Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  “Damn you, Ridley, get out of the water!”

  “Head on back to the surface and tell them all what happened down here,” Ridley said. “That was the job, and you did it. You’ve almost done it, at least. The last part is in the telling. It will mean a lot to people. More people than either of us have met.”

  “Then we’ll tell it. Get out of there. I’m going for help.”

  Ridley swiveled his head, and the beam of his headlamp threw a glare into Mark’s eyes, forcing him to lift a hand against it.

  “I was wrong about you,” Ridley said. “And about myself. I thought I’d have to come back up, but I don’t. You’re the one who has the job on the surface. When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.”

  “I understand. Now if you—”

  “No!” Ridley’s voice boomed with a near desperate sound. “You don’t understand yet. There’s a lot of responsibility ahead of you. A lot of pressure, Markus.”

  Ridley had never called him that. Never called him anything but Novak. The new man, the stranger, he’d said with such delight during their first meeting.

  “Okay,” Mark said. “I’ll handle the pressure. Right now, I’m going for help.”

  Ridley turned away, the light traveling with him, and began to wade again.

  “Get out of the water!” Mark looked at the wall, searching for any way down that wouldn’t end with a broken spine. There wasn’t one.

  “It’s beautiful up ahead,” Ridley said, and then he turned his headlamp off, plunging the passage into darkness. He was out of the range of Mark’s flashlight.

  “Travel safe,” he called from the blackness. “She doesn’t want you yet.”

  Those were the last words Mark heard from Ridley Barnes. Mark called for him again and again, shouting for him to come back, but the only voice that answered was his own.

  67

  Searchers worked for four days straight without finding Ridley or his body, but then Sheriff Blankenship called it off, partly, he confessed to Mark, because they seemed to be growing more interested in the cave than in the search. There was a lot of it. Nobody could agree on the total size, but early estimates were high. Maybe top ten in the country. Maybe top five. Maybe better.

  It was a remarkable find, they all agreed. Endless potential.

  Endless.

  Evan Borders was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, when a state trooper pulled him over for speeding and discovered the active warrant. Borders didn’t resist arrest, which was a career first. He was due to be transported back to Garrison County on the same day that Mark left. The same prosecutor who charged Cecil Buckner with the murder of Danielle MacAlister said he was weighing allegations and evidence concerning Pershing MacAlister.

  The first lawsuit over the Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust was filed before the search for Ridley Barnes had stopped. The news was filled with opinions on who should have the right to the cave, and legal experts weighed in on who already did and what could be done about it. Mark avoided those stories.

  He went to see Julianne Grossman before heading out of town. She was still in the hospital but had been moved out of intensive care, and the doctors were pleased with her progress. She’d sustained a fracture in her skull but there had been no bleeding in the brain. He sat beside her bed and they talked in low voices for more than an hour and several times they paused so that she could weep.

  “At first I wanted him to pay,” she said.

  “You weren’t alone.”

  “But that’s my job,” she said, “to be open to the subconscious, to help others learn how to be. When I had to open, I closed down. I heard what he said, and I closed down. I stopped wanting to help Ridley Barnes when he said those things. I wanted to help Sarah Martin then.”

  Mark assured her that everyone had. That was the worst of it, really. Everyone had been willing to help and join the cause. It took a village to kill a monster, after all.

  “I could have just walked away from him in the end,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once he was underground, once he was in trance, he was content. Maybe even before trance. It sounds strange, but it took a lot out of him to get back down there. I saw it. He was pushing himself toward the thing everyone claimed they wanted from him. By the end, I wanted to help him get there. Maybe I shouldn’t have, though. Maybe I should have tried to convince him to just leave.”

  “He’d have gone back down soon enough,” Mark said. “Or he wouldn’t have, and things would have gone worse for him up here.”

  She nodded. They fell silent but he did not leave. For a long while he just sat there at her side and then she reached out and took his hand.

  “Your mind has enormous potential,” she said. “You might not want to hear that from me. Not after this. But…there are special things ahead for you if you want them, I’m sure of it.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all.

  “You’re going home now,” she said. “Florida.” She enunciated each syllable so that the word sounded like a song.

  “Yes.”

  “Your firm understands what happened here?”

  “They know.”

  “If there’s any problem, I’ll tell them what they have to hear. I’ll tell them whatever you need me to so that you can return to work.”

  He thanked her and did not tell her that he’d written his resignation letter the previous night in his hotel room. His resignation letter, and a proposal. He wasn’t sure how either would go over, but it was time to deliver them.

  “Be in touch,” he said. “And I mean that. I’d like to hear from you again.”

  “Likewise. Stay open, Mark. Stay open.”

