BLIND DESENT

by Nevada Barr

  "You said 'It wasn't an accident.' Was that part of a dream?" Anna kept her voice intentionally casual. What she knew about head wounds would fit in chapter twelve of an EMT manual. A chapter she hadn't read in a while. It just made sense not to fever an already traumatized brain with unnecessary fears.

  "Did I?" Frieda asked. Anna waited, letting her work things through at her own speed. "Shit," Frieda said after a time. "Everything is like those stupid dreams. Piecemeal. Broken film."

  "It's okay," Anna said.

  "I remember all of us splitting up to follow a handful of leads. I remember going down a crack in the breakdown on the cavern floor. Maybe I heard something?"

  Anna kept quiet. Anything she suggested would only add to Frieda's confusion.

  "I must have been looking up." Frieda fingered the bruise on her temple. "Shit," she said again. "Maybe I saw something. I think I saw something. Somebody's hand. That might have been what I meant. I remember I saw a hand above me on a big fucking rock. Get thee behind me, Hodags."

  Anna thought Frieda had slipped back into her dream world, then remembered Hodags, like their German cousins, the Kobold, were spirits that didn't take kindly to foul language. Frieda was metaphorically throwing salt over her shoulder, knocking on wood.

  "Did you see the hand before the rock hit you in the head or after?" Anna asked. The hand could have belonged to Zeddie, lifting the stone from Frieda's shoulder.

  "I don't know."

  Anna could hear the weariness in her voice. She didn't want to overtire her. One more question, she promised herself, then she'd stop. "Was it a man's hand or a woman's?"

  "Gloved," Frieda replied with certainty. "Damn."

  "Don't push," Anna said. "It'll come back."

  "You won't go away, will you?" Frieda asked. Both women heard the fear in her voice. Frieda didn't approve of it. "No big deal," she said. "It's probably all bullshit. Scrambled brains."

  "Probably," Anna said, helping her save face. "But I've got to stick close anyway."

  "Why?" Frieda sounded stubborn.

  "So nobody will put me to work."

  Frieda tried to laugh, but it came out as a moan.

  "Hey, is that Frieda talking?" Sondra McCarty was five yards off, pulling her lean frame up onto a rock. "Oscar said to come back and see if you needed relieving or anything."

  If someone wanted Frieda dead, then comatose was surely the next best thing. Till Anna knew more, Frieda would be safer with the status quo. "No, just muttering. She's still delirious." Anna found Frieda's hand in the darkness and squeezed it. "Delirious," she repeated, and felt an answering pressure. Anna knew the ruse would not be foolproof. They could lie to Sondra and the others, but she was going to have to take Peter McCarty into her confidence. Frieda needed something for the pain. This far from the hospital, shock could kill her as surely as the most determined assassin.

  Anna wanted Frieda to pretend she remembered nothing, but quoting "in for a penny in for a pound" as her rationale, Frieda opted to tell Peter everything. Anna didn't put up an argument. For her own peace of mind, Frieda needed to trust her doctor. McCarty agreed to go along with the lie that she was still delirious—not because he deemed it necessary but because Frieda became upset when it looked as if he wouldn't. He seemed more annoyed than alarmed by the disembodied glove on the rock. Anna couldn't remember hearing a theory so thoroughly pooh-poohed since she'd told her sister, Molly, Jimmy Newton's idea that Dad and Santa were one and the same.

  McCarty laughed, shrugged, did everything short of actually saying "pshaw." The fact that he did it with humor and a thick gob of charm didn't let him off the hook. He put Anna's hackles up. If she'd had a tail, by the end of the performance it would have been lashing. She kept her misgivings to herself. There were two possibilities: the doctor had a reason for wanting Frieda to think it was all a dream, or it actually was all a dream and, knowing a whole hell of a lot more about head injuries than Anna ever would, he had chosen this method of allaying his patient's fears.

  However unsatisfying to the ego, Anna hoped it was the latter. Still, she watched him closely as he gave Frieda a shot for pain. Hovering, a suspicious and sweating guardian angel, Anna realized if McCarty wanted Frieda dead he could easily have killed her in the hours before Oscar, Holden, and she had arrived.

