Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  Grandpa?

  “Dad, do you think you can do it? Can you get that femur for Gretchen out tonight?” Jerry asks the old man.

  “Trying my hardest, son,” he says.

  “Earl, how about I help?” Laura says to the old man.

  “Bitch, work on your own bones,” Gretchen snaps.

  Industrial, caged construction lights surround the top edge of the pit within the open cave. Around the mouth of the cave, Gretchen and Jerry move into place various items set aside presumably the last time this motley crew came down here: a folding table, which Gretchen sets a puzzle atop; a tent behind that; two chairs; and a tripod holding a pot over a firepit, which Jerry is lighting. Once lit, he takes a water jug, fills it from a stagnant puddle to the side of the cave, and dumps it in the pot. A larger tripod is set up over the pit; dangling from its center is a rope from a wheel, around which the rope winds, leading to a winch set up beside the fire.

  Earl and Laura settle into the pit, the tops of their heads visible to Mag through her binoculars. Their voices are now even more amplified, the cave acting as a bullhorn to the bullhorn of the gorge walls.

  “Go on, Earl, please recite the facts again. Need ’em to work,” Laura says.

  “If you’re going to talk boring science again, make it fast, I want to do a puzzle,” Gretchen barks into the pit.

  “Well, now, Laura, happy to go over the science again if that helps to settle your mind. Our work pit here is the result of a convergence of rare factors, making it near impossible to have occurred, but it did. A sinkhole within the floor of a cave at the nub end of a gorge of granite.”

  As Earl talks, Mag skates her binoculars around the interior of the pit. From what she can tell, and based on Gretchen’s command, Earl is set before a femur embedded in the pit wall, and Laura is set before a skull, a quarter protruding out of compacted dirt. White pieces, presumably more bones, dot more of the pit walls.

  Earl continues his night lesson, apparently one given as a regular bedtime story to dull the horror of their work. A captive’s routine of forced archaeology. Mag feels whiplashed by the oddity, by the sheer horror. The inexplicable situation to find her baby girl stuck in—but she doesn’t have time for a stunning. She must listen. She must gather facts and plan. Recalling her summers of survival trainings with Cord and D, she settles her mind with a trick they taught her: Pretend there is a knob on the right side of your head, by your temple; turn the knob off. Literally turn off the worry and the fear. Listen, recite what you hear in your mind as if you’re saying the words yourself. And catalog every single little thing you see in a constant running list.

  “The pit, fifteen feet wide and thirty feet deep, so far, is the result of loose sediment giving way and sucking further to the core of hell, as if the earth has inhaled, and thus, revealed these hidden secrets. These vanished people,” Earl says.

  Gretchen, having set up her table with a puzzle, grabs two items out of a crate. She drops one to Laura and one to Earl. After the captives unfurl their packages, Mag can see they are satchels, each containing a plastic trowel, a toothbrush, several wooden skewers (typically used for dices of chicken and vegetables), and a separate cloth bag with a hook.

  The captives hook their cloth bags to the end of the rope that dangles from the center of the larger tripod over the pit. Once attached, the bags hang deflated in the center space. Presumably for bones they extract? The operation is somewhat like sending an advance team into a well to test for oil. Except Earl and Laura work the sides of this hole for human bones.

  “More facts, Laura?” Earl asks.

  “Yes, please.”

  Laura holds a toothbrush and a wood skewer, alternating between the two tools to pick away at pebbles and dirt around a tiny skull she appears to be working to extract.

  “But skip the part how these people died. I don’t want to hear that part tonight. Get to the science part about the bones,” she says.

  “All right, then,” Earl says. His voice is an elderly, authoritative, rumbly gravel, like big rocks in a tumbler. “Assume a mass of people died in the floor of this gorge decades ago. Assume the manner of death also helped with preservation of their remains. All in one day, one died, then another, then another. So on. The very next day . . . It’s crazy. But the very next day, with all those dead bodies on the floor of the gorge, a flash flood far off pushed a mudslide to rush in a funnel through this long-dry riverbed, causing mud and silt with plenty of fine sediment mixed with clay to cover the bodies and carry them into this cave. This then becomes an anoxic environment, no oxygen, and, with the way the people died, which part you want me to skip tonight, well, a perfect storm for preservation. With the bodies deprived of oxygen and under layers of mud, the skin, muscle, and fat decomposed, but no predators were able to carry off the bones. Then . . .” Earl pauses to cough.

