To Sleep No More (A Dalton & Dalton Mystery)

by Kathleen Marks



  TO SLEEP NO MORE

  A Dalton & Dalton Mystery

  Kathleen Marks

  Kathleen Marks (https://www.kathleenmarks.com)

  ***

  Copyright 2014 Kathleen Marks

  Published by RKH Press

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission.

  To Sleep No More is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Sheri McGathy.

  ***

  For Katrina

  ***

  Chapter 1

  ALEX TOOK one more step up the gravelly surface of the extinct volcano, stopped in front of the mound of fallen trees, and took a deep breath. She held the fresh pine scent inside her as long as her lungs could keep from releasing it then breathed in again. Despite the barren emptiness that shrouded this spot of earth in the middle of the Teton Valley, the sap and oils of the green foliage that had once lived there still lingered. Like it lived of its own accord despite the hot July sun. That fit the circumstances, she supposed, since the truly extraordinary—the preternatural—elements she needed dwelt beneath its surface. And yet, why was it so? It wasn’t like preternatural life was dead.

  Dead. Alex shuddered. She shook her head against the images that flashed through her mind, but still the word crumbled inside her like an earthquake shattering a mountain into pebbles. She must not let her emotions get away from her.

  Alex set her jaw, rubbed the sweat from her right eyebrow with the back of her hand, and hoisted her metal specimen collection pack farther up on her back. Mary, her only daughter, might be dead, but that didn’t mean Alex’s determination would die with her. No matter what it cost her in time or strength or—or heart, she would find those lavatricite mushrooms in that cavern and make the one who’d kidnapped and killed her Mary pay for what he’d done.

  Ivy, Alex’s black, yellow, and orange mottled cat, wrapped herself around Alex’s booted right ankle.

  “You can walk a few more yards.” Alex didn’t expect Ivy to actually understand her; she’d observed Ivy long enough to know the cat’s preternatural capabilities did not extend to recognizing human language. And even if Ivy could understand her, she’d pretend she hadn’t. Would likely turn away from her the way she did when Rick, Alex’s estranged husband, had been around. Rick had given Ivy to Alex for her twenty-first birthday back in 1881. He’d had a pet cat just like her when he was a boy and still missed it. So when he saw Ivy, he’d hoped she could replace that emptiness in his heart as well as be a friend to Alex. Instead, Ivy ignored Rick and clung to Alex.

  And comforted me. The unexpected thought trembled through Alex’s heart the way Rick’s voice had the last time she’d seen him, and she pressed her lips into a tight frown. No matter how many times people criticized her for coddling that cat she would not let it out of her sight. Ivy would not disappear as Mary had.

  Footsteps plodded through the grass behind her. Alex turned and smiled. Vera, her boarder and a fellow preternatural scientist, crested the hill. Why Vera insisted on wearing her blue and white bloomer suit and a wide-brimmed hat rather than buckskin trousers and a bush jacket as Alex did, Alex didn’t know.

  “Just because a woman has an adventurous heart doesn’t mean she isn’t a lady,” Vera said whenever Alex questioned her on it, to which Alex would think, “Must ladylike equal impractical?”

  Vera, breathing harder than Alex was but not as hard as most fifty-year-old women would be, stopped beside Alex. “I hope I haven’t held you up.”

  “Not at all.” Alex motioned to a circle of large boulders beyond the hodgepodge of logs. Rick would have said they reminded him of Stonehenge, which he claimed had a supernatural history. Alex would have shrugged off his assumption as another one of his treasure-hunting fantasies. Why couldn’t Rick ever keep his mind on the job at hand? If he had, Mary would still be alive.

  “It’s truly a natural wonder,” Alex said.

  “It is indeed, my friend.” Vera held out the book-sized crate she’d carried with her. It had slits in the top lid. “Alistair made such a ruckus when we stepped out from under the cover of the last grove of trees that I took a few moments to check on him.”

  “I thought tarantulas liked the heat when molting,” Alex said.

  “Alistair isn’t most tarantulas.”

