Mortal Pursuit

44

Dead end.

Ally stopped short, her flashlight beaming a pale yellow oval on a smooth limestone wall. The spot of light wavered badly, tracing lopsided spirals, because the hand that held it was palsied with stress and exhaustion and fear.

Behind her, Trish whispered, “Damn.”

Her voice shook as badly as Ally’s hand, no doubt for the same reasons, but at least Ally could hear her now. The ringing in her ears had subsided to a distant, monotonous chime.

“Guess we’ve got to double back,” Ally said. “Try the other route.”

The cave system was a labyrinth. Several times she’d had to decide which branch of a fork to take, relying on the compass as her guide. At the last intersection she’d guessed wrong.

She began retracing her path, leading the way with the flash. Her bare feet, scraped bloody by the unforgiving stone floors, hurt with every step.

But she couldn’t complain. She had seen how badly Trish was limping. Must’ve sprained her left foot or ankle. If Trish could go on, so could she.

She didn’t ask what they would do if the alternate route was a dead end also. Or if the flashlight’s battery gave out. Or if they blundered onto a false floor-a common hazard in caves-and plunged into a lower gallery from which they could not emerge.

Lots of worries, lots of dangers, and no need to talk about any of them.

Besides, there was another question on her mind.

“So who was she” she asked without looking back.

“Who was who”

“Your friend. The one who used to go with you to the old farmhouse.”

In the beat of silence that followed. Ally knew she had inadvertently fingered a nerve.

“Her name,” Trish answered finally, “was Marta. Marta Palmer.”

More silence, unbroken save by their ragged breathing and the scuffle of shoes and bare feet on the uneven floor.

Ally’s flash ticked like a pendulum, lighting the narrow passageway, picking low stalactites out of the gloom. An elaborately ridged section of the gallery wall passed by, the limestone sculpted into flowing draperies, water and time conspiring to rival Michelangelo. Brown streaks of iron oxide colored the rocks, creating the surreal impression of cave paintings.

Frigid air, stirred by no breeze, wrapped her in its chill. Not too cold for her-but Trish in her wet clothes must be risking hypothermia.

Maybe it was best to keep her talking. Besides, Ally didn’t like the ominous quiet of this place.

“Is she dead” she asked. “Marta, I mean.”

This time she did look back, the flashlight swinging with her gaze. She saw Trish’s eyes widen in the glow.

“How … how’d you know” Trish whispered.

“The way you said her name. I just had a feeling.”

“You should be a psychologist.”

“Anthropology’s my thing.” Hesitation. “I guess maybe you don’t want to talk about this, huh”

“I can talk about it. It’s just that I usually don’t. See, she was only nine years old. And so was I.”

There was weariness in her voice, a deeper weariness than any born of injury or fatigue. This was the listlessness of old grief and remembered tears.

They arrived at the fork in the maze and started down the alternate corridor. Somewhere ahead was a soft, susurrant whisper. An aquifer, probably.

The caves were wetter here, the walls slimed with even more of the ubiquitous gray-green muck. Ally circled around a birdbath-sized pool, the murky water speckled with small darting things. Pupfish She’d read someplace that they lived in caves.

The pool receded, but the hiss of rushing water grew louder, and the chill deepened.

“Marta was your best friend,” Ally said tentatively.

“Did I make it that obvious”

She waited for a further response, some explanation. None came.

Irrationally she was hurt that Trish wouldn’t share this secret with her.

Get over it, she chided herself. It wasn’t as if Trish was her sister or something. She was under no obligation to bare her soul to some inquisitive teenager she hardly knew.

The hiss resolved itself into gurgles and splashes, echoing eerily. The aquifer was close.

Her flashlight probed the dark. In the fan of light, shapeless mounds of calcite rose up like volcanic crags out of a mist. Automatically she recalled their technical names: helictites, culuphilites.

They could grow big enough to block a passageway. This latest worry teased her briefly before she pushed it aside.

Two of the dripstones had fused to form a pillar, its hourglass figure oddly aesthetic, a touch of beauty in this dismal world. Past the pillar was a dark void and a hint of freshwater spray.

Ally stepped closer to the void, the flash revealing a gap in the limestone wall. Framed in the gap, a vertical shaft. She spared a second to peer downward.

Fifty feet below coursed a subterranean stream, flowing around smooth rocks, falling away in a foaming cataract that descended out of sight. Reflected glare from her flash dappled the mossy walls in a scintillant light show.

