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.