  Alex almost smiled. Every preternatural scientist claimed some form of sensitivity toward extraordinary plants and animals, and Vera was no exception. According to her, she could look into the eyes of a small creature and both understand its needs and recognize its inherent powers. When Vera had first found Alistair on top of a rock in the canyon close to her Southeastern Idaho home, she’d said she’d recognized he had healing abilities. Unfortunately, Vera had not yet proven Alistair’s powers, and until she did, Alex and the other scientists could not accept her claims as truth. Hence, Vera took Alistair with her everywhere she went.

  Too bad that ability hadn’t worked on Ivy. But then, Vera’s eccentricity did take the attention off Alex’s own attachment to her cat.

  Vera and Alex climbed over the logs, maneuvered through the boulders, and plodded down the rocky incline to the narrow tunnel in the center of the shallow, circular depression. Years ago, in 1861 as Alex recalled, an explorer named David Webber had announced the opening was the entrance to what he’d termed the Cold Voice Caverns. He’d written in one of his many journals that he’d given the caverns that name because they were haunted.

  Which was ridiculous, of course. All anyone had to do was climb inside the caverns and they’d know the real reason. The inside temperature felt like winter, despite the fact that the hill above it once spewed lava. Hence, cold. And the few narrow openings into the system whirled the air like a voice. So the real question should have been, what else would he call it?

  Vera set her crate in the shade of a boulder. “Hand me one end of your rope. I’ll find somewhere to tie it.”

  Alex removed the coiled rope from her belt buckle. “Use the same log we did last time. It held quite well.”

  While Vera secured her end of the rope, Alex knelt next to the two-foot wide opening and dropped her end inside. Please let me find mushrooms today.

  “Ready?” Vera called.

  Alex loosened the top of her jacket from beneath her belt, forming a pouch, and cradled Ivy inside it. “Now I am. Make sure it holds.”

  She lowered her legs into the opening, wrapped them around the thick rope, and slid gloved hand over gloved hand down the shaft until she reached the first marker knot. One foot. Continuing on, she reached the second knot—two feet—and the third. Alex had only about twenty more feet to go until she reached the cavern floor, but already sweat pooled across her forehead and beneath her leather cap.

  Ivy squirmed.

  Five feet . . .

  “Meow!” Ivy stood against Alex’s chest and dug her claws into her collar bone.

  “Ow!” Alex lost her grip. She slid another three—no, five—feet more down the shaft before she finally latched onto the tenth knot. She inhaled between her teeth. “You wouldn’t be so scared if you’d use that ability of yours to glow,” she said to Ivy.

  Alex couldn’t see Ivy’s face, but she imagined Ivy staring at her as only a cat could and blinking as if she knew what Alex was talking about. Alex exhaled. If only Ivy could understand her. Maybe then she would have told her what ca
used her fur to light up.

  Alex wrapped her arms and legs tighter around the rope and climbed down a few more feet. She was almost there. Fortunately, when she’d last entered the cavern, she’d set Vera’s live animal trap well away from the bottom of the shaft so she wouldn’t accidentally step on it when she reached the ground.

  Thump!

  What was that? Furrowing her brow, Alex peered into the blackness below. She listened closer. The sound had come from the direction of the trap, but it wasn’t a snap, as though the trap had caught something. Had an animal moved it? Or maybe the noise wasn’t the trap at all. Maybe the sound had come from some other part of the cave and had echoed off the cold rock walls before it had reached her. In any case, Alex would have to tread carefully until she could see where she was walking.

  At last, Alex’s feet brushed the hard-packed earth. She pulled her miner’s candlestick from her belt and shoved its spiked end into the earthen wall. Next she pulled her candle from her jacket pocket, lit it with a lucifer, and slid it into the candlestick. Flickering light spread a few feet in every direction.

  Alex stepped toward where she had set the trap. It was in front of the tunnel she’d most recently explored. Though sharp rocks and stalactites hung from the ceiling just as she remembered them, the jagged earth felt grittier beneath her knee-high, low-healed gaiter boots. Had the ground changed since her last exploration? Or had she simply not noticed it because, one, so little sunlight filtered into the cavern that even with her candlelight, Alex could see very little of her environment, or two, because she’d heard scuttling noises throughout the tunnel system? The noises were likely only rodents or bats, but even so, while her natural senses had screamed for her to get out of there, her preternatural ones had heightened. The sounds had belonged to something else, and she really wanted to find out what that else was.

