She tried to speak but nothing came out but a sigh. Joe’s hand clamped down on her shoulder, and that was the only thing that kept her rooted in the here and now.
Horns. Fangs. Sparkling scales. And a message so powerful that it didn’t have to be spoken. Within seconds, the snake was gone, and the air was black again
Faye pressed her face into Joe’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Faye. He didn’t come to hurt you.”
“I know.”
“Faye saw the snake?” Mischief entered Oka Hofobi’s voice. “But she’s just a woman.”
“I figure that means that he has an extra big task for Faye,” Joe said.
She rolled her head back until it rested on the wall behind her. “That’s what he said.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When the voice sounded, Faye thought for a moment that the snake had returned.
Joe spoke again. “It’s time, Faye.”
Then it must be daylight outside. Not just dawn, but broad daylight, because Joe had said that they should wait until Neely would be certain they weren’t coming out. Faye wanted—no, needed—to be out in the sunshine.
Faye jumped off the ledge that had held her out of the water all night long. The cold shock of water didn’t even bother her. She jostled Oka Hofobi until he joined her. Feeling around for Joe, she asked, “Where to?”
There was no break in the blackness, but Faye thought that this might be a good thing. If the opening they sought were obvious, then Neely would surely have found it when she played here as a little girl. They wanted an exit hidden deep in the dark. Joe set out to find it with confidence, which buoyed Faye’s hopes.
It was hard to stay oriented in the darkness. Every few steps, Faye lurched when her foot rested on an uneven patch of floor, and her brain readjusted its opinion of which direction was up. She dragged a hand along the wall to give herself a frame of reference, and it helped a little. Regular grooves, probably tool marks, cut into the wall at irregular intervals. They supported Faye’s suspicion that someone—a lot of someones—had built this drain. Maybe they’d started from scratch, and maybe they’d simply enlarged the cave to meet their needs. Their work was crumbling, but it had stood for centuries, and maybe for millennia.
Faye was thrilled, and terrified, too. How would people with these skills have constructed an outlet for their drain? She pictured an ancient manhole cover of heavy stone, pierced with intricate carvings and held in place by a millennium’s worth of silt. They would have had to trade to get such a significant piece of stone, but their trading networks snaked out far and wide. Such an exquisite artifact would have let the water out, but it might trap Faye and her friends underground as long as they lived. Which wouldn’t be a long time, but it would sure seem like it.
Faye had recovered her equilibrium. By paying attention to her feet and hanging onto the wall with the hand that wasn’t clutching Joe, she felt pretty sure she knew which way was up. She was also pretty sure that her feet were pointed down.
Her panicking animal brain screamed, We’re moving down! Away from the sun!, but her rational brain rose to the occasion, reminding her that they wanted to be moving down. If the purpose of this culvert was to drain water from the creek when it got too high, then the exit had to be lower than the entrance. She was pretty sure that she could sense the faint motion in the water that Joe had been feeling all night. It was flowing in the direction they were walking. They were going the right way.
Oka Hofobi, whose hand was on her right shoulder, staggered. Her hand shot out to steady him and, bare inches from her shoulder, struck a wall. The culvert had narrowed suddenly. Poor Oka Hofobi had discovered that fact by planting his face into the wall.
“I’m okay. I don’t think my nose is broken. Keep going.”
Faye moved her face as close to Joe’s back as she could get it. Behind her own back, she felt Oka Hofobi take the same defensive position. Within twenty steps, all three of them were on their knees in the rapidly narrowing drain. Within twenty more steps, it was clear that only Faye was small enough to go on.
“It’s lighter down there, Faye,” Joe said.
She had to take his word for it, but that was okay. She already knew her eyes were nowhere as good as Joe’s. If he thought the exit was within spitting distance, she believed him.
“If it gets really tight,” Joe was saying, “you’ll have to decide whether to put your arms out in front of you, or whether to hold them by your sides. Kinda like a snake.”