  He nodded at that and then he squeezed her hand and left the hospital and drove out of Garrison for what he believed was the last time. He was headed north to the airport, and from there he would go south by plane. Jeff London was waiting to meet him in Tampa. There he would tell Jeff what he had to say, tell him the truth about how he felt about his wife’s unknown killer, and about the possibilities that he’d seen in this rural place where good but overstretched police could have benefited from outside help from the start. That the questions Did he do it? and Who did it? had always been intertwined, and it was time for Innocence Incorporated to embrace that. He had a sense of how that pitch would go over, and that was why the resignation letter had already been written. But he would do things right, and he would not hide behind Jeff or anyone else. Whether he remained on payroll or not, he had his next case. It had begun on a lonesome bend where the cypress leaves hung low and cast long shadows over the road to Cassadaga.

  The airport was far from the town, and Trapdoor was not on the way, but he stopped there all the same. He didn’t get out of the car, just parked where he could sit and look down at the place where Maiden Creek became the Greenglass River.

  She doesn’t want you yet.

  “It’s just a hole in the earth,” Mark said. “It’s nothing but stone and water.”

  But he couldn’t stare too long into the yawning blackness beyond the iron gate before turning away.

  He rolled the windows down and let the cold air in and he took out his phone and pulled up the recording of his only willingly entered trance with Julianne Grossman. By now he’d listened to it several times and knew it well, and he knew the precise part he needed to hear before he left this place. Her voice filled the car, stronger than the sounds of the winter wind and the thawing ice fracturing across the surface of Maiden Creek. He listened to her ask him if he had feared death in Trapdoor and then to his own answer, a firm and swift response.

  No, he said of the night that he’d nearly frozen to death beneath the earth, the night they’d had to use extracorporeal circulation to bring him back among the living.

  And why were you not afraid of death?

  Because there are places I still need to go.

  Where are those places? />
  I’ll have to go back to where she died. I have to do that.

  To where Sarah Martin died? To the cave?

  No. Back to Florida. Back to my wife. And then I’ll have to go to the mountains.

  Why the mountains?

  Here he had paused for several seconds, and even on the recording you could hear that his breathing was labored, the sounds of a man in the midst of a struggle. Finally he had answered: I’m not sure. But I’ve always known it.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, foremost thanks to those who make me look better than I deserve: My editor, Joshua Kendall, and my agent, Richard Pine, both kept the lights on in the dark for me throughout, and kept the batteries charged. Tracy Roe is a copyeditor without equal. And much gratitude to the readers who suffered through the messy drafts: Christine Koryta, Tom Bernardo, and Stewart O’Nan all put their unique and tremendous talents to work on this book. The team at Little, Brown continues to be the best in the business; thanks to Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Heather Fain, Nicole Dewey, Sabrina Callahan, Miriam Parker, Garrett McGrath, and everyone else at Hachette Book Group. It is an honor to be published by such an incredible company.

  I’m grateful to the people who took me into caves and did their best to explain them to me, particularly Anmar Mirza and Ty Spatta, and to the people who attempted to explain the realities of hypnotism versus the mythology to me and helped me capitalize on both. In this regard, Rima Montoya was truly exceptional, and for her insight and patience I’m most indebted.

  And to the readers, the greatest thanks of all.

  Look out for Michael Koryta’s next book, Echoes

  For an excerpt, turn the page.

  Cassadaga, Florida

  March 2014

  I was asleep when my wife died.

  That’s as near as I can tell from the coroner’s timeline, at least. I was stretched out on a deck chair facing the setting sun over the Gulf when Lauren pulled her car to the side of a lonely county road outside Cassadaga, Florida, opened the door, and stepped out.

  She was shot twice in the head sometime after that. The first witness who found her could say only that the car’s hood was still warm. The coroner said that Lauren was too. Dead, but still warm.

  Whatever happened, happened fast.

  Nobody knew why she’d stepped out of the car. A threat, maybe. Trust, perhaps. That’s how close they were to ascertaining the truth of her murder. Somewhere between trust and threat.

  Her car was returned to me nine weeks after she was buried. The title was in both our names, I was the rightful owner, and they couldn’t claim it was a crime scene any longer. No evidence existed in the car. Though she’d died five feet from its open driver’s door, the car didn’t even catch a blood spatter.

  Our condo building in St. Petersburg had been designed with the guiding principle of making space where none existed, and the garage that occupied the first floor featured one parking space per unit, but two cars per space. Hydraulic lifts hoisted one vehicle in the air so another could be parked below it. A seamless system, provided that you and your spouse worked in strict military shifts instead of leading human lives or that you were indifferent to which car you drove. Lauren was not indifferent; she loved the Infiniti, its speed and handling, its look. It was her car. My old Jeep—filled with empty coffee cups and notepads and the gym clothes I inevitably forgot to bring up for laundry—was not an acceptable substitute. When she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, she was going in her own car.

  I parked on the street. Problem solved.

  Lauren’s white—no, no, pearl, it was pearl, and to hell with anyone who called it white, she’d correct people despite herself, because she loved that paint job, loved everything about the car—her pearl Infiniti coupe had been sitting on the top of the lift, untouched, for nearly two years when I turned the key that operated the hydraulics. The system hummed and groaned and then lowered the car slowly, like pallbearers easing a casket into the ground. The tires were low and the battery was dead. I used a portable generator to air up the tires, pulled my Jeep into the garage long enough to jump the battery, and then got behind the wheel and closed the door.

