Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 24

“You sure this is where we turn?”

Art swiveled and gave me his most withering dead-eyed cop stare. “Didn’t Waylon tell you to follow the signs for the church?”

“I don’t see a sign,” I said.

Art pointed toward the trunk of a big tulip poplar, then swung his finger down toward the ground. There, nestled amid some weeds, lay a rusted, bullet-riddled sign: “Cave Springs Primative Baptist Church.”

“Oh, how could I have missed it? I guess if you need the sign to find it, they don’t want you there.”

Art grunted. “I’m guessing if you get there by following a sign, they invite you to reach into the box and hand out the rattlesnakes.”

“I don’t think Primitive Baptists are snake-handlers,” I said. “I think that’s Church of Holiness with Signs Following, or something like that.”

“What does that mean, ‘Signs Following’? Besides, aren’t we doing some sign-following here?”

“It’s a reference to a Bible verse — signs of the true Christian, supposedly: healing the sick, sipping cyanide, handling vipers. Y’all don’t do that in the Episcopal church?”

Art shook his head. “Not so much. We keep in touch with the Lord by sipping wine and handling golf clubs.”

“So tell me again what this octogenarian caver told you about this place?”

“You listening this time?”

“I was listening last time. I just wasn’t remembering.”

“Lord, grant me patience,” he sighed. “Okay, he said it’s been a long time since he was up here — like, forty years’ worth of long time — but caves don’t change all that fast, you know? I told him one of the locals had called it Russell’s Cave, and I relayed the description just the way you gave it to me. He said he’s sure it’s the same one he mapped a long time ago. And he said your pal Waylon’s right: there is another entrance, right by the church, which is a lot easier to get to than the one the sheriff took you in. He said you went in the back door.”

“And where, exactly, is the front door?”

“I believe his last words were, ‘You can’t miss it.’”

“I’ve heard that phrase a lot of times before, and I’ve finally figured out what it means. It means, ‘You’re about to get hopelessly lost, sucker.’”

As we rounded a curve at a dip in the road, we came upon a small church nestled at the base of a bluff. Off to one side sat a small, weathered farmhouse, which I guessed might be where the pastor lived. We whipped into the gravel parking lot and skidded to a stop — the church had snuck up on us — and got out to have a look.

We had nearly clipped another sign. This one stood at the road’s edge, so close as to seem almost challenging, daring the heathen to vandalize it — or even just ignore it — at their eternal peril. It was laid up of smooth river rock, mortared into an approximation of a Greek pediment; cradled within the rock was a weathered wooden slab inscribed “Cave Springs Primative Baptist Church.”

The church matched the sign: river rock in shades of tan and brown, nestled deep in a matrix of mottled gray mortar. The building appeared to have been created by geologic action rather than human hands. The double doors set into the front were stout wood, silver with age; their black hardware was forged iron, the hammer blows still visible on its surface. A pair of metal license plates was nailed to the doors: “Jesus Is Coming R-U Ready?” asked one; the other read “Heaven OR Hell — Where Will You Spend Eternity?”

“Friendly crowd,” I observed. I tried the iron latch, but the door seemed to be bolted from the inside somehow.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” deadpanned Art, striking a Jesus pose. He rapped on the wood. “Ow! Looks like oak, feels like ironwood. Let’s see what we can see through a window.”

The windows were miserly — few, small, and high — minimizing the temptation, I supposed, to admire the trees instead of heeding the sermons. Luckily the stonework made it easy to climb the wall. Art and I hauled ourselves up a few feet and peered through a grimy pane. There wasn’t much to see: a dozen backless benches, a scattering of ragged hymnals, a battered upright piano, and a lopsided wooden lectern. “Now I see why they call it ‘primitive,’” I said. We clambered down and began circumnavigating the little building.

A wide, well-worn path ran alongside the church, then led to the base of the bluff out back. The pathway ended at a natural rock basin, waist-deep or so, filled with clear water. The surface rippled slightly in the center, where water from a fissure welled up continuously. At the back of the pool, the water gurgled over a lip in the basin and disappeared into an opening in the cliff. “Now I see why they call it ‘Cave Springs,’” Art said. “Handy for baptisms, huh?”