Faye was still worried that the opening might be silted up, or sealed by an ancient grate. She wanted the use of her hands. “I’ll put my arms in front.”
She patted the rapidly narrowing walls. “I can do this. You gentlemen can expect a rescue party as soon as I get to a phone.”
Joe’d had the foresight to squeeze aside and let her take the lead, just before the passage grew too narrow for such a complicated maneuver. Oka Hofobi, who still brought up the rear, thrust a hand forward until it rested on her back. “Now we know why Sinti Hollo said you had a great task to do.”
Faye wished the snake god had taught her a little more about slithering on her belly.
Joe said nothing. He just slid an arm between her back and the culvert’s ceiling and squeezed her tight. She felt secure and cradled in the crook of his arm, but there was no time to linger there. It was time to move forward.
The irregular shape of the drain squeezed Faye’s body into one shape after another. Early in her passage, she felt her left side dip down at a point where the widest portion of the passageway was across the diagonal. Within a few feet, her body was level again, but it was recoiling from the pain of dragging her belly over a sharp rock. Then, at the bottom of a short, steep dip, she found herself rounding a curve in a slight backbend. This last discomfort didn’t bother her in the least, because the curve hid something precious.
Light.
“I can see it!” she called back to her companions. “It’s open, but it’s pretty small.” She oozed forward, reaching for the little hole with both hands. As she’d feared, a tidy ring of stones had held it open all these years. If her hips were wider than that circle…
She wished she could bend back and take a good look at those hips, but what would have been the point? Either she fit through the hole or she didn’t.
Not having experienced childbirth personally, Faye could only go by what she’d heard. Still, she’d found the Lamaze classes she’d attended with her friend Magda to be enormously helpful in her current situation.
Her head went through the opening easily. This was a good thing, since she didn’t have a newborn’s ability to let her head be molded into whatever shape its mother’s pelvis requires.
Her shoulders were too wide to go straight through, which wasn’t a good sign. Faye’s shoulders were almost too narrow to be fully functional. Her bra straps were forever sliding off one side or the other. Fortunately, the Lamaze lady had demonstrated how a baby exits the birth canal one shoulder at a time, twisting its body behind it. (She’d also said that, on occasion, a baby’s shoulder is broken by the birth process, but Faye chose not to dwell on that little detail.)
With both shoulders through the opening, Faye paused to rest, and to glory in the sight of the wide world. She was resting at the bottom of a grassy slope. Velvety green plants lined the damp track where water left the drain that had been her prison. If Joe and Oka Hofobi hadn’t been still trapped in the dark cold, she would have paused for a nap right there.
Grabbing at some handy saplings, Faye tugged herself forward until the rim of her pelvis caught on the drain’s opening. This was the moment. Either her hips could be dragged through, or they couldn’t. And if they couldn’t, then she, Oka Hofobi, and Joe would die.
No, they wouldn’t. Not yet. Not when Faye could scream and hope to be heard. Not when she could claw at the stones holding her in this spot. And not when she could dig in the dirt for worms that she and her friends could eat. Faye was not known for gi
ving up.
She pulled hard again, tilting her hips in every direction she could reach, looking for a place where the opening was out-of-round. She gained an inch, then found herself stuck again. Completely stuck. She couldn’t move forward or backward. She couldn’t even swivel.
The Lamaze teacher had been big on good posture. She had taught that too many women went through life swaybacked, which was particularly damaging when they were carrying a heavy load in their uterus. At a guess, Faye would say that a swayed back took up more room than a straight one. Following the Lamaze teacher’s instructions, she tilted her pelvis in the only direction left to her—tucked under.
And she slid out onto the fresh grass, landing in a curled-up heap at the base of a mound that had once lifted up a graveyard.
“Can you guys hear me?” Faye bellowed into the drain opening. “I’m out. I’m okay. I’m going for help.”
