by Ace Collins
They kept climbing. Curtis pulled out her cell phone. No service. No reason for towers out here. No one ever came out here. They stopped for water and crackers. Lije mentioned the two caves he’d noted in the property description.
Within a few miles, they found a place where the vehicle had been parked. They were in a small meadow, maybe fifty by thirty feet across. Lije judged them to be about a quarter of a mile from the river, about a hundred feet higher. He could hear the swiftly flowing water, but the thick forest made it impossible to see. On the north side of the meadow was a long sharp cliff. The other three sides were dense with trees and bushes. Curtis bent down to try to find some evidence of footprints.
Lije walked toward the edge of the cliff. Ducking under a lowhanging elm branch, he worked his way along a pathway that ran beside the cliff for fifty yards, then, as the sharp edge of the cliff ended, the trail made a soft right up a steep grass-covered hill. Working his way upward at about a thirty-degree angle for another twenty feet, he felt a sudden rush of cool air. Partially hidden by the leaves of a dogwood tree was an eight-foot-high, four-foot-wide opening in the hillside.
Should he go get Curtis? He kept climbing and soon was standing at the entrance. The cool air coming from inside the cavern made it feel as if an air conditioner had been left on. It was a welcome relief from the heat and humidity. He took the flashlight from his pocket. He’d get Curtis only if he found something interesting. For now, it was his land and his cave. He turned the flashlight on and followed the beam inside.
The cave was at least twenty feet high and probably thirty feet wide. About twenty feet past the entrance, the cavern made a sharp left. So there was at least one more chamber. Stopping to adjust his eyes to the darkness, Lije shined the light off each of the walls and across the floor. He spotted only bat droppings and dirt. Then the flashlight beam picked up a sharp edge. Footprints. Definitely footprints. And they looked recent.
He considered going back for Curtis, but moved on. Shining his light ahead, he hugged the rock wall, leaning out only to see if his beam could pick up anything. At first he saw zilch, just another chamber, this one perhaps twenty by fifteen and no more than ten feet high. He continued to flash his beam off the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Something at the back of the cave caught his eye. Something sticking out from behind a four-foot-high sandstone boulder. Keeping his light aimed at the object, Lije slowly put one foot in front of the other. When he was less than ten feet from the wall, he finally recognized what he had caught in his beam—two black boots.
He froze. His heart pounding, he moved closer. The boots had not been tossed behind the rock. The boots were attached to a body, and it was a body he knew well.
“Mikki.”
Lying on the ground, her hands and feet bound, a blindfold tied over her eyes, was his old high school classmate, the very first girl he had kissed and the girl he had taken to the junior prom. Falling to his knees, he reached down and felt her face. She was warm. Grabbing her hand, he put his fingers on her wrist.
“She’s alive!”
MIKKI STUART WAS ALIVE BUT UNCONSCIOUS. LIJE untied her hands and legs. She had to be dehydrated, and there appeared to be a gunshot wound in her back, but since Lije knew so little about medicine, that was only a guess. Unable to rouse her, he removed her blindfold, patted her head, and spoke in reassuring tones.
“If you can hear me, I want you to know that I’ll be back. You just hang on. I’m going to get help.”
After checking Stuart’s pulse a final time, he got up and raced from the cave. As he retraced his steps, stumbling along the uneven path, he screamed, “Diana!” Twice he fell, but quickly he was up and moving along the trail. Heart pounding, he pushed aside branches and stepped over rocks. Ignoring the pain in his side from his own healing wound, he was consumed by one thought—get help. Curtis was the only one who might be able to save Mikki. He wasn’t going to lose another person close to him.
“What’s wrong? ” Curtis demanded as she raced toward the clearing.
“I found Mikki Stuart. She’s alive!”
Curtis pulled out her cell phone. Still no signal. “Where is she?”
He whirled, pushing past tree branches and headed back along the trail to the opening in the hill. He led the way through the cave until they finally reached the deputy.
