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Esperanza Rodriguez, her dark eyes set deep in her lined face, watched silently as the body of Elliot Lyons was brought up from the depths of the mine. All her life she had been expecting something like this to happen. Over and over her mother had told her the story of what had happened when she was only a few days old, and the gringos, in their stupidity, had disturbed the cave of the lost children. They had died that day—many of them—and the mine had been closed. For fifty years it had remained undisturbed, its depths flooded with water, until a month ago, when Señor Lyons had come from Chicago and begun poking around. And now he, too, was dead. Dead like Amos Amber, who had owned the mine and died in the flood; dead like her own father, who had also been in the mine that day.
Esperanza had no memory of the flood, but in the half-century since, as she had grown up near the mine, her mother had been careful to warn her of what would happen if the mine were ever reopened. It was part of the sacred cave now, the cave of the lost children. Though the gringos claimed the cave was only a legend, what the gringos thought didn’t matter to Esperanza, for she knew the cave was real, as did all her friends. It was real, and it had to be left alone.
Elliot Lyons had not left it alone, and now he was dead.
Esperanza waited until they’d taken the body away, nodded briefly when the doctor whispered in her ear, then wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, told her son to stay at home, and started walking toward town, where, before obeying the doctor’s instructions, she would go to church and pray.
Amberton had never been much of a town—not like the other Mineral Belt settlements, which had boomed for years with gold and silver. Amberton had prospered only mildly, its coal providing a fortune only for the Ambers, who owned the mine and most of the land as well.
And then, in 1910, the mine had flooded, and the people of Amberton wondered what had happened.
Esperanza Rodriguez knew what had happened.
As she paused in the little park at the center of town, she looked up at the bronze statue of Amos Amber that kept watch over the village. Her own father, whom she had never known, had tried to warn Amos Amber of what could happen to the mine. But Amos had never been one to listen to the superstitious mumblings of a Mexican married to a Ute.
And because Amos Amber had not listened to Esperanza Rodriguez’s father, Amberton had suffered.
It didn’t show on the surface. The village was a pretty place, nestled in a valley low in the Rockies, its Victorian houses neatly painted in the bright colors that had been fashionable a century ago. Its streets, though never paved, were well-kept, and shaded by aspens that had long ago replaced the firs that once thrived there. It seemed, at a glance, to be prospering. Its shops were busy, selling memorabilia of days long gone when the town had been a center of commerce, and its old railroad depot, restored and turned into a restaurant, was, during the summer months, constantly filled with tourists who paused on their way to Aspen or Denver, spent a few minutes absorbing the quaint atmosphere of the village, then “moved on to the next stop on their Triple A tourist maps.
The tourists never went where Esperanza was going, for the tiny Catholic Church was near the edge of town, in the midst of the shacks that were occupied by Esperanza’s friends, the few mixed-breed Indians whose Mexican, Indian, and white blood left them fitting into no easily identifiable group. They existed in poverty, scratching out a living as best they could by doing the menial jobs that the shop owners tossed to them. Esperanza herself did not live in Shacktown—she still lived in the caretaker’s cabin near the entrance to the mine, where she’d lived most of her life—but every week she came to the church to pray for the children who, though their graves were marked in the tiny churchyard, were buried somewhere else.
Today, she didn’t stay long.
Today, she wasn’t praying for the dead children.
Today, she was praying for the one who was still alive.
Christie Lyons stared straight ahead, her eyes unseeing, her tiny white hand lost in Esperanza Rodriguez’s large brown one. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and her chin quivered as she struggled not to sob out loud.
She hadn’t believed it at first. Her father was all she had, and she was sure that what was happening was all a bad dream, that any minute now her father would wake her up and tell her it was only a nightmare.
Dimly, she wondered if they were going to send her to an orphanage. She supposed they probably were. If you didn’t have any family, where else could you go?
Though she was only nine years old, Christie knew exactly what had happened. Her father had gone to the mine by himself, and he’d fallen down the shaft. Many times, when she’d gone to mines with him, he’d told her what could happen if you weren’t careful. Now it had happened to him.
And now she was alone and going somewhere with people she hardly knew at all.
She looked out the window of the car and realized they were driving toward the mine. Was she going to have to look at her father? Were they going to show him to her? She hoped not. Knowing he was dead was bad enough—she didn’t want to have to look at him, too.
She stared up into the face of Esperanza Rodriguez, who had held her in her lap while they told her her father was dead. Now Esperanza was smiling at her, the way her mother used to smile at her when she was very little.
Christie didn’t remember her mother very well, but right now, with her father dead, she desperately wished that her mother would come back to her.
For some reason, she remembered how her mother used to wash her hair, making her blond curls light and fluffy. Now they clung damply to her forehead, and she wished her mother were there to wash them for her. But that, too, would never happen again, for her mother had died five years ago.
She felt the man who was driving the car squeeze her leg and looked up at him. He was Dr. Henry, and even though she didn’t know him very well, she knew he was a friend of her father’s.
She touched his hand, and he squeezed her reassuringly before putting his hand back on the steering wheel of the car. Feeling hopeless, Christie Lyons stared out the window, not really seeing the house they were approaching.
At fifty-two, Bill Henry was still lean and ruggedly handsome. His brown hair was shot through with gray, and his skin, darkened by the Colorado sun, was the color of saddle leather. He wished he knew how to comfort the little girl beside him, but she seemed to have drifted away somewhere, and he hadn’t the least idea what to say to her. Unmarried, he had never really learned the trick of talking to children. And never had he had to deal with one who had just lost her only parent.
Rather than risk saying the wrong thing, Bill Henry kept his eyes on the road and, as he turned the car into the driveway of Edna Amber’s mansion, examined the details of the house. The comforting of the child he would leave to Esperanza, or, in a few more minutes, to Diana Amber.
The house, the largest in Amberton, stood brooding on a rise that let it overlook the village like a sentinel. In contrast to the houses of the village, the Amber place had not been painted in years, and it had taken on the look of a derelict, its paint peeling, its shingles loosening. A few aspens and one or two firs dotted the scraggly lawn that surrounded the living quarters, and the outbuildings—a barn and a chicken coop, along with a carriage house that had been converted to a garage many years earlier—looked as forlorn as the house itself. Though Edna Amber still regarded the town as her personal fiefdom, she had never taken part in its restoration. Indeed, she had objected to the restoration every step of the way. Bill Henry supposed that, to her, turning Amberton into a tourist attraction meant admitting that the mine would never again produce—and that was one of the many things that Edna Amber would not admit.
“We’re here,” Bill said. Christie, seeming to come out of her daze, gazed up at him.
“Where?” she asked.”
“At the Ambers’. They’re going to take care of you.”
