Morgan James - Promise McNeal 02 - Quiet Killing

by Morgan James

  “Yeah, that’s what she remembered. But then, that was when they were teenagers, a long time ago. She said they didn’t go all the way into the cave. It looked like a good place for bears, so they backed out and found other entertainment. She couldn’t remember if they happened on the cabin before or after they found the cave, though I don’t suppose that matters.”

  “And you found the cabin after climbing through all that laurel thicket on your side of the mountain?”

  “Yes, one minute I was stumbling over roots and branches, and the next the laurel just ended, and I stepped out onto a meadow plateau.”

  Susan tapped the dowsing rods against her knee and looked me square in the eyes. She seemed to be forming a question in her mind.

  The tapping was beginning to annoy. “What?”

  Thankfully the tapping stopped. “Miz P., how do you know the waterfall and cave are anywhere near the cabin? They could be anywhere on the mountain.”

  How did I know that? Something around the cabin made me think water was nearby. Oh yes, I remembered. “For one thing, when I was poking around the cabin, I saw an old piece of pipe exposed in the shallow ground. I assume it was running from the house, or rather to the house, from a water source.”

  “Well, yeah, that could be, but the water source could be a shallow well or a rain cistern. Are you thinking January ran a water pipe to the base of the waterfall? If he did, the falls would have to be uphill from the cabin, otherwise there would be no pressure to take the water to the house. You know, gravity and all that—plus, no electricity in January’s time for a well pump. See what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. It is possible though. The cabin is built on a plateau cut from the side of the mountain, and the ground slopes uphill pretty fast behind it. But…” I tried to remember what I’d heard up on the plateau. All I could remember was thinking I heard a child singing: Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, upstairs downstairs, we all fall down.

  “But what?”

  I felt a frown and a headache spreading across my forehead. “The but is: I didn’t hear water running up there at the cabin. You’d think if the falls were nearby, I would have heard the water. Still, I know the cave has to be close to the cabin. So the waterfall must be close.”

  Susan took a swig of water from one of the bottles stowed in her backpack and offered me the second one. “But how do you know? I get the feeling there is something you aren’t sharing. We really need to work together on this. The temperature is dropping. Who knows how long a skinny little kid can survive out here.”

  Susan was right. I had to tell the rest of it. I just wasn’t sure where to start. “Okay, here is the thing…umm…you know how much this January McNeal thing has been bothering me—him being asked to leave the Methodist church and all that. Fletcher started some of it by telling me he was sure my relatives lived here a hundred years ago—which I didn’t have a clue of when I bought the house. I mean I’m not actually blaming Fletcher because it really started with my dream.” I paused, trying to think how to condense the long story into a couple of sentences.

  Susan gave me a questioning sideways glance. “Your dream?”

  “Yes. It was in the first dream.”

  Susan shook her head as though clearing cobwebs growing there. “All right. Please don’t take this wrong, but you’re not making sense. Try to get to the point. Just tell me how you know the cave is close to the cabin. Daylight is burning and we’ve got to find this kid before she freezes to death.”

  “The point. Okay. Short version. I’ve had the dream several times. January’s in jail. There’s a forest fire on the mountain. He’s calling out through the bars of the jail window to Reba. He’s screaming for her to take the baby and run for the cave. I believe the cave must be close to the cabin, or he wouldn’t think she could get there before the fire killed her and the baby.” I stopped talking when I remembered the baby did die. Maybe Reba couldn’t make it to the cave. Maybe I had the whole thing wrong. Oh God, what if I’m wrong?

  There was only a two second hesitation before Susan replied, “Okay. Now we have something. That makes sense. The cave has to be close to the cabin.”

  “Do you really think so? You don’t think I’m crazy to put my faith in information from a dream?”

  Susan waved the dowsing rods in the air. “Well duhh…not when I know these converted coat hangers can find water.”

  “How do they do that?”

  She handed the rods to me and I ran my hand up and down the shafts. Felt like ordinary coat hanger wire to me. No spooky vibrations. “Lots of theories,” she said. “I don’t know, exactly. It just seems that if a person can relax and let the rods do the work, the metal senses something in the water particles… energy or something. I just know they work; I’ve located probably ten good well sites with this pair here. It’s common practice around here to get a well site dowsed.”