Curtis made a quick but thorough examination. “She’s been shot. She’s alive, but I’m not sure how much longer she has. Her breathing is shallow and her pulse is weak. She’s probably been without food and water for a week, and she’s covered with insect bites. We need a medical team here now.”
Curtis looked back at Stuart, placed her hand on the woman’s forehead. “She’s burning up. Lije, you know the area better than I do. If I run back and get the car, how long will it take us to get to the nearest hospital?”
“From here … an hour, maybe more.”
Shaking her head, she leaned back down and rechecked the woman’s pulse. “The car won’t make it down the trail anyway. It’s not four-wheel drive. You any good at climbing?”
“I did my share when I was younger.”
“Can you find a quick way up the bluff and call for a medical copter? It could land in that meadow.”
“I can try.”
“You’ve got your cell?”
“Yeah.”
Curtis reached into her pocket and retrieved her phone. “Here’s mine. Better take them both. One might work even if the other doesn’t. Don’t take any risks, but get up there as fast as you can.”
Rushing from the cave, Lije quickly made his way through the woods and back to the meadow. In the clearing, he looked upward. The highest point in the area was some three hundred feet above, but without a rope, he wasn’t going to be able to scale the cliff. He’d have to run along the base to the point where the slope was more gradual, climb up that section, and then make his way back to the high point.
Except … standing on top of a hundred-foot rise just a short distance to his right was a walnut tree that had to be at least a hundred and thirty feet tall and probably was older than the United States. It could be the quickest way of getting help. He had climbed a bunch of trees as a kid. Like riding a bike, surely it was something you never forgot. Right?
Pushing to the east, he worked his way through thickets and over boulders, barely able to see the sky above his head. Thorns tore his pants and scratched his legs and arms. The forest’s uneven surface caused him to stumble and fall more times than he could count. Progress was slow.
After excruciating work, sweat soaking his clothes and his legs aching from scrapes and bruises, he broke out of the underbrush and walked through a wild blueberry patch into a clearing. There, just ten yards in front of him, was the walnut tree.
This had better work. It was his only chance. It was Mikki’s only chance. Surely it was tall enough. But what if it wasn’t?
Lije swung up on the lowest branch and started to climb, moving from branch to branch like a fireman climbing a ladder. The only interruptions in his ascent were when he stopped to check for a cell phone signal. At the halfway point there was nothing. No signal at the hundred-foot mark either. The gamble looked like it was not going to pay off.
Pushing up, he continued to check at each limb. Nothing, and he was running out of tree. Now within ten feet of the top, at a point where the wind was causing the trunk and branches to lazily sway from side to side, he wrapped his arms around the trunk and glanced at his phone. Finally, it was there, faint, but it was a signal!Locking his legs around the tree, he quickly punched in the number. Though the transmission was almost completely engulfed by static, a few seconds later the operator picked up.
Hold, baby, hold! The connection was so weak. But he didn’t lose it.
“Emergency services, I’m on Swope’s Ridge, a woman badly injured…. S-W-O-P-E-S Ridge! … Yes, that’s right, we need help!We found Deputy Stuart!”
He listened for a moment, trying to make out the crackling wor
ds, “Yes! Swope’s Ridge on Spring River. Lock on to my GPS. There’s a clearing not far from here, at the end of an old logging trail. The helicopter can land there.”
She couldn’t understand. She couldn’t hear him. His voice was breaking up. He had to try again. Moving a few feet higher, he repeated his instructions. This time he was yelling. Shouting. He kept repeating his words and finally she got it. Help was on the way.
Snapping his phone shut, he slipped it back into his pocket and took a deep breath. It had worked! Thank God it had worked.
LIJE HUNG ONTO THE SWAYING TREE UNTIL FINALLY his heart rate returned to near normal. He looked out over the land—his land—and was amazed at the incredible view offered by his lofty perch. He was on top of the world. Or at least near the top of Fulton County, and that felt like the top of the world. The ridge was almost at eye level. To his left he could make out the cave and the meadow. He could even see that Curtis had managed to move Stuart to the clearing and was waiting there for help. He prayed Mikki was all right. She just had to be. She was tough; she’d make it.
