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 Thelma and Louise. No, this goes deeper than that. It's dangerously close to midnight. We are about to descend into utter isolation. Isolation, I might add, from which your screams will not be heard. I am the only one whom you trust completely. Are you with me so far?"
"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 Dracula. Somewhere around ten P.M., fever and Stoker's genius combined to raise the undead. Vampires whined on the wind under the eaves, scratched at the windows with bony twig fingers, hid in shadows behind the piano and at the end of the hall. To put even a foot from her father's chair was to court disaster. There was but one way to exorcize her febrile demons. Knowing she committed the unthinkable, Anna had thrown the hardbound book into the fire and watched until even the cardboard curled in, completing the black rose-petal ruin of pages.
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?"
Curt went first, giving Anna time to weep the dirt from her eyes. After he called clear of the ladder, she followed. Standing on the second of the rungs welded inside the culvert, she had to use all her strength to force the trapdoor down against the gale. A muffled clang and sudden absolute peace let her know she'd succeeded.
Careful not to think more than was necessary, she hurried down the pipe and crawled out the dirt tunnel into the cave. Curt waited in the wide corridor that had once before ushered her into Lechuguilla. Corkscrewing away in the shadowed and toothy way of limestone passages, it was surprisingly comforting. For the first time she felt a glimmer of the passion that had cavers crawling into holes since the beginning of time. A fortress sense of safety surrounded her. The knowledge that bombs could fall, stock markets crash, and hemlines go up again, and none of it could touch her. Not in this world. Holding her breath, she waited for the familiar bite of claustrophobia to gnaw away this tenuous truce. It never came, and she breathed out her relief. Maybe she was cured. Chalk up a victory for aversion therapy. She made a mental note to tell Molly when next they talked.
Swept along by Holden Tillman's grace and expertise, Anna had made the trip from Old Misery Pit to Tinker's Hell in just over six hours. Curt was not so lithe, and neither she nor he so sublimely confident. A steady and careful trudge brought them to the rift in four hours. The traverse that had raised Anna's blood pressure the first time brought her close to a heart attack the second. When Curt finally dragged her into the constricting coils of the Wormhole, she was almost relieved. To the list of classic choices-rock and a hard place, devil and the deep blue sea-she added abyss and wormhole.
Minutes after dawn in a world that grew increasingly unimaginable with each slithered mile, they were at the egress from the Distributor Cap by the exit that would take them down the newly fallen rock and into Katie's Pigtail. There was just room in the opening for the two of them to sit side by side, their feet dangling over the lip, like children sitting on a tailgate.
After six hours' hard travel without a night's sleep to bolster her, Anna was tired. Muscles quivered on bones that felt brittle and old. In dire need of refueling, she spooned cold beans into her mouth from a foam cup. Curt drank noisily, his elbow jostling her each time he hoisted his water bottle. Close quarters foment love or war. Anna was unsure which way she was going to-fall. "Nudge me one more time and you're meat for cave crickets," she said before it came to a decision.
"You're little. You don't need any space," Curt returned. "Airplanes, ironing boards, shower stalls-all made for Munchkins. I've got to be somewhere."
Several suggestions came to mind, but Anna left them unvoiced.
True to the tradition of light leaches, Curt had turned his headlamp off to preserve batteries. Anna's burned a lonely hole in the darkness of the Pigtail. Below them, a fifty-foot slope of powdery silt and rock spread in an apron filling the Pigtail to the bridge from which Holden had called his orders. Tracks from their exodus and the subsequent extrication of Frieda's body were perfect, ageless in the soft soil. This internal hillside remained unstable. Another rock slide poised to tumble down at the least provocation. Untried by the vicissitudes of the surface, much of the underground teetered on this edge for eons, awaiting that first tip of the scales: an earthquake, the flicked wing of a lost bat, the footfall of an unwary caver.
"Would you think less of me if I pretty much said, 'you're on your own,' and went home?" Curt asked. Another drink, another bump of the elbow against Anna's sweaty shoulder.
"Oh, yeah," she said. "Absolutely. Left alone and helpless I would naturally have to accompany you out and blacken your name on ladies' room walls forever after. Are you going to back out?" she asked hopefully.
"Not now."
"Damn."
The light from her helmet had dimmed to a myopic eye, a dull yellow-brown iris around a darker center. With the movement of her head the watery orb wandered across the rockfall. "'S'pose she's under there?"
"Could be."
"Want to dig?"
"We'd be digging for days."
"Days," Anna agreed. The bottom of the slide, where one might reasonably expect Sondra's body to have been carried by multitudinous tons of loosed soil, was bulldozer and backhoe country. Two people with small folding shovels could dig till retirement and not find a thing.
"Not Zeddie?" Curt said.
"I don't think so. Maybe Peter. Zeddie didn't know Sondra was going for the jugular over the divorce issue. Peter did. Besides, Zeddie didn't have much of a motive. Neither money nor marriage rings her chimes."
"She's young," Curt said. "Give her a few years. They will."
"Too true." Anna remembered her aunt Peg telling her when she was in college, "Of course you're not conservative. You have nothing to conserve." Zeddie was still at an age at which "security" and "tedium" were synonyms.
"If you tell me about Zeddie and Frieda, I'll go down first," Curt offered.
Anna followed his gaze over the delicately balanced hill of loam. "I have to go first," she said. "I'm lighter."
