“She dies,” Ridley said, his voice dipping. “I need to find her before she dies.”
Mark thought of that first confession—I think I killed her. This version had another layer: he’d removed her lifeline. She’d died because of his actions but not at his hand in this scenario. If it was true, if any of it was true, that meant someone else had died in Trapdoor too.
“Let’s consider the dark man again, if you wish. Tell me what he sounded like, what he smelled like, what he felt like. Use all the senses. They have their own memories, as you know. Use them now.”
“Blood,” Ridley said.
“What?”
“He smells of blood. Then Sarah does. And then I do the wrong thing.”
“What wrong thing?”
“I take her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She belongs to the cave. She was never supposed to leave. That’s why so much pain came. It’s a penance. She wasn’t supposed to go.”
He sounded like a child now, his voice high and needy and desperate: Understand me. Mark shifted forward, trying to hear, because Ridley’s voice had grown very soft. Mark had no idea when he should act. He didn’t know where Cecil was, wasn’t even certain that Cecil was a threat. Without any view of the room or sense of where Ridley and Julianne were, Mark could put her in more danger by entering the room. He thought of the scope on the .22 then, the cheap infrared. He could project a red dot into the room, but they’d see that. Useless. He needed to commit to the light at some point.
“You wanted to talk about the necklace,” Julianne said. “You wanted to know how it found its way into your hand. Think of the necklace now. What is your first memory of the necklace?”
“She dies,” Ridley said as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I need to find her before she dies. I can hear her and I know that she is alive and I am supposed to find her. I am supposed to save her. It’s why I’m here. The only reason.”
There was silence from them, and Mark wondered if it was because Julianne was as stunned as he was, if she was beginning to fumble for the next question, the next bit of guidance. That didn’t seem like her, though. She understood how to take things home. Why the silence?
When she spoke again, the trance cadence was gone from her voice, and sharpness had replaced it.
“Ridley, I am going to count to five. When we reach five, you will be gone from the past, you will be feeling so good, relieved of your burdens and so good, you will feel safe and”—What in the hell is she doing? Mark thought, and that was when he saw a faint light on the wall up ahead—“at peace. One. Feeling energized now, feeling good energy spreading through you. Two.”
She was panicking, rushing through. That light bothered her, which meant it didn’t come from the two of them. They were no longer alone. Someone had joined them in the cave; someone was approaching.
The caretaker had arrived.
Mark got to his feet as she said “Three” and then Ridley spoke for the first time in several seconds.
“Here he comes. I knew that he would. She’s sent him to stop us.”
The pale light intensified then and the world of stone lit up before Mark. He was facing a chamber with an angled roof and he could see Ridley clearly, Ridley with one arm wrapped around Julianne Grossman’s throat, pulling her backward, stumbling among the rock formations, trying to clear the two of them away from the white light that was emerging from a tunnel twenty feet ahead. Ridley fell and Julianne fell with him and her skull smacked the stone with a crack that hurt just to hear. Ridley froze and looked at her in horror as blood spread through her blond hair. His attention belonged entirely to her and he didn’t even turn to face the light when Cecil Buckner stepped out from the tunnel, wearing a caving helmet and holding a shotgun belt-high.
Mark flicked the switch on the infrared scope and put a red dot on the center of Cecil’s chest.
“Put the gun down!” he shouted.
Cecil spun toward his voice, but Mark was on the ground, below the light. Cecil couldn’t see him, but that didn’t stop him from shooting.
The sound was enormously loud in the trapped space, like a mortar round. Rock fragments exploded into the air, and needles of pain found Mark’s cheek and neck as he pulled the trigger on the .22 and shot Cecil in the chest.
Cecil rocked back and fired the shotgun once more as he fell, this blast connecting with the ceiling, and then he was down on his back and the shotgun clattered over the stone and into the water. He sat up and fumbled for it. Mark worked the lever action on the rifle as he rose to his feet, and this time he put the red dot on Cecil’s eye.
