“What is it?” Erin asked. “What kind of mine?”
“Most of what you find in Tennessee ain’t worth spit,” Ware told her, and he spat on the rock floor in front of them to emphasize his point. “Semi-precious quartz, copper, bitumen. You can cart it out of here your whole life and not make enough to keep body and soul together. But every now and then, you find something else. You won’t find diamonds or sapphires in here, like in South Carolina. But you can find gold.”
“Gold?” Erin stared at one of the darker striations. “Is that what that is?”
“Nah. The gold is deeper down. There’s a whole little world down here. You could walk through these passages your whole life and not find your way out. This system probably runs under half of Tennessee.”
Erin felt the walls closing around her again. She could picture the labyrinthine tunnels he described. She’d seen them before. She could have died down there, and maybe she still would.
“I’ve seen your cave,” Erin moaned. “Please let me go now.”
Ware shook his head at her. “Don’t you have any spirit of adventure? Even that stupid girl at least took some interest in seeing what was down here.”
“Bella?” Erin croaked. “Did you bring her down here? What did you do with her? Where is she?”
“Do you want me to take you to see her?”
Erin held both hands over her stomach. “No! Yes. I don’t want to see her if she’s dead. Did you kill her?”
“I’ve never killed a thing intentionally in my life.” He paused for her reaction. “Can you believe that? Living out here in the wilderness, and I never once shot a deer. Not even a rabbit or a thieving raccoon. I’ll tell you, my pappy wasn’t too impressed with me. What’s wrong with a boy who doesn’t want to go out hunting or fishing? Back then, it was a matter of life and death. There wasn’t no grocery store where you could just go pick up whatever you needed. You ate what you got for yourself, and sometimes one deer was all that stood between you and starvation.”
“That must have been very hard.”
“Pappy whipped the hide offa me, trying to get me to give up my sissy ideas and help provide for the family. But that just convinced me all the more that I didn’t want anything to do with causing another creature pain. He never did break me, but he did his darnedest.” Ware’s voice softened. “He did at that.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds awful.” Erin ventured a glance at him. “I’ve had a lot of different parents, and some of them… they think if they hurt you bad enough… I don’t know if they really think you’ll change, or if it just makes them feel better.” She shook her head. She tried to see the boy this old man had once been. The little boy who had not wanted to hurt any living thing and was beaten mercilessly by a father who felt that he had to if they were going to survive. “I’m sorry he was like that.”
Ware gazed back at her, his eyes far away. “I found these caves way back then. Looking for somewhere to shelter. Somewhere I could sleep and be safe. My pirate grotto to run away to, when things got too rough at home.”
Minutes of silence ticked by.
“Can you show me where Bella is?” Erin asked.
“You’re going to have to go farther.”
“Okay. I’ll do my best.”
“Don’t know how long it will be before your friends get reinforcements. They’re not going to stay above ground forever.”
“I can talk to Terry. We can explain…”
“Nothing to explain. He already knows the lay of the land. He’s got a job to do.”
Erin didn’t know what was going to happen. It wasn’t going to be good. She didn’t want another case to end with more bodies than there were when she started investigating it. Too many lives had been lost already.
“Where’s Bella?”
Ware escorted her through the tunnels. She tried to trust that he knew where it was safe and where the dangerous places were. She had to trust that he wasn’t just going to push her off of a ledge or let her walk out into nothingness. The flashlight wasn’t strong enough for her to be confident of her footing.
Everything he had told her could have been a lie. Some people lied compulsively. Without even knowing why, they told story after story just plucked from the air.
For all she knew, he could be a mass murderer. And still she felt sorry for him.
The cave system had been getting cooler and cooler the farther they went into it. Erin was past goosebumps into full-blown shivering. Ware was dressed for the cave, with a long-sleeved flannel shirt and long pants, thick and sturdy.
Then they stepped into a cave that radiated warmth. Erin’s mind jumped illogically to volcanoes and lava and the center of the earth. Had they gone so far that they had reached a source of natural heat?
But as she looked around, she saw that wasn’t the case. There was a fire. Built where there had obviously been a lot of fires before it. There was lots of white ash on the rock floor and the cave walls were coated with black soot. Up above, there was a natural chimney that drew the smoke out, so cave didn’t just fill with smoke to smother them all.
Erin saw a shape beside the fire. A full figure and mop of curly blond hair that she recognized. Erin moved forward of her own accord for the first time.
“Bella! Bella, are you okay?”
Bella stirred and looked at Erin. Her eyes were distant, and it took her a few minutes to focus in on Erin. She pushed herself up. She was tied up, but still had some freedom of movement and didn’t seem particularly aware of her situation.
“Erin?” Her voice was vague and uncertain. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you okay? Did he do anything to hurt you?”
“I’m fine.”
But there was clearly something wrong with her. Had she gotten too cold? Not been able to get the oxygen she needed? Erin took in a deep breath, but the air in the cave smelled fresh, not stale.
