“Why in the hell did you force your way into that cave?” Jeff said. “Even in the annals of your decision-making, that one stands out as poor, which is really saying something.”
“Force my way into the cave?” Mark stared at him without comprehension. “You haven’t been told what happened?” He realized then what should have been obvious from the start—nobody had been told what happened. He’d felt it would be clear somehow. He’d been put in the cave and he’d been rescued from it, and so it seemed someone should have understood the basics. The rescue effort had been organized. He had vague flash memories of uniforms and lights and official questions. Amid all the confusion, he’d gotten some comfort in that—the police had been called, and that meant they understood what had happened. The idea that he had gone into the cave willingly was astonishing.
“I’ve been told you pried open an old gate and went wandering,” Jeff said. “I don’t believe that you chose to take your clothes off for the trip, though. It’s been a point of contention between me and your friend the sheriff. The appearance of things suggested you went into the water after something. Your clothes were folded in a tidy pile right beside some sort of underground stream, like you’d taken them off before you waded in so they wouldn’t get wet.”
“Jeff…I was abducted. Three guys with shotguns.”
“They took you to the cave?”
“Yes. Well…not directly. I mean, two of them left. I think. But I had a hood over my head, and I can’t say exactly. But there was…I was somewhere else first.”
“How’d you get into the cave?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? Did they knock you out?”
“Yes. Well…they must have. Because I don’t remember how I got in there. There’s a gap in my memory for a stretch, so they must have. I was up on the road, I was driving, and they stopped me and put me in this van. All of them had masks. All of them had shotguns. Then they put a hood over my head so I couldn’t see anything, and we went…somewhere. There was one guy asking questions.”
“The hood was on you the whole time?”
“No. It came off, I think.”
“You think?”
“I don’t remember!” He was watching Jeff’s eyes, seeing the skepticism in them, and panic began to rise at the idea that even his friend didn’t believe him. Jeff reached out and put a reassuring hand on his arm.
“All right, Markus. We’ll get it straightened out.”
“Straightened out? Someone tried to kill me! What do people think happened?”
Jeff pulled a plastic chair up close to the bed. “They think you went in there and got lost. The last report of you before that was from Ridley Barnes. He told the police that you came by and kicked the shit out of him. After tying him up with his own rope. That didn’t happen either?”
“That actually did.”
Jeff rubbed his eyes. “Beautiful.”
“But then I left, and there was a truck behind me. It turned and blocked the road, and then the van came. Three people total, two in the van and one in the truck.” Mark sat up with excitement, ignoring the aches that throbbed through his body. “My rental car. They took it. Didn’t it occur to anybody that it would be hard for me to get to the cave without a car?”
Jeff studied him for a few seconds before he said, “Your car was at the cave. Parked up on top, pulled off the side of the road. The caretaker saw it, and that’s when he went looking for you and found the damage to the gate and your clothes in a pile inside. Then he called the police.”
“What?” Mark eased back in the bed in disbelief, grateful that he could lie down. “I was left inside, Jeff. I don’t know how or by who, but I was left inside.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Waking up in the dark and the cold. I couldn’t just stay there, so I started to crawl. I was looking for a way out. There was no light. I can’t explain just how dark it was.” He remembered seeing the dead girl, Sarah Martin, and he knew that he’d better not tell Jeff about that.
“I was delirious at some points,” he said. “Obviously, that can happen with hypothermia. But when it comes to how I was stopped on the road, I’m not confused. Not even a little.”
“Okay. Well, we’re going to need to figure out how to prove it, Markus. Because right now, we’ve got big problems. And I don’t mean just the obvious ones. I mean back home.”
“I don’t follow.”
“While the docs worked on you, I worked for you. I met with the sheriff, met with the state police, got your things out of the rental car, and generally did all the pushing I could to find that woman who told you she was the dead girl’s mother.”
Diane Martin. The first time that Mark’s reality and the one everyone else participated in had separated.