  Alex, hearing nothing more, set Ivy on the ground next to her feet. “Stay there,” she said. But she needn’t have bothered. Ivy immediately wrapped herself around Alex’s ankle.

  Alex shifted the cross-body strap holding her specimen case to a more comfortable position and again peered about the cavern. She could make out some shadows and crevices along the rock walls, but she saw no new growth. Where were those mushrooms?

  She sighed. In the Western Preternaturalists’ Journal, 1884 spring edition, Dr. Evanston had named the fungi Amonita lavatricite because he’d discovered that when scientists dried the mushrooms, ground them into a powder, and mixed them with salt, they illuminated long-laden energies and unseen substances hidden in natural elements. This allowed the viewing of handprints on bodies, “cleaned” bodily fluids, like blood splatters, on walls, and any other clues that might still exist on the clothing Mary had last worn. Dr. Evanston had surmised, though he hadn’t yet proven, that the lavatricites’ power came from the magma that flowed close to the earth’s surface as it made its way toward Yellowstone National Park.

  Alex tilted her head sideways. Was that the reason the mushrooms had to grow underground? Hmm. Perhaps that would be a good topic for her to discuss in her next article for the Journal. It might not be as important a subject as the one she would write on the lavatracites’ physical and preternatural properties, but such work would both strengthen her credentials as a scientist and add to her limited funds.

  Alex sneezed, stepped toward the second tunnel, and sneezed again. When a third sneeze didn’t come, she tapped her forefinger against her chin. The air was stale and musty, but did it also contain pollen? Pollen always made her—sneeze!

  She sniffed, brushed the back of her finger across the lower ridge of her nose, and leaned a bit farther into the darkness. If, indeed, there was pollen in this cavern, there must also be plant life. And plant life meant there must be a water source nearby. Perhaps the mushrooms were near that water. Or did the mushrooms create the pollen?

  Like a prayer for good luck, Alex touched the pink hair ribbon she’d tied and knotted around her left wrist—it had been Mary’s favorite—and tugged her thin scarf out from where she’d tucked it beneath her cotton blouse. She lifted it over her nose and mouth.

  Ivy stood on her hind legs against Alex’s shin. “Meow.”

  “Yes, we’re going in there.” Alex now stood about ten feet away from the tunnel’s opening. It wasn’t much more than four feet tall at the entrance. She hadn’t looked far inside, but a quick glance at the narrow passage between the stalactites and stalagmites indicated she might eventually have to crawl through them. There was no way she could carry a cat. Would Ivy follow her?

  Ivy sat on Alex’s feet.

  Apparently, yes. “You do realize the dark would disappear if you’d light up. You have the power. Use it.”

  Ivy’s green eyes reflected the candle’s light, but just like before, her fur remained dark.

  Alex pursed her lips. Mental note: Ivy’s fear of the dark is not connected to her preternatural power—or to my insistence that she use it. “Suit yourself,” she said.

  A screeching, metallic slide.

  Alex whirled to where she’d set the trap. In his article, Dr. Evanston had mentioned he’d seen odd-shaped excretions in these caverns but hadn’t been able to catch or locate the unfamiliar animal. Was that what she’d heard? “Looks like I should have checked the trap when we first got down here, Ivy.”

  She squinted again into the second tunnel then moved toward the trap. Shadows from the candlelight danced between the crevices of the rocks. While she was quite certain something was over there, no preternatural tingles pulsed through her sinuses, which meant the thing wasn’t a plant. But then, why would it be a plant? Plants didn’t move of their own volition—usually.

  Something—not Ivy—hissed. Another metallic sound scraped across the gravelly floor. Definitely the trap. Hopefully whatever she’d caught wasn’t hurt. If it was, no matter how dirty or disagreeable the animal might be, she’d have to take care of it. None of God’s creatures deserved to stay in a trap until they’d died of starvation or dehydration. Alex had no stomach for senseless killing. Except, perhaps, for the one who’d murdered her daughter. But that killing wouldn’t be senseless. It would be justice.

  The edge of Alex’s light hit the metal trap. Beady mouse eyes lifted to Alex’s. At least half of it was a mouse. The back half had the curled, sharp tail of a scorpion.