“They’re going to come for us,” Erin told Bella, squeezing one of her hands. “They know where we are, and they’re going to come and get us.”
“Okay,” Bella agreed.
“You’re not hurt?”
“No. But you are. What happened?”
“I… fell…”
Erin looked at Ware. The angry man was gone. The man who had teased and joked with Bella was gone. Even the little boy who had been beaten for refusing to hunt for the family was gone. He just seemed like an empty shell. Like a meringue egg, which, broken open, turned out to be empty.
“Why did you bring us here?”
“This is where I used to come,” Ware said, turning in a slow circle to look around the chamber. “Before I was worried about finding any gold or minerals in here. Before… when the only thing I wanted was somewhere warm and sheltered, where I was safe.”
“So this was your pirate grotto.”
“Yes,” Ware agreed tiredly. “This is where it all began.”
They were all quiet for a while. Erin strained her ears for some sign of Terry or the others. As Ware had said, sooner or later they would descend into the caves to find her and Bella. They would bring their guns. They would arrest Ware, assuming they could talk him into putting down his little cannon. If not, his pirate’s grotto would be the site of his last stand.
Erin felt like she needed to keep Ware talking, if only to cover up the sounds of their rescuers’ approach for as long as possible. To give them a way to find the shelter among all of the labyrinthine passageways. Erin would never forgive herself if something happened to one of the rescuers because they got lost in the tunnels.
“Mr. Ware…”
“Maybe you could call me Grandpa,” Ware said. “That’s what the little girl has been calling me.”
It was funny for him to call Bella little, but Erin supposed that Ware’s years gave him the right to think of her as just a tot if he wanted to. And if it meant he wouldn’t hurt them, she didn’t care what he wanted them to call him.
“Okay… Grandpa…”
“That’s nice. I don’t have any granddaughters of my own, and I always felt like I missed out because of it.”
“What happened to Grandma Prost? You buried her beside Ezekiel, didn’t you?”
He stared into the fire. “It was a long time ago, now. Sometimes it’s just best to let things be.”
“Some things need closure. The townspeople thought that it was Ezekiel. That he had gone crazy and killed her. Or that he had found her dead and buried her himself. For twenty years, people have blamed him for it.”
“He didn’t go crazy. Not until after she died.”
“So do you know what happened? Can you tell me?”
“It was that darn fence… why did he have to be so stubborn about it? Why did he have to say no? I told him I’d swap with him. Hills and trees he couldn’t do anything with for flat pasture he could use. Why would he say no to that? It was a good deal for him. He wasn’t losing anything. He would get good pasture land out of it.”
“Why did he say no?”
“Because of the cemetery… the title for this land includes the cemetery, and it includes caveats that the land can’t be developed or subdivided, so that the cemetery will always be protected. I told him I’d take care of it. I wouldn’t develop it. I wouldn’t try to move it or develop it. I just… wanted the caves.”
“Did he know that was what you wanted? And why?”
“Of course not. I would never tell him that. I learned from my Pappy to keep my mouth shut and not act like a sissy.”
“And when he said no to the land swap, you tried moving the fence line.”
“Not to where it is now. Just… a little at a time. So that he’d never know what I was doing…”
“Except he did.”
“He had eyes like an eagle. Even though I only moved it a foot, a few inches, he knew it as soon as he saw it. He knew it, and he made such a big fuss about it that everybody else knew it too.” He was silent for a time. “Martha was up here tending to the graves. She was always such a great gardener.”
She didn’t die tending the graves. Something had happened.
“When she saw me working on the fence, she guessed I wasn’t just repairing it. She came after me, screaming about the property line, that I’d better leave the fence alone and keep to my own property. She said that when Ezekiel was upset, he’d take it out on her, even though it wasn’t her he was angry with.” He swallowed. “If she’d been my wife, I would never have done anything to hurt her!”
Erin looked at Bella to see if she was taking in all that Mr. Ware said. But Bella didn’t seem to understand what was going on or being said. She dozed by the fire, giving no indication of being interested in the conversation. This was the revelation she was looking for, what she had asked Erin to find out for her, but she was too dopey to understand it.
“What happened?”
“She tried to wrestle my tools away from me. What did it matter? I could come back later. I could buy new tools. There wasn’t any point in fighting over them.”
“But you did. You didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“No. I was just reacting to her trying to take something that was mine. They wouldn’t let me have the caves. She tried to take away my tools. Threatened to call in the sheriff and have me arrested. I just wanted what was rightfully mine!”
But discovering the caves and making them his boyhood refuge didn’t make them his. He was trying to steal them, just as surely as Martha had tried to take away his tools.
“I pushed her away and she fell.” Ware shook his head bleakly.
Erin tried to picture it. What had happened? Had she hit her head? Had a heart attack?
The cave was full of paraphernalia that had built up there over the years. Things that he had brought as a boy to make it more comfortable. Precious possessions he had perhaps wanted to hide from an abusive father. Tools that he had used for mining those first years, hand tools that must have taken weeks to get results that would have been instantaneous with power tools or explosives. Ware was staring at a basket of tools. At first, they didn’t look any different from the rest of the tools littering the room. But then Erin realized it was a basket of gardening tools.
