Deep Trouble

by Mary Connealy

  Gabe had never heard of this. He was just passing through the area now, but he’d ridden with the cavalry in Texas and the Southwest for years. How could this have gone undiscovered? And who had found it now and died?

  Fascinated, Gabe walked his horse into this lost valley, then swung down and tied the gelding to one of a thousand mesquite bushes. The wind whistled through the hills and canyons. It was the only sound, and that moaning wind told him no one else was here.

  Those tracks cut in the dust were the only sign that humans had ever passed through here. Seven horses in, seven out. Judging by the tracks, he’d say two pack horses, maybe three. So five people had come in here. How many had ridden out?

  He tried to remember exactly where that sound had come from, and it wasn’t hard to figure out. He could see where people had stood, horses, supplies. A camp had been set up here and had only been torn down a few minutes ago. A chill sliced up his spine in the Arizona heat as he realized he’d barely missed whoever left this place. The folks doing all the shooting.

  But who had done the screaming?

  He stared at the wonder before him and studied the sign and terrain with no idea what to do next. There was nothing. No one.

  The place was eerie, as if whoever had lived here before still watched, testing those who came. He heard wind whistling like a specter, calling to him from the unnatural caves high overhead.

  Where had the people gone who had done such work, created such a home? Who would work this hard then leave? Had they died? Had they abandoned all their labor? Had they been killed? And if so, where were those who had done the killing?

  His eyes went up four levels of stone homes. Gabe felt a quick chill of fear. No human hand created this. And yet what were the other possibilities? He was left with the sense that it was ancient and utterly empty of life.

  “Help me.”

  He jumped, drew his gun, and whirled around toward where the riders had left. Heart slamming, he looked left and right. Blinked and gasped for air and saw… no one.

  There was no one anywhere. Could the place be haunted? He didn’t believe in such things, but—

  That cry echoed and bounced until Gabe was surrounded by it.

  “Help me, please.”

  This time it was stronger, and even with the echo, Gabe whirled back and looked up and up and up.

  A woman.

  Gabe almost screamed.

  Her face was soaked in blood, one arm flung over the edge of the cliff as she lay on her belly, looking down.

  He probably would have screamed if he hadn’t choked on spit when he drew in an involuntary breath. While he coughed, he fought to get a grip on his nerves. Spooks and haints were something he’d heard of plenty growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee. Lots of superstition in those mountains. But his ma raised them Christian and wasn’t given to such nonsense. Still—

  “I’m trapped. They left me.” Her voice was weak, but it carried on the quiet of the canyon. This was no ghost. Except could ghosts fly? Because that’s the only way Gabe could see that she’d gotten up there.

  The coughing ended and, with a whoosh of relief, his head cleared and he knew there was a woman up there. A real woman. A living human being, definitely in terrible distress.

  She was so high overhead, her face streaked in bright red blood, dark hair spilling down over the edge of the cliff. He had no notion of what she looked like, only her voice and long hair told him she was female.

  “Ma’am?” Gabe had no idea what to say or do.

  “Help me, please.” Each word shook as if she gathered every ounce of her energy to keep talking. “Help me get down.”

  “I’ll help you.” His voice didn’t exactly work. He tried again, loud enough so she could hear him. “I’ll help you.”

  “Promise you won’t leave me.” She sounded on the verge of pure panic.

  Gabe couldn’t say he blamed her. “I’m not going to leave you.

  I promise.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice broke, and he heard a muffled sob. “I need you to get me down.”

  “How?” It wasn’t fair to ask a trapped, bleeding woman how to save herself.

  “I don’t know.”

  Not fair at all.

  Three

  Shannon was calm and brave and ready to help.

  And she intended to tell her rescuer that just as soon as she could quit crying.

  She rolled onto her back and rested her aching head on the unforgiving rock. But she couldn’t stand to just collapse and cry her eyes out. Besides, her ears were full of salt water.

  Also, she was afraid she’d imagined that man. What if he vanished while she was lying here trying to stop crying and bleeding?

  Goaded by panic, she gathered her strength, sat up, and turned so she could look down and down and down. The world circled sickeningly. For a moment she thought she might cast up her breakfast.

  The man hadn’t vanished. He still stood there, looking baffled and dismayed.

  She couldn’t say she blamed him, but if he wasn’t happy now, just wait till she retched on him.

  “How’d you get up there?” He plunked his hands on his hips and studied the wall in front of him. He looked almost annoyed. Like he blamed her for this situation.

  Something her mother would do.

  Well, she could get him part of the way up. She’d break the news about the last twenty or thirty feet when he was close enough to hear without her raising her voice. Yelling made her head hurt.

  “You can get close by going up there.” She pointed to a spot to his right that was rough enough for hand- and footholds. “Then if you go down there”—she pointed past a row of cave dwellings to his far left—”you can—”

  “Okay. Hang on,” he interrupted her and headed for the right side. “Let me get up on this side first.”

  She wasn’t sure how to break it to him that the last level was unclimbable. Her head was swimming, her thoughts were scattered, and her eyes were a little blurred—whether from injuries or tears or terror, she just couldn’t say.

