“There was something else in my pockets,” Mark said. “A diving permit.”
The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Diving permit?”
“It’s a little plastic disk. Like a poker chip almost.”
“I’m sorry, that’s all they gave us. I’m sure you can get your diving permit replaced,” she said without interest.
Mark thought of his first trip with Lauren, of the sunset over the Saba reefs, of how many times he had touched that old tag as a reassurance that he had been made whole once and could be again.
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get it all replaced.”
He lay alone in the hospital room, one light on and shadows heavy in the corners, and read Ridley’s case file for the first time.
The Diane Martin impersonator might have lied about what mattered most, but she’d been honest with regard to the way the case had developed. Evan had been the first suspect, his father also in the mix, before Ridley came to the surface with a body and a stream of bizarre statements that turned into silence and never changed. Evan’s story hadn’t changed either — he never backed off the claim that they’d heard noises and he thought someone had entered the cave with them so he’d told Sarah to hide while he checked it out, and she’d hidden a little too well.
Carson Borders had been a target of the investigation in the early days, and it was clear that the police had sweated Evan long and hard over the whereabouts of his father. He said he had no idea where his father had gone, and the police couldn’t turn him up either, but with good reason — Carson was dead by then. Five years earlier, he’d given information about a gun- and drug-runner from Detroit named Lamar Hunter in hopes of receiving an early release. He hadn’t been granted it, and Lamar hadn’t forgotten about him. Prison guards at Pendleton testified that those last five years behind bars had been plenty rough for Carson, but Hunter was too smart to kill him inside. He’d promised Carson that he’d never see his family again, and apparently Hunter had made good on that promise. Evan swore that he hadn’t seen his father after he was paroled, and while police had initially been suspicious of that, they couldn’t come up with any evidence that Carson had made it back to Garrison. He’d vanished almost instantly upon his release. Photos in the case file showed thirty-one teeth, nicked and scarred by pliers, in a simple plastic sandwich bag. The teeth, along with a candy cane, had been mailed from a Detroit postal code in a plain brown envelope that arrived at Carson’s son’s doorstep on Christmas Eve.
There were references to Diane Martin in the file, plenty of them, but no indication that she had died. At the time the case file was assembled, she’d been very much alive and a factor in the investigation. The world created by the case file included two highlight-reel moments:
1. Ridley Barnes had been hired to map Trapdoor’s passages the summer before Sarah Martin disappeared inside the cave; and
2. Dan Blankenship, then a chief deputy, had been removed from the search scene and, later, the investigation due to a “conflict of interests as a result of a personal relationship with the victim’s mother.”
The sheriff of Garrison County, the one Jeff had just identified as someone Mark was going to need to become awfully friendly with, had a personal attachment to the dead woman Mark had claimed to meet. It didn’t seem like a promising start for a friendship. Mark remembered Blankenship’s fists opening and closing, the way he’d said, I told you this thing could cause pain. Would cause pain.
They hadn’t been together when Sarah went missing. By then, Diane Martin was engaged to Pershing MacAlister.
A missing item from Sarah’s person, identified by both her mother and Evan Borders as something she was wearing the night she disappeared, was a sapphire necklace that was actually her mother’s and that had been given to Diane by Dan Blankenship. The sheriff’s voice had broken when he’d described Diane’s last moments, that trip to her daughter’s bedroom, the children’s Bible in her hand. Mark had thought it was just that the case had struck an emotional chord, but he’d been wrong.
Mark flipped through the case file until he came to a photograph of Ridley Barnes taken the day he’d appeared with the body. He was a decade younger but didn’t look much different. The wild hair was brown then, not gray, but not much else had changed. He was still whip-thin and fit, with hollow cheeks that seemed designed to draw attention to those oddly bright eyes. In the photograph he was dressed entirely in black but so covered in mud that the clothing looked like some sort of camouflage pattern. He was staring at the camera with distrust, like a primitive warrior who thought the device might steal his soul.
The final entry in the report was a supplemental written by the Indiana State Police summarizing the difficulties of getting the cave to reveal its secrets, a challenge exceeded only by the task of getting Ridley Barnes to reveal his.
Mr. MacAlister resisted sending Mr. Barnes on the search and was overruled by Chief Deputy Dan Blankenship of the Garrison County Sheriff’s Department. Blankenship insisted that sources, including Mr. MacAlister, had stated that Mr. Barnes knew the cave better than anyone else and would be the most capable of conducting a full search in a timely fashion, the report read. This was before the chief deputy was removed from the scene.
“Good Lord,” Mark whispered. Blankenship had made the call. Blankenship had sent Ridley in, despite objections from the landowner. Mark doubted the sheriff had gone to sleep one night since without thinking of that decision.
Mr. Barnes has been mapping newly discovered passages for the past several months, the report continued. He declined to produce any of the maps but said he would lead the search team. Once underground, however, Barnes separated from the search team, citing a lack of sufficient speed, and proceeded alone. He was not seen again until he arrived back in an area known as the Chapel Room with Sarah Martin’s body. At that time, he was unable or unwilling to answer questions as to where she had been located. He was judged to be suffering from hypothermia and he was taken to Garrison County Hospital for treatment. In subsequent interviews, Mr. Barnes refused to provide any further detail as to his experiences in the cave once he left the larger search team, maintaining that he has no recollection of the events and had grown confused in the darkness. It is true that when Mr. Barnes returned, he no longer had a functioning light, although he had three of them at the start of his search. The location of Sarah Martin’s body when he discovered it and her condition when discovered has never been established. Subsequent searches of the cave have been conducted prior to and after its closing, all with permission and cooperation of the landowner, but the experts involved were unable to determine what route Barnes took. One caving expert who was interviewed suggests that as much as 90 percent of the cave system may remain unexplored and unmapped. The system is a complex web of passages that are subject to being rendered unnavigable due to shifts in the water table, and all experts interviewed agree that the shifting conditions of the “wet cave” create a situation in which the possible routes taken by Barnes may sometimes be as good as invisible due to high water. An unusually dry summer preceded Sarah Martin’s disappearance in the cave, although it began to rain that night and continued to rain heavily throughout the following week, causing swift and significant changes in the cave’s water levels. To re-create the circumstances of Mr. Barnes’s journey without his cooperation is essentially impossible at this time.