by B. T. Alive
I crossed my arms and grounded my feet, adopting an appropriate Detective Power Stance.
“Elaine,” I said.
“Elaine?” repeated everyone else, with not exactly rapturous agreement.
“Elaine’s a sweetie!” Tina said.
“Who’s Elaine?” Jamie said.
“How do you figure that?” said the sheriff.
“Easy,” I said. “Elaine and I were talking to Paris in Elaine’s store, and Elaine literally blurted, ‘ROOT CELLAR!’ I thought she said ‘ROOT SELL HER’, which made almost no sense, but Elaine covered for it, like she was all dyslexic and was saying she wanted to sell Paris coloring to touch up her roots.”
“Okay,” said the sheriff. “That’s your only evidence?”
“No!” I said. “Clue number two: where was Elaine at Classic Movie Night? Did you see her there? Did you, Tina? I sure didn’t.”
“I don’t think so,” Tina said. “But I didn’t notice everyone.”
“And even so,” said the sheriff. “That’s still incredibly circumstantial.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Because then Elaine blurted something else, just this freaking morning. Tina and Jamie, you were both there, remember? Paris got all huffy, and Elaine was like, we’re all FAMILY.”
“Oh!” Jamie said. “So that’s Elaine. Huh. She does look kind of like she could maybe be related to my mom. My mom had gray hair. I mean, similar gray hair—”
“This is not helpful,” the sheriff said. He pried out a second shelf, and more tools clanged.
“What, and all this remodeling is better?” I said. “How long has Elaine even lived here?”
Sheriff Jake frowned. “Several years. At least.”
“Ah! See! Did she grow up here? Is she a Wonder Springs native? No!”
“That’s true,” he said. “That does automatically make her a murderer.”
“Think about it,” I said, and I lowered my voice to speak only to the sheriff. “The Graves family tree is clearly a big bushy mess. Jamie and Tina are digging through all those notebooks and they still can’t figure it out. But what if Elaine did? She figures out she’s connected to Una, and that there’s only two more people between her and millions. They’re all strangers to Elaine, or whatever her real name is. All these Graves are just one big jackpot. So she makes a fake identity, she moves to Wonder Springs, and then she watches and waits and makes her plans.”
“Hmm,” said the sheriff.
“Don’t hmm. You know I’m right!” I said. “This whole plot could only have been pulled off by someone who’d had time to live here and know the details. Look at how she framed Cade! She had to know all about Classic Movie Night, and about him and me and Una, and even how he left his window open at night. And that she’d be able to use Wilson’s truck.”
“Imelda did pass along that theory you told her about the window,” he said. “It still doesn’t finger Elaine in particular.”
“Why else would she randomly blurt ROOT CELLAR? With Paris right there?” I said. “She must have been looking for something that night she was here in this house, the night she killed Una. But she forgot to search down here, or she didn’t have time, and she blurted it at Paris because she’d just remembered this cellar.”
“Or, she’s dyslexic and she was trying to make a sale,” said the sheriff. “Wasn’t she taking your course on sales?”
“Holy crud!” I said. “Even that was bogus! She knew that once she framed Cade, I might go all Holmes on her and start snooping around! She just wanted a way to try to keep me distracted!”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or she might have been impressed by your professional skills.”
“Please,” I said. “My course was way overpriced.”
“So I heard,” he muttered.
“Look, shouldn’t we at least go talk to Elaine? Or why don’t you…” I glanced back at Jamie. She and Tina were deep in the pile of notebooks, but I still dropped my voice even lower, to a near whisper. “…sniff around upstairs and see whose scent you pick up at Cade’s window? I’m telling you, I’ve got your killer. We’re done.”
“Not just yet,” said Sheriff Jake.
He reached into the space between two shelf supports, from which he’d removed the shelves on all three levels, and he tugged at one of the vertical boards on the wall. I expected a single board to yank out in his hand… but that’s not what happened.