  He’s stopped talking and is brushing at the femur he’s been trying to extract.

  Just watch. Get intel. Make a plan.

  “Pull yourself together, Grandpa! Get back to work,” Gretchen yells at Earl, who is barely breathing through the coughing.

  Laura edges closer to Earl as if to help him.

  “Back away from him, Laura. Do you want me to drop boiling water on you two again? Keep apart, no whispering. Only talking loud enough for us to hear. No plotting, you two.”

  “Fine,” Earl says. “I’m fine, ah, fine,” he repeats, between catching his breath.

  Earl points up to Gretchen, his own damn granddaughter, to indicate he hears her. He shows her his brush and that he’ll begin work again.

  “I need that femur tonight.”

  “Oh baby, you’ll be the best orthopedician. I’m so proud,” Jerry Sabin says.

  “Tonight, Grandpa!” Gretchen shouts.

  “Yes, Gretchen. You’ll have it tonight,” he says.

  As Earl brushes at the femur, he continues his recitation of scientific facts. “Then, in the most perfect of storms to collide, a minor, minor sinkhole began beneath this pit, much like a pinched-in nozzle on a funnel. But real pinched in and tiny. So anyway, sediment starts sucking into the core of earth, and I imagine there’s some kind of rock bed with crevices below us here making this happen, revealing the bones. Now they haven’t had time to fossilize, obviously. And you know we need to be careful. Some are in good shape, preserved pretty well, some brittle, some yellowed, so on. There’s a ton of variation in the preservation of bones in here. But all these rare factors came together all right, and this pit’s the proof. Now the wildlife?”

  “Yes, please,” Laura says, brushing away dirt from the small skull’s cheek. “Go on.” She’s pick, pick, picking at a stubborn cluster of pebbles.

  “Did you ever see a bear den, Laura?”

  Mag listens and watches and logs and catalogs all night.

  Dawn now. A mist haze hanging in the colorful fall treetops acts as a low ceiling above the cliff walls. Mag scans the face of the granite ledges and notes ravens’ nests. All around in trees and in rock crevices are homes for black-capped chickadees, tits, the Northern cardinal, and sparrows. Mag thinks back to how she and Laura and all the Triple C girls were trained on bird-watching, especially as part of their treetop–bird bingo course. Birding was the key, number-one theme, a core tenet, at the camp for “adventurous girls.”

  On the top of a dead tree in the base of the gorge is an eagle’s nest. A woodpecker greets with his morning hammer, and joining his drum comes the orchestra of several birds braiding their calls into a symphony of chip-chip-chips, dee-dee-dees, trilllllls, and caws.

  “Send up your tools,” Gretchen yells to her captives in a chipper morning voice.

  Earl and Laura place their respective tools in the pouches attached to rope, cinch the tops, and yank to let Gretchen know she can pull. Up the sides of the pit, the tools go. Next, Gretchen cranks the wheel that winds the now-empty cloth bags up the center space. Earl had sent up the femur hours ago to a silent audience, which Mag noted, for
at that time, Gretchen was napping in the tent.

  Jerry and Gretchen nap in turns in the tent.

  Earl and Laura climb out of the pit, Laura struggling and pausing and grunting with the effort of using her mangled legs.

  The songbirds chitter and dee-dee and pick and hammer and caw, a song to accompany Laura’s literal crawl through the valley to the trail that slopes up and up and winds in serpentine curves onto the Sabin property.

  Mag monitors and logs the entire trek, timing when she herself will add to the birds’ symphony. She has a plan.

  Once the train of captors and captives reaches the joint where the valley floor meets the serpentine, upward trail, Laura Ingrace shifts her crawl to a wobbly stand. This joint is also where Mag had last night watched Laura struggle to reach during a guarded pee break. Now, in daylight, through her powerful binoculars, Mag notes a bright-orange mushroom in a hole in the base of a large pine that marks this very turning point.

