19
I hope you realize you're putting me in an awkward position.'
By the light of the flash Anna held, Curt was tying an anchor line around the stunted oak at Lechuguilla's mouth. 'I realize,' she said. 'Arrest, fines. You're a pal.'
'Not that. Going to jail would lend me a certain cachet with my students. And you are going to pay any and all fines incurred, including the speeding tickets we get while running from the law a la
'Hurry up.' December was breathing ice down Anna's collar. Mixed with a bad case of nerves, it was all she could do to keep teeth from chattering and knees from knocking.
'I'm duty-bound to try to kill you,' Curt said. He stopped twisting the nut on the locking carabiner and looked up. His eyes were masked in shadow, but the glow from the flashlight illuminated small white teeth bared in a wolfish smile. A chill deeper than that of the north wind worked its way toward Anna's bone marrow.
'What?' she said stupidly.
'That's the way it is,' Curt said. He went back to his anchor. 'Hold the light still.'
Anna's hand was shaking. She grabbed her wrist to steady it.
'In the next to the last chapter the only guy the hero-or heroine, in this case-trusts undergoes a sudden and total personality transplant. Sort of the literary equivalent of growing fangs and hair on his palms. And it turns out he was the killer all along. Voila!' This was in mild celebration of the completed anchor. 'You first or me?'
Anna was unable to speak. Like a child by the campfire, she had been scared by the ghost story. When she was twelve, her parents had left her home alone. A city council meeting, the results of which could affect their business, required their joint attendance. Anna had the flu but, wanting to be grown-up, she hadn't told them. To pass the evening, she'd curled up in her dad's big chair by the fire and read Bram Stoker's
That same feverish terror gripped her on the limestone ledge above the gateway to Lechuguilla. This time there was no book, no symbolic crucifix to frighten away the bogeyman.
'Anna! You or me?' Curt's voice cut through the sludge of remembered horrors.
'That wasn't funny,' Anna said.
Curt registered mild confusion, then laughed. 'Sorry.' He didn't sound it. 'My sisters used to take me out for walks at night when we were little, then stop and say, 'Did you hear that? What was that!' then run shrieking away, me shrieking right behind them. I fell for it every time. Till now I didn't know I'd inherited the knack.'
'Not funny. I'll go first.' Anna handed him the light. They traded places, and she straddled the rope where it snaked over boulders hinting at white in the truculent light from the stars. Having clipped her safety to the line, she began threading rope through the ladderlike rack for the descent.
'You're sure this is a good idea?' This was not the first time Curt had asked that question since Anna had stolen the key to Lechuguilla from the pegboard behind Oscar Iverson's desk.
'Nope.' She gave the usual answer. 'But Holden knows all the details. He'll know where to come looking.'
'Tell me you didn't leave him a letter marked 'To Be Opened in the Event of My Death.''
'Something like that. On-rope.' The circle of gold from her headlamp dancing giddily across her boots, Anna walked backward down the face of a boulder the size of a small Airstream and providing only slightly more traction than polished aluminum. Among Holden, Rhonda, endless phone calls, and a short stint as a burglar, the day had been tiring. Closeted in her cold cabin in White's City she had tried for a few hours' sleep. Though her body ached for rest, her mind refused to cooperate.
Much as she liked Curt and-morbid fantasies aside-trusted the man, she wished Holden Tillman were with them. The broken foot rendered it out of the question. Superstitiously she couldn't but believe the cave wouldn't hurt Holden. Her it might devour. Like a dog or a horse, it would smell her fear and turn on her.
'Cut that out,' she said aloud.
'I didn't say a word,' Curt complained.
Anna didn't have sufficient concentration to explain that it wasn't he but her own subconscious she ordered to silence.
The night below sucked her inexorably from the night above, darkness swallowing darkness till even the hope of day was lost. Fleetingly, she wished she were a religious woman. Perhaps it would be a comfort to have a blessed congregation lobbying a beneficent deity on her behalf.
Descending into a forbidden pit at midnight was ridiculously melodramatic. The sheer theatricality of it helped keep reality at bay. For half the afternoon Anna and Holden had gone around and around trying to find another way. She'd laid out her thoughts, and they'd spent an hour going over reports from the Blacktail well, Brent's recommendations for concrete and pipe, and the desert road, pulverized to a choking dust. Holden agreed that the key to Frieda's death would most likely be found in Lechuguilla. Between them they pieced together a picture of what must have occurred, though not one so clear they could identify all the players. Adding the Blacktail to the mix implicated half the brass in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. There was no one they could safely tell until they had proof.
And there was still the question of Sondra McCarty. How she fit in was unclear. The woman had literally vanished off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. If she, like Brent, had been involved and then disposed of, the field was somewhat narrowed. If not, then the number of people who would want Anna kept out of the cave and permanently silenced increased by at least one.
As Anna dropped down the last forty feet, the now-familiar musk of the underground filled her nostrils. A dank cellar smell, it put her on alert like a jittery cat. For Holden, Zeddie-true cavers-it was perfume, the scent of adventure, of untapped potential in the earth and within their own souls. To Anna it smelled of trouble, the olfactory hallucination that warned of a coming seizure. Once inside the cave it would be gone. Lechuguilla didn't have bat colonies to provide guano, no ready exchange with the surface to promote mold or insect life.
The floor of Old Misery Pit was below. Spinning like a spider on its web, Anna suffered a moment of vertigo. Her helmet light moved across one wall, was lost in a hole that fell sharply to one side, then flickered to life again on the ridge between the drop-off and the subtler exit that led into Lechuguilla. Giving in to momentary dizziness, she landed not lightly on her feet but firmly and solidly on her butt. She'd been right to descend first. This was not an entrance she would care to have witnessed by a pretty young man. Feeling all thumbs, she freed herself from the rope. In her limited but intense caving experience, she'd noticed a phenomenon she could always count on. Regardless of how often she changed batteries or switched lamps, the light from her helmet always appeared dirty brown, possessing only half the wattage of that of the other cavers.
'Off-rope,' she hollered into the void. On hands and knees, she crawled to the side of the pit, trailing the end of the rope so she could steady it when Curt neared the bottom.
'On-rope,' filtered down from above.
Less than ten minutes later she and Curt had negotiated the ten foot nuisance drop from the floor of the pit. They crouched in the cramped chamber, where a trapdoor sealed the throat of Carlsbad's other world-class cave. The stolen key fitted the lock, and Anna pulled on the iron trapdoor. It gave easily, the heavy octagon springing upward. A blast of wind screamed out of the bowels of the earth as if the cave howled in rage. Blinded by dust, she staggered back, tripped over Curt's feet, and fell heavily.
'Holy smoke,' she muttered, trying to rub the grit from her eyes. Wind continued to pour from the pipe at forty to fifty knots, filling the tiny earthen room with its own noxious brand of weather. 'What the hell-'
'Pressure equalization,' Curt said, unperturbed. 'Must be a low-pressure zone passing over New Mexico. Still want to do this?'
'No. You first or me?'
