Last Words

50

It was time to see Ridley again face-to-face.

Mark had returned to Garrison determined not to make the same mistake he’d made on his first visit, when he’d had the blissful sense of going through the motions. He’d rushed into contact with Ridley then. He didn’t intend to repeat the mistake.

The time had come, though.

He was driving along the icy country roads when Jeff called.

“Please tell me you’re on a plane,” Jeff said without preamble.

“Not yet.”

“Mark...”

When Jeff London used the short version of Markus, it was the equivalent of anyone else using the full version and the middle name.

“I’ve got nothing for them yet,” Mark said. “But I will. You tell them that, and—”

“I can’t just tell them things! This is it. This is the end of the road. You’ve got to sit at the table this time. No pick-and-roll left to be run. You’ve got to understand that.”

“If I leave here, Ridley Barnes is not going to answer for anything, and—”

“Ridley Barnes is not your case!”

Mark turned onto the winding road to Ridley’s, grateful for the security of the all-wheel drive beneath him. “I was nearly one of his victims. If it’s not my case, whose is it?”

“That’s not the point, and you know it. There are victims and there are vigilantes. I thought we’d reached an understanding as to which side of that fence you were staying on.”

Mark watched the lonesome fields pass by and didn’t speak. They’d reached an understanding on this, yes. An understanding that was based on a lie: I will leave Lauren’s case to the authorities and I will not seek the death penalty.

It had been an easy lie to tell then, when it saved him the only thing he had left that he cared about — his job. Somewhere along the line, somewhere during his time in this backwater Indiana town, he’d begun to tire of the lie. No matter what it gained him. No matter what it cost.

“I think I’m drifting a little too Old Testament for our line of work,” Mark said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Eye for an eye.”

“Don’t start again, Markus. Damn it, do not start that again. Leave her case to the people who have the right distance.”

“We’ll talk about it. We’ll also talk about this case. We never would have taken it. Sarah Martin’s death wouldn’t have qualified, because there was no capital-punishment element. No conviction, even.”

“I’m well aware of that, and if you think you deserve yet another apology, then—”

“I don’t,” Mark said. “She does.”

“What?”

“What if Diane Martin had been alive, Jeff?”

“She isn’t.”

“She might have been. What if I’d walked into her town and sat across from her and promised her the answers she deserved would finally be given to her. And then I walked away.”

Jeff’s sigh had some horsepower behind it. “I’m going to say this once, and you need to listen to it and comprehend it: I’ve been busting my ass for weeks trying to convince the board that you are still a trustworthy employee, that when you are given direct instructions, you follow them. Your instructions here are simple: Come home. First flight you can get on. Or drive all night, I don’t care, but you better be back in town tomorrow. You’re going to have to talk with the board at this point. I can’t promise how that will go with you in the room, but I can promise how it will go if you’re not in the room — you’re done. And I won’t vote against it. If you can’t do something as simple as get on a plane when you’re told to, Markus?” There was a long pause, and when Jeff finally spoke again, his voice was sorrowful. “Then even I can’t trust you anymore.”

It was a statement that demanded a response, but Mark couldn’t even grant it his full attention. He was closing on Ridley’s house now, and two troubling things were already apparent: Ridley’s truck was gone, and his front door was standing open.

“Jeff,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I’ve got to go.”

He disconnected before he heard another word. He pulled into the driveway and parked in the place where Ridley’s truck belonged and stared at that open door. Maybe it didn’t mean a thing. The wind had been coming in gusts all day; it was certainly capable of pushing open a shut door, and maybe Ridley hadn’t locked it when he left.

Mark doubted that, though.

He got out of the car and called Ridley’s name but heard no answer. He wished he had a weapon.

He walked up the steps and called Ridley’s name again and received nothing but silence, and then he pushed the door wide open and looked inside at the shadowed room. Everything seemed in place, no trace of disturbance, but the shadows teased his mind and suggested possibilities. He found the light switch and flicked it on and breathed a little easier when the shadows vanished and tangible objects took their places.

“Ridley!” The name left his mouth with more aggression than he’d intended. For some reason, the empty place and open door had summoned adrenaline. You weren’t supposed to be scared of empty spaces. Ridley’s house had other ideas.

He walked to the stairs and stopped himself from calling Ridley’s name again. There would be no answer. He had proven that now. He found another light switch and illuminated the hall at the top of the stairs and then went on up. There was a single bathroom, clean and tidy but missing a mirror. The medicine-cabinet frame where it belonged was empty, the contents beyond the door exposed. Past the bathroom was a bedroom, and beyond that another room that was filled with bookshelves. There was a strange shadow to the left, something out of place. Mark hit more lights and saw that there was a false wall that had been turned into a door.

The chill he felt then was almost a prayer — Don’t let me find what I’m afraid of in there — as images of chains and shackles and bones flickered through his mind, all the things a psychotic might store away in secret places. Then he dropped to one knee, pushed the wall back, and saw what it hid: maps.

Nothing else. The wall was lined with maps. Not the sort that hung on the basement walls at Trapdoor, those hand-drawn illustrations of cave interiors. These were topographic land maps. Mark looked at them and thought of what he’d told Julianne Grossman during his trance: that he’d been looking at the wrong maps.

He pushed the wall back farther so he could see one of the topographic maps clearly. It was covered with notations and filled with pushpins.

Burial sites, he thought. My God. If every one of those pins represents a...

But they couldn’t. There hadn’t been that many missing people in Garrison County in the past hundred years, probably, and Ridley wasn’t known to range far from home. So what had he been locating?

Mark climbed farther behind the wall, studying the maps. None of them were of Trapdoor. None of them showed anything that made them worth hiding, as far as he could tell.

Wrong maps. You said you were looking at the wrong maps.

He’d looked at every map he knew existed, and now he was looking at others, but still he didn’t see where his mistake had been made, because he hadn’t known these existed before.

You told me your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.

But his mother wouldn’t have known about Ridley’s maps. Where was the joke there? Julianne said that he’d laughed before he said it. Hilarious stuff going on in his subconscious, apparently, but he couldn’t imagine what it had been.

It took him a while but he finally found the location of Trapdoor on the map. He traced the outline of Maiden Creek with his index finger and came up to the road and the place where the trailer stood and then he stopped and for a long moment he didn’t move or make a sound.

There had always been other maps, and they’d always been available to him. They were the ones that counted too. Everyone else cared about the ones Ridley had not shared, but those mattered only when they were paired with others: the ones of the surface, the ones that showed ownership.

He left Ridley’s hidden room and walked back down the stairs. In front of the cold stove where Ridley had once sat with bright eyes and told Mark that someone needed to speak for Sarah Martin, Mark sat and called Jeff London.

“Call back after a hang-up,” Jeff said. “Let me guess — you’re in trouble. What can I do for you?”

The bitterness in his voice was valid, but Mark couldn’t worry about it. Not now.

“You got a computer handy?” he said.

“Hell are you talking about?”

“I need to know whether Garrison County has a GIS database.”

GIS stood for geographic information system, computer-mapping technology that had its origins in nuclear-war fears during the 1960s but was now common for local property records.

Jeff was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded near desperate, a broken man asking a priest to explain to him once more why he should believe.

“What do you think this can accomplish?” he said.

“Ridley wants the cave,” Mark said. “I can’t explain how much it means to him. He believes it’s something more than a cave. But he’s no fool. He understands access. He understands that someone owns it. And that he isn’t that man.”

“Tell me why that matters.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Markus—”

“I’m almost there!”

This time the silence went on so long that Mark thought Jeff had hung up. He actually pulled the phone away and looked at the display, saw the ticking seconds. A countdown of trust. It had to blow at some point.

“They have a GIS database,” Jeff said. Speaking in measured tones now, clinically. Like Dr. Desare when he’d explained how Mark had been brought back from the dead. “Who do you want me to search for?”

“Ridley Barnes.”

Pause. “One property. Five acres, with a single residential structure valued at—”

“I’m standing in it now. I don’t need the specs. Try again. First name Pershing, last name MacAlister. M-A-C.”

Pause. “Nothing.”

“There has to be.”

“There isn’t.”

Mark rose from the chair but didn’t move away from it. “Put in the word Trapdoor. See if it hits.” Mark could see his reflection in the window. With the woodstove in the background, the image reminded him of different places, a different man. Howling blizzards and small towns. Broken fingers and pickup trucks crawling through the snow. Exposed lies. Blood and justification.

“Eleven properties,” Jeff said. “The name is Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust.”

“Eleven? Eleven unique properties. You’re sure? No duplicate records.”

“I’m looking at the parcel map, Markus. Eleven properties, roughly following the basin of something called Maiden Creek. Sound right?”

Too right. Mark wet his lips and said, “Can you see who owns the trust?”

“Nobody owns a trust.”

“What do you mean?”

“A land trust is its own entity. Like a corporation. It doesn’t have owners, it has beneficiaries. Those names aren’t public. Obviously, we can find them, but as far as the public record is concerned, Trapdoor Caverns is its own legal entity. Trapdoor can buy and sell land. So far, it has only bought.”

“How recently?”

“Let me see.” It was quiet for a few seconds while Jeff looked, and then he said, “Each parcel was transferred to the trust from Pershing MacAlister in October of 2004.”

“The month after Sarah was killed.”

“That makes sense, though. They shut the place down after she was killed.”

“You said you could see a parcel map,” Mark said. “What does it look like?”

“Look like?”

“Yes. What does the shape of the Trapdoor land-trust property look like?”

“Like a snake. It follows the creek, then curls out and away. I don’t know what shape it has. It looks like a suburban subdivision, maybe. Winding roads and cul-de-sacs. What are you hoping to hear?”

“Exactly that.”

“Markus, what are you talking about?”

“Ridley mapped it from below,” Mark said. “But the cave’s not worth anything unless you own what’s above it. I’m sure of that, Jeff. I’m from oil country. Surface ownership extends to the core of the earth. Ridley was working from the bottom up.”

“Which matters how?”

“How fast can we get ahold of that trust document?”

“Not very. Private and sealed legal agreement. We’d need a subpoena.”

“There has to be a faster approach than that.”

“Sure. You can find one of the parties involved and ask if you can see a copy. Short of that cooperation, you’ll need a subpoena. But you still haven’t given me an answer. Why do you think this matters? What does it have to do with Sarah Martin?”

“I’m close,” Mark said, as if that answered the question. He was circling through the fog, waiting to land. Instruments were out, only instinct left. He was close. You either landed or crashed.

51

Ridley questioned Julianne Grossman’s authenticity on many things, but he couldn’t deny the power of her presence. Her energy was palpable in the truck, even though she couldn’t speak and chose not to move. She sat there in his jacket with the tape over her mouth and she stared straight ahead, and still he could feel her like a pulse. He was relieved that he had silenced her.

On the road to Trapdoor they passed the tumbledown trailer that had once belonged to Carson Borders. The headlights caught a glimmer of police tape. Ridley hit the brakes so hard that the truck fishtailed and what was left of the tires was put to shrieking work. They held on to the road, but just barely.

The truck was across both lanes when it stopped but Ridley didn’t care to move it. He kept his foot on the brake and stared at the trailer. The snow all around it was mashed down and trampled by tire tracks and boot prints. A perimeter had been cordoned off with tape.

“What is this?” he said, but of course Julianne was unable to answer. He thought she might know and he was tempted to remove the tape to ask but afraid of the result. The point was to make it into Trapdoor, and it was more than logical that the surface world would try to prevent him. Perhaps the scene at the trailer was not even real.

“Do you see that?” he asked Julianne.

She was eyeing him warily but she nodded.

“I don’t mean the building. I mean the rest.”

Again she nodded. He thought she was being sincere. “Okay,” he said. “All right, that’s very good.”

He took his foot off the brake, but he was shaking now.

“The thing to remember,” he said, “is that this doesn’t matter. All of this, what we see up here? It doesn’t mean a thing. What matters happened down there. We can’t see any of what matters. Not yet. That is what we must remember!”

He had started to shout and he didn’t like that, because it suggested a lack of control. He concentrated on his breathing until they reached Trapdoor. Just beyond the closed gate, he pulled off the road and into the snow and killed the engine. He took the sapphire necklace down from the rearview mirror and put it in his pocket and then he got out of the truck and took both backpacks out of the bed. He opened Julianne’s door, took her hand, and helped her out of the cab. He would never have admitted it but the touch of her hand was comforting. He doubted that she felt the same about his.

“There’s a garage up ahead and to the left,” he said. “That’s the caretaker’s quarters. We’ll walk there. Don’t run.”

She didn’t run. He put one of the backpacks over her shoulders, and she moved to cooperate, no sign of resistance. They walked on the other side of the tree line and parallel to the drive, went as far as the back corner of the garage, and then Ridley whispered, “Hands, please. Only for a little while.”

She offered them reluctantly, and he tied them without ever having to take his eyes off the house. This was why you practiced. You never knew what would be asked of you.

“All right,” he said. “Quietly ahead. Quietly. And, Julianne, you might see some things that will suggest that all of your efforts have been wasted. That I’ve lost control again. Don’t be fooled. I’m in control.” He extended his hands, palms down, like a child waiting to play a slap game. They showed no more movement than the ice over the creek.

He nudged her forward and they walked around the garage and up the exterior stairs that led to the apartment above. He was entranced by her movement. He’d anticipated that she would struggle to walk, that fear would make her clumsy. Instead, she glided along in perfect step, matching his energy and joining it, like a dance partner.

Maybe you’re wrong about her. You don’t know what she really said to Novak. You’ve made assumptions.

No, no, no. He had trusted once and would not again. The surface world was false and she had come from it.

At the base of the steps that led to Cecil Buckner’s apartment, Ridley paused and studied the windows, looking for any indication that Cecil was up and moving. He wasn’t at the window, but Ridley could see his socked feet resting on a coffee table, a can of beer beside them. He was clueless and unprepared, as he should be. Despite his proximity to Trapdoor, Cecil had never learned to listen to what she might tell him, the warnings she might whisper. The very notion that he was entrusted to be the cave’s caretaker was offensive.

Ridley positioned Julianne in front of him, withdrew his knife, flicked the blade open, put it to her throat, and shoved her forward. He walked with his chest pressed to her back and guided her up the stairs. He reached around her then and knocked on the door with his free hand.

The beer had vanished from sight but now it returned to the coffee table and Cecil’s socked feet went into motion and the door was opened. His eyes took in the scene fast.

“Ridley,” he said. “What in the hell... Ridley, no, don’t—”

“Let us in.”

Cecil took a step back, too willingly, and Ridley saw that his eyes were drifting right, and so he released Julianne and stepped around her and punched Cecil once in the face and kicked him once in the groin, and the bigger man fell to the floor in gasping pain without ever reaching the shotgun leaning against the wall just to the right of the door.

“Your choice, Cecil,” Ridley said. He guided Julianne inside and closed the door behind them. Cecil was writhing on the floor.

“I know this is not the way it is supposed to go,” Ridley said, “but I’m going to need to get in to see her tonight. There simply is no other choice at this point. It has to be done.”

For a time Cecil didn’t answer, just gasped his way back to breath, a string of spit hanging from his lips. He got slowly to his hands and knees, looked up at Ridley, and said, “You stupid son of a bitch. You’ll end up in prison. Ten years free, and you’ll still end up in prison.”

“There’s a lot left to play out before that,” Ridley said, “though I acknowledge the possibility. I always have.”

Cecil breathed through his mouth, his eyes flicking around the room in search of options.

“Keep your attention on me,” Ridley said. “There’s no need to delay. I just need the keys.”

“All you had to do was wait, you freak,” Cecil said.

Ridley nodded with sorrow. “I tried to. You know that. But it was easier for you. You never had any questions. And if you did, they were about me. Now, imagine being me and having those same questions.”

“You’ll end up in Terre Haute waiting on the electric chair.”

“The keys,” Ridley said, beckoning with his hand. “Otherwise, you’ll watch everything that happens to her and it will happen in your home and before your eyes. And you will know that you made a choice that might have stopped it. You’ll live with that.”

Cecil rose unsteadily.

“I’ll give you the damn keys, though if you were only smart enough to wait, they’d have been yours anyhow. Now that will never happen. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Where are the keys?”

“Right behind your head. Hanging on the peg.”

“Get them for me.”

“They’re only a foot away from you.”

“Get them for me.”

Cecil shuffled forward, walking in pain, and extended his arm to reach around Ridley for the keys. When he made his next move, it was with speed that Ridley hadn’t anticipated. Cecil had been a fine athlete in his day, his name still in the Garrison High record books for tackles, and his muscle memory had lasted through the years — he got both arms around Ridley and drove him back into the wall. Julianne was trapped between them, in danger from Ridley’s knife, which was the reason he hadn’t been prepared for the assault. He’d expected Cecil would value her life more than this.

He couldn’t allow her to be hurt, not yet, not when they were so close to the place where he would need her, and so he dropped the knife and stumbled backward. All three of them hit the floor hard. Ridley rolled and Cecil did exactly what Ridley had expected and went after the shotgun. Ridley stepped over Julianne and grabbed the back of Cecil’s head just as he reached the gun. Rather than pulling him back, Ridley drove him forward and slammed Cecil into the wall. The shotgun clattered to the floor just as Cecil’s nose shattered.