  Higher up in the orange mushroom pine, a female long-eared owl nests in a cavity. She’s nocturnal, so her round eyes are closed. Last night, Mag had noted her yellow globes glaring out, searching for a midnight snack skittering on the gorge floor.

  And now, trusting Laura would have also noticed the long-eared female, given their similar experience at the Triple C, and given what the feds have since told Mag of Laura’s bird-photography business, Mag adds to the birds’ morning symphony. “Whoo, whoo,” she sounds out from the top of the opposite cliff wall, sending the imitation call from the back of her throat, using her stomach to push the air as a singer would, as trained in birding, as practiced for years.

  Laura pauses in her wobbly stand. She’s beside the orange mushroom pine, the long-eared female above her, sleeping in a high cavity.

  “Whoo, whoo,” Mag signals again.

  Nobody else in the train pauses; nobody else notices a different birdcall among nature’s morning clatter.

  But Laura does. And Laura looks up to the long-eared’s nest and then around and up toward Mag’s cliff wall. There is no way Laura can see Mag, camouflaged so far away and up and flat on the surface of the cliff top. And yet, Laura most definitely heard her.

  “Whoo, whoo,” Mag signals to cement the call.

  Laura tips her head up, indicating an answer, an I heard you. And I know you’re not the gorge’s one resident owl.

  Anyone trained on birds, like Laura and Mag, would know a whoo whoo would not come on an October morning from a nocturnal, female long-eared owl. Laura would know. She’s been paid big bucks to capture snaps of male long-eared owls who whoo whoo during breeding season, February to July.

  A whoo cannot come from this female, in the morning, while she’s snoozing, in October.

  In the train of people in the silt valley, only Mag and Laura know her whoo whoo is not natural. Another whoo whoo, and only Laura reacting, confirms to Mag that everyone else hears only an owl hooting. They don’t even look up into the tree they stand beside, apparently not knowing one was ever there the whole time.

  Before turning back to the task of hobbling and struggling and grasping pine boughs to pull herself up the trail, Laura shoots a look of pure hatred to the top of Mag’s cliff wall. She is in the rear now, Gretchen ahead, waiting for Laura to find her feet and step into her second-from-the-rear spot in the train. And it is at this point, as her face is free to stare up to the top of Mag’s cliff wall, when Laura mouths, “Fuck you, Magpie.”

  Laura is sick, Mag thinks. She’s deranged. She’s captive and sick and broken. But she’s going to need to get her shit together and help me save Lucy. And then I will think on punishment and revenge. Then. Only then.

  Mag is frightened and confused, but she turns that invisible survival knob on the side of her head. Turn, turn, turn of the knob, fighting through the horror and panic, because what other choice does she have?

  At least Laura recognizes my voice, our old game of birdcalls. Our old camp training. Part of our secret game.

  Once the valley of the gorge is clear—presumably they’re all back on the Sabins’ property—Mag finds a precarious trail down the side of the gorge wall. In clear daylight, she logs the intricate details of the silt floor. The slate-colored inchworm on a slate rock. The lime brightness of lichen on light-gray stones. A carpet of moss bordering the edges, dotted with fallen crimson leaves. A lacy cobweb strung between the lowest boughs of a Douglas fir, like the low-hanging ornament a toddler hangs. The smell of dirt. Twigs that look like stick-insect soldiers for fairies. A white-tipped gray-and-black tail feather from a wild turkey. A blue feather from a blue jay for good luck.

  She extracts pen and paper from her backpack and writes a note. Once done, she slides to the skull—an infant’s skull—Laura is working to extract but hasn’t cleared yet. Having rolled her note, Mag sticks the scroll in an eye socket.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  LUCY

  The first night was a long one of me whipping myself into a fruitless fury. I kept slamming my body into the damn locked door, locked good and tight. Jamming on the solid knob. Nothing. Stupid, wasteful efforts, along with unfocused pacing. Dumb. I tried to find a way to climb on something to get to the big halogen lights, thinking I could smash one apart and create a tool or weapon. The yellow toilet is no help, as it’s in a nook and not near a damn thing in the ceiling. So I dumped all the bones out of the kiddie pools and stacked the pools on top of each other upside down. But that was an obvious stupid waste of time, because when I took a running jump to the top of the plastic tower, the top pool ate the one below, and that one ate the one below that, and so on. Friggin’ crumpled to the ground, and now I have a huge bruise on my forearm.

