Deep Trouble

by Mary Connealy

  Rolling over, her stomach threatened to rebel. She fought the sickness, stretched out to look over the edge of her cave opening, and got hit in the face by a rope. It settled around her head, and she was well and truly lassoed.

  He saw her and dropped as if his knees gave out. Her rescuer was near a cave opening on the level below her. “You’re awake.” He grabbed the lip of that cave and struggled to stay on the narrow ledge. “Thank You, dear Lord God. I’ve been so worried.” Like he’d knelt to pray. Or maybe he’d collapsed, and since he was on his knees anyway, he included a prayer. He swiped his wrist across his face, almost like he was wiping away tears, but the setting sun cast him in shadows, so she wasn’t sure. Then his shoulders squared and he stood, looked up, and smiled. “Sorry for roping you.”

  She was so happy he was there she’d have let him lasso her and slap a red-hot branding iron on her backside. “That’s okay. Gabe, right?”

  “Yep. I didn’t hurt you, did I?” He made a small grimace. “Yet.”

  That sounded ominous. Which made her ask, “Have you figured out a way to get me out of here?”

  “Maybe?” He sounded like he was apologizing. It all boded very poorly. “I’ll need your help.”

  That would be her pleasure. “What do you want me to do?” She pulled the lasso off her head.

  “Don’t drop it!”

  She hung on tight. It felt as if she were connected to the world again. She couldn’t help the lift in her spirits, though she still didn’t see what he wanted her to do. “There’s nothing to tie this to up here.” Her chin wobbled, but she fought the urge to cry. She’d wasted enough time and salt water on that.

  “I know. You said. And I looked in a cave down here and didn’t see a thing that would work.”

  “So, what do you have in mind?” Her fingers curled around the rope so hard her knuckles turned white.

  “Uh, well, I’m open to other ideas.” He grimaced again.

  “Such as?” Shannon was open to ideas as well.

  “I thought maybe you’d have them.” He gave such a tiny shrug from where he stood about twenty feet below her that she wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t been riveted on the man.

  Thinking, thinking, thinking.

  She’d always done well in school, and this situation she’d gotten into notwithstanding, she’d always considered herself intelligent. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “For me neither.” His dark eyes almost seemed to beg for forgiveness. “Except one thing.”

  Dark hair hung from beneath his hat. He seemed very tall, too, though honestly it was a little hard to judge from her position. He had a droopy moustache and broad shoulders, and she found him almost stunningly attractive for the shallowest of all possible reasons—he was here. She’d have thought a warthog was cute.

  “So what do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “I want you to slip that noose around your waist and snug it tight.”

  “And pull you up?” She shook her head. “What would be the point of that? I doubt I’m strong enough to hold it while you climb, and besides, if we were successful, then we’d both be up here together. Our problems wouldn’t be solved at all.”

  So far a cute warthog might also be a bit more help.

  “No, I don’t want you to pull me up.” That small flinch again. Hard to tell what his expression really meant. His mouth was covered by the moustache; his face was tilted almost straight up to be able to see her. Maybe she was misinterpreting it. Maybe he wasn’t flinching and grimacing. Maybe it was just because she was so overwrought that she thought Gabe had something unpleasant to say.

  “What do you want then?” She slipped the noose around her waist while she waited for an answer.

  She noticed that he was standing on a ridiculously narrow ledge. He began moving to the far side. When he was well off to her side, he took a few seconds to pull on leather gloves then wrapped the rope around his own waist and around his wrists several times. He looked up, and though he was farther away, he was at more of an angle so his face wasn’t quite so tilted. She could see him quite well. That was definitely another grimace.

  “I want you to jump.”

  Four

  Gabe wished there was a better way to word his plan.

  “You want me to what?” Shannon had obviously recovered somewhat from whatever had happened to her. Recovered enough to be horrified at his idea. He was a little horrified himself. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Gabe had been rehearsing this. Not because he wanted to convince her, but because he was trying to convince himself. “It’ll be like swinging. I’m off to the side, and you’ll fall at first, a little.”