“Very. Okay, your spelunking friend was right — hard to miss.” The opening in the rock wall was an oval about eight feet high by four feet wide. A grate of rusting bars blocked the entrance, supported by iron hinges pounded into the rock; a stout padlock hung from the hasp. “Dang,” I said. “Now what?”

“Pray,” said Art as he moved to study the lock. I heard a jangling of keys, then the click of a lock popping open.

“Hey, how’d you do that?”

“God provides,” he intoned, looking heavenward as he slipped a master key back among its fellows and dropped the key ring into his pocket.

We made a quick trip back to the truck for flashlights, jackets, Art’s headlamp and evidence kit, and my camera, then returned to the opening. Despite the rust on the grate, the hinges turned easily and silently. I noticed a liberal coating of grease on the pins. “Be nice to know who greases the hinges and carries the keys,” I said.

As we entered the mouth of the tunnel, a cool wind fanned our faces. I sniffed the air, wondering if I might pick up a faint whiff of decomp or adipocere, but I knew that if I did, it would be emanating from my imagination, not the cave itself. Just inside, once the harsh daylight began to fade behind us, Art knelt down, his flashlight angling low along the dirt floor. “Look familiar?”

I crouched, and felt a chill that had little to do with the cave’s temperature. “See all those? Those are the same work boot prints as in the slides.” He played the beam slowly back and forth, and I clutched his arm. “There — that’s the sheriff’s track, or one just like it.” Just as in the photos I’d taken in the grotto, the crisped lugged prints were superimposed over the worn tracks. At least, in the closest set of prints. But as Art played his beam farther along the cave floor, he let out a low whistle.

“This place gets more traffic than a bathroom in a sports bar,” he said. “Looks like whoever owns that beat-up old pair of boots has been back one more time since your friendly neighborhood sheriff was in here.” Sure enough, here the worn prints were clearly uppermost, smashing the lug marks nearly flat.

“So whoever it is, he knows that somebody else knows.”

“Maybe. Probably. But that’s not all.” Art wiggled his flashlight beam slightly to the right of the layered prints. “Somebody else has been here, too.”

I studied the area he was illuminating, but I couldn’t see any more prints. I leaned closer, but all I saw were what appeared to be vague smears in the mud. I looked at Art in puzzlement.

“That one was smart enough to cover his tracks,” Art said. “Maybe dragged a board or something along behind him to wipe ’em out. Lot of work.”

Art snapped open his evidence kit and took out a small headlamp, which he snugged into place, then removed a big ziplock bag. The bag was half-filled with a white powder that I recognized as dental stone, a stronger, harder cousin of plaster of paris. “What say we grab some casts?” said Art. “Just for kicks. So to speak.”

“You are the sole of wit,” I said. “I’ll take some pictures, too.”

From a plastic squeeze bottle, Art squirted a stream of water into the bag, zipped it shut, and began to knead the mixture through the plastic. “This is some kind of mess we’re stirring up here, Bill,” he said. This time he wasn’t joking.

“I know. You wanna just pack up and forget about it?”

“Naw, too late for that — hate for this dental stone to go to waste.” The mixture looked a lot like pancake batter, though I wouldn’t want to bite into a cake of it once it was hard. “Besides, you’ve got me curious now. You wanna bail?”

“Guess not. Still can’t stop thinking about that girl and her baby.”

“Okay then.” He dribbled the goopy mixture into four individual prints — two from each boot — as well as a short section of the obliterated track. “First time I ever tried to match a sawmill print,” he said. “These’ll take thirty minutes to set up. Meanwhile, you wanna see where these tracks go?”

“I’ve got a pretty good guess. Let’s see if I’m right.”

