“An Anasazi cliff dwelling,” Jacob said as David handed Sister Miriam the binoculars. “You can just see some stones there stacked in a line.”
“I don’t see—no, wait, there it is. But it’s right on the side of the cliff. Who did you say?”
“Anasazi. Ancient Pueblo people. Nobody knows why they built their homes in the cliffs. Defensive, I’d guess. In some places there are whole villages, but mostly it’s just a few buildings here or there. And some of them have never been discovered. Like that one, apparently.”
“I always thought they were Nephite ruins,” Father said, “from the final days of the Book of Mormon, before the Lamanites wiped them out. Final refuges from their enemies.”
“Except they’re about a thousand years too recent,” Jacob said. “Look at it. You could hike this canyon a hundred times and never spot it. I was searching and still almost missed it.”
“But how do we get there?” Miriam asked. “There’s no way up.”
“There’s got to be a way.”
The staircase, when Jacob discovered it, was obscured by erosion and by streaks of desert varnish—black mineral trails on the rock—but presented a clear enough trail when you knew what to look for. They were nothing more than steps chipped from the rock, an inch or so deep. Handholds and footholds. Jacob looked up the sheer face dubiously, trying to imagine some Native American family carrying game, baskets of corn, or young children a hundred feet up the cliff with nothing more than a few niches in the rock to cling to.
“Here we go,” Jacob said. “Tighten the straps on your packs.”
“Jeez, are you sure?” David asked. His pale face turned ashen as he looked up the face of the cliff. Stephen Paul looked uncertain as well.
“You saw the footprints,” Jacob said. “This is how they left the canyon. It’s either this or give up. Well?” he asked when they continued to hesitate. “Do we abandon the chase?”
One by one they shook their heads until at last David sighed. “Let me go last. That way I won’t knock the rest of you down when I fall.”
“The stairway cuts across at an angle. If you fall, you’ll only kill yourself. Now isn’t that comforting? But don’t worry. Nobody is going to fall.”
Then, without waiting to see if they were following, he started to climb the cliff wall. In another situation Jacob might have suffered second thoughts. He might have looked down and felt his stomach lurch at the sight of the ground receding beneath him. Might have realized that a single slip of the foot or misplaced grip on a crumbling shelf of sandstone meant a fall to his death. But with a little confidence the steps were placed for a quick and easy ascent. He imagined surprising Taylor Junior in the Anasazi ruins. Jacob would lift his rifle. Taylor Junior would rush him. A gunshot. And then Taylor Junior, falling. The bullet wouldn’t kill him. He would still be alive until he hit the ground. It was a disturbingly satisfying image.
Before he knew it, he’d reached the clump of brush and a narrow ledge at the mouth of a shallow cave. The house was snugged into this natural fissure in the sandstone. Now that he was upon it, he could clearly see the stone walls, wedged in without mortar. There was a sort of porch or lip of stone in front of the doorway and a reed basket sitting outside the building as if set down moments earlier, but clearly ancient. He glanced inside to see that the basket was filled with tiny corncobs, preserved by the arid air and kept dry beneath an overhanging lip of stone, even if the kernels themselves had long since been nibbled away by rodents. But the doorway itself was a pair of boards that looked modern. He slipped out of the backpack and grabbed his rifle.
Jacob glanced down and was surprised to see that none of the others were more than halfway up. Miriam came next, followed by his father, then Stephen Paul, and finally David, who was taking his first, tentative steps up the eroded staircase. Why were they so far behind?
He turned back to the ruins. Some of the stones in the wall were of a different shade or were bare of the lichen that splotched their neighbors. It looked as if someone had gathered tumbled-down stones and repaired the house. The wall snugged parallel to the fissure of rock into which it had been built. He imagined how it had happened. Someone, hundreds of years ago, had wandered into this dry, desolate canyon, perhaps looking for a safe place to make a home. He had first eyeballed the crumbling ledge from below, then spent hours chiseling away at the rock until he’d made a staircase halfway up the cliff. He had then spent untold hours more quarrying sandstone from the cliff, widening and deepening the fissure at the same time, then building this exterior wall. How many people did it hold? One family? Two?
