Black Gold Chapter 17

17 Surprise Discoveries

“I’ve done a lot of things,” Trish grinned, “but I’ve never used my pants as an escape ladder!  I never would have thought it of you!”

“Well,” Nancy smirked amusedly, but now casting a meaningful glance at Mary Catherine, “you do what you have to do to take care of yourself!”  And Trish sensed in Mom’s eyes the same message for Mary Catherine as she herself had tried to convey…

“All I can say is you weren’t the one running all over Powhatan County in a pair of hand-me-down underpants!” Cat grumbled, but with a distant look in her eyes as if thinking of something entirely different…  “And it really did wonders for my self-esteem,” she sighed.  “I’m in that truck half-naked and his eyes were on you all the time!”  Oh boy, here we go again, Nancy sighed, rolling her eyes…

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Mary Catherine had plenty to dither about.  Her jeans had been abandoned at Stoneville High, she was sneaking around Powhatan County in a tee-shirt and unmentionables, and she was doing that sneaking around in a truck driven by what seemed to her to be a bearded redneck kamikaze pilot.  She wasn’t sure she would be able to get her fingers uncurled from around the door handle onto which she was hanging for dear life as Richie flew the truck up the road to Indian Springs at what felt like warp speed.  My luck and we’ll all be killed in a wreck and it’ll be in the papers that I died in nothing but underwear…

“Here,” Richie smiled, “you need to relax, Cat!  It’s okay if I call you Cat?  Nancy does.”

“Sure,” she muttered.  “I’m going to be dead in a minute anyway!”

“Ain’t never had a wreck or a ticket!” Richie chuckled, understanding her concern.  Even Nancy beside him seemed a little green around the gills…  “I figured you two would want to get up to the graveyard, find out what you want to find out, and get back home quick, so I’m just pushing it a little.  Here,” he said, pushing a cassette tape into a cassette stereo that was obviously designed to fit in the dash but was slung underneath instead.  “Buddy of mine got himself this stereo but it broke on him.  Bought it from him for five bucks and fixed it up.  There’s this radio show I can pick up out of Martinsburg I record.  It’s actually kind of funny.”  He turned on the machine—scratchy radio music crackled through the speaker—accordion music—a strangely familiar tune—

“What-is-that?” Nancy smirked, her nose crinkled as the tune—yes, there was no doubt it was the tune to “Another One Bites the Dust” as performed on the accordion by a crazed madman with crazed lyrics—

“Guy that goes on Doctor Demento sometimes,” Richie chortled, clearly enjoying the song.  “Al Somethingorother,” he explained through is laughter.  “The guy’s funny as heck!  Does all sorts of funny songs!”  He caught a glance of Mary Catherine trying to swallow a gust of silly laughter—“Well, that’s better!” he smiled.  “From what Nancy says, you need to have a laugh!”  Mary Catherine’s expression went aghast—“Yeah, sorry about that remark about a boyfriend down at the school.  I was out of line with that.  But I gotta say, that Hadley guy must be some kind of real jerk to dump a cutie like you, ‘specially over your family.  You can’t help your relations, and you’re a real nice girl, anyway.  If he ain’t got the guts to stick with you, it’s his loss, that’s all I have to say about it!”

“You really mean that?” Cat peeped.

“Mean it?  Them Stoneville boys must be either blind or stupid if they can’t spot a winner like you when they see her!  Like I said, his loss!  Now, you not so worried about me wrapping us around a tree?”  And she surely wasn’t…

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“Just like I said,” Tricia tittered, watching the sun rise over Stoneville.  “I told Mary Catherine you love Dave for how he reminds you of Daddy.  You just have a thing for Weird Al fans!”

“You know, Mom,” Abigail mused, awake herself after Aidenn woke up crying in a strange bed and wakeful even after getting Aidenn to lie back down, “that’s true.  The first time you brought Dave home I told Jenny and Megan you were going to marry him.  They’re a lot alike.  Besides their…ah, size, they’re both friendly, both work hard…and intelligent.  I don’t think people understood that about Daddy, just because he didn’t get good grades in school, but when it came to knowing how things worked, how to do something right, he”—

“I knew that from the first time I saw him, girls,” Nancy smiled, thinking back on those first days together.  “All you had to do was look close, and I liked looking close!”

“And Mary Catherine said he sort of bailed you two out on Daddy’s case!” Trish tittered…

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Mary Catherine knew she owed God a few extra prayers of thanks for delivering her to the old Indian Springs cemetery in one piece.  I’ll bet Richie’s favorite TV show is The Dukes of Hazzard!  I wonder if the horn on his truck plays “Dixie”…

“Come on, Cat!” Nancy pressed, already following Richie into the dark recesses of the cemetery, Geiger counter in hand.  “You don’t want left behind in a spooky old graveyard, do you?”  Her sudden rush to join Nancy and Richie was more than adequate answer to the question.

