by Marc Cameron
“Someone knelt here,” Lola said.
But it was the glint of metal that had caught her eye. Something shiny pressed into the dirt, almost hidden.
Fired brass.
Lola used her pen to pick it up and passed it back to Van Dyke when she found another.
“Rectangular primer strike,” the detective observed. “Glock.” She dumped the spent casing in her vest pocket and continued to watch the surrounding woods for threats.
“Cutter’s,” Lola said, searching the undergrowth, trying to suss out what had gone on here from the signs on the ground.
“I thought he carried that big revolver.”
“His grandpa’s,” Lola said, still searching the ground. “Technically, that’s his backup. Per policy he has to carry a Glock, but if he resorted to…” She dropped to her knees next to a wide stump a dozen feet to the right of the hemlock, seeing something out of place, wanting a closer look.
“So,” Van Dyke said. “They had a firefight here, but there are no bodies, so something happened to break off the fight.”
“Here we go,” Lola said, pushing aside some rotten wood at the base of the stump to reveal two spent .357 cases.
“This is what I was looking for.”
Cutter had reloaded here – maybe just topped off after a couple of shots, Lola couldn’t tell. She decided not to take the time to search for more brass.
The spent ammo lit a fire in Lola’s belly. Arliss Cutter was the most capable guy she’d ever worked for or with, but he was in trouble now. She could feel it in her gut. And if there’s one thing Cutter had instilled in her, it was to trust that niggling gut when it spoke to her.
The terrain steepened considerably. Rotten logs bigger around than her waist crisscrossed the forest floor. Blacks and greens and browns ruled the day, smudging back other colors. The skids and scuffs in the ground grew deeper, more widely spaced. Lola imagined Cutter and Lori running. But were they running from someone or after them? Cutter would have done some of his tracking voodoo and figured it out. The bastard. He made it look so easy.
The tracks suddenly cut left into a depression that Lola guessed was an old trail. The ground leveled some, running along an exposed granite face just taller than her head. It was easier going here and she had to remind herself not to run faster than she could read the ground.
Then the tracks stopped.
A slab of moss-covered earth had sluffed down the mountain on a slurry of mud and gravel fifteen feet across.
“What do you think?” Van Dyke asked, breathing heavily from the fast climb. “Landslide?”
“Yep,” Lola said.
But what had caused it? She skirted the loose gravel and rock, and found tracks on the other side, leading along the same overgrown trail.
“Let’s hurry,” Lola said, pointing up the mountain, urgency welling in her belly. “This slide looks fresh. Cutter’s close. I can feel it.”
Chapter 48
Under normal circumstances – above ground where people were meant to live – the tiny candle flame beside Donita Willets’s cot would have hardly been noticed. Down here, in the darkness of her underground prison, it was bright enough she could turn off her headlamp unless she was reading. The little flame served three purposes. It told her there was oxygen, chased the darkness away from her little nest, and kept her from sliding any further into insanity.
Pacing beside her cot, she checked her phone. The intense glow from the screen reflected off her face, which she knew was slightly scrunched from the helmet straps. She’d thought of taking it off, but the frequent clatter of rocks falling from the high ceiling made her decide to sleep in it.
She kept the phone on airplane mode to save battery, but switched that off for a few seconds. Maybe a miracle signal would somehow beam down through the portal at the far end of the huge man-made cavern and bounce around on the rocks until it found her.
There was nothing, of course, but living in a pit could make you think crazy stuff.
She switched back to airplane mode and consoled herself by swiping through some pics – Levi in his boat on a sunny day, looking happy; some old ones of her mom during the all-too-infrequent healthy times between rehab and falling off the wagon.
Sighing, she switched off the phone and set it gently under the rolled jacket she used as a pillow at the head of her cot.
Near the opening, a rock fell from the ceiling, bounced off the ledge, and then smacked the ground.
“That was a big one.” She whispered to herself a lot now. Anything louder seemed freaky, out of place.
