Saving Laurel Springs

by Lin Stepp

  “Okay.” Rhea followed Carter into the cabin.

  They stood quietly, listening for several more minutes before Carter flicked on his flashlight. Rhea followed Carter around the room then, the two of them examining every inch of the cabin carefully, looking for anything the sheriff might have overlooked.

  “I don’t see anything unusual, do you?” Carter turned gradually around, fanning the light from the flashlight over the room again. “I guess we’ll just go set up a little watch camp behind the rocks now. If our man comes back, we’ll hear any movement or see any light from there.”

  Rhea nodded, her eyes moving over to the old bedstead, thinking of how Taylor had been wrapped in a quilt and tossed there earlier.

  “Look, Carter.” She put a hand on his arm. “That bed’s not exactly where it usually is. It looks like it’s been shifted.”

  Carter followed her eyes. “It probably got pushed around with all the skirmish with Taylor.”

  “Let’s move it and check underneath, just in case. All right?”

  He stuck his flashlight into his jeans pocket and moved to one end of the iron bedstead to help Rhea push it away from the wall.

  Rhea shone her own flashlight over the area where the bed stood before. “These floorboards look odd here. See?” She walked over to stand in the area where she could see more closely.

  Carter, interested now, started over to join her. “You’re right. It looks like one of the boards has been shifted.” He stepped over to stand beside her to look down where her light shone.

  And the floor fell in!

  With a scream, Rhea heard the wood splinter and felt herself tumbling down with Carter into some long, dark dirt hole.

  Carter hollered, too, and added a few expletives before the two of them quit rolling and tumbling and finally came to a stop, piled on top of each other in a heap, at the bottom of what appeared to be a deep tunnel.

  “What the devil!” Carter groaned and pushed himself upright.

  Rhea, lying halfway across him, winced and tried to sit up, too.

  “Are you all right?” Carter rescued Rhea’s flashlight from the dirt floor nearby and shone it on her.

  “I think I’m okay.” Rhea rubbed at her arm. “But I’ve scraped my arm, whacked my leg something fierce, and turned my ankle.” She tried to move it. “Ouch.” It hurt.

  He ran the light down her ankle and pulled up her pants leg to check it. “There’s no break. It looks okay.” He moved her ankle carefully. “I think you just twisted it a little.”

  “What about you?” Her eyes moved over him anxiously. “Are you all right?”

  “My pride’s hurt.” He chuckled. “And I’ve got some nice scrapes and bruises and a bump on my head. But I’ll live.”

  He shone the light upward. “Look at that. We must have fallen twenty feet. You can see the remains of the floorboards above us.”

  Rhea looked upward. “Good heavens! It’s a wonder we weren’t seriously hurt falling that far.” She looked around. “What is this place?”

  “Obviously a tunnel.” Carter shone the light along the dirt walls. “It drops down about twenty feet under the cabin and then heads eastward into a smaller passage. See?” He pointed ahead.

  Snatching the other flashlight from Carter’s pocket, she shone a light toward the smaller tunnel curiously. “Where do you think that passage goes?”

  Carter shrugged, brushing dirt off his jeans from the tumble. “I don’t know, but we’ll need to find out.” He looked up and frowned. “We can’t climb out of this hole easily, so we’d better hope that passage leads to an outside entrance.”

  A trickle of fear crawled up Rhea’s spine as she shone her light up the dark tunnel toward the broken remains of the cabin floor. “No one knows where we are, Carter, and we didn’t bring cell phones with the reception so bad up here.”

  “Don’t panic. Even if we’re stuck here for a while, someone will come looking for us. That hole above would be hard to miss.” He shone the light upward, moving it around the splintered opening. “Look. There’s a trapdoor hanging down from the cabin floor.” He pointed it out to her. “The two of us standing over the area must have been too much weight. We probably snapped the latch on the old trapdoor and then broke the floorboards through with no support beneath them any longer.”

  “Nice to know that now,” Rhea groused.

