“Then what happened?”
“Just what I said happened from the start. We went in there because Sarah wanted to, then somebody scared us, and she hid. Then she was lost. Every bit of that was true.” He swallowed. “I just didn’t mention that I met my father in the cave. When I left her to check out the noises, the drunk son of a bitch came in and screamed at me for telling her about the cave. Except I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to tell her anything that she didn’t know, that everyone who paid ten bucks for a tour didn’t know. I tried to explain that. I’ll never know if she heard any of it or not. He laid me upside the head with a Maglite, and by the time I came to, they were both gone. So I went for help. I went to Cecil. I’ve spent ten years wishing I’d turned in any other direction. Hell, just gone right to the cops and let the old man go back to prison. But he was my father. I didn’t like the man, but he was my father. And the only friend he had in this world was Cecil Buckner.”
“What did Cecil tell you to do?”
“We went back and searched together. Didn’t find them. He told me to call the police but to keep my dad out of it and said that he would do the same and he’d find my father and get it settled. Basically, he told me he’d fix it. Then as soon as I got away from the police, he came to me and said that they were figuring it out. That Sarah was fine, my father was just waiting for the chance to take her back to a place where they could find her, toward Pershing’s entrance. Because it couldn’t be this place, you know. The whole fucking dream would have died then. Even while Cecil was telling me that, though, he was seeing the angles. He knew that Sarah meant something to Pershing. My father didn’t.”
“You think your father would have brought her back out?”
“I honestly do. Maybe that’s ignorant. But he listened to Cecil. Always. He trusted Cecil, because Cecil had earned it as far as my father was concerned. Cecil didn’t give up the cave while my father was in prison. He kept quiet. My father considered Cecil a partner. More than that, he considered him a boss. You got in trouble, you asked Cecil how to get out of it. Well, we both did that summer. And you can see how well that worked for us.”
Mark turned from him and stared into the unimpressive crack in the earth.
“This was the point of it all?” Mark said. “People died because of this?”
“People died because Cecil and my father wanted their dreams back. But don’t write this off until you’ve seen it, brother. What’s down there is special, and somebody will pay one hell of a lot of money for it. Wait and see on that. You can add a few more zeros to whatever number is in your mind. You can roll your eyes and shrug right now like everybody else, but trust me, by the time it’s done, a lot of money will have traded hands over this place.”
Mark believed him. The story wasn’t a new one. People had been doing two things with the earth for centuries upon centuries: digging for their fortunes beneath it, and burying their dead within it. In Trapdoor, the two had collided.
“Pershing’s land has the best entrance chamber,” Evan said, “but he never had a clue what kind of cave was there. That’s what Cecil kept telling my father. ‘Be patient, be patient. This guy, Pershing, he’ll get bored and sell his interest. Because it really isn’t that special of a cave over there. Dozens like it have opened and closed already.’ Problem was, Pershing wanted to keep exploring it. He was pecking on the borders. Still, you had to work to get through it from over there. Nobody but Ridley Bats in the Belfry Barnes could’ve done it. If what he says is true? If he actually brought Sarah out of there in the dark?” Evan shook his head. “If he managed that, they should build a statue of him and put it on the courthouse lawn. Because that is some heroic work, I’m not kidding you. That’s flat-out miraculous. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I suppose nobody ever will.”
He fell silent and joined Mark in looking into the dark stones for a time.
“I understand why Pershing was willing to deal with Ridley,” Mark said finally, “but what value did Cecil have? He was your father’s partner, not Ridley’s. Why include him in the trust?”
“Because Cecil kept Pershing clean. Kept his secrets, same as he kept mine. Cecil, he’s damn good at tending secrets. Only man better is Ridley Barnes. Except that son of a bitch apparently just can’t remember his.” Evan shook his head. “When Ridley brought her body out…I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t. My father was feeding her, he was giving her water, he was keeping her alive and he’d never let her see him. He was always in the dark. She didn’t know who he was, that’s what he said. She didn’t know it was him. So he was going to wait for the right opportunity and he was going to take her back. Was supposed to be within a day. That was the promise they made me. She’d be out by the end of the day. I didn’t know he was writing ransom notes then. I’ll tell you who did know: Cecil.”
