going to write about things I love. Like my beautiful daughter Natalie.
My eyes about bulged out of my head when I read that.
He wasn’t going to write about my mother--he was going to write about things he loved? Did that mean, when I was seven, my father and mother had already fallen out of love?
I scanned through the entire journal, looking for references to Edna, my mom’s first name, or mom or anything close.
Nothing. Nada. Zip.
I sat back on my father’s bed and let out a deep breath, which reminded me how cold it was when I could see it. It had been a little chilly at first, but I was starting to get accustomed to the cold. In the basement, I’d found an electric space heater which I would bring into whichever room I was going through.
Maybe I should just stay here tonight?
No. It would drop to well below freezing tonight and it wasn’t safe. Even if the heat turned on, I wanted to go back and stay with Shane. I had this sense he was hiding something from me. Not to mention, with how horrible I now felt about Louisa’s death, which I still didn’t know the cause of.
Guilt rode me for having become so distant, so quickly from my grade school friends.
My father’s journal’s, now strewn messily about the floor of his room, reminded me that I had my own grieving to do.
I wanted to read them all, or at least scan them all.
As I was boxing them back up, my phone buzzed.
“Hey honey!” It was my mom. “How are you?”