The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [44]
“Don’t you want to find out what happened to Jed?”
I expected her to say, “What part of ‘Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Go Beyond This Point’ do you not understand,” but she surprised me by climbing up next to me and helping to widen the opening. “It can’t hurt if we go a little farther and see where that daylight is coming from, can it?” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t look any more dangerous than what we’ve already been through. And Jed lived to tell about it. Or will someday.”
In a few minutes we had cleared a big enough hole in the wall to climb through. Breathless with effort, trembling with nervousness, we crept along. We didn’t know what to be careful about, but we were being careful.
As we got closer to the sunbeam, our eyes adjusted and we could see each gray lump in the walls. We turned off the tired flashlight to save the last of the batteries.
The crack of daylight grew longer and wider as we approached along the curving tunnel. Then there was a boulder to squeeze around. I squeezed first—and felt the ground give way underfoot as I stepped out into broad daylight. Dirt slid against dirt. A terrifying noise.
“Whoa, Barbie! Stop!” I screamed, reaching to grab her. One more step forward and I’d have gone over the crumbling edge. She pulled me toward her, my heart beating in my ears. I caught my breath, and then from the crack at the edge of the boulder we carefully looked out.
We had reached the end of the mountain, what was left of it. The beginning of the gore. Only that boulder stood between us and a long fall.
We looked down on a huge mossy green circle that could have passed for something natural if it wasn’t squatting in an unnatural churned up piece of ground.
Odum’s Onion. ORC.
“Oh! Jed!” Barbie said in gasps.
All of a sudden I was more worried about my brother than I could ever put into words. Because instantly I realized it probably wasn’t Pa he’d run away from after all. It probably had something to do with this place.
Had he fallen off the cliff and gotten hurt? But who would have found him? And why wouldn’t he have come home after that? Where was he now, and where was he calling from on those nights when the phone rang once?
In silence me and Barbie stood clinging to the boulder, staring out over the gore. From here it looked even more bare and miserable than from Kettle Ridge. At least over there you could turn your head the other way and see the land the way it ought to be. Kettle Ridge was a long way from here, a hazy line in the distance. All the land in between used to be connected, rolling hills and valleys, but Odum’s bulldozers had scooped out the triangle. There was just one small spot of green in sight, a natural ravine tucked between slag piles and bumping up against the cliff near the narrow point of the mine wedge. My Hole in the Wall.
“Look there!” Barbie said, pointing to it. “Some kind of park! People who work for ORC must go there during their breaks.”
“No, nobody goes there,” I said. “It’s really out of the way. It just looks close to ORC from up here.”
“How do you know that?” She stared at me. I looked away. “Never mind, I can guess,” she said. “That’s where you disappear to all the time when Ma’s trying to get you to do your homework, isn’t it.” I shrugged. I knew I was busted, but after all we’d been through today, I didn’t care anymore. If she wanted to go to my hideout, I’d take her.
And then she had to go and yank on my arm, trying to drag me back the way we came. “Hurry up, Seb. We gotta go tell Ma. She can get the police to collect all the evidence and find out what happened to Jed!”
I would have wrung myself free, except I was afraid I’d spin off in the wrong direction and fall off the edge of the world. But I did dig in my heels so she couldn’t drag me another inch. Oh, cheese, there went my toes, right through the tips of my sneakers.
“Just what do you plan to tell Ma?” I said.
“Everything! She has a right to know what’s on her own property, Seb.”
“She also has a right to ground us forever when she finds out everything. Do you really wanna be stuck in the house