That had to be it. The water was contaminated with sulfide. And Ray had said he might need my help. He’d intended to search the riverbed where it disappeared underground. He must have been wading around down there, scouting the area.
And someone had shot him.
But it hadn’t happened there. He was closer to town, Charlie said. Shot in the head at close range. But after Hannah’s warning, I doubted he would have stopped for a stranger who looked anything like Walter. Someone else then? Did Walter have help? A friend? Maybe a son? Or even... a cop? An old football buddy, say, or someone in his department?
I didn’t care for this last idea, but it would explain a lot. How Ray’s brother had disappeared so easily, and why the army hadn’t been able to find Walter. He could have been a step ahead of them all the way.
But if Walter was here, who was he now? I had no idea. Or perhaps too many. The only thing I was sure of was, he’d be off his guard now, thinking he’d solved his problem. And if I could find Jimmy Calderon’s body, it would flush Walter into the light like the cockroach he was.
The winds of autumn had been at work, covering the hills with a carpet of leaves, scarlet maples, and golden oak. Even the air up here was heady with the scent of fall, woodsmoke and wet pine. Hunting season.
I parked my dad’s old pickup truck at the end of the logging trail near the eight-foot chain-link fence that surrounded the sinkholes. The fence had been cut, years ago judging from the rusty ends of the severed wires. Kids, probably. You can’t fence off curiosity, and most adventurous local kids had been back here at least once. I’d explored the area myself when I was fifteen or so, with a gaggle of friends.
We’d been disappointed. The sinks were really just giant holes in the ground, so large and obviously natural that they didn’t seem particularly wondrous. The vegetation in them was the same as on the hills around them. Jack pines and aspen ringed the rims like sentries, and in a few spots trees clung like climbers on rocky ledges. The crater floors were a camouflage blend of moss and swamp grass, ochre and autumn gold.
The largest of them was different. A finger of the Thunder River surged to the surface roughly a third of the way across the floor of the crater, glittering like mercury in the afternoon sun. I guessed it was twenty feet across. It bisected the pit for seventy yards or so, then disappeared into the southwest wall of the hole.
I stepped carefully to the crater rim directly above the river’s exit, wary of the footing. The soil was red clay covered with a slippery layer of pine needles. I’m no tracker, but someone had obviously been here recently. Ray? Possibly.
The drop to the river was sheer, a free fall of a hundred and fifty feet. You wouldn’t have to carry a body down, you could just push it over the rim and let the current do the rest.
I’d brought along a three-hundred-foot coil of nylon rope, thinking I’d have to lower my diving gear to the crater floor, but it wasn’t necessary. A section of the rim had collapsed since I was here last, forming a ramp to the bottom of the pit, steep but walkable.
I strapped on my air-tank backpack, slung the duffle bag with the rest of my gear over one shoulder, the coil of nylon line over the other, and worked my way down.
It was a rough go. The footing was steeper than it appeared from above, especially since I was loaded down with what felt like a ton of gear. I paced myself, pausing several times to catch my breath and scan the area. The view was heart-stopping, cloud-castles scudding across the open bowl of the moss-draped cliffs. But its beauty was diminished for me because Ray might never see it again. Or anything else. If he survived.
And then I noticed the footprints. Slight depressions were visible in moss and clay. I knelt and examined them. The edges were sharp, unsoftened by the rain earlier in the week. Someone had definitely been down here. Ray. This was the place then. It had to be. I felt it to the core of my soul.
At the hospital I’d been numb, shocked by what had happened to him. But as I worked my way down into the pit, I felt my spirit and my energy level rekindling, fueled by an icy anger I’ve only felt a few times in my life. A killing rage.
The river roiled and eddied when it met the cliff face, forming a pool. It didn’t look deep, eight to ten feet. I couldn’t be sure because the water was the color of café au lait, clouded with sulfide seepage. The foul reek of it was much stronger down here, held close by the walls. It was a rank stench of decay, as though the sinkhole was an open wound in the earth, and gangrene had set in.
The current looked steady, but not too fast; working in it would be no problem. My dive plan was simple; I’d anchor the nylon cable to one of the stunted jack pines near the pool’s edge, then let the river carry me underground. If I was right, I shouldn’t have to go very far. This current would move a weighted body only twenty or thirty yards at most. Still, the idea of actually being beneath the earth was sobering. It would be like swimming down into a bottomless grave.
As I grimly pulled on my dry suit, tanks, and weight belt, I must have come up with a dozen perfectly sound reasons to quit, to get help, to come back another day. But each time I countered it with an image of Ray Calderon, smiling as we talked, looking into my eyes. Something he would never do again. And I knew if his brother was down here, I had to find him. I just had to.
I waded slowly into the river, chest deep, then knelt and double-checked my regulator. Everything was A-okay. I was wearing a double tank, so I had plenty of reserve air. There was no reason to delay, and yet I hesitated. I took a long last look at the sky and the stunted tree I’d lashed the nylon cable to. And then I sank slowly into the water and let the current take me.
It was like swimming in a mist. The sunlight reflected off the hazy water and set it aglow with a milky fluorescence, limiting visibility to a meter or less. But the light held no warmth, the water was icy, and the chill, steady current seemed to suck life from me. Or maybe it was fear that made me shiver.
I stayed down near the bottom, circling the pool a few feet above the riverbed, scanning the rocks, stumps, forest debris. No algae or reeds grew here, no fish swam. The sulfide made this stretch of river as dead as... the boy I was looking for.
But he wasn’t there. At least not in the hazy pool. If he was here, he must be farther on, in the darkness of the underworld beneath the hills. I could almost feel the weight of all that soil and stone crouched above the river, ready to collapse again, to form a larger sinkhole. With me beneath it. And I knew if I paused for even a moment now, I’d turn tail and swim for the light.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, cursing my luck and my own damned stubbornness, I switched on my helmet lamp and thrust forward into the shadowy mouth of the cave. Into the darkness. And then the earth fell away.
I’d been quartering back and forth across the riverbed, scanning literally almost every inch of it, seeing nothing but debris, stones, and a few river crabs skittering about. The sudden downward slope shouldn’t have surprised me; this river had already wreaked major havoc on the land about it. But the development did make me stop to reconsider my situation.
I’d assumed the river flowed beneath the hills more or less in a direct line to the lake, that my search would be restricted to a relatively narrow area. But the riverbed was dropping rapidly now, angling downward and widening out into a huge subterranean pool. A new sinkhole in the making.
My grip tightened involuntarily on my nylon lifeline. In a cavern this large I could no longer trust the current for my sense of direction. If I lost the line I could easily become disoriented and... and then I saw James Calderon’s corpse.