'I haven't looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?'
'Still here,' her voice responded after a moment. 'If you guys are coming in, I'll open the trapdoor.'
Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe's adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.
Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.
Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.
'Did I hear shots?' he demanded.
No one answered that directly.
'I thought I heard one,' said Maria. 'And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there's a small hole in one of the windows.'
'All right, we'll deal with that later.' For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. 'Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?'
While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio. 'This is the house,' she kept saying. 'Bill, is that you? Come in.'
Only noise responded.
Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.
'They always worked great before,' John commented.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill's voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria's hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill's message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.
Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.
'Sit tight, then,' she told Bill. 'Anything you need?' Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.
Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn't have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then… Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.
She had the nagging feeling that there had been something else. But just exactly what…
Neither the client nor her nephew, thought Maria, puzzling, were as outraged as she would have expected clients to be under the circumstances. At first old Sarah had been, naturally enough, somewhat stunned by the intrusion, but now she appeared much calmer. Neither she nor Brainard wanted to call in the Park Rangers, who served as the police here on this federal land. She, Maria, would certainly have been outraged if she had hired a private security force at great expense, and her new employees had failed her dismally within a few hours of going on the job.
Joe established himself for the time being in a chair on the highest level of the house. Maria suggested tentatively that she and John try searching downhill for Bill in darkness; or they could at least try shining flashlights in that direction, so their missing colleague might have a beacon that could guide him home.
Joe fiercely forbade any attempt to search, and proclaimed that shining lights anywhere would be a waste of time.
'But there's no use his just sitting there on a rock all night if he doesn't have to. If we could just show a bright light—'
'Sit down and shut up.' Joe Keogh's gaze for once was icy. 'I know what I'm doing. I'm not sending any more people down that hill tonight. Our client is up here.'
'Okay.' Maria wondered silently why the boss was so vehement. Well, some people got that way after they had screwed things up.
All of them gradually became aware that Brainard seemed much more at ease now than he had been before the mysterious visitation. Now he was going out of his way to be friendly with the hired investigators, offering to get them coffee or hot chocolate from the kitchen.
Sarah Tyrrell on the other hand, after a few minutes of apparently peaceful contemplation, had resumed worrying. She had retreated to her bedroom, where she sat in a rocker, tense, staring into space, saying little. The old lady seemed still to welcome the presence of Maria, who tried to comfort her.
John and Joe also remained in the Tyrrell House for another couple of hours. The two men took turns, one dozing in a chair while the other remained awake, listening for any further radio communication from Bill. A light was kept burning in one of the northern windows of the house.
But Bill's radio remained silent, despite the fact that they tried several times to call him back.
Chapter 6
'Numbly Jake followed Camilla uphill through heavily gathering darkness, treading the path beside the nameless little stream whose voices chanted only nonsense. She was leading him back, Jake knew, to the place where the side canyon widened into a kind of amphitheater. Back to the neat little house standing not far from the strange cave.
Jake's companion led the way in silence, now and then pausing to look over her shoulder at him, as if she wanted to make sure he was still with her.
In a few minutes they were standing once again in front of the small log house, whose windows showed no lights behind their curtains. There was plenty of light in another place, forty or fifty yards away, at the foot of one of the surrounding cliffs. An electric glare poured from the cave's low entrance, as wide as a garage door. The glare was growing steadily brighter and brighter against the coming night. The generator, whose housing was now invisible in the background dusk, droned on as before, making noise that was barely perceptible through the voice of the waterfall. Nearer at hand, intermittent clinking and hammering sounds from the direction of the cave indicated that the old man must be still at his labors, though for the moment at least he was out of sight.
Jake jerked his head in that direction. 'You say old Edgar is to blame for my troubles. He's the one who can show me the way out of here. The one who can let me go.'
Camilla bobbed her head, and whispered, as if she feared old Edgar might hear her even against the noises of the generator, and the stream, and the racket he himself was making. 'He can. He could. But—'
Jake had already turned his back on her, starting toward the place where the old man banged fanatically on rock. Camilla grabbed Jake by the arm.
'No!' she whispered fiercely. 'Don't mess with him tonight. Not while he's working. Stay with me tonight, and—and get some rest. You don't want to try to walk hack to your camp tonight anyway. Tomorrow you can talk to Edgar. That'll be plenty time enough.'
Jake hesitated. The truth was that he did feel as if he'd hiked a hundred miles today. He was almost swaying on his feet.
'Come get some rest,' Camilla coaxed him again. 'And I'll fix you something to eat.'
Giving up for the time being on the idea of a confrontation, Jake let her lead him to the little house, where she held open the neat screen door for him to enter. Despite all the strangeness that engulfed him, and his weariness, Jake retained enough capacity for surprise to notice how nicely the place was fixed up inside. He thought it could almost be in the middle of a suburb somewhere instead of here in the wilderness.
It was really a small house, not a shack. Camilla after opening a couple of windows clicked a wall switch and an electric lamp came on, revealing the main room, furnished with rustic chairs and tables. A large, new-looking rug covered much of the floor of broad planks. Under the windows at one side was a kitchen sink, complete with faucets—indoor plumbing was more than anyone had back at the CCC camp.
Crossing this main chamber, Camilla led Jake to a door that opened into what seemed to be the only bedroom. There she gestured for him to sit down on the only bed. Another door on the far side of the bedroom remained closed. Maybe, he wondered, a real bathroom?
Sitting on the bed, which softly squeaked beneath his weight, Jake looked around him. An ordinary dresser, with drawers. No mirror on the dresser, or anywhere else. Several pictures decorated the whitewashed walls.
He asked: 'Where's the old man sleep? What time does he turn in?'
'Don't worry about him,' Camilla assured him positively. Bustling about almost maternally, she fluffed pillows