Hugging the wall of the passage so as not to disturb the other tracks, we followed the trail. It didn’t go far: barely two hundred yards from the entrance, the tracks veered sharply to the left and through a cleft in the tunnel wall. It was so narrow, Art and I had to plant our feet on the walls and straddle through to avoid trampling the sets of footprints. As the cleft opened up, I saw that we had emerged right where I’d thought we would: in the narrow end of the crystalline grotto. Directly ahead of us was the foot of the stone bench where Leena’s mummified body had lain. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Every time I decide he’s okay, I find out the sheriff’s playing more games with me. Hauled me up a damned mountainside, when he could’ve just dropped me off at the front door.” I remembered the hours I’d spent straddling the ATV, and the days of sore muscles. “Obviously he wanted me to think she was way out in the middle of nowhere.”

Art’s headlamp bobbed assent. “Looks like it. Reckon how come?”

“Something he didn’t want me to know about the front entrance, maybe.”

He nodded again. “That’d be my guess, too.” He played his light across the stretch of floor between us and the bench. “That the same way it looked last time you saw it?” There was a mass of tracks in the room now. Amid the jumble, I could make out my own prints coming in from the opposite side, along with those of Tom Kitchings and Deputy Williams. I could see them departing, too. But ours were no longer the uppermost set of tracks: the work boots trumped us all. Heading into the grotto from where Art and I now stood, they approached the now-empty shelf, then turned and followed partway out the other side of the room before doubling back toward us and the church.

“You know what this means?”

“Yeah,” I said, with a queasy feeling in my gut. “He’s been here within the past week.”

“Yeah. So not only does he know that somebody knows, he knows that several somebodies know. Place like this, won’t take much asking around to find out that you’re one of those somebodies.”

Suddenly there was a muffled thud, followed by the clatter of falling rock. A cloud of dust shot through the crevice, filling the grotto, sending us into spasms of coughing. I put my arm across my face and tried breathing through my shirtsleeve; Art pulled his face inside the neck of his pullover shirt, turtlelike. We stood stock-still, and gradually the clatter and the dust subsided, leaving behind a silence that was close and menacing. A silence like death.

The rubble extended all the way up to the cleft in the grotto wall.

“Just a guess,” Art said, “but I’d say somebody knew we were here.”

It didn’t take a forensic genius to realize we’d have little hope of digging our way out through the rubble blocking the entrance by the church. “Guess it’s a good thing I know the back way after all,” I said. We headed for the opposite side of the grotto, but then I stopped to snap photos of the new footprints on the floor. “Not that I’m feeling real confident I’ll ever get to use these in court,” I muttered, “but I’m getting pissed off now.”

“Yeah, this is getting personal,” Art said. “Those were some of my best plaster casts ever. That one of the board? I was gonna get a trip to a forensic conference outta that one.”

“Easy come, easy go,” I said. “So the good news is, I know how to get out of here. The bad news is, the road is three or four miles down a rough trail, and that’s nowhere near the truck. It might take us—”

A bright flash split the darkness, accompanied by a sharp crack. The floor shook, and rocks began raining down around us. Art grabbed my jacket and yanked me backward just as a stalactite plunged downward and shattered on the floor where I’d been standing. I jumped, then cursed. A lot.

“Bill, you okay?”

I nodded, shaken. “You?”

“Still taking inventory. So far, I count a knot on the head and a couple bruises, but nothing broken.” He paused. “Hey, Bill? That four-mile trail you called the bad news? I think that was actually the good news. Back when there was some good news.”

We picked our way across the fringe of jagged rock surrounding us, making our way toward the cave’s back door, or what used to be it. The pile of debris grew steadily higher. Within a few yards the rubble reached clear to the roof, sealing off the passage completely.

I felt a tide of panic rising fast. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, no matter how deeply I breathed. My head began to swim. As if from a distance, I heard Art’s voice. “Bill? Bill! Listen, Bill, you need to calm down.” He sounded strangely normal, not like a man struggling for oxygen. “Bill, you’re hyperventilating. You need to breathe slower or you’ll pass out.” I fought the urge to gasp, but it was stronger than I was. “Try breathing through the sleeve of your jacket — maybe that’ll help.” I felt his hands on my arm, bringing my sleeve up to my face. The fabric slowed the flow of air. As I labored to breathe against the resistance, I felt my respiration slow, my head begin to clear. Finally my breathing seemed under control again, and I dropped my arm.

