Spider mountain

19

Deputy or Special Agent John-I wasn’t sure which-greeted us when we drove up to the Creigh cabin. He’d been reading a book in his cruiser. Bobby Lee Baggett would have had his ass for that. Anyone could have snuck up on him in the dark. It wasn’t until we’d gotten out of the Suburban and walked up to the cruiser that we saw the second cruiser, with Big Luke inside, shotgun and all, artfully concealed in some trees. Luke waved.

The cabin itself was not decorated with miles of crime-scene tape as I would have expected. Perhaps this was because no one had detected any crime there, unless you wanted to count the shotgun booby trap.

“Where’s everybody gone to?” I asked John. The moon was up, so there was ambient light in the front yard, but the cabin was dark. I left my shepherds in the Suburban.

“Bureau showed up this morning,” he said. “Made Sam King’s day, long about nine. Been downhill since then.”

I could just imagine. The place seemed eerily quiet without the dog pack. I kept glancing over to the cabin’s front porch, expecting to see the two of them sitting there in their rockers, shotguns at hand. “And none of them is worried about six little girls?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There was nothing in the cabin, ‘cept that little business with the door gun. No evidence of children. No drugs, no money, no nothin’.”

“And no Grinny and no Nathan,” Carrie said.

John nodded, patiently.

“We’d like to go inside and look around,” Carrie said. “If there was no evidence of criminal activity, and I don’t see any scene tape, then I don’t think we’ll be disturbing anything of value here.”

“What’re y’all looking for?” he asked her.

“Anything that might tell us where they went. And how they went.”

“I’ll have to come with y’all,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “And I mean that.”

He stared down at his oversized feet. “Something ain’t right,” he said, speaking to Carrie. “No offense intended, but the bosses seem to be skatin’ on this one.”

Carrie went up to him and hugged him. He absolutely did not know what to do. Then we went up to the front porch and picked up some lanterns. John lit them for us and we went inside.

“I’d like to see that hidden room,” I said.

John took us downstairs to the basement. It was earthen-walled and -floored, with a dressed stone rim that formed the cabin’s foundation. The dirt was hard packed and had been there a while. There was a stack of shelves that had been pulled to one side, behind which was the opened hidden door. The left edges of the door were badly damaged.

The shotgun trap had been confiscated, so we went in, holding our lanterns high. The room was perhaps twenty feet by ten, and there was nothing inside but a single wooden chair and more dirt walls and floor. The ceiling was formed by the floor joists and floors of the cabin above.

“Okay,” I said. “The shotgun was wired to that chair, and a trigger mechanism was made to the inside door handle.”

“Yessir,” John said.

“So how was that done from outside this room?” I asked.

This question provoked the expected silence. Carrie walked to the back wall of the room and began to thump the wall with her good hand, testing for a hollow area. Then we heard a car horn out front.

When we got back outside, Luke was standing in front of the cabin with a young woman who was so thin you could almost see right through her. Luke was holding a lantern so we could get a look at her. She had a bony, pale face, a strangely receding hairline for a young woman, and pale blue eyes. She was wearing a white, often-patched dress that barely made it to her knees, and her legs looked like white sticks with red bumps on them. She had blond hair so white that it made her look young and old at the same time. I’d seen hair like that recently. The girl wouldn’t look at any of us. She stood there, twisting one grubby fist with the other.

“Whatcha got there?” John asked his brother.

“Says she’s a’lookin’ for her child, name of Honey Dee?” Luke replied. “Came walkin’ out of the woods. Lieutenant’s dogs told me she was comin’.”

I nudged Carrie and she took over. She took the lantern from Luke and went over to the obviously frightened woman and began to talk to her. She told her that we’d seen her child earlier, and that she’d seemed to be all right.

“Where she at, then?” she asked, looking at each of us for an answer. Her teeth were dark brown, and her cheeks twitched when she spoke.

“We don’t know,” Carrie said. “That’s why the sheriffs are here.”

She put a hand over her mouth and began to tremble. I looked over at the Bigs and indicated with my head that we should leave Carrie to it. We backed off and listened from a distance. Carrie coaxed the story out of her with gentle questions, while the poor thing cried silently through closed eyes.

Baby Greenberg had been right about what was going on up here. She’d traded her child to Grinny to pay for her boyfriend’s meth habit. It was obvious to me that she had one of her own, but Carrie finessed that problem. Grinny had finally cut them off, kept the child, and turned them out of the network. The boyfriend was, of course, long gone, and the young woman was now at her wits’ end, starving, and crushed by guilt for what she’d done. When all we could tell her was that little Honey Dee was probably with Grinny Creigh, she folded into herself, squatted down next to the lantern, and began to beat her breast.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed. “Oh, God Almighty. I’m a’lookin’ at the fires of hell.”

I figured that for once in her miserable life she was absolutely right, but held my tongue. Carrie asked Luke to put her in one of the cruisers, and then we took the lantern and went back inside.

We stood in the middle of what we suspected had been the kids’ bunkroom. The lantern threw flickering shadows on the earthen walls and floor. The damaged door hung by a single hinge, and the basement beyond was dark as a tomb. The place was cold.