Cecil stopped searching for the shotgun. He moaned in pain as he put a hand to his chest and found it wet with blood, but he wasn’t going to die from the wound. Not from the .22, which had hit low, missing his heart. The killing gun in play was still the shotgun, and Mark needed to claim it.
Ridley had been silent and motionless until Mark was almost to Cecil. Then he spun with such speed and agility that Mark nearly shot him out of surprise. But Ridley ignored him, splashed into the water beside Cecil, and came up with the shotgun. He pivoted toward Mark, his finger drifting to the trigger.
“Don’t,” Mark began, but he didn’t need to bother with instruction, because Ridley simply threw the gun onto the rocks.
“Those don’t belong here,” he said. He sounded groggy, distant and uninterested. He stared at Mark as if he did not recognize him or even understand what he was.
“Same team, Ridley,” Mark said. “I’m here to help you. And Julianne. Let me help you.”
“You’re not here for her,” Ridley said.
“Yes, I am,” Mark said, though he had no idea whom Ridley meant by her. Julianne, Sarah Martin, the cave? All of them? “Step back,” Mark said. “Ridley, just step back.”
“None of you belong here,” Ridley said. “She doesn’t want any of you.” He stepped over Cecil and moved through the water, heading deeper into the cave.
“Ridley! Stop moving!”
Ridley ignored him. He dropped to his hands and knees in the water and crawled toward a narrow gap in the wall. Mark had the choice to shoot him in the back to stop him or let him go.
He let him go. Ridley crawled through the gap and vanished into the darkness. Then it was just Mark, rifle in hands, and two people on the ground in front of him, bleeding into the rocks.
59
Cecil was terrified of his wound, pressing on it with both hands and giving a high, strange moan that echoed around the room. His eyes were wide and panicked as he watched the blood flow through his fingers.
“Help,” Cecil said. He looked from the wound to Mark, his face desperate. Taking blood was one thing to him; watching it leave his own body another. “I’m dying. Don’t let me die!”
Mark ignored him, set the .22 beside the shotgun, both weapons well out of Cecil’s reach, and turned to Julianne. She was facedown, and blood ran through her hair and joined the water on its slow journey deeper into the cave, chasing after Ridley Barnes.
Her wrist showed a pulse, and her breathing seemed steady. The blood loss was the only immediate threat, or at least the only one Mark was qualified to do anything about. He removed his jacket to serve as a compress but he needed something to secure it. Ridley surely had brought rope with him, and his caving pack was still here.
There was rope, but once Mark had the pack open, he realized he didn’t need it. Before Ridley Barnes had decided to try to kill Julianne Grossman, he had packed a first-aid kit for her. There was a packet of pads coated with a clotting agent, and there was a roll of three-inch-wide gauze. Mark took both of them and left the rest of the kit. All he was concerned with right now was stopping that bleeding as fast as possible. He pushed her hair out of the way as best he could and applied two of the sterile pads. When they contacted the blood, a sticky gel formed. He wrapped the roll of gauze around her head, keeping it tight. Blood stained the first layers but did not continue to soak throu
gh.
Through it all, Cecil had moaned and called for help, and Mark hadn’t responded. When Julianne spoke, he almost dropped her head onto the rocks again.
“Worked,” she said. Her voice was as thick as if her mouth were packed with cotton. “Worked.”
He moved so he could see her face, and her eyes tracked him but they had a foggy look.
“Julianne? Julianne, do you understand where you are?”
“It worked,” she said. “Detail. He gave…detail.” She put together sentences like a climber clawing toward an icy summit.
“Just rest,” he said. “Rest for now. We’ll talk about it. But right now we need to get you out of here. That’s the—”
Light splashed over the wall behind them then and Mark whirled and reached for the shotgun. He realized quickly that the light was coming from the tunnel that led back to the Chapel Room and not the one Ridley had vanished into, but that didn’t mean a whole lot; Ridley was capable of circling back in ways no one else understood.