  He did seem to be real though. Not vanishing. Not a mirage or a figment. It was vastly encouraging really.

  He made short work of scrambling up the first level. “Now, where next?”

  “You have to walk along that ledge.” With a shudder, Shannon thought of that narrow, crumbling ledge. “And climb up to the next level on the left side.”

  He started along a ledge that wasn’t more than six inches wide, though he could have stepped off the ledge into the structures built on that level. About two steps in he turned to face the wall and slid along on his tiptoes. “How did you say you got up there again?” He was so close to the wall his voice was muffled against rock.

  She leaned out and wobbled on the ledge. Pulling back, she rolled onto her stomach and poked her head out. The height was still dizzying, but with no risk of falling, she could handle it. Besides, she felt a lot better lying down.

  He inched along until he came to the first opening. On the lower levels there were definite walls built with stone, a very clear structure. “What is this place?” His voice echoed because he was speaking into the opening.

  She leaned farther out to see him cross the open space cautiously. “I’ve had a very bad day.”

  She almost started crying again. Really, where did she begin? And besides, since she’d kept a very big secret from the expedition members, she was in the habit of not talking. “I came here with a group… exploring.” Searching for gold… exploring, they were kind of the same.

  “I saw sign of riders heading out. Six of them?”

  “Six when we came in. Only five rode away. They turned on me and left me here and stole my horse and all my supplies.” Shannon heard her voice rising as her panic built. She quit talking before it all turned into hysteria.

  He reached the left side and began climbing without asking for more direction until he was only two levels below her. He looked around then up at her, and
she pointed back to the right.

  This ledge was even narrower, and the structures there were more rugged and partially collapsed, making it easy for people to convince themselves it was just a jumble of rocks. If they didn’t want to believe their eyes. But the lower level forced one to accept that a human hand had erected this strange home.

  She thought she heard grumbling as he inched along, but he was clinging to the rocks, and that deadened the sound some so she couldn’t be sure.

  “Who built these?” He was getting closer. She could hear him easily now.

  “I don’t know. They are long deserted from what I can tell. Very ancient, I think. A lot of the stone is crumbled away to dust.” Including any natural place to climb to her level from the lower one he was just now reaching.

  He stepped across a wide spot where the ledge was completely caved off, and just as he shifted his weight, a bit more of it crumbled away. But he made it and started climbing again until he was only one level below her. He looked up, and she saw his brow soaked with sweat and a tight expression on his face, possibly caused by his recognizing he had a very good chance of falling to his death at any moment.

  She knew how he felt.

  He squared his shoulders and firmed his jaw and gave her an encouraging nod. “Where next?”

  “I don’t know.” And that was the absolute truth.

  His brow arched so high it disappeared into his Stetson. “Then how’d you get up there?”

  “I had a ladder. The people who stranded me here shot it to pieces.”

  The man looked around his feet.

  Shannon leaned out farther to try and see the damage. Her head went foggy and she teetered—yes, even lying flat on her stomach—and almost fell the rest of the way forward. A gasp brought his head up.

  “How badly are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Uh, miss, your face is all bloody.”

  Shannon looked down at her hands and saw blood. “I had a nosebleed.”

  “That doesn’t explain all of it, I don’t think. I heard gunfire.”

  “Ricocheting bullets. I—I don’t think—” She scanned her body, assessed her aches and pains, and didn’t feel shot. “I wasn’t struck by one, but—” She did seem to remember being hit. “I think maybe some rocks went wild when the bullets struck. They may have hit me.” Getting hit by rocks, getting shot—none of it was the least bit pleasant. It took more energy than she had to tell him more.

  She did take a moment to wonder just how bad she looked. A woman liked to make a good first impression, and she seriously doubted she was accomplishing that.

  “Let me think. I’ve got a lasso on my horse. I could throw it to you, and you could tie it off.”

  Shannon looked around the utterly empty cave. “There’s nothing to tie it to.”

  “Okay, okay… uh… what’s your name? I’m Gabe.”

  “Shannon.” She barely had the energy to say that out loud. In fact, she didn’t have the energy to say much more of anything. “Don’t leave.”

  “I wont.”

  “Promise me, swear to me on your mother’s life, you won’t leave.”

  “My ma’s dead, but I won’t leave. You have my word, I’ll stay, and we’ll figure out a way to get you down from there.”

  She just barely had the strength to roll away from the ledge.

  “Shannon?”

  It was like someone was talking to her in a dream.

  “Shannon, answer me.”

  For just a second she thought it was Bucky calling her. Poor Bucky. He’d told her not to come.

  “Shannon!”

  As things stood right now, Shannon had to admit the man was probably right. She wouldn’t mind being back in her mother’s elegant drawing room right now.

  “Shannon, are you all right?”

  She tried to figure out when she’d agreed to let her fiancé come along on this trip. And why he was shouting at her so loudly. And while she pondered that, she stared at the roof of her cave and wondered why it was going inexplicably black.

  She could be dying up there for all he knew. But how to reach her? Gabe closed his eyes and prayed for inspiration.

  Rebuild the ladder?

