Faye was still clutching Joe’s arm when he lurched backward, knocking her off her feet and into the water. Violating his naturally chivalrous character, he didn’t help her to her feet. He just grabbed her under her armpits and scuttled backward. She felt enough jostling knees and swinging hands to be sure that Oka Hofobi was keeping up with them as they all rushed away from the mouth of the cave. A primitive part of her wanted to reach out for the fading spot of charcoal gray that was her only connection to light and fresh air.
Then she heard the hissing sound of sand on sand.
For a moment, the dim light illuminated single grains of sand as they fell. They had the hard, glinting beauty of diamonds. Then the avalanche came, a great sighing rush of sand as it slid over the mouth of the cave. Gravel and rocks came next, punctuating the sand’s soft roar with their noisy splashes.
Faye had been so quiet in her hopes that Neely wouldn’t hear them…that she’d never find them. At this undeniable evidence that those hopes were dashed, she felt a full-throated scream leave her. Then she realized that she’d never seen true darkness before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Faye leapt to her feet, grabbing for her right back pocket. Long-standing habit had made her slip her trowel in that pocket when she made the decision to go into the creek. It had made its presence known repeatedly—first, when she landed butt-first on the creek bottom, and again during the avalanche, with every bump Joe dragged her across. Now, when she had a pressing need to move some dirt, she was grateful for the huge bruise that the trowel had left on her backside. She was going to dig a hole and get the three of them out of this tomb.
Joe, who seemed to have had a penchant for manhandling her lately, wrapped both arms around her and jerked her back, whispering in her ear. “Don’t be stupid. She’s still out there. Wait.”
Faye didn’t wait well, but she couldn’t deny the wisdom of Joe’s advice. She pocketed the trowel and reached out her arms to take the measure of their prison. It was wide enough to let the three of them crowd shoulder-to-shoulder, and it was just barely tall enough to let Faye stand up straight. This meant that Joe and Oka Hofobi were certainly hunched into an uncomfortable crouch.
She pulled her cell phone from her pocket, hoping to see its face light up when she pushed the power button. Nothing. They made them tough these days, but not tough enough to survive a prolonged dip in the creek—which meant there was little hope that Joe or Oka Hofobi had a phone that had fared better.
Joe put a warning hand on her shoulder that she intuitively knew meant, “Wait here.” He moved toward the pile of earth blocking the cave’s mouth, but he didn’t scrabble at it with his hands the way Faye would. She knew this because she heard absolutely nothing. Oka Hofobi shifted his weight slightly and Faye knew it because she was close enough to feel him move. Once Joe moved out of physical contact, he was simply…gone.
A flicker of panic shook her, but she shook it off. Joe was still there, and she knew what he was doing. He was listening. She knew this as surely as she knew what he looked like and how his voice sounded. Joe could hear a mockingbird land on a dogwood branch.
When the loud crashing sound of gunshots came, again and again, another scream was ripped out of her throat. The roof of the cave opened up over Joe’s head, and Faye did what her instincts told her to do. She lunged forward—groping, feeling, slapping at the walls—and she didn’t stop until her hands made contact with Joe’s body. Oka Hofobi was right beside her, and the two of them yanked Joe away from the falling earth.
There was sand in her eyes and dirt in her mouth, and the pebbles bouncing off her head were getting larger by the second. There was nothing for the three of them to do but to keep backing up and hope the whole roof didn’t come down. When Faye found that she was still alive, thirty seconds after the thundering roar commenced, she began to hope that the ceiling would survive. And maybe they would, too.
“I’m okay,” Joe said, directly into her ear. “Scream, Faye.”
She did as she was told.
The earth continued to empty itself into the water ahead of them, but the roof over their heads held. Joe clamped a hand over her mouth. “Good. You can stop now,” he said. “There’s no way she can hear you.”
How could that possibly be a good thing?
Darkness and quiet left Joe plenty of time for self-blame. He should never have dragged his friends into this hole, but he didn’t think well when faced with a gun. He didn’t much mind bears or sharks or snakes. Creatures lashed out with the weapons God gave them, and he didn’t blame them. God had given him some gifts, too. When faced with nature, Joe always felt like he was on firm footing.
