"Love at first sight."
"I wish."
"That's what I feel. It's what you feel too. I know it is. You said it is."
"That was before."
"I love you, Jo-Beth."
"You can't. You don't know me."
"I do! And I'm not going to give up on that because of gossip. We don't even know if any of this is true." In his vehemence, all trace of his stammer had disappeared. "This could be all lies, right?"
"It could," she conceded. "But why would anybody invent a story like that? Why did neither your mother nor mine ever tell us who our fathers were?"
"We'll find out."
"Who from?"
"Ask your momma."
"I already tried."
"And?"
"She told me not to go near you. Not to even think of you..."
Her tears had dried as she'd told the story. Now, thinking of Momma again, they began to flow. "But I can't stop that, can I?" she said, appealing for help from the very source she'd been forbidden.
Watching her, Howie longed to be the holy fool Lem had always called him. To have the freedom from censure only idiots, animals and babes-in-arms were granted; to lick and lap at her, and not be slapped away. There was no denying the possibility that she was indeed his sister, but his libido vaulted taboo.
"I think maybe I should go," she said, as though sensing his heat. "Momma wants the Pastor."
"Say a few prayers and maybe I'll go away, you mean?"
"That's not fair."
"Stay awhile, please," he coaxed. "We don't have to talk. We don't have to do anything. Just stay."
"I'm tired."
"So we'll sleep."
He reached and touched her face, very lightly.
"Neither of us got enough sleep last night," he said.
She sighed, and nodded.
"Maybe it'll all come clear if we just let it be."
"I hope."
He excused himself and went through to the bathroom to empty his bladder. By the time he got back she had taken off her shoes and was lying on the bed.
"Room for two?" he said.
She murmured yes. He lay down beside her, trying not to think about what he'd hoped they'd be doing between these sheets.
Again, she sighed.
"It'll be all right," he said. "Sleep."
Most of the audience gathered for Buddy Vance's final show had drifted away by the time Grillo got back to the woods. They'd decided, apparently, that he wasn't worth the wait. With the onlookers dispersed the barrier-guards had become lax. Grillo stepped over the rope and approached the policeman who looked to be in charge of the operation. He introduced himself, and his function.
"Can't tell you much," the man replied, in answer to Grillo's questions. "We've got four climbers going down now, but God knows how long it'll take to raise the body. We haven't found it yet. And Hotchkiss tells us there's all kinds of rivers under there. The corpse could be in the Pacific for all we know."
"Will you work through the night?"
"Looks like we'll have to." He looked at his watch. "We've got maybe four hours of daylight left. Then we'll be relying on the lamps."
"Has anybody investigated these caves before?" Grillo asked. "Are they mapped?"
"Not that I know of. You'd better ask Hotchkiss. He's the guy in black over there."
Again, Grillo made his introductions. Hotchkiss was a
tall, grim individual, with the baggy look of a man who'd lost substantial amounts of weight.
"I understand you're the cave expert," Grillo said.
"Only by default," Hotchkiss replied. "It's just that nobody knows any better." His eyes didn't settle on Grillo for a moment, but roved and roved in search of some place to rest. "What's below us...people don't think much about."
"And you do?"
"Yeah."
"You've made some kind of study of it?"
"In a strictly amateur capacity," Hotchkiss explained. "There's some subjects just take hold of you. This did me."
"So have you been down there yourself?"
Hotchkiss broke his rule, holding his gaze on Grillo's face for a full two seconds before saying: "Until this morning these caves were sealed, Mr. Grillo. I had them sealed myself, many years ago. They were—they are—a danger to innocents."
Innocents, Grillo noted. A strange word to use.
"The policeman I was talking to—"
"Spilmont."
"Right. He said there's rivers down there."
"There's a whole world down there, Mr. Grillo, about which we know next to nothing. And it's changing all the time. Sure, there's rivers, but there's a good deal else besides. Whole species that never see the sun."
"Doesn't sound like much fun."
"They accommodate," Hotchkiss said. "As we all do. They live with their limitations. We're all of us living on a fault line, after all, which could open up at any moment. We accommodate that."
"I try not to think about it."
"That's your way."
"And yours?"
Hotchkiss made a tight, tiny smile, his eyes half-closing as he did so.
"A few years ago I thought about leaving the Grove. It had...bad associations for me."
"But you stayed."
"I discovered I was a sum of my...accommodations," he replied. "When the town goes, so will I."
"When?"
"Palomo Grove is built on bad land. The earth beneath our feet feels solid enough but it's on the move."
"So the whole town could go the way of Buddy Vance? Is that what you're saying?"
"You can quote me as long as you don't name me."
"That's fine by me."
"Got what you need?"
"More than enough."
"No such thing," Hotchkiss observed. "Not with bad news. Excuse me, would you?"
There had been a sudden galvanizing of forces around the fissure. Leaving Grillo with a punchline for his story any comedian would have envied, Hotchkiss strode off to oversee the raising of Buddy Vance.
In his bedroom Tommy-Ray lay and sweated. He'd come out of the sunlight and closed the windows, then drawn the curtains. Sealing the room thus had made it into an oven, but the heat and the gloom soothed him. In their embrace he didn't feel so alone, and exposed, as he'd felt in the bright, clean air of the Grove. Here he could smell his own juices as they oozed from his pores; his own stale breath as it rose from his throat and dropped back down over his face. If Jo-Beth had cheated on him then he would have to seek out new company, and where better to begin than with himself?
He'd heard her come back to the house in the early afternoon, and argue with Momma, but he didn't try to catch the words between them. If her pathetic romance was already falling apart—and why else would she be sobbing on the stairs?— then that was her own damn fault. He had more important business.
Lying in the heat, the strangest pictures came haunting his head. They all rose from a darkness which his curtained room couldn't hope to match. Was that, perhaps, why they were incomplete as yet? Fragments of a scheme he wanted passionately to grasp but that kept slipping from him. In them, there was blood; there was rock; there was a pale, flickering creature his gut turned at seeing. And there was a man he could not make out but who would, if he sweated enough, come clear in front of him.
When he did, the waiting would be over.
First, there was a shout of alarm from the fissure. Men around the hole, Spilmont and Hotchkiss included, set to work to haul the men up, but whatever was taking place underground was too violent to be controlled from the surface. The cop closest to the crevice cried out as the rope he was holding suddenly tightened around his gloved hand and he was jerked towards the lip like a hooked fish. It was Spilmont who saved him, taking hold of the man from behind long enough for him to pull his fingers free of the gloves. As both fell backwards on to the ground the shouts from below multiplied, supplemented by warnings from above.