Leaning forward, Laval touched the flesh fragments, wiping the dust away. The composition was bizarre: dark and cakey. As best she could determine, it had turned to soot. Within the ash, she felt a hard round object that she lifted up. She sat back to examine it, wiping it clean with her gloved fingers.
It was a plain gold man’s wedding ring. Cleaning it more thoroughly, Laval looked inside the band and found an inscription that read, “From your beloved wife, Sharon.”
She looked up to the sky, thinking. This morning on her police scanner she heard a missing person’s report for a “Joe Redman” who lived on the river. He was last known to be asleep in bed next to his wife, Sharon, on Friday night. Sharon Redman had awakened early Saturday morning and, after searching the house, had walked into the backyard to find a four-foot gap in their dock. Not a shred of wood was found in the water. The edges of the splintered planks appeared burned. The first assumption was that a boat had rammed the dock in the middle of the night; that is until authorities realized that even the dock piles were missing. Not cut off, but completely gone. Given the depth that dock piles are sunk into the riverbed upon construction, it would not be feasible to think a boat colliding into the dock could dislodge them. As a result, police suspected foul play.
Interesting, Laval thought.
CHAPTER 22
“Do you believe this?” Scott said, as his light licked the mottled walls.
They stood at one end of a perfectly symmetrical rectangular cave. Shining the flashlights around, Curt saw that the floor was hard and smooth, and the solid rock walls were beige, with portions blotched in black. The back wall was indiscernible from where they stood, even with their flashlights. The ceiling was approximately twelve feet high. A musty smell hung in the still air. “This place is obviously manmade,” he paused. “Lila? Are you in here?”
There was no response.
“Look,” Curt directed his light back to the base of the entry shaft they had just arrived through. “There’s fresh dirt caked on the ground. It didn’t come from me. Someone’s been down here recently.” He turned and pushed his light ahead over the length of the cave.
“If this is Ed Leedskalnin’s cave, where’s the box in the middle of the room he mentioned?” Scott asked.
Curt had wondered the same thing. He aimed the beam of light along the base of the wall until he saw something. He moved toward the object and gently picked it up. It was a piece of board with stamped text. Scott arrived at his side and read it aloud:
17th Connecticut Volu
The wood was broken off at the ‘u.’ “This is from the 17th Connecticut Volunteers. Union troops,” Curt said.
“Civil War?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that Union troops were confined to Jacksonville. Wasn’t this side of the St. Johns River held by the Confederates?”
“Union troops were primarily in Jacksonville,” Curt replied, “but they held Palatka on the west side of the river. This wood fragment must be all that’s left of Ed’s box. It most likely held supplies and disintegrated over time. Let’s keep looking.”
The men carefully stepped through the cave as the light from their flashlights danced across the floor. They paused here and there to inspect the floor, which contained a fine coating of dark dust. Curt paid it little heed. His concern was for Lila’s well-being.
“Curt, look,” Scott pointed ahead, shining his light through an opening in the back wall. “That must be the tunnel that leads to the inner cave where Ed found the stick with the red and green stones and where he saw human bones and a ‘face’ looking at him.”
They stepped gingerly to the rear of the cave and indeed found a tunnel declining at a slight angle through a five-foot-high by four-foot-wide aperture. The dimensions remained constant down the tunnel, which extended approximately 15 feet.
Curt cupped his hand to his mouth, and projected loudly, “Lila, are you in there?”
There was no response.
With some trepidation, they moved through the opening, careful of their footing down the graded tunnel. Along the wall to their right, at waist level, the wall jutted out 20 inches and then dropped straight down to the floor, creating a sloped stair step that mirrored the entire length of the downward tunnel. As in the outer cave, the walls were beige and splotched black. The stair step was coated with the same black dust that carpeted the cave floor.
They paused to look at the top of the flat shelf surface where Curt aimed his flashlight. “Interesting.”