  “And the rods can find the waterfall?”

  “Sure. The problem is they find all water underground and running on top. With so much laurel growing up here, there has to be water everywhere. Laurels love water. We could crisscross Fire Mountain until we are too old to walk and still be finding water. That’s why we need a clue where to start. I say we start at the cabin, think about which way Reba could run, and work out from there.”

  “Sounds like a good plan. I’ll call your dad and tell him we’re headed directly to the cabin.” When I flipped my cell phone open to make the call, the screen read: No Service. So much for that idea. We’d try again when we reached the cabin.

  26

  When we finally stood in the meadow, January’s tumbled down cabin seemed smaller than before. Susan must have been thinking it looked small as well. She tugged her coat collar higher on her neck to block the steady wind, now stinging cold and laced with spitting snow. “Can you believe a entire family lived here? It’s no bigger than your kitchen.”

  I nodded and we rounded the corner of the structure to stand beside January’s stone chimney, the lone surviving soldier standing watch over the homestead. Behind the ruins, hardwoods, hemlocks, and white pines climbed the remaining slope up Fire Mountain. Thinking if we found the water pipe I’d remembered seeing we could follow it from the cabin to the waterfall, we spent several minutes searching in kicked up snow. The only tubular item we found was a one-foot section of deteriorated rubber hose lying beside the rusted washtub I’d found on my first trip. The snow was coming down harder now, blowing sideways with the icy wind and prickling against our faces as we backtracked around the skeleton of the house.

  Susan’s face was drawn tight with worry and frustration. “We have to stop looking for the pipe. If Missy is up here we’re running out of time,” she said. “Who knows if this snow is going to get ass-deep or blow itself out? Whichever, it’s sure as hell getting colder. Let’s take the dowsing rods and walk toward the laurels.”

  She removed her gloves and loosely grasped a rod in each hand. I followed her slow gait away from the cabin and along the ridge where the cleared meadow gave way to thick bushes and trees. This was where I’d seen Mrs. Allen and Missy. Both rods pointed in the direction we walked. “So what happens after they locate water?”

  Her voice was low, barely audible above the wind. “They cross each other.”

  She was concentrating on the rods and didn’t need questions, so I nodded I’d heard her and veered off several feet to the left to search further back into the woods. I turned around several times to make sure the cabin chimney was in sight behind me. At my last check for the cabin, I noticed I had a clear line of sight through the woods to the structure. I must be standing on a path. A path to the waterfall? I whistled for Susan and she turned around. When I waved both arms in excitement, she hiked up to join me.

  “Good job, Miz P.” She righted her dowsing rods to point with the path, and we followed it until we were facing a cliff of jumbled, elephantine rocks extruding from the face of the mountain. The dowsing rods cr
ossed each other, making an X above the ground. Susan looked up, smiled at me, stowed the rods in the backpack, and put her gloves back on. Above us was the top of Fire Mountain swirling in a flurry of snow; below was an outcropping of smaller rocks, scooped out to form a moss covered damp depression about the size of my kitchen table.

  I followed Susan’s gaze upward, snow stinging my eyes. Water trickled down the cliff rocks like a slow dripping faucet. No wonder I’d not heard rushing water when I found the cabin. If this was the waterfall, it had all but disappeared. “Do you think this is it?”

  Susan slapped her hands together to warm them. “Could be. From the erosion on the face of the rocks up there and the sediment down here at the bottom, looks like a lot of water came down the mountain at one time. Maybe the falls got diverted somehow. Water can wear a break in rock and go to ground.”

  “And the cave?” Susan pointed to a stand of buffalo-sized boulders on the other side of the mossy depression. “And climb across these slippery rocks? I don’t think so.”

  She extended a gloved hand to me. “Come on, I’ll steady you. Won’t usually find a house-sized open door for a cave up here. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a corridor sandwiched between the rocks that opens to a cave formed in the side of the mountain.”