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought we were running out of air.”

“Not yet. We’ve got plenty still. Probably starve to death first.”

“Damnit, Art, this isn’t a joke. We’re in a tunnel that’s blocked by tons of rock. Even if we could clear it, which I doubt we can, there might be somebody outside just waiting to kill us.”

“Might be,” he agreed. “But no sense getting all worked up about it, seeing as he’ll have to wait awhile for us to get within range. Let’s figure out what to do.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Okay, let’s see what our resources are. We’ve got two flashlights and one headlamp. A camera. A gun. An evidence kit, which probably doesn’t help us much at the moment. You got any food or water?”

“Pack of gum,” I said. “Sugarless, so there’s no energy in it. We got water flowing in the cave, though.” I pointed my light in the direction of the subterranean stream, which we now knew originated at the springs behind the church. But the stream was gone, leaving only a muddy bed behind. The first of the two cave-ins must have blocked it.

“I’ve got a Snickers bar and a bottle of water,” said Art. “If I can just pull off that loaves-and-fishes trick I read about in the Bible, we’ll have bushels of leftovers. Oh, this might help — the map Methuselah the Caver faxed me.”

“What good’s that gonna do? We already found the cave. Unfortunately.”

“It’s not a map to the cave, Smarty Pants, it’s a map of the cave. The interior. The part where we happen to be trapped like rats. Or bats.”

“But we’re sandwiched between two cave-ins, with nothing in the middle but fifty yards of tunnel and that damn grotto.” Art studied the map silently. “Face it, Art,” I said. “We’re sealed up in here. No way out.”

Art aimed his headlamp straight into my eyes, blinding me. “You’re just gonna give up?” he said. “Me, I’m not ready to throw in the towel.” With that, he spun and began picking his way back through the debris, back toward the grotto.

“Art, wait. Slow down.”

“You hurry up.” He kept moving, his lights sweeping every square foot of the tunnel’s walls and ceiling. But his pace slackened slightly.

I caught up with him in the grotto, just in time to see the beam of his light point upward at the grotto’s ceiling and disappear into a circular opening about the diameter of a beach ball. “Aha!” he said.

“Did you know that was there?”

“Not until I checked the map. Back there when you were busy kissing our asses good-bye.”

“Sorry. Does it go out?”

“Don’t know.”

“What’s the map say?”

“Says ‘Unexplored.’ Guy who made the map used to be pretty hefty. I’m guessing the word ‘Unexplored’ shows up on most of his maps.”

“So maybe it leads to another entrance — but maybe it just meanders around inside the mountain for a while and then peters out?”

“Maybe. Do I need to get all hardass with you again, or are you feeling optimistic and exploratory?”

“Let’s go.”

That proved easier said than done. The opening was about ten feet overhead. Even if I stood on Art’s shoulders, I doubted I could reach it. I was about to suggest we start hauling in rocks from the tunnel — we certainly had enough debris to build a big pile — when Art clambered up onto the stone shelf and began studying the wall above, playing his light across the surface from various angles. “Hand me that case, will you, Bill?”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “You found some evidence up there?”

“No, genius. I need something to stand on.”

I handed it up, and he stood the rectangular case — a glorified tackle box, basically — up on end. Reaching slightly up and to one side, he grabbed a small knob of rock with his left hand. With his right, he stretched straight up and jammed two fingers into a narrow vertical crack in the wall. With a grunt, he levered himself up off the box, the toes of his hiking boots somehow latching onto projections I hadn’t even seen. Once he had both feet up off the evidence kit, he extricated his fingers from the crack, reached a foot higher, and inserted his entire right hand into the crack. As first one foot, then the other, sought purchase on the wall, I saw him strain. His left hand lost its grip and he slipped, smacking against wall and dangling by his right hand, still wedged tightly in the crack. He cried out in pain, and his feet frantically scrambled against the rock. Instinctively I climbed onto the stone bench, took his boots in my hands, and hoisted upward with all my strength. With agonizing slowness, his boots reached the level of my chest, then my shoulders; finally, I found myself standing with my arms fully extended, quaking with the effort. Just as I was about to gasp out a warning about my strength failing, I felt the load lighten, and then he was gone, his legs disappearing up through the opening in the roof of the grotto.