  Unless he didn't think she'd wake up.

  Unless he didn't think she'd remember if she did wake up.

  Remember what? An attempt on her life? Surely there would have been a reason for attempted murder. Hope she would have forgotten that reason? Not likely, not unless that reason had occurred moments before the rock fell, and even then traumatic amnesia wasn't something anyone would count on, especially not a doctor of medicine. In a heretofore undiscovered crack in the earth there was no secret Frieda could stumble on, and it was unlikely, though not impossible, she'd overheard anything compromising. Peter McCarty's too hearty skepticism was making more and more sense.

  The doctor left. Anna listened till the sound of his going was gone. "Frieda, are you awake?" she whispered.

  "Hard to tell," came the reply.

  "Do you have any idea why somebody would want to push a rock on you?"

  "No reason. I'm a secretary, for Chrissake."

  Anna wasn't sure being a secretary was as harmless as Frieda thought, but she understood the thrust of the comment. And it was unlikely any NPS secrets—as if a bureaucracy the size of the Park Service could actually keep a secret—from Mesa Verde, Colorado, would get her killed this deep in New Mexico. In anything but James Bond stuff, the power of secrets tended to have only local jurisdiction.

  "How about personal animosities," Anna pushed. "Somebody on the survey team?"

  "No way. I'm a frigging saint. Oops. Make my apologies."

  Frieda was succumbing to the medication, and Anna had to quit badgering her. It was her opinion that "frigging" would be acceptable to even the most persnickety spirits; still, on Frieda's behalf, she said, "Sorry, little Hodags. She's not herself at the moment."

  6

  If two people know a secret, it is no longer a secret. On long car trips Anna and her sister used to amuse themselves by planning the perfect murder. The catch was always that you couldn't tell anyone, not a soul. And where's the fun in doing anything perfectly if no one else knows about it?

  Oscar was the first to pay his respects. McCarty, he said, felt duty bound to tell him and Holden of the change in the patient's condition. His tone left no doubt that he felt Anna had been remiss, as indeed she had. Extenuating circumstances, she told herself as she squirmed under his reproachful stare.

  In the way of runaway secrets, the tale spread without any traceable source—each person told one other, someone overheard, someone deduced. Within an amazingly short period of time, Frieda's lucidity went from secret to news.

  As the Stokes was moved up the incline, cavers greeted her, welcomed her back to the world of the living. Never comfortable with subterfuge, Dierkz dropped the pretense and answered as best the pain medication allowed until a squat clean-shaven caver from the outside, boasting EMT status, as if EMTs weren't a dime a dozen in this crew, got so officious Frieda became anxious. Then Holden asked the rescuers to dispense with their good cheer and let her get what rest she could, given she was being trundled up a steep slope.

  For reasons of his own, which were possibly sinister but more likely intended to save Frieda from embarrassment, Peter McCarty had left the gloved hand and the possible murder attempt out of his report.

  Anna had no idea if this boded good or ill. If someone wanted Frieda dead, perhaps not knowing she was aware of the attack would stay their hand. Then again, maybe if everyone knew, it would discourage a second attempt. The whole thing was too much for Anna's beleaguered mind; the ravings of a head injury patient and the paranoia of an admitted claustrophobe weren't much of a basis for a meaningful dialogue with reality.

  Shelving these vague possibilities, she put her back into carrying Frieda ho
me. With each step taken, each rock climbed, they were that much closer to getting out. Left to herself, she knew she would set an underland speed record from Tinker's to the surface, but even the creeping gait of their human caterpillar was heartening.

  The passage out of Tinker's closed down so tightly a person couldn't walk upright. It narrowed until shoulders and hips brushed the sides. Well back on the balcony, between the Stokes and the cavers derigging the first haul, Anna felt fear rise in a freezing tide. To hold it at bay, she busied herself checking every knot, buckle, and hook on the Stokes. The stretcher couldn't be rigged and hauled through the passage. Given the horizontal as well as vertical twists and turns, it couldn't be passed from hand to hand. At every step of the way it would require lifting over rockfall, easing across crevices, working under projections of limestone. The stoop-walk in front of them would be impossible to rig; consequently Anna assumed Holden would be a while figuring out the logistics. She planned to use that time to compose herself for an interminable incarceration in a very small space.