Manmade weapons were different. It could be impossible to defend oneself from an attack with a gun or a tank or a nuclear bomb. Joe liked to have a fighting chance. This cave (or drainage culvert or whatever the heck Faye said it was) had looked like that fighting chance.
If only he’d remembered something else Faye said. She’d told him that Neely’s father had owned this land when she was a kid. A single look at the woman’s tanned face and weathered hands said that she’d spent her life outdoors, just like Joe. What were the odds that she didn’t know about this hiding spot? And what were the odds that a woman with her woods skills wouldn’t recognize the overhanging bank as a chance to bury them alive?
If his ears told him true, Neely had stood outside the cave and swung a big branch up at that overhang, knocking down just enough dirt to seal the opening. Even then, Joe had held out hope that he could dig them out of this hole, once he was convinced that Neely and her gun were gone. But she and her gun had confounded him again. She’d stepped back and fired at the shelf, bringing down tons of sand and rock. Though Neely couldn’t know it, her shots had been even more successful than she might have hoped, collapsing part of the roof over their heads. The most valiant efforts of Faye and her little trowel weren’t going to get them out of here.
Joe sniffed the air. It was still sweet, and the water around his legs was too cool and fresh to be stagnant. There was still hope.
“Why did you tell me to scream, Joe?”
“Talk a little quieter, Faye.”
She wondered whether he really thought Neely could still hear them. A skin-crawling thought occurred to her. Maybe he thought the ceiling above them was still unstable.
Faye had spent hermit-like years when she’d had no one to talk to, and she hadn’t much cared. Now she found that being buried alive had loosened her tongue. She was willing to talk quietly, but she was going to talk. Joe and Oka Hofobi didn’t seem to mind.
Joe explained his thinking in a quiet voice that still managed to warm their dank, cold surroundings. “We want Neely to go away. She probably heard you scream the first time, so she would have been worried that you were still alive. I thought if she heard you scream while the roof was falling in, then you never made another peep, well, maybe she’d think you were dead. Oka Hofobi and I never made any noise at all, so I bet she’s out there hoping we’re dead, too.”
This conversation was creeping Faye out, but it was interesting. “So do you think she gave us up for dead and went home?”
“Nope,” was Oka Hofobi’s succinct answer. “I wouldn’t. Would you?”
“Nope,” echoed Joe. “I’d give us time to suffocate.”
Faye had been trying not to breathe too much, but now that the word “suffocate” had been spoken, she felt every muscle in her chest spasm.
“You’re not smothering, Faye.” Joe didn’t sound like a man measuring his breaths in shallow sips.
“You’re sure?”
“There’s a breeze, Faye.”
“I don’t feel it.”
“I do.” There was surprise in Oka Hofobi’s voice. “I didn’t before you mentioned it, but I do now.”
Faye decided to take their word for it. Joe’s senses had always been far keener than hers. “So there’s an opening. We can breathe. Great.”
“Probably more
than one, since the air’s moving.”
Faye had to take Joe at his word on that one, too.
“And the water’s moving,” he said. A slight splash told her that he had dipped a hand in the water. Faye’s legs were freezing. She couldn’t imagine voluntarily dipping another body part in water that felt, to her Florida sensibilities, like snow melt.
She had to remind herself that it rarely snowed in Mississippi, and never in July. Cold water in these parts didn’t fall frozen from the sky. It welled up from the ground. “Mr. Judd said that there was a spring in here. Can you tell which direction the water’s flowing? Is it heading toward the mouth of the cave?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should look for the source of the spring. If the water changes direction there, it might be a sign that there’s another way out of this hole. We could follow it, and maybe find an opening that’s not closed up,” she said, hoping she understood the thinking of ancient engineers properly. “This doesn’t seem like a natural cave to me. Or maybe it started out as a natural cave, but it was enlarged by humans sometime in the past. I’ve read that some of the moundbuilding civilizations used culverts and drains to control the flow of water. Notice the word ‘flow.’ If the water’s going out somewhere, then maybe we can, too. It’s worth a try.”