Three boards pulled away from the wall, bolted together, like a door off its hinges. He hefted this aside.
“Whaaat?” I said. It was a long exhalation, and then I forgot to breathe in for a couple of seconds.
Because embedded in the wall was a black iron door.
With a huge metal bolt and a massive lock.
“Don’t suppose you’ve seen this before?” said Sheriff Jake, eyeing Jamie.
Jamie’s eyes were as round as ping pong balls. She made a mewling sound like, “Nuh.”
Tina rushed over. “What is it?” she said. “A safe?”
“Don’t think so,” the sheriff said.
He shook out the ancient ring of keys and tried the middle key. This time, the key squealed in the lock, and it stuck hard. The sheriff yanked to pull the lock open, but it didn’t grind out until his fourth try. Then he heaved up the wide bolt laid across the door.
“Why is it locked on this side?” I said.
But the sheriff tugged the door open with a slow, screeching swing, and I saw why.
A dark tunnel opened down into raw earth.
Chapter 38
“The mines!” Tina breathed. She was radiant with excitement. “It’s a tunnel from the old mines! I’ve been looking for these forever!”
“So, just to be clear,” I said. “It’s not normal to have a basement door that opens into a dank underground passage?” I said. “That’s not a Wonder Springs thing?”
“It is not,” said the sheriff, frowning into the darkness. He aimed his high-beam flashlight into the hole, but the tunnel only stretched about twenty feet before curving out of sight. The roof and sides and floor were all dirt, a roughly dug hole that sloped sharply down.
It might have been the downward slope that got to me. There’s something deeply counter-intuitive about climbing down into a pitch-black, unknown passage that could slip right into an abyss.
Sheriff Jake eyed me. “I’ll take those flares, please.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m coming.”
The dank air wafting from the passage smelled like rot.
“Are you two insane?” Jamie shrieked. “I have no idea where that goes, or why my aunt had that door. And what if that Elaine person comes?”
“She won’t,” the sheriff said. “She’s miles away.”
“How do you know?” Jamie said.
“He knows,” Tina said.
Jamie crept over toward us, but she barely peeked before she drew back and clutched Tina’s arm.
“Stay. Please,” she said. “For god’s sake, don’t everyone go down there and leave me here.”
Tina gave the tunnel a wistful gaze. Then she glanced at me, suppressed a sigh, and turned to Jamie. “Can I at least go down there later?” she said.
“You can live down there!” Jamie said.
“That, I would not suggest,” said Sheriff Jake. He stepped boldly into the tunnel and slipped.
His sudden jolt made us all cry out, but he caught himself on the rough wall and steadied himself without falling. Then he walked forward, with knees bent and a bit more caution.
As he walked, his light moved before him, leaving the path behind him utterly dark.
At the turn, he stopped and looked back. “Coming? I need those flares.”
I admit, the thought did cross my mind to let Tina take this one. She even wanted to go, right?
But I’d worked way too hard (not to mention lost my job) to catch this killer. If the sheriff thought he was sniffing some clue, I was there.
Besides, how often do you get to prow
l around a real abandoned mineshaft? With a lift of explorer excitement, I plunged into the dark.
You know how when you’re standing at the edge of a pool, and you’re psyching yourself out about how cold it’s going to be, and you torture yourself and torture yourself and then you finally jump in and it’s fine?
This was nothing like that.
It was a freaking pitch black tunnel going down into the bowels of the earth.
I’d never really thought about that “bowels” metaphor, but of course it popped right back into my head as we stumbled our way along a narrow, curvy, metaphorical large intestine. The first turn revealed another short stretch of tunnel and another turn, and the sheriff and I rounded that bend only to find more of the same. The ground was smooth and slick, the roof was so low that both of us had to bend, and the slope kept going down.
I looked back, expecting to see Tina waving from the portal. I’d forgotten that after that first turn, there’d be nothing behind us but shadow.
“Should I light a flare?” I said, hating the shake in my voice.