“I can understand an underground hold for supplies, but why would Union soldiers cut an angled shaft like this with a paralleling ledge?” Scott asked.
Curt had no answer.
They continued on, sliding between the tunnel wall on the left and the stair-step ledge on the right, keeping their flashlights focused on the ground ahead. A tinkling noise that started low increased in volume as they went down. When they reached the end of the tunnel, the floor leveled, and they stepped through a ragged opening into a larger cave with a ceiling no more than eight feet high. By contrast with the outer cave, the walls and ceiling of this inner cave were irregular and smelled of moisture and dust.
“The second cave,” Scott said in awe.
“This one looks natural,” Curt remarked. “Lila, are you in here?”
They were met with silence.
“Natural or not, if it’s all the same to you, I prefer not to see the ‘face’ Ed mentioned looking back at me,” Scott said.
“I believe Ed was referring to a skull.”
The bubbling sound was louder now, and Curt flashed his light over the ground until he found the source: a thin stream cutting through a sizable crevice in the stone floor running left to right. The clear water reflected the beams from their flashlights.
“Everything Ed described is true,” Curt said softly, “but there’s no sign of Lila or anyone else.” While his professional curiosity was aroused by the find of the caves cited by Ed Leedskalnin and also the evidence of the Union occupation during the Civil War, his goal was still to find Lila. So far, they’d found nothing to suggest she’d been down here, or even on Bayard Point.
Scott fixed his light on the stream.
Curt slowly stepped forward and shined his light on the rough floor beyond the stream. A heaping pile of white stone appeared. “Look,” Curt said. Curt ran the light over the pile. He half expected the face and bones to leap out of the darkness at him. Several passes of the light, and a scan of the rest of the cave floor, though, confirmed there were only rocks.
“Ed said he threw the stick with the remaining red stone near the rubble. I don’t see it.”
“Neither do I. Scott, turn off your light,” Curt said hitting the off button on his flashlight, “just for a moment.”
Scott complied, and they were enveloped in total darkness.
Curt flipped his light on. “Nothing. No red or green glow.”
“He took the green stone, remember?”
“Which means the other stone should still be here with the stick, if everything he said was true.”
Curt stepped forward and approached the stream that sliced through the cave floor. He briefly shined the light on the irregular walls and on the roof with its craggy rock formations sticking down. Then he turned the light back on the cave floor, noticing its uneven surface.
“What about the stream? It looks almost too linear to be natural,” Scott said.
“Not really,” Curt began. “Notice how it’s not quite a straight line. And here,” he said pointing the light into the water, “it varies in depth. My guess is anywhere from two to six inches. If it was manmade, you’d expect it to be a uniform depth.” He ran the flashlight along the stream to the left until it met the wall. “See, it flows from a crevice in the side that’s a few inches above floor level, creating a mini-waterfall.” He then ran the li
ght to the far right. “Look, it goes into that wall at the base.”
Scott bent down and placed two fingers in the gently flowing water. “Cold,” he said looking up.
“This is the stream Ed dropped the stick into when he held it and it became warm,” Curt commented. He reached down, dipped his finger in the water and brought it to his lips. “Spring water.”
“So what’s with the pile of stones?” Scott said as he was about to step over the stream. As if a new thought struck him, Scott spun around and shined his light back toward the opening where they had entered. Curt turned to see. Several feet to the side, against the wall, an object cast a small shadow. It was a rusty lantern. It stood silently where it had been left by Ed Leedskalnin.
Curt said, “Ed’s lantern.”
Curt and Scott walked over to examine the antique light. More rust than metal, it was remarkably nondescript.
Curt turned back, took a long step over the stream and appraised the pile of stones. It covered a generous area of floor and reached at least 40 inches high. Besides the stark white pieces of stone, there were smaller gray rocks mixed in the rubble. Curt couldn’t help but wonder about the face Ed had described. According to his story, Ed had already been spooked by the stick with the glowing red and green stones. Had he only imagined a face in his flustered state?