“Somehow I should have figured this mystery would put me in another graveyard at night!” Mary Catherine dithered, scanning the surrounding woods as best her weak eyesight would allow.  “Just like that moonshiners case we did.  And here we are in a cemetery at night again!”

“Cat, we were twelve!” Nancy giggled.  “Are you still bothered by it?”

“No,” Cat hissed in reply, “I’m still bothered by getting captured by the moonshiners!  Or did you forget that?”  Mary Catherine certainly hadn’t forgotten—

“How many times you girls been caught by bad guys anyway?” Richie queried.  I don’t think Nancy Drew ever got caught as much as my Nancy does!…

“Too many times!” Cat smirked.

“Well anyway,” Richie murmured, suddenly somber, “here’s Uncle Lawrence’s grave.  They’ll put Daddy’s right over here beside it when we when we finally get”—

“It’s okay to be upset, Richie,” Nancy mewled, squeezing his hand.  “It’s been an awful lot for you to have to take.  But we might be about to prove what happened to him now, with this—with this”—She groaned, bewildered by the controls on the device.  “Maybe we should have stolen some instructions while we were at it!”

“Here, let me,” Richie offered, gently prising the counter from Nancy’s hand.  He examined it quickly in his flashlight beam.  “Think I got it,” he smiled, flicking a switch and turning a small dial.  The device was silent but for an occasional quick pop and growl.  “Natural radiation,” he shrugged.  “Like they do with that carbon-13 thing to figure out how long something’s been dead, I guess.  Some radiation is just natural.”  He edged up to Uncle Lawrence’s grave—held the probe to the very ground over Lawrence Dwight’s final resting place—

The static-y growl was faint but insistent, clearly distinct from the occasional pops of a moment before—Nancy saw Richie’s shoulders tense, his eye round large upon the dial—his brow creased—after a moment, he scooted away a few paces, held the probe to the new ground—

“He’s radioactive!” Richie gulped, staring at the inert needle over the empty ground.  “It’s going nuts over his grave, but over here, nothing!  Gotta check again!”  He scooted back to the grave—replaced the probe—and again came the faint chattering growl—“Damn…” he breathed, his heart thundering in his chest.  “If it’s the same with Daddy…”

“That explains why they won’t let you have him, Richie!” Nancy cried.  “The radioactivity!  They know more about it than they did in 1941, which would explain why they let your family have your uncle, but not your daddy!”

“Something’s going on in that mine!” Richie gritted as the implications of this discovery struck him.  "I gotta know what it is!  Something they don’t want people to know!  And it has to be the part the owner bought from the old Trailhead Mine!  If Daddy and them other men were working that part of it…”

‘That much radiation after so long…” Nancy mused.  “And bad enough they won’t release your dad…that’s not just an accident.  They’re doing something weird…”

“That stuff they use in bombs and reactors and stuff,” Richie theorized darkly, “that’s…what do they call it?  ‘Enriched’ or something like that.  They have to do stuff to concentrate it so it’s useful…”

“Yes,” Mary Catherine confirmed.  “I saw it in a science class film.  They have to separate U-235 from U-238 to get the kind of stuff they can use in a reactor or a bomb.”

“So maybe…maybe they’ve found a deposit or something that’s already mostly U-235,” Nancy mused.  “They could make enormous amounts of money with that!  But then why would they keep it secret?”

“We have to use safety equipment when we’re down in the mine,” Richie murmured, “just for getting coal.  You have to think there’s a lot more protective gear they’d have to use for getting out that uranium stuff, and that stuff costs money.  Maybe they’re trying to hide it so they wouldn’t have to follow some kind of rules.”

“Or maybe they’re selling it to the wrong people,” Cat interjected her own theory.  “If people don’t know they have it, they could sell it to anybody, you know.”

“We have to find out more about the company,” Nancy finally asserted.  “I know the owner’s some man down in Charleston named Bert Reddiger, but h doesn’t really run things up here.”

“Reddigers own lots of mines, you know that,” Richie replied.  “Whole family’s done that for years.  He don’t actually do the work, he just has managers and stuff to run things for him, like old man Wheeler was telling me at lunch.”  Richie’s broad face sudden rounded with a realization—“And maybe the Reddigers don’t even know what’s happening!  The manager—old man Wheeler called him a ‘managing director’ or something like that—maybe he’s the one who bought what was left of Trailhead because he knew what was there!  He’d want to keep the uranium thing away from the Reddigers so they wouldn’t know he was doing it!  He could be making money from the mine that the Reddigers should be getting!  That would explain why he’d be hiding it!”