“People are lying about her,” Mark said. “I don’t know why. I don’t see how one man, who appears to be a town pariah, can exert so much influence. But he’s doing it. The story the hotel clerk told? Total bullshit, Jeff. That woman was pretending to be Diane Martin! I can’t say that clearly enough. If you’ve ever believed any words that came out of my mouth, it better be those.”
The look on Jeff’s face then was chilling—not because he was disturbed by what he’d heard, but because he apparently didn’t believe it.
“How is he getting them to lie, Jeff? How in the hell is Ridley Barnes getting so many people to lie?”
Jeff wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“What?” Mark said. “Damn it, you do believe me, don’t you?”
Silence for a beat, and then Jeff took a deep breath and faced him again. “I talked to the bartender who served the two of you. His version of events closely matches the hotel employee’s. He said he overheard you talking about Diane Martin, so unless you and this woman lapsed into the third person, it’s hard to use his story to validate yours. I’ve also seen the security tapes from the hotel lobby. There’s no audio, but your interaction with the woman…it certainly matches the clerk’s story better than yours. There’s no anger. You shake hands, talk a little, all pretty relaxed, and then you walk out the door together, happy as could be.”
“That’s not what happened,” Mark said, although how he intended to argue with the video, he wasn’t sure. He just needed to argue because doing anything else was to accept…what? That he was losing his mind?
“Fine. But it’s what appears to have happened, and credible witnesses are backing that version. You’ve got to come up with the best explanation you can. And finding that woman will go a long way toward it. I don’t want to keep you in Indiana, but…you’re going to need to provide some better answers than you have.”
Mark swallowed—a painful task—and said, “Let me guess. Board of directors isn’t pleased.”
“They weren’t pleased before all of this. Now, with that frigging attorney calling everyone on the board individually and threatening to sue—”
“Hang on. What attorney?”
“One Danielle MacAlister, Esquire, of Louisville, Kentucky. Her father owns the cave. Based on my conversation with Miss MacAlister, she owns the universe. Of all the caves to wander into, you picked the wrong one. She came at us aggressively. A lot of talk about criminal trespassing.”
“Trespassing!” Mark barked out a laugh at the absurdity of the claim. “I was—”
“I know. You were left there. But you can’t prove it. Just like you can’t prove that woman was really lying to you. And the board was already uneasy with your recent conduct. I’d just gotten that out of the way when this blew up.”
“Am I going to be fired?”
Jeff hesitated. “Nobody wants to say that you’re fired. Not right now, when press calls are flooding in. The board has decided to revisit the issue next week. Until then, you’re suspended without pay, pending internal investigation.”
Mark took the news in numbly. “What’s your read?” he said. “Do I even have a chance?”
“Before this? Yes
. With the current story, though? Without a better explanation for it, at least? I won’t lie—the votes will be against you. There are some people who think you’re going off the rails.”
“I was kidnapped,” Mark said. “Doesn’t that mean anything? Doesn’t that give some credibility to my story, as you call it?”
“You’re going to need a witness.”
“I’m going to need a witness? I was attacked by three men and put in a van and beaten and drugged and left to die!”
Jeff rubbed his eyes again as if weary of Mark’s repetition. “I understand all of this. And I believe it, because I know you. But here’s the scenario that the rest of the world knows right now: You wandered into town and claimed that you’d talked to a dead woman, then you claimed that someone had impersonated her, and both claims have been blown out of the water. Then you left the sheriff behind and went after Ridley Barnes. You’re damn lucky he’s not pressing charges, frankly.”
Mark didn’t say anything, and Jeff nodded at the silent confirmation.
“Then you fell off the grid,” Jeff continued, and he lifted a hand before Mark could voice objection. “You were forced into the situation, but right now we can’t prove that.” His face was grim. “We’re going to need to. If you want to hold on to your job, Markus, you are going to need to give me something real.”
“It’s all real,” Mark said. “We’ll prove that.”
“Sure we will,” Jeff said.
