“Because five-year-old Ike died,” Erin said. “Is this…” She looked at the pile of rocks in and around the pool. “Is this where he is buried?” She moved her feet away a little, not liking the idea of standing on or near his grave.
“No, not in here. We couldn’t leave him in here. She couldn’t.”
“Jenny?”
He just gave her a hard stare and didn’t answer.
“Then this is where he died,” Vic suggested. “That’s why the marker is here.”
The rocks, the pool, the cold food just out of reach.
It would be a temptation for a hungry child. A child climbing over the rocks, over a slippery wet surface, trying to reach a bottle of juice or a package held down with a large rock. So easy for him to slip and fall and either hurt himself or end up in the water. Maybe a child alone, separated from his siblings, following his daddy. Or sneaking away when Rip was supposed to be watching him. Maybe Rip had been too drunk to understand the danger or the need to watch him closely.
“So Rip… that’s what made Jenny so angry? She blamed him for Ike… getting killed?”
“I wasn’t part of that conversation,” Wiseman growled, “but I can imagine how it went. I didn’t get here until it was too late. Too late for either of them to take anything back. And if you think I would ask her to explain exactly what had happened, you’re crazy.” He stared at the pool, then looked up from it and gazed at the blank wall of the cave as if he could see a movie playing there. “She was in trouble herself. Saving her had to be the priority.”
“Saving Jenny?” Vic shook her head. “From what?”
“She went into labor,” Erin guessed. “Lifting that heavy rock. Trying to drag Rip’s body. Maybe picking up Ike’s.”
“She was in a bad way.” His voice was gravelly. “I had to get her out of here. Away from him. But she wouldn’t leave her little boy behind. Doubled over with pain, and she still had to carry him.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving up and down as he tried to keep his voice steady. “She had to save her boy.” He saw the questions in their eyes and shook his head. “It was way too late for him.”
Vic rubbed at the corners of her eyes. “Poor Jenny. That poor woman.”
Wiseman walked toward them. The gun was still pointed loosely toward them. He toed the other rocks with his boot. He turned one over and found what he was looking for. On the reverse side, this one was scratched too.
RIP
Rip? Or was it R.I.P.?
Either way, they were both gone. Jenny’s son and her husband. Both killed in that cave.
Chapter 40
“Why did you leave Rip in here?” Vic demanded, sounding angry. And maybe she was. Angry that they had just left the body there for her to find. To inhabit her nightmares, maybe for years to come. “If you took Ike out of here to lay him to rest, why couldn’t you do the same for Rip? Why leave him here, in this pool?”
Wiseman didn’t look at Vic. He was looking at the pool, where he had disposed of the body.
“Have you ever tried to move a man of that size? A dead weight? Do you know how long it would have taken to get him out of here, even with help? I could barely get him over here, pulling and rolling him. I couldn’t have gotten him all the way out. And even if I could, why would I? He was stupid and careless and caused his own son’s death. Why show him respect? Why give him any dignity in death?”
He circled partway around the pool, like the restless pacing of a bear in a zoo cage, looking down into it and seeing what only he could see.
“So yeah, I dumped him in there. I weighted him down. I cut him. Cut into his flesh so that the fish would be attracted to him faster. After they were finished with him, it would have been easy to move his cleaned bones out of here. To throw them in a trash heap or burn them. Get rid of every last bit of him.” His lip curled into a sneer, disgusted with Rip.
Wiseman was no longer between Erin and Vic and the exit. Erin gave Vic a nudge and started to shuffle toward the passage. It wasn’t exactly covert. With the bright flashlight in her hand, every move Erin made was magnified, the light and shadows jumping around the cave walls. She was feeling closed in. Trapped in a cave again. She didn’t want to find herself in the bottom of a pit, or injured and blinded by the dark, tied up and trying to find her way around a maze of tunnels. Her heart was in her throat.
No matter how casual and relaxed she tried to appear, Wiseman couldn’t help but notice their intention to leave. The shotgun came up, pointing toward them.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“We’re going home,” Vic said. “Don’t you think there has been enough killing here? You don’t want two more bodies to dispose of. Especially when one of them is the girlfriend of a Bald Eagle Falls police officer.”
“What?” His eyes flicked from Vic to Erin and back again.
“Yeah. You really want Officer Piper looking for you? I don’t know how hard they’re looking for Rip’s killer, and they don’t even know about Ike, but if Erin and I disappear, you think Piper won’t move heaven and earth to find out what happened to us? And you already know my boyfriend, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“You didn’t recognize the truck outside? Willie kicked Rip out of here twice. He never talked to you? Told you to stay out of this cave?”
Wiseman’s finger tightened, starting to squeeze the trigger. Erin’s heart was in her throat. Vic’s arguments were not helping. They were pushing Wiseman in the wrong direction, making him panic. He would wipe out anyone who knew anything. Anyone who could identify him or knew anything about his role in the cover-up.