  Pieces of it were scattered on this narrow ledge, more pieces had fallen all the way to the canyon floor. There was one fairly long section with a few broken rungs clinging to it. Maybe he could do it.

  Had it been a still, small voice suggesting that? Since it was an idea very unlikely to work, Gabe didn’t think so.

  Was there another way to the top of this cliff? He had a long rope on his horse. Could he get above her and lower a noose? He leaned back to look up and up and up. It was too high for his rope to be of any use. Besides, he didn’t see any way up there.

  Praying quietly, he scooted along the ledge and stepped into the cave opening nearest him. Nothing. Not one rough spot or heavy rock of any kind. If her cave was like this one, she was absolutely correct in saying there was nothing to tie on to.

  Gabe poked his head out the cave opening and looked down on his horse, standing tied to the mesquite bush. He had an idea. He had to climb all the way back down, which was fairly terrifying considering the ledges were only slightly sturdier than the hardtack biscuits he had in his saddlebags.

  And Shannon had to help. A lot. Since she was bleeding and unconscious, that was a real weak spot in a real weak plan.

  While he was down there, he’d look at those ladder fragments and see what he could do. There were no trees of any size to use to build a new ladder. How far might he have to ride to find such? And then he had no ax to cut down even a small tree. Hacking one down with his knife was possible, probably, though it might take days of hard work. Still, he’d do that if he had to.

  Leave her up there alone while he rode away? She might well lose her mind if he did.

  Gabe could almost hear his ma nagging him to quit dallying and get that girl down from there. With a quirk of a smile, Gabe knew his ma would also want him to marry her. His ma pretty much wanted him to marry any unattached female he came across when he was living at home. His ma believed people were supposed to go through life two by two, for sure.

  He’d joined the cavalry instead, eager to be out on his own. And he’d never gone home again. And his ma had died a hard death with no family at her side.

  Swear to me on your mother’s life.

  He’d done worse than that. He’d left his mother to die alone at the hands of villains. It appeared evil people had harmed this woman, too. But she wasn’t alone anymore. He wasn’t going to let her end up like his ma.

  His smile shrank, and he stepped carefully out of the cave to make his way back down to the ground.

  Shannon’s eyes blinked open, and she looked at rock. Nothing but rock. No golden city to be seen anywhere. She lay bleeding, one hand covering her face, terrified at her aloneness. The moan of the desert wind hummed into the cave.

  How had she come to this? Shannon Dysart. Daughter of Delmer Dysart, nicknamed Delusional Dysart. The academic world knew him as the professor who’d lost his mind and his reputation over an obsession with gold. Shannon knew him as an honest man who died in her arms, haunted by an expedition he’d barely survived.

  Her father had emerged from the West, the sole survivor of harsh deserts, wild Indians, and a brutally hard land. She’d known his expedition was late returning. Long overdue. In direct defiance of her mother, she’d gone hunting.

  His group had been large and well known—funded with her family’s money. It had made him easy to track until he vanished into the Arizona desert. She’d headed for his last known location. Within days of her arrival in West Texas, Father had been found, barely lucid, near death, and very much alone.

  Her gentle-spirited father had been crawling when a train had passed him and a compassionate engineer had broken the rules and stopped the train to pick him up in the middle of nowhere. Her father had known little more than his name, but it was enough fo
r Shannon to hear he’d been found and rush to his side.

  Shannon’s mother, bitterly tired of her husband’s neglect as he pursued his passion for researching America’s distant past—especially fables about the kingdom of Quivera, a hidden city built of pure gold—had refused to come west. Giselle Dysart was years beyond feeling anything but bitter resentment for her gold-obsessed husband.

  But Shannon had been there, and she’d cared and listened. Her father had pressed on her notes from the journey. He’d lived for several days, but his words about treasure were taken as rantings by anyone who’d come near them in the dusty Texas town.

  Shannon had known better, and she’d taken his words to heart. She’d returned to her mother in St. Louis then burned away two years searching for the key to understanding the intricately secretive maps her father had drawn.

  Last winter she’d finally broken his code. She understood what he wrote. Her father truly had found Cibola and Quivera, the two most renowned of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.

  She’d approached a university hoping to find historians who would share her father’s dreams, and found only mockery. Her father had tried and failed too many times.

  Determined to go alone to restore her father’s name, she’d defied her high society mother, who wanted Shannon to settle down and marry an acceptable man and let Delusional Dysart rest in peace. Shannon couldn’t betray her father by letting him stand as a madman. She’d used her last dime to fund this expedition for Cibola and Quivera, cities of gold.

  She’d searched and found only death.

  “Shannon, are you there?”

  Was this death then? Come calling?

  “Shannon!”

  Something whipped past the edge of her vision, and she turned her head but saw nothing. She had a flicker of memory. Bucky had been shouting at her. Odd, Bucky was a sweet-natured, easygoing man. Not one for yelling overly.

  “Shannon, wake up!” Whoever it was shouted until Shannon wondered that grit didn’t cascade down off the ceiling.

  “Yes.” As she said it, Bucky faded from her foggy mind and another face sporting a heavy moustache took his place. “Yes, I’m here.”