"And I can dig faster."
"Good point." Anna didn't relish the image, but it was good to know he'd be standing by with a shovel. "Five more minutes." Screwing her courage to the sticking place, she switched off her headlamp to save the batteries. Total darkness closed around them. She touched Curt's knee, then the cool stone in the passage beside her to reassure herself that space had not vanished with light. Curt scooted closer, brushing her shoulder with his, letting her know she wasn't alone. Anna appreciated it. Fear of the dark had never been a problem for her. Since beginning her reluctant caving career, she understood why. She'd never been in the dark. Night was a kindly living entity. Darkness was not. Darkness was an invitation to the bottom dwellers of the id to come out and play.
"Frieda and Zeddie," she said, her voice sounding odd in her ears, as if the going of the light had altered the acoustics of Katie's Pigtail. Or those of her own skull. Resisting an impulse to feel her cranial bones to see if they had shifted, she went on. "Frieda's mom told me the story. It's Zeddie's secret to share or to keep, not mine."
Curt didn't say anything. Without light, not only space was rendered a bizarre and changeable entity, so was time. A blunt-edged clod of it tumbled by to a ticking in Anna's head.
"Strictly entre nous?" she said when a brief struggle between ethics and temptation had concluded.
"Oui, oui," Curt replied. "Sub rosa and all that good stuff."
Anna laughed. The noise rebounded from unseen walls, frightening her. Returning to a murmur, she told Curt the story Dottie Dierkz had related over the phone.
"Short and sad," she said, and in her blindness felt as if she spoke only to herself. "Zeddie was a sophomore in high school. Her sister was home from college on spring break. She and Frieda took Zeddie climbing with a group of other college kids up to some rocks on the Yellow River, north of Minneapolis. There was ice. There was beer. There was a lot of general horsing around. Zeddie was belaying her sister. The anchor didn't hold. Zeddie wasn't strong enough. Her sister fell sixty-five feet and broke her back and neck. Eight days later they pulled the plug on the life-support machines, and she died."
A moment passed, then Curt said, "Like I'd dine out on that story."
Drowning in cave ink, Anna nodded.
"No wonder she went ballistic when you so rudely brought the subject up."
"I said maybe Frieda had died like her sister. I meant killed for revenge. Zeddie must have thought I was suggesting she'd screwed up."
"She was always anal retentive about rigging."
"Nobody was going to die on her watch again."
"Maybe that's why Zeddie got so strong," Curt suggested. "The woman is an ox."
A tremor took Anna as she saw herself, too weak to hold on, dropping Molly half a hundred feet to shatter on icy river rocks.
Time for the monsters to scuttle back under their stones. She flicked the button and turned on her lamp. A pool of light no bigger than a Frisbee and the color of mud feebly illuminated their boots.
"Why do people bury their dead?" Anna growled. "It's redundant." She pulled her helmet off and turned the switch, extinguishing the pathetic beam. Fresh batteries were in her sidepack and a Maglite was Velcroed in a canvas pocket on her belt. Before she could free it, a thin ululating wail stopped her hand. Caught in the Never-Never Land of Lechuguilla's night, the sound was directionless, without substance, a frail lament of the cave. Anna hadn't heard its like before: the keening of a child lost to hope, a meager, broken, madhouse moan. Prickling spread up her scalp as the vestiges of primordial muscles tried to raise the hackles on her neck.
"Did you hear that?" she whispered.
"No. God, no. And I never want to hear it again," Curt breathed, a voiceless warmth in her ear. Fear shook through his words. Anna's own ratcheted up a notch. She clung to his arm, Becky to his Tom Sawyer, listening for Indian Joe.
"Wind?" she managed.
"No."
"Kelly's ghost?" She was thinking of the obnoxious grandstanding of the man swearing he heard Frieda calling from beyond the grave.
"Get a grip," Curt hissed. Veiled by a testosterone version of the heebie-jeebies, his irritation failed to bolster her courage.
"Light!" Anna fumbled out her flashlight, felt it tip from her fingers to fall away soundlessly. "Fuck. Light!" she demanded.
Curt sat too still. She wanted to pound him. Fractured visions from movies her mother had told her not to watch flickered through her brain. "It" had gotten him. She sat next to a headless corpse. Possessed by an evil spirit, even now he lifted his hands to close around her throat.
Anna punched him.
"Doggone it, Anna, I'm trying to find that little switch thing."
Relief tugged a giggle from her throat. A thin heartless wail trailed on after her laughter stopped. Adrenaline worked its way to her bowels. The phrase "having the shit scared out of you" took on a sudden and graphic interpretation.
Curt's headlamp came on, pushing the cave back where it belonged. With the return of the sense of sight, the chilling cry seemed an unreal memory. Panic subsided, and thought resurfaced; still, every cell in Anna's body quivered.
At their feet the Pigtail yawned. The long rift looked bottomless in the imperfect light. Curtains of stone, rounded and draping from ages of gentle erosion, filled the chamber with theatrical shadows, a stage where the most impossible fantasies were rendered credible.
"You did hear it?" Anna begged. There was something about the bend and waver of the sinuous limestone walls that brought back memories of acid nights and flashback days. She needed reality ratified.
"I heard. Let's get out of here."
A good idea. A great idea. Probably the best idea Anna had heard in weeks.
"We can't," she said finally.
"Why not?"
"We're grown-ups."
"Now you tell me."