Unless some others lurked inside the black mouth of the overflow cave, that was it. Even so, five trout were probably too many for a pool this size. She shook her head with amazement that she could catch the ones she did.
It was wonderful what a little patience could do for her. She just moved slowly, like she was no threat at all, and slipped her hand up behind the fish and snagged it by its tail. Then she gutted and cleaned the trophy with her Swiss army knife and stuck it over the fire of driftwood the stream had washed into the sinkhole.
She was burning the last of that, too, except a few chunks too rotten to even smolder, and she was lucky non-smoking Maureen had carried a Bic lighter in her coat pocket along with the useless .38. Otherwise Jo would've been eating raw fish and shivering.
Or she would have been dead of hypothermia days ago.
She flexed her left arm for the thousandth time and made a face at the lingering ache right under what passed for muscle in her forearm. It was time to try the wall again.
A seasoned rock-climber would laugh at her and walk out like a fly, she knew. Probably take two minutes, max. Those idiots could stick to hand- and footholds you couldn't even see, stick to coarse sandpaper glued on overhanging rock. She'd seen it on TV.
However, she was a city girl. Her idea of climbing was the escalator up to Casual Corner out at the mall. And as far as bodybuilding was concerned, her version of pumping iron involved bedsprings.
At least she didn't need a bath. A zillion falls into the pool took care of that. Her hairdo was shot to hell, though, and she couldn't guess where to find the nearest electric outlet and blow-dryer.
Sore arm or no, logic told her to climb now. Then there would still be some coals and scraps of wood to warm her up after she fell in the pool again. She shoved the gun, the knife, and the life-saving Bic lighter into a pocket and zipped it tight. If she did make the top, it was damn sure she wasn't coming back for anything.
Climb now. If she didn't make it out today, she never would.
This time she tried the other side of her prison, working on the pig-headed theory that if it looked worse for climbing, it really must be better. She'd done a lot of things like that in her life. She'd gotten away with most of them--so far.
The first part was easy. The first part was always easy, just clamber up some loose rock fallen from the walls above as the water ate the limestone.
"Just don't be under the particular part that wants to fall today," she muttered. "You're known for being thick-headed, but that ain't good enough."
Those TV rock climbers used helmets as well as ropes. She ran a tentative finger over the hot raw lump above her right eye, the track of a chunk of sinkhole that had turned into a portable handhold.
She looked down. Just like every time before, the hole gave her eight or ten feet for free, high enough to really drive her ankles up her nose if she fell. What she saw wasn't pretty: one reason she'd avoided this side was that the pile of rock stretched further out. The pool sat off-center; if she fell now, she'd splatter instead of splashing.
She looked up. No fun there, either--the wall overhung her head maybe four feet, five feet in the distance up to the shadow-cut rim. She'd have to hang from her tattered fingernails. She reminded herself that she was the girl who couldn't do a single pull-up in high school gym. Thin was in.
But she thought it might be better to bash out her brains on the rocks than starve to death. This was talking about thin like a sub-Sahara refugee camp, bones sticking out and dry crinkly hair and skin like a banjo head and bug-eyed alien faces. Not pretty. Not chic.
She saw a ledge, big enough to stand on or even sit, up above her head. That's what she needed to keep her muscles working, some place she could slack off and relax. Half of her exhaustion came from tensing up, from her own muscles clenching against each other. Shit, last time her jaw had ached worse than her legs after the climb, from gritting her teeth.
She could fit a boot into that rough spot, wrap her hand around the gritty, chalky knob of stone over there, shift weight onto them and lift the other foot a few inches, rather than trying to swallow the whole elephant in one gulp. She'd gotten herself into trouble just last night, stretching for a foothold about half an inch too high.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on friction, dragging her boot up the rock-face to search for a little nubbin just big enough for the edge of her sole. Her free hand groped blindly into a faint scratch in the stone, a line like the scoring of a cat's claw where the water had flowed and etched the lime away. It ran vertically and she pulled sideways against it, moving the first hand higher.
"Breathe, Cynthia Josephine," she muttered. "Always remember to breathe. It's useful."
Keeping her eyes closed helped. She couldn't see a damned thing, anyway, the stone was so close she had to go cross-eyed to focus on it, nose rubbing its tip raw against the dirty chalk that leaned out as if it wanted to French kiss her right tonsil. Maybe she could use that for support.
Her right hand found another crack and she risked jamming her fist into it rather than wasting the energy of a finger hold. She groped around with the left, banging up against a dangling root and following it back to the lumpy base of a shrub, then clamped on like she planned to strangle