Mark recalled a hospital in Wyoming where his uncle Ronny lay dying of lung cancer, evidence that forty years of chain-smoking and no visits to doctors wasn’t a recipe for a long life. Mark had told him they’d do some fly-fishing on the Lamar as soon as Ronny got out. Sure we will, his uncle had said with a wan smile, and they’d both known it would never happen. He was dead three weeks later.
“I’ve got to fly out tonight,” Jeff said. “We’re in trial on the Texas appeal. I’ve got to testify, and I don’t know how fast things will move. When I can be back, I will be. Two days, maybe three. You have any idea when they’re going to release you?”
“Not yet.”
“All right. If it’s before I get back, call me. I think we’re going to need to make some good friends out of the police down in Garrison. I know you probably hate the idea of setting foot back in that town, but if you come home now, no evidence of anything you’re claiming, then I’m afraid—”
“That it ends with the lie,” Mark finished for him. “And you can’t keep a crazy man employed.”
Part Three
Pressure Points
23
His belongings were in plastic evidence bags, but they had been released to Jeff, apparently without any objection from the police. Legally, no crime except trespassing had been committed. Mark had willingly driven to Trapdoor, parked, and walked down to the cave. This was exactly what he’d been asked to do—visit the cave, spend some time down there in the dark.
Do some thinking.
Jeff was gone when the nurse finally brought the bags into the room, all of the things that had been removed from his unlocked rental car after they’d hauled him out of the cave on a backboard and carried him to a waiting helicopter. His wallet was untouched, every card and every dollar still inside, and his laptop was still in his travel bag, along with the thick folder from Ridley Barnes. Everything seemed just as it should be, at least until he went through his pockets with a growing unease.
“There was something else in my pockets,” Mark said. “A diving permit.”
The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Diving permit?”
“It’s a little plastic disk. Like a poker chip almost.”
“I’m sorry, that’s all they gave us. I’m sure you can get your diving permit replaced,” she said without interest.
Mark thought of his first trip with Lauren, of the sunset over the Saba reefs, of how many times he had touched that old tag as a reassurance that he had been made whole once and could be again.
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get it all replaced.”
He lay alone in the hospital room, one light on and shadows heavy in the corners, and read Ridley’s case file for the first time.
The Diane Martin impersonator might have lied about what mattered most, but she’d been honest with regard to the way the case had developed. Evan had been the first suspect, his father also in the mix, before Ridley came to the surface with a body and a stream of bizarre statements that turned into silence and never changed. Evan’s story hadn’t changed either—he never backed off the claim that they’d heard noises and he thought someone had entered the cave with them so he’d told Sarah to hide while he checked it out, and she’d hidden a little too well.
Carson Borders had been a target of the investigation in the early days, and it was clear that the police had sweated Evan long and hard over the whereabouts of his father. He said he had no idea where his father had gone, and the police couldn’t turn him up either, but with good reason—Carson was dead by then. Five years earlier, he’d given information about a gun- and drug-runner from Detroit named Lamar Hunter in hopes of receiving an early release. He hadn’t been granted it, and Lamar hadn’t forgotten about him. Prison guards at Pendleton testified that those last five years behind bars had been plenty rough for Carson, but Hunter was too smart to kill him inside. He’d promised Carson that he’d never see his family again, and apparently Hunter had made good on that promise. Evan swore that he hadn’t seen his father after he was paroled, and while police had initially been suspicious of that, they couldn’t come up with any evidence that Carson had made it back to Garrison. He’d vanished almost instantly upon his release. Photos in the case file showed thirty-one teeth, nicked and scarred by pliers, in a simple plastic sandwich bag. The teeth, along with a candy cane, had been mailed from a Detroit postal code in a plain brown envelope that arrived at Carson’s son’s doorstep on Christmas Eve.
There were references to Diane Martin in the file, plenty of them, but no indication that she had died. At the time the case file was assembled, she’d been very much alive and a factor in the investigation. The world created by the case file included two highlight-reel moments:
Ridley Barnes had been hired to map Trapdoor’s passages the summer before Sarah Martin disappeared inside the cave; and
Dan Blankenship, then a chief deputy, had been removed from the search scene and, later, the investigation due to a “conflict of interests as a result of a personal relationship with the victim’s mother.”
