Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Chapter Nine

  Joe Wolf Mantooth, for the first time, stood face-to-face with Cully Mantooth. He wasn’t clear on how they were related, although his father Sly had done his best to walk him through the tangle of relatives who connected them.

  “My mother could have explained it better,” Sly had said when he finally gave up, “but she’s been gone since before you were born.”

  He and Cully had the same last name, so Joe figured that their fathers had been kin. Since Cully was born just a few years after Joe’s grandfather, Joe thought that maybe they had been cousins, but were he and Cully blood-kin? Probably, unless somebody along the line had been adopted or unless somebody’s mom had been fooling around with the milkman. When the lines of kinship were stretched this far, the blood ties were so thin as to be unimportant. Joe had been taught that family was family, and that was that.

  He stretched out his hand to and said, “Hello, Cousin Cully.”

  It would never cross Joe’s mind to approach a family member as anything other than an equal, so it didn’t occur to him that Cully might find it refreshing to meet someone who didn’t look at him and say, “Hey! Movie star!” Joe only noticed the genuine warmth in the older man’s handshake, and it told him that they would be friends.

  Cully introduced him to his friend Jakob Zalisky, who was friendly but quiet. This was odd, because Jakob didn’t seem like a man who kept to himself.

  “So you’re Cousin Faye’s husband?” Cully asked.

  “I am, and I’d really like to lay eyes on her right about now. She needs to rest up from what happened to her and stop rushing into something else dangerous.”

  “You don’t look real happy about her underground adventure.”

  Joe was by nature a truth-teller. Right now, he was struggling for a way to tell the truth about what he was thinking without throwing his wife under the bus. “I just don’t think she tells herself the truth when she sets out to do this kind of thing. Faye wants to think she’s immortal.”

  “I only just met her, but I already think I understand your point. That woman would rather eat dirt than admit she couldn’t do something.”

  “So you have met my wife.” Joe felt himself laughing. He wanted to keep being mad at Faye, so this laughter made him even madder.

  “Indeed, I have. Why don’t you sit next to Jakob and me on this bench while you wait for her? I’ve been homesteading it for hours. An advantage to being old is that a lot of people will give up their seat to you. If I see a lady with a baby, I’ll get out of this comfy spot. Until then? I’m going to enjoy the fruits of age.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “This is a handy place for Jakob and me to do absolutely nothing while we wait for the FBI to tell me whether the conference that brought me here is still going to happen and whether either of us has a place to sleep tonight.” Cully said. “I for one appreciate the company.”

  “As do I,” said Jakob.

  “Don’t worry about a place to sleep. We’ll find you both a place to sleep, even if we have to drive to Sylacauga and sleep at Dad’s.”

  “That is very kind of you,” Cully said. “My guess is that Faye will be back from her trip down below with her new buddies, the feds, before anybody remembers that Jakob and I are here. This is the disadvantage of old age. You get kind of invisible.”

  A fan fluttered up and asked for Cully’s autograph, putting the lie to his claim of invisibility.

  “Jakob here directed three Oscar-nominated films,” Cully said to a man in his twenties who wanted some time with a movie star. “And he won once. Want his autograph, too?”

  The man did, so Jakob added his signature to the scrap of newsprint that Cully had just signed.

  Joe settled himself beside Cully. Before his butt hit the bench seat, he asked, “How much do you know about where Faye went? She didn’t tell me much and what she did say didn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

  Joe was still hurt that his wife wasn’t waiting for him with arms spread wide, but he had known who she was when he married her.

  “Well, Cousin Joe, would you believe that the bomb opened up an entrance into an underground lost city? And that your wife was handy when the FBI decided they needed Indiana Jones to go down there with them, but he wasn’t available?”

  “Faye’s smarter than Indiana Jones. More ethical, too. Usually.”

  “You’ve gotta cut Indy a break,” Jakob said. “He was working a long time ago. Us old guys, we do the best we can.”

  Joe wondered if Cully and Jakob knew any of the actors who played the indigenous people who had faced off against Indiana Jones. Hollywood was a small town and the two men had been working there a long time, so Joe figured they probably did.

  Cully stretched his long legs in front of him and rested his capable-looking hands atop his thighs. For the first time, Joe noticed what he was holding.

  “Is that the flute? The one you made for Faye?”

  Cully nodded and held it out to him. “She’s pretty possessive of it already, but she got a fed to bring it to me while she went exploring. Guess she figured that since I made the thing, I’d keep it safe.”

  Joe took the instrument, resting his fingers on precisely drilled holes and preparing to fit his mouth to a mouthpiece that a European would say was more like a recorder’s than a flute’s.

  “You hold that flute like a man who knows what he’s doing. I’d just given it to her when the bomb blew. She hasn’t even had a chance to try it out.”

  “I play a little,” Joe said, pulling the instrument away from his mouth. Faye should be the one who played it first.