“Not yet,” said the sheriff. The passage was too small to walk side-by-side, and since he was the one with the flashlight, he stayed a few steps ahead. “No need until a fork.”
His flashlight flickered.
“Dang it,” he muttered. “Any chance you’ve got double-A batteries in that purse?”
“None that work,” I said. “Should we maybe—”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m not tracking this trail by sight.”
We shuffled along in silence. The light was fading with truly remarkable speed. It was like my first car ever, where as soon as the gas needle got below a quarter tank, you had maybe forty-five seconds before the engine stalled and stranded you in an industrial zone after midnight in Newark. Not that that ever happened.
“I have serious reservations about your Elaine theory,” the sheriff said.
“Can we just focus on not falling into a crevice?” I said.
“Una Graves was murdered on the day she changed her will,” the sheriff rumbled. “Even one day earlier, and Cade would have gotten everything.”
“So?” I said. “Elaine could have killed Cade too.”
“But we didn’t hear that will,” he said. “How do we know that the Cade will even had that clause about ‘next of kin’?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it did!”
“How would Elaine even know these kinds of details?” he said. “I don’t believe she was close to Una, or Ambrose.”
“Maybe she spied on them,” I said. “She could have bugged Ambrose’s office. It’s not that hard.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“What? What did Cade tell you?” I snapped. In the past, as Cade knew, I may or may not have had to rely on “surveillance techniques” of questionable legality.
Sheriff Jake chuckled. “Relax. Cade and I don’t talk much…” Then he raised a hand behind him, and his voice changed. “Stop.”
I froze. “What? What is it?”
“Just a fork.” He swung around the dying light, revealing that our narrow, sloppily-dug passage had opened into a wider tunnel. The walls here were smoother, like they might have been dug by real miners, but the chunky surface still hinted at hand tools.
“How old are these tunnels?” I said.
“Civil War, at least,” he said. “Maybe earlier.”
I wondered why they had been abandoned.
“Time for that flare,” he said. But first, he took a long, lingering sniff in the new tunnel, and he nodded left… which of course sloped down.
He lit a flare and set it inside the way we’d come. The light spilled out into the wider tunnel, but the flame pointed the way back to the surface.
We walked off left down the wider tunnel. At first, my anxiety eased a bit in the larger space. And the extra room meant that at least we could walk side-by-side, instead of me having to trail at his heels. I hate following.
But when I looked back, the pool of pink light from the flare was tiny and distant in the dark.
“Don’t go grabbing my hand,” said the sheriff.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re scared.” He shrugged. “I can smell it.”
I groaned. “Can you just please come out and say what your problem is? I know you’ve never liked me. You hated me from the first day I came to Wonder Springs.”
“That’s not true.”
“You literally tried to arrest me for murder!”
“That is true.”
“I know I’m not like Tina or Grandma or the other cool Merediths… my power’s fairly dicey, even anti-social. Especially compared to sniffing out criminals or freaking healing trees.”
“We all have our strengths.”
“Dude, you have never wanted me to date your son! You are clearly disappointed that I had to come along and botch things up with him inheriting from Una. I mean, I’m disappointed. Me and my stupid pressure… if it wasn’t for me, he might be set for life. He’d have millions of dollars and the orchard, which is like the only thing he really publicly honestly openly loves! And it’s all my fault!”
Sheriff Jake grunted.
“Was that agreement?” I said. “Feel free to contradict me here. I’m young, what do I know?”
He stopped walking, and he sniffed closely at a crack I hadn’t noticed. “Hold this, if you would,” he said, and he held out the handle of the flashlight. I took the light and pointed it at the wall, and the sheriff began… to dig.
He used his bare hands. I think. I mean I think they stayed hands. It was hard to tell in the dying light.
But his grunts of exertion grew guttural and strange.