Cecil threw a high, powerful elbow that might have found Ridley’s face if Cecil hadn’t slipped on the hardwood floor. This was why Ridley kept his boots on even in his own home. Traction was something you could never take for granted.

Cecil was a tall and muscular man, bigger and stronger than Ridley, but he did not have traction and he did not have momentum. Ridley banged Cecil’s face off the wall one more time and then threw him to the floor. It could have ended there, should have, but Cecil landed near the knife and made the mistake of reaching for it.

Ridley raised his boot and smashed it down on Cecil’s hand and felt the bones break. Cecil cried out and rolled away, clutching his wrist to his belly as Ridley picked up the open knife. He felt in control at that moment, aggressive but focused, the goal clear: incapacitate Cecil and enter the cave.

Two changes occurred. Fast. One: Cecil reached for the shotgun again, even after he should have known better. Two: The knife spoke to Ridley. It was open and in his hand. In its designed position. Ready to do what it was meant to do, but more than that, what it had already done on a night he could not fully remember.

Night, was it night? Maybe day. Darkness. Certainly darkness. Down there, all days become nights and neither matters. And you held the knife like this and you—

Cecil’s fingers scrabbled for the shotgun and missed. Ridley pulled the big man’s head back and saw wide white eyes, and then Cecil’s chin rolled up and back and his throat was exposed. Ridley was ready then, ready to slash the knife down to do what it was intended to do, what Ridley was intended to do, when Julianne howled from beneath the tape over her mouth. The trapped sound was soft but its intensity was not.

He looked back to where she lay on her side on the floor, a helpless spectator, and he saw only terror in her eyes. It was the way Ridley’s sister had looked at their father on many occasions. Whenever Ridley saw that look come into his sister’s face, he had interceded. It hadn’t gone well for him, ever, but he’d always done it.

Julianne took a gasping breath that made the tape over her mouth bubble, and the look in her eyes made Ridley cringe. All she saw was horror, and she blamed Ridley. She was afraid of him, and that was a standard part of his days now and had been for years, but it had never been desired. He had never wanted to cause fear. People feared him, yes, but it wasn’t a product of his intentions. Actions, perhaps, but never intentions.

He slid off Cecil Buckner’s back and swept the shotgun across the floor. Cecil didn’t struggle. His eyes were on the blade that had nearly carved through his throat.

“You can wait here in peace, or they can find your body,” Ridley said. “Now put out your hands.”

Ridley was even faster with the paracord this time, binding Cecil’s hands and then his ankles, then connecting the two with a fast hitch. There was no need to pull Cecil’s feet as close to the back of his head as Ridley did, but the knife was no longer involved, and it seemed that Cecil should be forced to consider that and appreciate it. His life had been saved by the look in a stranger’s eyes. Would he ever know that? Ever understand how close he had come? Ridley doubted it, and so he pulled the cord tighter, pulled until Cecil’s heels came close to the back of his skull, and his spine was pushing its limits. Cecil shrieked in pain and Ridley found the tape and wrapped it quickly over his mouth to silence that aggravating sound. When he was finished, Cecil was bound with his hands and heels pressed together, his body arched backward. The paracord cinched tighter as he struggled. Soon he would realize that. He would remain in that position until someone came to free him. Ridley hoped that it would take some time and that Cecil would use the time to think, but he wasn’t optimistic about that possibility.

He straightened and took the keys — there were three key rings on different pegs and he took them all — and considered the shotgun briefly but decided against it. A gun was not a caving tool, and when he entered Trapdoor, he wanted the cave to know that he was pure of heart.

“We’re close,” he said, and then he used the open knife to guide Julianne back toward the door.

52

Mark was driving too fast over the icy roads when he called Danielle MacAlister, but the Ford held steady in its lane.

“You said your father bought his land for timber rights,” he said.

“Well, hello, Mr. Novak. Nice to hear from you again.”

“You said your father bought his land for timber rights,” he repeated.

“Correct.”

“He never did any cutting.”

“The cave redirected him, obviously.”

“But he owns property in all directions and most of it is open field, no timber at all. There’s a local who rents it for horses. The cave maps that Ridley drew are guides, but they’d have nothing to do with ownership. Those would be standard maps. Parcel maps. Ridley stopped drawing the underground maps at one point. Stopped sharing them with your father, at least.”

“We’ve already discussed this.”

Mark made a turn, felt the tires slide, and corrected for the skid. “I disagree. You told me what you wanted to share. I have new questions. I’m on my way to see you, in fact.”

In truth, he wasn’t even sure of his questions. The property mattered to Ridley. The property mattered to Pershing MacAlister’s family.

“You’re making a mistake,” she said.

“Explain how.”

He could hear her breathing. For a moment he thought she was going to offer something, but all she said was “I’ve taken enough of your questions. You have no legal authority. If you come here, it’s trespassing. I can have you arrested.”

“Tell Cecil to open the gate. It’s what he’s there for. To keep an eye on things, make sure there’s no trouble.”

“Do I have trouble, Mr. Novak?”

“If you didn’t think that you did, you wouldn’t have come up here. You damn sure wouldn’t have stayed.”

“You broke into our property and got lost in the cave. That’s why I’m here.”

“It’s not why you stayed. You stayed to know what Ridley was telling me.”

“You’ve already earned that confession once. I’m not hiding that interest.”

“What are the stipulations of the land trust?” Mark asked. “The property just sits there untouched, forever, is what Cecil told me. Your father felt that strongly about it?”

“About a girl being murdered on his property, a girl who’d been about to join his family? Yes, he felt strongly about it. He didn’t want to let this become a sideshow, an exploitation of tragedy.”

“Your father sounds like a shrewd businessman. But rather than bring a concrete company down here and just fill that entrance in and call it a day, he makes the decision to pay a caretaker to live on the property. For ten years, he does this. He’ll do it for another ten? Twenty?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was tight.

“How do you not know? It’s your property.”

“It’s in a trust. The environmental stipulations of the trust might preclude that sort of—”

“No legalese, no stipulations. You’re an attorney, you know what it says. What will the situation at Trapdoor be in ten years?”

“Probably not what you think, but it’s none of your concern. I’ve been patient enough with you and I—”

“Show me the trust documents, then. You won’t even have to talk to me this time. Just show me those documents and I’ll be on my way.”

“You won’t see me if you come here. I’ll send for Cecil. It’s his baby now. I’m done with your questions, Mr. Novak. If you come here, you’ll need to deal with Cecil.”

“This is why he’s worth keeping on for a decade, Danielle? To keep trespassers away from the cave and questions away from your family?”

The line went dead.

Mark didn’t call back. Just kept driving. Snow was falling again. The conditions and his speed would have bothered him when he arrived in Indiana but they felt familiar now. Muscle memory. Sometimes the things you thought you’d left behind circled back for you.

53

The door was in sight and the keys were in hand but still the surface world wouldn’t grant Ridley access without resistance. He and Julianne were no more than fifty feet from the entrance when the security floodlights went on.

The footbridge and the gate were instantly illuminated, and the light spread out almost far enough to reveal Ridley and Julianne. They were in the farthest reaches of the shadows. He stopped walking and grabbed Julianne’s arm to bring her to a halt. The lights had come on without warning, as if tripped by a motion sensor, but he knew that the lights here didn’t operate on motion sensors. Someone had turned them on, which meant someone had seen them.

There was the sound of a door opening and closing — not just closing, slamming — up at the big house just above them, and then a flashlight beam appeared.

Ridley pushed Julianne farther from the light. This required leaving the creek bank and moving out onto the ice itself. They’d made it three steps when there was a single loud crack followed by an uneasy yawning sound all around them as the stressed ice fought to hold. Ridley stopped moving. If the ice broke beneath them, it would draw that flashlight beam their way, and then he would have to act fast.

Water bubbled up beside Julianne’s foot but the crack didn’t spread. The ice sheet creaked and strained but it held. Ridley kept his eyes on the house, and a few seconds later the source of the flashlight appeared: Danielle MacAlister, walking with hostile purpose, walking toward them. Ridley’s jaw clenched as he reached for his knife. He did not want Danielle to be part of this but he could not allow her to disrupt him either. He simply couldn’t.

He had put the knife to Julianne’s throat and was ready to push her into the light, ready to show Danielle the consequences that awaited, when Danielle turned away from the creek without breaking stride.

She wasn’t coming to the cave. Wasn’t coming to confront them. She was following the driveway.

When it was obvious that she wasn’t approaching them, Julianne did a strange thing. Despite the knife at her throat, she leaned her head against Ridley’s shoulder. A gesture of relief, which made some sense, but almost intimate as well, and even more fascinating, the relief didn’t seem to be entirely on her own behalf. She seemed relieved for him as well.

Maybe you are wrong about her.

No. She had a knife at her throat, that was all. Of course she did not want him to be forced to use it. Her relief was only a product of self-preservation.

Still, he felt a connection to the touch that suggested they were in this together. Did she understand now? She was an intuitive woman. Did she realize that he’d told her only the truth, always?

Ridley looked at her face and then back up at Danielle MacAlister, who was walking away from them, toward either Cecil’s apartment or the front gate. If she was headed to Cecil’s, that meant he was about to be freed and the police called. Trapdoor would be a scene of chaos soon, and that couldn’t be allowed. All Ridley needed was time. They wouldn’t understand that, though. Never had.

“I need to stop her,” he whispered. “I have to.”

Julianne lifted her head from his shoulder, twisted to face him, and shook her head. Slowly and emphatically. Then she tilted her head pointedly to the right. Toward the cave. He followed the gesture with his eyes, saw the door, so close to them now. When he looked back at her, she flicked her eyes down at the keys in his hand, then back up to him. Held the stare.

She was right, he realized. There was no need to intervene with Danielle MacAlister. Not when they were this close and he had the keys. Let Danielle call the police, let them come for him. Once he was inside the cave, they wouldn’t catch him. Once he was inside, he could stay as long as he wanted, as long as he needed.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll go ahead. That’s all that needs to be done.”

Julianne nodded. He felt his trust for her returning despite his better judgment.

“Step carefully,” he said. “We need to stay in the shadows.”

Staying in the shadows required walking under the footbridge instead of across it, and that meant they’d have to cover the rest of the distance over the ice, which had cracked once already. The creaking and groaning sounds were all around them, but Ridley preferred that risk to climbing back onto the creek bank and standing exposed in the floodlights.

They moved slowly across the slick surface. Once, there was a sharp crack like a gunshot, and Ridley braced himself for the fall. The crack had come from a tree branch, though, not the ice. The weak limb snapped and its load of snow fell to the earth with a sound like the release of a held breath. He nudged Julianne forward again. They passed beneath the bridge and then made it up onto the rocks. He looked back up the drive and could no longer see Danielle’s flashlight. It didn’t matter. He just needed to get inside.

Cecil had better have told the truth about the keys. If he lied about that and I do not have the right keys, then God help them all. I’ve come too far to be lied to.

The first key he tried fit the lock. He exhaled and turned the key and heard the bolts slide back. When he pulled the door open, it scraped on the stone and sounded terribly loud, but he didn’t allow himself to look back, just shoved Julianne through. He saw no way to lock the door from the inside and he didn’t have the time to waste, so he left it standing ajar. He walked Julianne ten steps inside the cave and then he paused and took a deep breath.

“All right,” he said. “It should go easier from here. She will understand why we’ve come. I’m sure of that.”

Almost as if in response, a gunshot thundered from somewhere outside the cave. Julianne went rigid and Ridley spun and stared back at the entrance. He saw nothing but snow and ice.

Cecil is free, and Cecil is shooting. I could have killed him. Should have killed him. She stopped me.

Julianne’s hand found his. Squeezed. He looked at her fingers as if he weren’t sure what they were. She tugged him forward, tilting her head again, indicating the black depths that lay before them.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we will just leave them behind. We will leave them all behind.”

She nodded and tugged again. This was wrong — he was supposed to be the guide, not her. But he also knew she was right. There was no reason to retreat to the surface. Not now. He walked ahead, moving quickly and without light because he did not need it here. This was the old tour route, the ground carefully scraped free of any obstacle, any potential lawsuit. Pershing had shown no respect for the cave in the way he had cleared the tour route.

They went far enough that the entrance disappeared from view and total darkness descended and then he stopped and drank in the wonderful smell of the place — stone and water and power. Traces of blood, yes. But the power was there.

Julianne seemed aware of it too. Her body had stiffened and she was pivoting her head as if straining to see in the dark.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” he whispered. “You’ll see so much more of it than most. More than anyone else alive. I’ll take you farther, I promise. The tours they ran, those were like making people pay admission to admire a mansion’s front porch but never letting them get inside the door. I’m so excited to show someone else what lies beyond. Nobody has seen these places but me, do you understand that? And she was mine. She was going to be mine.”

His own whispers returned to him in a soft echo and he felt a pang of regret, thinking of all that this would cost him.

“What’s done is done,” he said, and then he pulled his helmet free from his pack and put it on and turned the headlamp beam to red, the night-vision setting. A crimson glow covered Julianne’s face. He slipped his knife out and opened the blade, and her eyes went a little wide but still she did not resist. Not once had she made a move to run or fight him. She had demonstrated nothing but trust in a situation where he had expected no trust. It took courage, but he understood the manipulation in the technique. She was trying to create a sense of partnership so that he might let down his guard.

He leaned as close to her as he could, nose to nose, his eyes on hers, her face awash with red light, their exhaled breath creating mingling tendrils of fog.

“I’m giving her up for the truth,” he said. “No one will ever understand what that means. No one but her. I had hope for you, even for Novak. Misplaced hope. But we’re still here. And the lie you told me once will need to become the truth now. Do you understand me? Do you understand what that means?”

She nodded.

He moved her hair away from her neck gingerly and brought the blade up against her flesh and made a soft “Now, now,” like a parent removing a splinter from a child’s finger, as he sliced through the tape. He peeled it loose and her lips parted but she didn’t speak. She just breathed. Her breath fogged in the red light like bloody vapors.

“I told you that I would show you everything I could,” he said. “And I do not tell lies, Julianne. I do not tell lies. For a long time, I thought that you did not either.”

“I want to help you,” she said.

Ridley smiled. “Sure you do. And now you have your chance. We’re here for the truth. Your job is to help me remember. Can you do that? I have faith in your abilities, if not in your integrity.”

She gave an unsteady nod. None of her usual confidence. Trapdoor could do that to you. Trapdoor could turn the brave to weak in a flash.

He put the knife back in his pocket and retrieved the sapphire necklace and pressed it into Julianne’s palm. He held her hand tightly, the stone between them.

“That was around Sarah Martin’s neck,” he said. “Then it was in my hand. I want to know how that happened. That’s your job. That’s your life.”

54

Ridley’s truck was pulled off the road just in front of Trapdoor.

Mark parked behind it. His headlights caught the rear window and showed an empty interior. When he cut the engine he felt as if he could hear his own heartbeat. He got out of the car and approached the truck. There was no one inside, and the dusting of snow across the hood and windshield told him that it had been parked here for a while. He’d been on the phone with Danielle MacAlister not five minutes ago. The truck had been here longer than that.

He started to walk around the gate and then hesitated, turned, and went back to his car. Opened the door and found the map he’d peeled off the wall of Danielle’s basement, the last map Ridley had turned over to the MacAlister family. Folded it and put it in his pocket.

“You won’t need to go inside,” he said aloud. The reassurance felt necessary. His mouth was dry just thinking of the place. Something in the stillness of the night whispered otherwise, though, whispered that Ridley hadn’t left his door wide open and his truck here because he intended to skip stones over the frozen creek.

Twin tracks of footprints leading away from the truck said that he hadn’t come alone either.

Mark thought about calling Blankenship. But what was there to report? The appearance of trespassing, which Mark was about to do himself? He’d come here to confront Danielle, not pursue Ridley. Suddenly both were in play.

He followed the tracks away from Ridley’s truck. The size difference was apparent. Ridley was traveling with a woman or a child.

Julianne?

Mark wished for a gun.

The tracks led along the driveway but behind the trees, as if whoever left them had wanted to approach unseen. They led all the way up to the garage. Mark was thirty feet from the base of the exterior stairs when he saw the blood.

There were vivid splashes of red on each riser of the steps and on down into the yard. There the footprints continued but the blood died out, washed clean by the snow. Two sets of tracks led to the garage. Three led away. And one of them had left bloodstains. That set of tracks came from the biggest footprints.

Cecil went after them, Mark thought. Ridley roughed him up and probably got what he came for, but Cecil went after them.

He followed the tracks as far as the blood went, then stopped and stared ahead. The frozen creek was lost to shadows but the footbridge and the cave entrance were illuminated with floodlights. He could see a figure on the footbridge, descending toward the cave. Cecil Buckner. Mark shouted at him, but Cecil didn’t hear; he stepped through the open door and vanished. It was not a good sign that the door was open, and Cecil didn’t appear to be the one who’d unlocked it. Ridley had gotten in ahead of him.

Trapdoor was open for visitors once more.

