by Pratt, Scott
“Mr. Barnes came to see me after the criminal case was concluded and asked me to tell my client that he had forgiven him. He was a genuinely decent man.”
“Yes,” Charlie said, “he was.”
“He called a couple of days ago and gave me very specific instructions on how and when to deliver the documents to you. He wanted them delivered by courier at precisely 11:00 a.m. this morning.”
“Did you read them?”
“Just the will. The other envelope was already sealed when he delivered it.”
“So this is legitimate? I mean, he was okay?”
“He seemed perfectly normal. As a matter of fact, he seemed… how should I put this? At peace. He was at peace.”
“Did he say anything about his son?”
“Very little.”
“Did he tell you that his son had filed a petition to have him declared mentally incapacitated and was asking for a conservatorship?”
“No.”
“If he had, what would you have thought?”
“I would have thought it ridiculous. And I’d be happy to say that under oath if it comes down to it.”
“Did he leave instructions for his funeral?”
“He did. Now that his death has been confirmed, I’ll be taking care of everything. I’ll give you the particulars once the arrangements have been made.”
A few minutes later, Charlie thanked Benton and hung up the phone. She walked out of the conference room and into Mr. Dillard’s office.
“I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” she said. “Maybe the rest of the week.”
Mr. Dillard got up and walked around his desk. He put his hands on her shoulders.
“That’s a good idea,” he said. “Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you need to talk?”
“Not right now. I just need some time to think.”
Chapter 17
CHARLIE drove home in a semi-daze, unaware of the colors, shapes and textures of the beautiful, rugged country that surrounded her. She went into her bedroom and changed clothes. She took her laptop out of her briefcase, sat down on her bed, and Googled “Prometheus.” As she read, the story came back to her. Prometheus was a mythical Titan. He’d molded the first man from clay, and in order to help his creation survive, he’d stolen fire from the gods and given it to man. But while Prometheus’ intentions were noble, Zeus, the king of the Olympians, was furious. Prometheus had given man the ability to survive, but he’d also given him the ability to destroy himself. Zeus was so enraged that he ordered Prometheus chained to a rock for eternity. Each day thereafter, a great eagle would fly down and eat his liver. Each night, the liver would regenerate.
The ability to survive, and at the same time, the ability to destroy himself. Charlie considered the irony.
Fire. So valuable, yet so dangerous.
A gift, and at the same time, a curse.
Charlie took the envelope out of the briefcase next. Jasper was out in his shop; she was alone. She read the letter a dozen times, studied the map. She’d been to Roscoe’s house many times. She’d been riding her horse on Roscoe’s property for nearly a decade. She believed she could follow the map, but she was hesitant. Zane might be there, and there could be legal complications. Since she’d represented Roscoe in the conservatorship, there was no doubt in her mind that Zane would contest the will by claiming that Charlie had a conflict of interest, that she’d somehow coerced Roscoe into leaving his property to her. Zane seemed to have plenty of money. He and his lawyers would most likely tie up the estate for years.
But the map beckoned. Roscoe’s letter had said there was something “incredibly valuable,” something that would change her life.
“I have to go,” she said aloud. “Right now.”
She walked out to the barn and saddled Sadie, an eight-year-old Palomino quarter horse that Charlie had bought when she was seventeen with the tips she earned as a waitress at Buddy’s Diner in Roan Mountain. Biscuit stood by watching, his long tail wagging like a buggy whip. He loved to accompany Charlie and Sadie on their mountain excursions. As she led Sadie out of the barn, Jasper emerged from his shop.
“What are you doin’ home so early, Peanut?” he called.
“Hearing got cancelled.”
“Where you going? It’s gonna rain like pouring piss out of a boot. I can smell it.”
Charlie looked to the southwest. The wind had freshened, and a huge bank of dark thunderheads was rolling over the mountains in the distance.
“I’m going on a treasure hunt. It looks like Biscuit wants to come along.”