  After picking our way across what had once been the deep pool of January’s waterfall, that’s what we found—two upright boulders standing like dominoes, with a passageway the size of a narrow hallway between. We eased into the darkness single file, and I retrieved the flashlight from my coat pocket. A few feet into the corridor, the light revealed a room with wood timbers shoring up sections of the walls and ceiling. It was noticeably warmer inside the cave than outside in the wind and snow. It was also deadly quiet.

  Susan’s voice filled the small space. “What is this place? Shine your light over on the left wall.”

  I did as she asked. Pick marks scarred the wall and mounds of discarded dirt lined up in neat rows on the dirt floor. Then I heard tinkling laughter and a child’s voice. Upstairs, downstairs. We all fall down. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.

  Susan cocked her head, listening. “I heard something. Don’t know what. I couldn’t make it out— maybe the wind whistling through a crevice.” She took the flashlight from me and aimed it at the rear of the cave. A boulder, about half as wide and tall as the cave, sat at the rear of the space. “Missy,” she called out, her voice dulled as it ricocheted off the rocks. “Are you back there? It’s Susan and Miz P. It’s safe to come out now.”

  We heard shuffling in the dirt from behind the boulder. “Is that you Missy?” Susan called again. She turned to me and said, probably only half joking, “Hope we haven’t found a hungry bear family.”

  A child’s voice, deeper than the voice I’d heard singing, answered, “Da.”

  When she didn’t come out, Susan and I crossed to the sound of her voice and eased around the boulder. There the cave opened up into another room, the boulder dividing the two spaces. Missy stood near the left wall of the room, motioning for us to come in. When Susan scanned light on the darkened floor and walls, I saw a stone ledge tucked into the rock and extending the length of the wall behind Missy. I had the sense the child had been sitting on this ledge, waiting. As my eyes tried to adjust to the dim light, I realized there was something else on the ledge.

  “Susan, let me see the flashlight for a second.” She handed it over and I focused the beam on the ledge. Missy’s blue stuffed elephant sat on the stone slab in the center of several rows of yellowed candle stubs. On the wall above the ledge, Ezekiel 37 was chalked in large bold script. My stomach dropped like a rollercoaster. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of Missy reaching over and retrieving her elephant from the rock. Then Susan grabbed the flashlight, killed the light, and gathered the three of us to a crouching huddle on the dirt floor.

  “Quiet. Someone’s out there,” she whispered.

  “Maybe the search party,” I whispered back.

  “No. I don’t think so. Stay here.” In the near darkness, I could make out Susan duck walking over to the boulder, and slowly rising up to peer around into the front cave.

  The voices grew louder. They were arguing. Then it dawned on me that these were the same voices I’d heard at Fletcher’s house earlier that morning. One of them was saying, “I don’t give a rats ass about the snow. It’s your own damn fault. If you’d done your job right, we wouldn’t have to worry about nothing. But nooo, the old man’s gonna live and be right back up here. Just dig. I ain’t come all this way for a few hundred dollars worth of shit.”

  The second voice was muffled and seemed to be complaining to the first voice. Susan crawled back to us on all fours and whispered, “The Goddard twins. They cut Mr. Enloe’s brake lines—trying to kill him.”

  My mind got busy sorting the few facts we knew about Fletcher’s accident and Shane Long’s murder. The Goddard twins must be the trespassers. But why? What could they dig up in the cave that would be valuable enough to kill for? Surely they weren’t digging for the Redmond gold. But maybe Shane Long thought that’s what they were after and decided to find the gold first. The sound of metal against rock reverberated in the cave. They were grubbing rocks from the cave wall with a pick. Could Fletcher have found one of the lost ruby mines written about in the tourist brochures? If so, no wonder he wanted to keep me and everyone else off Fire Mountain.

  When I looked over at Missy, her pale eyes were wide, the pupils luminous, like a wild cat ready to strike. “Hurt mine Hubert man?” she whispered angrily. “Bad, bad.”

