Hush My Mouth (31 page)

“We have it on tape,” Quint said, almost apologetic. He proffered the camera.

At my nod, he switched on the miniature screen and scanned for the beginning.

On the replay, I watched and listened as they walked through the black tunnel toward the shaft of light. The dripping water was audible, but I could only catch some of their whispered words.

Their scuffling steps in the wet sand discernible at times on the tape, they walked toward the light that descended into the blackness. I knew from experience that the light was capable of illumining their path. However, the darkness around them was so complete, they likely hadn’t quite trusted the light ahead.

Drips, scuffles, whispered words, dark and light. Not exactly compelling television.

“What the—” Quint’s voice replayed loud with alarm.

The camera then picked up the sounds that had drawn Quint’s reaction. An animal bellow, a plea.

The camera stopped moving.

“What is that?” someone—Trini?—whispered.

“Who’s there?” Colin yelled.

In the truck, we all jumped at the unexpected volume.

“Help!” a loud bellow in the distance answered.

The camera continued to move toward the light shaft, sweeping slowly from side to side, perhaps scanning for threats.

As it drew closer to the light, the camera angle slowly lifted, drawn upward into the tall shaft. The wide mouth at the top of the mountain looked small from where they stood. The falling condensation sparkled in the bright sunlight and fell in shades of green, colored by the trees thick and far above.

The yells for help grew louder, more distinct.

What at first looked like a clapper in a bell hung halfway up the shaft. The two legs gave a wild kick as if clamoring for a foothold.

“Oh, dear,” I said. That about summed it up. Cuke hung in the center of the shaft, at least eighty feet from the sandy stone floor.

The picture cut off.

“We went for help,” said Trini.

We all sat silent.

“Sorry this hasn’t worked out for you,” I said after a time.

“Oh, it’s worked better than we expected,” said Colin. “Much better, thanks to Trini’s scream.”

“Oh?”

All three nodded.

“We stayed up last night brainstorming some plot ideas. We’ve decided to make a horror movie. All thanks to Trini’s one helluva scream.”

I remembered their awed mention of her scream after one of their adventures.

“Bloodcurdling,” said Quint, giving her an admiring smile.

“The real stumbling block is distribution,” said Colin. “I know a guy in Charlotte who quit his big bank job to get into
movie production. He made a serious film, entered festivals and such before he did a DVD release. We figure the straight-to-DVD market will be a better route for horror.”

The other two nodded enthusiastic confirmation.

“Another guy used to make movies around Charlotte. We’re hoping to hook up with him. After you get some credits, you can get hired on film crews. Charlotte gets a good bit of filmmaking traffic, even big Hollywood work.”

“That’d be fun,” I said. Probably not lucrative, but fun. I’d never asked what they did in the rest of their lives when they weren’t chasing their artistic dream. College students? Retail? Fast-food restaurant staff? Something with flexible hours, obviously.

“Bet you guys could make quite a horror picture,” I said.

“You reckon that would be something Mr. Bertram would be interested in investing in?”

If persistence was the key to success, Colin had what it took.

“I don’t know,” I said. I sincerely doubted it, but why should I deliver the bad news?

Outside our perch in the fire truck, a loud cheer echoed out of the tunnel, and the crowd gathered below began to clap and chatter in a slow wave, no more certain than we were what had happened but taking it as a good sign.

With so many members of the Ghouly Boys present—the scanner addicts who don’t have anything better to do than show up at car accidents hoping for gore—they might have preferred something more tragic just because it would make a better story when they were sitting around in the pool hall waiting for the next scanner call. But since it was one of their own who’d almost re-created the made-up miner’s fatal fall, they graciously celebrated the happy ending.

I was surprised to see Rudy exit the tunnel, waving his arms and yelling.

“Okay, I’m gonna have to ask you to break it up,” he called. “Break it up. Everything’s fine now. We just need to get him to the ambulance to be checked over. Let us have some room here.”

The crowd milled about, condensing toward the edges of the drive, but nobody turned toward the parking lot or made a move to leave.

Their persistence was soon rewarded. Two men, one wearing a complicated harness that looked like a parachutist’s apparatus, supported a third man—bushy-headed Cuke.

The crowd erupted in cheers and claps. No lack of enthusiasm.

Cuke, with what looked like blue nylon ski rope still knotted around his thighs and waist, waved his hand high overhead, acknowledging his well-wishers before he ducked his head with a sheepish grin.

