peed and pooped. Pete amp; Macs had me for life. Back in the house, she followed me from room to room, her eyes delirious with devotion.
The message light on my phone was?ashing red. I punched the play button and listened as Joy told me that since I had forgotten to call the radiologist’s office, she had done it for me, making an appointment at eight the next morning, ending with a reminder: “It’s time for you to learn to take care of yourself, Jack.”
I replayed the message, deciphering her voice, not the words. Joy wasn’t angry, frustrated, or annoyed that I’d forgotten to call. There was no touch of humor either, no gentle teasing, just sadness, her voice fading away at the end, like she was letting go.
I had buried our shared pain, stepped around our long silences, and ducked her wounded eyes until I was certain that our love had become another casualty of Kevin’s death. The truth, though, was in her voice.
Joy still cared, after all that had happened, after all that she had done and I had failed to do. She still cared. That’s why she’d come to the house. That’s why she’d made the doctor appointments. I listened to her message again, hearing, at last, the rest of it. She still cared, but that was no longer enough.
I retreated to my chair in the den, cross-examining myself in the soft shadow of the lone lamp about what had happened and what might still be possible. I wasn’t good at this. I was better at accepting the harsh reality of death, loss, and guilt, lowering my head and pushing on without looking back or wondering whether a second chance lay beneath the wreckage.
I closed my eyes and slept, dreaming that I was suspended in midair, Joy and Kate on either side, each extending a hand, one slipping away, the other reaching out, forcing me to choose. In that instant, a spasm shot through me, arching my back and neck, binding me as I shook, pulverizing my dream in a blast of blinding white light. I opened my eyes. Ruby was standing on my chest licking the tears from my cheeks.
Chapter Thirty-four
Latrell waited until close to midnight before he left home. There was a Wal-Mart two miles from the cave that was open twenty-four hours. No one paid any attention to cars left in that lot. He parked there and walked like he always did, passing through a neighborhood, with few streetlights, of older, modest houses whose residents had long since gone to bed.
He would have preferred to park at the rail yard and take the path behind the storage sheds, but then he would have had to explain why he left his car parked at the terminal building overnight. His coworkers might start asking questions if they saw him disappear into the woods, especially after a body had been found nearby in the Dumpster.
The local news had reported that the victim was another drug dealer. The reporter noted there was speculation that the murder could be part of a gang war that had started with the murders earlier in the week. Good, Latrell thought. Things were coming back together.
Dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, he was nothing more than a shadow. No one saw him slip into the eastern edge of the woods. Aided by the moonlight and the years underground that had sharpened his night vision, and with his?ashlight tucked into his backpack, Latrell kept on walking.
Though the night had cooled, the woods were dense, holding on to the day’s heat. Latrell heard occasional rustling in the underbrush, night prowlers giving him wide berth. It took him close to an hour to reach the entrance, a thin sheen of sweat coating his skin.
The entrance to the cave was through a hollowed waist-high gash nature had cut into a rocky mound that pushed out from the face of a wooded hillside like a blunt snout.
Concealed with a quilt delicately woven from fallen tree limbs, torn shrubs, and other debris, it appeared natural and random to anyone who stumbled onto it. It was for him a perfect example of ordered chaos, another trick he played on the rest of the world from whom he hid his true self.
Latrell’s breath froze in his throat when he saw that his careful camou?age had been shredded, reduced to a pile of rubble scattered around the entrance as if thrown from the back of a truck. He was certain that no animal could have caused such a disturbance. Someone had found his cave. He clutched his gut as if he’d been cut open.
Kneeling in the darkness, Latrell examined each limb, each fragment of tree bark and remnant of bushes and vines, trying to understand what had happened. His mind raced with so many possibilities the woods began to slowly rotate, speeding up until he threw his arms around the base of a tree, holding on with his eyes pinched closed until the earth stopped moving.
Breathing heavily, Latrell let go of the tree, sat with his back to the trunk, and hugged his knees to his chest. He sorted the possibilities like the papers he filed at work until he gained control of them. The exercise calmed him so that he could think clearly.
Whoever had found the entrance may have stopped outside or gone inside and left or gone inside and stayed. There could have been one person or several-kids drunk or stoned, a bum looking for a cool dry place or, worst of all, it could have been someone who knew, someone who might be waiting inside to ruin everything.
Shock and fear had given way to the fine, hard rage that drove Latrell to put things right. Gripping his? ashlight, he shimmied through the slanted opening, crab walking down ten feet of a rough-hewn chute until he came to the first and smallest of three chambers. Standing, he swept the chamber with the?ashlight’s halogen beam.
The?oor of the cave was dirty. Latrell had given up trying to keep it clean. Not even he could do that. For once, the dirt was helpful.
There were two overlapping sets of footprints, one coming toward him and the other going back toward the interior of the cave, neither of them his. They were large, bigger than his feet, and smooth, not ridged like the athletic shoes he wore. The footprints had not been there when Latrell was in the cave the night before. Latrell stopped, listened for echoes of the intruder’s footsteps.
Hearing nothing, Latrell hurried through a?oor-to-ceiling crevasse that split the first two chambers, the rock cool and moist, easily picking out more footprints on the?oor of the second room with his?ashlight. This room, slightly larger than the first, was a humpbacked oval wide enough for a large table but with a ceiling low enough that even he had to stoop. The opening to the main chamber was a long, shoulder-width vertical cut rising from the base of the opposite wall.
Latrell waited again, pressing against the edge of the opening, listening for any sound that didn’t belong, and then, comforted by the silence, he pushed through the opening and into his private cathedral. The ceiling was twenty feet above the?oor, the walls sloping outward to the edges of a wide basin with jagged alcoves cut into the limestone face. An underground lake lapped at a rock beach, its far shore beyond the reach of Latrell’s? ashlight.
He stood on the outer edge, cutting through the darkness with his?ashlight. The cave was empty, save for him.
Latrell didn’t stop to marvel at the limestone formations dripping from the ceiling like melted wax. He didn’t stop to light the candles he had left hidden on ledges along the wall. He didn’t look for the occasional salamander that crawled out of the ink-black water to lounge on the rocks.
He went straight to the deepest recess of the cave, his most private space, where behind a small barricade of rocks he kept the photograph Johnny McDonald had taken of him and his mother in front of the house when he was fifteen. There, the rocks had been scattered, kicked to the far corners. The photograph was gone. His breath was coming in gasps, his belly churning.
He checked his other hiding place, an alcove Latrell could only reach by climbing ten feet above the?oor and holding tight to natural footholds cut into the rock face. That’s where he kept his gun and night-vision goggles. They were gone, too. He cocked his head toward the cavern roof, certain that he heard laughter deep in the darkness. He dropped to the?oor, spotlighting the ceiling with his?ashlight, the beam bouncing back at him from the empty shadows.
Latrell lit every candle, painting?ickering images on the limestone canvas, kicking small rocks out of his path, hurtling larger ones into the shallows of the lake. The rest of his things, the canned food, the sleeping bag, the change of clothes he kept neatly stacked and folded, were untouched.