“No. I mean, yes, it is,” Joe stammered. “Let’s try it, but not yet. We need to wait.”
If Joe told Faye to sit down, be quiet, or wait one more time, she planned to smack him. The dark silence was stealing her sanity. “Why should we wait in this dank pit even one more second?”
“If we wait until daylight, the opening might show itself,” he responded in an insufferably reasonable voice. “We might never find a tiny little hole in the dark, but if light were shining through it…”
“…we couldn’t miss it!” Now Oka Hofobi was finishing Joe’s sentences for him. Faye was charmed to find out that she was buried alive with the Doublemint twins. “Joe’s right. We should wait.”
So this, Faye thought, was hell. She was trapped underground with two contemplative types, when every fiber in her being was screaming, “Take action! Do something! Even if it’s wrong!”
“There’s another reason to wait, Faye.” Oka Hofobi seemed to feel a need to placate her, because he didn’t know her all that well. Joe was well aware that she’d squawk and grouse, but she’d eventually settle down and do the sensible thing. “If we wait until daylight,” he continued in his conciliatory tone, “Neely might decide we’ve suffocated to death and go away. We can’t be sure she doesn’t know about the other opening.”
“If there is one.” Faye was enjoying her moment of sulking negativity. Oka Hofobi might be worried about her bad attitude, but Joe knew she’d get over it.
“Let’s presume there is one,” Oka Hofobi went on. “If Neely ran these woods as a child, she may have found it. She may be sitting there watching it. If we don’t show up at sunrise, she’ll walk away.”
“So why are we talking when she could be sitting out there listening to us?”
“That’s why I told you to talk quiet. Also, listen to the way our voices bounce off these walls. There’s no opening anywhere near us to carry our voices outside. I think it’s way back there.” Faye felt Joe’s arm move, without seeing it. “And I think we’ll have to crawl through some tight spaces to get to it.”
“So she thinks maybe we’re dead. And she’s either sitting out by the creek, or she’s sitting by the back door to this culvert. What makes us think we’ll know when she’s gone?” Faye found that negativity had enduring charms. “When will she feel safe in assuming we’re dead?”
“She doesn’t care all that much if we’re dead when she leaves.” Joe’s voice echoed oddly off the culvert walls. “If she’s sure we can’t get out—and she’ll be pretty sure if we don’t come out pretty soon after the sun comes up—then she can leave us here to die slow. Don’t forget that she’ll be in charge of the search parties. She’ll make good and sure we’re never found.”
A killer with a badge had an unfair advantage. When the three of them were reported missing, a sheriff could easily sabotage the search. Earlier that day, Faye had unthinkingly told Neely where she was, simply on the basis of a crisply barked order.
Neely had even been in charge of the crime scene investigation when Calhoun was killed. How easy it must have been for her to obliterate any forensic evidence she might have left behind. Even her footprints had told lies. By treading over the entire crime scene in the line of duty, she’d made it impossible to distinguish her new footprints from any she left behind during the killing.
And if Mr. Judd’s doctors ever suspected a problem with his drugs, Sheriff Neely was poised to frame Preston Silver for poisoning him. The whole county—and thus the entire jury pool—suspected he was capable of violence to a black man. A trusted sheriff could railroad him in a heartbeat.
Faye pondered the fact that Joe had been willing to step out when Neely called, while she and Oka Hofobi had hung back for that critical millisecond. Faye’s great-great-grandmother had been born a slave, and she herself had been the first member of her family born after the Civil Rights Act draped its protection over them. Oka Hofobi had been born to people still digging out from the debris left behind by the Indian removals. Broken treaties and unjust laws had knocked the Choctaws from prosperity to dire poverty with the stroke of a pen. She and Oka Hofobi had been born to suspect the law and its agents.