Mark glanced up at the big house, where even more lights were on and Danielle’s car was parked in front. Did she have any idea what was happening here? Or was she waiting, clueless, as her bloodied caretaker staggered after Ridley Barnes into the cave? Mark took out his phone and called her as he doubled back toward the drive. Five rings, voice mail.

He came out of the woods beside the garage, intending to run up to the big house and tell Danielle to call the police just as she’d threatened to, when something moved in his peripheral vision and he pivoted to look.

Motion again, and this time he saw it clearly — a scarlet bead fell from the top of the stairs and hit the snow below. Another fell, and then another. Mark lifted his head to look at the apartment. From this angle, he saw that the door was ajar and the wood in the center of it was splintered, puckered with small holes and jagged fragments.

Numbness crawled up his spine and spread along the back of his skull.

Too much blood. That is too much blood.

He went up the steps slowly, taking care to avoid the blood, which grew thicker with each riser. Now he could see a stream of it working through the cracked-open doorway. He felt just as he had when he’d opened the hidden door in Ridley’s house, certain of the horrors that waited. This time, though, he wasn’t going to be rewarded with maps.

He pushed the door open, which allowed more blood to rush out and pool against his boots, and he saw what remained of Danielle MacAlister.

She lay on her back in the center of the floor, close to the door. She hadn’t been standing that close to it when she’d died, though. The impact had blown her back several feet. It was a shotgun wound. Twelve-gauge at least. Maybe a ten. Fired at close range, the load heavy enough to obliterate most of her left side and shoulder and rip a hole through her throat. Her right hand was curled toward her throat, as if she’d tried to close the wound.

Mark stood absolutely still and looked at her and thought, I will kill you, Ridley. I will find you in whatever hole you’re headed for down there, and I will kill you.

There was paracord on the floor, snipped into several lengths, and a pair of kitchen scissors lay in Danielle’s blood. A few feet farther on was a long piece of duct tape, tangled and stuck together.

Was this how Ridley had brought Julianne inside? It didn’t have to be Julianne with him, but Mark felt certain it was. She was the only one Ridley wanted. She was the fated one in Ridley’s warped mind, the one who had to join him belowground. He would have brought her here and demanded access. Because of this, she was possibly still alive.

He called 911 from the doorway. He wasn’t very aware of the words that he offered, but they seemed to make sense to the operator. He heard snippets of her questions back to him: Were there any other victims? Was there an active shooter? He answered as best as he could. Told her that he believed the shooter was in the cave and that he might have a hostage. Told her that someone else had probably gone in after the shooter. He said Ridley Barnes’s name several times. Heard his voice rising when he said it. There were too many questions. Why hadn’t Cecil called them? What was he thinking following Ridley into that cave, where Ridley held every advantage?

The same thing you are. He wants to end it himself. Not wait on the police. He wants to end it.

The operator was still talking but Mark had stopped responding. His eyes were on the gun cabinet in the corner of the room. He stepped over Danielle MacAlister’s body without looking at her and went to the cabinet. He set the phone down while he opened the cabinet. Two shotguns and a lever-action .22-caliber rifle with a scope. No handguns. He wanted a handgun if he was going into the cave. Easier to move with, easier to shoot with. The shotguns were bad options. A wide spray pattern in a contained space was likely to hit more than the intended target, and Ridley was not alone. Mark didn’t like the .22 either, but at least it gave a shooter a chance to deliver in a tight window. Down there, it was going to be tight.

He removed the .22 and checked it for ammunition. It was loaded. The scope was a cheap infrared model, one that projected a red dot onto its target. Cutting-edge technology when Mark was a kid, now available at every Walmart. There was a flashlight at the bottom of the cabinet, resting against the stock of one of the shotguns. Not a big light. A small Maglite, probably powered by two double-A batteries. It was going to seem very weak in the cave, but there was no time to look for another option. Cecil had made the right decision, trying to stop Ridley before he got deep into the cave. If he was allowed to get far enough, there’d be no catching him. Not in Trapdoor.

Mark put the flashlight in his jacket pocket and shifted the rifle to his left hand. The voice was still coming from his cell phone. Loud and urgent. He picked it up and put it back to his ear.

“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, we have officers en route. I need you to stay where you are and stay on the line until they arrive.”

“Tell them to go to the cave. There’s nobody left here but the dead. The live ones are in the cave. For now, at least, there are live ones left.”

“Sir, I am instructing you to stay where you are and stay on the—”

Mark disconnected. The phone began to ring again almost immediately and he silenced it. He left the apartment with the .22 in his hands, walking around Danielle MacAlister’s body.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said to her. Maybe somewhere, somehow, the promise mattered. Mark wasn’t sure, but he felt it needed to be said. Just in case.

He walked down the stairs and followed the tracks out to the creek as far-off sirens became audible and fat, soft snowflakes wafted down. Ahead of him, the gate to Trapdoor stood open, and the darkness beyond beckoned.

55

The cave was as it should be, still and silent and soothing. Ridley had permitted Julianne to use the full strength of her headlamp for navigation, an undesirable intrusion but one he would not deny her because it allowed them to travel faster. They were walking on a ledge beside the deepwater channel. The channel was runoff from Maiden Creek that formed an underground tributary that Ridley had named the Greenglass River. In 2004, Pershing had run boat tours into the cave on the Greenglass, and Ridley hated those. He’d been in a boat in the cave only once, and he hadn’t lasted long in it that time, gone just far enough to ferry himself and his gear to the regions of the cave that fell off the maps, regions that had been dismissed by previous searchers because of the high water. Nobody could believe that Sarah Martin would enter a passage filled with water so high that she barely had clearance to breathe between the surface and the ceiling. All that Ridley had known was that they hadn’t found her yet and that people did strange things during spells of panic.

Back then, he hadn’t understood that people might do strange things in Trapdoor simply because the cave coerced them.

They walked in silence, and Julianne was honoring his demand not to assault his mind with words. The tape had been a valuable teacher. Perhaps she was even savvier than that, though, and knew that what Ridley needed from the cave was found in trapped whispers that came from beneath the water and behind the walls and out beyond the black.

The boat tours — fifteen dollars a pop in the old days, and ten for kids — had gone three-quarters of a mile back into the cave, a mere taste of what the Greenglass had to offer. Still, it was fascinating to have the experience of floating along beneath the earth, watching that green water reflect the light, seeing the dips and darts of the blind cave fish, listening to the slow, steady drips of stalactites — all of that was a new world to most.

It was also a world that extended far beyond what anyone understood. During the summer of 2004 Ridley had believed he’d learned most of what the cave had to offer, but at some point in the search for Sarah Martin, after the food went but before the batteries did, he’d found himself in spectacular new territory. Afterward, in total blackness, carrying a handcuffed corpse, he couldn’t say what he had passed through.

When they reached a wide chamber where the ceiling climbed to forty feet and rock formations jutted out of the water like abandoned pilings from a collapsed dock, he nudged Julianne to the right and into the walking passage that led to the Chapel Room. The Chapel Room was the first grand feature of Trapdoor, with a high domed ceiling and gorgeous stalactites that hung like prehistoric icicles over a series of descending rock ledges that had once been the ground formation of a waterfall but now, left high and dry, resembled empty church pews. Ridley paused when they entered the room, considering stopping there and sitting and taking this spot to engage Julianne in the talk that must begin soon, but he shook that off and led her deeper.

“There are passages all around us,” he said, breaking the silence. “Above and below and on each side. Some are navigable, some aren’t. Some go places, some don’t. Picture a bowl of spaghetti, and each strand is a passage. That’s what it’s like down here.”

Julianne said, “May I speak now?”

“Not yet. Thank you.”

The simplest route out of the Chapel Room led to the right. The fastest was straight ahead, the crawling passage that had given Blankenship so much trouble. You could get to the same place in far less time through the crawler. Ridley was impressed by the way Julianne forged ahead once they were inside, the walls squeezing, the ceiling lowering. She was much smaller than Blankenship but size didn’t necessarily affect claustrophobia. There was much ahead that she would not be capable of doing, though, passages that required technical expertise, but he was counting on Trapdoor to cooperate once his mission was clear. Trapdoor would simply have to. Not only was Julianne incapable of following him as far as he’d gone on that last trip; he was incapable of guiding her. He didn’t remember the turns he’d made, the paths he’d chosen. After he’d pulled on his wetsuit and slipped into the water, things had gotten away from him fast, and now that trip existed only in splashes — of water and of blood — and in whispers. Oh, maybe some screams too. Yes, there had been some screams.

Once, he thought he heard something and came to a stop. Killed his light and listened. All he could hear was Julianne’s breathing and, up ahead, the soft sounds of moving water. He turned the light back on and kept crawling.

They came out of the crawling passage into the Funnel Room and Ridley guided Julianne away from the basin and toward a high ledge at the far wall. The stalagmites here were taller than a man. Where the floor and ceiling sloped steeply toward an angled meeting point there was a shallow stream that bubbled up at one end and had carved a small portal through the wall at the other.

The only sound beyond his own breathing came from echoing drips of water that were carving new crevices that would later become new passages and, later still, spectacular chambers. The drips had a leisurely pace as they went about their work, and why not? They had literally all the time in the world.

Julianne disobeyed the order of silence to say, “It really is incredible.”

Ridley didn’t answer. He was looking at the stalagmites and remembering when they had started to move. There had been a time, in a room not so far from here, when the rocks had begun to move around him. At first he’d believed it was a trick of shadow, but then the rocks had grown hungrier and he could hear them sliding in from behind and cutting him off up ahead, circling him, drawing ever closer. He’d taken to the water then in a hurry — in a panic, fine, he would admit that. He had panicked when the formations moved; who wouldn’t?

It was then, entering the water in the panic, that he’d lost his first light.

He wiped sweat from his face. He was sweating freely, though not due to either temperature or exertion, and his mouth was so damn dry. “Yes, it is a special place,” he said.

Up ahead, the stream trickled through an opening in the wall about the size of a truck tire. Ridley pointed at it.

“That’s where I went into the water for Sarah Martin. It’s where I came back from the water with Mark Novak.”

“They were found in the same place?”

“No. She didn’t want me to go that way for Novak. It was too easy. She wanted to have some fun with me. She made me earn him. I had to climb up and crawl down, that was all she would give me, but once I got to him, she gave me an easier out. She was done with Novak by then, I guess.”

“When you went in after Sarah, this is where you left the group?” Julianne was ignoring the directive of silence, but he didn’t care to stop her. It was time to begin.

“Yes,” he said. “This is where I left the group.”

Julianne stared at the opening. “It’s tight. And the water doesn’t look deep.”

“Not here, but you crawl through for about fifty feet, and it gets much deeper. Crawl a little farther than that, and you begin to swim. When the water table is high, you’re bouncing right off the ceiling. The best way to explore this section is with diving equipment.”

“What’s that in the water?”

He followed her gaze and, sure enough, saw something floating. That was odd. He walked closer, with Julianne trailing, and trapped the object in the beam from his headlamp: it was a remnant of crime scene tape. The rest had been torn free when they cleared out of the cave ten years ago, but this short length had been missed, and now it undulated slowly in the water, like a dying snake. Or a long strand of a girl’s blond hair.

“A welcome mat,” he said. “She knows we’re here. I think maybe she even knows why.”

Julianne had taken a few steps back, but she said, “This is good. This is perfect. I hadn’t dared hope for anything so perfect.”

“Why so pleased?”

“It’s ideal visualization. That narrow opening is a literal portal.”

Her voice was natural again, just as if they were inside her living room for a scheduled appointment. As if she’d never had a knife at her throat and tape over her mouth. He was both pleased by that and disarmed by it. He needed her to be a willing, focused participant, but her calm suggested that she believed she could gain control again. She simply had to learn that down here, neither of them would have control.

“A portal is exactly what it is,” he said. He thought he saw one of the rock formations moving, shifting as if leaning down to overhear them, but he didn’t turn toward it. He knew better. “This is where your work begins.”

“You wish to enter trance here.”

“A form of it.”

“There’s only one form I know.”

“She knows others. She’ll guide the process. You’ll facilitate, but she will guide. It won’t be what you’re used to. She won’t allow that.”

“There are many reasons you don’t want to leave here now,” she said, “and it is obvious that whatever trust you had in me has been damaged, but for your own well-being, I would like you to listen to me when I say that trance here is a dangerous thing for you.”

“Remaining on the surface is far more dangerous.” Ridley dropped to his knees on the stone and removed his backpack and began to assemble the special equipment he’d brought for this portion of the journey. He had a white wax candle and a small crystal base, and he fit the candle into it carefully and withdrew a pack of matches and struck one, tingeing the damp air with sulfur. The wick accepted the flame immediately.

“This isn’t how we do things,” Julianne said. “Not with candles and crystals, Ridley. You know better than that.”

“Things are different here. Do you have the necklace?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Hold it in both hands, please. And turn your headlamp off.”

She removed the helmet to turn off the lamp. She was clumsy with the equipment, and he watched that with dismay, because he knew they would have some traveling to do. At least she was not scared of tight spaces, or hadn’t been so far. Trapdoor could breathe new fears into you swiftly, though.

When her headlamp was off, he was relieved. The candlelight was softer and it shifted and breathed and it was natural. Ridley’s mouth was the driest it had ever been. He freed a water bottle from his pack and drank heavily. It made no impact.

56

Mark had spent hours in a cave in a way few people alive could relate to, and yet he’d never experienced one in anything but blackness.

In the light, it could take your breath away.

The deepwater channel with its odd coloration set the tone, but it was the way the cave expanded as it descended that really created a sense of awesome power, a promise that there was so much more here than you would have guessed.

The small flashlight seemed weaker with each step. He thumped it against his hand and adjusted the focus, trying to coax more light out of it. The sense that it was dimming was an illusion, though, created by the size of the cave and the totality of the darkness.

He walked on a ledge to the right of the water because it was the only option.

Drops of fresh blood painted the cave floor. Cecil was wounded, but he wasn’t bleeding badly. Just a steady drip. Mark’s flashlight caught something reflective and glistening up on the stones. A strip of duct tape, sliced neatly in half. A twin of what had been on the floor in Cecil’s apartment, only without any of Danielle MacAlister’s blood on it.

He stepped over it and moved ahead.

For a while he did not need to attempt any tracking or even consider it because there was only one path. Then, in a spot where the water channel opened up into a wide pool, he saw the looming blackness of a tunnel on the left and another one on the right, and for the first time there was a decision to be made.

He dropped to one knee, removed Ridley’s decade-old map from his pocket, and got his bearings. He’d been walking along the Greenglass River and now he had the choice of scrambling toward the tunnel on the left or bending toward the one on the right. According to the map, the tunnel on the left emptied out into a circular room named Solitude. There was no indication that there was a way out of Solitude, but of course Ridley had stopped recording the passages at some point and it was entirely possible that there were numerous ways ahead from the supposed dead end. All the same, Mark found himself guessing that Ridley had gone right, toward the Chapel Room and then the Funnel Room, where Mark had been told they’d begun the search for him, Ridley traveling up when everyone else was looking down.

His turn was the right choice — Cecil’s blood was visible again, meaning that he, at least, had come this way. Whether he’d had visual contact with Ridley at the time was another question. Inside the cave, Ridley held all the advantages — knowledge of terrain, technical expertise, every level of comfort one could have on his home turf — but he’d hindered himself by bringing Julianne along. The things that Ridley could do down here alone using his ropes and wetsuits and challenging high walls and narrow tunnels, he would not be able to do with Julianne, or at least not with any speed. That meant if Mark kept up a good pace, he stood a chance of finding them fast, but moving quickly would be a struggle because he was beginning to feel the return of the unease with the cave now. As he entered the tunnel that led to the Chapel Room, he was positive he heard a sound behind him, and he whirled and banged the rifle barrel off the stone walls. The flashlight illuminated nothing that could have moved or made a sound. It was only in his head.

Mark knew he had to hurry to catch them, but he wanted to go slowly. No, that wasn’t even the truth. He wanted to get out. There was a bad feel to the place once the walls of the tunnel narrowed around him and the ceiling angled down and he saw that he was going to have to crawl.

You may only be making this worse, he thought. An amateur chasing a pro in a place like this, it could be a disaster for everyone.

True, but that was not enough to make him leave. It would take them a long time to get caving experts in here, and who knew what the police would want to do at that point? Caving experts were still civilians. The police might decide to enter themselves, and they’d be just as slow as Mark. Maybe slower.

Cecil was out there ahead, and Mark wanted to catch up to him, at least. Together they would have a better chance. Mark understood the adrenaline, the desire for immediate pursuit, but Cecil had scarcely entered the cave when Mark arrived. He should have seen Mark’s car pulling in and known that someone was here, someone who maybe could help. If nothing else, Cecil should have asked Mark to call for reinforcements while he went after them.

Decisions made in battle often lacked clarity and logic, though, and Cecil had certainly been under fire. His home had been ransacked, his employer brutally murdered, and Ridley had a hostage. Mark hadn’t even thought to check the phone in Cecil’s apartment and see if it worked. He’d called the police from his own cell. Perhaps Ridley had taken away Cecil’s ability to call out. The only chance for Cecil then would have seemed the hero’s play, trying to stop Ridley alone. After seeing what Ridley had done to Danielle, that took real courage.

