But he’d been skilled, there was no denying that, and he’d enjoyed passing the lessons along. Between his first beer and his sixth, he was a marvelous teacher. When he edged toward the seventh, though, the steady hands vanished, and then the patience, and then the temper control. Some kids learned to count on their fingers; Ridley learned to count by his father’s empty beer bottles. Ten down, go underground, he’d rhymed to his sister, but he’d taken that mantra literally. There was an old strip pit on the family land in Stinesville — you couldn’t really call it a cave, because it went nowhere; it was just a hole in the ground, but it went deep and it went dark and it was tight. If you were committed, you could squirm far enough down that you’d never be found by a searching light or, worse, a reaching hand.
His father had been in a pine box for years — actually, there couldn’t be much of the box left by now — and what memories Ridley had of him were far from fond, with one exception: when he worked on wood with hand tools. They were the old tools, too, the ones Ridley had been taught with. And, more than occasionally, the ones he’d been hit with.
One thing his father could do better than any other carpenter Ridley ever saw was join boards so that they appeared to be one piece. He could work them in such a fashion that he seemed to convince the boards themselves that they belonged together. Even a trained eye had trouble finding the seams in Joel Barnes’s work.
But Ridley didn’t think his father had ever hidden a seam better than Ridley himself had with the knee wall in his attic. Under the dim light of the lone forty-watt bulb that lit the room, the wall looked flawless — one straight stretch, surely nothing but insulation and ductwork behind it. The old man would have been impressed. Between beers one and six, he might even have been proud.
As the morning wind rose to a steady moan, Ridley pressed on one corner of the attic knee wall and watched as it moved inward and another panel opened outward like a revolving door, all of it done without a sound. There wasn’t a screw or a nail in the whole thing. It was all built with wood, the door turning on a dowel. The area behind it wasn’t large — eight feet long by four feet deep and only four feet high. While that low ceiling would have driven many people mad, Ridley was used to tight spaces. Once he was inside and the wall was sealed behind him again, he had to use a headlamp or lantern.
There in the hidden room, surrounded by some items it was legal to have and others that would get him arrested, Ridley swung around so he was facing the wall that he’d sealed shut behind him. It was lined with maps — some topographic versions produced by the U.S. Geological Survey and others hand-drawn, produced by Ridley. The topos showed the surface world. Ridley’s showed what went on down below.
Today, he was interested in the topographic maps, all of which were covered with pushpins and notations in red, blue, or black ink. Each red circle had an X in the center, meaning Ridley had explored the cave, or potential cave, and found that it didn’t suit his memory or his needs. Each black circle had a check, which meant that he’d been in the cave and thought it held possibilities. Each blue circle had a question mark, meaning that he wasn’t certain there was a cave there but the topography suggested it was likely.
Southern Indiana was a karst landscape, which meant that part of the state existed above a world honeycombed with caves, caverns, and crevices. The land was home to springs where water bubbled up from below, sinkholes where the surface was pulled underground, a river that vanished for miles at a time — countless collisions between worlds above and worlds below.
Because of this, southern Indiana, like Kentucky, was heaven for cavers. Unless you were looking for one particular place in a cave and you weren’t certain that it even existed. Then it felt a lot less like heaven and a lot more like hell.
Trapdoor itself had been viewed as nothing but a sinkhole, a pocket of stone that caught excess runoff when Maiden Creek spilled its banks. Then came a week of relentless rain, and the ground opened up and revealed the entrance to an extensive cave system, but exploration efforts had stopped once the cave was closed, leaving Ridley to peck away from the outside and forcing him to remind himself, time and again, that the locked gate put in place by the MacAlister family concealed only an entrance, not the entrance.
There were others.
There had to be.
The issue was patience. That thing his father had never been able to hold, Ridley must keep firmly in hand. He put his finger on one of the maps and traced from one pushpin to the next, crossing over two blue circles with question marks. It was a swale maybe a quarter of a mile long, a small depression, and it seemed to offer little hope. But he’d searched so many better options for so long. He had to keep at it.
But not today. Today he would cut boards in his tiny sawmill operation, the only thing that still brought him any money. People had stopped hiring Ridley for carpentry ten years ago. There were rules in Garrison, and one of them was that you didn’t let Ridley Barnes in your house. Particularly if you had daughters.
Still, the men who were hired remembered the way that Ridley could work wood. Cabinets built by his hands were in plenty of homes around the area, though the owners didn’t know it. The contractors waited warily outside while he loaded their trucks, and they passed him cash quickly, and they left in a hurry.
Probably some of them had daughters.
Before he left the hidden room, he turned and took Sarah Martin’s necklace down from the peg on which it hung. A simple silver chain with a blue stone — it was a sapphire, her mother’s birthstone — in a setting rimmed with diamond chips. The clasp was still solid, but the chain was broken. It had been snapped, torn off her neck. The way things tore when reaching hands grabbed at them in tight, dark places. Trapped places.
He handled it delicately, running his thumb over the sapphire, remembering the time the police had come in with a list of things missing from Sarah’s body, things remembered by her mother and her friends and her boyfriend, and searched his house. Both her mother and Evan Borders recalled the necklace. Her mother said she never took it off and Evan confirmed she was wearing it the last time he’d seen her.
The police had been thorough with their search, but they didn’t quite understand Ridley. If they had, they would have looked at the place with different eyes. Maybe they would search again. Because they were coming back, make no mistake. Novak would see to that.
Everything old was about to be new again.
As if in confirmation, a knock thundered at his door. It wasn’t the knock of a casual visitor; it was a pounding of anger and authority. Ridley let out a breath of relief at the sound, understanding that things were, finally, back in motion.
11
Mark had given up knocking — either Ridley wasn’t home or he was pretending not to be — and was considering the pros and cons of kicking the door open when he finally heard footsteps inside.
“Now, Markus,” Mark whispered to himself, “you’ve got to think about that temper. Got to anticipate it.” He was speaking in an affected Southern drawl, handling each word as if he were testing the flavor. “A question of willpower, that’s what you’ve got to figure out. That’s what defines you, Markus. Willpower.”