A second rock hit the ledge below the opening, then stopped. A shower of smaller stones followed, some piling on the ledge, others clattering to the floor.
“Levi?” she said, breathless, barely audible, even to herself. Finally, he’d come back and she could leave this horrible tomb. She snuffed out the candle, and all but ran to meet him, keeping to the edges to keep from getting brained by falling rocks. The angle of the portal let in very little light except for up on the ceiling.
Donita stood against the wall beneath the ledge next to the dangling ropes. She kept her headlamp on its dimmest setting so as not to blind Levi when he started down. Frantic to see his face again, she cupped a hand to her mouth to call up.
More rocks fell, which was weird. Levi was more careful than that. He had to know that she’d be down here, going stir-crazy waiting for him to come back.
He was supposed to whistle before he came down, signal it was him and that she was safe.
She pressed her back against the rock face. Gravel continued to pour over the lip of the ledge – but no whistle.
The climbing rope to her right swayed, and then the carabiner attached near the ground began to rise as someone started to haul it up. Levi had used this one to get out and then lower the water down to her. Someone gave the rope to her left a tug. Her ascenders still hung on the dangling line, one above the other. Anyone who pulled up the rope and saw them attached would know she was still down here.
She thought of trying to take them off, but the rope was already rising. She’d need slack to release the cam that held them in place. Instead, she drew the folding knife Levi had given her. Holding slack above the cut so anyone at the top wouldn’t feel the sudden increase in tension, she managed to saw through the line moments before it rose out of her reach. The cut would look suspicious, but not as much as the ascenders at the end of a rope.
The ropes disappeared over the ledge. She clicked off her light and trotted as quietly as she could back around the wall to her cot. She switched the headlamp to a dim red glow, hoping it couldn’t be seen from above, and then scooped up her bedroll and cot and shuffled behind the largest of the stone support pillars in the small beetle-head room. She chanced one more quick trip to get her pack and then ducked behind a second pillar with her back to the underground pool. She switched her headlamp off and waited. In the darkness behind her, droplets of water plopped into the underground pool. Rocks continued to chatter against the floor, echoing through the Great Hall.
Donita thought she heard voices, held her breath, still hoping it might be Levi. A whirring buzz suddenly pierced the darkness, whining loud enough to cover the noise of persistent rock fall. Bats? No. She’d been here long enough she would have seen bats. The whir grew louder, filling the cavern, bouncing off the rock. It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
The buzz of ten thousand bees.
It was almost on top of her now, waiting on the other side of the column, daring her to show herself.
Donita covered her ears and clenched her eyes tight, pressing tears of fear through her lashes.
Darkness was absolute – but it didn’t matter. She didn’t have to see to know exactly what it was.
Chapter 49
Lori Maycomb sloshed through ankle-deep water, shoulder to shoulder with Cutter. Every breath filled her lungs with more of the dark that never came back out, making her heavier and heavier until she fe
lt sure she would collapse. The tiny pools of light from their headlamps were far too feeble to help her steady herself in the unbearable closeness of the mine. Cutter walked in silence, waiting for her to unburden herself, surely unable to imagine the things she’d done.
She jumped when he spoke, gasping in more darkness.
“You can change your mind,” he said.
“No… I…” She looked sideways, aware of her lamp and not wanting to blind him. “What would you do if your wife got so drunk she woke up next to some guy in a homeless camp?”
Cutter walked in silence for a time. “I have no idea.”
“Right answer,” Lori said. “I’ll spare you the lead-up, but my drunk brain told me booze was far more important than my husband and our little boy. I remember going to Anchorage to work on a story, and telling myself I’d just have a couple of beers at a little sports bar in midtown. A couple of beers turned into seven, and all the little bottles of liquor from my hotel minibar – even the baby Patróns, and I hate tequila. Every day for a week, I tried to outdo my previous record. The lady at the Brown Jug even started to cajole me when I went in. I stopped calling home the third day. By the fourth, I stopped answering my phone. The next day, I lost the phone in a bar somewhere. Six days in, I was trying to stumble back to my hotel room when I saw a drug store off Northern Lights that was having a sale on box wine…”
Lori shuddered as the memories came rushing back.