Evan wiped at his face and left streaks of dirt under his eyes.
“End of the day turned into a second day, and then a third, and she stayed in, and I was too scared to talk. I mean, if it had just been me going to jail, maybe. Thing was, that was my father who had her. And as damn foolish as it sounds—and it would sound even more foolish if you’d known the nasty son of a bitch—I couldn’t tell the police it was my father. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He’d done seven years in prison waiting to come back to this. It was family land, had been for a hundred and thirty years, and he was going to take it back. Besides, everything was going to be fine, right? Everything was going to work out fine. If everybody just stayed silent, it’d work out. Cecil told me that plenty of times.
“Then Ridley came out with her body, and Dad was gone. I figured she’d died from the cold, and he’d taken off when he realized what he’d let happen. Once he saw he was looking at murder, he bailed fast, and bailed for good. Cecil thought the same. It wouldn’t have been unlike him. But then it began to feel like Ridley had killed her because he was so damn strange about it, saying he couldn’t remember what had happened. Meanwhile the old man’s gone. I was scared to come here; hell, scared to go anywhere. There was no trace of him, though. I told myself that was good, but you know what? You can’t walk away from your family. You all walk together, whether you can see them there beside you or not.”
“How long was it before you found him?”
“More than a year. I told Cecil, and he said to leave him where he lay. Said the facts of the situation hadn’t changed—I brought Sarah in, my dad grabbed her, I lied to the police about it, and she died. I’d still go to prison. He was telling the truth about that much. I would have gone then, and I will go now. I’m an accessory, always have been. Didn’t have to be, but I made the wrong choice and trusted the wrong people. I thought she’d come back out safe. I was promised that she would. I had the chance to be something different, and I didn’t take it.”
He fell silent. The two of them lay there in the wet earth under the decaying trailer and Evan Borders stared into the cave entrance as if willing it to turn into something else. A door to the past. A second chance.
“You think Ridley’s still down there?” Mark asked eventually.
“If he’s still alive, he’s still down there. We’ll let you go take a look.”
Mark had no desire to venture down that flimsy ladder into the narrowing walls and the blackness.
“We’ll go together,” he said. “Show me how to get to him.”
Evan laughed. “Sure. I have no idea how to get to him. And I don’t want to. It’s time for me to roll. They probably won’t let me get far now, but I’ll give ’er hell, right? Make the run I should’ve made ten years ago.” He offered Mark the flashlight. “Go on.”
“Just drive,” Mark said. “I’ll give you some lead time. But give me the chance to get the right people here.”
Evan shook his head. “Let’s not make it complicated. You make it to the bottom of that ladder, and you’re on your own. I’ll leave it for you. You can climb right on back up if you want. But you’re going to start
at the bottom whether you choose to take the ladder or not. I’d be careful walking up on Ridley Barnes down there, though. It usually goes bad.”
Mark made it only three steps down before he hesitated. The ladder swayed with every step and each rung flexed as if it were about to break.
“It ain’t so bad,” Evan said. “But if I were you, I’d put the flashlight in my teeth so I could use both hands, at least.”
Mark put the flashlight in his teeth and bit down on the rubber handle so he could have both hands on the ladder. The climb felt long, thirty feet at least, maybe forty, and still his feet hadn’t touched the ground. When he heard a grinding noise, he looked up to see Evan sliding the manhole cover back in place.
“With any luck,” Evan called, “you’ll be talking to the police before I am. We’ll see. But if you do, you tell them something. Tell them I loved that girl. People won’t believe it, but it needs to be said.”
