“Landscapers. A lot has happened in seven years,” Jack agreed.
“Okay,” Annabelle took a deep breath. “Looks like we go this way.” She pointed in a direction and they began making their way through the underbrush, careful to make as little noise as possible.
Jack had darkened the pen light before they set off, so they moved in relative darkness. From somewhere unseen, the smell of cigarette smoke filtered through the bushes and tree branches. Along with that smell came the scent of fresh cut grass and fertilizer. The very faint undercurrent of fish and river could be detected, as well as something like… Chinese food? Some students nearby, perhaps. Having a late dinner picnic, despite the early May, nighttime chill. Some people were more stubborn than others.
They came to a place below the rugged cliff faces that the park was known for and looked up. Annabelle compared the structures to the drawings on the map. “It’s somewhere in that second cliff face,” she pointed.
“We’ll have to dig our way past some vegetation, it seems,” Jack muttered. While much of the park had been successfully manicured, the cliff faces, yet untended, were still very jungle-esque.
“You up for a climb, luv?”
Annabelle smiled over at him. She was wearing good shoes and kept her nails short. She wasn’t the kind of woman to shy away from physical activity. But, the fact of the matter was, it wouldn’t really be much of a climb. The cliffs weren’t that tall, and if she was reading the map right, the opening was only two-thirds of the way up. The difficult aspect wasn’t the cliff – it was what lay in between the cliff and Jack and Annabelle.
“More like a swim,” she muttered, gesturing toward the large, deep-looking pond that separated the cliff’s base from where they stood.
“We’ll skirt the edge as far as we can go and take it from there,” Jack said.
They carefully and slowly moved around the pond’s outer border, ducking beneath overhead branches and stepping wide over low bushes and roots. Eventually, they came to a place where they had to crawl through a rock formation that jutted out from the first cliff face. They moved through this, finding cigarette butts and used condoms on the other side. They stood quickly, brushing off their hands and feet.
Annabelle was very grateful that she hadn’t accidentally touched down on any of the human-created refuse hidden behind the formation. “Give me a sec,” she said, pulling out the map once more. Again, his pen light provided illumination.
“Okay,” she said, looking up at the cliff. “It’s either start climbing now and crab-walk it to the crevasse Craig talked about, or we go for a swim. Choice is yours.”
“Really?” he asked, one brow shooting up as he smiled.
“No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “Not really. I vote we start climbing, and my vote’s the only one I care about at this very moment.” She shot him an apologetic look and re-folded the map. He chuckled as she slipped the map back into her jeans pocket and started searching the cliff for hand and foot holds.
It wasn’t a hard climb. The cliff was steep and narrow, but not overly tall, and there were excellent natural grips. She pulled herself up and shimmied in a diagonal line, toward the place Craig and Virginia had marked on the map.
Jack was right behind her.
She realized, as she ascended, that she and her companion were sitting ducks, splayed out as they were on the rock’s face. The stone was light in color, and they both wore black. As she realized this, she wondered whether Jack had put back his gun. She imagined that he had, though she couldn’t really look just then. It would be impossible to climb the rocks without both hands.
She began holding her breath and attempting to move a little faster. Jack hadn’t appeared worried about their temporary vulnerability, and she reminded herself of this. But there was an agoraphobic uneasiness about being so virtually visible at such a dangerous juncture. She was defenseless. She didn’t like being defenseless.
“Here it is,” she said then, as she came to a strange dip in the rock’s face. It curved inward and split, forming a gap in the stone as if they were two tectonic plates. They appeared almost glacier-like in their smoothness.
To the average passer-by on any of the walkways below the cliffs, the opening would only appear a foot wide, at its widest. But up here, on the cliff, Annabelle could see, first-hand, that the cliffs had been fooling people for more than a century.
She smiled as she looked over the rim of the opening, to the much larger space beyond. It was like that scene in The Labyrinth, where the single rock suddenly splits apart and becomes two very far apart rocks, with a simple switch of the camera’s angle. What people would see from below was an optical illusion. A smooth rock face.
Here, right up against it, the face split, allowing more than enough room for a human body to fit through.
Annabelle leaned into the stone, putting her weight into her legs, and turned her head to glance back at Jack.
He was closer than she’d expected, but he wasn’t looking back at her. He was staring at the opening in the cliff. It wasn’t the smallest hole a spelunker had ever crawled through, but it was, nonetheless, a tight, dark space, by Jack Thane’s measure.
“I can go it alone,” she said to him, softly.
Jack’s eyes met hers. He shook his head, once, and gestured, with a nod of his head, that she should move on.
“You a’ri’?” Clara stepped into the kitchen, where Dylan had been leaning against the counter, a mostly-full bottle of soft drink in one hand, his other hand tucked into his front pocket.
He looked up when she walked in, her softly-spoken query jarring him from his troubled thoughts. He’d been thinking about his mother. There were times that he couldn’t remember her quite right. He couldn’t recall her scent or the exact features of her face. But he always remembered her voice. It played in his mind at times, telling him to slow down when he was driving too crazy, or to cool it with the beer. It had become his conscience.
He wondered what would happen with his father’s voice now.
How would he remember his dad?
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice scratchy from recent neglect. He shuffled his feet a little and stood up straighter, glancing down at his drink. Nervously, he took another sip. Some of the fizzle had gone out of it. How long had he been standing alone in there?
Clara glanced around the kitchen. He watched her as she shoved her own hands into the front pockets of her jeans. It was a minute before she spoke again, and Dylan could appreciate that. She was taking the time to carefully choose the words she wanted.
But, for some reason, he wanted to spare her the uncomfortable silence. So, he said, “Where do you think your dad will cart us off to next?” He tried hard not to make it sound as resentful as it felt.
She looked back at him and smiled. “I reckon ‘e’ll most likely want us all to ‘ead back to England.”
He nodded. He’d expected as much. He’d thought a lot about it, and as much as he hated Jack Thane, he wasn’t sure that staying in the country was wise for any of them at this point. England was as good a country to defect to as any.
“Miss Drake’s not gonna be too happy about that,” he muttered, making conversation. He was a little surprised at the slight thrill of satisfaction he got in thinking about the fit Annabelle would throw when Thane gave her the news.
Clara cocked her head to one side and narrowed her gaze thoughtfully. “Yeah, I noticed tha’.” She chewed on her cheek for a moment and moved further into the kitchen, pulling a glass down from one cabinet and filling it with water at the sink. “Wha’s ‘er damage wi’ tha’, anyway?” She asked, as she turned back around to face him.
“Her
“That’s true,” Dylan said, as if trying to defend Annabelle. “I have an irrational fear of sharks.” He had since he was a child. He’d read enough about them to earn a degree in sharkology, and he wasn’t naive. He knew they were over-hunted and misunderstood and endangered. Still, you would never catch him swimming in water that didn’t have chlorine in it.
Cassie smiled at him and then her gaze cut back to Clara. “And what about you, Miss Thane? What are you