  “I know she liked it,” Cully said, “so you did good with your gift giving. When that bomb went off, it was like somebody cracked open the gates of hell. I thought it was Judgment Day, and I’m here to tell you that I’m not ready to go. I’ve got some burdens on my soul that I need to lay down before I face judgment. I’m ashamed of them but the truth is the truth. Your wife? She must have a clean heart, because she hit the ground with a face as calm as an angel. And she was clutching that worthless flute to her chest the whole time, like it was made of platinum.”

  “She’s really okay?”

  “She’s really okay. Well, she’s underground with some people who are certainly packing heat, and they’re underneath a building that was just bombed and is probably still smoking. And nobody’s got a clue why it got bombed, but yeah. She’s okay. I get the sense that Cousin Faye will always be okay.”

  “She’s okay in a mysterious underground city from the past?”

  “Yeah. In a mysterious underground city from the past.”

  “Then we might as well get comfortable on this bench. My wife won’t be coming back until she’s seen all she can see.”

  “It’s what Indiana Jones would do.”

  Chapter Ten

  It wasn’t supposed to go like this. All my careful plans blew up along with the bomb that I aimed at nobody but Lonnie. Lonnie has been obliterated, according to plan, but now the whole world is involved. His death was supposed to stay secret.

  Lonnie was supposed to be underground when the bomb blew. And he should have been. End of story.

  I planned his route carefully. I told him that he would be planting the bomb beneath the IRS’s Oklahoma City offices, and he loved that idea, but I actually sent him to a place where even an underground explosion wouldn’t hurt anybody but him. And if a bomb that small turned out to be too undersized to kill him right away, it was certainly big enough to injure him too badly to find his way back to the surface. It would not have pained me to know that he suffered alone until death took him.

  His death would have been marked by people on the surface by a shuddering vibration and nothing more. These days, Oklahoma City is shaken regularly by supposedly harmless little earthquakes brought on by fracking. Most people wo
uldn’t have known that this one was different.

  Geologists probably would have noticed something was wrong when their seismographic charts showed a pattern that couldn’t be natural. They might have been able to pinpoint the blast but, with no knowledge of the old network of tunnels, they would have been hard-pressed to find its source. Would they have tried to track it down using ground-penetrating radar or some such technology? Possibly, but the cost would have been tremendous, and the end game would have required excavating a chunk of downtown Oklahoma City.

  This is a city that couldn’t be bothered with exploring the Chinese catacombs the first time they were uncovered, much less preserving them. Like so many other problems, city officials covered them up and pretended they were never there. Why would anything be different now? Nobody would support spending so much money to investigate a single unexplained tremor, but if they did? What would they find? The rotting pieces of Lonnie, who fully deserved to be blown into pieces and left to rot. And absolutely no evidence that would lead them to me.

  Lonnie was too stupid to realize that he wasn’t carrying a bomb big enough to destroy the offices of his sworn enemy, the IRS. He was carrying a person-killer, packed with enough black powder and nails to obliterate him, but not nearly enough firepower to bring down buildings.

  On the off chance that I was wrong about how much damage my little bomb could do, I sent him to a place under an alleyway where there were no buildings above him to collapse and hurt people. It took me hours of studying maps and searching my memory for the routes of the underground passageways, but I found the safest place to set off the bomb, and that alleyway was it.

  If Lonnie had followed the plan, he would have been standing in just the right place when I placed the call that triggered the bomb.

  Why didn’t Lonnie go where he was supposed to go?

  The pieces of Lonnie have now been scraped off the floor of the Gershwin Hotel’s lobby, and they are resting in a morgue. Eventually they will be autopsied, if that hasn’t already happened. Is it possible that the medical examiner might find a way to identify him? And could that lead the FBI straight to me or to the people I care about? I don’t see how.

  Lonnie must have had a birth certificate, which was more than could be said for most of his children. He once had a driver’s license and a birth certificate was a necessary part of getting one of those. But no valid license exists for him now and it hasn’t in a long time.

  Lonnie was a homeless grifter from the time the family broke up, and more than twenty years have passed since then. He earned no criminal record, held no passport. He held no job in the years since background checks and fingerprints became part of the hiring process for the kind of menial work he was qualified to do. At least, he never held a job where his employers kept up with those legal niceties. Lawn care and handyman work put food in his mouth, and that was all Lonnie needed.

  To my knowledge, Lonnie was never even arrested, which was a true joke when one considered the things that he had done. If anybody had ever dug up the rotting pieces of Lonnie out of the catacombs where he was supposed to have died, I can think of no way they could have identified them.

  Even now, after the plan has fallen apart and Lonnie has died aboveground and in a crowd, I see no way for the FBI to ever figure out who he is. Or rather, who he once was. This is important, because there is more at stake than my freedom, much more, but I can find no reason to worry about being caught.

  If there has ever been a perfect murder, this was it. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  Chapter Eleven

  Faye was more happy to be sitting down than she could possibly say, even if her mouth weren’t full. She was sitting on a sidewalk bench between Cully and Jakob, grateful for the sandwich that Joe had pushed into her hand. Joe sat at her feet on the curb with his own sandwich.