Jacob caught the faint scent of flowers—geraniums, he thought. It was so distinct over the smell of juniper and sandstone that he stopped short. The smell came from inside. Had someone decorated the inside of the cliff dwelling with a pot of flowers? The thought was so absurd that a laugh escaped his mouth. It echoed across the canyon, harsh as a crow’s caw.
Quiet, you idiot.
There might be someone inside. He needed to knock down the makeshift door and finish it in a hurry. He crossed the ledge in two steps and reached out his hand.
* * *
It was time to give up, Eliza decided after they’d searched for a half hour. Thirty minutes of nothing. But Charity continued to insist it was along this ridge somewhere.
But where? They’d moved back and forth across the edge of the cliff three times already. The first time, they strolled for a hundred yards in every direction. Looking for what? Fayer suggested a rope ladder. It had to be tied to a rock or a tree. But that turned up nothing.
The second time they took it more slowly, Eliza and the two agents walking single file along the edge. They looked for footprints, for broken branches, or disturbed clumps of brush. But most of the surface was slickrock, and they found nothing on the bare sandstone.
After some discussion, they decided to make a third and final pass. This time, they slowed to an agonizing trudge, moving at the pace of a desert tortoise, step after frustrating step. Fayer would stop periodically to drop to her belly and search along the edge of the cliff, while Krantz chewed his lip and Eliza burst with impatience. Nothing.
We can’t do this again. We have to find another way down.
At last, Fayer stepped back with a frustrated grunt and Krantz followed, looking relieved to put some distance between himself and the edge of the cliff. Eliza turned away, reluctant to give up. Fayer cleared her throat to say something—no doubt to suggest they continue on and try to find a path into the canyon the long way around—when something caught Eliza’s ears.
“Wait,” she said. “Shhh. I thought I heard someone.”
She listened more carefully, and a moment later heard it again. Voices. When the wind died, some trick of acoustics in the canyon brought words to her ears. She could pick some of it out. “… hideaway…ruins.”
It was Jacob’s voice. A second voice—a woman’s—answered, but Eliza couldn’t parse the words. Sister Miriam? There was something about the way their words echoed through the canyon that made them sound simultaneously close and yet impossibly far away. And then her ears identified the origin of the sound. They were somewhere above the canyon floor.
“…pry open the door,” Jacob was saying. It sounded like he was trying to get into something, maybe a cave or shelter on the side of the cliff.
And then she remembered what Charity said about Taylor Junior setting snares for his enemies. A panic swept over Eliza, deeper than the fear of the cliff edge.
She rushed to the edge. “Jacob! Don’t open the door!”
From below came a woman’s high scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jacob stopped before opening the door, suddenly cautious. But it was nothing more than two boards propped against the opening into the cliff dwelling to shield the interior from the weather. He glanced down at the ground and saw boot prints heading away from the door, pressed over the top of older prints that led inside.
; Miriam called up to him from the staircase. “Did you find it? What is it?” She sounded close, as if watching Jacob disappear into the brush-obscured alcove had inspired her to pick up her own pace.
Her voice was loud enough to alert anyone hiding inside, but all was quiet.
He called over his shoulder. “Definitely Taylor Junior’s hideaway. Anasazi ruins. Someone repaired the wall and put up a door. There are boot prints. Coming, then going. Nobody is here now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, sure enough.” He wondered if the disappointment sounded in his voice, if Sister Miriam guessed that he’d hoped to confront Taylor Junior and finish it.
“Wait a minute, I’ll be right there.”
A sudden jealous feeling passed through him. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted to be the first to see the inside. He wanted that first glance, where he could see his enemy’s lair, his hidden sanctuary, and see into the mind of his quarry, and Jacob wanted to do it before the others arrived.
Just to be safe, he unstrapped his rifle and slipped out of his backpack. He flipped off the safety and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. He reached for the door.