“You aren’t guilty of murder,” Erin told him, her voice squeaking upward so she sounded like a doll playing a recording of a faked child’s voice. “You didn’t have anything to do with Ike’s or Rip’s death. Just with disposing of the body. That’s all. You don’t want our blood on your hands.”
The muzzle of the shotgun wavered but didn’t move away from them. His finger on the trigger did not relax.
“Go,” Vic murmured. “He’s not going to be talked down. Just move.”
Erin agreed. She jumped to the side, then turned her back on Wiseman and zipped toward the entrance as quickly as she could over the rough ground, trying to ignore the disorienting play of the light and shadows cast by the flashlight. She knew Vic was right behind her. She couldn’t look back or she would slow down or freeze up.
Wiseman shouted at them to stop. Of course they didn’t. The thunderous blast of the shotgun filled the cave, echoing. Erin couldn’t help looking back to see if Vic had been hit. If Wiseman had killed her friend…
Vic was still moving, her face white. “Go, go, go!”
Erin needed no more urging. Wiseman called after them again, swearing. Following them.
Erin heard Nilla yipping wildly.
Nilla. She’d forgotten all about the annoying little white puffball and, apparently, Vic had too. But they couldn’t stop with Wiseman in pursuit. Nilla would have to follow them, to find his own way out. At least he was a much smaller, faster target than either Erin or Vic.
Erin couldn’t breathe. The walls closed in around her as she left the large cave and had to slide sideways through the passageway, watching the rocky ceiling to make sure she wasn’t going to hit her head on some outcropping. She couldn’t get any air. She could barely see through a black haze in her vision, even with the flashlight still firmly in her hand.
Wiseman yelled, not in anger but in pain. Erin looked back, but she had left the big room and of course she could no longer see what was going on there. Nilla was barking and growling, a different note in his voice. He must have gone after Wiseman.
Nilla had always been such a coward when threatened by Willie; Erin would never have guessed he would have the courage to attack a man. She sucked in a deep breath and kept going, trying to get out before Wiseman could resume his pursuit. Nilla had given them a bigger head start, but the
y weren’t out of danger.
Erin moved as quickly as she could. In a few minutes that seemed like hours, they were running through the trees, back toward Willie’s truck. Erin’s lungs burned. She was not a runner and she had put on a couple of pounds in the time she’d been working at Auntie Clem’s. She was still slim and had been working on tai chi, but she was not exactly fit.
As they got within sight of the truck, she heard Nilla yipping again, and the dog caught up with them, then burst past, barking excitedly to be let into the truck. By the time they reached it, he was pacing impatiently, wondering what was taking the two-legs so long to get there. Erin and Vic didn’t say anything, both puffing and trying to catch their breaths.
They jumped into the truck without a word. Nilla hopped into the back seat of the cab. They slammed their doors shut.
Vic started the truck and shifted into drive, which auto-locked the doors.
As they pulled out, spraying gravel and clumps of grass and weeds, Erin saw Wiseman emerging from the trees, limping after them, shouting, still carrying his shotgun.
She ducked, hoping he wouldn’t shoot the truck, and held on to the dashboard as Vic floored it over the washboard surface of the little-used road.
Chapter 41
Of course, it wasn’t all over. Erin realized as they sped back toward Bald Eagle Falls that she had another firing squad to face. She was going to have to tell Terry what they had found so that the police department could follow up properly. And they had tipped off someone who had been an accomplice after the fact in the murder and who would probably go straight to Jenny to let her know that Erin and Vic had figured it all out.
“Oh, great,” Erin muttered.
Vic looked over at her. She opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, then closed it again, nodding her head. “Uh… yeah. Officer Piper.”
“He’s not going to be happy.”
“What did you tell him when you left?”
“Just that I was going out to take care of some things.”
Vic considered, staring at the highway stretching out ahead of them. “I think you should call him.”
“It would be easier to explain face to face.”
“Yeah, but if you call him, then you can explain and not have to be there to take the fallout right away. He can hang up and be mad for a while, but when he sees you, he’ll be calmed down.”
“Like when we went to Whitewater Falls to find Joshua.”
“Right. He was mad at first, but by the time he got out there, he was just happy that everyone was okay. And Terry can get out here faster to deal with him if you don’t wait.”
Erin nodded to herself. Vic had a point. She did a few of her tai chi breathing exercises and took out her phone. She tapped her speed dial for Terry. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to pick it up right away, or whether to hope he was tired out from working and had fallen asleep so it would go to voicemail. But if he didn’t get the message right away, then she’d have to call the sheriff or someone else in the police department and explain to them. She wasn’t sure that would be any better. Then Terry would want to know why she hadn’t talked to him first.
“Erin? Is everything okay?” he asked as soon as he picked up.
“Why wouldn’t everything be okay?” she countered.
“You left here in such a hurry and didn’t say what was going on. I didn’t know if something was wrong or you just wanted to get to a sale before it closed.” His tone was teasing, but had an edge to it as well. Like he hoped it was just something innocent that they could joke about, but was afraid that it wasn’t. And of course he was right.