“Back to your question,” Carrie said. “I thumped the walls all around and didn’t hear anything that sounded like false wall. The floor is obviously hard-packed dirt.”

“Which leaves the ceiling,” I said, looking up at the floor joists and planks above our heads. Not, I noticed, very far above our heads. I wondered aloud if this room was lower than the basement. “Let’s go find some water,” I said.

We retrieved a large pitcher of water from the hand pump in the kitchen and went back downstairs. I stood at about four feet back from the entrance to the bunkroom and poured the water onto the floor. As I’d hoped, it immediately streamed across the floor and down into the bunkroom, where it puddled against the far wall.

“The ceiling it is,” Carrie said. It took us fifteen minutes to figure it out, and it was pretty ingenious. Pulling down in the middle of one floor joist at the left end of the bunkroom opened a trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor had boards nailed across it to serve as step risers, and at the top was a narrow black rectangle. We went back upstairs to tell John what we’d found and got ourselves a second lantern.

I went first, discovering that I had to crawl on my hands and knees once I got into the tunnel. It, too, had been cut out of hard-packed earth, and it seemed to drift slightly upward in a gentle left curve. The air was reasonably fresh, which made me think that it led to the outside.

After crawling for about a hundred feet I was finally able to stand up, albeit in a crouch. Carrie was right behind me. Ahead was a rough-cut wooden door, around whose seams I could feel air moving.

“Remember that nasty secret surprise the guys found when they opened the bunkroom door,” Carrie said quietly. I nodded and examined the door. It was locked on our side by a large bolt-and-hasp arrangement. I tried the bolt and it moved freely.

“Let’s get flat and then open it,” I said, and that’s what we did. There was no resistance when the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. Beyond there was an alcove of sorts, from which another tunnel led off to the left at about a ninety-degree angle to the one we’d been in. We stood up and stuck the lanterns into the alcove. The tunnel going left was wider than the original tunnel, and its ceiling had been reinforced with wooden beams and sheet metal. On the right-hand side of the alcove was a stone wall. Whoever had built the wall had been no mason, but it extended from floor to ceiling and felt solid. What cracks there were around the edges were dust-filled and looked undisturbed. As if to make the point, there were three solid beams standing in front of the door at regular intervals, one on each side and one in the middle.

“That may one of the abandoned mine tunnels,” I said. The air was coming in strong from our left. “If they used this to bug out, then the outside is thataway.”

“Outside would be good,” Carrie said. Apparently she did not care much for tunnels. For that matter, neither did I.

“Left it is,” I said, and we soon found ourselves walking up a moderate incline for about three hundred feet until we encountered another hard left turn and some crude wooden steps nailed to a plank going up to a small hole at the top. There was a fine trickle of water seeping down the side of the steps. When we pushed our way through the hole we found ourselves standing under that lone pine tree at the entrance to the Creigh-side crack in the backbone ridge. We left the lanterns down in the tunnel and climbed out.

We stood next to the tree and instinctively looked around for attacking dogs. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled for my shepherds, who came at the gallop across that big open space between the crack and the cabin. It felt good to have them nearby. I saw Carrie massaging her injured hand, remembering.

“Okay, so now we know how they got out,” she said. “But not where they went.”

“I’m having a problem visualizing Grinny Creigh getting through that first tunnel,” I said. “Nathan, maybe, the kids, no problem. But Grinny?”

“What’re you saying? She’s still down there somewhere?”

“Yeah, I think that’s a real possibility. They’ve had a hundred years to dig out all sorts of tunnels and chambers down there-just look at this tunnel. It had to have taken months to cut this thing by hand.”

“There was that one stone wall, at the junction,” she said. “Maybe we-”

“Hold up, there’s a vehicle coming,” I said, pointing down toward the cabin. We watched the Big brothers join up to see who was arriving. We could only see headlights until it stopped in front of the cabin, so we started down the hill. It turned out to be the Big Chief himself, Mose Walsh, driving a pickup truck with a cap on the back.

He was apparently on good speaking terms with the Bigs, who were talking to him when we made it back down to the cabin. He gave me a sideways look as we walked up, but greeted Carrie with a big grin.

“The glass hole,” he said. “I found out where that is.”

“Great,” Carrie said. “But what is it?”

“Well, actually, I’ve never seen it,” Mose replied. “Guy I know, likes to do cave diving? He says it’s the one vestige of volcanism in the Great Smokies on our side of the Tennessee line. According to him it’s on the edge of the park, right inside the boundary with your favorite county. The scientists who’ve seen it say it’s an ancient collapsed lava bubble.”

“Can you take us there?” I asked.

He hesitated. “I’ve got directions, so I can take you there. I don’t want to, because this involves the Creighs, but you said there are kids at risk. So…”

“How long would it take to get there?”

“Actually, we can drive most of the way, then it’s a five-, six-mile hike in and mostly up.”

“Is it someplace you could hide six kids?” Carrie asked.

“I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “According to my guy, it’s under water.”