Joe, despite his Creek heritage, had been born to people who had turned their back on that culture. His father drove a semi, criss-crossing America’s interstate system on a weekly basis. His mother had cooked TV dinners and shopped at Wal-Mart. His hunger for the heritage they’d forgotten had made him, in some ways, as Creek as anyone born on the reservation. But he’d had to do it for himself. He’d sought out people that could teach him the religion and handcrafts and philosophy of his ancestors, but the mistrust that rests in the bones of the long-persecuted had been lost in translation.
Somewhere in the night, a woman wearing a badge was hanging her hopes on the likelihood that they were dead. Joe thought they could outwait her. A few hundred years of bad history made Faye desperate to do so.
“How will we know when it should be daylight?” Faye asked, then she remembered who she was talking to. Joe would just know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Faye was waving her trowel around again. She could tell it made Joe nervous when she did that, so she kept doing it.
“You’re not going to get anywhere, digging into that wall.”
“Yeah, but I’m using my muscles, so I bet I’m warmer than you.” She scooped out some more clay debris and let it fall into the water. “Later on, I’m gonna be a lot warmer than you.”
Joe grunted, but Oka Hofobi was willing to humor her. “How you planning to manage that?”
She continued working on the pile of broken clay that she guessed remained from some earlier time when a segment of the wall had collapsed. Using her trowel to clear a flat place to perch, high and dry, she said, “I’m digging myself a ledge to sit on.”
The tone of Joe’s next grunt signified interest.
“Can I borrow that trowel when you’re done?” Oka Hofobi didn’t seem to mind humbling himself, not when everyone concerned had to admit that her idea was a good one.
“Yes, you may borrow my trowel. If you ask nicely.”
“May I borrow your trowel, ma’am?”
Faye hauled herself out of the water and onto a new-made ledge just wide enough to accommodate her hips. She felt around for Oka Hofobi’s hand before giving him the trowel. Otherwise, she might have put his eye out. “Just make sure you dig yourself a ledge right next to mine. We don’t want to waste any body heat tonight.”
Before long, the three of them had dug out a fairly respectable perch—although “before long” was a relative term. Faye couldn’t say that she had any notion how to judge time in this place.
Was
she warmer or more comfortable than she’d been while standing in chilly water? “Warmer” and “comfortable,” too, were relative terms. The dampness evaporating from her clothes was sucking all the body heat out of her. Joe and Oka Hofobi didn’t seem to be generating enough body heat to share, either. Her teeth were chattering like an excited squirrel, but she guessed it might have been worse. They could have all been floating in the creek, riddled with gunshot wounds.
The thought did nothing to warm her.
A vision of Mrs. Nail rose unbidden in front of her, and she knew that rescue was at hand. “There’s no way we’re going to be here all night,” she burbled. “Your mother will have the whole county looking for you.” Faye was certain to her core that all Neshoba County was awake and on the move, because Mrs. Nail had made it happen.
Oka Hofobi said only, “Um.”
“What?”
“My mother likes you a lot. Also, I’m over thirty, so she’s desperate. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“She knew that I was going to ask you for a ride. My car’s gone. Your car’s gone. When I didn’t come home…let’s just say that she’s probably leafing through bridal magazines right now.”
Faye wrapped her arms around her legs and squeezed tight, hoping to warm either her arms or her legs.
“What about you and Joe? Aren’t your roommates missing you by now?”
“Think,” Faye said. “Who are our roommates?”
“I don’t know. You guys disappear to the hotel every afternoon. I don’t know who sleeps with who.”
“Oh, I bet you do. Joe’s roommate is Bodie. My roommate is Toneisha. Toneisha hasn’t slept in her bed in days. How about you, Joe?”
“I’ve been living high on the hog in my private room. Sometimes I eat crackers in his bed, just to keep myself entertained.”
“Face it, guys,” Faye said, hugging her legs harder. “No one’s gonna miss us until we don’t show up for work.”
Mrs. Nail crawled quietly under the bedcovers, careful not to wake her husband. It seemed that Oka Hofobi had acted on her not-so-subtle comments that Faye Longchamp seemed like such a lovely girl. Smart. Independent. Caring.
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