“Jacob?” Miriam called. She was closer now. He could hear her panting from the exertion of the climb. A moment longer and she’d be over the edge. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”
“I’m going to pry open the door.”
He reached between the two boards. Each was about four feet high, just tall enough to cover the short doorway. Taylor Junior must have climbed with them strapped to his back. Jacob started to pull.
A woman’s voice cried out, “Jacob! Don’t open the door!”
He started, pulled back his fingers as if he’d been burned. He whirled around with his rifle in hand to see Miriam just struggling over the ledge into the ruins, her fingers gripping the stone, a startled look on her face. What was she warning him about? But the voice had been distant and strangely pitched for Miriam. For a moment, he’d thought it was Eliza warning him, and from somewhere above him, if that were possible.
And then Miriam screamed.
What he’d taken for surprise was fear and alarm. Miriam’s fingers clutched at the side of the ledge. “Help me!”
She was slipping. Somehow, in the last scramble over the edge and onto the flat ground that served as the cliff dwelling’s front porch, she’d lost her footing on the stone staircase. The men scaling the cliff below her shouted in alarm. Jacob tossed the rifle to the ground and grabbed Miriam’s wrist as she started to fall. She pulled back, weighed down with her pack and too heavy by far, and he got a sudden, dizzying glimpse of the canyon floor. A vast, yawning distance. Pine trees dotted the bottom like miniatures in a child’s railway set. The two of them dangled for a long moment, Jacob losing his footing and the grip on her wrist. And then Miriam got her other arm over the edge and took some of the weight off. Jacob gave a final heave and got her body up and over, and then he got his hands under her shoulders and dragged her the rest of the way to safety.
Miriam lay heaving and shuddering. Gone was her cool, confident mask, her expression stripped to raw terror. Jacob could feel the same fear on his own face. His heart felt like a stone banging against his ribs.
“Jacob!” the woman’s voice cried again. “Are you all right?”
Jacob struggled to catch his breath. “Eliza, is that you?”
“It’s me! I’m with Fayer and Krantz.” She shouted something else that he couldn’t pick up.
“What?”
“I said don’t touch anything. Stay away! Do you understand?”
Jacob glanced at the door, thought of his fingers between the boards, ready to yank it open. Somehow Eliza had figured out what he was doing down here—she must be standing on the plateau at the top of the cliff. What did she know?
“I won’t,” he shouted back. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“How do I get down there?”
“Stay where you are, it’s too dangerous.”
“Don’t argue,” she shouted back. “Tell me how to get down.”
Jacob went back to the edge, craned his head, and looked up the face of the cliff. There was Eliza, waving down at him. His sister was mildly acrophobic—something must have spooked her to make her come to the edge and shout down at him.
He couldn’t see Agent Krantz, but spotted Fayer walking along the edge of the cliff, searching, he guessed, for the handholds. From his vantage point, he spotted the staircase cutting its path up the cliff and figured out why Eliza and Agent Fayer couldn’t find it. It ended and was obscured by a bristlecone pine at the top of the cliff. The tree had the gnarled, twisted look of an overgrown bonsai tree, its trunk desiccated and seemingly dead except for a single pair of living branches that stretched over the edge. It was not a big tree compared to the Douglas firs on the canyon floor, but a bristlecone pine of that size would be at least two thousand years old, maybe twice that. It would have been an old tree already when the Anasazi family built their cliff dwelling and hid the entrance to their stone staircase.
He started to shout directions to Eliza, but a gust carried his voice away and he had to wait for the wind to die. “Do you see the tree with two living branches?” he shouted. “No, keep going. Keep going. Stop! There are some stairs. Right there, do you see them?”
Meanwhile, Abraham, Stephen Paul, and David came up, one by one. Sister Miriam helped them over and into the hidden alcove. David was pale, sweat pouring down his face, and he lay down on the ground, panting like a dog in a thunderstorm. Sister Miriam sat next to him and stroked his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m holding you back.”
“You’re not holding me back,” Miriam said. “And anyway, would you rather be in rehab with a bunch of addicts, picking at your mental scabs?”