He looked back toward the river. The sun was almost directly overhead. A rotting post oak was leaning out over the water as if waiting for the next big storm to tear it from its foundation. Two fishermen were floating down the stream in a flat-bottom johnboat. One was trying to reel in a trout. Lije watched the man work the rod and reel, then saw something glinting on the bank, reflecting the sun’s rays. Looked like metal, at least a yard long. Focusing on the object, he wondered what it could be. It was too small to be a boat pushed on the bank. He moved to get a better view and it was gone. As if it had been moved.
He needed to alert Curtis that help was on the way, so he began his long descent. Once on the ground, he patted the tree, took a final look at his perch, and began hiking through the woods. On his way back, he heard the helicopter fly in and land. He arrived at the meadow just as the medevac crew was loading Mikki onto the copter.
“Good job, Lije,” Curtis said. “The fly boys think she has a chance to pull through. They got some fluids in her before they loaded her up.”
Lije watched as the copter lifted off. Mikki was a good person. She didn’t deserve this. Then again, no one deserved what had happened—not Dean, not Jennings, and surely not Kaitlyn. And the other man, the suicide, what was his name?
Laying her hand on Lije’s shoulder, Curtis said, “You saved her life.”
“She saved mine a week ago.”
How had Mikki survived in the cave for that long? Anyone else would have given up and died. She was always tough—state champ in cross-country in high school. And she was still going the distance.
Curtis and Lije walked back toward the trail. Curtis said, “I got on the medics’ radio and ordered an ABI team to come up here and look at the cave. Doubt if we’ll get anything that’ll help us solve this thing, so we have to pretty much hope Stuart can tell us what happened. I need to stay here with the team. Hope you don’t mind hanging around for a while.”
Lije turned his gaze from the sky to the river. “Don’t mind at all.”
THE TREK DOWN THE HILL TO THE RIVER WASN’T AS easy as Lije had expected. While Curtis waited for the arrival of more ABI agents to investigate the cave—and probably survey the whole ridge—Lije made his way down to the river. It was a solid forty minutes before he finally broke out of the woods onto the grassy bottom land. He paused there, resting, and took a long drink of bottled water.
The river was much cooler and much louder than Lije had remember edit in his many trips downstream by canoe. The water rushing over the rapids made it difficult to hear anything else.
Spring River was fed by Mammoth Spring, one of the largest, if not the largest, springs in the world. More than nine million gallons of water poured out of the ground each hour. Even at its headwaters the river was more than seventy-five feet wide. The water temperature never varied; it was always fifty-eight degrees—winter, spring, summer, and fall. The cold water acted as a natural air conditioner for the bottomland. At night, fog would drift off the water and swallow almost everything on both sides of the river.
In the first ten miles of the river’s run through these hills, it fell in waterfalls or rapids more than twenty times. Some of the falls were six to ten feet in height; most were no more than a foot or two, like the series of rapids he was standing beside. But any of them could flip a canoe as easily as he could pick up a rock and toss it in the water.
He walked over to the bank’s edge and looked upstream. About five hundred yards away, the water splashed over a series of rocks that formed a horseshoe-shaped falls. Looked like someone had lost an ice chest that was caught in the rapids. Probably lost their lunch. The falls looked harmless, but there was a whirlpool waiting below the spot most people picked to shoot the rapids. That bit of water had humbled him several times. Someday it was going to drag someone down and not let go. Even the placid places in this stream could be killers.
Lije leaned over to look down into the water. It was so clear that if your eyes were good enough, you could read the date on a penny at a depth of ten feet. Or so he’d been told.