Jasper laughed. “I’m partial to gold doubloons myself,” he said. “Bring me a few, would ya?”
Charlie climbed into the saddle. “I think I’ll take a ride up around Roscoe’s place,” she said. “If I’m not back by dark, sound the alarm.”
“Will do,” Jasper said. He waved and walked off toward the house.
Charlie had changed into a pair of jeans and a bright orange T-shirt with the University of Tennessee logo across the front. She’d stuck a flashlight and the map in one of the saddlebags. She clicked her tongue and Sadie took off at a trot with Biscuit trailing close behind. Her grandparents’ property, fifteen acres which she owned jointly with Jasper, abutted Roscoe’s five hundred acres just to the north. In twenty minutes, she was sitting atop Sadie on a knoll overlooking Roscoe’s house. Zane’s black Mercedes was parked in the driveway.
Charlie felt a pang of anger as she looked down at the car. Zane was probably inside rummaging through Roscoe’s belongings. She thought about riding to the house and confronting him with the will but decided against it. Confrontations would occur in the future, she was certain, but for now, she wanted to try to follow the map.
She reached down and took it out of the saddle bag. It was brittle and yellowed, obviously very old. The drawing had faded, but she could make out the words “House,” “Road,” “Tempest Creek,” “Sinkhole,” “Teardrop Island,” “Eyeball Rock,” “Oak Split By Lightning,” “Hourglass Rock,” and “Cave.” Arrows indicated the direction she should travel. She felt a twinge of excitement as she oriented the map to the property. Tempest Creek originated at the top of the mountain and wound through Roscoe’s property like a long, emerald-green snake. She knew where the giant sinkhole was.
Charlie turned Sadie southwest into the breeze and rode until she reached Tempest Creek. She turned due south and followed it through a draw for about a quarter mile. Just before a bend in the creek, she spotted the first landmark – “Eyeball Rock.” It sat atop a small bald, one that Charlie had passed before. The boulder was almond shaped, about twelve feet across, and exposed to the weather. As Charlie stared at it, she could make out what looked like a pupil at its center. She looked to her right, to the west. Down a gentle slope, about a hundred feet away, was a small island in the middle of Tempest Creek. It rose out of the creek like a turtle shell and was shaped like a teardrop. The map told her to cross at “Teardrop Isle.”
On the other side, five minutes due west of the creek, was the giant sinkhole. Charlie skirted the southern edge and began a steady climb through another stand of trees. At the top of the ridge, the creek came into view again on the other side. Charlie rode down the far side, crossed the creek again, still heading west, and came to another steep slope, this one bare, rocky and treacherous. Charlie was in unfamiliar territory now. She’d never ventured this far up the mountain. It just didn’t seem safe.
Sadie picked her way carefully to the top of the slope behind the sure-footed dog. Charlie pulled on the reins and removed the map again. She looked at it, looked ahead. The creek wound through a small valley three hundred feet below. On the other side was another rock face, massive and sheer. About ten feet above the creek, a large boulder jutted out of the mountain, this one shaped like an hourglass. Charlie’s eyes moved through the midline of the hourglass to the top of the face. Per
ched at the top, in a place where it had no business, was one of the biggest oak trees Charlie had ever seen. Its canopy was shaped oddly, like an umbrella. It had to be the “Oak Split by Lightning.” The entrance to the cave should be on the other side of the hourglass-shaped boulder. Charlie looked at her watch. She’d been riding for less than hour.
“Let’s go,” Charlie said, and Sadie began the descent through the rocks. At the bottom, just before they were to cross the creek a third time, Sadie spooked. She threw her head back, whinnied, and reared her front hooves off the ground. Charlie grabbed the saddle horn, barely managing to keep from going over backward.
“Easy, now,” she said, patting the horse on her thick neck. “Just a little ways to go.”