“Right now we’re just guessing!” Nancy interrupted, glancing at her watch in the flashlight beam and wincing.  “We have to find out more about all of that, Richie.  For now, we better get back to Cat’s house, and you need to get home and get some sleep.  You work on getting things from your friend at the mine, and Cat and I will look into Bert Reddiger and this managing director your friend told you about.  Just get his name and we’ll start looking into him.”

Richie’s face fell at the thought of taking Nancy and Cat home.  Clearly he didn’t want to be parted from Nancy…  “Well,” he sighed, “guess I can’t let you two get in trouble,” and the sleuthing threesome piled into the truck for the trip back to Stoneville, already working out a plan of attack to discover the truth behind the uranium in the Pine Branch Mine…

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“Actually Mom,” Trish murmured over a Sweet Pea Diner omelet, sitting across from Mom in one of the small booths, “I’m kind of with Abby on this one.  I know she’s your mom and all, but she doesn’t really count for us kids.  We sure could have used her and your dad back before…”  She swallowed the budding diatribe, shamed out of it by an irritated conscience.  What would Sister Mary Catherine or Father O’Doolan say if they’d heard her?…  “I sound like a little kid, don’t I?  But that’s how I feel, Mom, I can’t help it!  She knew you and Daddy had us, she knew we were her grandkids, and she didn’t want anything to do with us!  And my God, Mom, Abby, what happened to her…did she watch all the news when Walton had her hostage?  Did she even care what he was doing to her?  Did she even think of Abby as her family?”  Trish made herself stop, choked back the tide of bitterness in her mind…

“Mom said…it was pride, I’d hurt her pride…” Nancy mewled.  “But I could have…I had my pride too, Tricia Marie.  I wouldn’t…if I’d have asked for her help, that would”—

“It’s not the same thing, Mom!” Trish objected.  “She and your dad would have refused anyway!  You said they cut you off, disowned you!  Why would you waste your time anyway?”

“But it wasn’t just that, Tricia,” Nancy demurred—drew in a meditative breath—“It would have meant admitting I couldn’t make it on my own.  It would have hurt my pride, honey.  And you…half the time you get in trouble in your mysteries is that same pride, that you can do it yourself even when you can’t.”  Trish sighed, admitting to herself the justice of Mom’s words—“It’s our family curse,” Nancy mewled, her mind drawn back to that long-ago case even as it dwelt on Abigail’s intransigence against her grandmother.  “That it hasn’t killed more of us is a miracle…”

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Richie drifted the truck down the short straight to the curb beside the forlorn old O’Doolan house, lights off in order to avoid any notice by a possibly still-awake Mary Beth or Mrs. O’Doolan.  With the lightest of touches, he eased the truck doors open to let out Nancy and Mary Catherine, then after a long goodnight kiss with Nancy while a red-faced, mortally embarrassed Mary Catherine sneaked around to the darkened back kitchen door of the old house set against the low hillock behind the house, quietly eased the doors shut to make his escape as quietly and unobtrusively as he could.  He drifted the truck down the mild incline, only starting the engine at the corner.  Nancy watched him go, then eased around to the back door of the darkened house.  The way back in, she knew, would be as easy as the way out; the old O’Doolan house’s back door was an old, nay ancient, lever-tumbler lock which could be easily picked.  Th only reason the O’Doolans had never been burgled, Nancy smiled to herself as she eased inside on stocking feet, was that they didn’t have anything a burglar would want to steal…

The house was quiet as she tiptoed upstairs—Mary Beth and Mary Denise not aroused, Mrs. O’Doolan long asleep, Mr. O’Doolan probably still down at the bar drowning his consciousness.  Nancy knew the creaky old back stairs as thoroughly as her own house, and she son found herself in Mary Catherine’s room.  The events of the night, and the shocking revelations she and Richie and Cat had learned, left her not at all tired, indeed overexcited even as she sneaked into Cat’s still-empty room.  Overexcited enough to dress down not into her nightie, but into a cool little blouse, a pair of shorts, and her sneakers and short white socks.  She was even entertaining ideas about hiking up the old trail to the old mine with the Geiger counter to check it for radiation like she had discovered at Uncle Lawrence’s grave…

But Mary Catherine was surely exhausted, Nancy allowed, probably already in the bathroom winding down and settling into her bedclothes after a particularly tumultuous night for her.  She allowed a small laugh at Cat’s misadventures that night, eased across the hall to the bathroom door, pushed it open--

To see Cat swallowed up in the grip of a large, masked, black-dressed man—her eyes hugely wide, a gloved hand clamped cruelly over her mouth, her arms pinned to her sides—dashed all thought from her mind—and the sudden, inevitable pinioning by the man’s companion muffled the gasp which rose into her throat—

“We’d give you back your jeans, little fish-eater,” the man holding Mary Catherine taunted quietly but with horribly amused cruelty, “but you won’t be needing them any more.  We told you two what would happen if you didn’t stop nosing around, and now it’s time for you two to pay up!”