  Carter leaned over to examine Rhea, turning her arms over looking for cuts, rubbing a thumb over her face to remove a dirt streak. “You know, I realize now why there are remnants of an old ladder beside the house, grown over in ivy and kudzu. Grampa mentioned once it looked like a mighty long ladder for work on a small cabin like this.”

  Rhea stared at him. “You think old Jonas Sutton dug this tunnel under his cabin?”

  “Well, I hate to mention it, but it’s pretty creepy down here.” Carter shone the light around. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in a mighty long time.”

  Rhea shivered, pulling her arms in to hug herself. “You don’t see any rats or spiders or anything, do you?”

  “Not right off.” He chuckled. “But I’d say there’s some critters living in the area. We probably scared them off for now, falling down screaming like we did.”

  As if on cue, Rhea heard a scuffling in the small tunnel ahead of them. She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t relish spending much time here.”

  “Me neither.” Carter flashed his light into the tunnel. “We’d better see if this passage leads anywhere.”

  The small side tunnel led only about twelve feet to a rocky wall. From the light of their flashlights, Rhea and Carter could see quartz veins in the rock face and occasional minute flecks of gold. They also found a battered wooden box, covered with dirt, wrapped in a rusted chain and locked tight at the hasp.

  The tunnel had narrowed as it progressed, and Carter and Rhea found it hard to stand upright at the wall. Squatting, Rhea looked up toward the ceiling. “I guess we’re under Rocky Hillside and not far from the mouth of the springs.”

  “Yeah.” Carter followed her eyes around the passage. “And it looks like we’ve found old Jonas Sutton’s gold stash.”

  “Maybe.” Rhea studied the dirty box covered in spiderwebs and grime. “Do you think this is what the vandal has been looking for all this time, digging up first one place and then another around Laurel Springs?”

  “Could be.” Carter kicked at the box to judge its weight. “This box is heavy, obviously filled with something, but I doubt we can get into it without the proper tools to break the hasp and chain.”

  He looked around. “The bad news, Rhea, is that this old passage goes nowhere but right to this wall. Old Jonas must have been picking for gold bits in the rock, and came in to work through the cabin floor each time.”

  Fresh alarm seized Rhea. “Then we’re trapped here.” She hugged herself with a shiver.

  “Might be for a time.” Carter shone the flashlight back down the passage. “The ceiling is too low to stay here, Rhea. Let’s go back to the bottom of the tunnel below the cabin. We’ll be more visible there when help comes, and we’ll be able to hear if anyone gets close, so we can call out.”

  They worked their way back through the low passage to the broader area below the cabin floor.

  Carter spent some time examining the tunnel wall with his flashlight, seeing if he could dig out toe-holds in the dirt to climb out on. Rhea soon saw his efforts weren’t profiting.

  She began to gather up the boards that had splintered from the cabin floor. “Let’s put these together to make something to sit on, instead of having to sit in the dirt.”

  Giving up on the idea of climbing out, Carter helped Rhea put the boards together against one side of the tunnel. “We can sit and lean back here,” he said, taking off his backpack and dropping it beside the boards.

  Rhea unfastened her waist pack and settled down beside Carter in resignation. She looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven now.

  “Mother and Nana
thought I’d gone to bed early with a book. It’s unlikely they’ll check on me until morning when I don’t come down for breakfast.” She looked at Carter. “Did you tell your folks you’d gone to bed or out walking for a while?” She hoped the latter was true.

  He touched her cheek. “They went to bed early, worn out from working in the yard transplanting bulbs and from all that happened with Taylor. I told them I was doing the same.” He paused. “Unless Taylor wakes up with another nightmare, they won’t know I’m gone until morning either.”

  “Oh, goody.” She tried to make a joke but knew it fell short.

  Carter turned his flashlight off. “We’ll need to conserve the batteries in our flashlights. For now, we’ll keep one on.”

  Rhea saw a nasty scratch on Carter’s arm and dug out wipes from her pack to clean it. They took turns then, checking each other for scratches and cuts, cleaning them as best they could and putting first-aid ointment on them from Rhea’s tiny first-aid kit.

