by H. P. Bayne
“So I’m staying here while you go ahead, is what you’re telling me.”
“You okay with that?”
“I’m going to have to be.”
“Just keep the flashlight in the bag,” Sully suggested. “And try not to think about where you are.”
“Sully, we’re standing in more than five feet of water in a rock-encased tunnel, searching for a way out of a cave that’s known to collapse and kill people. Add to that my lifelong fear of water and my more recent issues with claustrophobia, and it’s pretty damn hard to ignore where I am.”
Dez didn’t need to see to know Sully was grinning.
“It’s not funny,” Dez said.
Sully’s response came through the suspected smile. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. I know you too well.”
“Look, if you need me to come back right away, just tug twice on the line, and I’ll be here, okay?”
Sully was trying to be helpful, and Dez decided he’d better do the same. “Okay. Just hurry. But be careful.”
“You realize I can’t do both, right?”
“Hey, Sull? Get out of here.”
Sully laughed, then took a deep breath and disappeared.
Sully might have been away ten seconds or ten minutes. Down here, trapped between increasingly cold water and darkness, time was irrelevant, a thing to be endured rather than counted.
If one positive existed, it was the stillness of the water. Were there movement, dizziness and disorientation might have forced Dez to do something besides stand here, eyes closed, with the flashlights buried within the recesses of the backpack. Denial would be a lot more difficult to pull off with eyes open and lights on. Hard to ignore a ceiling of solid rock just above his head if he could see it.
Death wasn’t just back in that small tunnel they’d left behind. It was all around them.
Try as he might, there was no escaping that.
Dez had busied himself for a while feeding out line to Sully, waiting for the periodic single tugs letting him know his brother was still okay somewhere up ahead. Now, the line taut, Dez was left with the worry that settled in whenever things went too quiet. They’d been working this so Dez fed out the line and Sully took it back as he returned. While Dez remained alert to the possibility of a double-tug, which would require his immediate response, his mind wandered down dark paths.
He’d been back several times to the nightmares following the discovery of Aiden’s body. He’d returned to the confines of that buried casket, heart thumping and shoulder pounding against an immovable satin-covered lid.
Searching for light in the psychological dark, Dez thought of Sully, how he’d saved him both times: literally in the case of the coffin and metaphorically from the horrors of those post-Aiden years.
Now, trapped down here in this waterlogged hellhole, Sully was saving him all over again.
Dez jumped as he had each time he heard the splashes of Sully’s return. He found relief in his brother’s hand reaching him in the dark, reassurance in the sound of his few heavy breaths as he fulled his lungs with air.
This time, Sully brought news that had Dez doing something more than shoring up what remained of his courage; rather, it injected him with a new dose of it.
“Dez, I think I found the second entrance Evan was talking about. We’re almost out.”
Dez’s manic laughter echoed through the air pocket as he crushed his brother in an enthusiastic hug.
19
In following the ghost through the tunnels, Sully’s searching hands had more than once collided with what felt like openings to other crawls or chambers. With plenty of ways to get lost, the rope would allow him to find his way back, but there would be no safe way forward once the two of them were making the swim together—not without Carter as guide. The dark made it easy to get disoriented, with too many turns to make, too many obstacles to bump up against, too little air to allow for consistent clear thought.
Now with Dez back with him, Sully was assured of a way out, provided Carter didn’t go anywhere.
He and Dez made two more stops at air pockets, one so small they had to crane their necks back to get their faces into it, noses brushing the ceiling overhead as they sucked in the few breaths the space would allow.
“Almost there,” Sully said for his brother’s benefit.
Dez muttered something incomprehensible, but otherwise kept his response to a series of shallow, shaky breaths. He’d need a deeper one to get through the last and final underwater swim, and Sully did what he could to calm him.
“One more, man. One more swim and we’re out. You’re doing awesome.”
He was relieved to hear Dez’s snort. “Shut up. I’m not five.”
Sully chuckled, hoping the sound would further relax Dez. He found his own relief as Dez’s breaths slowed and deepened, waiting until he heard one long, deep final inhale and received a signalling pat on his chest before leading the way once again.
Carter drifted upward, a welcome signal of the swim’s end, when a rapid series of sharp tugs on the rope indicated Dez was out of air. Nearly there himself, Sully reached back, grabbed Dez’s arm and heaved, towing his brother upward until their heads broke the surface together.
Dez sputtered, wheezed in one attempt at a deep breath, and instantly started hacking. Sully patted him on the back and pushed himself out of the water, shifting until he was sitting on the lowermost stone that formed a makeshift ledge. A moment later, the coughing having eased to manageable levels, Dez joined him, letting out one long breath that gave every indication of the deepest relief.
“Buddy, I never thought I’d be so happy to be sitting my soaking wet ass on a cold rock,” Dez said.
Sully sniggered and gave Dez’s leg a solid pat. “Yeah. Me neither.”
They stayed there a while, not speaking, the only sound their own breath and the occasional echoing drip of water on stone. Sully gave it a few minutes, then sat forward to wriggle out of the backpack he’d put on before this final swim. Retrieving the large flashlight and hoping for the best, he clicked the button.