Their responses were joyful, but unintelligible, soaked up by soil and rock and water. “Hang on,” she called to them. “You won’t believe how fast I’ll be back.”
It took Faye only seconds to get her bearings, locating the creek on the far side of the cemetery mound and wading upstream to locate the tree where Neely had found them. She shouldn’t have been surprised to find that her day pack was gone. A sheriff knew all there was to know about eliminating evidence. Was it at the bottom of a lake far from here? Or would it be carefully planted someplace where Neely wanted the search parties to waste a few days?
The day pack mattered for just one reason. Faye’s car keys were in it. This narrowed her options, but it wasn’t a tragedy. Her first goal wasn’t to reach her car. She just needed to get to a phone, which could be had at the Nail house. Then she’d need a car, but Mrs. Nail would surely lend her one.
Faye pointed her face in the general direction of the road and ran. If she kept the creek on her right, she’d come out of the woods just a few steps from Oka Hofobi’s home.
Oka Hofobi wished he could crowd down into the passage that Faye had just traversed. His body would have still been soaking in springwater, but at least he could have stretched his face toward the warm sun. It was a ridiculous wish, because he could never fit through the narrow opening. And it was a selfish wish, because he would have been putting himself between his new friend Joe and the same warm sunshine that he craved.
So he couldn’t go forward. And he didn’t dare go back to the ledge where they had spent the long night. It wouldn’t do to be out of earshot when Faye brought their rescuers.
He and Joe hadn’t discussed the issue of where they should wait, because the answer was so obvious. Standing in this exact spot, they had heard Faye call back to them that she had freed herself. So the two of them were just going to stand in that spot until she came back with help.
The frenzied flight from Neely’s gun had sapped most of his strength. A night spent soaked with springwater had taken the rest. His trembling legs would fail him soon, but he knew he wouldn’t live until Faye came back if he collapsed into the cold water. He vowed to stand another minute. Then another. The faint light showed him that Joe’s legs were quivering just like his, so he vowed to hold him up, too, if need be.
He couldn’t do it for an hour, but he thought he could do it for sixty minutes, if he took those minutes one at a time.
Faye checked the sun. It must be higher in the sky than it looked, because Mrs. Nail had already gone to work. It couldn’t be too late, though, because her archaeological colleagues weren’t here yet.
She looked around for a rock. If anyone ever had an excuse for breaking a window, Faye knew she did, but she hesitated. It was going to be hard to call in a search-and-rescue team without alerting the sheriff to the situation, but Faye was developing a plan. She was sure she could get Joe and Oka Hofobi saved, and she was pretty sure she could corner the sheriff at the same time, but a simple phone wouldn’t be enough. Faye needed a car.
She looked across the road at the Calhoun house. Mrs. Calhoun’s ill temper had been gossiped over all week, but she’d never been ugly to Faye personally. There weren’t many people who would close their door on a life-or-death request. Not when they had recently lost a loved one to violent death.
It was time to face the formidable Mrs. Calhoun.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A closed screen door separated Faye from Mrs. Calhoun. The widow stood impassively inside the door. She was a big woman, just as her husband had been a big man. Her dress was worn. Her apron was worn. Her face was worn. This was not a woman who had led an easy life.
Faye knew that her own bedraggled appearance was the only trump card that she held. Her tale of being trapped underground all night would ring true for anyone who got a good look at her. Her final escape had left abrasions on every bit of exposed skin. The mud smeared on her clothes was starting to stiffen and dry, and her body seemed shriveled from the night-long chill. Mrs. Calhoun had been called a racist by people who knew her, but Faye didn’t know it for a fact. Besides, compared to the blood and bruises and mud that covered her, her dark skin was fairly unobtrusive.
“People are in danger. I need help.”
Mrs. Calhoun opened the door without speaking a word.
“There are people trapped in a…a cave on your property,” Faye began, gesturing vaguely toward the back of the house. “We need to—”
“I’ll call Neely Rutland. She’ll have someone out here to—”
“No!”