  “A little? Fall a little? At first? I will plummet straight down to the earth like a stone… only more easily killed.” She paused as if waiting for him to show signs of intelligence, then added, “It’s called gravity.”

  “But then you’ll reach the end of the rope, and you’ll swing. Since I’m off to the side, see?” He held up the rope as if to show her where he was. As if her eyes weren’t already locked on him in horror. “It won’t have the impact of just jumping straight down with a noose around you.”

  “It’s called being hung. It’s a method of execution.”

  “Now, Shannon. That’d only be true if the noose was around your neck. Your belly is a lot tougher than your neck.”

  “You hope.”

  He did hope. “It stands to reason. They don’t hang horse thieves from the belly until they’re dead after all.”

  “How long was I unconscious?”

  Gabe didn’t have a watch, but it had taken him awhile to crawl down, fiddle with the ladder pieces, give up, get his rope, and climb back. The sun had lowered past the rock wall they were standing on. The caves were facing east, and the whole canyon was filling with shadows. “Not long.”

  “Obviously not, if this is the only plan you had time to come up with.”

  “Shannon, c’mon.” Gabe froze. That tone of voice. He hadn’t heard it for a long time. It was his “little brother” voice. Many of his big brothers would call it whining. He paused for a second to apologize silently to his brother Abe, whose home Gabe was heading to before he’d heard Shannon’s screaming.

  He was gonna be late. Not that he minded. Whenever he was near any of his six big brothers, he immediately began feeling about ten years old. He caught himself acting like a kid, too.

  Deepening the tone, he said, “I haven’t been able to think of another way to get you down. It’s this or nothing.”

  “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  Gabe glared at her. “Don’t change the subject. Come up with a better plan or jump.”

  “My belly isn’t all that tough. Not today certainly. And it feels a little queasy besides.” Partly from her abusive day, partly from Gabe’s plan.

  “Got the collywobbles, huh?”

  “The what?” Shannon had a second to wonder if this was another part of Gabe’s plan to save her. “Collywobbles?”

  “It’s what my ma called it when our food wouldn’t stay in our belly.”

  “Oh, collywobbles. I’ve never heard it called such before.”

  “The rope around your stomach won’t help, I’m afraid.”

  Shannon was afraid, too. Very, very afraid. “We have to think of something else.”

  “Okay.” Gabe could swear he heard a clock ticking in the silence. He’d been thinking until he’d about worn a hole in his skull. “I looked at the ladder. It’s broken off too short.”

  Women liked to talk. His big brothers, all six of them married, had told him that. So, if Shannon wanted to talk around all sides of this problem, he was okay with it. There was no real hurry for her to get down. It wasn’t like she was starving to death or anything.

  “I haven’t eaten or had a drink of water since breakfast, Gabe.”

  Maybe she was starving. But on the good side of that, maybe starving would help convince her to jump.

>   “There’s one somewhat long piece of ladder. If I brought it up, I might be able to reach you with it if I stood straight below you. If I could get it braced against my shoulder and the wall, you could shimmy down it.”

  “Shimmy? What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s something my ma called it when we’d sort of wiggle around. I reckon it just means you wrap your arms and legs around the piece of wood and sorta slide down.”

  “Collywobbles? Shimmy? Where exactly are you from, Gabe?”

  “I’m from Tennessee originally. We can talk about that later. If you do shimmy, you… uh… you might get splinters.”

  “If my legs are wrapped around the wood, those splinters might end up in… in… in… unfortunate places.”

  “Well, honestly, Shannon, there aren’t any good places to get splinters.”

  “Some places are better than others if I want your help pulling them out.”

  So true.

  “Then if I can keep the long, narrow board from tipping while you—uh—”

  “Shimmy.” She repeated the word so it sounded like the voice of doom.