I kept expecting him to reappear, and when he didn’t after a few moments, I felt the panic returning. Finally, his head popped back into view. “Damn, that was tough. Thanks for the help. I thought for a minute there I was gonna leave that hand behind.”

I was still panting, partly from exertion, partly from fear. “No problem. Anything encouraging up there?”

“Come see for yourself.”

I considered the rock wall facing me. “Hell, Art, I can’t climb this. I can’t believe you could.”

“My wife gave me some visits to a climbing gym last Christmas. I think she was hoping I’d get hooked on climbing and fall off a cliff somewhere.”

“Well, unless there’s a ladder up there you can send down — or unless you want to trade places and push me up — you might have to go on without me after all.”

“And break up this winning team? No way. How big’s your waist?”

“Thirty-four. No, more like thirty-six these days. What’s that—” A glimmer of understanding began to dawn on me. “How ’bout yours, Slim?”

“None of your business. But throw me your belt and we’ll see if we’re fat enough.” I took off my leather belt, refastened the buckle to make a hoop, and tossed it upward. Art snagged it, then disappeared. When he reappeared, he had fastened the tapered end of my belt into the buckle of his own. As he lowered one end of the linked belts, I saw that they added up to a good six feet long. “Let’s hope that buckle holds,” he said. “The rivet looks pretty stout, but then again, so do you.”

Art sat on the lip of the circular opening, bracing his feet on the opposite edge. Wrapping a loop of leather around one wrist, he gripped the strap with both hands. “Try to feel for footholds,” he said. “I’m not sure I can deadlift you all the way up.” I nodded, climbing onto the evidence kit. Standing on tiptoe, I could reach just enough of the strap to take a turn around one wrist, as Art had done. He nodded. “Ready?”

“Ready. No, wait. Shouldn’t we bring the evidence kit?”

He considered this. “We’ve got bigger problems now than evidence gathering. Besides, I don’t think we can — you’re gonna need both hands to get up.”

“Yeah, but we might need to stand on it again. Lucky you’re trapped with a Ph.D.” Stepping down off the case, I bent down and unlaced both of my hiking boots. Splicing the two laces together gave me a piece of cord nearly ten feet long. I knotted one end to the case’s handle and hitched the other to one ankle. Then I climbed back up, put my flashlight in my pocket, and took hold of the dangling belt again. “Heave-ho,” I said, and he did.

Much grunting and scrambling later, I felt one of Art’s hands grasp first one wrist, then the other. He hauled me through the opening and landed me like some giant fish, thrashing and gasping. I undid the loop of belt from my now-purplish hand, fished out my light, and set it beside me, pointing upward. As I reeled in the evidence kit, I surveyed my new surroundings. We were in a disappointingly small chamber, narrow and low-ceilinged. I looked at Art. “You sure this is progress?”

He was wearing his poker face, but I thought I saw a trace of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Let’s take a look around, see what we see.”

It didn’t take long to spot what he was smiling about. “Okay, I see footprints going around that bend in the wall. But do they go anywhere besides a dead end?”

“What do you think? Study the tracks, Sherlock.”

I did. “Okay, I see prints going in both directions. But the last ones are leading away from here.”

“Which means…?”

“This must go somewhere.”

“Bingo. Unless, of course, we find Injun Joe’s shriveled corpse wedged in a cul-de-sac up ahead.”

“Or Lester Ballard’s lying in wait to have his way with us.”

“Lester? I thought Lester only had a thing for the female body.”

“These days,” I said, “you never know. Forensics makes for strange bedfellows.”