Despite pain, despite fear, she felt her mouth smile at the spectacle. She glanced at Trish. “Really something, huh”

Trish merely nodded, her gaze faraway.

Ally moved on, Trish following. The stream’s babble diminished to a static hiss that blended with the distant clanging in her ears.

Overhead, the gallery’s roof whitened with old deposits of guano. Bats had roosted here once but appeared to be long gone. She wondered if there was an egress nearby. Bats usually-

“We played together all the time.”

Trish’s voice was a whisper, but coming unexpectedly it seemed explosively loud in the settled stillness. Ally jumped a little.

Then she found a context for the remark. Trish and Marta. Two nine-year-old girls.”Did you” she asked as she caught her breath.

“Explored vacant lots, chased butterflies, got ourselves ice cream on the way home from school. Small-town stuff.”

“What town”

“Called Barnslow. Up in central California, in the mountains. Fifteen hundred people. Band concerts in the summer. A safe place, nobody was afraid-until Marta … until she …”

Trish took a breath and said it.

“She was murdered.”

Ally pursed her lips. The news ought to have been shocking, but she’d grown up in the ‘90s, when the violent death of children was taken for granted, as much a part of everyday life as headaches and traffic jams and inconvenient weather.

“I’m sorry,” she said pointlessly.

Trish didn’t seem to hear. “It was a stranger who did it. They never caught him. Just someone passing through. He …”

Her brief pause spoke of censorship, some hurtful fact suppressed.

“He must have picked her up while she was walking home from school. She had a jump rope with her, and I …”

Another glitch, another edit.

“They found her in the weeds, with the jump rope around her neck.”

“She was strangled,” Ally said, then winced. Brilliant deduction.

“Strangled, yeah.” Trish coughed. “And left in the weeds behind the farmhouse where we used to go, the farmhouse where we would sit on the porch and talk about boys and make up futures for ourselves. She was there in the weeds, sprawled in the weeds.”

That phrase, in the weeds, seemed to hold some significance for Trish, but Ally couldn’t fathom it and was afraid to pursue the issue.

“Is that why you became a cop” she asked instead.

Trish made a noise like a chuckle. “You guessed that too Yeah. I knew it was too late to save Marta. But there are other girls, and other strangers passing through, and … and bad things do happen-even in small towns.”

Ally knew there was more to the story, but Trish didn’t want to tell it. Maybe the memories were too hard to face.

New silence, deeper than before, trailed after them as they proceeded down the passage. Clutching limestone fingers snagged the ragged hem of Ally’s dress. She pulled free again and again.

Abruptly she realized the snags and scrapes were becoming more numerous, the groping fingers emboldened.

The passage was narrowing. The walls were closing in.

She looked over her shoulder, caught the same awareness in Trish’s eyes.

“Another dead end” Ally whispered.

Trish didn’t answer.

Swallowing fear, Ally crept forward, hunching lower as the ceiling kissed her hair. Hardly any room to maneuver now. Ahead, a still narrower space terminating in darkness.

Desperately she probed the shadows with her flash. The pale fan of light found a small round hole at the end of the passage, looming like a hungry mouth.

“I think there’s a tunnel,” she breathed, her throat tight.

“Big enough for us”

“Don’t know.”

On hands and knees now. Crawling to the tunnel’s mouth, if that was what it was.

She played the flashlight inside. The beam illuminated a gun-barrel tube winding into the dark.

The passage was barely wider than a doggie door, but probably navigable.

“Does it go in the right direction” Trish asked.

Ally checked the compass. “Maybe. We’re heading due north now, but the tunnel looks like it bends west.”

“We’ll have to take it.”

As if we’ve got a choice. Ally thought.

She eased herself horizontal and wriggled inside.

“Hope you don’t have claustrophobia,” she said, tasting dust from the crawlway’s chalky floor.

“Speaking in public-that’s my only phobia.”

“Funny,” Ally grunted, worming forward. “Mine too.”

Or it had been, anyway. After tonight she expected to face a dazzling profusion of new fears, unhealed psychic wounds that would bleed into her dreams and make them nightmares.

Was Marta Palmer a wound in Trish’s mind, her dreams Ally thought so.

There were some things you could never escape from, it appeared. Even adulthood wouldn’t rescue you. Even college wouldn’t take you far enough away.

She crawled on, deeper into the dark.