  “Yep, until you get all the way down.”

  “And you’re going to keep it from tipping?”

  “Try to.” Gabe did his best to sound confident.

  “Tipping, like… backward? Tipping off the cliff backward?” Shannon’s voice seemed higher than he remembered. Panic most likely. But maybe she had a higher range when she was fully conscious. If she got any more conscious, at this rate, she’d sound like a train whistle.

  “It might go sideways instead of backward.”

  “And that’s better because—”

  “We might be able to control the fall. You’d be against the rock wall and land on that ledge over there.” He saw her look to his right at the four-inch ledge. The crumbling four-inch ledge.

  “Hmmm.”

  “And then if the board doesn’t break—”

  “The board from the ladder that’s probably hundreds if not thousands of years old that was shot full of bullet holes a few hours ago and shattered into near toothpicks—all but that one long, jagged-edged, splinter-riddled piece?” Shannon jabbed a rather unsteady index finger at the ladder fragment far, far, far below.

  “Yep, that board. If it doesn’t break, and you don’t go backward, and you don’t fall off, and I don’t drop it—”

  “I’ll end up alive and well and stuck so full of splinters in unmentionable places that a porcupine will want to marry me and take me home to his place in the woods.”

  “Which is why I thought you should just jump.”

  “I’ll just jump.” Shannon swung her legs over the edge of the cave, looked down and down and down, and swung her legs right back.

  “So, Gabe, tell me a little bit about yourself.”

  “Like if I’ve got a good grip, strong arms, a healthy back?”

  “No, I’d just like to get to know you better. Where did you grow up?”

  Gabe grinned up at her, now lying on her belly with only her poor, blood-streaked face showing.

  She’d rubbed the worse of it off—though Gabe doubted she even knew her face was bloody. She’d probably knocked it off without intending to because her face itched. From the blood. The blood she didn’t know about. But she still looked really, really awful. Cute but awful.

  “Quit stalling.”

  A moan of distress was her only response before her head disappeared and her feet reappeared. She sat on the ledge again.

  He gave her one last warning. “Check the rope around your waist.”

  Gabe checked his. If he did this exactly right, her weight wouldn’t pull him off this ledge and drag him a hundred feet down to land on top of her and crush what was left of her into the stone floor of the canyon.

  And also kill him. That was a real weak spot in his plan. One of about ten.

  Shannon tugged somewhat frantically on the rope as if she hoped it’d come loose. It didn’t. Gabe knew his way around knots.

  “The rope’s good.” She didn’t sound all that happy about it.

  Gabe didn’t knot his end around his own waist. He wanted to be able to let it out and pull it in. And he didn’t want to be dragged off the ledge. Which seemed a little selfish, but if she did fall—he swallowed hard—he couldn’t rush down to help if he plunged to his death, now could he? “Okay. Good. Get ready to jump on the count of three. One…”

  “Why three? Why not ten?”

  “We’re doing three.” Gabe looked up to meet her terrified eyes. “Two…”

  She gripped the edge of the cave as if she planned to dive straight out.

  “Wait!” He gripped the rope in case she thought he’d said three.

  She didn’t come close to accidentally jumping.

  Gabe had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t going to be all that easy to get her to take the big leap. Couldn’t say he blamed her. “I think I should climb in this cave instead of being on the ledge. There’s less chance of me dropping you if I’ve got a more solid place to stand.”

  “Dropping me? You’re worried about dropping me?” That train whistle was definitely coming closer.

  “No, I’m just, uh… I had a little time to think and decided this would be a way to be extra careful.”

  “Is there any chance in the world that you could come up with a better plan than this if you had a little more time to think?”

  Gabe scooted into the cave. It was high enough inside for him to stand up, barely, once he ducked through the opening. Once in, he poked his head back out. “Now, the reason I told you to wait was—”

  “You mean besides needing to go into the cave.”

  “I thought of that after I said wait.”