  Then I got all worried Gretchen would return from her stupid work out back and her supervision of pit workers, whatever the fuck that means, and see all the dumped bones and freak out. The fact she wasn’t saying anything over the intercom told me she was truly not in the house—I don’t think she would have been able to keep her flapping mouth shut had she seen what I’d done. And certainly she would have mocked me when my pool tower collapsed and I fell.

  Anyway, I put all the dumb pools back in their two lines next to the gray mats, filled them back up in a way that looked even, but now all the stupid bones are mixed up, and who cares, because I am not going to ever finish all these skeletons. I am going to find a way out. I wasn’t kidnapped and kept from Mag for thirteen years to wind up kidnapped by Gretchen Freakshow Sabin for her personal horror show.

  It’s our second day now, and about elevenish, I’m guessing. I’m judging from this morning when Gretchen’s sickening voice startled me over the intercom and said, “Lucy, it’s dawn. Daddy went to go get his coffee and snickerdoodles, as usual. I see you made no progress with the bones.”

  I didn’t look up at her. I slumped on the floor.

  “Well, poopsie-doo. You better get on it. No cookies for you this morning.”

  Then she was gone.

  Now it’s a few hours later, so I’m saying it’s eleven, and here’s her horrible voice again.

  “Shoot, Lucy, darn. Your moth-errr is insisting on video evidence that you’re okay. She’s such a psycho. She’s sitting on top of her camper holding up a big poster that says, ‘Proof of Life Call Now. Or I Call the Cops. FaceTime.’ And then her dumb phone number. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to hold my iPhone up to my screen, and we’ll do a proof-of-life call. You say you’re fine. And that is all. If you do anything more, I will snap Allen’s neck. Ready? Oh, and you can stand now, walk to the center of the room, and look up to the cameras. Ready?”

  I’m reminded how when I came up here, I stupidly left my own iPhone charging in the camper, and then once I was locked in, Gretchen made me strip and prove I had no phone before she turned her Wi-Fi back on. That was humiliating. All I had on was my jelly necklace.

  I do as she says and emit no emotions for a proof-of-life call to Mag. No emotion of fright or anger or anything. I do exactly
as Gretchen says, because now I’m plotting; some kernel of a plan is bubbling in my mind.

  “Lucy, are you okay?” Mag asks. “I see you. Where are you in there?”

  “Room. First floor—”

  “Enough,” Gretchen interrupts.

  “Sit tight. They say it’s a game. They’ll torch the place if we don’t play along,” Mag says.

  “Enough,” Gretchen says, harsher this time.

  “Wait. Wait. Put her back on the screen now or I swear to God, I’m calling the cops,” I hear Mag yell.

  “Lucy, I’m back. I see you. What level are you at?” She stresses the word level.

  Level.

  A calm washes over me, because she’s speaking code. I love that I have a secret code with my mother. When we were in California and visiting Cord and D at the Triple C, they taught me how in their search-and-rescue-and-extraction practice—in case any resort guests ever went missing (they like to overprepare)—they have signals. A number-one pointer signal meant “Level 1: no danger.” Four fingers meant “Level 4,” and shit is going all haywire.

  Obviously this shit show is a Level 88, maximum haywire, so Mag asking is her way of saying she’s working a rescue-and-extraction plan. If there’s one thing I trust, it’s that there’s no way Mag is sitting still, so I want her to concentrate on whatever she’s doing on the outside of our trap and not worry that I’m falling apart on the inside. We’re fighting this together, I can feel it. She is the very wedge of me I was always missing, and with her, I am whole now. I need to work the inside while she works the outside. We’re a tandem team: mother and daughter.

  I’m scared as all hell, but my past makes me hard. And I will not be a simpering girl. I will not weaken this team. I won’t fall and fail. I’m going to be tough as nails.

  It is so hard to do, but I do not smirk at our sly code in holding up a single pointer finger, meaning, Sure, Mag, I’m cool. I’m at a Level 1. And I trust we’ll work this out together.

  “What the hell is that?” Gretchen yells. “That’s it. You’re done with this call.”