Scott moved beside, then past Curt. Guided by his flashlight, he carefully rounded the backside of the pile. “Um, Curt? Come here.”
Curt joined him. Scott pointed to the light’s destination. On the stone floor, not far from the rubble, a hat lay on the ground; not a Civil War-era fedora or a hat from Ed Leedskalnin’s 1920s era, but a present-day baseball cap. It was blue, with the University of North Florida osprey mascot above the ‘UNF’ lettering.
Curt knelt forward and picked up the hat. “This is new.” He looked up at Scott. “Didn’t that CIA guy, Tolen, mention Lila was accompanied by a University of North Florida student?”
“Yes.”
Curt and Scott turned in unison and swept the area of the cave floor with their flashlights, sending light all the way to the far wall. It was empty. After several more disappointing minutes of wandering about the cave and carefully examining the ground, including the stream’s ingress and egress into the walls, they left. They deemed it best to leave everything in place, including Ed’s lantern and the pile of rubble, taking with them only the UNF cap. Using his phone, Curt took a series of photographs of the inner cave before moving upward through the connecting tunnel, where he took more pictures along the way, then concluded by snapping a dozen shots in the outer cave.
Curt paused to recall the details of Ed’s story. A little voice told him they were missing something. Then it occurred to him. He turned to Scott. “We almost forgot something.”
“The picture Ed described,” Scott realized, “the one he said was like nothing he’d ever seen.”
“A picture that, according to Ed, seemed wrong,” Curt added. He thought back to the story. “Ed said he saw the picture before going into the inner cave, so it must be here on the walls of the outer cave.”
They spent the next ten minutes examining the outer cave walls with the light from their flashlights. It was a fruitless search.
To be safe, they even gave the connecting tunnel and the inner tunnel a cursory examination. Ed’s picture was nowhere to be found.
Scott finally said, “The caves, the box, or at least what was left of it, the connecting tunnel, the lantern…even the stream. It all matches Ed’s story, yet there’s no stick with the red stone, or a face, or any other bones. And there’s no picture. What gives?”
“Maybe Lila and her assistant found the stick,” Curt said. “I wish I knew what they were looking for down here,” he continued, scratching his bristled head. “It might give us insight as to what happened to them. Regardless, we’ve got to expand the search on Bayard Point.”
They climbed the rope up the long, angled tunnel and covered the opening with palm fronds and leaves, then re-coiled the rope and placed it out of sight in the brush. The two men returned to the top of the plateau. Curt was anxious to scour the point around the rise. His eyes were still adjusting to the harsh sunlight as they slipped back into their hip-waders. They made their way back down the eastern slope, dripping with sweat, and began an exhaustive search around the plateau, slowly moving outward from the base in large concentric circles. The going was difficult as they sloshed through the swampy surroundings. On more than one occasion, they flushed a cottonmouth snake from the underbrush. On each occasion, Scott let out a yell.
CHAPTER 23
The Fish continued to move with determination up the river, swimming south in longer increments before stopping to rest. It now felt the first pangs of hunger; the first ravenous urges for flesh. Stopping near a dock pile on the west bank, the creature felt its hunting instincts return. A female manatee and her young calf became its first kill since being submerged in the ocean last summer. The attack had been merciless and violent, the water saturated with the blood of the two creatures, but the Fish was unable to consume much of its catch. The salt in the water prohibited it from behaving as it was created. Only small portions of the carcasses were eaten, and while it had been a practically useless kill, there was something energizing about the event. The Fish ached to rediscover its full, potent appetite.
With each passing hour, the farther it ventured upriver, the stronger the Fish became. Somewhere ahead, it knew it would encounter the water it sought, and when it did, all of its power would return.