He shoved the lid all the way over the top then and sealed Mark in the blackness.
66
Mark’s feet touched stone but still he clung to the ladder, feeling around carefully to make certain it was the floor and not just a ledge. He had to be fifty feet down, and it was a straight descent. He tried to imagine Carson Borders taking a look at that crack in the earth and deciding to rappel down to see what he had. How many tries had it taken him?
He stepped away from the ladder and took the flashlight out of his mouth and for the first time he saw the room around him. There was nothing impressive about it. It had the size and feel of the cellar in an old house, cold and cramped, with a low ceiling and smell of old moisture. There was an opening about twenty feet across that looked like a tunnel. Mark considered it and then looked up at the ladder, wondering if the best course of action was simply to climb back out and call for help.
That was when he heard the moaning.
The sound seemed far away, but it was clear, a low wail of pain or anguish or both, and the way it whispered through the cave and echoed raised the hair on Mark’s arms and neck.
“Ridley?” he called, and even in the cramped room, his voice sounded small.
I’d be careful walking up on Ridley Barnes down there, though. It usually goes bad.
He turned from the ladder despite his desire to keep one hand on it and moved toward the tunnel, toward the sound. The walls were narrower here but the ceiling was about the same, so all he had to do was stoop. He’d gone no more than twenty paces when the cave opened up to his left and spread out in an immense chamber filled with bizarre and glorious rock formations. The stalagmites rising from the ground were far taller than him. He stood transfixed by the size of it for a moment and then took a few steps into the room, awed by its scope and grandeur. Carson Borders had seen this beneath his own land while police were investigating him for drug dealing and robbery, had gone away for seven years and sat in a cell knowing that it was there, waiting.
Mark was turning to his right when he saw a flicker of light in his peripheral vision to the left. He turned back and lost it in the beam of his own flashlight, so he turned the flashlight off, and there it was. A faint glow in the farthest reaches of the room, coming from the opposite direction. Another tunnel.
He turned his light back on and picked his way through the rock formations, and the second light grew brighter and brighter and then he rounded a corner and nearly walked into thin air.
He was standing on a ledge, and some twenty feet below him was a stream, not as wide as the boat channel at the main entrance, but close. Ridley Barnes sat on a shelf of stone beside it. He was wet and he was shaking and he looked at Mark without much interest.
“This is where she was,” he said. He angled his headlamp down and Mark saw water jugs and tin cans and a spoon and the remains of a blanket.
“This is where you found Sarah?”
Ridley nodded. “There’s a body back there. I don’t know who that is. I would like to know. I came a long way and I think that I deserve to know.”
It didn’t sound as if he was talking to Mark.
“It’s Carson Borders,” Mark said.
Ridley cocked his head as if surprised that the answer had come from Mark and not the cave.
“Carson.”
“Yes.”
“Carson kept her down here. You know that?” He looked at Mark then, swinging the headlamp to face him. His long gray hair was plastered against his neck in wet tangles. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I just heard it from his son.”
“No teeth,” Ridley said. “The skeleton had no teeth. You’re right. That’s Carson. Who took his teeth?”
“Evan.”
It was a thought that would have revolted most, but Ridley took it in stride, nodding as if it made some sense to him.
“Nobody would look for him then.”
“Exactly. He’d been holding her down here. He told some people he was going to let her go, but he wrote ransom notes while he said it.”
Ridley thought about that for a while in silence, then indicated the old cans and water jugs. “But he was caring for her. You can see that much. She was alive and she had food and water. So long as she had him, she was all right.” He spoke through chattering teeth.
“You don’t know that, Ridley. She was abducted by a violent man who was fresh out of seven years in prison and didn’t want to go back. You don’t know how it would have played out.”
“I know how it did. I can remember that now. Julianne got me that far and then…” He closed his eyes. “Is she safe?”
“She’s alive,” Mark said. “She’s fine.”