But Sadie refused to cross the creek. Charlie pleaded and cajoled, she even dismounted and tried leading Sadie into the water, but the horse would not budge.
“Coward,” Charlie said.
She walked Sadie fifty yards downstream to a laurel bush, tied the reins to a branch, retrieved the flashlight from one of the saddle bags, and walked back upstream with Biscuit beside her. She waded across the creek and climbed up next to the boulder. She stared, uncertain at first, but then her eyes widened.
The mouth loomed before her, a narrow ellipse about three feet wide and perhaps eight feet tall, almost entirely covered by crawling vines, inviting and repulsive at the same time. Charlie stepped to the mouth and stood there, breathing deeply, calming herself and screwing up her courage.
“You ready?” she said to Biscuit. The dog hung back; he wasn’t going in first.
She shined the beam inside. It penetrated several feet and then seemed to die out. She heard Sadie whinny. She took another couple of steps, now inside. She looked up. Slick, rock walls rose twenty feet on both sides, forming a tunnel. She looked down. No sign of animal waste, which meant, hopefully, no bears. More rock, shiny and hard, stretched out before her beneath her feet. She took a few more tentative steps. Biscuit was right behind her. The tunnel curved to her right. The blackness ahead was thick, impenetrable. She turned and looked back toward the light.
The tunnel sloped downward slightly. Ten feet inside, the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees. Ten feet farther, it dropped some more. The darkness was cool and utterly silent. Charlie stopped. She was sure she’d never experienced this kind of complete silence, complete darkness, complete stillness. The only sound was Biscuit’s panting.
“If I keep going,” she said to the dog, “I’ll know what it’s like to be dead.”
Another ten feet and she would be so far around the curve that the entrance would disappear. The thought of being unable to see the light terrified Charlie. She didn’t want to go back, but like Sadie, she didn’t want to go forward.
Don’t be a sissy. It’s just a cave. The human race started out in places just like this.
More uneasy steps. Biscuit panting. The mouth was out of sight now, leaving Charlie wrapped in a cocoon of darkness. She thought about the batteries in the flashlight. Were they fresh? If they died… she wouldn’t think about that right now. Just a little farther. The grade beneath her feet steepened downward.
Another step. Another. The dog growled.
Charlie sensed something frightening. The rock wall on her right ended suddenly and she moved the light in that direction. The cave opened into what looked like a giant, sprawling, eerie, gothic cathedral. Layers of rock, rounded cones of rock, webs of rock, as smooth as if they’d been polished, hung from the ceiling and rose from the floor. Some of it sparkled in the beam of the flashlight. Charlie cast the light around slowly. The cave seemed endless.
You need a bigger light. A much bigger light.
Biscuit growled again. Charlie’s breath began to come in short bursts. Her mind conjured sharp-toothed beasts with shiny eyes crouching behind the rock formations, waiting for her to come closer. Then another image, this one of thousands of vampire bats, hanging upside down just beyond her light, ready to fly out, sink their fangs into her flesh, and suck all of the blood from her body. She suddenly felt surrounded, overwhelmed. She began to feel as though the walls of the cave were closing, that the rock ceiling above was collapsing. She tried to take another step, but her foot caught a rock and sent her sprawling onto her stomach. The flashlight clattered against the floor and rolled away. She crawled forward and reached for it.
“Please don’t go out,” she gasped. “Please don’t go out.”
Her fingers wrapped around the tube and she climbed to her feet. Terrified, she turned and scrambled back toward the entrance.
Back to the world.
Back to the light.
The thunderstorm Jasper had predicted began to rage just after Charlie returned home and finished tending to Sadie. She fixed supper for Jasper and herself and spent the rest of the evening doing laundry. Jasper puttered around the house, happily unaware that Roscoe Barnes had committed suicide earlier in the day. Charlie went to bed at midnight, determined to go back to the cave the next morning. She finally drifted off an hour later. She dreamed that she’d been chained to the hourglass-shaped boulder outside the cave. A huge eagle soared down out of the sun and landed on the rock behind her head. Charlie believed the eagle to be an angel from heaven, sent to rescue her from bondage. It wasn’t until she felt the sharp pain of the great bird’s beak tearing into her flesh that she realized she was being punished.