Grandma Prost had been tending to the graves. Digging and edging and using the long shears to clip the grass around the headstones. Long, sharp blades. If she fell while holding the shears or the basket of tools, she could have been badly injured. Out in the wilds, away from any help, far from hospitals and medical care, there might have been nothing Ware could do for her.
“You never meant to hurt any living thing,” Erin said softly.
“My pappy thought I was a coward. Maybe he was right. Maybe there is something wrong with my head. He said it’s only natural, taking a life to preserve your own.” He shook his head, eyes glistening. “You couldn’t expect me to tell anyone. Ezekiel would kill me. They would put me in prison. I’d never survive there. Not a… a pacifist like me.”
“It was an accident. Maybe you wouldn’t have had to go to prison.”
“Things were different those days. You don’t know what it was like. They would have killed me.”
Erin couldn’t think of what else to say.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I
t seemed like they were stuck in the cave for an eternity. It wasn’t like it had been the last time. Erin was hurt, but only superficially. She wasn’t lying alone in the dark wondering if she was going to be able to survive. She knew that Terry would come. It would take time to get reinforcements and to devise a plan, but he would come back for her. It was important not to agitate Ware. She couldn’t know what he was capable of if he got worked up. He said that Martha Prost’s death had been an accident, but that might just be how he chose to color it twenty years later.
He might be a pacifist, incapable of harming another living soul by choice, or he might be dangerous, lying to cover up a cold-blooded killing for profit. He couldn’t deny that he had a gun and that he had held it on her, threatening her. He’d grabbed her and pushed her around. He’d already made her hurt herself once, no matter how innocent he claimed to be.
The fire made Erin drowsy once the adrenaline started to seep away. She shivered at first, all of her muscles quivering, and then the shakiness was replaced by the overwhelming desire to just curl up and go to sleep. Ware withdrew into himself, not talking to her, holding the gun in his lap and staring at it. He moaned and he whispered to himself, a man who had been alone with his own company for many years.
Erin cuddled up to Bella, trying to protect her and to reassure herself that everything was okay. She closed her eyes, drifting in the suffocating warmth of the fire.
She awoke with a start, hearing them coming. In the quiet of the caves, sound carried. As stealthy as they tried to be, the men couldn’t completely mask the sounds of their footsteps and their words with each other as they coordinated the search through the caves. Erin sat up, trying to force alertness. She had to protect herself and Bella in whatever was to come. Bella was even dopier than Erin was, and she thought it more than just the warmth of the room. Maybe Ware had given her something to keep her quiet. Bella hadn’t answered the calls of the searchers, who had been at least as close as the cemetery. Maybe their voices hadn’t penetrated that far, or maybe she had heard them but been unable to answer.
“Mr. Ware!”
Erin recognized Terry’s voice. She couldn’t see him, but his sudden call made Erin jump, startled.
“I want you to put down the gun and come out with your hands behind your head.”
Ware looked up from the gun in his lap, eyes unfocused. He made no move to obey.
“Please, Grandpa,” Erin said to him. “Listen to what they say. Do what they say, and you’ll be okay.”
He looked in her direction. “Grandpa. I like that.”
“You would have made a good grandpa. It’s too bad you didn’t have any grandchildren.”
“I never even had a sweetheart,
” he said sadly. “Last in my line, and not even fit to marry.”
“Couldn’t you have found a girl like you, who respected your values?”
“A man had to be able to provide for his family. How could I have done that? I was worthless. Worse than worthless, needing to be fed by the efforts of others. Consuming but never giving anything back.”
Erin turned her head slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of Terry. Wherever he was, she couldn’t see him.
“Since you aren’t going to shoot anyone,” she said in a little louder voice, “why don’t you just put the gun down?”
“This gun has been in the family for generations. Generations of Wares who have protected their homes and killed for their families. This country was built by guns like this.” His voice was loud, as if he were trying to make it sound like he meant what he said, but it was flat and unconvincing.
“But you’ve never fired it, have you? Does it even work?”
He fiddled with the gun. Erin swallowed. Even if he hadn’t ever fired it, that didn’t mean they were safe. People got killed all the time by someone who didn’t know how to handle a gun. Weapons that weren’t supposed to be loaded and were just being handled casually. She was pretty sure that the police weren’t going to take Erin’s word for it that Ware wouldn’t shoot them, or his hostages, or himself. Erin herself couldn’t be sure that what he said was true.
“Mr. Ware,” Terry’s voice came again, loud and firm and in control of the situation. “Put the gun down on the floor in front of you.”
Ware didn’t move.
“Please, Grandpa,” Erin coaxed. “Put it down or give it to me. I’ll look after it for you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
He looked across the dimly-lit cave at her. “I never meant for that woman to die.”
Coup de Glace Page 17