Ridley opened his eyes slowly. “You’re sure?” he asked. Certainty seemed to be Ridley’s focus today. He wanted reassurance on every answer.
“I brought her out. I spoke to her. She’s alive.”
This seemed to mean something to him. There was no spoken response, but it was like a coil that had been wound tight inside of him loosened just a bit.
He pointed at the blanket and the tin cans. “If I’d had light left, I would have made it. No trouble. She was so damn close. It’s a simple turn. But in the dark…” He shook his head. “When I ran out of light, I ran out of time.”
“Nobody will blame you for it.”
Ridley didn’t answer that. He was shaking hard.
“We need to get you out of here,” Mark said.
“Julianne’s all right?” Ridley said. “She’ll make it? You’re not lying? I cannot hear any more lies. Whatever I hear has to be true now.”
“It’s the truth, damn it. Let’s get you the hell out of here so you can see her for yourself.”
“I wish it hadn’t gone the way it did,” Ridley said. “With her, I mean. Cecil Buckner, he earned what he got. But Julianne? She was good to me. She was scared of me, sure, but she was good to me even when she worked against me. You know why? Because she wanted to hear the truth, and she understood that I couldn’t say it yet. Not without her.”
“You just need to explain it. You can finally do that now.”
“What I want explained,” Ridley said, “is how hard it was. I want people to know that, but they can’t. They can’t ever know, because even if they believe it, they won’t have felt it. When I got her out of here alone in the dark? Not many men could have done that. Not many.”
He wiped tears from his eyes.
“That was a long trip,” he said in a whisper.
“I know it was. We’ll make sure everyone else knows too. Now you’ve got to—”
“There aren’t many who will understand,” Ridley said as if Mark hadn’t spoken. “You will now. That’s funny, when you think about it. You’d never even been underground. But now you get it, don’t you?” He looked up, and Mark squinted against the headlamp glare. “You know how she is in the dark.”
She was Trapdoor. Mark said, “I get it, Ridley. Yeah.”
“You understand how a man’s memory could go. Alone in the dark, down here? You understand w
hat nobody else could. Things happen in the dark that you can’t make any sense of. So then you try to. You do that by telling yourself a story. Maybe the story is wrong, but it’s the only one you have, and so it becomes the truth. You need it to be the truth.”
“People will understand,” Mark said. “I’ll help you with that. Julianne will. Hell, I think at this point, the sheriff will.”
Ridley seemed uninterested in that. He looked around the cave with an appreciative gaze.
“She works on you. People will tell you that any cave will, but people are wrong. She’s special. Trapdoor really is special.”
“Can you get up here somehow, or do I need to go find help? There’s a ladder to the top if you can just make it this far. You’re very close to the surface now.” Mark was studying the wall beneath the ledge. It was too smooth to allow free-climbing. They’d need ropes or another ladder.
“I’m going to get help, Ridley. I don’t think you can make it up this wall. We need the right gear. You need to get out of the cold.”
“Cold’s not so bad.” Ridley got to his feet. It took some effort. “Thank you, by the way. What I wanted from you, from both of you, was just to know. It didn’t go as planned, did it? But I know now. I don’t need my name cleared, don’t need to explain myself to anyone, never did. I just needed to know.”
“I think more people will understand than you expect.”
“I’ve never been much for talk,” Ridley Barnes said. His teeth were chattering violently. “I’m supposed to go up there, sit with police, have cameras in my face, and then what do I tell them, exactly? I killed one man, and a girl died because of it.”
“You just say what happened. Self-defense with Carson, and with Sarah Martin, good Lord, that wasn’t your fault. You were the only person who even came close to saving her.”
“I was never good up there,” Ridley said. “I was better down here, always.”
He stepped into the water, and for an instant Mark thought he was going to cross the stream and try to make it up the wall. Instead, he waded away, moving unsteadily through waist-deep water. On the far wall, his silhouette was an enlarged version of his staggering form.
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