  “I don’t mind giving you more time. You’re thinking up stuff right and left.”

  “The reason I told you to wait was because I didn’t like the way you were going to jump.”

  “There’s a right and wrong way to cast myself off a cliff?”

  Gabe sure hoped so. “Instead of diving or even jumping straight out, how about you flip over on your belly so your legs hang down, then scoot out and hang from your hands. Keep your body flat against the cliff. Use the cliff to slow you down. Yes, you’ll still fall, but see if you can kind of slide down. I’ll reel in the rope as fast as I can to take up the slack. The less distance you fall and the slower you fall, the less you’ll jerk on the rope. It won’t hurt you as much.”

  “Except for the part where I grind my face into the side of the rock the whole way down.”

  “Yep, except for that part.” Gabe wondered if they hadn’t ought to forget the whole thing and try again in the morning when they were both rested. He could send up some water on the rope. A biscuit. Maybe in his dreams something better would come to him.

  “Pull your head back in the cave.”

  “What?” Gabe was already planning where to put his bedroll. They both definitely needed to sleep on this.

  “Pull your head back. I’m going to scoot over the edge of this cave. Then I’m going to do my very best to hang from my arms. That should take some distance out of my fall, right?”

  “If you’re five and a half feet tall.”

  “That’s about right.” Shannon seemed to want to talk.

  Gabe didn’t blame her. “And your arms add two more feet to the length of your body.”

  “I’ve been told my arms are very slender, but I don’t think they’re particularly long.”

  “Let’s go with two feet. You should hang down about seven and a half feet closer on a twenty-foot drop. So you’ll be dropping…” Gabe reflected that he should have paid a little closer attention to arithmetic in school. But who could predict a situation like this?

  “Twelve and a half feet instead of twenty.” Shannon the genius had it right close to hand. Of course if she was real smart, she wouldn’t be up in that cave, now would she?

  “That seems better than twenty, doesn’t it?”

  �
��Couldn’t hurt.” She sounded like it really could hurt. Very badly.

  “So swing around.”

  “After you pull your head in.”

  “Why? I want to be ready when you fall. I need to watch you.”

  “When I do my dangling and hanging and falling, my… my… unmentionables and possibly even my… limbs may be temporarily revealed. It wouldn’t be at all proper for you to see them.”

  “How’d you say you got stuck up there again?” Gabe hadn’t grown up around girls except for his ma. And he’d headed for the cavalry as soon as he was old enough. All men there, all the time. He didn’t much understand what went on in a woman’s head. “It seems a whole passel of improper things had to happen to get you stuck up there. I can’t imagine how a glimpse of a petticoat can even begin to bother you at this point.”

  “And yet it does.”

  Gabe stared.

  She stared back. Waiting.

  He pulled his head in the cave. “Okay!” He yelled mostly to be clearly heard but partly because he was pretty scared for her and yelling helped a little. “Are you ready?” He sat down and braced his legs against the ground and gripped the rope with both hands.

  He heard some muttering and scratching around out there. She was definitely doing something. “I’m ready.”

  Gabe could hear the mail train pulling into Durango in her voice.

  “One…”

  “I’m going to do it this time.”

  He’d believe that when he saw it. “Two…”

  “I’m ready. I mean it.”

  Gabe braced himself just in case she went through with this madness. “Three!”

  He heard her come sliding down. He dragged hand over hand on the rope. Within seconds it was taut… and… it never jerked. He made sure his grip was secure then poked his head out.

  She was standing on the ledge just as if she’d flown down there and landed like a red-tailed hawk. Her arms were lifted over her head and spread wide, flat against the cliff. Her face was turned away from him. Her toes were semisolid on a narrow ledge. The rope was a firm line between them. Her… petticoats and limbs were…

  Gabe jerked his head back fast. “So, you made it.” It seemed stupid not to look at her. But he’d give her a minute to address various issues of decency.