Trappett stirred nervously. His dark eyes poured out hatred upon the county detective. When the clicking ceased the music took up again, tinkling a different tune. But Heath wasn't trying to recognize tunes now. He was looking into Trappett's eyes, fighting the yellow man's mind.
“It happened nineteen years ago in Baltimore,” Trappett suddenly said, his voice wavering, sounding of defeat. “My wife deserted me, taking our year-old baby. I haven't seen them since. It's almost driven me crazy, all these years, never a word from them. Then a few weeks ago I passed a house in Baltimore, heard a music box playing. It was a box just like this one. I listened, believing I had at last truly gone mad.
“I rapped on the door, offered to buy the music box. The family sold it to me, told me the man David McCulloch had sent it to was dead months before it arrived. Had he lived to receive it, then—”
Trappett drew a slashing breath, his big eyes fixed in his head like frozen balls of blackest ink. “Now you know why I came here a week ago. I'll tell you this, I've only been waiting to make sure. A man can't undo murder.
“Then today I saw this music box at Coverlee, thought it might complete the message that is only partially given by my instrument. The old devil in the antique shop wouldn't let me play it. I came nearly killing him for the privilege. He'll never be closer death until he dies. I offered him all the money I have. He wanted more. I came back to borrow the money from McCulloch. He was gone when I got here—I think he was. Someone tried to kill me in the tower, stole my book. Now it has told them all about the music box.”
He drew another hard breath, grinned cheerlessly. “If I'd got the loan from McCulloch it would have been a little like Napoleon borrowing money from his enemies to finance a war against them. A joke for death to laugh at.”
Heath picked up the music box as it stopped playing, holding the shotgun as he would a pistol to cover Trappett. “We'll hear the story over again,” he said, making to put the box on a stand. The shot came from outside, through the open door. The bullet ripped through the music box, tore through the fleshy part of Heath's right hand, between thumb and palm. It did more harm, though, as it passed on and struck Ira Trappett in the chest. The jaundiced man turned halfway around, fell.
Heath leaned quickly and blew out the lamp, then leapt to the open door. He heard someone beyond Mary's car, running away. He was feeling for a match to light the lamp, intending to give Trappett all aid possible, when he heard Mary's cry. Thin at first, it lifted piercingly:
“Sully! Sully, help!”
SHE called him again as he reached the parked cars. He dropped the shotgun, pushed the cracked music box beneath some dead grass, and grabbed the flashlight from Mary's coupe.
She'd called from the direction of the creek, he knew. As he ran through a field he silently thanked the county prosecutor for advising him to make a map of this farm. The agriculture agent had aided him with airplane pictures, taken of the countryside during a soil erosion survey. At the time he'd thought the map-making a bit silly.
He almost fell over the creek bank. He caught himself, knelt, reached down and touched creek mud, wet and slimy. This was the creek bed, but it was waterless. He recalled the jarring blast, the sunk look in Trappett's eyes.
A murky moon lazied from a rack of clouds and found him kneeling beside the waterless creek bed, poised like a runner for the take-off. He was trying to make sense of the inscription under the music box's lid, hoping that Mary would cry out again, give him a lead.
“When the water runs low look at the feet of the weeping one,” he muttered, trying to force his brain to grasp at lost ends of things it couldn't know, laboring to spur it on to the business of evolving something from nothing, fighting to make it tie in the missing parts neglected by the message of the music box. Pressing muddy knuckles to his forehead he groaned, cursed the circumstances, damned the blank wall of mystery that rose before him.
He lifted his face moonward, saw the drooping branches of the old tree above him. A bit of misty something like dew touched his face. It couldn't be starting to rain! The sod in the field had been dry! “A tear!” he said softly. The weeping one. . . He was beneath a weeping willow tree.
He leapt forward, swung around the big bole of the tree, slid down the bank beside it, and found himself in mud up to his knees. He snicked on the flashlight. Tracks! Tracks, fresh and still oozing mud bubbles, showed him a way to a large open rift in the face of an otherwise smooth outcropping of stone. Minutes ago water had covered the rock ledge. Its wet mark was still there, some five feet above the top of the crevice. A man and a girl had recently gone that way, walked right into the earth.
Sully Heath let caution go hang as he sped into the crevice. Fifteen paces on and he found himself in a high- ceilinged natural cavern, a wide hallway nature had fashioned in the deep belt of limestone stratum. He had penetrated the cavern about two hundred yards when he heard Mary scream. Catching the flicker of a light on ahead, he speeded up.
The moment before he saw the yawn of a deep chasm breaking across the cavern floor, he saw Mary McCulloch.
“Watch out!” Mary cried.
He stopped, tottered over the chasm's lip, caught his balance, and leapt back. A glance and he saw what had happened.
John McCulloch and Mary had been crossing a narrow ledge to reach an opening in an opposite wall. Part of the edge had crumbled, and McCulloch had fallen into the chasm. Mary had got safely back to firm footing. Now she stood on the lip of the deep rift holding a lantern.
Heath heard splashes coming from below and sent down the flash's beam. He caught a glimpse of McCulloch's face staring up from a pool of black water. In the instant Mary slipped into his arms he knew that McCulloch had been in the brush clump above the highway after the hoodlum had been killed. Mary's voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Oh, Sully, I've been wrong! Father shot Mr. Trappett. I saw him and tried to run, but he caught me, brought me here. He had a rope. He was going to leave me here—kill me. Then the rocks gave way, and—”
Heath kissed her cold face. “It'll keep,” he said. “Save it.” He leaned over the rift, said, “Keep your head, McCulloch. I'll pull you up in a jiffy.”
“Hurry then,” came the reply. “This is a blind hole. Water feeds in through a sump at the bottom. We're all lost when the creek water comes back.” Mary handed Heath the rope McCulloch had .brought into the cavern.
