Serial Saturday: Landry’s Letter (Kati’s story part 4)

(Need to start at an earlier part? Click the appropriate number:   1  2  3)

“I guess we’ll just have to wait for God to reveal it.”  Jonathan had said.

Sometimes she wanted to strangle him.

It wasn’t what he had said.  She respected the purity of his convictions even as she struggled to understand how he could hold them.

No, it wasn’t what he’d said, it was the reason he had said it:  The twinkle in his eyes, the clear attempt to bait her.  He was manipulating her; not just trying but succeeding.  This is what irked her most: even as she knew it, even as she resisted it, she knew he had pushed exactly the right button to get exactly what he wanted.  What he wanted, of course, was her help finding Landry’s mine.  And Walter’s too.  That puzzled her.  Why bring Walter into it at all?  Maybe he needed his money; that must be it of course.

She looked at the letter in her hand; the one Jonathan had revealed with such a dramatic flair.  According to him, it was a genuine letter from Landry.  Not just any letter but a virtual suicide letter.  She looked at the last paragraph, the one Jonathan had indicated he believed contained clues to the location of the mine.  She doubted it.  The man had lost his wife to the mine somehow, and these last lines seemed only to speak of bitterness and despair.

  My wife’s death leaves me dead too.  The fate of my wife had indeed sealed my own fate as surely as I have sealed up the mine.  The curse of the mine has become mine own curse.  Perhaps another 100 years will pass before it’s found again, only God can say as only the Angels know.  I have hidden it again as surely as it was hidden before.  I have hidden myself inside it.   Caroline, my Caroline, what terror must you have suffered, what pain of loneliness, what pain of hopelessness, as your breaths grew thinner and thinner.  I come to you as you left me, hoping that through our shared suffering I can receive some small redemption, that you can forgive me. 

Katherine shivered.  Could such a horror actually hide clues to the mine?  Did Landry even desire it to be so?  She put the letter away on the stand next to her bed.  Even if it could be found maybe it should be left alone.

I guess we’ll just have to wait for God to reveal it.

Ugh.  Jonathan had made the statement as if a concession, as if he were excusing them, excusing her, from the task of finding the mine.  After all no one had been able to find it for fifty years at least; after all it would be so much work.  No one could possibly find it.  As the note itself said, perhaps only God can say.  She knew she could find it if she put her mind to it.

As irrational as it seemed, even to Kati, the idea that God might reveal it someday to someone else would be an indication that she had failed to find it.  As Jonathan had known, she could not let God win this one.  A God she refused to believe in was goading her to prove His irrelevance by finding a mine she didn’t even care about.  She swore at Jonathan under her breath and wondered if the others were sleeping; wondered what seed Jonathan had planted to insure Walter joined them.  She was sure he had, and she was sure, as usual, Jonathan would get what he wanted; and then give the credit to God.

Thus thinking of tragic lovers, and the vagaries of men named Walter and Jonathan, she finally drifted off to sleep.