He was rewarded with first a flicker and then a solid beam that illuminated the area in which they’d ended up.
He cast it over Dez’s form, ensuring his brother was uninjured. “You doing okay?”
“Now? Yeah. Just damn glad to be out of there. You?”
“All good.” Sully redirected the light, aiming up at the slope of rock he’d clambered up earlier. “Watch your step going up. It’s probably a bit slick from when I made the climb earlier.”
“You’re sure it’s a way out? I’d hate to get up there and find another damn problem waiting for us.”
Honestly, Sully wasn’t completely certain, aware of the possibility his eyes had been playing tricks on him in the dark. All he knew for sure was that when he’d reached the top of the slope, he’d thought he could make out shapes ahead—shapes cast in a pale glow as if from residual moonlight.
If it turned out it had merely been his brain playing tricks on him, he’d hate to get Dez’s hopes up any more than he already had.
“I’ll check it out again and let you know.”
“Uh-uh. Let me. I want the hell out of here now.”
Sully wasn’t about to argue, happy enough to sit there an extra minute. He wouldn’t say as much to Dez, but he was exhausted, having essentially made double the swim his brother had as he’d scouted ahead and then returned with news.
Dez stood and picked the backpack up off the ledge, shrugging into it as he studied the incline Sully illuminated in the flashlight beam. “Doesn’t look too hard.”
“Watch yourself. Like I said, it might be slippery.”
Climbing Dez could handle, long limbs and muscle making it look relatively easy. Sully waited until his brother safely reached the top before clicking off the light in anticipation of starting up himself.
Dez’s voice echoed down from above. “What are you doing? Toss the
light up and I’ll shine it down for you.”
“I did this fine in the dark before. It’ll probably be easier without you shining a light in my eyes. Anyway, I’d rather not break the thing if one of us drops it.”
“Okay, but be careful. I don’t want to have to come down there again and carry you up if you fall and smash your head open.”
It took another minute for Sully’s eyes to readjust to the dark, allowing him to make out a few shapes above. He tucked the flashlight’s long handle into the waistband of his jeans and shook his hands out before starting. His fingers were cold, the water having become progressively chilly as they’d moved away from the first chamber. Rubbing his hands together, he huffed a warm breath over them to ease the chill. Starting up, he relied mostly on his sense of touch to figure out where to place his weight.
After a couple of minutes, he reached the top and, when he got there, he was surprised to find no immediate sign of Dez. It occurred to him he also hadn’t seen Carter since they’d left the water, which didn’t really surprise him. It took energy for spirits to manifest in a way that enabled him to see them in their once-human form. Maybe it had something to do with his youth, or maybe it was sheer determination, but Carter had managed it far longer than most. He hadn’t gone far—Sully could still feel his presence nearby—but he wasn’t likely to return in visible form for a little while.
The slope evened out into a short tunnel, just a few feet between the spot where he now stood and the moonlit cavern. Still not seeing Dez, Sully took a few steps forward, entered the large chamber and opened his mouth to call out.
He’d barely managed the first letter when a hand over his mouth silenced the rest of his brother’s name. He was yanked down into the shadows created by a pile of rock that stood between the cavern’s entrance and the tunnel he’d just escaped.
Dez’s whispered warning was a hiss in his ear. “Ssh. A couple people just came in. I think it’s Lars and Tessa.”
Sully nodded his understanding, and Dez released him. Grateful the flashlight hadn’t slipped out when Dez grabbed him, Sully pulled it free and adjusted his grip to hold it by the bulb end. Should it come to it, it would make a solid enough weapon.
He could hear the soft echo of conversation between two voices, a man and a woman, but although he could identify an intensity to the tone, he couldn’t make out the words. Not from here anyway.
Using the sound of Dez’s breath to guide him, Sully whispered into the side of his brother’s head. “Think we can get closer?”
“We can try. Follow me and go slow.”
Sully rose to a crouch, intending to follow Dez, when his toe scuffed along the cave floor and kicked something ahead a couple feet. It didn’t sound like a stone, the tiny, rolling ping suggesting something metallic. Sully grasped a handful of Dez’s shirt to stall him.
“That wasn’t the key I just heard, right?”
“I don’t know what it was, but it’s not the key,” Dez whispered back. “I checked as soon as I heard that. There’s no time to look around right now. Let’s move.”
As they slunk around the perimeter of the cavern, the voices seemed to move and grow louder, accompanied by the bounced glow of a pair of flashlights or headlamps.
The woman’s voice, clear and high, was the first to become intelligible. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“I don’t have a choice. They’re coming after me on this. If there’s anything still down here they can use against me, I need to find it.”
“Come on. The crawl’s flooded; no one’s going to be able to find anything down there. Not anymore. I still don’t see why we had to go grab scuba gear. No one will think about it. Besides, Prescott’s going to start wondering if I don’t get back soon. I said I was visiting a girlfriend. If he calls her—”
“Listen, Tess, we’ve got bigger things to worry about than your asshole husband, don’t you think? You think no one else will consider grabbing scuba gear and diving in there? It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw all the water.”
“Why would they? It’s been four years. And who knows if there’s even a way through. It could be sealed off at any point down there. Anyway, what exactly is it you think we’re going to find?”
