Some of the chambers had names — the Funnel Room, the Chapel Room — and others did not. The stream flowing through the middle was labeled Greenglass River. Danielle, following his index finger as he traced along, said, “Ridley came up with that name. Most of the names are my father’s ideas. The Chapel Room and Greenglass River belong to Ridley.”
Outside the mouth of the cave, Greenglass River changed to Maiden Creek.
“Maiden Creek? That’s really what it’s called?”
“Yes,” Danielle said. “Supposedly named after a beautiful young pioneer girl who drowned in it while running from the Indians.”
Mark felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. His face must have showed it, because Danielle said, “Why is that a problem for you?”
Because when my mother decided to be an Indian, she named herself Snow Creek Maiden, he thought, so if I’m standing beside Maiden Creek in the snow, maybe Ridley is right. When dangerous things stop feeling like coincidences, what’s the term for that?
But all he said was “That’s a sad story, if it’s true. Probably isn’t, though. Most of the legends aren’t. Here’s a novice question, but I don’t understand how it could take so long for these new portions to be found.”
“Then you don’t understand caves. My father didn’t either. Ridley Barnes did. It also wasn’t that long, really. My father bought the acreage for the timber rights but hadn’t cut a single tree before the cave opened up.”
“What do you mean, opened up? He had to go looking for it, right?”
She shook her head. “He bought the property in August and intended to begin timbering the following summer. That winter, it just sat. The next spring was a wet one, with high flood levels. The creek spilled over its banks and flooded a small pond that was on the other side. The level in the pond kept rising too. Then the pond vanished into the ground.”
“Completely?” He was trying to envision it, trying to imagine what it must have been like to walk out into daylight and see that while you’d slept, the earth had changed.
“Completely. Where it had been, there was nothing but a gaping sinkhole with a small gap in the stone at the base. The ground just opened up and swallowed the pond. Hence the name — it swung open just like a trapdoor. A couple of the locals grabbed flashlights and ropes and went in and eventually called my father. Back then, the entrance was so small you had to squeeze to get through it. When my father realized there was a large cave beyond, he blasted the stone out to get the entrance you see today, and it looks like it has always been there.”
Mark kept moving around the walls of maps as he listened, and as he studied the dimensions and details, he tried to find a room that approximated the one where’d he found himself. None of them did. There were some drops and cliffs, but nothing that looked as sheer as what he’d encountered. Maybe it wasn’t that deep at all. How do you know when you didn’t see it? You also heard snakes. Without a doubt. But those weren’t real. And what about Sarah Martin, sitting on that ledge with light emanating from her pores? Was that real?
He finally reached the last one, an elaborate and painstaking sketch, dated May 2004.
“Ridley didn’t find anything new that summer?” Mark asked.
“Oh, he did. He claimed to have made extraordinary finds that summer. He was getting close, he kept telling my dad, he was always getting close. But he never turned over the maps.”
“According to the case reports, Blankenship was removed from the investigation because he had a relationship with Sarah’s mother. But she was engaged to your father.”
Danielle winced. “Both are true, ugly as that sounds. Sarah’s father was killed in a bad trucking accident when she was twelve. Blankenship was the deputy who’d informed the family. He stayed in touch with Diane throughout, and eventually, he fell in love with her. Fell hard, I believe. Sarah told me that. But then Sarah began to work out here. Diane had a terrible fear of cars after the accident. She wouldn’t let Sarah get a driver’s license, so she would drop her off and pick her up every day. It was humiliating to Sarah — you know, the worries of the sixteen-year-old — but it also meant Diane was around every day.” She sighed. “I’d love to tell you my father is this wonderful, noble man. I think he’s a good man, and I love him. But he has his weaknesses. Diane would have been his third wife, and I think there was another one who was almost in the mix. My mother was his second. My father liked to play the savior role. People accused those women of being gold diggers, but they were wrong. He liked to find women he could dazzle. Women he could introduce to a different type of world, a different lifestyle. Diane was one of those.”
“So Blankenship was the jilted one in all this?”
“He felt he was, at least. He was also the one who called for Ridley over my father’s objections. I don’t think he’s ever really recovered from that. How could someone?”
“Why did your father object?”
“Ridley was a disturbed man. We all knew that, because we’d been around him. Blankenship hadn’t. He just thought he was getting an expert. That much was true, but he hadn’t heard the way Ridley talked about the cave, talked about its power, talked about it like it was a person. And I think my father had an even darker concern that he didn’t give voice to.”
“What was that?”
“Ridley made some odd remarks about the girls who worked here. About me, and about Sarah. He said once that Sarah looked like his sister, but it was not a casual comment. It was creepy. It just felt off.”
Mark remembered the chill he’d felt when Ridley said that Sarah had caught his eye.
“I understand that Blankenship was told Ridley could move fast in the cave, but I’ve always wondered how much of that decision to overrule my father came from testosterone rather than logic.”
Probably a lot of it, Mark thought. Put a woman between two men, and anything that was even a cousin of logic would usually drown in the tidal waves of testosterone.
“At any rate, Blankenship was removed from the scene, and Ridley came. The rest... well, you know the rest.”
“I know the result. That’s all.”
“Then you know as much as everyone else. Nobody knows the rest except for Ridley Barnes.”
“What do you think he did?” he asked.
“I think he killed her. He was supposed to lead the team, not leave the team. And the way he talked about the cave as if it were alive? It always gave me chills. He referred to the cave as ‘her’ or ‘she’ all the time. ‘The old girl,’ that was one of his favorites. Then he began to talk about his discoveries of new passages as if the cave had guided him. ‘The old girl was whispering to me today, Danielle. She’s starting to tell me her secrets.’ I will never forget those words. So disturbing, particularly with the look in his eyes. This... hunger. He’d gotten possessive about access to the cave too, wanted limits on everyone. Ironic, because that’s just the way my father was. Trapdoor has that effect, I suppose. Another reason I’ll never open the door.” She looked at Mark with distaste. “Not that the locks stopped you.”
“I didn’t go in that cave of my own free will. And if you feel so passionately about Ridley’s history, then you really should believe me.”
“Maybe. If that were the only part of the story, I probably would, in fact. But that’s not the only part of the story, is it? You also claimed to have seen Diane. I can believe some things about Ridley Barnes, and most of them are uniquely evil, but I don’t believe he summoned poor old Diane Martin from the grave.”