  “There’s a guy with a restaurant a couple of blocks away,” Joe said, waving his sandwich in the air to punctuate his story. “He told me that he came running as soon as he heard the blast, but the fire department was already here and they wouldn’t let him go into the hotel to help search for survivors. So he went back to his restaurant and started making food for the workers and for the people stuck on the street. He said he figured that it was something that he knew how to do, and everybody needs food. He opened up his bathroom to all those people with no place to go, too.”

  “People can be really good,” Faye’s voice was muffled because her mouth was full of ham, bread, lettuce, and mayonnaise. Jakob handed her a napkin so she could wipe her face.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “He walks up and down this street with a big tray of sandwiches and cups of water every thirty minutes or so. I saw him come and go at least three times while you were down there. Faye, I was so scared. First when I heard about the bomb, then the whole time that you were deep underground. I was so scared that I couldn’t even eat.”

  Joe was now demolishing his roast beef sandwich like a man who hadn’t eaten in a while, so Faye supposed that this was true.

  “I wish you hadn’t gone down there, Faye. There was a bomb. Remember? What if the ceiling had caved in on you? I wouldn’t have been able to get you out.”

  Faye said, “The fire department and the city engineers said it was safe,” and she realized how naive she sounded when Cully rolled his eyes and clutched his heart.

  Joe grunted. “They’re just people like you and me. They can make mistakes. The bomb tore that hotel up. I saw the pictures on the web and they’re bad. If you’re trying to say that it was just a tiny little bomb because it didn’t kill anybody but the bomber, well, just don’t. I won’t believe you.”

  Faye had seen the damage to the hotel, up close and personal, so she had no intention of telling Joe that it wasn’t all that bad. “Well, I’m back now, and I’m all in one piece.”

  “But you’re going back down there. Aren’t you?”

  Her husband knew her well. If the FBI thought she could help crack this case, then yes. She was going back down there. She wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about the children’s bodies that they had seen down there, so there was no way to tell Joe why she was so determined to help. He was going to have to trust her.

  The thought of dying and leaving her own children without a mother was the only thing that made her waver in that determination. “Do you want me to say no?”

  “I’d say no,” Jakob said, “but nobody asked me.”

  Faye was more interested in what her husband thought. “Joe, do you want me to tell the FBI to find some other archaeologist to help them?”

  “If you did that, I’d take your pulse and ask you if you were okay. It’s your nature to say yes to an adventure and worry later.”

  She supposed she should let him keep thinking that this was just an adventure, but she wasn’t sure how long she could manage it.

  Long enough. She was sure that she could keep her secret long enough.

  Carson’s bear-like form appeared at the end of the block, ambling toward them with a sandwich in each hand and a companion on either side.

  “I could tell the FBI that they should hire Carson,” Faye said.

  “You’re going to do this job, because it’s who you are. And also,” Joe said, speaking quickly so that he could finish before Carson was close enough to hear, “Carson’s my friend and I love him, but he ain’t half the archaeologist you are. And he ain’t got your experience dealing with crime. The FBI needs to find out who set that bomb ‘cause they might do it again. It would be pretty dang selfish of me if I told the person who might actually be able to help them that I didn’t want her to do it.”

  * * *

  Faye, not wanting to be rude, hauled her aching body to her feet so that she could shake hands with Carson and his companions. Faye was pretty sure that they were two of the scholars he’d invited to speak at his conference. It seemed right to stand out
of professional courtesy.

  Cully and Jakob rose, too. Jakob let out a little groan as he maneuvered his portly, seventy-something-year-old body to standing. Faye, thirty years his junior, did the same thing, but Cully sprang up like a dancer.

  Joe hopped to his feet, too, which was no surprise, given his young bones and his habitual courtesy. In this case, that courtesy was serving him well. Being invited to present at Carson’s conference was a major professional opportunity for Joe, and becoming friends with Cully Mantooth and Jakob Zalisky certainly wouldn’t hurt.

  Faye stopped worrying about three dead children long enough to wonder whether the conference would be canceled because of the bomb. Of course it would, and that was a bad thing for Joe.

  Faye had always thought that her husband should be a hot ticket as a presenter at archaeological conferences, where there were hundreds or even thousands of people who would be fascinated to spend a little vicarious time in the Stone Age. He just needed to get in front of the right people and show them what he could do. A goodly number of the right people were registered for Carson’s conference. Faye was only just realizing that the bomber had robbed Joe of that opportunity. This was definitely not the worst thing about the morning’s disaster, but Faye hurt for her talented husband.

  “This is Dr. Stacy Wong,” Carson said.

  “Oh, I know Stacy!” Faye said, reaching out to shake the historian’s hand. “I’ve just never met her in person.”

  “Faye,” Carson said, “if Stacy doesn’t get to pump you for information on what you saw underground, she’s going to explode.”

  After an awkward pause, Carson said, “Okay, that was a bad metaphor, especially today. Stacy will not explode. But she may scream. Anyway, I need to introduce Kaayla Jones before Stacy starts screaming. Kaayla’s the assistant manager for the Gershwin Hotel and she has just managed to save our conference. This is not the most pressing problem of the day, but I invested most of the past year planning the thing, so the thought of saving it makes me really, really happy.”