Mark stood absolutely still and looked at her and thought, I will kill you, Ridley. I will find you in whatever hole you’re headed for down there, and I will kill you.
There was paracord on the floor, snipped into several lengths, and a pair of kitchen scissors lay in Danielle’s blood. A few feet farther on was a long piece of duct tape, tangled and stuck together.
Was this how Ridley had brought Julianne inside? It didn’t have to be Julianne with him, but Mark felt certain it was. She was the only one Ridley wanted. She was the fated one in Ridley’s warped mind, the one who had to join him belowground. He would have brought her here and demanded access. Because of this, she was possibly still alive.
He called 911 from the doorway. He wasn’t very aware of the words that he offered, but they seemed to make sense to the operator. He heard snippets of her questions back to him: Were there any other victims? Was there an active shooter? He answered as best as he could. Told her that he believed the shooter was in the cave and that he might have a hostage. Told her that someone else had probably gone in after the shooter. He said Ridley Barnes’s name several times. Heard his voice rising when he said it. There were too many questions. Why hadn’t Cecil called them? What was he thinking following Ridley into that cave, where Ridley held every advantage?
The same thing you are. He wants to end it himself. Not wait on the police. He wants to end it.
The operator was still talking but Mark had stopped responding. His eyes were on the gun cabinet in the corner of the room. He stepped over Danielle MacAlister’s body without looking at her and went to the cabinet. He set the phone down while he opened the cabinet. Two shotguns and a lever-action .22-caliber rifle with a scope. No handguns. He wanted a handgun if he was going into the cave. Easier to move with, easier to shoot with. The shotguns were bad options. A wide spray pattern in a contained space was likely to hit more than the intended target, and Ridley was not alone. Mark didn’t like the .22 either, but at least it gave a shooter a chance to deliver in a tight window. Down there, it was going to be tight.
He removed the .22 and checked it for ammunition. It was loaded. The scope was a cheap infrared model, one that projected a red dot onto its target. Cutting-edge technology when Mark was a kid, now available at every Walmart. There was a flashlight at the bottom of the cabinet, resting against the stock of one of the shotguns. Not a big light. A small Maglite, probably powered by two double-A batteries. It was going to seem very weak in the cave, but there was no time to look for another option. Cecil had made the right decision, trying to stop Ridley before he got deep into the cave. If he was allowed to get far enough, there’d be no catching him. Not in Trapdoor.
Mark put the flashlight in his jacket pocket and shifted the rifle to his left hand. The voice was still coming from his cell phone. Loud and urgent. He picked it up and put it back to his ear.
“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Sir, we have officers en route. I need you to stay where you are and stay on the line until they arrive.”
“Tell them to go to the cave. There’s nobody left here but the dead. The live ones are in the cave. For now, at least, there are live ones left.”
“Sir, I am instructing you to stay where you are and stay on the—”
Mark disconnected. The phone began to ring again almost immediately and he silenced it. He left the apartment with the .22 in his hands, walking around Danielle MacAlister’s body.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said to her. Maybe somewhere, somehow, the promise mattered. Mark wasn’t sure, but he felt it needed to be said. Just in case.
He walked down the stairs and followed the tracks out to the creek as far-off sirens became audible and fat, soft snowflakes wafted down. Ahead of him, the gate to Trapdoor stood open, and the darkness beyond beckoned.
55
The cave was as it should be, still and silent and soothing. Ridley had permitted Julianne to use the full strength of her headlamp for navigation, an undesirable intrusion but one he would not deny her because it allowed them to travel faster. They were walking on a ledge beside the deepwater channel. The channel was runoff from Maiden Creek that formed an underground tributary that Ridley had named the Greenglass River. In 2004, Pershing had run boat tours into the cave on the Greenglass, and Ridley hated those. He’d been in a boat in the cave only once, and he hadn’t lasted long in it that time, gone just far enough to ferry himself and his gear to the regions of the cave that fell off the maps, regions that had been dismissed by previous searchers because of the high water. Nobody could believe that Sarah Martin would enter a passage filled with water so high that she barely had clearance to breathe between the surface and the ceiling. All that Ridley had known was that they hadn’t found her yet and that people did strange things during spells of panic.
Back then, he hadn’t understood that people might do strange things in Trapdoor simply because the cave coerced them.
They walked in silence, and Julianne was honoring his demand not to assault his mind with words. The tape had been a valuable teacher. Perhaps she was even savvier than that, though, and knew that what Ridley needed from the cave was found in trapped whispers that came from beneath the water and behind the walls and out beyond the black.
The boat tours — fifteen dollars a pop in the old days, and ten for kids — had gone three-quarters of a mile back into the cave, a mere taste of what the Greenglass had to offer. Still, it was fascinating to have the experience of floating along beneath the earth, watching that green water reflect the light, seeing the dips and darts of the blind cave fish, listening to the slow, steady drips of stalactites — all of that was a new world to most.
It was also a world that extended far beyond what anyone understood. During the summer of 2004 Ridley had believed he’d learned most of what the cave had to offer, but at some point in the search for Sarah Martin, after the food went but before the batteries did, he’d found himself in spectacular new territory. Afterward, in total blackness, carrying a handcuffed corpse, he couldn’t say what he had passed through.
When they reached a wide chamber where the ceiling climbed to forty feet and rock formations jutted out of the water like abandoned pilings from a collapsed dock, he nudged Julianne to the right and into the walking passage that led to the Chapel Room. The Chapel Room was the first grand feature of Trapdoor, with a high domed ceiling and gorgeous stalactites that hung like prehistoric icicles over a series of descending rock ledges that had once been the ground formation of a waterfall but now, left high and dry, resembled empty church pews. Ridley paused when they entered the room, considering stopping there and sitting and taking this spot to engage Julianne in the talk that must begin soon, but he shook that off and led her deeper.
“There are passages all around us,” he said, breaking the silence. “Above and below and on each side. Some are navigable, some aren’t. Some go places, some don’t. Picture a bowl of spaghetti, and each strand is a passage. That’s what it’s like down here.”
Julianne said, “May I speak now?”
“Not yet. Thank you.”
The simplest route out of the Chapel Room led to the right. The fastest was straight ahead, the crawling passage that had given Blankenship so much trouble. You could get to the same place in far less time through the crawler. Ridley was impressed by the way Julianne forged ahead once they were inside, the walls squeezing, the ceiling lowering. She was much smaller than Blankenship but size didn’t necessarily affect claustrophobia. There was much ahead that she would not be capable of doing, though, passages that required technical expertise, but he was counting on Trapdoor to cooperate once his mission was clear. Trapdoor would simply have to. Not only was Julianne incapable of following him as far as he’d gone on that last trip; he was incapable of guiding her. He didn’t remember the turns he’d made, the paths he’d chosen. After he’d pulled on his wetsuit and slipped into the water, things had gotten away from him fast, and now that trip existed only in splashes — of water and of blood — and in whispers. Oh, maybe some screams too. Yes, there had been some screams.