I tried not to look at him, this burrowing, growling creature, and instead I focused on the task. The crack looked to be a junction with another passage, long since filled with broken rocks and dirt. The sheriff was flinging this fill aside, clearing the way, and as he worked, I glimpsed the passage that lay beyond.
We would have to crawl. Great.
“Flare,” he grunted. He grabbed back his flashlight without touching my hand, and then he dove onto his knees and crawled off into the earth.
As I lit a flare to mark our way back, my hands were shaking. I set it on the dirt, and the flame and its aura cleared a few tiny inches of the vast and dismal dark. Then I turned to face the new hole.
“Come on, Summer,” I muttered. “If he can fit, I can fit.”
It occurred to me that I might as well carry a flare in there myself. In that tight crawl, the meager light might make a difference. So I lit myself a flare, and I crawled into the hole.
But I could barely push my way forward. The craggy floor bit into my knees and hands, and the roof was so tight that it scraped my back. All I could glimpse ahead was the faint flicker of the dying flashlight, blocked by the bulk of the grunting sheriff. I tried to look behind, but… I couldn’t. There wasn’t room to turn my shoulders.
That’s when I freaked.
I was panting, trying to crawl faster and escape that death trap. But the faster I tried to crawl, the more I slipped and dug sharp pebbles into my kneecaps, and then somehow my shoulders jammed and I thought, my God I really am dead, I’m trapped and alone and I can’t even breathe…
And then I remembered. Trouble breathing. Panic attacks.
“Am I being attacked?” I groaned. “Now? Here? Come on, Malice Alice! What the hell?”
But if some malicious telempath was targeting me, she didn’t deign to reply.
“How’d you even find me down here?” I griped. “I am freaking in the bowels of the earth. I was already terrified. Oh, wait… is that how it works? Was it some kind of signal? Hello out there, universe, in case anyone’s listening, I’m feeling mild anxiety—anyone out there want to make me lose my mind?”
This wasn’t helping.
Somehow, the “signal” theory only made me more helpless. I was creating a feedback loop; the more fear I felt, the easi
er she could load me with more terror. My whole body was shaking now. I couldn’t even try to crawl.
If only I’d had Charm.
My beloved cat could always break an attack… his warm weight and his rolling purr could slow my pulse and banish panic in a moment.
But now Mr. Charm was a world away. I was going to freak out and blow a brain vessel and die down here, while the oblivious dog-man ditched me to sniff out his big clue. I wouldn’t even get a last meal.
Wait, meal? Crud! Had I even fed Charm today?
Dang it. I was running all over the place, all preoccupied with murders and trying to exonerate my quasi-boyfriend, and meanwhile, my poor faithful cat was going to starve to death! I was a terrible person! I deserved to die!
No, hold on. Charm and I didn’t live in an apartment anymore. Now Mr. Charm could pad downstairs and beg food off Vladik. The chef might act all tough and huge and Russian, but he was a total sucker for Mr. Charm.
Wow, I didn’t take that out often enough and think about it, the whole community thing. It had been super difficult trying to raise a cat alone. Mr. Charm and I were very, very lucky to finally have a home.
“Summer?” called Sheriff Jake.
I realized a few things.
One, the beam of the flashlight was bouncing down the passage and right into my eye.
Two, the end of the passage was about ten feet ahead, and the sheriff was crouching there, waving me forward.
Three, my pulse was totally normal. I was fine.
“Whoa,” I murmured. “I broke that attack just by thinking about Charm?”
Or did this new calm have more to do with how I’d thought?
“Summer?” the sheriff called. “I think you should see this.”
I powered through those last ten feet and burst out free into a wide, blessed space. I don’t officially remember being born, but in that moment, I had some serious deja vu. The light was too paltry to see much, but I could feel the space, vast and cavernous, and even the rustle of my movements as I stood seemed to echo out into an expanse.
“Good,” said the sheriff. “You smell much better.”
“Just so you know,” I said, “that is really weird.”
“If you’re looking for weird…” he said, and he played the dim light ahead into the dark.