  Finishing applying salve to a scratch on her cheek, Carter leaned over to kiss a spot below it. “I’m sorry this happened, Rhea.”

  She tucked the first-aid supplies back in her waist pack. “It wasn’t your fault. Don’t start trying to blame yourself because we’re stranded here.” She smiled at him. “Who knew old Jonas had a tunnel below his cabin? I can’t believe we haven’t discovered it in all these years.”

  Carter leaned back against the dirt wall. “He concealed it well under the floorboards. Probably the passing of time rotted the trapdoor underneath, and the extra weight of the two of us standing over that area on the floor caused everything to break through.”

  They dug out water for a drink and shared a package of crackers that Carter had tucked in his backpack.

  Rhea looked in his bag and grinned. “You have a lot of snacks in here. At least we won’t go hungry or thirsty.”

  “There is that.” He leaned over and kissed her nose. “It’s nice to have your company, Rhea Dean—even in a bad situation.”

  She gave a disgusted snort. “Well, personally, I’d rather be home in bed.”

  He chuckled softly. “That sounds good, too.”

  Rhea kicked at him, overlooking the little frisson of awareness that raced through her at his implication.

  “Do you think there might really be gold in that strongbox?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I don’t know.” Carter fished in his shirt pocket to pull out a small metal item. “Look at this.” He placed it in her hand. “I found this on the floor when we were looking around the cabin, right before we started to move the bed. I meant to show it to you but then got distracted.”

  Rhea turned the item over in her hand. “It’s a lapel pin of some type.” Borrowing the flashlight, she studied it closely and then looked at Carter with a shocked expression.

  “I know what this is. It’s a Rotary pin.” She pointed to the center of it. “See the wheel spokes in the middle? The wheel design symbolizes civilization and movement; it’s been the Rotary symbol since the earliest days of its organization. I researched the club once for one of my newspaper articles.”

  Carter took the pin to study it. “What are these words here?” He held the flashlight closer.

  Rhea leaned over to see. “They say ‘Past President,’ so probably whoever this belonged to was a …”

  A chill rolled over her, and she stiffened, unable to finish her sentence.

  “What is it, Rhea?” Carter asked quietly.

  “I know whose pin this is.”

  Carter’s eyes found hers.

  She stared miserably at him. “It’s Marshall Sutton’s. I’m almost sure. He often wore it, even on casual jackets. He took a lot of pride in having been the last Rotary Club president.”

  “Sounds like Marshall,” Carter muttered.

  “Oh, Carter, do you think Marshall might be the vandal?”

  His lip curled. “You know I wouldn’t have any trouble believing it, although I won’t blame any of it on a good organization like the Rotary.”

  Rhea chewed on her knuckles in thought. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d certainly like to get my hands on him if he was the one who scared my son like he did and hit me over the head with that stick.” He practically spat the words.

  She stared at Carter in the dark, dumfounded.

  Carter fell silent for a short time and then began to speak slowly. “Let’s think about this. Marshall Sutton is a great-grandson of Jonas Sutton’s. If old family documents or letters existed, telling anything about Jonas’s treasure, a blood relative would be the one most likely to find them.” He paused. “I’d imagine if Marshall had discovered this sort of information, he’d view any treasure as his, no matter whose property the gold sat on now.”

  Rhea shivered, considering this.

  Carter’s eyes narrowed in thought. “One thing we know about Marshall for sure is that he likes money. He likes money and things. I can’t imagine Marshall Sutton would feel especially generous about telling the Deans or the Laymans about a possible treasure hidden underground near one of their old houses or sheds.”

  Rhea caught her breath. “If an old document only revealed that money or gold lay buried somewhere, but not exactly where, it would explain why Marshall, if he was the vandal, kept digging around cabins and buildings at Laurel Springs.”

  Her nerve endings came to full alert. “Carter, if any gold is in that strongbox, who would it belong to legally?”