Mark stopped crawling and rested his bruised knuckles on the stone, the .22 in his left hand, the flashlight in his right. He leaned against the tunnel wall as sweat dripped from his forehead and his heart thundered. Adrenaline coursing, the same thing he was busy ascribing to Cecil. He’d been telling himself he couldn’t pause, couldn’t slow, that it was all about speed now, and Ridley had had a head start.

Speeding in the wrong direction wasn’t worth a damn, though. Speeding in the wrong direction was a good way to die.

Did you see things right, Markus? Did you see the truth back there?

He’d seen brutality, a murder victim awash in blood, and he’d identified her killer without pause. Ridley was the threat, and Ridley was on the property, ergo...

But why hadn’t Ridley killed Cecil, then? If Mark’s perception was right, it meant Ridley had been armed with a shotgun in Cecil’s apartment and had used it on Danielle. Why Danielle? And why let Cecil live?

Maybe Cecil fought back. He resisted; he escaped.

Fought back well enough to avoid death, but not well enough to kill Ridley? Cecil was a large and powerful man. He had no shortage of firepower in that gun cabinet. If he’d been able to gain the upper hand even for a moment, why had it ended with Ridley and Julianne already out of sight in the cave, and Cecil limping after them?

Something was wrong in there. Something didn’t make sense in there.

Danielle’s body had occupied Mark’s focus. Her body and the blood. So much blood. It had been hard to consider much else. But there had been other things. Paracord, the kind that lay in neat coils all around Ridley’s house. Duct tape, more of which Mark had seen in the cave. The tape had been different, though. The tape on the floor in Cecil’s home had been pulled off and lay in a tangled clump. The tape in the cave had been sliced perfectly in two. The latter made sense. Ridley was a knife man. Ridley and that ever-present Benchmade. His reflex weapon, the one he’d drawn on Mark.

Far more important, though — Ridley was also a rope man. He cared for them, worried over them. Ridley was a knot master. He’d have untied the paracord, not cut it. Rope men did not cut their ropes if they could possibly avoid it. And even if for some reason he had decided to cut it, Ridley would never have needed to find a pair of kitchen scissors for the task. He’d have used the knife, just as he had on the tape in the cave.

That wasn’t his work. Someone else cut Julianne loose.

Or they hadn’t cut Julianne loose at all. There was tape left behind in the cave but no rope. Why would there be? Ridley would have untied it and kept it. Rope was valuable to him. So who had been cut loose in Cecil’s apartment? The work had been awkward — all the lengths of cord hacked into pieces. That was the product of someone who didn’t understand the knots at all, who simply kept cutting until all the cord was loose. Had Ridley bound Danielle up, leaving her to be hastily freed by Cecil?

Not Danielle. There wasn’t enough time for her to go through all of that. I’d just spoken to her. So that leaves...

Cecil.

Which meant that Danielle had freed him.

So who had pulled the trigger on her?

I’ll send for Cecil. It’s his baby now, she had told him just before she hung up the phone. He’d thought that meant that she was going to ask Cecil to block him from the property. That the trouble Mark represented was about to be Cecil’s baby. It had seemed obvious. She was calling her caretaker in to do his job. But maybe she wasn’t calling him in for the obvious reason. Maybe she was calling in Cecil for another reason entirely — to answer for himself.

It’s his baby now.

For the first time, Mark was fully aware of the cold in the cave and of the darkness ahead and behind. There were three people belowground with him. He’d thought one was an enemy.

Maybe he had two.

57

Julianne sat on the stones with her legs crossed. Her helmet was beside her, and she held the sapphire necklace in her hands. Her face was obscured by shadows in the flickering candlelight, and Ridley couldn’t make out her eyes. He wanted to see them and find the comfort that they held, but he couldn’t afford to sacrifice the darkness. The truths that he wanted out of Trapdoor had all been lost in the dark. He would have to find them there.

“We’ll start with an offering,” he said. He set the knife on the stone near his right hand, blade open.

“No,” Julianne said. “No, Ridley, that’s not how we start.”

“Things are different here.” He reached into his backpack and pulled free a roll of papers.

“What is that?”

The pages were larger than normal, the long format of legal documents.

“This is a trust document,” Ridley said. “Dated October second, 2004. You know what’s special about that time and this place. I don’t need to explain it to you. All that matters to you are contained in a few lines.”

He knew the document so well he could have recited the lines from memory, but still he flipped through the pages. They deserved to be read once more.

“‘To be executed ten years from the date of this agreement or at the time of my death, whichever comes first,’” he read aloud, “‘with the stipulation that all terms of this agreement are rendered wholly null and void if the circumstances of my death are determined to be the result of criminal action.’”

Julianne was staring at him with an expression he’d never seen on her face before.

“What is this?” she said. “Why was this agreement made?”

“Let me finish. Let me read the beautiful line, the one that gave me hope and patience for so long.” He worked his tongue around his mouth in a fruitless attempt to bring moisture to it, and then read, “‘At which time all holdings of Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust will become the property of Cecil Buckner and Ridley Barnes.’”

Julianne didn’t speak. Ridley took a deep breath and shook his head. “How much that meant to me, I can’t explain. But those were in different times. Patience can hold you only so far in the absence of truth. Cecil doesn’t understand that, because Cecil doesn’t have the same questions. I’ll trade for the truth. It’s a bargain I hate to make, but I’ll trade the trust for the truth.”

He was speaking more to the cave than to Julianne now. He fed the title page of the document into the candle flame. The flame chewed around the edge of the paper and flared brightly but then died, leaving one charred corner. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

“She has no use for documents,” he said. “Certainly no use for talk of ownership. I always understood that. My request was that I be referred to as a steward of Trapdoor Caverns. That was the role I wanted. Apparently, it was not the right legal term, but it’s all I wanted to be.”

He set the partially burned document aside and took the knife in his hand. “Now it’s about to be your show,” he said. “Are you ready for that?”

“Let’s talk more about this.”

“No.” He shook his head. “We will talk about Sarah. Where she was found, how she was found. You’ll have to trust the cave. We’re so much closer to the truth now. All you have to do is open the door for me. You’re the only one who can do that.”

For a long time she was silent, but when she finally spoke, her voice was perfect, the cadence he’d come to know and require.

“If you would like to face the water and focus on that portal, you may do so,” she said.

He turned obediently, and now Julianne and the candle were in his peripheral vision, a flickering in the corner of his right eye. He could see the shadow line of the stream and the place where it disappeared. He turned to look at her. With the blackness at her back and the candlelight before her and those pale clothes and her blond hair, she seemed to glow.

“I’ll need total darkness,” he said.

“Even from the candle?”

“Yes. I’ll need it the way it was back then.”

She hesitated, but then she leaned her face close to the candle’s warm, soft light, parted her lips, and exhaled soundlessly, and the candle extinguished and they belonged to the blackness.

“All right. Let’s work our way toward that day together, shall we?” she said. “Always together. Never alone. Remember that you are never alone here.”

Not a problem, Ridley thought. Not in Trapdoor.

“You may focus on that spot,” Julianne said. “On that portal. It may be the place where the present ceases for you and the past begins. Take your time if you wish, and maybe you will wish to let the water guide you. You may wish to remember all of the days we have done these exercises together and all of the progress you have made. Your confidence and your strength. Remember that you are required to follow it only as far as you wish.”

He’d worked with her long enough to understand the double message here, the way she was using the word remember as often as possible, a guide that went beyond the surface message.

“Whenever you are ready, you may focus all of your attention on that portal,” she said, her voice rising and falling in subtle shifts. “You may begin to consider all of the places that it can take you. All of the places that lie beyond. You may remember those now, if you choose. You may vocalize those, if you choose. The seeing is within your reach and yours alone. You know this, and you know that even though it is dark to me, it is not to you.”

“Yes,” Ridley said in a dried-out whisper. “Yes.”

“Would you like to approach it now? Would you like to pass through it and tell me some things about what lies beyond?”

“Yes.”

“Listen to the water and to the other sounds that you might hear, sounds perhaps different than those that I can hear.”

He knew what she could hear: the steady, tinny drip of water from the ceiling, plinking down into a puddle that was patiently working its way through the stone, unhurried by the passing centuries. It was a pleasant sound, not unlike the ticking of a clock. In its own way, that was exactly what it was.

“Allow yourself to pass through, if you wish. Give yourself that permission now. Permission to go down that path. Moving forward, yes, but also backward. As far back as you choose. You know the path. You’ve been on it before. Follow it now, if you wish. Follow it and see where it leads. I will count down from ten to one, and when I reach one, you will be on the path as you once were before.”

Ridley closed his eyes even though he was in blackness, and his head bobbed in rhythm with her voice, and his thumb worked lightly over the knife. Though it drew blood, he felt no pain.

58

Mark was on his hands and knees again, freshening the bruises from his last time in this terrible place. If you wanted to make it out of Trapdoor alive, you had to be willing to spend some time on your knees. There was no other option.

The pain from the bruises was bad but the memories it triggered were much worse. Each ache forced him to recall the way it had been down here before, when he was alone and shivering in the blackness. When he had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life: I cannot save myself.

These memories should have made him even more grateful for the light, but instead he found a strange resentment of it. He maneuvered through the tunnel without needing to make any effort or even give any thought to avoiding the walls and the rocks, and he felt almost outraged by how simple it seemed. He knew what he’d earned in the dark, he knew how hard it had come, how much it had taken from both mind and body. That anything so arduous could be made so easy felt almost insulting, a mocking of what he had achieved.

The tunnel opened up, and the flashlight exposed a wide chamber with high ceilings and an odd, staggered floor that looked almost like bleachers, as if the water had carved seating for some grand performance. The Chapel Room, he assumed. There was no trace of Ridley or Julianne, but there was blood from Cecil. Less of it now, spaced out by larger distances.

Mark set down the rifle and withdrew Ridley’s map once more and checked. Yes, this was the Chapel Room. Here again he had options — three passages, one that went up to a second level of the cave, one that went straight ahead, and one that curled to the right. The passages both directly ahead and to the right took you to the Funnel Room, the place where they had first heard Mark’s voice. According to the dimensions on the map, the passage to the right was much larger, a walking passage with a twelve-foot ceiling. The passage ahead was labeled in Ridley’s scrawl — belly crawl, very tight. The wider passage was a much longer trip toward the same destination, a distance of a quarter of a mile to achieve what the belly crawl would do in three hundred feet.

He stepped back and moved the light around and saw that what looked like one rock angled in front of another was actually a gap in the wall. The obvious opening was a dead end, but the hidden one led on. There was blood on the floor here. Cecil had taken the walking passage.

Mark hesitated and looked back at Ridley’s map. For ease of access, he should follow Cecil’s route. If he took the crawl, though, and he moved fast enough, he could pull ahead of Cecil.

He turned from the open passage and walked back to the crawl without allowing any pause for reflection. When he saw the opening, it did not look so bad: a gap at least three feet high and equally wide. Easy going. He dropped back down to his hands and knees then and shone the light into the tunnel and saw a shelf of rock ceiling so low that it didn’t look as if a basketball could roll through.

“No,” he whispered. “Not worth it.”

That was when he heard a voice. Too soft to be understood but undeniably human. He ducked lower, listened. Heard the voice again and this time he recognized it: Julianne’s.

She was alive, and she was speaking. Cecil Buckner, who had left behind a gruesome scene that made no sense to Mark, was heading toward her. How close Cecil was to her, Mark didn’t know, but thanks to Ridley’s map, Mark knew exactly how close he was — three hundred feet. One football field, that was all.

One football field that he would have to crawl over on his belly, his shoulders squeezed on each side, the ceiling brushing his head.

He lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled forward, once more pushing the .22 ahead of him with his left hand while holding the flashlight in his right. Five feet in, then ten, and he was feeling fine, he believed that the visual intimidation of the crawl was harder than the process.

Then his shoulders brushed the walls. No big deal. Just wriggle forward. He lifted his head so he could extend his elbows.

His head cracked off the stone ceiling, and when he lowered it, his chin bounced off the floor.

Terror now. A flood of it. Not even fifteen feet in and he felt trapped, felt as if he should scramble backward.

He closed his eyes. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and over his eyelid and across his lips. He licked it away, tasting the salt. Opened his eyes.

Everything ahead of him was blurred. The passage was too low, too narrow, too dark.

But he could breathe. He could breathe and he could move.

He also knew where it led. He knew that because Ridley Barnes had passed through here before. More than once. He’d passed through it with enough calm and composure to not only see where it led but chart its dimensions. Belly crawl, very tight.

A voice became audible again. Julianne’s. Soothing, composed. What she’d endured to this point Mark had no idea, but he’d seen Danielle MacAlister’s corpse. He knew what waited ahead for her.

We’ll all end up here, he thought. It’s just a matter of time. I’ll join them all down here. Sarah Martin. Diane Martin. Lauren.

He crawled ahead. Ten feet, fifteen, twenty. His breathing came too fast and his heart thundered. For the second time in this cave, he thought that he heard snakes, but there weren’t any. This time he had the light to prove it. He paused for a few seconds and steadied himself and then pushed on. Again he tried to look up and banged his head and felt a shudder of pain all the way along his spine. There was a reason you were supposed to wear a helmet. He crawled on, shoving the rifle in front of him, and he was cursing his slow progress when he heard two voices, a man’s voice joining Julianne’s, and this time he could understand the words, and the first one that registered was light.

He clicked off the flashlight, sure that they were speaking of him and were aware of his arrival. The instant the light was gone he had no idea where he was. The totality of the darkness was like a physical thing. His thumb moved toward the switch again but he willed it down and did not touch it. Instead, he crept forward slowly, moving as quietly as possible. He no longer believed the distance on Ridley’s map. It had to be a lie. Mark had been crawling for more than a hundred yards. A half a mile at least. Two miles. The distance was as endless as the darkness.

The words became clear just as the walls widened and the ceiling lifted. Julianne and Ridley were speaking, and they were not far from him. It seemed they were in a room just around the bend, but that meant they were in total darkness. All that existed of them was their voices. It gave the situation an eerie quality of unreality. Ridley’s voice had been low and sluggish when it first became audible but now it was sharp, his words racing.

“She’s there and I can hear her and I know that I can’t go back because it sounds as if she’s hurting. Hurting and afraid but so close. She is so close and that means I can’t go back, I have to go forward or I might lose her. And it’s a problem because the light is getting dim; it’s getting dark and so I have to hurry.”

Mark shifted his hand so he could reach the rifle’s trigger. Then he heard Julianne.

“Why is the light getting dim?” she asked, but there was no light in their room, and Mark finally understood what was happening. Ridley’s rapid account was being spoken in the present tense but the story came from the past. He was talking about Sarah Martin.

Ridley said, “Batteries, batteries, I’ve been running this lamp too long, the whole time down here, and there’s another one behind me but I can’t go back for it now because I can hear her and I can’t lose her, this is why I’m in the cave, I came for her, right? I came for her. The crawl is tight, very narrow, squeezes the shoulders, and I can’t believe she came this way. I can’t believe it. She was not skilled enough to get here, but she is here. No one else has been here, so how did she make it? Just a scared girl in the dark. How did she make it? She couldn’t have made it.”

“If you didn’t believe you would find her in this place, what led you to it?”

“I take what the cave gives me. It’s one of the only rules.”

“Who makes those rules?”

“The cave. The rules have always been here, but you understand them better in the dark.”

Mark was relieved that he’d turned off his light. He hadn’t wanted to go dark in this place ever again, but if Ridley believed these were the rules, it was better not to disturb him. He wasn’t sure whether to advance or wait. Without being able to see what was before him, he couldn’t make a call on how to proceed. It seemed to be just the two of them, no demonstrated danger, but Cecil Buckner was circling from the other side.

“Continue along the journey,” Julianne said.

“It’s dark by the time I make the top of the crawl. Battery’s done, it’s dead, I’ve made it all the way now but I don’t have light and I can’t go back because she’s so close. So I shout.”

Mark didn’t like the use of the present tense. It suggested Ridley wasn’t recalling the past as much as reliving it. Still, he was entranced by it, because what Ridley was telling Julianne now was the thing he’d refused to share for ten years.

“What do you shout at her?” Julianne asked.

“That I’m coming for her. That she will be safe.”

“Does she answer?”

“Yes. She asks me to stop. She says, ‘Please, stop.’ But that doesn’t make any sense because she’s lost and she’s hurt and she needs help. So I keep climbing, and she says, ‘Please, stop,’ and I think that she is talking to me but it’s to the cave.”

“Why do you think it’s to the cave?”

“Because the cave tries to kill me. And then I do the wrong thing. I fight it.”

“How do you fight it?”

“With my knife. The dark man, he has me by the throat. I have no lights anymore but I still have the knife.”

“Who is the dark man?”

“He belongs to the cave. He’s always been here.”

Mark thought, Here we go, here we lose him, any chance of getting the truth dies with the madness of the dark man, but Julianne countered Ridley beautifully.

