Instinct Jason Hough (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

At the intersection with the state route, I pull in once again to Last Chance, opting for a decaf this time. I ask for a blueberry muffin top again, making sure they give me the right one. The same two teenage girls are working the small booth today, both gossiping in hushed voices as they work the espresso machine. OMG this and LOL that.

“Anyone else come through this morning?” I ask. “Hikers, I mean, headed for the lake?”

“Just that weirdo from StellarComm,” the blond one says.

“Weirdo how?” I ask, intrigued.

The brunette girl replies, “He said if we ever wanted to check out the tower, he could show it to us. Guh-Ross!”

“Like we didn’t know what he meant. Also, last time he was here, I saw he had a porno mag on his dashboard. I mean, seriously? So frickin’ gross.”

My personal opinion is that he’d genuinely meant to impress them with the tower, and not any innuendo. “Just him? No one else came through?”

Blondie shrugs. “Saw some station wagons turn off that way as I was opening this morning. They didn’t stop for coffee.” Her chin indicates the left turn at the intersection. While the right turn goes up to the cell tower, the left goes off into forest, downhill.

“ ‘Wagons’ plural?”

“Uh-huh. Three of ’em.”

“What’s back there?” I ask, glancing toward the road.

The girl wrinkles her nose. “Beats me. Trees?”

Her friend speaks up, though. “Some old trail. It’s all overgrown, though. I think there’s a ghost town way down there somewhere.”

A ghost town. That’s a new one. Not only does Silvertown have an abandoned military base and a toxic mine site, apparently we’ve got a ghost town, too. Of course we would. “Interesting. Thanks.” I leave them with a five-dollar tip, eliciting big smiles, and head back to my car to drive away. Out of curiosity I take the left and follow the weather-beaten road into the trees. It only goes about two hundred yards before transitioning into a lumpy gravel trail.

After about a mile of twists and turns, I come to a sort of clearing. There are indeed three station wagons parked off to the side. One has a tiny sticker in the back window that reads SILVERTOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. I place my hand on the maroon hood. Cool to the touch. From one of the pockets on my belt I find a piece of chalk and use it to mark one of the tires. This is more out of habit than anything. One of the oldest police tricks in the book, primarily to know if someone has been parked too long in the same place. That’s not a concern here, but if the cars are parked here tomorrow it might be nice to know if they camped wherever they are, or left and returned.

Back in my cruiser I pull an old paper map from the glove box. It doesn’t take long to find this stretch of road, nor to find the dotted line continuing from the dead end. A walking trail. I trace its winding, erratic path with my finger. Sure enough, nearly six miles into the forest there’s a marker for a historical site. Trinity, it’s called. This is a new one to me. I google it on my phone and sit for several minutes reading about the place. More of a settlement than a town, really. According to the site, there was a “general store, saloon, and several brothels,” all-purpose built to serve prospectors, but the location turned out to be inconvenient once the silver mine was dug. People gradually moved to the rapidly growing nearby Silvertown, which was much easier to access from the mountain’s base.

I read on, finding blog posts from the historical society. The term “ghost town” is used generously. It’s really just a collection of decrepit, disused structures, all rendered inaccessible to any tourism by six miles of treacherous, poorly maintained trail. And though it’s not expressly stated, I get the sense the historical society’s preservation efforts are more for their own satisfaction and not to turn the site into another stomping ground for tourists.

Map folded again and tucked away, I set off once more, though less sure now of where I’m going to go next. The cell tower theory seems like a dud. All the other options seem too much like the plots from episodes of Ancient Aliens. Next thing I know I’m going to be at the county airport, asking about chemtrails.

Without any real sense of purpose, other than simply to keep looking, I head on down the highway, through a quiet downtown, and all the way to Keller’s Bridge—the westernmost point of my jurisdiction.

The old iron bridge marks the spot where Silvertown ends and Granston begins. It’s a rusted, ugly thing that looks about twenty years past its maintenance date. Greg is convinced a tired trucker is going to bump into it one night and send the whole thing down into the river some fifty feet below. One of us comes down here every day just to make sure no one’s broken down on the span, as it is the only way in or out of town.

There had been an effort back in the 1980s to replace the bridge with a modern steel-and-concrete version, but like the planned telescope at the mountaintop, work was scrapped when 90 percent of the residents moved away in the wake of the Conaty fiasco. Not enough tax-base to justify the cost. “The state is just waiting for the town to die, now,” Greg told me on our first visit to the bridge together.

What they’d managed to build before that happened was large concrete pylons on either side of the river. They’re still here today, like two monuments to the shifting winds of politics and economy in Silvertown.

As for the river, it’s not much more than a trickle right now. In spring I’m told it gets quite full and swift, but with all the snowpack already