“Lisa!” I yelled. “Wait!”
I peeled off the tracks and into the fields myself, past a gigantic skull-and-crossbones sign that read: Warning: Uncovered mine shafts, do not enter on foot. I dashed past it. Lisa was ahead of me, the distance shrunk by ten or so meters. I kept an eye on her while trying to keep my gaze down. All around me the ground opened up into gaping wells, mounds of dirt beside them. Lisa was being slightly more cautious around the mine shafts than I was, so I was closing in on her.
“I know what happened!” I yelled. “Please. Let’s talk about it.”
Lisa didn’t stop. And so I kept running, weaving between the holes and the dirt and gaining, step by step. Closer. Closer. I focused on her back as the distance closed. Thirty seconds and I’d have her.
My left foot slid sideways. I looked down and saw cascading silt pouring into a deep black hole. My arms pinwheeled as I regained my balance. I stood for a second, peering into the hole, breathing deep relief.
When I looked up, Lisa was gone.
I whipped my head around but she was nowhere to be seen. The entire opal field was desolate, empty. Mounds of dirt surrounded me like statues. Spindly insect legs of cranes and drills rose up in the distance against the bright blue skyline. I listened. No footsteps.
She couldn’t have outrun me so quickly; my rebalancing had only taken a couple of seconds. Had she fallen? I figured I might have heard a scream. She had to be hiding, must have ducked behind one of the dirt mounds. She might even be moving from mound to mound, circling back to the car. Or sneaking up behind me. I imagined hands on my back and spun around. Nothing. Just me and hundreds of silent mounds.
I edged forward, now prioritizing silence over speed and peering behind each mound as I passed it. “Come out, Lisa,” I said. “The Ghan has left. It’s just us here.”
I kept moving forward, in a wide sweep, giving myself as broad a view as possible of the backs of the dirt pillars. And then I spotted an elbow. It was indistinct, about three mounds down to the left of me—Lisa had indeed been moving back toward the car, hopping mound to mound while my head was turning. I’d only caught the barest glimpse. I took a sideways step to get a better view.
The saying should really be to never walk backward or sideways in Coober Pedy, but it wasn’t really the right time to be pedantic. This time I’d taken a heavier step, straight in the middle of the shaft: open air. I pitched forward immediately, my whole leg in the hole. My chest hit the rim, and the air was knocked out of me. My other leg slid in after. My hands scrabbled for grip, but there was nothing but gravel, tiny shards of dirt and stone that shredded my fingertips, ripping my nails on my gloveless hand. I tried to yell but couldn’t draw breath. My feet paddled air underneath me. I tried to ground my forearms on the rim, but they kept slipping as gravity dragged me down. I had no idea how deep the hole was, but even if the fall wasn’t enough to kill me, surely, out here, I’d never be found. A broken leg and a week to die, down in the dark. I hoped I died on impact.
I heard footsteps, running. It was hard to tell where they were coming from over my thrashing. My scrabbling got more desperate. But all I was doing now was dislodging more and more dirt, creating, unwillingly, an almost perfect funnel for me to slip down. I could feel blood on my fingertips, sticky and warm. There goes a second set of fingerprints.
I slid backward another couple of inches and knew I was gone. Red dust was in my hair, my eyes, caked in my mouth. Bite the dust, huh? Tears rolled down my face. I wondered if I would be able to see the sky from the bottom, or if I would die in the dark. I thought of Juliette, alone in that cell. I wondered if she had a small window, if she would look up at the same sliver of blue that I might see from the pit, and it made me feel not quite so alone.
I fell.
Chapter 29
A hand clamped around my wrist.
A violent jerk rippled through my shoulder. The drop halted. I looked up. Silhouetted against the sun was Lisa, legs splayed, heels gouging into the earth on the rim of the pit. We hung there for a second, me dangling in the hole. She was a strong enough counterweight, due to our relative positioning, to stop the fall, but not to get me back out again. I dug my knees into the wall and grappled up it, and somehow we overcame gravity to spill me over the top and onto the dirt. I rested my cheek against the ground, marveling at my breath. Lisa sat, knees up, her wrists balanced on top.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I didn’t kill him,” Lisa said softly. “Either of them. And because I’m not a killer, I’m not about to let you fester in the bottom of one of these.” She wiped her nose with the back of one hand. Her hair had been whipped around by the run. “But I don’t suppose you believe any of that.”
I rolled onto my back, still catching my breath. Jagged rocks dug into my neck. This is what’s missing from action scenes in novels like this; sometimes everyone involved needs a bit of a break.
“I believe exactly that, actually,” I said, propping myself onto my elbows. “And I know what he did to you. In Edinburgh, two thousand and three. This supposed fling isn’t the truth. He raped you.”
“He didn’t—” I thought she was about to deny it, but then something squeaked in her throat. “He didn’t stop.” She locked eyes with me. “I tried. I really did. McTavish told everyone I’d wanted to. I was the young hopeful newbie, he was the older big shot. It was so hard to be believed. They all thought I was starstruck. It wasn’t like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’ve never told anyone this. But Majors was at the bar, before we all split off. I’m pretty sure, deep down, she knew something was wrong. I went to her, begged her to back me up. But she stayed quiet for the same reason I ended up silencing myself. You wouldn’t understand. I want to be known for the art I made, for my words and my voice, not for the mark some man left on me.” She sighed. “Of course, at first I did want to speak out. Even if it was on my own. I wanted justice. I’d tried to fight him off and had scratched him on the cheek, so I had his DNA under my fingernails. But would you believe it? There was a bloody admin error and they mislabeled my test. By the time they found it, it was inadmissible because no one could be sure it hadn’t been tampered with. Wyatt threatened me, said he’d bury my career, and by then I thought I had no other option, so I signed an NDA. There was money too. But if I’m honest, it had become my word against his, and signing seemed like the only path out. And I . . . needed the money.” Her jaw set hard. “How’d you figure it out?”
“A few reasons. Wyatt published your first book, and you moved away from him for the second, which hints at a falling out of sorts. Of course you wouldn’t want to work with the man who had enabled Henry McTavish to get away with what he had. But that only becomes clear once the rest clicks into place. My agent, Simone, used to be McTavish’s assistant. He has a certain . . . shall we say tone to his interactions with women.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“He’s an outright sleaze, if you prefer. But that’s conjecture. As is the reason I suspect that you and Majors refused to support each other’s accusations after Edinburgh. You were there together, after all. Surely each of you saw something that might help the other.”