  I wanted to be able to smell her, feel her, taste her. I had a million memories of the car, and Lauren was in all of them, and it felt as if the vehicle should have held on to some of her. Instead, all I smelled was warm dust and all I felt was heat blasting from the air vents. It had been a warm day when she died, but a cold one when I’d driven the car back onto the lift.

  I adjusted the seat and mirror for the pronounced difference in our heights, something I had not done before, when I was unable to bring myself to make any alterations to Lauren’s car, when I had driven with my knees against my elbows and tears in my eyes.

  Today my eyes were dry and I wanted to be comfortable. I made the necessary adjustments, listened to the engine purr—Lauren had always enjoyed that, and she wasn’t wrong, the motor sounded different from my Jeep, sounded better—and then I drove to Cassadaga.

  In 1888, a spiritualist named George Colby claimed he had been given a directive from a spirit guide named Seneca. Colby was to move south and start his own spiritualist colony. So it had been decreed. Colby moved.

  He settled in Volusia County, Florida. And the colony lasted. More than a hundred years later, the residents of Cassadaga all maintain the spiritualist faith, and most are registered mediums. How one goes about registering to be a medium, I’m not sure. But it was the truth of the place on the day I drove there to see where my wife was killed.

  At the time of Lauren’s death, I’d believed she was pursuing her own work in Cassadaga, and I wasn’t in favor of it. I recently learned otherwise: she had taken my assignment for me because she thought I wouldn’t give the psychics the necessary patience and respect.

  Lauren and I worked together at a firm called Innocence Incorporated, a pro bono outfit that took on death penalty–defense cases. Lauren was on the legal team, and I was on the investigative side. From the day I met her until the last time we parted, in front of our home, I’d never known anyone more emphatic about the evil that was capital punishment. For many years, as we lived and worked together, I had shared those beliefs, and I had preached them. When Lauren was killed, I continued to do so—publicly.

  I don’t know exactly when I parted with them in my soul. Maybe at her funeral. Maybe when I saw the crime scene photographs. Maybe the very moment the sheriff’s deputy arrived to tell me the news.

  It’s hard to be sure of a thing like that.

  The thing I was sure of? I’d never really believed it. I’d wanted to, and maybe even convinced myself that I did, because it was the most important ideology to the woman I loved. She knew a bit about where I came from and about the way the world had worked for me there, but that was nothing I couldn’t dismiss, and so I did. I dismissed my past often to Lauren and assured her of my revised understanding of the world: that no man should kill another, no matter what the circumstances, what the sins. I meant it then. That’s important for you to know: I meant the words when I said them.

  Back then, I had a wife I was deeply in love with, I had a job that fulfilled me, and I had no reason to wish death on anyone.

  Things change.

  When you drive east from Tampa on I-4, you’re guaranteed to hit two things: traffic and false happiness. The latter is often referred to as Disney World, but you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to, right? Watch enough people stuck in traffic trying to get to that destination and you won’t tell me I’m wrong.

  It was just ahead of sunset when I arrived on the western outskirts of Orlando, and the sun was well down by the time I made it through, even traveling on the interstate. March, spring-break season, didn’t help. I saw a lot of kids with Mickey Mouse ears, and a lot of fathers with blinking turn signals and soul-questioning faces.

  Farther east, traffic opened up, but still I arrived in Cassadaga in full dark, which bothered me in a way it shouldn’t have. The p
lace was silly at best, harmless at worst. Either way it shouldn’t have bothered me. When I made the turn on exit 116, though, following the sign marked CASSADAGA, there was an ambulance on the overpass just above me, running with lights but no siren. Just a giant, flashing caution sign. Then it was on to the county roads, single-laned and palm-fronded, and every so often a PSYCHIC READINGS or MEDIUM AVAILABLE sign would flash by. I knew the place, I knew where I was going and why I was going there, and none of it should have bothered me. I’d told myself that before I left.

  You can tell yourself a lot of things until you drive the wrong roads in the dark.

  To block out the uneasiness, I played music. It was a security blanket, nothing more—Native American chant and drum music, a relic of my youth in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. It had entranced me as a child and never released its grip. There was an inherent confidence to the war drums and a disregard for life and death to the songs that made worldly concerns seem foolish. There was a time when I had tried to hide my affinity for the music and the emotions it conjured in me. That was before a case in Indiana after my wife’s death, before I’d turned an eye to both my past and my present, before I realized who I was and what I had to do. No small things, those, but I’d resisted them for years. People might laugh at that, the notion that a short stay in a place like Indiana could change your life, but those people haven’t traveled the same roads as I have. There was a hypnotist in Indiana who said that I’d found a different voice after my time there. She was wrong. I’d recovered my own voice.