“Who’s there?” Mark shouted.
The light’s motion stopped and there was a pause before another voice responded. “Indiana State Police. Who are we talking to?”
Cecil stopped moaning. For the first time, he seemed aware of something beyond his wound. Julianne’s face showed no response at all.
Mark said, “You’re talking to Markus Novak. You’re clear to approach. There are two wounded in this room, and there’s one missing somewhere else. There are two weapons that I’m aware of, but they are not in play.”
The light went back into motion and he turned to face Julianne, hoping she understood that rescue was here. She didn’t look relieved, though; she looked concerned.
“We didn’t end trance,” she said. “That…that is dangerous for Ridley now. The worst possible thing. He doesn’t know what is real down here…that could be very bad.”
60
Ridley embraced the cold water, swam down until his hands touched the bottom, and then pulled himself forward along the rock lining the streambed. Only at the last possible second, when his head had begun to throb and his lips threatened to part despite his will, did he allow himself to break the surface.
The water-table line was high and he struck the limestone ceiling with enough force to snap his teeth together; the impact drove his face back into the water. Choking and sputtering, he rose again and this time he leaned his head back and got a fuller breath.
He treaded water there, in a place where he had anticipated it would be shallow enough for him to stand, and got his breath back as the cold found his bones. He saw motion to the right, perhaps a stalactite relocating from one side of the stream to the next, a process that not even a millennium could bring about in another cave but that could occur within seconds in Trapdoor. She was shifting around him, changing the rules; all night she had been changing the rules, and he was weary of that. What the cave had done tonight revealed her true character.
Something Ridley had always understood about Trapdoor was that she protected the past. The cave wanted to hold her secrets and so she had wiped Ridley’s mind clear with blackness before she sent him back to the surface. Certainly there had been a price to pay for that, not one without pain—the hostile police, hateful neighbors, relentless media. And, of course, what memories the cave had allowed him to keep. Those seemed carefully crafted, snapshots of blood and scrabbling fingers and echoes of screams and then, far worse, echoes of whispers.
Please, stop
He had hoped that with ten years in constant communion with the world below—if not in this place, then close by, close enough that he could feel Trapdoor’s heartbeat and know that his could be felt as well—a mutual understanding might grow. The cave would learn that Ridley wanted to atone for only himself, that he did not blame Trapdoor for what had occurred, and that whatever he might learn about the past, he would answer for on the surface, leaving the cave in peace.
Those hopes had vanished back in the Funnel Room, where Ridley Barnes had once entered the water with rescue on his mind and returned with a dead girl in his arms, and where tonight he had sat with an innocent—
an interloper, an intruder
—at his side. All that had followed had been hostile, and unnecessary. He’d come for the truth, and he deserved it. Instead, the cave had turned on him. He was enraged by that, because his intent had been clear and his respect unquestionable.
“She didn’t belong to you!” he screamed into the blackness. “She belonged up there! And you know it! You fucking know it!”
He was gasping when he finished, the scream spreading pain through him like a fever. All he wanted to do was pass that pain along to the cave, the source of it all. Sarah Martin had belonged on the surface, and she had not deserved harm. Ridley had not deserved harm either, and still the cave had applied her power for vengeance, nothing more. When Trapdoor turned on a good and faithful servant who had sought only the right path, who had honored every request and kept every secret? At that point, even the righteous should be allowed to resist.
He bobbed too high in the water again and his helmet cracked against the stone and he was about to sink lower when he paused to consider his helmet and the potential it carried.
He’d instructed Julianne to join him in total blackness down here because he believed it was what Trapdoor had desired of him. Now he no longer cared what Trapdoor desired.
Problems with the dark man, he thought, and he tried to recall what Julianne had said and what he’d said to her. The words didn’t seem far off, but they were hard to grasp. There was a problem with the dark man.