  "Everybody listen up," Holden said, and she felt an icy poke in her innards followed by an irrational anger. Tillman had already worked out the carry. Did the man never sleep?

  The cavers, most of whom were crowded onto the balcony or perched like colorful crows on rocks nearby, fell quiet. Those who weren't actively engaged in derigging had their headlamps switched off. Holden moved the beam of his light from one face to the next, and they appeared like actors in the spotlight, each with his own bizarre tale to tell before the curtain came down.

  Counting his sheep, Anna realized, and she was put in mind of a long ago and long forgotten Sunday school. Fleetingly, she wondered if Jesus of Wherever counted his apostles with the same half-loving, half-annoyed, totally concerned look, reading people for fatigue, injury, fear—any weakness that could harm them or the cause.

  "This passage is one hundred sixty-two feet long. There are only two rooms big enough to stand up in, and there're not many flat enough to set the Stokes down. What we're going to do is turtle it." Judging by the intrigued looks that flickered from the darkness, "turtling" wasn't a classic maneuver culled from the most recent edition of the Manual of U.S. Cave Rescue Techniques.

  Deferring often to Frieda to make sure she knew that she was part of her own rescue and not just one hundred forty pounds of packaged meat, Holden talked them through the next leg of the journey. Turtling was evidently a process he'd learned from his predecessor at the BLM. Like many things that worked, it wasn't in the pages of any how-to book. Though to give credit where credit was due, the few books on cave rescue Anna had looked at agreed that the most important piece of equipment in an underground rescue is the rescuer's brain.

  One by one Holden sent them into the passage. Half a body length apart, they were to get on hands and knees and pass the Stokes along their backs, a shoulder-wrenching premise, but workable. When Frieda reached the head of the line, the trailing cavers would close ranks like an inchworm taking up its inch. The litter would be pushed to the last two backs, the leading fourteen would spread out farther up the passage, and Frieda would recommence travel over the soft shells of Holden's turtles.

  Of necessity, Anna would be separated from her patient. She tried to work up a good case of anxiety over that, but at the moment, she really didn't care. She was the third turtle sent in. Dr. McCarty and his wife were in front of her, Curt Schatz directly behind. Due to the congestion and the knowledge that large chunks of flesh and bone walled her in fore and aft, the passage felt much tighter than it had when she'd come through eight hours before.

  Eight hours. Anna marveled at the number. On a good night she could sleep that long. In Lechuguilla it seemed a lifetime.

  To have something to think about other than the fact that the walls were going to close in, she wondered if her hair would have turned snow-white by the time she reached daylight, as was reported in old ghost stories. Not that it had that far to go. Since Cumberland Island, when she'd hacked it off short, the gray had become more evident, streaking both temples in the timeless fashion of the Bride of Frankenstein.

  Lechuguilla had been formed in a rather peculiar manner. It hadn't been carved out by underground rivers as many eastern caves had been. Surface water percolating downward had not dissolved the limestone as Anna once thought. Deep in the petroleum-rich land beneath New Mexico, hydrogen sulphide waters welled up to mix with the fresh water and oxygen at the water table, creating sulphuric acid. The acid ate away the stone. The result was a cave that was formed without the sobering influence of gravity. Corrosive acid burned along cracks and fissures, chewed away the softer places, and created intricate mazes, deep pits, shafts, and crevices that grew away from one another in a dizzying manner.

  The passage Anna and her fellow turtles traversed exhibited this lack of respect for rhyme and reason. In the skittering glow of her headlamp it resembled a seascape rolled in on itself. Stones were pale gray and pitted all over with holes of varying sizes, from the merest pinprick to sockets she could have stored a bowling ball in had she been a bowling ball kind of girl. Nothing had been worn smooth. Edges retained the razor sharpness they'd been honed to in their geological youth, some hundreds of thousands of years before. Rocks as capricious as clouds lowered down from the ceiling. Sharp-edged scythes, rude fingers poked from all directions, forcing her to one side then the other, pushing out at waist level in a dragon's head daring her to climb over or squeeze beneath. The floor rolled and buckled, spewing up till Anna skittered over on belly and elbows, dropping away in cracks she chose not to consider the depth of. All melded seamlessly together. The effect was exhausting, disorienting. Space-time relations taken for granted aboveground ceased to exist. In the roiling rock-filled chaos, distance couldn't be measured in feet or miles. Minutes and hours tangled until she felt as stoned as she had a hundred fifty feet below the surface of Lake Superior, suffering from nitrogen narcosis.