“How can you fight someone who has always been here?” she asked.

“With my knife. I grab it and I slam the blade backward, again and again, and he’s screaming now.”

“Screaming because you are causing him pain?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s always been in the cave?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see how these things might create a problem when considered together?”

There was a long pause. Finally, Ridley’s voice returned: “He should be hard to hurt. Impossible to hurt.”

She was getting him to confront his own fiction or hallucination or whatever it was. Mark could hardly breathe. There was no police interview that could have delivered this. No interrogation. He wouldn’t have believed that before, but he was sure of it now.

“If he is eternal, it seems he should be difficult to hurt, yes,” Julianne said. “But you’re certain you hurt him?”

“Yes. I am certain. And then I have to make him stop. I have to silence him.”

“Why?”

“Because when he screams, she screams, and so I need him to stop, I have to make him stop. So I do. It’s a mistake, though. It is a terrible mistake. Because now he can’t tell me where she is, and he’s the one who knows. Who knew. I should have stopped when he screamed.”

Mark could hear Ridley sobbing between the words now.

“I should have let him keep screaming, that is better than the way it is now, because he can’t talk, and he’s the one who knows where she is. And now I can’t see and I don’t know where to go. It’s dark all around but I can still hear her. She’s so close, but I can’t see! And I think... I think he was providing for her, maybe? At least he knew how to find her. But now he can’t go back. Because of me. So I’m going to have to find her in the dark and I will have to find her fast, because if I don’t, if I don’t...”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“She dies,” Ridley said, his voice dipping. “I need to find her before she dies.”

Mark thought of that first confession — I think I killed her. This version had another layer: he’d removed her lifeline. She’d died because of his actions but not at his hand in this scenario. If it was true, if any of it was true, that meant someone else had died in Trapdoor too.

“Let’s consider the dark man again, if you wish. Tell me what he sounded like, what he smelled like, what he felt like. Use all the senses. They have their own memories, as you know. Use them now.”

“Blood,” Ridley said.

“What?”

“He smells of blood. Then Sarah does. And then I do the wrong thing.”

“What wrong thing?”

“I take her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She belongs to the cave. She was never supposed to leave. That’s why so much pain came. It’s a penance. She wasn’t supposed to go.”

He sounded like a child now, his voice high and needy and desperate: Understand me. Mark shifted forward, trying to hear, because Ridley’s voice had grown very soft. Mark had no idea when he should act. He didn’t know where Cecil was, wasn’t even certain that Cecil was a threat. Without any view of the room or sense of where Ridley and Julianne were, Mark could put her in more danger by entering the room. He thought of the scope on the .22 then, the cheap infrared. He could project a red dot into the room, but they’d see that. Useless. He needed to commit to the light at some point.

“You wanted to talk about the necklace,” Julianne said. “You wanted to know how it found its way into your hand. Think of the necklace now. What is your first memory of the necklace?”

“She dies,” Ridley said as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I need to find her before she dies. I can hear her and I know that she is alive and I am supposed to find her. I am supposed to save her. It’s why I’m here. The only reason.”

There was silence from them, and Mark wondered if it was because Julianne was as stunned as he was, if she was beginning to fumble for the next question, the next bit of guidance. That didn’t seem like her, though. She understood how to take things home. Why the silence?

When she spoke again, the trance cadence was gone from her voice, and sharpness had replaced it.

“Ridley, I am going to count to five. When we reach five, you will be gone from the past, you will be feeling so good, relieved of your burdens and so good, you will feel safe and” — What in the hell is she doing? Mark thought, and that was when he saw a faint light on the wall up ahead — “at peace. One. Feeling energized now, feeling good energy spreading through you. Two.”

She was panicking, rushing through. That light bothered her, which meant it didn’t come from the two of them. They were no longer alone. Someone had joined them in the cave; someone was approaching.

The caretaker had arrived.

Mark got to his feet as she said “Three” and then Ridley spoke for the first time in several seconds.

“Here he comes. I knew that he would. She’s sent him to stop us.”

The pale light intensified then and the world of stone lit up before Mark. He was facing a chamber with an angled roof and he could see Ridley clearly, Ridley with one arm wrapped around Julianne Grossman’s throat, pulling her backward, stumbling among the rock formations, trying to clear the two of them away from the white light that was emerging from a tunnel twenty feet ahead. Ridley fell and Julianne fell with him and her skull smacked the stone with a crack that hurt just to hear. Ridley froze and looked at her in horror as blood spread through her blond hair. His attention belonged entirely to her and he didn’t even turn to face the light when Cecil Buckner stepped out from the tunnel, wearing a caving helmet and holding a shotgun belt-high.

Mark flicked the switch on the infrared scope and put a red dot on the center of Cecil’s chest.

“Put the gun down!” he shouted.

Cecil spun toward his voice, but Mark was on the ground, below the light. Cecil couldn’t see him, but that didn’t stop him from shooting.

The sound was enormously loud in the trapped space, like a mortar round. Rock fragments exploded into the air, and needles of pain found Mark’s cheek and neck as he pulled the trigger on the .22 and shot Cecil in the chest.

Cecil rocked back and fired the shotgun once more as he fell, this blast connecting with the ceiling, and then he was down on his back and the shotgun clattered over the stone and into the water. He sat up and fumbled for it. Mark worked the lever action on the rifle as he rose to his feet, and this time he put the red dot on Cecil’s eye.

Cecil stopped searching for the shotgun. He moaned in pain as he put a hand to his chest and found it wet with blood, but he wasn’t going to die from the wound. Not from the .22, which had hit low, missing his heart. The killing gun in play was still the shotgun, and Mark needed to claim it.

Ridley had been silent and motionless until Mark was almost to Cecil. Then he spun with such speed and agility that Mark nearly shot him out of surprise. But Ridley ignored him, splashed into the water beside Cecil, and came up with the shotgun. He pivoted toward Mark, his finger drifting to the trigger.

“Don’t,” Mark began, but he didn’t need to bother with instruction, because Ridley simply threw the gun onto the rocks.

“Those don’t belong here,” he said. He sounded groggy, distant and uninterested. He stared at Mark as if he did not recognize him or even understand what he was.

“Same team, Ridley,” Mark said. “I’m here to help you. And Julianne. Let me help you.”

“You’re not here for her,” Ridley said.

“Yes, I am,” Mark said, though he had no idea whom Ridley meant by her. Julianne, Sarah Martin, the cave? All of them? “Step back,” Mark said. “Ridley, just step back.”

“None of you belong here,” Ridley said. “She doesn’t want any of you.” He stepped over Cecil and moved through the water, heading deeper into the cave.

“Ridley! Stop moving!”

Ridley ignored him. He dropped to his hands and knees in the water and crawled toward a narrow gap in the wall. Mark had the choice to shoot him in the back to stop him or let him go.

He let him go. Ridley crawled through the gap and vanished into the darkness. Then it was just Mark, rifle in hands, and two people on the ground in front of him, bleeding into the rocks.

59

Cecil was terrified of his wound, pressing on it with both hands and giving a high, strange moan that echoed around the room. His eyes were wide and panicked as he watched the blood flow through his fingers.

“Help,” Cecil said. He looked from the wound to Mark, his face desperate. Taking blood was one thing to him; watching it leave his own body another. “I’m dying. Don’t let me die!”

Mark ignored him, set the .22 beside the shotgun, both weapons well out of Cecil’s reach, and turned to Julianne. She was facedown, and blood ran through her hair and joined the water on its slow journey deeper into the cave, chasing after Ridley Barnes.

Her wrist showed a pulse, and her breathing seemed steady. The blood loss was the only immediate threat, or at least the only one Mark was qualified to do anything about. He removed his jacket to serve as a compress but he needed something to secure it. Ridley surely had brought rope with him, and his caving pack was still here.

There was rope, but once Mark had the pack open, he realized he didn’t need it. Before Ridley Barnes had decided to try to kill Julianne Grossman, he had packed a first-aid kit for her. There was a packet of pads coated with a clotting agent, and there was a roll of three-inch-wide gauze. Mark took both of them and left the rest of the kit. All he was concerned with right now was stopping that bleeding as fast as possible. He pushed her hair out of the way as best he could and applied two of the sterile pads. When they contacted the blood, a sticky gel formed. He wrapped the roll of gauze around her head, keeping it tight. Blood stained the first layers but did not continue to soak through.

Through it all, Cecil had moaned and called for help, and Mark hadn’t responded. When Julianne spoke, he almost dropped her head onto the rocks again.

“Worked,” she said. Her voice was as thick as if her mouth were packed with cotton. “Worked.”

He moved so he could see her face, and her eyes tracked him but they had a foggy look.

“Julianne? Julianne, do you understand where you are?”

“It worked,” she said. “Detail. He gave... detail.” She put together sentences like a climber clawing toward an icy summit.

“Just rest,” he said. “Rest for now. We’ll talk about it. But right now we need to get you out of here. That’s the—”

Light splashed over the wall behind them then and Mark whirled and reached for the shotgun. He realized quickly that the light was coming from the tunnel that led back to the Chapel Room and not the one Ridley had vanished into, but that didn’t mean a whole lot; Ridley was capable of circling back in ways no one else understood.

“Who’s there?” Mark shouted.

The light’s motion stopped and there was a pause before another voice responded. “Indiana State Police. Who are we talking to?”

Cecil stopped moaning. For the first time, he seemed aware of something beyond his wound. Julianne’s face showed no response at all.

Mark said, “You’re talking to Markus Novak. You’re clear to approach. There are two wounded in this room, and there’s one missing somewhere else. There are two weapons that I’m aware of, but they are not in play.”

The light went back into motion and he turned to face Julianne, hoping she understood that rescue was here. She didn’t look relieved, though; she looked concerned.

“We didn’t end trance,” she said. “That... that is dangerous for Ridley now. The worst possible thing. He doesn’t know what is real down here... that could be very bad.”

60

Ridley embraced the cold water, swam down until his hands touched the bottom, and then pulled himself forward along the rock lining the streambed. Only at the last possible second, when his head had begun to throb and his lips threatened to part despite his will, did he allow himself to break the surface.

The water-table line was high and he struck the limestone ceiling with enough force to snap his teeth together; the impact drove his face back into the water. Choking and sputtering, he rose again and this time he leaned his head back and got a fuller breath.

He treaded water there, in a place where he had anticipated it would be shallow enough for him to stand, and got his breath back as the cold found his bones. He saw motion to the right, perhaps a stalactite relocating from one side of the stream to the next, a process that not even a millennium could bring about in another cave but that could occur within seconds in Trapdoor. She was shifting around him, changing the rules; all night she had been changing the rules, and he was weary of that. What the cave had done tonight revealed her true character.

Something Ridley had always understood about Trapdoor was that she protected the past. The cave wanted to hold her secrets and so she had wiped Ridley’s mind clear with blackness before she sent him back to the surface. Certainly there had been a price to pay for that, not one without pain — the hostile police, hateful neighbors, relentless media. And, of course, what memories the cave had allowed him to keep. Those seemed carefully crafted, snapshots of blood and scrabbling fingers and echoes of screams and then, far worse, echoes of whispers.

Please, stop

He had hoped that with ten years in constant communion with the world below — if not in this place, then close by, close enough that he could feel Trapdoor’s heartbeat and know that his could be felt as well — a mutual understanding might grow. The cave would learn that Ridley wanted to atone for only himself, that he did not blame Trapdoor for what had occurred, and that whatever he might learn about the past, he would answer for on the surface, leaving the cave in peace.

Those hopes had vanished back in the Funnel Room, where Ridley Barnes had once entered the water with rescue on his mind and returned with a dead girl in his arms, and where tonight he had sat with an innocent—

an interloper, an intruder

— at his side. All that had followed had been hostile, and unnecessary. He’d come for the truth, and he deserved it. Instead, the cave had turned on him. He was enraged by that, because his intent had been clear and his respect unquestionable.

“She didn’t belong to you!” he screamed into the blackness. “She belonged up there! And you know it! You fucking know it!”

He was gasping when he finished, the scream spreading pain through him like a fever. All he wanted to do was pass that pain along to the cave, the source of it all. Sarah Martin had belonged on the surface, and she had not deserved harm. Ridley had not deserved harm either, and still the cave had applied her power for vengeance, nothing more. When Trapdoor turned on a good and faithful servant who had sought only the right path, who had honored every request and kept every secret? At that point, even the righteous should be allowed to resist.

He bobbed too high in the water again and his helmet cracked against the stone and he was about to sink lower when he paused to consider his helmet and the potential it carried.

He’d instructed Julianne to join him in total blackness down here because he believed it was what Trapdoor had desired of him. Now he no longer cared what Trapdoor desired.

Problems with the dark man, he thought, and he tried to recall what Julianne had said and what he’d said to her. The words didn’t seem far off, but they were hard to grasp. There was a problem with the dark man.

He found the headlamp switch and pressed it, and the shapeless dark became a tunnel, its outer reaches within the range of Ridley’s spotlight. The last time he’d passed this way, it had been only blackness. Now he could see. He could find his way back to where it had started.

He had to.

The lack of a wetsuit in fifty-eight-degree water put a ticking clock on Ridley, but the light allowed him to beat it. Maybe.

It was a question of preparation and performance now, and Ridley Barnes had been a long ten years in training.

He swam ahead. The light led the way, and Ridley chased behind it.

61

It snowed all night and then broke off just before dawn, and the clouds pushed east and left a hard, shining sun behind.

All of this happened as Mark sat in the Garrison County Sheriff’s Department. He’d given three interviews to a total of seven police officers and still hadn’t seen Blankenship. He’d asked about him several times but nobody had an answer and finally they’d left him here and told him to wait.

The state police had been the first ones into the cave, and they’d separated Mark from Julianne swiftly and handcuffed everyone, even the kidnapping victim. Mark couldn’t say that he blamed them, though. It was a hell of a strange scene down there. The last he’d heard from Julianne, she was imploring the police to go after Ridley. They promised that they would, but Mark saw the looks in their eyes as they studied the water-filled passage Ridley had vanished into and he knew that nobody was going to be rushing after him. They’d send for experts, people with the right knowledge and equipment, and by then Ridley would have had quite a head start.

He’d been waiting alone for more than an hour when Blankenship finally entered the room. He crossed over to him and pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. Reached into his shirt pocket and removed something and spun it across the table to Mark. The object came to rest just in front of him: the Saba National Marine Park diving permit.

“No prints on it,” Blankenship said. “I thought you should have it back as soon as possible.”

“Thank you.”

Blankenship nodded and he kept his eyes occupied elsewhere while Mark picked the plastic disk up and put it in his pocket.

“You got one back from him alive,” Blankenship said. “I thank you for that. It could have gone another way. It has before.”

“She’s doing all right?”

“Docs say she’s stable, and she’s talking pretty well now. Same story as you gave me. Says he came to her originally asking for help with memory retrieval and that she heard a confession. Knew it wouldn’t stand up in court and wanted to find help. She says he wouldn’t have taken help from my kind of detective. She thought he would from yours.” Blankenship’s face showed only the sleepless night.

“Did she know what Ridley wanted from her last night? Before they got down there?”

“Not hardly. He came to the house. She was sure he was going to kill her. Then they got in the cave and he said he wanted to... to do her thing.”

“He wanted to go into trance in the cave.”

“I suppose that’s what you’d call it. I suppose they made it too. She says they did. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know what I believe of it, to tell you the truth.”

“Believe more than you want to,” Mark said. “It’s a start. Trust me. I’ve stood in your place on that one. Any luck locating Ridley?”

“Not yet. We’ll get him, though.”

Mark didn’t share his confidence, and, after seeing Ridley’s face in those last moments, he wasn’t sure they should want him back on the surface.

“What about Danielle MacAlister?” he asked. “Was Julianne able to tell you anything?”

“Danielle MacAlister walked out of the house while Ridley and Julianne were heading toward the cave. Ridley started to go for his knife, then let her pass. They were just inside the cave when they heard a gunshot.”

“Cecil.”

“It would seem that way, yes. Cecil was talking for a time. Then he realized his story wasn’t as believable as he needed it to be, and he asked for a lawyer. I was with him in the hospital while he told a weak story about going into the cave to try to make sure Julianne Grossman was safe.”

“Bullshit. He went in to kill them. The only problem he had was that they were in the dark. That meant he had to show himself to them instead of the other way around. There’s no sneaking up on Ridley Barnes in the dark. If Cecil wanted to clip him, he should have done it on the town square under a bright sun. My guess is he’d have found a sympathetic jury in Garrison.”

Blankenship let that one pass and said, “You understand why he killed Danielle?”

“She was done with whatever story they’d been protecting, would be my guess. She went down there to prep him for my arrival and found him trussed up. Cut him loose, and then...”

“Paid for that mistake,” Blankenship finished. “Yes. That’s my read. Cecil has some risk in all this that I don’t quite understand yet, some risk that made murder acceptable so long as he could blame Ridley for it.”

“But what is that? What’s he protecting?”

“You see the shit Ridley brought in there? The paperwork?”

“I saw it, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. I was just aware that it was there. Looked like he’d burned some of it.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it’s a trust document. Interesting read. Deeds the property to Cecil and Ridley.”