Still, the Fish was conflicted; confused about a primal directive. Not only was it in search of the fresh water ahead, the creature also felt a calling. Its soulless core was, for the first time, feeling a sense of duty, of responsibility. It traveled upriver not for its own sake or even of its own volition. It was moving in this direction because it was being forced into a destiny that it could not fight.
CHAPTER 24
It was late morning when Samuel Tolen returned home and relaunched his Bayliner into the St. Johns River at the northern end of Green Cove Springs. The air was muggy, the humidity stifling. The skies had clouded, usually a welcome relief from the heat, but the dark gray horizon indicated an approaching storm, a common event this time of year in Florida as daytime temperatures soared. Under normal circumstances, Tolen would have waited for the weather to clear. Summer storms, while extremely violent, were generally quick moving. After what he had discovered diving off Fort Caroline, though, his adrenaline was charged. He was not about to wait. If he could validate the accuracy of the hieroglyphic text, not only would the significance of the find be immeasurable, it might lead to clues as to what had happened to Dr. Lila Falls and her assistant, Kira Compton.
Tolen steered the vessel upriver, passing the heart of the small riverside town. The sight of the Spring Park pier and the patrons on shore enjoying the grounds brought back thoughts of the unfinished business with his father’s ashes. With all due respect to Jaspar, he would have to deal with it another day. Even his father would have understood, given the situation.
Tolen followed the shoreline to the Old Shands Bridge Boat Launch where he had encountered Officer Melanie Canstar, Dr. Curt Lohan, and Scott Marks, along with Dr. Lila Falls’ damaged rental boat yesterday. It was obvious he and Dr. Falls had arrived at the same conclusion after discovering the Egyptian text on the riverbed 30 miles to the north. The question was, had Dr. Falls and Kira Compton found the evidence needed for validation? Or had they crossed paths with others after the same archaeological prize? Tolen considered the theft of the stone tablet and the Jacksons’ vicious murder four months ago in Nebraska. It was possible the tablet had led the killers to the same destination. If Dr. Falls and Kira Compton happened upon these men, had the same deadly fate befallen them? It was a harsh probability given their disappearance, Dr. Falls’ frantic call to her ex-husband, Dr. Lohan, and the damaged re
ntal boat recovered yesterday morning by the FWC officer.
Passing the Old Shands Bridge Boat Launch, a light rain began to fall from the ever-darkening sky. Tolen crouched down in the seat, pressing forward to use the Plexiglas window as a shield. He slowed his speed as the water grew choppy and the wind blew in long gusts. He saw flashes of lightning and heard thunder to the south, but fortunately it remained in the distance. Five minutes later, as he passed under the lofty rise at the north end of the Shands Bridge, the rain stopped and the sound of thunder grew faint.
A short time later, as Tolen neared the vegetation-thick Bayard Point, the sun crawled out from behind the clouds. A recreational boat was angling away from shore as he approached. Tolen wasn’t positive, but it looked like Dr. Lohan and his friend Scott Marks. This only heightened Tolen’s suspicion of the men. He considered following them, but then decided against it. He would investigate the point then have another talk with Dr. Lohan and Mr. Marks, if needed.
Tolen pulled the Bayliner to shore. He removed the light jacket, which helped conceal his weapon. Given the humidity, traipsing through the marsh and onto the rise was going to be brutal. He secured the vessel to the underbrush, put on rubber waders, grabbed a bottle of water, and hopped into the mud on the thin strip of beach. He checked to make sure his Springfield .45 was nestled in its holster under his left arm.
Tolen looked up. His target wasn’t difficult to find. A short way inland, the rise reached a flat summit. He took a final look around him, and toward the water to make sure no one was watching then he pushed his way into the underbrush.
Almost immediately, sweat began to pour from his body. He moved purposely through the muck and foliage, aiming for the rise. Once he reached the first upturn of the tree-covered land, the footing became solid. The incline slowed his progress, but he was relentless. Within minutes, he reached the top of the plateau.
Evil in the Beginning (The God Tools Book 2) Page 14
