“I saw it, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. I was just aware that it was there. Looked like he’d burned some of it.”
“Uh-huh. Well, it’s a trust document. Interesting read. Deeds the property to Cecil and Ridley.”
“Cecil and Ridley?”
“Yes. The document Ridley took down there has an effective date that is only a few months away, or when Pershing dies, whichever comes first. Fun thing about that? Pershing has to die of natural causes. It’s the strangest damn protective order in history, essentially.”
“Why is the cave willed to them?”
“Because Pershing gave Ridley the motive to kill Sarah.”
“What?”
“Cecil puts the blame on Pershing. Pershing can’t speak to defend himself, and now his daughter can’t defend him either. But according to Cecil, Ridley reached a point where he wouldn’t take money for mapping the cave. He wanted a piece of ownership. Pershing didn’t want to grant that. So he drew Ridley up a nice little cartoon trust to keep him going with the exploration and keep him silent about just what he was finding. Only problem is that Ridley went down to the courthouse to inquire about it.”
The disclosure should have felt like a triumph, but Mark’s stomach turned.
“Ridley found out he had a handful of wooden nickels? And then Sarah went missing how much later?”
“Six weeks later,” Blankenship said. He had trouble with the words.
“Why in the hell didn’t Ridley tell anyone this?”
“Because they drew up the new trust. It contented him, apparently. This is what he explained to Julianne Grossman.”
“But that came after Sarah.”
Blankenship nodded and when he spoke again, his voice had a honed edge. “So Pershing and Cecil knew the man was crazy, they played him for a fool, and then they got caught. All in the summer before... before Sarah. By the time I enter the frame, all of this has come to pass and she’s missing in the cave and I pull rank and demand that they send Ridley in after her. Pershing put up some resistance, I’ll admit that and already have, but the chickenshit never came close to saying what needed to be said. He didn’t want to admit it in front of Diane, is what Cecil and Danielle told me. He also didn’t think Ridley would hurt Sarah; he thought that she was just lost. But I’ll tell you this right now — I was the one who dealt with Pershing, and he was scared of Ridley Barnes. Never said a word of the true reasons, though. Never said enough to convince me Ridley was a threat and had reason to want to hurt Pershing, hurt the family. So I let him in, and then Ridley went in there and killed her!”
Mark let him run out of steam and allowed a few seconds to pass before he spoke.
“I think you’re almost there,” he said. “But you’re having trouble seeing past Pershing. I don’t blame you. It’s the reason they pulled you back then, but I don’t blame you a bit.”
“What am I missing, Novak?”
“The dark man that Ridley talks about like some sort of ghost or spirit of the cave? I think he was real. There was somebody else down there with him.”
“Cecil, probably.”
“I don’t think so. If Ridley told Julianne the truth last night, the dark man from that encounter is a dead man now. Ridley killed him.”
“I should have seen a crime report on him, then. This dark man. Somebody should have noticed he was missing.”
“I think you’ve got his teeth,” Mark said.
Blankenship went silent for a few seconds. “You think Carson Borders was down there.”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“Teeth came from Detroit. Motive for killing him came from Detroit. Connections to Ridley don’t exist.”
“His son is connected to it,” Mark said. “Of that, I’m certain. Where’s Evan?”
“Missing. Same as his cousins.”
“You’ll need to find him,” Mark said.
“I’m not buying Ridley’s version of what happened in that cave, whether he was hypnotized for it or not,” Blankenship said, but the words came slowly and his eyes had a far-off look.
“You’re wondering about it, though.”
“No.”
He was lying. Mark had seen similar lights in investigators’ eyes before. He’d felt that light.
Blankenship’s chest filled with a tired breath. “I suppose if Ridley ever comes back to the surface, I can ask him.”
“You can’t ask him,” Mark said. “That’s the hell of it, Sheriff. You’ve got to figure out his world to see where the pieces of your own got lost in it.”
62
Ridley was freezing and wet and it was impossible to dry off down here in the damp air. The chilled water beaded all along his goosefleshed skin, and when he shivered water sprayed from him like a dog shaking dry. Even by Ridley’s standards, it was far too cold, and that meant he was entering dangerous ground. He’d flirted with hypothermia before, but nothing like this.
He sat on a lip of stone, pondering problems that light alone could not fix. Ahead of him was a steep drop of at least thirty feet, and while he remembered it and knew that he was on the right path, he’d had climbing gear the first time through. He’d removed his backpack to work with Julianne, a critical mistake. He needed it now, but going back didn’t seem like an option. He wasn’t sure that the cave would allow him to pass back through the water again. He had to stay in pursuit until he found the dark man, but that meant finding a way down this wall. There were bolts in the stone and that surprised him because he didn’t remember running any bolts when he’d come this way searching for Sarah Martin. He was almost certain he hadn’t, but it was foolish to think that the dark man would have needed them. He could pass through as he wanted; the cave yielded for him, and surely he did not require mechanical assistance.
Ridley leaned forward, out over the lip, and studied the bolts. They were not the kind he used for the etriers. They were open U-bolts and there were only two of them, set eighteen inches apart and just below the cliff edge. Ridley was no stranger to visions, so he reached out and touched one of the bolts, feeling the steel under his fingertips. Very real. The steel was scraped, the base of the U-shaped portion nicked. Ropes would not do that. Metal would. He looked at the open bolts again and now he thought he understood. A quick scan of the room confirmed it — a caving ladder rested in the rocks just beside him, coiled up and tossed aside, waiting for someone’s return.
Ridley had been using single-rope techniques for so long that the possibility of the ladder had not come to him as swiftly as it should have. The ladder was made of aluminum steps with strands of cable for the side supports so that it could be rolled up.
Ridley unfurled the ladder slowly and the feeling that descended upon him then was one he’d always feared he’d encounter in a cave, although he’d expected it would come from a roof collapse, a rock slide, something that left him trapped and hopeless. He hadn’t expected it to come in the form of a ladder.
Police searchers could not have left this behind ten years ago. They hadn’t made it this far. No one had. This was the province of the dark man, the heart of Trapdoor, and nobody but Ridley — and Sarah Martin — had ever passed this way.
None of this made any sense. The cave had created the dark man, and the dark man did not require ladders.
Ridley hung the ladder through the bolts, giving him a method of descending the wall, but he was so tired after that small bit of effort that he sat on the cliff with his feet dangling off the edge as he fought to catch his breath. He stared at the ladder as he breathed, so focused that his peripheral vision began to blur, almost as it did during visualization just before trance.