“Cecil and Ridley?”

“Yes. The document Ridley took down there has an effective date that is only a few months away, or when Pershing dies, whichever comes first. Fun thing about that? Pershing has to die of natural causes. It’s the strangest damn protective order in history, essentially.”

“Why is the cave willed to them?”

“Because Pershing gave Ridley the motive to kill Sarah.”

“What?”

“Cecil puts the blame on Pershing. Pershing can’t speak to defend himself, and now his daughter can’t defend him either. But according to Cecil, Ridley reached a point where he wouldn’t take money for mapping the cave. He wanted a piece of ownership. Pershing didn’t want to grant that. So he drew Ridley up a nice little cartoon trust to keep him going with the exploration and keep him silent about just what he was finding. Only problem is that Ridley went down to the courthouse to inquire about it.”

The disclosure should have felt like a triumph, but Mark’s stomach turned.

“Ridley found out he had a handful of wooden nickels? And then Sarah went missing how much later?”

“Six weeks later,” Blankenship said. He had trouble with the words.

“Why in the hell didn’t Ridley tell anyone this?”

“Because they drew up the new trust. It contented him, apparently. This is what he explained to Julianne Grossman.”

“But that came after Sarah.”

Blankenship nodded and when he spoke again, his voice had a honed edge. “So Pershing and Cecil knew the man was crazy, they played him for a fool, and then they got caught. All in the summer before... before Sarah. By the time I enter the frame, all of this has come to pass and she’s missing in the cave and I pull rank and demand that they send Ridley in after her. Pershing put up some resistance, I’ll admit that and already have, but the chickenshit never came close to saying what needed to be said. He didn’t want to admit it in front of Diane, is what Cecil and Danielle told me. He also didn’t think Ridley would hurt Sarah; he thought that she was just lost. But I’ll tell you this right now — I was the one who dealt with Pershing, and he was scared of Ridley Barnes. Never said a word of the true reasons, though. Never said enough to convince me Ridley was a threat and had reason to want to hurt Pershing, hurt the family. So I let him in, and then Ridley went in there and killed her!”

Mark let him run out of steam and allowed a few seconds to pass before he spoke.

“I think you’re almost there,” he said. “But you’re having trouble seeing past Pershing. I don’t blame you. It’s the reason they pulled you back then, but I don’t blame you a bit.”

“What am I missing, Novak?”

“The dark man that Ridley talks about like some sort of ghost or spirit of the cave? I think he was real. There was somebody else down there with him.”

“Cecil, probably.”

“I don’t think so. If Ridley told Julianne the truth last night, the dark man from that encounter is a dead man now. Ridley killed him.”

“I should have seen a crime report on him, then. This dark man. Somebody should have noticed he was missing.”

“I think you’ve got his teeth,” Mark said.

Blankenship went silent for a few seconds. “You think Carson Borders was down there.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“Teeth came from Detroit. Motive for killing him came from Detroit. Connections to Ridley don’t exist.”

“His son is connected to it,” Mark said. “Of that, I’m certain. Where’s Evan?”

“Missing. Same as his cousins.”

“You’ll need to find him,” Mark said.

“I’m not buying Ridley’s version of what happened in that cave, whether he was hypnotized for it or not,” Blankenship said, but the words came slowly and his eyes had a far-off look.

“You’re wondering about it, though.”

“No.”

He was lying. Mark had seen similar lights in investigators’ eyes before. He’d felt that light.

Blankenship’s chest filled with a tired breath. “I suppose if Ridley ever comes back to the surface, I can ask him.”

“You can’t ask him,” Mark said. “That’s the hell of it, Sheriff. You’ve got to figure out his world to see where the pieces of your own got lost in it.”

62

Ridley was freezing and wet and it was impossible to dry off down here in the damp air. The chilled water beaded all along his goosefleshed skin, and when he shivered water sprayed from him like a dog shaking dry. Even by Ridley’s standards, it was far too cold, and that meant he was entering dangerous ground. He’d flirted with hypothermia before, but nothing like this.

He sat on a lip of stone, pondering problems that light alone could not fix. Ahead of him was a steep drop of at least thirty feet, and while he remembered it and knew that he was on the right path, he’d had climbing gear the first time through. He’d removed his backpack to work with Julianne, a critical mistake. He needed it now, but going back didn’t seem like an option. He wasn’t sure that the cave would allow him to pass back through the water again. He had to stay in pursuit until he found the dark man, but that meant finding a way down this wall. There were bolts in the stone and that surprised him because he didn’t remember running any bolts when he’d come this way searching for Sarah Martin. He was almost certain he hadn’t, but it was foolish to think that the dark man would have needed them. He could pass through as he wanted; the cave yielded for him, and surely he did not require mechanical assistance.

Ridley leaned forward, out over the lip, and studied the bolts. They were not the kind he used for the etriers. They were open U-bolts and there were only two of them, set eighteen inches apart and just below the cliff edge. Ridley was no stranger to visions, so he reached out and touched one of the bolts, feeling the steel under his fingertips. Very real. The steel was scraped, the base of the U-shaped portion nicked. Ropes would not do that. Metal would. He looked at the open bolts again and now he thought he understood. A quick scan of the room confirmed it — a caving ladder rested in the rocks just beside him, coiled up and tossed aside, waiting for someone’s return.

Ridley had been using single-rope techniques for so long that the possibility of the ladder had not come to him as swiftly as it should have. The ladder was made of aluminum steps with strands of cable for the side supports so that it could be rolled up.

Ridley unfurled the ladder slowly and the feeling that descended upon him then was one he’d always feared he’d encounter in a cave, although he’d expected it would come from a roof collapse, a rock slide, something that left him trapped and hopeless. He hadn’t expected it to come in the form of a ladder.

Police searchers could not have left this behind ten years ago. They hadn’t made it this far. No one had. This was the province of the dark man, the heart of Trapdoor, and nobody but Ridley — and Sarah Martin — had ever passed this way.

None of this made any sense. The cave had created the dark man, and the dark man did not require ladders.

Ridley hung the ladder through the bolts, giving him a method of descending the wall, but he was so tired after that small bit of effort that he sat on the cliff with his feet dangling off the edge as he fought to catch his breath. He stared at the ladder as he breathed, so focused that his peripheral vision began to blur, almost as it did during visualization just before trance.

Look at it from above, and then from below. What do you notice about it now that you did not notice before?

There was blood on the rocks. These were old stains, streaks of dusty red that might have belonged to an ancient people. Ridley had shed no blood here.

The only thing that seemed less likely than the dark man requiring ladders was the dark man bleeding.

What do you understand now that you did not understand before?

The light was bothering him now and he wanted to reach up and turn the headlamp off and be soothed by the dark. He squeezed his hands into fists to still them. He needed to keep the light on, whether it was pleasant or not. He had to remember the things Julianne had taught him.

“What did you do, Ridley?”

He breathed the words into the emptiness, a question so familiar it seemed like part of his name now. It was the wrong question. He thought that he knew what he had done and that he always had. That meant he needed to ask a different question.

Why had he done it?

63

Mark’s rental car was in the police impound lot in an alley across from the sheriff’s department. Blankenship opened it for him and then said he was going back to talk to Cecil Buckner.

“You hang around town for me, okay? We’ll need to talk again.”

“I’ve got no place to go,” Mark said. They had just returned his phone to him. The battery was dead, so he couldn’t see how many calls from Jeff London had stacked up. By now the board of directors had already met. He wondered if they had any idea what was going on in Indiana at the moment. He had trouble bringing himself to care. What had once seemed paramount — appeasing the people in that room — now seemed inconsequential, with Julianne in the hospital and Ridley Barnes still belowground and the dark man with him in mind if not in body.

Mark pulled out of the impound lot and went through the alley and came out on a street that ran toward the downtown square and the courthouse where once Ridley Barnes had walked in with a few questions and a fake deed. What exactly had that day done to this town? What had that decision by Pershing MacAlister done?

“Never count out your sins,” Mark’s uncle had told him the night they had Mark drive them through the snow to find the poker cheat. There had been blood on Larry’s jeans by then, and they weren’t even through with the search.

He started toward Trapdoor even though he’d been told to stay away. The town fell behind him and the fields opened ahead and he’d gone no more than half a mile before he saw the white truck approaching in his rearview mirror. He reached for the brake but just as he hit it, the truck turned off the road and the exhaust growled as it headed south, away from Mark and out of sight. He watched the mirror for a few seconds anyway, but the road behind him was empty now, and then he let up on the brake and continued out of town.

The next time, he heard the exhaust before he saw the truck. It came from his right, where a four-way stop loomed, woods on the right-hand side and fields and two pole barns on the left. The barns were closed and no one was in sight. By the time Mark reached the stop sign, he could see the truck tear-assing up the road in an effort to beat him to the intersection.

He brought the car to a stop and put it in park. Watched as the white Silverado fishtailed into the middle of the intersection, black smoke bubbling from the worn-out muffler. Mark opened the door and got out of his car and walked toward the truck with his hands in his pockets and his head high as Evan Borders fumbled out of the driver’s seat with a gun in hand.

“No mask today,” Mark said. “And no friends?”

Borders looked at him and then glanced at his gun as if confused by it, because it now appeared to be an unnecessary tool. “You were a long time with the police,” he said.

“Lots to talk about. People keep dying in this town. They’d like that to stop.”

“You’re pretty relaxed for a guy without a gun.”

“I’m getting used to the role.”

Evan Borders nodded, looking over Mark’s shoulder and back toward town. No traffic was coming from that way, but it was bound to eventually.

“You stay relaxed, then,” he said. “We’re going to take a little trip. You can drive.”

“I’m not real interested in a trip right now.”

“Bullshit you aren’t. You want to know if Ridley makes it through. So do I. Why don’t we take your ride? Police have eyes for mine. I’ll leave it here where it’s convenient for them.”

The gun was pointed down. A car had appeared far off down the road, heading toward town, and Evan pressed the handgun into the pocket of the oversize farm jacket he wore and said, “Just get back behind the wheel and keep it in park.”

He climbed into his own truck and pulled out of the intersection and onto the side of the road as the car came by. Mark gave the driver a nod and a wave as he passed, casual. By the time the car was gone, Evan was out of the truck and jogging toward him, the gun still hidden in his coat.

“All right,” Mark said. “I’ll drive.”

“There ya go!”

Evan walked around the front of the car with a cheerful, buoyant stride, went to the passenger door, opened it, and fell into the seat.

“Cold today!” he said. “My goodness, the sun comes out and it gets colder? Crazy.”

The muzzle of the gun was showing again, pointed at Mark, and Evan had a strange false smile, like a department-store greeter.

“Where are we going?” Mark said.

“Just drive toward Trapdoor for now.”

“Bad location if you’re hoping to avoid police.”

“Why don’t you let me give the tour?”

The route took them across the intersection and back into the winding hills. Evan watched it all as if he were seeing the place for the first time.

“What do you think of our town?” he said.

“One of those unfortunate situations where my experiences are tainting my sense of the place,” Mark said. “Don’t take that personally. It’s not Garrison, it’s me.”

“Sure. You know, it’s actually a hell of a nice little town. I’ve always enjoyed it. Haven’t enjoyed all the people, and that’s more than mutual, but I like the place. Growing up, kids were always talking about getting out of here. For what? I’d say. I don’t like cities. Just can’t take them. People talk about the beach too, someplace warm, but, you know, I like seasons. I like knowing the back roads and the trails that nobody else knows. Sound enough like a country song to you? It’s the truth, though. I was always happy here.”

Mark didn’t say anything. He just drove. The gun was pointed at him but Evan seemed uninterested in it, or even in Mark.

“I never cared about money,” Evan said. “That’s the truth. I just needed enough to get by. Tell you something that makes me happy — cutting grass and plowing snow. You can see your work. See the mess that was there before you, and how nice and clean it is when you’re done. How orderly. I always liked that feeling. People say a lot of negative shit about me, but I defy you to find somebody who says I did a poor job of cutting grass or clearing snow.”

Mark drove on in silence.

“Wonder where I’ll land,” Evan said. “Man, I hope not in a city. I don’t like crowds.” He shook his head and sighed as if to redirect himself, then said, “So, the longer I’ve been waiting on you, more curious I’ve been getting. Who said what? You solved it all yet, Detective?”

“No,” Mark said. “I didn’t do much detecting either. I just put on enough pressure that things started to leak.”

“Things blew up, is what happened. Didn’t leak long. Now we’re going to talk straight, just the way you wanted when you came around the first time.”

“I came around then because I was curious if you’d tried to kill me. And you had.”

“Oh, hell, I’ve never been a killing man. Not even a hunter. Kids would make fun of me for that. I just had to pretend I’m a lousy shot. You weren’t going to die down there.”

“The doctor had another perspective on that.”

“Well, you wandered off. Shit, if you’d stayed in one place, you’d have been fine.”

“My apologies. It was inconsiderate of me. What was supposed to happen?”

“I didn’t really have a plan for that. I just thought it was time to send them back in.”

“Send who back in?”

“Police, searchers, the whole damn show, one more time. Encore performance. See if anybody made it through and wait for Cecil to make a decision on pulling your ass out if nobody else did. Far as I know, only Ridley Barnes has made it through, but he doesn’t remember how he did it. Word is he’s taking another run at it right now; is that true?”

“He’s in the cave,” Mark said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Then he’s making a run at it. He’s not as young as he was the first time, and he damn near died in there then, so this will be a stretch.”

The snow-covered farmland was falling away at the road’s sides and the interior of the car had warmed and Evan seemed like an almost congenial presence as long as Mark disregarded the gun in his hand.

“Tell me something,” Evan said. “Did you really remember the trailer? If so, I was given some bad advice. You weren’t supposed to remember shit.”

“It came to me,” Mark said.

Evan frowned. He’d pulled the hood down from his jacket, and with his dark hair cropped short, he looked younger than he was; he could have passed for a college student.

“Well, not all of it came to you. So I guess I got my money’s worth. Go on and pull in there now when we get to it.”

“The trailer?”

“Yes. Nobody’s been back since last night. You got ’em all distracted now. Of course, it doesn’t take much in this county, there aren’t that many police. What do you think of our sheriff anyhow?”

“You’ll meet worse.”

“I agree,” Evan said, seeming to miss the predictive quality of the statement. “He’s a good man. He wouldn’t say the same of me, would he?”

“He hasn’t yet.”

“I didn’t think so. You tell him I appreciate him, though. Always did.”

Mark made a left turn and they were now just two miles from Trapdoor. The open fields came into view and with them the snow-covered collapsing trailer that Carson and Evan Borders had once called home, on the last of their family land.

“Almost done with it,” Evan said. “Maybe I’ll think different in a little while, but right now, I’m almost glad you blew into town. The wait has been too long for too many good people. Maybe it worked out well for me these past ten years, maybe not, I could argue either way, but there are too many good people in this place who cared about Sarah. Why in the hell did you come back, though? Close as you came to death down there, why in the hell make a return trip?”

“Somebody tried to kill me.”

“Exactly. That’s the point of leaving for good.”

Mark shook his head. “That’s the point of coming back.”

“You want to die?”

“I’m in no hurry to. But somebody tries to kill me, I’m going to try to find out who he is and why I was worth it to him.”

They reached the trailer and Mark pulled into the drive. There was crime scene tape around the front door and the ramp, and the snow all over was trampled. In the distance police vehicles were visible at Trapdoor.

“Congratulations, then,” Evan said. “You’re about to find out why you were worth it. Now we’ll have to hustle. Only a matter of time before somebody stops in, and I’ll need to be on the road before that. I hope you don’t mind me taking your car. Nothing parties like a rental, right?”

Mark shut off the car and Evan nudged him with the muzzle of the gun. “Be good when you get out, now. You’re close to what you came for.”

64

Ridley walked alone through a forest that was so spectacular he could almost forget the pain.

In a room with a towering ceiling and stalagmites that rose like trees, triple his height or even greater, Ridley stumbled forward, his headlamp beam small in the vastness. The first time he’d been here, he’d hardly believed what he was seeing. The second time, he’d been unable to see and he had the girl over his shoulder.

Now there was no reason to rush ahead because the only cries of pain were his own. He could take his time to savor this place, and so he did, pausing and leaning against a rock formation that was as thick as an oak tree. He gazed around, painting the high domed ceiling with his headlamp beam. He had read about caves in places like Mexico and Russia and Vietnam that held unbelievable wonders — caverns with their own ecosystems, home to animals and trees. Son Doong in Vietnam contained a river and a jungle and even its own cloud system, and it hadn’t been explored until 2010. There were wonders beneath the earth beyond anything most had seen on its surface, but Ridley would take Trapdoor over any of them.

Because he’d been the first one through. Or so he’d always thought. That was becoming hard to believe, though. There were things down here that did not belong.

He was sad about that, because he’d always viewed himself as an explorer of the first order, breaking new ground. But maybe there was always somebody who’d beaten you there. When John Colter returned from the West and reported his discovery of Yellowstone — a discovery for which he’d been mocked, with his outlandish tales of giant, boiling geysers rising from the earth — there had been Indians living there for hundreds of years. Maybe there was always someone ahead of you.

