The chill he felt then was almost a prayer — Don’t let me find what I’m afraid of in there — as images of chains and shackles and bones flickered through his mind, all the things a psychotic might store away in secret places. Then he dropped to one knee, pushed the wall back, and saw what it hid: maps.
Nothing else. The wall was lined with maps. Not the sort that hung on the basement walls at Trapdoor, those hand-drawn illustrations of cave interiors. These were topographic land maps. Mark looked at them and thought of what he’d told Julianne Grossman during his trance: that he’d been looking at the wrong maps.
He pushed the wall back farther so he could see one of the topographic maps clearly. It was covered with notations and filled with pushpins.
Burial sites, he thought. My God. If every one of those pins represents a...
But they couldn’t. There hadn’t been that many missing people in Garrison County in the past hundred years, probably, and Ridley wasn’t known to range far from home. So what had he been locating?
Mark climbed farther behind the wall, studying the maps. None of them were of Trapdoor. None of them showed anything that made them worth hiding, as far as he could tell.
Wrong maps. You said you were looking at the wrong maps.
He’d looked at every map he knew existed, and now he was looking at others, but still he didn’t see where his mistake had been made, because he hadn’t known these existed before.
You told me your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.
But his mother wouldn’t have known about Ridley’s maps. Where was the joke there? Julianne said that he’d laughed before he said it. Hilarious stuff going on in his subconscious, apparently, but he couldn’t imagine what it had been.
It took him a while but he finally found the location of Trapdoor on the map. He traced the outline of Maiden Creek with his index finger and came up to the road and the place where the trailer stood and then he stopped and for a long moment he didn’t move or make a sound.
There had always been other maps, and they’d always been available to him. They were the ones that counted too. Everyone else cared about the ones Ridley had not shared, but those mattered only when they were paired with others: the ones of the surface, the ones that showed ownership.
He left Ridley’s hidden room and walked back down the stairs. In front of the cold stove where Ridley had once sat with bright eyes and told Mark that someone needed to speak for Sarah Martin, Mark sat and called Jeff London.
“Call back after a hang-up,” Jeff said. “Let me guess — you’re in trouble. What can I do for you?”
The bitterness in his voice was valid, but Mark couldn’t worry about it. Not now.
“You got a computer handy?” he said.
“Hell are you talking about?”
“I need to know whether Garrison County has a GIS database.”
GIS stood for geographic information system, computer-mapping technology that had its origins in nuclear-war fears during the 1960s but was now common for local property records.
Jeff was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded near desperate, a broken man asking a priest to explain to him once more why he should believe.
“What do you think this can accomplish?” he said.
“Ridley wants the cave,” Mark said. “I can’t explain how much it means to him. He believes it’s something more than a cave. But he’s no fool. He understands access. He understands that someone owns it. And that he isn’t that man.”
“Tell me why that matters.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Markus—”
“I’m almost there!”
This time the silence went on so long that Mark thought Jeff had hung up. He actually pulled the phone away and looked at the display, saw the ticking seconds. A countdown of trust. It had to blow at some point.
“They have a GIS database,” Jeff said. Speaking in measured tones now, clinically. Like Dr. Desare when he’d explained how Mark had been brought back from the dead. “Who do you want me to search for?”
“Ridley Barnes.”
Pause. “One property. Five acres, with a single residential structure valued at—”
“I’m standing in it now. I don’t need the specs. Try again. First name Pershing, last name MacAlister. M-A-C.”
Pause. “Nothing.”
“There has to be.”
“There isn’t.”
Mark rose from the chair but didn’t move away from it. “Put in the word Trapdoor. See if it hits.” Mark could see his reflection in the window. With the woodstove in the background, the image reminded him of different places, a different man. Howling blizzards and small towns. Broken fingers and pickup trucks crawling through the snow. Exposed lies. Blood and justification.
“Eleven properties,” Jeff said. “The name is Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust.”
“Eleven? Eleven unique properties. You’re sure? No duplicate records.”
“I’m looking at the parcel map, Markus. Eleven properties, roughly following the basin of something called Maiden Creek. Sound right?”
Too right. Mark wet his lips and said, “Can you see who owns the trust?”
“Nobody owns a trust.”
“What do you mean?”
“A land trust is its own entity. Like a corporation. It doesn’t have owners, it has beneficiaries. Those names aren’t public. Obviously, we can find them, but as far as the public record is concerned, Trapdoor Caverns is its own legal entity. Trapdoor can buy and sell land. So far, it has only bought.”
“How recently?”
“Let me see.” It was quiet for a few seconds while Jeff looked, and then he said, “Each parcel was transferred to the trust from Pershing MacAlister in October of 2004.”
“The month after Sarah was killed.”
“That makes sense, though. They shut the place down after she was killed.”
“You said you could see a parcel map,” Mark said. “What does it look like?”
“Look like?”
“Yes. What does the shape of the Trapdoor land-trust property look like?”
“Like a snake. It follows the creek, then curls out and away. I don’t know what shape it has. It looks like a suburban subdivision, maybe. Winding roads and cul-de-sacs. What are you hoping to hear?”
“Exactly that.”
“Markus, what are you talking about?”
“Ridley mapped it from below,” Mark said. “But the cave’s not worth anything unless you own what’s above it. I’m sure of that, Jeff. I’m from oil country. Surface ownership extends to the core of the earth. Ridley was working from the bottom up.”
“Which matters how?”
“How fast can we get ahold of that trust document?”
“Not very. Private and sealed legal agreement. We’d need a subpoena.”
“There has to be a faster approach than that.”
“Sure. You can find one of the parties involved and ask if you can see a copy. Short of that cooperation, you’ll need a subpoena. But you still haven’t given me an answer. Why do you think this matters? What does it have to do with Sarah Martin?”
“I’m close,” Mark said, as if that answered the question. He was circling through the fog, waiting to land. Instruments were out, only instinct left. He was close. You either landed or crashed.
51
Ridley questioned Julianne Grossman’s authenticity on many things, but he couldn’t deny the power of her presence. Her energy was palpable in the truck, even though she couldn’t speak and chose not to move. She sat there in his jacket with the tape over her mouth and she stared straight ahead, and still he could feel her like a pulse. He was relieved that he had silenced her.