She awoke when the eagle tore out her liver and flew off into the clouds.
Chapter 18
AT ten o’clock the next morning, Charlie was back in the saddle. Jasper had gone to town and taken Biscuit with him, so she and Sadie were on their own. The storms from the night before had moved northeast, but a thick cover of puffy, gray cumulus lingered and a fine mist of fog hovered over the mountain like damp gauze. The weatherman on the radio had said more storms were on the way. She’d gotten out of bed early and driven into Elizabethton to pick up some things at Wal-Mart. Charlie had made up her mind. If there was really something in the cave, she was going to find it.
There was a high-powered, battery-operated searchlight in one of the saddlebags along with extra batteries. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and she had gloves and a stocking cap to keep her warm in the cave. She had a lighter in one pocket and a small can of pepper spray in another. She had enough food and water to last an entire day tucked into a backpack, along with two dozen small, cylindrical wax candles. The labels said they would burn for at least three hours.
The morning was unusually still, the forest chilled and misty. Charlie rode slowly, watching and listening for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. She expected Zane Barnes to spring from behind every tree and rock she passed. She strained to see as she topped ridges and rounded bends. She stopped often and turned to look behind her.
When she got to the creek across from the cave entrance, Charlie walked Sadie back to the same laurel bush where she’d tied her before. She wrapped the reins loosely around a small branch and pulled the searchlight out of the saddlebag.
“You can get away if you need to,” she said, stroking the white patch between Sadie’s eyes. “There are black bears up here, but they won’t bother you. The bobcats and the coyotes are too small. You’ll be fine.”
Charlie looked back at Sadie as she stood at the mouth of the cave, took a deep breath, turned on the light, and walked inside. The difference between the piddly flashlight she’d used on the first trip and the spotlight was amazing. She’d decided she would spend as much time as she needed familiarizing herself with the cave. She wanted to know its scope, its depth, its dimension. She wanted to know if there was more than one entrance. She’d spent a great deal of the previous night trying to convince herself that this could be an adventure. Exploring a cave could be fun.
The temperature inside the cave was cooler than it was beneath the cloud cover outside. Again, the only noise Charlie could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Her eyes moved constantly, following the beam
of light up the walls on both sides, across the ceiling, and back down to the floor. She reached the spot where the tunnel opened up into the cathedral. The size of it reminded her of the basketball arena on the University of Tennessee campus. Charlie stood there looking, marveling at the formations. She knew enough about caves to know that the formations had grown over thousands, perhaps millions of years and were still growing. She wondered how anything could grow in total darkness. How could a rock grow? It was fascinating, and so, so frightening.
This time, she kept going. Something like a path, about two feet wide, wound its way down through the rock. She kept moving the light, surprised at the colors that surrounded her: splotches of deep red, walls of tan and brown, the sparkle of crystallized oxide. She made her way deliberately, scanning the walls and ceilings, hoping she wouldn’t encounter anything too terrifying.
When she got to the bottom, to what appeared to be the floor, Charlie took a candle from the backpack, lit it, and placed it on the ground. If she could get back to this spot, she knew she could find her way out. So, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs, she started lighting candles every twenty steps and working her way along the wall around the cathedral floor.
Five candles in, Charlie’s light illuminated a round opening in the rock about thirty feet ahead of her. It looked very much like the elliptical opening at the mouth, but it was much larger. When she reached it and shined her light through, it appeared to be another tunnel, angling sharply downward. She set another candle down and forged ahead.
Sadie entered her mind. How long had she been in the cave? She took her cell phone out of her pocket. No signal, of course, but it told her the time. She’d been inside about thirty minutes. She kept going.