Once, Ridley would have cared about that more. Today, shivering and weak, he could only appreciate that he’d been one of the early ones. That he’d had the chance to see this at all.

The room he was in had ceilings at least ninety feet high that fanned out like a giant dome, vaulted like a holy structure. He considered lying down and soaking in the beauty of it and waiting until his light burned out again.

He couldn’t do that, though. He had a purpose, although it was not as urgent as the one he’d had the first time he’d passed through. He needed to find the place again. Where the dark man had lain in wait for attack and where, just above, Sarah Martin had waited for rescue. They were not places Ridley wished to see again or had ever wished to see — no one had understood that when they refused his requests for a return, over and over again; no one had ever understood that it would be worse for Ridley than anyone else. Ridley had given up on being understood long ago. What he knew now was that he had to keep moving or he was never going to reach those places again, and he had promised himself that he would do that before the end of his life. He had sacrificed much for it and it would do no good to stop here, no matter how beautiful the spot.

He pushed away from the oak-size rock and moved ahead, his steps sluggish. All around him, the massive formations spread their shadows, and Ridley’s own was very small against them. His shadow was the only one moving, though, and he was grateful for that. Trapdoor had turned a benevolent eye on him once more and would not hinder his way through the wilderness. He did not understand the reasons for her choices. She gave and she took and the order of those choices seemed indiscriminate and arbitrary at best and, at worst, cruel.

But it wasn’t his role to understand her. It was his role to get through her, that was all. She had been around for more millennia than he had years and he had no right to question anything that she did. You had to enter the darkness with some humility if you hoped to pass through it.

He traversed the full length of the domed room and then he faced half a dozen passages honeycombed in the far wall and did not hesitate before selecting one. He believed he’d tried several on his last time through, wasting valuable time, but the cave was guiding him now — it was either that or his memory, and Ridley’s memory had long been suspect and often loathed — and he knew that he was on the right path. The tunnel led past a wide pool like a lagoon, and air moved over the water and carried a clean, undamaged smell that seemed to heal him as he walked, the smell doing more to ease the pain than any pill could. The cold, not the pain, was the real killer and he knew he was beyond the threshold there, but he believed he had enough time left to see it through.

He stumbled over a rock and fell to his knees too easily, his body unable to offer any resistance, lacking the coordination necessary to simply regain balance. The landing was painful, and he cried out without shame because there was no one to hear him but the cave, and she’d watched him come all this way and had to understand that he was hurting. It would do no good to cry out to her, but it would do no harm either. She simply watched and listened in silence.

He closed his eyes and fought for breath and for a moment he could feel the girl’s weight on his shoulder again. He’d fallen many times with her, and each time he had apologized. Several times he had wept. Never had he stopped.

Sarah had been as silent and cold as the cave for most of the journey and Ridley did not hold great hope for her but he’d come too far to simply leave her behind and so he had talked with her and wept with her and he had carried her. For a long time he had carried her, so long that he had come to believe that he’d passed on and entered another life where there would be no pleasure, only pain and suffering and responsibility. But he’d understood the responsibility and so he’d bent to that task and he had never stopped carrying her through the darkness.

The surface world that had opened up to greet him was the same one he’d left behind, but it was no more welcoming than the underground one he’d shared with Sarah Martin. In many ways it was worse. Tell us what happened went from a request to a threat fast, and Ridley couldn’t tell them what happened because he didn’t remember all of it, and what he did remember, they refused to believe. When he spoke of things that sounded like magic, they were dismissed as lies and again and again people demanded the truth from him without accepting that he’d told the only parts of it that he knew.

His head fell forward, heavy with sleep, but his eyes snapped open and he shook himself awake. He couldn’t estimate how long he’d been going. He guessed it was well into a new day now, but perhaps he was wrong. All he knew was that he’d not allowed himself to rest so far and that he’d left much distance behind him. He turned and looked back and wondered if anyone would ever believe that he’d made it in the dark the first time while carrying her. He’d told them this, and he’d been ridiculed and scorned and even marked for death by many, and he could have accepted all of those things if only they had accepted the truth of what he had done to bring her out.

He rose from the ground with an effort and walked on and he’d gone maybe another fifty feet and the ceiling was getting lower when he saw his old backpack.

This was where he had started to climb ten years ago. Where he had heard her voice, her cries, and left his gear to try the crawling passage that led up to the level above, shedding weight to gain speed, because she was hurting. Where he’d left his last light, the backup light, the one he had not been able to find again when he emerged through a different passage with the girl in his arms. The fact that it was sitting out in the open, so visible now with the light, was hard to bear.

But you’re close. Yes. He was very close now. He just had to climb.

That sounded like an extraordinary task, but he reminded himself of what he had once achieved in this same place and he passed by his backpack and found the crawling passage and began to climb. He was slower than he had been on the first trip, but he allowed himself to be, for there was no hurry. The climb seemed endless but he doubted it was more than twenty feet, and it required no ropes, just dedication. Most of this stretch of the cave was that way. He came to the end and managed to shove his shoulders through and that was when he saw the bones.

The skeleton was intact and it looked quite beautiful. Its eye sockets were twin shadows, and one arm was extended and the finger bones were stretched toward the surface, as if it were begging for something.

Something glistened amid the bones, and Ridley reached forward and gingerly removed the object. Ten years of dampness had corroded the Benchmade knife a bit, but it still felt familiar, an old friend in his palm. He tried to close the blade but it would no longer shut, so he placed it back where it had been, as if the scene were a tableau the cave wanted to preserve.

Ridley sat back on his heels and looked at the skeleton for a long time.

What do you see that you did not see before?

“The dark man,” he said.

But the dark man was white and shining now. And the dark man had once been human.

65

Only my father,” Evan Borders said, “could sell the wrong part of his own land. If he’d just hung on to it, he’d have had the golden ticket he wanted. But he was in a hurry. You don’t get rich by being slow, he told me. He was broke when he said that, by the way. So he sold it, and the other fucking entrance opened up within the year. How about that?”

“Other entrance?” Mark said.

Evan nodded. “You got it, brother. You’re the one who’s going to need to understand this shit and weigh it against whatever comes out of Cecil’s mouth. That’ll be intriguing.”

“All right. Tell me what I’m weighing.”

“First entrance to Trapdoor was the one on the property my father kept. But he was secretive about that, was scared to death to tell people, because he was looking at ten years in Pendleton if things went wrong during his trial, and that’s a long time to let your oil well sit, right? He thought somebody would claim it, somehow. So he went looking for money and lawyers fast as he could.”

“So Cecil connected him with Pershing.”

“And that didn’t work out so well all the way around. I’ll say this much for Cecil — he never said shit about the cave, to the best of my knowledge. He had to scramble once the other entrance opened, though. The second entrance opened twenty months after my father found the first. Think about all the time the cave has sat down there, right? A thousand years, or is it a million, I don’t know. Hell of a long time, just sitting there. And then one year it rains too much. One year out of all those. One wet year too many. For all those thousands of years, nobody would have killed over this land. Then something shows itself under the ground, and now we’ve got, what, three dead already, and Ridley down below somewhere. All because of the chance to take money out of the ground.”

Mark followed him around to the northern corner of the trailer, closest to where the ground sloped off into a deep sinkhole, a farmer’s nightmare. The trailer was raised on cinder blocks and skirted with a rotting piece of fascia. Evan pulled one of the fascia panels loose and crawled under, and Mark followed. There wasn’t much clearance, maybe two feet at most. It was a belly crawl. Evan slid forward over the wet soil, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, and turned it on. The beam showed an elevated concrete ring with a rusted manhole cover over the top.

“What do you think that is?” Evan said.

“Somebody wants it to look like the septic tank, but you don’t drop a trailer on top of your septic.”

“That was a last-minute call. My father spent the days just before his trial out here with Cecil Buckner. They rented an excavator and did the job alone. He still didn’t trust it, though, so they moved the trailer too. I suppose it worked. Not the worst idea in the world, really. Most people don’t pause to study on trailers and septic tanks.”

He crawled over and pushed the lid back. He had to set the gun down to do it; the lid was plenty heavy. When it had scraped clear, Evan rolled onto his right shoulder and waved for Mark.

“Not bad, right? Only my old man could think to hide his golden ticket in shit. More I think about it, more it suits him.”

Mark crawled close enough to see, and then Evan lifted the flashlight and shone it down. The false septic tank spread out into a narrow and deep chamber of stone. Deeper than the light could reach. In the center, a long ladder made of steel cables and aluminum steps dangled. The walls sloped inward, forming a V, and it looked tight at the far end.

Mark glanced away from it and out at the fields that swept toward Trapdoor, and the distance seemed extraordinary. He’d made it all that way in the dark?

“This is where you put me?”

“Hell, no! You’d still be down there, your bones sitting alongside my old man’s. You went in the main entrance, the one people know about. And not far in, either. But in your attempt to get out, you just went farther in.”

“I thought I was getting close,” Mark said. “I thought I was heading the right way.”

“You were heading deeper into the cave.”

It seemed impossible to believe, but if anyone would know, it was the man who’d left him there.

“The entrances connect,” Evan said. “Only two people ever figured out how. My dad from this end and, apparently, Ridley Barnes from the other. Because Ridley got there, didn’t he? Hard to kill a man if you don’t get to him.”

“Your father is the dark man,” Mark said.

“The what?”

“He’s down there,” Mark said. “Your father’s body is down in that cave.”

Evan nodded.

“The teeth came from Detroit,” Mark said. “The police seem convinced of that.”

“That’s because they were mailed from Detroit, yes. Cecil needed people to stop looking for my father. The longer they looked for him, the more trouble it would be. Good news was, there was already somebody in the game who’d promised to kill my dad. And his people were in Detroit. Cecil drove up there and mailed them down and damned if he wasn’t right — it quieted the search awfully fast. Everybody had been waiting for my dad to get popped when he came out of prison, so when they finally had evidence that he had been, they were content with that. The old boy who put the hit on him, he wasn’t one to miss. That’s why, during the short time my dad was back in this town, he was stealthy about it.”

“Cecil pulled your father’s teeth out of his mouth?”

“No,” Evan said. “I did that.”

He didn’t look away from Mark. His face was hard and his voice steady and dark. “Cecil offered. I didn’t think that was right. I thought if anyone was going to treat his body like that, it should be family.”

Mark tried to imagine what that had been like. How long had it taken? How easily did they come out? How often did Evan see those images when he closed his eyes at night?

“I was told he never came back to town after he was paroled,” Mark said. “Everyone seems to believe that. How long was he really here?”

“If they believe it, then Cecil did his job. All summer, from the day my father got paroled to the day I came in here with Sarah, Cecil was hustling to keep my father quiet and invisible. It wasn’t easy. My old man was fixated on the cave and he would drink and do dumb shit, call Pershing and make threats, go down there and tag the cave with paint like a little kid. Cecil would rip his ass and then put the blame on Ridley, and that was easy enough because Ridley Barnes is the craziest fucking man who ever walked through this county. He’s talking to caves, right? Got himself friends down there, rocks he thinks are people. You know how convenient Ridley Barnes was for Cecil Buckner? Damn, brother, you have no clue just how valuable that old boy was. He was like one of those loons who stand on street corners preaching about the end times and government conspiracies or whatever. People expect him to say crazy shit, do crazy shit. They don’t expect him to say the truth.”

“You took Sarah in there for your father?”

“I did not take her in there for him!” For the first time, his mask of good nature shattered and Mark could see the dangerous rage that existed beneath it. When Mark spoke again, he took care to keep his voice gentle.

“Then what happened?”

“Just what I said happened from the start. We went in there because Sarah wanted to, then somebody scared us, and she hid. Then she was lost. Every bit of that was true.” He swallowed. “I just didn’t mention that I met my father in the cave. When I left her to check out the noises, the drunk son of a bitch came in and screamed at me for telling her about the cave. Except I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to tell her anything that she didn’t know, that everyone who paid ten bucks for a tour didn’t know. I tried to explain that. I’ll never know if she heard any of it or not. He laid me upside the head with a Maglite, and by the time I came to, they were both gone. So I went for help. I went to Cecil. I’ve spent ten years wishing I’d turned in any other direction. Hell, just gone right to the cops and let the old man go back to prison. But he was my father. I didn’t like the man, but he was my father. And the only friend he had in this world was Cecil Buckner.”

“What did Cecil tell you to do?”

“We went back and searched together. Didn’t find them. He told me to call the police but to keep my dad out of it and said that he would do the same and he’d find my father and get it settled. Basically, he told me he’d fix it. Then as soon as I got away from the police, he came to me and said that they were figuring it out. That Sarah was fine, my father was just waiting for the chance to take her back to a place where they could find her, toward Pershing’s entrance. Because it couldn’t be this place, you know. The whole fucking dream would have died then. Even while Cecil was telling me that, though, he was seeing the angles. He knew that Sarah meant something to Pershing. My father didn’t.”

“You think your father would have brought her back out?”

“I honestly do. Maybe that’s ignorant. But he listened to Cecil. Always. He trusted Cecil, because Cecil had earned it as far as my father was concerned. Cecil didn’t give up the cave while my father was in prison. He kept quiet. My father considered Cecil a partner. More than that, he considered him a boss. You got in trouble, you asked Cecil how to get out of it. Well, we both did that summer. And you can see how well that worked for us.”

Mark turned from him and stared into the unimpressive crack in the earth.

“This was the point of it all?” Mark said. “People died because of this?”

“People died because Cecil and my father wanted their dreams back. But don’t write this off until you’ve seen it, brother. What’s down there is special, and somebody will pay one hell of a lot of money for it. Wait and see on that. You can add a few more zeros to whatever number is in your mind. You can roll your eyes and shrug right now like everybody else, but trust me, by the time it’s done, a lot of money will have traded hands over this place.”

Mark believed him. The story wasn’t a new one. People had been doing two things with the earth for centuries upon centuries: digging for their fortunes beneath it, and burying their dead within it. In Trapdoor, the two had collided.

“Pershing’s land has the best entrance chamber,” Evan said, “but he never had a clue what kind of cave was there. That’s what Cecil kept telling my father. ‘Be patient, be patient. This guy, Pershing, he’ll get bored and sell his interest. Because it really isn’t that special of a cave over there. Dozens like it have opened and closed already.’ Problem was, Pershing wanted to keep exploring it. He was pecking on the borders. Still, you had to work to get through it from over there. Nobody but Ridley Bats in the Belfry Barnes could’ve done it. If what he says is true? If he actually brought Sarah out of there in the dark?” Evan shook his head. “If he managed that, they should build a statue of him and put it on the courthouse lawn. Because that is some heroic work, I’m not kidding you. That’s flat-out miraculous. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I suppose nobody ever will.”

He fell silent and joined Mark in looking into the dark stones for a time.

“I understand why Pershing was willing to deal with Ridley,” Mark said finally, “but what value did Cecil have? He was your father’s partner, not Ridley’s. Why include him in the trust?”

“Because Cecil kept Pershing clean. Kept his secrets, same as he kept mine. Cecil, he’s damn good at tending secrets. Only man better is Ridley Barnes. Except that son of a bitch apparently just can’t remember his.” Evan shook his head. “When Ridley brought her body out... I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t. My father was feeding her, he was giving her water, he was keeping her alive and he’d never let her see him. He was always in the dark. She didn’t know who he was, that’s what he said. She didn’t know it was him. So he was going to wait for the right opportunity and he was going to take her back. Was supposed to be within a day. That was the promise they made me. She’d be out by the end of the day. I didn’t know he was writing ransom notes then. I’ll tell you who did know: Cecil.”

Evan wiped at his face and left streaks of dirt under his eyes.

“End of the day turned into a second day, and then a third, and she stayed in, and I was too scared to talk. I mean, if it had just been me going to jail, maybe. Thing was, that was my father who had her. And as damn foolish as it sounds — and it would sound even more foolish if you’d known the nasty son of a bitch — I couldn’t tell the police it was my father. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He’d done seven years in prison waiting to come back to this. It was family land, had been for a hundred and thirty years, and he was going to take it back. Besides, everything was going to be fine, right? Everything was going to work out fine. If everybody just stayed silent, it’d work out. Cecil told me that plenty of times.

“Then Ridley came out with her body, and Dad was gone. I figured she’d died from the cold, and he’d taken off when he realized what he’d let happen. Once he saw he was looking at murder, he bailed fast, and bailed for good. Cecil thought the same. It wouldn’t have been unlike him. But then it began to feel like Ridley had killed her because he was so damn strange about it, saying he couldn’t remember what had happened. Meanwhile the old man’s gone. I was scared to come here; hell, scared to go anywhere. There was no trace of him, though. I told myself that was good, but you know what? You can’t walk away from your family. You all walk together, whether you can see them there beside you or not.”

“How long was it before you found him?”

“More than a year. I told Cecil, and he said to leave him where he lay. Said the facts of the situation hadn’t changed — I brought Sarah in, my dad grabbed her, I lied to the police about it, and she died. I’d still go to prison. He was telling the truth about that much. I would have gone then, and I will go now. I’m an accessory, always have been. Didn’t have to be, but I made the wrong choice and trusted the wrong people. I thought she’d come back out safe. I was promised that she would. I had the chance to be something different, and I didn’t take it.”