  Susan and I reached for her when she bolted, but we missed grabbing her. She was around the side of the boulder in a nanosecond. We got to her in time to smell sulfur, and see her hurl a fiery mass at the Goddard twins. One twin’s jacket caught immediately. He slapped at his burning back with his hands, then yelped and ripped off the flaming fabric. The other twin was screaming for him to roll on the dirt floor. The last thing I saw, before we pulled Missy back behind the boulder, was fire licking up the dry, wood support timbers of the cave wall.

  “Holy shit,” hollered one of them. “I’m burned to hell.”

  “Over there,” hollered the other one.

  Two gunshots exploded in quick succession and pinged off the rocks. Two more followed. We heard rocks and dust raining from the ceiling, and then we heard “shit” one more time as timbers collapsed, bringing down more rocks and dirt. Susan, Missy, and I crouched under the Ezekiel 37 stone ledge.

  “We have to make a run for it or be buried alive,” Susan said.

  “That means getting past the twins.”

  “I’ll take my chances with them rather than be buried in here. Who knows, they could be unconscious in there. I’ll go first; try to distract them. Maybe by the time they realize they have company, you and Missy can get around the mess and get out.”

  “Susan, they know they have company. That’s why they shot at us.”

  Missy eased out from under the ledge, stood up, and took my hand. “Out,” she said and tugged. We followed her to the rear wall of the chamber and around another upright boulder, squeezing against the rock wall as we edged past and into yet another corridor. About twenty feet ahead I saw daylight shafting down. An opening to the outside.

  We stood in the light and looked up. Snow was falling on scrub blueberry bushes around the mouth of the hole. On the floor where we stood, rocks from a thousand years of upheaval had piled up to form a jagged, steep ladder into the wall and up to the opening above. If you were a monkey, or an acrobatic child, you could scamper up the face of the rocks with no problem. Missy bounced up onto the first rock and held out her hand. “Out,” she said again.

  “Wait,” I said and pulled her back to ground level. I retrieved my shrunken wool sweater from Susan’s backpack and slipped it over her head. “It’s wicked cold out there.”

  “Hang on, I’ll go up behind you in case you slip,” Susan told her, but her words were too late. With h
er beloved blue elephant stuffed into the back of the sweater, Missy scaled up what looked to be about fifteen feet from the floor to ceiling before Susan found a stable footing on the second rock above the ground. Missy leaned against the rock opening and pushed the elephant through the hole. Then she easily pulled herself up and out to stand on the snowy ground. Once free, she looked down at me, opened her arms wide, and smiled, as if to say ta-da.

  It was a little more difficult for Susan to extract herself through the small opening. When she was finally standing on top, she leaned over the hole. “Come on up. It’s easy. Just pretend you’re climbing a stepladder.”

  I gauged the distance between the cave floor and the top—yes, at least fifteen feet. I am not an especially agile fifty-nine-year-old. A couple of years ago, I broke my foot in two places at a Zumba exercise class. Don’t ask me how? Whose idea was Zumba anyway? Oh, yes, that was my friend, Brooks. Thought I would shed some weight. I mentally measured the small opening up top. Sure Susan was eight inches taller than me, but she was also a lot slimmer. I looked back over my shoulder to where the angry, murderous, Goddard twins were waiting. Any thread of courage I might have had took flight. My breath was coming in short gasps. “I’m not sure I can. It’s too high. I’ll fall. I know I’ll fall. Maybe I should wait until the twins leave.”

  “No. That’s a really bad idea. There could be forty tons of falling rock back there. And the reverb from the stupid gunshots could collapse the whole cave structure. You have to get out now. Just do it.”

  Tears burned my eyes and I wiped them away with the heal of my hand. I knew Susan was right. I just couldn’t move.

  “Look, here’s what we’ll do: I’ll lean over and give you a hand up as soon as you get near the top. If we have to, we’ll dig rocks away from the opening to give you more room to get through the hole. Just try. You have to try.”

  I stood frozen. The Committee in my head kicked in to nag. What’s wrong with you, girl? What a sissy. It’s only a little bit higher than the chinaberry tree you climbed in Atlanta when you were six, for pity’s sake. Don’t look down and you won’t fall. Get a grip. Don’t think. Just Climb. The Committee really pissed me off. Sometimes pissed can shove you in the right direction.