  Hiss!

  Alex gasped, gaped at it a second longer, and raced back to the rope. “Vera! I can hardly believe—we’ve caught something that might interest you.”

  “Plant, animal, or insect?”

  Alex sneezed. “It’s hard to say, but it’s definitely not a plant.”

  Alex couldn’t see Vera’s shadowed expression, but she heard a smile in her tone.

  “Those are the best kind,” Vera said.

  Words—a human voice?—whispered from the direction of the trap, and goose bumps trickled down Alex’s spine. The creature couldn’t talk, could it?

  She stepped closer to the trap. Ivy, glowing softly, batted at the cage, and the creature hissed again.

  Alex lunged forward. “Get away from there, Ivy!”

  Ivy batted again, but this time, when her paw hit the wire, the creature’s tail arched and shot forward. It stung Ivy.

  “Meow!” Ivy shrank back from the cage. She licked her paw. She also stopped glowing.

  Alex scooped her into her arms. “Ivy! Are you all right?”

  Ivy’s breathing turned ragged.

  Alex’s pulse pounded against her ears. She ran to the rope. “Vera! Are you sure that tarantula of yours can heal?”

  “That’s what his eyes say.”

  Ivy’s muscles relaxed against Alex’s body. Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them away. “I hope you’re right! That creature stung Ivy, and Ivy—she’s struggling to breathe!” She set Ivy inside her jacket, but she was too limp to hold herself there, so Alex wrapped one arm around her and grabbed hold of the rope. She pulled herself upward, but her grip slipped before her
toes left the ground. “I can’t carry Ivy and climb at the same time,” she called up the shaft.

  “Stay there, my friend.”

  Suddenly, Vera’s floppy hat dropped down the shaft and plunked to the ground. “Tie the rope around it, and set Ivy inside. I’ll pull her up.”

  “Bless you.” Alex blinked hard. She absolutely would not cry.

  “Something down there is upset,” Vera said. “The vibrations coming out of that cavern feel like thunder.”

  “If it’s that creature that poisoned Ivy, it’ll have to stay upset.” Alex set Ivy in the hat and wound the rope around it. “Pull!”

  The rope tightened, and the hat with Ivy nestled inside moved upward.

  Alex folded her arms against her chest. Please be all right. I can’t bear another loss.

  “I’ve got her!” Vera said. “And now—Alistair’s on top of her. Incredible! You should see this, Alex. He ran right to Ivy’s paw and bit it.”

  Alex cringed. She glared into the darkness toward the mouse-scorpion. A big, hairy spider biting her pet was not the most comforting image. “Ivy better live,” she spat.

  The trap briefly scraped across the ground.

  Alex inhaled. Her breath tasted like damp dirt. Had that creature understood her? “How is Ivy?” Alex called.

  “She’s still breathing.”

  Alex moved toward the trap until she could see it again. The creature had already eaten the grain Alex had left as bait when she’d set the trap, but Alex didn’t care. Every inch of her wanted to leave that creature right where it was. Leave it to die. But even as she thought those words, something inside her recoiled. She must not feel, only think. That creature, if it had characteristics similar to natural mice or scorpions, was a living being that had acted only out of instinct. She had to do what she could to help it. But how could she do so without getting stung?

  “Is Ivy still all right?” Alex called.

  “She’s still breathing,” Vera dropped the rope back into the shaft. “What about that animal?”

  “The same. Actually, Vera, when Ivy stabilizes, I need you to find me a long, sturdy stick.”

  “The creature is not too big for your specimen case, I take it.”

  “No.” Alex jumped up, grabbed the rope, and tucked her knees toward her chest. Hopefully she was high enough off the ground. Letting that creature loose to run free and perhaps sting her the next time she entered the cavern seemed foolhardy, but if her attempt to catch it failed and it escaped into the cavern, she needed a quick way out.

  What if there are more of them around? Alex took a deep breath. She couldn’t think about that now. Nor could she think about the mushrooms she would have to wait to look for.

  “Ivy’s breathing normally!” Vera said.

  Alex gazed longingly at the unexplored second tunnel and exhaled. “Thank the stars above.”

 

  ***