If he’d pulled a successful stunt, nobody but his buddies would have known. A royal screwup, and most of the town’s underemployed population turned out and cheered. Cuke Metz had to have mixed feelings about the contradictions of fame.

His escorts walked him through a cross between a ticker-tape parade and a perp walk toward the ambulance. Looking at the thin ski rope he’d dangled from, I had no doubt he was having trouble getting his legs—and more personal parts of his body—to function again.

Rudy came over and waved up at us. “You all can go home now. We may need to talk to you later.” He gave Colin a nod for emphasis. “We know where to find you.”

The ghosters exchanged glances, the official menace not lost on them.

I followed them to the ground and walked them to their van. Miraculously it was no longer blocked in by other cars.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said. “Mumler. That’s an interesting nickname.”

Colin gave me a pleased grin. “After the first spirit photographer. The man who first captured recognizable apparitions on film. During the Civil War, so many restless spirits were taken when they didn’t expect to go. He helped comfort a lot of family members after their tragic losses.”

“That’s—interesting.”

As Colin walked on ahead to the van, I caught sight of Quint and Trini as they exchanged glances. I raised my eyebrows.

“Nobody really calls him that,” said Quint.

“Except him.” With a gentle smile, Trini rolled her eyes.

I nodded. Not much else to say.

Back at my car, I wasn’t so lucky. Cars had triple parked around mine. I climbed in, cranked the windows down, and sat in the shade watching people stroll back to their cars as if they’d just been to a church softball game rather than a near-death experience. Odd way to spend a Sunday. I wondered if Fran was spending the day with her parents.

I noticed a message on my cell phone. Lydia’s voice said, “Frank’s fired up the grill for hot dogs and hamburgers. Mom and Dad are coming, and Letha, Hattie, and Vinnia. Let me know how many hot dogs you want.”

I hit redial. A family cookout sounded like just the ticket. I’d stop for a bag of marshmallows.

According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), more than 50,000 missing-person cases were open in the United States in 2007, and more than 6,200 unidentified-remains cases were active.

In researching
Hush My Mouth
, I wanted to understand the search for missing persons and the identification of remains. I first became aware of the poignant realities and the staggering statistics when I met Dr. Emily Craig, the state forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Dr. Craig, a medical illustrator before she studied forensic anthropology with Dr. Bill Bass at the University of Tennessee’s legendary “Body Farm,” brings an artist’s eye—and an artist’s heart—to her work as a scientist. In her book
Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America’s Most Infamous Crime Scenes
(Crown, 2004), she talks about the power of the Internet in matching the names of the missing to the unidentified remains—and bringing murderers to justice.

The NCIC is a national clearinghouse available to law enforcement, but it has limitations. Sometimes missing persons aren’t reported because family and friends don’t know they are gone or are embarrassed to report they’ve run off. Because the database records information by code, it requires proper coding in both the missing-person report and the unidentified-remains report. So much of what identifies us as human beings, though, is in the eye of the beholder. Is the hair dark blond or light brown? Is she tall because she always wears heels? The most important identifiers—such as a tattoo or unusual teeth or habits—might be missing because someone forgot to mention them. Another problem, too, is that investigators can have overwhelming workloads that give a low priority to logging the information into the database.

Over the last few years, thanks to dedicated and tireless work by law-enforcement officials and families missing loved ones, resources have become available to the general public, not just to law enforcement. One of the best-known organizations, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (
www.missingkids.com
), provides a database of cases, an online support group for families, and resources for law enforcement.

Because NCMEC focuses only on children, the National Center for Missing Adults was formed (
www.theyaremissed.org
). This organization was promoted through the dedicated efforts of Kristen Modafferi’s family in Charlotte when the lack of resources hampered them after their eighteen-year-old daughter disappeared in San Francisco.

Resources also exist to help give names to unidentified remains. The Doe Network (
www.doenetwork.org
) catalogs both U.S. and international cases. The site also allows geographic
searches, and the list of resolved cases includes happy endings of families reunited, sometimes years after the disappearance. Many states also have individual sites covering unsolved cases in their jurisdictions.

Though the reporting sites—for both the professionals and the public—are far from complete, they represent a quantum leap in the amount and quality of information available. As a result, more of the stories have endings—some happy, some predictably sad, but closure nonetheless.