Out back was a stack of railroad ties, neatly formed into a square pile. Beside this was smaller lumber, a lot of it used two-by-fours scarred by nails.
Hermit Jim, as Lana thought of him, must be out. Maybe he had left forever. Maybe what had happened to her grandfather had happened to him, and now she was the only person left alive in the whole world.
She didn’t want to be there if he came back. There was no way to know whether you could trust a man who lived in a searing hot valley between dusty hills at the end of no road, and had a lawn as lush as a putting green.
Lana finished watering the grass and sprayed Patrick playfully with the hose before turning it off.
“Want some chili, boy?” she asked the dog.
She led the way back inside. It was an oven in the cabin, so hot, she started sweating before she had cleared the threshold, but Lana did not think she would ever complain about something so minor. Not after what she had endured.
Heat? Big deal. She had water, she had food, and all her bones were unbroken, which was how she liked them.
The chili came in a big number-ten can. With no refrigeration, they had to eat it before it could go bad, so it was chili, meal after meal, till it was gone. But at least there was fruit cocktail for dessert. Tomorrow, maybe she’d open one of the number-ten cans of vanilla pudding and just eat pudding for a couple of days.
There was no oven, just a one-burner cooktop. No sink. There was a single chair and a table, and an uncomfortable cot against a wall. The one decorative feature was a ratty Persian rug in the center of the only room. The best seat in the house was a smelly but comfortable La-Z-Boy that sat on that rug. It was stuck in the recline position, but that was fine with Lana. She was all about reclining and taking things easy.
The only thing to do was read. Hermit Jim had exactly thirty-eight books. She had inventoried them. There were fairly recent novels by Patrick O’Brian, Dan Simmons, Stephen King, and Dennis Lehane, and some books that she supposed were philosophy by writers like Thoreau. There were classics whose names seemed familiar to her: Oliver Twist, The Sea Wolf, The Big Sleep, Ivanhoe.
Nothing had exactly jumped out at her, there were no J. K. Rowling or Meg Cabot books, nothing for kids at all. But over the course of the first day she had read all of Pride and Prejudice and now she was starting The Sea Wolf. Neither was an easy book. But Lana had nothing but time on her hands.
“We can’t stay here, Patrick,” Lana said as the dog attacked his bowl of chili. “Sooner or later we have to move on. My friends will be worried. Everyone will be. Even Mom and Dad. They must think we’re dead.”
But even as she said it, Lana had her doubts. There wasn’t much to do once she had inventoried the groceries, so she spent most of her time sitting on the wooden chair, reading, or just watching the desert landscape. She would pull the chair into the doorway where she could have some shade and look out across the lawn at the hills around. She had mastered the trick of reading a paragraph at a time, looking up to scan the area for danger, checking Patrick for warning signs, then sinking back into the book for another paragraph.
After a while the unending emptiness took a toll on her never-strong sense of optimism.
The barrier was still there. It was behind the cabin, not in her field of vision unless she stepped away from the cabin.
Lana carried a tin cup of water toward the door, intending to drink it while having another look at the lawn and suddenly there was Patrick, racing toward her. His fur was up. He shook his head like he was having a seizure.
“Get in!” Lana yelled.
She held the door open. Patrick barreled in. She slammed the door and threw the bolt.
Patrick hit the rug, skidded, rolled over twice, and came up to a sitting position. Something was in his mouth. Something alive.
Lana approached cautiously. She bent down to see.
“A horny toad? That’s what you have? You scared me half to death over a horned toad?” She felt her heart thud heavily as it restarted. “Spit that thing out. Good grief, Patrick, I count on you and you freak out over a stupid horned toad?”
Patrick didn’t want to give up his prize. Lana decided to let him have it. It was dead now, anyway, and she supposed Patrick was entitled to his own version of crazy.
“Take it outside and you can keep it,” she said. She headed for the door but knelt first to straighten the rug. Then she noticed the hatch in the floor.
Lana pulled the rug back farther, folding it up over the La-Z-Boy.
She hesitated, not sure if she wanted to see what was under those floorboards. Maybe Hermit Jim was Serial Killer Jim.
But it wasn’t like she had anything else to do. She shoved the recliner aside and rolled up the rug. There was a recessed steel ring. She pulled it up.
Lying in the space below were neatly stacked metal bricks, each maybe six or eight inches long, half as wide, and a third as thick.
There was no question in Lana’s mind what they were.
“Gold, Patrick. Gold.”
The gold bars were heavy, twenty pounds or more, but she lifted enough out to be able to see the extent of the pile. Her best estimate was that there were fourteen in all, each at least twenty pounds.
Lana had no idea what gold was worth, but she knew what a pair of gold hoop earrings cost.
“That is a lot of earrings,” she said.
Patrick looked into the hole with puzzlement.
“You know what this means, Patrick? All this gold here and all those picks and shovels outside? Hermit Jim is a gold miner.”
She ran outside to the lean-to where Hermit Jim had formerly parked his truck. Patrick bounded along, hoping for a game. Sometimes she tossed a broken axe handle for him to retrieve, but today Patrick was to be disappointed.