“I know. You wanna just pack up and forget about it?”
“Naw, too late for that — hate for this dental stone to go to waste.” The mixture looked a lot like pancake batter, though I wouldn’t want to bite into a cake of it once it was hard. “Besides, you’ve got me curious now. You wanna bail?”
“Guess not. Still can’t stop thinking about that girl and her baby.”
“Okay then.” He dribbled the goopy mixture into four individual prints — two from each boot — as well as a short section of the obliterated track. “First time I ever tried to match a sawmill print,” he said. “These’ll take thirty minutes to set up. Meanwhile, you wanna see where these tracks go?”
“I’ve got a pretty good guess. Let’s see if I’m right.”
Hugging the wall of the passage so as not to disturb the other tracks, we followed the trail. It didn’t go far: barely two hundred yards from the entrance, the tracks veered sharply to the left and through a cleft in the tunnel wall. It was so narrow, Art and I had to plant our feet on the walls and straddle through to avoid trampling the sets of footprints. As the cleft opened up, I saw that we had emerged right where I’d thought we would: in the narrow end of the crystalline grotto. Directly ahead of us was the foot of the stone bench where Leena’s mummified body had lain. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Every time I decide he’s okay, I find out the sheriff’s playing more games with me. Hauled me up a damned mountainside, when he could’ve just dropped me off at the front door.” I remembered the hours I’d spent straddling the ATV, and the days of sore muscles. “Obviously he wanted me to think she was way out in the middle of nowhere.”
Art’s headlamp bobbed assent. “Looks like it. Reckon how come?”
“Something he didn’t want me to know about the front entrance, maybe.”
He nodded again. “That’d be my guess, too.” He played his light across the stretch of floor between us and the bench. “That the same way it looked last time you saw it?” There was a mass of tracks in the room now. Amid the jumble, I could make out my own prints coming in from the opposite side, along with those of Tom Kitchings and Deputy Williams. I could see them departing, too. But ours were no longer the uppermost set of tracks: the work boots trumped us all. Heading into the grotto from where Art and I now stood, they approached the now-empty shelf, then turned and followed partway out the other side of the room before doubling back toward us and the church.
“You know what this means?”
“Yeah,” I said, with a queasy feeling in my gut. “He’s been here within the past week.”
“Yeah. So not only does he know that somebody knows, he knows that several somebodies know. Place like this, won’t take much asking around to find out that you’re one of those somebodies.”
Suddenly there was a muffled thud, followed by the clatter of falling rock. A cloud of dust shot through the crevice, filling the grotto, sending us into spasms of coughing. I put my arm across my face and tried breathing through my shirtsleeve; Art pulled his face inside the neck of his pullover shirt, turtlelike. We stood stock-still, and gradually the clatter and the dust subsided, leaving behind a silence that was close and menacing. A silence like death.
The rubble extended all the way up to the cleft in the grotto wall.
“Just a guess,” Art said, “but I’d say somebody knew we were here.”
It didn’t take a forensic genius to realize we’d have little hope of digging our way out through the rubble blocking the entrance by the church. “Guess it’s a good thing I know the back way after all,” I said. We headed for the opposite side of the grotto, but then I stopped to snap photos of the new footprints on the floor. “Not that I’m feeling real confident I’ll ever get to use these in court,” I muttered, “but I’m getting pissed off now.”
“Yeah, this is getting personal,” Art said. “Those were some of my best plaster casts ever. That one of the board? I was gonna get a trip to a forensic conference outta that one.”
“Easy come, easy go,” I said. “So the good news is, I know how to get out of here. The bad news is, the road is three or four miles down a rough trail, and that’s nowhere near the truck. It might take us—”
A bright flash split the darkness, accompanied by a sharp crack. The floor shook, and rocks began raining down around us. Art grabbed my jacket and yanked me backward just as a stalactite plunged downward and shattered on the floor where I’d been standing. I jumped, then cursed. A lot.
“Bill, you okay?”
I nodded, shaken. “You?”
“Still taking inventory. So far, I count a knot on the head and a couple bruises, but nothing broken.” He paused. “Hey, Bill? That four-mile trail you called the bad news? I think that was actually the good news. Back when there was some good news.”
We picked our way across the fringe of jagged rock surrounding us, making our way toward the cave’s back door, or what used to be it. The pile of debris grew steadily higher. Within a few yards the rubble reached clear to the roof, sealing off the passage completely.
I felt a tide of panic rising fast. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, no matter how deeply I breathed. My head began to swim. As if from a distance, I heard Art’s voice. “Bill? Bill! Listen, Bill, you need to calm down.” He sounded strangely normal, not like a man struggling for oxygen. “Bill, you’re hyperventilating. You need to breathe slower or you’ll pass out.” I fought the urge to gasp, but it was stronger than I was. “Try breathing through the sleeve of your jacket — maybe that’ll help.” I felt his hands on my arm, bringing my sleeve up to my face. The fabric slowed the flow of air. As I labored to breathe against the resistance, I felt my respiration slow, my head begin to clear. Finally my breathing seemed under control again, and I dropped my arm.
“Sorry,” I said. “Thought we were running out of air.”
“Not yet. We’ve got plenty still. Probably starve to death first.”
“Damnit, Art, this isn’t a joke. We’re in a tunnel that’s blocked by tons of rock. Even if we could clear it, which I doubt we can, there might be somebody outside just waiting to kill us.”
“Might be,” he agreed. “But no sense getting all worked up about it, seeing as he’ll have to wait awhile for us to get within range. Let’s figure out what to do.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“Okay, let’s see what our resources are. We’ve got two flashlights and one headlamp. A camera. A gun. An evidence kit, which probably doesn’t help us much at the moment. You got any food or water?”
“Pack of gum,” I said. “Sugarless, so there’s no energy in it. We got water flowing in the cave, though.” I pointed my light in the direction of the subterranean stream, which we now knew originated at the springs behind the church. But the stream was gone, leaving only a muddy bed behind. The first of the two cave-ins must have blocked it.
“I’ve got a Snickers bar and a bottle of water,” said Art. “If I can just pull off that loaves-and-fishes trick I read about in the Bible, we’ll have bushels of leftovers. Oh, this might help — the map Methuselah the Caver faxed me.”
“What good’s that gonna do? We already found the cave. Unfortunately.”
“It’s not a map to the cave, Smarty Pants, it’s a map of the cave. The interior. The part where we happen to be trapped like rats. Or bats.”
“But we’re sandwiched between two cave-ins, with nothing in the middle but fifty yards of tunnel and that damn grotto.” Art studied the map silently. “Face it, Art,” I said. “We’re sealed up in here. No way out.”