There weren’t many places in the country where a person could still see this kind of unspoiled nature. Kaitlyn would say, “Anyone who experiences the majesty and the power of this river has to believe in God.” She had enjoyed capsizing the canoe and watching Lije’s shock at the cold water. When he was with her, a day on Spring River always erased any doubts he might have about a supreme being. Yet now, even with so much splendor all around him, he wasn’t so sure.
Kaitlyn was dead.
Lije turned from the water and began the short trek up the bank and back into the bottomland. He thought what he had seen from up in the tree was somewhere over there. He studied the ground to his left and to the right. What should’ve been right in front of him wasn’t there. Things looked a lot different at ground level. The angle of the sun was different too.
He studied the ridge, found the walnut tree, and turned back toward the water. Initially he saw nothing familiar. It looked so different now. But then he saw it, the rotting post oak tree leaning over the edge of the stream on the other side of the river next to the Frisco Line track.
Turning back toward the ridge, he walked a few feet to his left. This seemed to be the right place; it was in line with the walnut tree and the dead post oak. Curtis might use CSI techniques to find things, but Lije opted to use the time-tested rural method: walk the area until you stumble into something. He turned and took three steps forward. On his fourth, his toe caught on something hard, and he fell forward. He landed on his hands just as his knees hit the rocky soil. It was at least the fifth time that day that his knees had tested the solidness of rock.
Wincing, he pushed himself up and brushed off his jeans. He took a step back to see what had caused his fall, and there it was. Sometimes the old ways of doing things were the best ways.
Lije thought he’d tripped over a rock, but the object was metal, a little rusty. It looked like iron or steel. He began brushing away the dirt. The rains must have washed away the ground and exposed this for the first time in decades. He pushed away more dirt and realized what he had seen from up in the tree.
It was a railroad track rail. But the Frisco Line was on the other side of the river.
Lije pulled out a pocket knife and carefully went to work, pushing away the clay and pebbles from the object. After ten minutes on his knees, he had cleared a square foot of ground to a depth of almost four inches. He bent down to more closely examine the object. It was hard to believe what he was seeing.
Dr. Cathcart was going to want to know about this.
Lije was sure now that the rail hadn’t been washed up here or just dropped here as trash; it had been set in place. Some rusty spikes and even remnants of the wood ties were still in place. Could this railroad track be what everyone was looking for? And if it was, why was it here? There was no place for it to go.
He followed the r
ail, uncovering more as he walked toward the river. The track didn’t end until it was five feet from where the bank sloped down to meet the water’s normal level. He walked down the bank to the water’s edge and looked up at the place where the track was buried. On the shore where dirt and grass had been washed away by the recent high water, he saw stacked rocks at least a foot wide and two feet high. Probably a stone wall had been constructed there. It almost looked like part of a bridge support wall.
Lije should have gone back for Curtis, or at least for a shovel. But he wanted to find out how far the tracks went. He walked back up to the tracks, dropped to his knees, and kept digging with his knife. After fifteen minutes, he had uncovered only a few more inches of track. He’d convinced himself he needed help.
As he started to stand up, he made one last swipe of his knife into the hard clay. The knife freed something. It looked like a stone encrusted with clay. Then he noticed the intricate design of a cross.
He picked it up, got to his feet, and walked back down to the river. Dipping his find into the water, he rinsed off the dirt and wiped it clean with his shirttail. He had found a gold ring, a man’s ring, with a cross—not the typical Christian cross, but a squarer, more intricate design—made of red stones. He wasn’t sure, but they looked like rubies.
THE NEXT MORNING, LIJE HAD A CONTACT AT THE courthouse bring him copies of everything in the public records about Swope’s Ridge. He and Curtis were going over the copies at the kitchen table. Older records showed three caves and three springs; newer records showed only two caves. The springs might well have dried up over the years. There were no details on where the caves were.
Curtis got a phone call; the ABI was finished with the examination of Swope’s Ridge. Agents had found a second cave and evidence that someone had recently searched every corner of the cave and even done some digging. Still, no evidence that could tie anyone to the kidnapping of Deputy Stuart.