“The next thing I know, I’m waking up in a tent under the trees in some greenbelt in midtown. I had no idea how I got there, or how I met the lump asleep beside me. I mean, I love my husband. I drink, at least I did, but I don’t pick up men. Ever. And still, there I was, next to a toothless guy who somehow convinced my drunk brain that I should party with him in his tent.”
She checked Cutter’s face. Still impassive. He was a better sin eater than he let on.
“Anyway, he smelled like old socks and stale urine, but then, so did I by this point. My wallet was on the ground beside him, the money gone. He must have passed out before he… you know. I just… I puked right there on the tent floor, then again outside. I think I left a trail all the way to the road.
“Anyway, I ran until my feet bled, wanting to put as much distance between myself and the situation. Then I caught a glimpse of a reflection in the window of a Subway sandwich shop, a barefoot Native woman with a snotty nose and matted hair. It hit me like a train. I was the situation. It didn’t matter how far I ran, I’d still be there. I tried to wash up in a coffee shop restroom, but the hipster barista ran me off in the middle of my spit bath.”
Maycomb sighed, giving Cutter a pitiful look, not because she wanted sympathy. She just couldn’t manage anything else. “So there I was, barefoot on the streets of Anchorage, with sopping wet hair and cry-swollen face. I fell down on my knees on the corner of Northern Lights and… I don’t know where…” She began to cry but kept talking. “My heart was not strong enough to tell my drunk brain to quit drinking. People talk all the time in AA about rock bottom. Well, that day was my rock bottom – not that I’d nearly let some drunk guy go to town on me in his tent, but that I’d totally forgotten about my husband and son, the most precious people in my life.
“I flagged down the first Anchorage cop that I saw and told him I was a drunk and wanted to get sober. He believed the first part, but was not so sure about the last. Six days in detox, another month of in-patient, and they gave me my old job back at the radio station in Juneau. You know, the worst part? The worst part is that my husband took care of our little boy the entire time without a word of argument or threat. He never filed any papers, no protective orders, nothing to tell the courts what a shitty mother I was. I have no idea why, but he took me back – and then he died. Suddenly. A headache. Dead.”
Maycomb slogged along in silence for several steps, then gave a halfhearted shrug. “It’s pretty easy to see why Rockie hates me.”
“You told your husband everything?” Cutter said at length.
“All of it. More than I told you.”
“And he took you back,” Cutter said. It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway.
“Yes.”
“Seems to me, that’s all that matters. Detective Van Dyke is going to think what she’s going to think. My granddad used to say that we can’t change someone else’s mind, we can only change ourselves and let things shake out like they shake out.”
“Sounds too simple.”
“The principle is simple,” Cutter said. “Following through with it’s hard as hell. I’m not big on pop psychology, but I will tell you this – everybody on earth’s got a secret sin. Something they know without a doubt is so much worse than everybody else’s sins. Most of the time, they’re not worse, they’re just different.”
“Have you got one?”
“Indeed I do,” Cutter said. “And I will spend the rest of my life making amends for it.”
“Will you—”
“Not a chance.”
* * *
Cutter played his headlamp across the gray rock face at the end of the tunnel. Maycomb had given up a lot, but he wasn’t the sort of guy to ask questions. If she wanted to say more, she was welcome to. Until then, he needed to reach Donita Willets.
Two rough-cut pieces of timber stuck a few inches above a dark void at the base of the wall. Cutter stood at the edge, toes against the ladder, looking down. The ladder was probably as old as the mine, well over a hundred years. Hand-hewn timbers formed the uprights, as well as the crosspieces. Water from the tunnel floor cascaded in a small but steady fall over the rungs, keeping them wet and, Cutter hoped, from wasting away to dry rot. In its day, the ladder had been hell for stout, capable of holding the weight of miners and heavy gear. But now…
Cutter put a boot to the top rung, pressed, but didn’t commit.