Jacob turned back to look up at Eliza. She’d found the hidden staircase and now crept down one handhold at a time.
“What do we need that girl down here for?” Abraham grumbled.
“I don’t know, Dad, but she’s not out for a hike in the mountains. Can you sit down and be patient for two minutes?”
“Did you hear what she said? She brought the blasted FBI. They’re going to muck things up, keep us from doing what we need to do.”
Jacob clenched his jaw to keep from snapping something at his father. What’s more, his bloodlust was fading. Hearing Miriam’s scream and then looking over to see that she’d been startled by Eliza’s shout and had lost her grip, was about to fall to her death, had shocked him out of the trance he’d been in since the hospital. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. Even after hearing Eliza’s warning, his first thought had been to tear open the door guarding the cliff dwelling to see if he could find anyone to kill. What was wrong with him?
Agent Fayer followed Eliza in a zigzag pattern down the face of the cliff. And finally, Agent Krantz, creeping down, body flattened against the stone. Even from here, Jacob could tell he was terrified.
Eliza looked shaken when she finally angled down into the cliff dwelling, looking doubly cautious on the last few steps. Jacob took her arm and helped her in. She glanced at the stone wall, the door, then asked, “Anasazi?”
“Looks that way,” Jacob said. “Check out the basket with the corncobs.”
“That was a hell of a climb,” she said. “These damn Kimballs—I think I preferred Caleb’s dump to this.”
“Watch your language,” Abraham said. “You swear like a sailor.”
“Have you ever met a sailor?” Eliza said. “Neither have I, but I’ve heard you say hell or damn a million times, so please don’t lecture me. Apologies for the language, Brother Stephen Paul,” she added.
“It didn’t offend me,” Stephen Paul said with a half smile on his face.
Jacob thought about Stephen Paul’s senior wife, the expert coyote shooter, and suspected the man preferred his women with a little kick. He wondered if Stephen Paul regretted not marrying Eliza when he’d ha
d the chance, or if he still needed his women to be fully committed to the church.
Agent Fayer entered the fissure. She took in the cliff dwelling with a glance, then met Sister Miriam’s gaze, thinned her lips, and gave a quick nod. The current FBI agent and mainstream LDS member, sizing up her former colleague who had turned fundy. Just what they needed, yet another personality clash. What a dysfunctional band. There were seven of them on the threshold to the cliff dwelling now, and they stood nearly shoulder to shoulder. The eighth finally arrived, bigger than anyone else, and squeezed his way in.
“Well,” Krantz huffed, his face pale. “This is cozy.”
“What’s going on?” Jacob asked his sister. “Why did you yell down like that?”
Eliza shared what Charity had told them about Taylor Junior setting up a trap.
Jacob’s mouth went dry as he thought about how close he’d been to opening the door. And he thought about that peculiar smell of flowers. He couldn’t smell it now, but was certain he hadn’t imagined it. “Anyone have any ideas?”
“Is there another way in?” Fayer asked.
Jacob looked. Brush grew along the outer wall of the ancient house, which ran directly parallel to the cliff, filling in the natural fissure in the sandstone. As the branches of the scrubby trees bent to meet the sunlight, they left a small gap where one could wedge oneself between the curving tree trunks and the bricks of the cliff dwelling. There were two windows halfway across the front of the building.
“Miriam, do you still have that penlight?”
He took it, tucked it into his pocket, and started across the front face of the building, moving between the wall and the screen of trees. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, as the trees, each trunk only three or four inches across, provided a springy, but secure railing of a sort, between the edge of the building and the drop-off to his right.
There was one scary moment when he had to stretch across a gap in the trees—the exposed cut stones he’d first spotted from below—grab a thin trunk on the other side, and shift his weight across the void. The weight of the smaller, farther branch bent as it took his weight. The tree groaned and he heard the roots shifting where they gripped the crumbling outer wall of the cliff dwelling. And then he was across and squirming through the first window and into the cliff dwelling.
The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4) Page 21