  “To Laurel Springs, in a broad sense and, in a more technical sense, to our families since they own the assembly grounds.” He stretched his neck, stiff from the fall. “Jonas Sutton died too long ago for Marshall to be able to claim any of his property legally as inheritance. The land passed hands in sale long before Marshall was even born.”

  He turned the pin over in his hand thoughtfully. “However, Marshall might have convinced himself that any Sutton gold or money ought to be his by rights. Also, if he found it and didn’t tell anyone—who would ever know? Most everyone around here thinks those old stories about Jonas Sutton finding gold are myth and legend. Marshall could claim he suddenly made a killing in the stock market and no one would be the wiser.”

  Rhea stared miserably at her clenched hands. “This is really hard to take in, Carter.”

  “I imagine.” He snorted softly. “Did Marshall ever ask you questions about the Suttons or about the gold mining around here?”

  She searched her memory. “We talked about it often when we first started dating. I’d written a column for the newspaper about the gold-mining days and another piece solely about Jonas Sutton and the old legend.” Rhea paused.

  “And?” Carter probed.

  Rhea managed a wan smile. “And Marshall told me he hadn’t heard much about Jonas before. He wanted me to tell him everything I knew, about all my sources, all the old books I researched. He said the whole story fascinated him.”

  “I’ll bet it did,” Carter murmured.

  Rhea remembered Marshall’s ardent interest and blushed in the darkness. She’d believed that interest was mainly in her.

  A small silence descended.

  “All right, you might as well say it.” Rhea poked Carter in the ribs. “I know you’re thinking it. This is the main reason Marshall made such a run on me. He wanted to soak me for information. He wanted more access to the grounds without it seeming suspicious he was here a lot. He also probably figured if we married, he’d have clearer access and title to any gold or treasure found. With my father deceased, and me the only child, he probably assumed he’d become a joint owner in Laurel Springs in time, too.”

  Carter considered this quietly before speaking. “Somehow, I can’t see Marshall Sutton getting excited about fixing up Laurel Springs. I think he’d want to see his money go into something more personal and showy.”

  “You’re being rather nice not to laugh about this.” Rhea crossed her arms, her bottom lip pushing out in a pout. “If all this is true
about Marshall, I’ve been a real idiot.”

  Carter leaned over and kissed her. “No. You always knew, as you told me, things weren’t sizzling between the two of you. And you never agreed to marry Marshall.”

  Tears stung her eyes, and she sniffed once. “I might have considered it more seriously if you hadn’t come back when you did. Being with Marshall seemed much worse after that.”

  “Oh, Rhea Dean,” Carter said, burying his face in her neck and raining kisses over her shoulders, before finding her lips. “You shouldn’t tell me things like that here in the dark.”

  She giggled and put her arms around his neck. “I see little risk, Carter Layman, in anything I might say down here. Surely you know I would never disrobe and fool around with a man—any man—in an icky, nasty dirt tunnel twenty feet below ground. No matter how attractive he was or how he made my blood sizzle. This place is gross.”

  Carter laughed, nuzzling her hair as if to test her theory. “You’re not especially upset about Marshall, are you?”

  “I don’t like acknowledging that I’m such a bad judge of character, if Marshall is the vandal.” She let her hands roam over Carter’s arms and back, obviously enjoying his warmth in the gathering chill of the tunnel. “Can he be arrested for the things he’s done?”

  Carter nodded. “Trespassing. Vandalism. Destruction of private property. Assault. I don’t know if he’ll get much—if any—jail time, but the publicity won’t be good. I doubt he’ll stay in the area afterward as a banker if it is him. It would tarnish his reputation around here.”

  She bit her lip. “I guess I feel sort of sorry for him.”

  Carter spit out an expletive. “Pardon me if I don’t join you in those sentiments. I spent most of the evening, before coming to get you, trying to get a frightened little boy settled down to sleep. He even said he was afraid of the quilt in his room. I had to take it out.”

  “Poor little guy.” She shook her head and then shivered. “It’s cold down here.”

  Carter pulled her around to tuck her between his legs, her back against his chest.