“It’s more hope and rust than it is wood,” he said. “But it seems to be holding.”
“For now,” Maycomb said, unconvinced, Eeyore-like.
Cutter peeked over the edge, exploring the bottom to see what sort of jagged rocks and mining tools he would impale himself on if the ladder disintegrated. The shaft appeared to widen into a larger room below. The water pouring over the edge turned the bottom ground to a muddy slurry. For all Cutter knew, it was a bottomless pit of gunk, but a splintered dynamite crate and a rusted coffee can beneath the hole made him believe it was no more than a few inches deep. He dropped a rock the size of his fist, watched it splat and then sink halfway into the ooze. The water had to be going somewhere.
Bracing himself on the uneven rock wall, he leaned forward to point his light farther back in the open room. He slipped on the slick floor, caught himself, and then began to turn his helmet back and forth, scanning the muddy cavern below.
Maycomb’s hand shot to her mouth when the beam illuminated something pale at the edge of the shadows. The shapes were too regular for rocks.
She gasped. “Are those bones?”
“Too big to be human,” Cutter said.
“Aliens then,” Maycomb groused.
“More likely a horse or a mule. Probably spent a good deal of its life underground, maybe even born down here without ever seeing the light of day. Odd that the miners would just leave the dead carcass to rot in this spot. It would have been a straight shot to cut it up like a moose and haul the pieces out. Something must have happened…”
“Like what?” Maycomb asked, eyes locked on the bones. Absent any sunlight to bleach them, the bones had absorbed the minerals in the mud that surrounded them, turning the color of a terracotta pot.
Cutter shrugged off his pack and set it on the ground.
“You’re going to use the rope?” Maycomb asked.
“Nope.” Cutter slipped on his thin Mechanix gloves to give him some level of protection from hundred-year-old slivers of wood. “But that pack is thirty pounds the rungs don’t have to hold if it’s not on my back. Drop it down to me when I get to the bottom.”
Maycomb began to chew on a hangnail. She looked up at Cutter, then said, “I know, I know. No smoking.”
Cutter used the lip of the shaft to lower himself into the hole, descending slowly. He added pressure gradually to each successive rung, one foot at a time, probing, testing, before committing both feet to repeat the process. He had a vague idea that he’d grip the uprights if one of the rungs gave way, letting his feet crash through while the shattering wood acted as a brake. But they held. The idea sounded insane anyway by the time he reached the bottom, like something from a superhero movie.
“Toss it down,” he yelled when his feet hit firm ground.
Water gurgled somewhere in the shadows, like the last few inches of dishwater in a sink. He put his light on the bones first. A heavy-duty leather harness lay half embedded in the mud with the skeleton. Some of it had decayed along with the flesh that it rested against, other bits looked almost serviceable. A pear-shaped loop of rolled leather and several smaller straps lay in the mud beside the pelvis. Cutter recognized it as a crupper, the strap that went under the tail of a mule or horse with low withers to keep the saddle or harness in place. He was right. Likely a mule.
The fact that the animal had just been abandoned there at a well-traveled junction to rot began to eat at his curiosity. He scanned the room, trying to make sense of it.
Maycomb’s voice tumbled over with the trickle of water from above. “I’m coming down,” she said.
“Nice and slow.” Mud sucked at his boots as he stepped to the base of the ladder to steady it. He sniffed the air, suddenly wondering if it had been gas that had killed the mule. If that were the case, he’d already be dead.
Maycomb made it down the ladder quickly, unwilling to spend any more time than necessary in a pitch-black tunnel by herself.
She brushed remnants of the wet timbers off her hands when she reached the bottom, and immediately began to chew on her fingernail again.
“It seems a little cooler down here to me,” she said.