  "Nice butt."

  Curt Schatz's flat drawl filtered through from behind her. His tone was devoid of lasciviousness, malice, or condescension. She'd never heard the words without one or all of these accouterments. Clearly she'd misheard. She stopped and turned, bending down to push her helmet under a curtain of limestone. "Pardon?" she murmured politely.

  "Nice butt," Curt repeated. "I couldn't help but notice. Since I started caving I've become something of an expert. I've followed some of the finest butts in the business. Yours is up there. Better than Peter McCarty's. But don't tell him I said so. He prides himself on that sort of thing." He smiled showing small white teeth, perfectly even. In a fairy-tale princess, they might have been described as pearls. Peeking out from his thick beard they lent him the rakish charm of a wolf pup.

  Anna laughed. "Better than Dr. McCarty's?"

  "Yup," Schatz said. "And I know Pete's butt like the face of my own mother."

  Anna returned to the business of wending her way through New Mexico's lower intestine, but she felt cheered. No more airspace presented itself. The tonnage between her and the sky remained unchanged. Yet the anxiety squeezing the blood from her veins was momentarily lessened. Where there was humor there was a fighting chance of remaining sane.

  Such were the isolating influences of Lechuguilla's topography: a turn in a passage, a change in elevation, an upthrust of formations, and all light and sound was cut off. Smaller, more agile, Anna left Curt and was once again as alone as if the earth had buried each of them in their own personal grave.

  Dr. McCarty and Sondra were on the far side of two pincers of rock coming together under a wall of calcite drapery that folded down like velvet curtains to within sixteen inches of the bottom of the passage. Anna recognized the formation as the place she was to stop. The crawl was too tight to pass through except one at a time, but the floor beneath was uncharacteristically flat. Here she was to wait for Frieda to be brought across the backs of her fellows. Anna and Curt would set the Stokes onto the floor and feed it through to the McCartys. T
hey would move it far enough up the passage that the cavers could congregate on the far side of the crawl and the mechanism of the turtle ferry would be started up again.

  Anna sat down, her fanny pleased with the smooth flooring, her body pleased with a rest. Sweat poured down the sides of her face, burned her eyes, and ran in a small river between her breasts. Mixing with the ubiquitous dirt, it formed a streaked layer of mud over skin and clothes. She pulled her helmet off and scratched at tickles creeping through her hair. No doubt this left her locks standing Medusa-like in snaky ire, but she could not have cared less. On some primitive level she was beginning to enjoy being dirty, to see each layer of crud as a testament to her undaunted perseverance. Maybe she'd turn into a caver yet. She switched off her headlamp to test out the idea.

  With the dousing of the light she became aware of a faint play of gold from beyond the crawl space: the McCartys. It was a comfort, and she watched it come and go, wishing Professor Schatz would hurry up. Even discussing the nether parts of Peter's anatomy was better than sitting alone with only her thoughts for company. A minute more passed in this lonely internment before she flicked her lamp back on and shone it down the way she had come. No sign of life. Perhaps Curt had stopped to wait for the turtle in his wake. Zeddie Dillard, Anna remembered.

  Lamp off again, she sat a few minutes more, drank water, and tried not to think about anything. Without action it proved an impossible task, and she decided to belly down and investigate the crawl so she could better prepare Frieda for the experience when the litter arrived. The space allowed for a lizard-like creep using elbows and knees but little else. Trusting to the McCartys' light, Anna left her hard hat and lamp behind. From the forced march in, she knew the crawl wasn't long—maybe eleven feet—then it opened into a small chamber, one of the few places in the tunnel large enough that two or three people could stand upright with some degree of comfort.