Her Last Breath: A Kate Burkholder Novel

thought it was a lucky shot, but Leon had spent the next week bragging about it to the girls at the pool where they were on the dive team. The girls had been impressed because word around town was that the old place was haunted. By whom, no one knew. Jack didn’t care; the rumors made for some good stories, even if they weren’t quite true.
    Jack wheeled his bike up the gravel track and laid it on its side twenty yards from the yawning mouth. “You bring smokes?”
    “I got two off my dad.” Leon leaned his bike against a good-size sapling and hopped off.
    “Just two?”
    “My old man catches me smoking and I’m dead meat.”
    The boys started toward the overhead door, which was rolled halfway up and off its track on one side. The afternoon air was humid, hot, and thick with end-of-summer bugs swarming in the rays of sun slanting down from the treetops. Jack ducked through the door first and stepped into the hazy shadows of the elevator. Even after coming here all summer, he couldn’t get over how big the place was—or how creepy. The office was the scariest. There were papers and bird shit all over the place. Once, they’d found blood and feathers on the floor. They hadn’t come back for almost a week. But this old place had been the most exciting part of their summer, and despite the creep-factor, neither boy had been able to stay away. They were explorers, after all, and danger was part of the allure.
    School started on Monday, so this would be their last day to explore, before football practice and all those extracurricular activities crowded their schedules. Both boys would be in seventh grade. Jack wasn’t looking forward to middle school. He liked being a sixth grader because that made him one of the oldest—and biggest—kids. He was king of the playground and no one messed with him. Seventh grade would put him back at the bottom of the totem pole and he’d have to start all over again. The good news was, once he got up the nerve, he planned to ask Lori Deardorf to go steady.
    “Come on, you dip.”
    Pulled from his daydreaming, Jack trotted up beside Leon. The murky interior smelled of dirt and mold and rotting wood. Jack liked the smells. He was going to miss this place when school started.
    They walked along the cracked concrete slab where farm trucks had once rolled in with loads of corn and soybeans. Ahead, the office with its broken windows and rusty file cabinets beckoned. There was an old chair inside. Some animal had ripped up the seat and pulled out the stuffing. Every time Jack walked in, he checked the office first because he was always afraid he’d find someone sitting on that old chair, watching them. Once when they’d come here on a windy day, they’d been in the office and the old overhead door where they entered fell down another foot. Aside from finding the blood, it was the creepiest thing that had ever happened.
    Remembering, Jack quickened his pace. “Gimme a cig.”
    Leon reached into the pocket of his hoodie. “Wish I’d brought the BB gun. We could have shot us some rats.”
    Jack looked around uneasily. He didn’t like the idea of rats. “They only come out at night.”
    “Still, it woulda been—”
    Leon’s words were cut off as he went down. One moment he was walking beside Jack, digging for his smokes. The next he was being sucked into the ground, like in the movie where the corpse grabs your ankle and yanks you into his casket. Jack looked down to see that his friend had stepped into some kind of hole and fallen in up to his waist.
    “Crap!” Leon’s hands scrabbled on the dirt as he tried to claw his way out. “Help me!”
    “Shit! Hang on!” Jack grabbed one of his arms and pulled as hard as he could.
    Within seconds, Leon was back on his feet and both boys found themselves staring into a deep, dark pit. “Holy cow!”
    “That’s a deep fuckin’ hole!” Jack exclaimed.
    “Gotta be ten feet down.”
    “More like twelve.”
    Leon brushed the dirt from his jeans. “I ain’t never seen that before. What the hell is it?”
    Jack lived on a farm a few miles down the road. Just last week, he’d gone to the grain elevator in Painters Mill with his dad. He knew what the boot pit was and had a pretty good idea how it worked. “It’s where the farmers dump corn and shit.”
    “I wonder why they didn’t cover it up.”
    “Looks like they did. Sort of.” Jack used the toe of his sneaker to uncover the edge of the steel grate. “They just