He found the headlamp switch and pressed it, and the shapeless dark became a tunnel, its outer reaches within the range of Ridley’s spotlight. The last time he’d passed this way, it had been only blackness. Now he could see. He could find his way back to where it had started.
He had to.
The lack of a wetsuit in fifty-eight-degree water put a ticking clock on Ridley, but the light allowed him to beat it. Maybe.
It was a question of preparation and performance now, and Ridley Barnes had been a long ten years in training.
He swam ahead. The light led the way, and Ridley chased behind it.
61
It snowed all night and then broke off just before dawn, and the clouds pushed east and left a hard, shining sun behind.
All of this happened as Mark sat in the Garrison County Sheriff’s Department. He’d given three interviews to a total of seven police officers and still hadn’t seen Blankenship. He’d asked about him several times but nobody had an answer and finally they’d left him here and told him to wait.
The state police had been the first ones into the cave, and they’d separated Mark from Julianne swiftly and handcuffed everyone, even the kidnapping victim. Mark couldn’t say that he blamed them, though. It was a hell of a strange scene down there. The last he’d heard from Julianne, she was imploring the police to go after Ridley. They promised that they would, but Mark saw the looks in their eyes as they studied the water-filled passage Ridley had vanished into and he knew that nobody was going to be rushing after him. They’d send for experts, people with the right knowledge and equipment, and by then Ridley would have had quite a head start.
He’d been waiting alone for more than an hour when Blankenship finally entered the room. He crossed over to him and pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. Reached into his shirt pocket and removed something and spun it across the table to Mark. The object came to rest just in front of him: the Saba National Marine Park diving permit.
“No prints on it,” Blankenship said. “I thought you should have it back as soon as possible.”
“Thank you.”
Blankenship nodded and he kept his eyes occupied elsewhere while Mark picked the plastic disk up and put it in his pocket.
“You got one back from him alive,” Blankenship said. “I thank you for that. It could have gone another way. It has before.”
�
��She’s doing all right?”
“Docs say she’s stable, and she’s talking pretty well now. Same story as you gave me. Says he came to her originally asking for help with memory retrieval and that she heard a confession. Knew it wouldn’t stand up in court and wanted to find help. She says he wouldn’t have taken help from my kind of detective. She thought he would from yours.” Blankenship’s face showed only the sleepless night.
“Did she know what Ridley wanted from her last night? Before they got down there?”
“Not hardly. He came to the house. She was sure he was going to kill her. Then they got in the cave and he said he wanted to…to do her thing.”
“He wanted to go into trance in the cave.”
“I suppose that’s what you’d call it. I suppose they made it too. She says they did. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know what I believe of it, to tell you the truth.”
“Believe more than you want to,” Mark said. “It’s a start. Trust me. I’ve stood in your place on that one. Any luck locating Ridley?”
“Not yet. We’ll get him, though.”
Mark didn’t share his confidence, and, after seeing Ridley’s face in those last moments, he wasn’t sure they should want him back on the surface.
“What about Danielle MacAlister?” he asked. “Was Julianne able to tell you anything?”
“Danielle MacAlister walked out of the house while Ridley and Julianne were heading toward the cave. Ridley started to go for his knife, then let her pass. They were just inside the cave when they heard a gunshot.”
“Cecil.”
“It would seem that way, yes. Cecil was talking for a time. Then he realized his story wasn’t as believable as he needed it to be, and he asked for a lawyer. I was with him in the hospital while he told a weak story about going into the cave to try to make sure Julianne Grossman was safe.”
“Bullshit. He went in to kill them. The only problem he had was that they were in the dark. That meant he had to show himself to them instead of the other way around. There’s no sneaking up on Ridley Barnes in the dark. If Cecil wanted to clip him, he should have done it on the town square under a bright sun. My guess is he’d have found a sympathetic jury in Garrison.”
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