“I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out. What I do know is this lawsuit’s set for trial next week, and people are asking questions. That investigator who came to my place, he talked like he knows something suspicious happened to Carter, something not just accidental. I think they’re looking to pin a murder on me now. I keep wondering, what if they recovered his body, or they’re looking to? What if there is evidence of more than a simple cave-in? I’m not going down for that. I need to know what I’m up against.”
There was no immediate response. The reflected light had stopped moving, and Sully could imagine the two of them standing there, face to face, Lars awaiting a reply, a promise of the help he was clearly requesting.
When Tessa spoke, it was obvious she needed of another kind of reassurance, her voice heightened with anxiety.
“He’s probably still down there.”
“Probably. But we need to find out for sure.”
“Lars, I just…. I don’t want to be down there. With him. I’m scared.”
“You’ve got nothing to be scared of. He’s dead, all right? There’s nothing there to hurt you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. He’s in there because of me. This isn’t a memory I’ve ever wanted to face. Hell, it’s not even a memory. I live with this every goddamn day. Now, I’m going down there. I could use the help. Are you coming or not?”
Another loaded pause, more stillness from the lights shining between them. Only an affirmative response would bring salvation to Lars, Dez and Sully; Lars because he’d get the support he was seeking, and Dez and Sully because it would clear their path out of there.
When Tessa at last answered, she left Sully holding back an exhale of relief.
“Okay. Okay, I’ll go with you. But I swear to God, you lose me down there, I’ll kill you, you hear me?”
Nothing in her voice provided evidence she was capable of making good on the threat but, at this point, Sully couldn’t have cared less one way or the other. His body had been overtaken by a wracking shiver likely to be halted only by a hot shower, a change of clothes, and a steaming drink in hand.
He and Dez ducked down farther as the lights from the headlamps bounced past. The light dimmed as Lars and Tessa entered the passage the brothers had just exited, then disappeared into the darkness.
Dez clicked on a flashlight. As they shuffled toward the cave entrance, Sully heard Lars’s voice echo from the tunnel. “Shit. Do those look like footprints to you?”
Dez gripped Sully’s arm and tugged, drawing him into a run beside him. The distance to the cave entrance was minimal from here, and they made it outside with no indication of having been seen.
Sully followed his brother to the far side of a large tree—and just in time, because Dez’s phone, back in a service area, started to ping inside the backpack.
“Shit,” Dez said, as he shut off the flashlight with a trembling thumb. “Between Lachlan and the judge, I’m probably in deep right about now.”
“Let’s get back to the car. I get you’re sort of on a job here, but we’re both freezing. As far as these two go, I think we’ve heard quite a bit already.”
“Maybe I should confront them. With everything we’ve just heard, it might be the ideal time.”
Sully talked quickly, hoping to nip that plan in the bud before Dez gave it any more room to grow in his mind. “It sounds like Lars has a lot to hide—maybe even murder. How do you know he didn’t come armed? It’s too dark to confront him safely. If he pulls a gun, you won’t see it in time, and I can’t go down there with you if I want to stay hidden. Let’s just go, all right? I’m freezing, and I’d rather deal with them when we’re both bringing our A-game.”
�
��We’ve got cover here. If they come out and start shining those lights around while we’re on the move, they’ll be able to pick us out pretty quick. Just stay put for a minute. And keep an eye out while I check my messages.” Dez rummaged through the backpack until he found the sandwich bag keeping their phones dry. While Sully kept watch on the cave’s entrance, Dez keyed in his passcode—with some difficulty, if the swearing was anything to go by—and held the phone to his ear to listen to his voicemail.
Sully nudged Dez as light showed at the cave door. A moment later, two figures topped by headlamps came into view. Sully tucked himself farther behind the tree, and felt Dez doing the same behind him.
The sound of Dez’s phone being clicked off signalled an end to the messages.
“Anything important?” Sully whispered.
“Nah. The judge called and sent a couple texts wanting to know what the hell I was doing. Then Lachlan called twice to tear me a new one. Far as I’m concerned right now, the pair of them can go to hell. You’re right. I’m bloody cold, and I just want to go home.”
“Are the phones off?”
“No idea about yours, but there aren’t exactly a lot of people besides me to call it. And I just put mine on silent.”
They waited a few minutes, watching as the castoff light from the headlamps bounced around the area. But the forest floor was hard to read by day, virtually impossible by night, so the search didn’t last long.
“Tessa,” Lars called out. “Forget it, it’s too dark. Let’s just go get this done, all right?”
Sully risked peering around the tree enough to see the two headlamps rejoin and disappear into the darkness.
He refocused on the shape of his brother’s head, features just visible in the moonlight. “Can we go now?”
“Damn straight. But I get the shower first.”
Unsurprisingly, Dez gave Sully the first shower—although he threatened him against using all the hot water.
The risk was minimal. It was late, and with just four suites in the building, hot water wasn’t typically in short supply. Even so, Sully didn’t dawdle, spending just long enough under the spray of warm water to take away the worst of the chill. Dez would have coffee on in the kitchen, and that would help with the rest.