Mrs. Calhoun blinked. Even Faye was surprised at the huge sound that came out of her own mouth at the sound of Neely’s name.
“My friends are in danger, and Neely Rutland put them there.”
“Why, I was Neely’s Girl Scout leader. A smarter, nicer girl I never hope to see.” Mrs. Calhoun’s hand was on the phone. Faye prepared herself to rip it out of the wall, rather than let this woman warn Neely.
“Neely killed your husband.”
Now the old woman’s hand was off the phone, and she was using her body to crowd Faye toward the door. “That’s crazy. How dare you even suggest—”
Faye gambled that Carroll Calhoun had been one of those men who told their wives everything. “She found out what her father did to Mr. Judd. And she was afraid your husband would tell his secret.”
The gamble paid off. Mrs. Calhoun took a step back, though she was nearer to the phone than Faye would have liked.
“Neely always did think her daddy hung the moon, but she never saw his mean streak. Carroll told me he thought Kenneth Rutland would have killed that young man, just for the sheer fun of it. And he knew he could get away with it, because the young man was black.” Mrs. Calhoun’s voice was uncertain, almost feeble. “What are we going to do? You and I can’t dig those people out of that cave with our bare hands.”
Faye’d had a long night to muse over the relationships between people and their lawgivers. Mrs. Calhoun would never have believed her, if she hadn’t offered the telling detail of Kenneth Rutland’s guilt. This county had elected Neely sheriff. Most people obviously liked her and trusted her. Who could be trusted to help Oka Hofobi and Joe without calling in their beloved sheriff for assistance?
Faye knew from her own family history that African-Americans could well believe that a person’s government might betray her. But she needed government-level help. She needed a search-and-rescue team with lots of training and equipment. Black people didn’t ordinarily keep that stuff lying around the house, no more than anybody else did.
How fortunate that there was a sovereign nation just a few miles away, one with a long memory that stretched back to a time when it had been betrayed by the United States of America. If anyone could be persuaded that an official of the government might lie and kill, it would be the Choctaws.
Chief Matt Hinnant of the Choctaw Fire Department felt his bad-news meter rise when his assistant Pete handed him the phone, saying only, “I think you’d better handle this one, Chief.”
At first, he’d thought the young woman wasn�
��t making any sense. She sounded like she might even be slipping into shock. “Are you warm enough, ma’am? Do you want to put down the phone and get a sweater? I’ll wait for you.”
Her outburst was so vociferous that he felt reasonably assured that she wasn’t in immediate danger. He just wished her story wasn’t so far-fetched.
“You’re not on the reservation, but you want our rescue team, not the county’s…because why? Because Neely Rutland tried to kill you?”
Chief Davis had dated Neely’s best friend, when they’d all been in high school. He had rarely met a straighter arrow. Neely never smoked a cigarette. She never sneaked an underage beer. She never even missed her father’s ridiculously early curfew. Not once. “Let me call Neely,” he said, “and we can get this straightened out.”
The word “No!” blasted out of the phone, darn near blowing out his eardrum. “I told you that Sheriff Rutland left us to die in a flooded cave. My friends, Joe Wolf Mantooth and Dr. Oka Hofobi Nail, are still there.”
The Chief straightened in his chair. Two of the firefighters on duty today were related to Oka Hofobi Nail. One of them was his brother, Davis. If Oka Hofobi was truly in trouble, Chief Hinnant knew he’d have some personnel who wouldn’t be at their most objective. Personal feelings got people killed. “I hear you, but we have a jurisdictional problem here. We can’t just go rushing willy-nilly onto non-reservation property. Other departments call us in for help all the time—our dive team was just out last week—but they have to ask us to come. If we go barging into Sheriff Rutland’s territory—”
“Why is it so hard for you to believe that an agent of the government might commit a crime? Haven’t you ever heard of broken treaties? Why are the rest of the Choctaws in Oklahoma today?”
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