“We’re fine,” she said to start with. Reassure him of that first. Help reduce the tension. “We—Vic and I—went out to the cave. I wanted to see something.”
She left out the part about going to see Adrienne first. That wasn’t what had gotten them in trouble, but Terry would think that it was. He would accuse her of sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, all that stuff that she’d heard before.
“To see what? You won’t even go inside a cave.”
“I did!”
“You went inside?”
“Yes. I really did. And it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And nothing… there wasn’t a collapse and I didn’t get hurt.”
“No. You see? I told you it would be okay. And next time, it will be easier because you’ll know that it is safe. That something bad doesn’t happen to you every time you go into a cave.”
“I still don’t think I’m going to do it again.”
“We’ll see,” he said with good humor. “So… did you see whatever it was you wanted to know about?” The police had already processed the scene, so of course he didn’t see what she could have learned from the cleaned-up murder site. He thought they had found everything there was to find, but he had been wrong.
“Well, actually, yes.”
“Which was what?”
“The families over there, the Ryders anyway, they were using the cold water in the stream and pool for refrigeration.”
“How do you know that? There wasn’t anything like that in it when we were there.”
“They cleaned it up before anyone found Rip’s body.”
“I suppose they didn’t want to be questioned, so they didn’t want there to be any indication that any of them had been in the cave.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s tampering with evidence, but I don’t think anyone is going to prosecute them for it.”
“There’s more than that. That’s just how it started.”
“How what started? You think that is somehow related to Ryder’s death?”
“It was. In a roundabout way.”
“You’re going to have to explain it to me. Are you on your way back? You can tell me all about it when you get home?”
“We’re on the highway right now, on our way home. But I think I should tell you everything right now. You’re not going to want to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Well… you need to go out there…”
“Exactly what did you find out?”
Erin took a couple more deep breaths. “Promise me you won’t get mad.”
“Erin.”
“I just don’t want you to blow up.”
“Just tell me. The more you say things like that, the more anxious I get.”
“It had to do with the baby being named Ike.”
There was a pause. “We talked about that. There are a lot of reasons that they might have named the baby Ike.”
“But we didn’t talk about one of them. That sometimes, a family gives a baby the same name after a previous sibling dies. It happened a lot in Clementine’s genealogy that I’ve been reading. Sometimes a family would have two or three babies named the same thing, because the first few died in infancy.”
“Yes, that’s true. I don’t see it happening very much anymore, but I’m sure it still does happen sometimes.”
“Especially with families with long traditions. Like we were talking about, where they want to carry on grandpa’s name in every generation…”
“So are you telling me that they had a child named Ike who died, and that was why they named the baby Ike?”
“Yes.”
“Only… when did he die? I thought he was registered with the school. Did the school just register him automatically and didn’t know that he had passed?”
“He just died recently. Right before Rip.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Erin pictured Terry grabbing his notebook and pen to start jotting down notes, realizing that Erin had actually discovered something important to the case.
“Tell me what you know,” he instructed. “When did the other Ike die?”
“The same day as Rip.”
“You think it had something to do with Rip’s death?”
“Yes. I think it was the motive for his murder.”
Another pause as Terry apparently wrote
notes to himself. “What do you think happened?”
“Something happened in the cave. Rip was supposed to be watching Ike, or maybe he was drunk and he did something stupid. Whatever it was, Ike died there in the cave.”
“What makes you think that?”
“We found a rock in there with his name carved on it. A makeshift tombstone.”
“A rock could be carved with his name for a lot of different reasons. He could have done it himself. Kids like to write or carve their names into everything.”
“But he didn’t. There’s a man in the settlement, his name is Wiseman, and he confirmed it. That Ike died. And Jenny… she’s the one who killed Rip. Because he killed their son.”
“It would have taken a lot of strength to lift a rock of that size and bring it down with enough force to do the damage that was done.”
“And you don’t think a woman would be strong enough? You hear about them lifting cars when their children are in trouble. You don’t think that a woman used to living and working out there in the wild, chopping wood and stuff like that, couldn’t lift a rock?”
“She was very pregnant at the time. That was either right before or right after the baby was born. It isn’t that I can’t see a woman being able to lift a heavy rock or to kill her husband in a fit of rage or grief. Just… in that condition… wouldn’t she be risking harm to the baby? Or to herself, if she’d already had the baby and happened to tear something with the strain?”
“I don’t think she was thinking about the consequences. She just acted. She was so upset, she just picked it up and…” Erin didn’t finish the sentence. Maybe if she didn’t say it out loud, she wouldn’t see it in her head. She wouldn’t have nightmares about what Jenny had done.
“And this Wiseman, he is a witness? He says this is what happened?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need to get someone out there to talk to him, then.”
“I think you should get someone out there soon. Or… he won’t be out there anymore. And neither will anyone else.”
“Because you had to go and put yourself in the middle of it,” he sighed.
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