He fell silent. The two of them lay there in the wet earth under the decaying trailer and Evan Borders stared into the cave entrance as if willing it to turn into something else. A door to the past. A second chance.

“You think Ridley’s still down there?” Mark asked eventually.

“If he’s still alive, he’s still down there. We’ll let you go take a look.”

Mark had no desire to venture down that flimsy ladder into the narrowing walls and the blackness.

“We’ll go together,” he said. “Show me how to get to him.”

Evan laughed. “Sure. I have no idea how to get to him. And I don’t want to. It’s time for me to roll. They probably won’t let me get far now, but I’ll give ’er hell, right? Make the run I should’ve made ten years ago.” He offered Mark the flashlight. “Go on.”

“Just drive,” Mark said. “I’ll give you some lead time. But give me the chance to get the right people here.”

Evan shook his head. “Let’s not make it complicated. You make it to the bottom of that ladder, and you’re on your own. I’ll leave it for you. You can climb right on back up if you want. But you’re going to start at the bottom whether you choose to take the ladder or not. I’d be careful walking up on Ridley Barnes down there, though. It usually goes bad.”

Mark made it only three steps down before he hesitated. The ladder swayed with every step and each rung flexed as if it were about to break.

“It ain’t so bad,” Evan said. “But if I were you, I’d put the flashlight in my teeth so I could use both hands, at least.”

Mark put the flashlight in his teeth and bit down on the rubber handle so he could have both hands on the ladder. The climb felt long, thirty feet at least, maybe forty, and still his feet hadn’t touched the ground. When he heard a grinding noise, he looked up to see Evan sliding the manhole cover back in place.

“With any luck,” Evan called, “you’ll be talking to the police before I am. We’ll see. But if you do, you tell them something. Tell them I loved that girl. People won’t believe it, but it needs to be said.”

He shoved the lid all the way over the top then and sealed Mark in the blackness.

66

Mark’s feet touched stone but still he clung to the ladder, feeling around carefully to make certain it was the floor and not just a ledge. He had to be fifty feet down, and it was a straight descent. He tried to imagine Carson Borders taking a look at that crack in the earth and deciding to rappel down to see what he had. How many tries had it taken him?

He stepped away from the ladder and took the flashlight out of his mouth and for the first time he saw the room around him. There was nothing impressive about it. It had the size and feel of the cellar in an old house, cold and cramped, with a low ceiling and smell of old moisture. There was an opening about twenty feet across that looked like a tunnel. Mark considered it and then looked up at the ladder, wondering if the best course of action was simply to climb back out and call for help.

That was when he heard the moaning.

The sound seemed far away, but it was clear, a low wail of pain or anguish or both, and the way it whispered through the cave and echoed raised the hair on Mark’s arms and neck.

“Ridley?” he called, and even in the cramped room, his voice sounded small.

I’d be careful walking up on Ridley Barnes down there, though. It usually goes bad.

He turned from the ladder despite his desire to keep one hand on it and moved toward the tunnel, toward the sound. The walls were narrower here but the ceiling was about the same, so all he had to do was stoop. He’d gone no more than twenty paces when the cave opened up to his left and spread out in an immense chamber filled with bizarre and glorious rock formations. The stalagmites rising from the ground were far taller than him. He stood transfixed by the size of it for a moment and then took a few steps into the room, awed by its scope and grandeur. Carson Borders had seen this beneath his own land while police were investigating him for drug dealing and robbery, had gone away for seven years and sat in a cell knowing that it was there, waiting.

Mark was turning to his right when he saw a flicker of light in his peripheral vision to the left. He turned back and lost it in the beam of his own flashlight, so he turned the flashlight off, and there it was. A faint glow in the farthest reaches of the room, coming from the opposite direction. Another tunnel.

He turned his light back on and picked his way through the rock formations, and the second light grew brighter and brighter and then he rounded a corner and nearly walked into thin air.

He was standing on a ledge, and some twenty feet below him was a stream, not as wide as the boat channel at the main entrance, but close. Ridley Barnes sat on a shelf of stone beside it. He was wet and he was shaking and he looked at Mark without much interest.

“This is where she was,” he said. He angled his headlamp down and Mark saw water jugs and tin cans and a spoon and the remains of a blanket.

“This is where you found Sarah?”

Ridley nodded. “There’s a body back there. I don’t know who that is. I would like to know. I came a long way and I think that I deserve to know.”

It didn’t sound as if he was talking to Mark.

“It’s Carson Borders,” Mark said.

Ridley cocked his head as if surprised that the answer had come from Mark and not the cave.

“Carson.”

“Yes.”

“Carson kept her down here. You know that?” He looked at Mark then, swinging the headlamp to face him. His long gray hair was plastered against his neck in wet tangles. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I just heard it from his son.”

“No teeth,” Ridley said. “The skeleton had no teeth. You’re right. That’s Carson. Who took his teeth?”

“Evan.”

It was a thought that would have revolted most, but Ridley took it in stride, nodding as if it made some sense to him.

“Nobody would look for him then.”

“Exactly. He’d been holding her down here. He told some people he was going to let her go, but he wrote ransom notes while he said it.”

Ridley thought about that for a while in silence, then indicated the old cans and water jugs. “But he was caring for her. You can see that much. She was alive and she had food and water. So long as she had him, she was all right.” He spoke through chattering teeth.

“You don’t know that, Ridley. She was abducted by a violent man who was fresh out of seven years in prison and didn’t want to go back. You don’t know how it would have played out.”

“I know how it did. I can remember that now. Julianne got me that far and then...” He closed his eyes. “Is she safe?”

“She’s alive,” Mark said. “She’s fine.”

Ridley opened his eyes slowly. “You’re sure?” he asked. Certainty seemed to be Ridley’s focus today. He wanted reassurance on every answer.

“I brought her out. I spoke to her. She’s alive.”

This seemed to mean something to him. There was no spoken response, but it was like a coil that had been wound tight inside of him loosened just a bit.

He pointed at the blanket and the tin cans. “If I’d had light left, I would have made it. No trouble. She was so damn close. It’s a simple turn. But in the dark...” He shook his head. “When I ran out of light, I ran out of time.”

“Nobody will blame you for it.”

Ridley didn’t answer that. He was shaking hard.

“We need to get you out of here,” Mark said.

“Julianne’s all right?” Ridley said. “She’ll make it? You’re not lying? I cannot hear any more lies. Whatever I hear has to be true now.”

“It’s the truth, damn it. Let’s get you the hell out of here so you can see her for yourself.”

“I wish it hadn’t gone the way it did,” Ridley said. “With her, I mean. Cecil Buckner, he earned what he got. But Julianne? She was good to me. She was scared of me, sure, but she was good to me even when she worked against me. You know why? Because she wanted to hear the truth, and she understood that I couldn’t say it yet. Not without her.”

“You just need to explain it. You can finally do that now.”

“What I want explained,” Ridley said, “is how hard it was. I want people to know that, but they can’t. They can’t ever know, because even if they believe it, they won’t have felt it. When I got her out of here alone in the dark? Not many men could have done that. Not many.”

He wiped tears from his eyes.

“That was a long trip,” he said in a whisper.

“I know it was. We’ll make sure everyone else knows too. Now you’ve got to—”

“There aren’t many who will understand,” Ridley said as if Mark hadn’t spoken. “You will now. That’s funny, when you think about it. You’d never even been underground. But now you get it, don’t you?” He looked up, and Mark squinted against the headlamp glare. “You know how she is in the dark.”

She was Trapdoor. Mark said, “I get it, Ridley. Yeah.”

“You understand how a man’s memory could go. Alone in the dark, down here? You understand what nobody else could. Things happen in the dark that you can’t make any sense of. So then you try to. You do that by telling yourself a story. Maybe the story is wrong, but it’s the only one you have, and so it becomes the truth. You need it to be the truth.”

“People will understand,” Mark said. “I’ll help you with that. Julianne will. Hell, I think at this point, the sheriff will.”

Ridley seemed uninterested in that. He looked around the cave with an appreciative gaze.

“She works on you. People will tell you that any cave will, but people are wrong. She’s special. Trapdoor really is special.”

“Can you get up here somehow, or do I need to go find help? There’s a ladder to the top if you can just make it this far. You’re very close to the surface now.” Mark was studying the wall beneath the ledge. It was too smooth to allow free-climbing. They’d need ropes or another ladder.

“I’m going to get help, Ridley. I don’t think you can make it up this wall. We need the right gear. You need to get out of the cold.”

“Cold’s not so bad.” Ridley got to his feet. It took some effort. “Thank you, by the way. What I wanted from you, from both of you, was just to know. It didn’t go as planned, did it? But I know now. I don’t need my name cleared, don’t need to explain myself to anyone, never did. I just needed to know.”

“I think more people will understand than you expect.”

“I’ve never been much for talk,” Ridley Barnes said. His teeth were chattering violently. “I’m supposed to go up there, sit with police, have cameras in my face, and then what do I tell them, exactly? I killed one man, and a girl died because of it.”

“You just say what happened. Self-defense with Carson, and with Sarah Martin, good Lord, that wasn’t your fault. You were the only person who even came close to saving her.”

“I was never good up there,” Ridley said. “I was better down here, always.”

He stepped into the water, and for an instant Mark thought he was going to cross the stream and try to make it up the wall. Instead, he waded away, moving unsteadily through waist-deep water. On the far wall, his silhouette was an enlarged version of his staggering form.

“Damn you, Ridley, get out of the water!”

“Head on back to the surface and tell them all what happened down here,” Ridley said. “That was the job, and you did it. You’ve almost done it, at least. The last part is in the telling. It will mean a lot to people. More people than either of us have met.”

“Then we’ll tell it. Get out of there. I’m going for help.”

Ridley swiveled his head, and the beam of his headlamp threw a glare into Mark’s eyes, forcing him to lift a hand against it.

“I was wrong about you,” Ridley said. “And about myself. I thought I’d have to come back up, but I don’t. You’re the one who has the job on the surface. When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.”

“I understand. Now if you—”

“No!” Ridley’s voice boomed with a near desperate sound. “You don’t understand yet. There’s a lot of responsibility ahead of you. A lot of pressure, Markus.”

Ridley had never called him that. Never called him anything but Novak. The new man, the stranger, he’d said with such delight during their first meeting.

“Okay,” Mark said. “I’ll handle the pressure. Right now, I’m going for help.”

Ridley turned away, the light traveling with him, and began to wade again.

“Get out of the water!” Mark looked at the wall, searching for any way down that wouldn’t end with a broken spine. There wasn’t one.

“It’s beautiful up ahead,” Ridley said, and then he turned his headlamp off, plunging the passage into darkness. He was out of the range of Mark’s flashlight.

“Travel safe,” he called from the blackness. “She doesn’t want you yet.”

Those were the last words Mark heard from Ridley Barnes. Mark called for him again and again, shouting for him to come back, but the only voice that answered was his own.

67

Searchers worked for four days straight without finding Ridley or his body, but then Sheriff Blankenship called it off, partly, he confessed to Mark, because they seemed to be growing more interested in the cave than in the search. There was a lot of it. Nobody could agree on the total size, but early estimates were high. Maybe top ten in the country. Maybe top five. Maybe better.

It was a remarkable find, they all agreed. Endless potential.

Endless.

Evan Borders was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, when a state trooper pulled him over for speeding and discovered the active warrant. Borders didn’t resist arrest, which was a career first. He was due to be transported back to Garrison County on the same day that Mark left. The same prosecutor who charged Cecil Buckner with the murder of Danielle MacAlister said he was weighing allegations and evidence concerning Pershing MacAlister.

The first lawsuit over the Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust was filed before the search for Ridley Barnes had stopped. The news was filled with opinions on who should have the right to the cave, and legal experts weighed in on who already did and what could be done about it. Mark avoided those stories.

He went to see Julianne Grossman before heading out of town. She was still in the hospital but had been moved out of intensive care, and the doctors were pleased with her progress. She’d sustained a fracture in her skull but there had been no bleeding in the brain. He sat beside her bed and they talked in low voices for more than an hour and several times they paused so that she could weep.

“At first I wanted him to pay,” she said.

“You weren’t alone.”

“But that’s my job,” she said, “to be open to the subconscious, to help others learn how to be. When I had to open, I closed down. I heard what he said, and I closed down. I stopped wanting to help Ridley Barnes when he said those things. I wanted to help Sarah Martin then.”

Mark assured her that everyone had. That was the worst of it, really. Everyone had been willing to help and join the cause. It took a village to kill a monster, after all.

“I could have just walked away from him in the end,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Once he was underground, once he was in trance, he was content. Maybe even before trance. It sounds strange, but it took a lot out of him to get back down there. I saw it. He was pushing himself toward the thing everyone claimed they wanted from him. By the end, I wanted to help him get there. Maybe I shouldn’t have, though. Maybe I should have tried to convince him to just leave.”

“He’d have gone back down soon enough,” Mark said. “Or he wouldn’t have, and things would have gone worse for him up here.”

She nodded. They fell silent but he did not leave. For a long while he just sat there at her side and then she reached out and took his hand.

“Your mind has enormous potential,” she said. “You might not want to hear that from me. Not after this. But... there are special things ahead for you if you want them, I’m sure of it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“You’re going home now,” she said. “Florida.” She enunciated each syllable so that the word sounded like a song.

“Yes.”

“Your firm understands what happened here?”

“They know.”

“If there’s any problem, I’ll tell them what they have to hear. I’ll tell them whatever you need me to so that you can return to work.”

He thanked her and did not tell her that he’d written his resignation letter the previous night in his hotel room. His resignation letter, and a proposal. He wasn’t sure how either would go over, but it was time to deliver them.

“Be in touch,” he said. “And I mean that. I’d like to hear from you again.”

“Likewise. Stay open, Mark. Stay open.”

He nodded at that and then he squeezed her hand and left the hospital and drove out of Garrison for what he believed was the last time. He was headed north to the airport, and from there he would go south by plane. Jeff London was waiting to meet him in Tampa. There he would tell Jeff what he had to say, tell him the truth about how he felt about his wife’s unknown killer, and about the possibilities that he’d seen in this rural place where good but overstretched police could have benefited from outside help from the start. That the questions Did he do it? and Who did it? had always been intertwined, and it was time for Innocence Incorporated to embrace that. He had a sense of how that pitch would go over, and that was why the resignation letter had already been written. But he would do things right, and he would not hide behind Jeff or anyone else. Whether he remained on payroll or not, he had his next case. It had begun on a lonesome bend where the cypress leaves hung low and cast long shadows over the road to Cassadaga.

The airport was far from the town, and Trapdoor was not on the way, but he stopped there all the same. He didn’t get out of the car, just parked where he could sit and look down at the place where Maiden Creek became the Greenglass River.

She doesn’t want you yet.

“It’s just a hole in the earth,” Mark said. “It’s nothing but stone and water.”

But he couldn’t stare too long into the yawning blackness beyond the iron gate before turning away.

He rolled the windows down and let the cold air in and he took out his phone and pulled up the recording of his only willingly entered trance with Julianne Grossman. By now he’d listened to it several times and knew it well, and he knew the precise part he needed to hear before he left this place. Her voice filled the car, stronger than the sounds of the winter wind and the thawing ice fracturing across the surface of Maiden Creek. He listened to her ask him if he had feared death in Trapdoor and then to his own answer, a firm and swift response.

No, he said of the night that he’d nearly frozen to death beneath the earth, the night they’d had to use extracorporeal circulation to bring him back among the living.

And why were you not afraid of death?

Because there are places I still need to go.

Where are those places?

I’ll have to go back to where she died. I have to do that.

To where Sarah Martin died? To the cave?

No. Back to Florida. Back to my wife. And then I’ll have to go to the mountains.

Why the mountains?

Here he had paused for several seconds, and even on the recording you could hear that his breathing was labored, the sounds of a man in the midst of a struggle. Finally he had answered: I’m not sure. But I’ve always known it.

Acknowledgments

As always, foremost thanks to those who make me look better than I deserve: My editor, Joshua Kendall, and my agent, Richard Pine, both kept the lights on in the dark for me throughout, and kept the batteries charged. Tracy Roe is a copyeditor without equal. And much gratitude to the readers who suffered through the messy drafts: Christine Koryta, Tom Bernardo, and Stewart O’Nan all put their unique and tremendous talents to work on this book. The team at Little, Brown continues to be the best in the business; thanks to Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Heather Fain, Nicole Dewey, Sabrina Callahan, Miriam Parker, Garrett McGrath, and everyone else at Hachette Book Group. It is an honor to be published by such an incredible company.

I’m grateful to the people who took me into caves and did their best to explain them to me, particularly Anmar Mirza and Ty Spatta, and to the people who attempted to explain the realities of hypnotism versus the mythology to me and helped me capitalize on both. In this regard, Rima Montoya was truly exceptional, and for her insight and patience I’m most indebted.

And to the readers, the greatest thanks of all.