The sheriff of Garrison County, the one Jeff had just identified as someone Mark was going to need to become awfully friendly with, had a personal attachment to the dead woman Mark had claimed to meet. It didn’t seem like a promising start for a friendship. Mark remembered Blankenship’s fists opening and closing, the way he’d said, I told you this thing could cause pain. Would cause pain.
They hadn’t been together when Sarah went missing. By then, Diane Martin was engaged to Pershing MacAlister.
A missing item from Sarah’s person, identified by both her mother and Evan Borders as something she was wearing the night she disappeared, was a sapphire necklace that was actually her mother’s and that had been given to Diane by Dan Blankenship. The sheriff’s voice had broken when he’d described Diane’s last moments, that trip to her daughter’s bedroom, the children’s Bible in her hand. Mark had thought it was just that the case had struck an emotional chord, but he’d been wrong.
Mark flipped through the case file until he came to a photograph of Ridley Barnes taken the day he’d appeared with the body. He was a decade younger but didn’t look much different. The wild hair was brown then, not gray, but not much else had changed. He was still whip-thin and fit, with hollow cheeks that seemed designed to draw attention to those oddly bright eyes. In the photograph he was dressed entirely in black but so covered in mud that the clothing looked like some sort of camouflage pattern. He was staring at the camera with distrust, like a primitive warrior who thought the de
vice might steal his soul.
The final entry in the report was a supplemental written by the Indiana State Police summarizing the difficulties of getting the cave to reveal its secrets, a challenge exceeded only by the task of getting Ridley Barnes to reveal his.
Mr. MacAlister resisted sending Mr. Barnes on the search and was overruled by Chief Deputy Dan Blankenship of the Garrison County Sheriff’s Department. Blankenship insisted that sources, including Mr. MacAlister, had stated that Mr. Barnes knew the cave better than anyone else and would be the most capable of conducting a full search in a timely fashion, the report read. This was before the chief deputy was removed from the scene.
“Good Lord,” Mark whispered. Blankenship had made the call. Blankenship had sent Ridley in, despite objections from the landowner. Mark doubted the sheriff had gone to sleep one night since without thinking of that decision.
Mr. Barnes has been mapping newly discovered passages for the past several months, the report continued. He declined to produce any of the maps but said he would lead the search team. Once underground, however, Barnes separated from the search team, citing a lack of sufficient speed, and proceeded alone. He was not seen again until he arrived back in an area known as the Chapel Room with Sarah Martin’s body. At that time, he was unable or unwilling to answer questions as to where she had been located. He was judged to be suffering from hypothermia and he was taken to Garrison County Hospital for treatment. In subsequent interviews, Mr. Barnes refused to provide any further detail as to his experiences in the cave once he left the larger search team, maintaining that he has no recollection of the events and had grown confused in the darkness. It is true that when Mr. Barnes returned, he no longer had a functioning light, although he had three of them at the start of his search. The location of Sarah Martin’s body when he discovered it and her condition when discovered has never been established. Subsequent searches of the cave have been conducted prior to and after its closing, all with permission and cooperation of the landowner, but the experts involved were unable to determine what route Barnes took. One caving expert who was interviewed suggests that as much as 90 percent of the cave system may remain unexplored and unmapped. The system is a complex web of passages that are subject to being rendered unnavigable due to shifts in the water table, and all experts interviewed agree that the shifting conditions of the “wet cave” create a situation in which the possible routes taken by Barnes may sometimes be as good as invisible due to high water. An unusually dry summer preceded Sarah Martin’s disappearance in the cave, although it began to rain that night and continued to rain heavily throughout the following week, causing swift and significant changes in the cave’s water levels. To re-create the circumstances of Mr. Barnes’s journey without his cooperation is essentially impossible at this time.
Last Words Page 15
