A Boy Called Duct Tape (14 page)

“I hope your discovery was better than ours,” Kiki said. “The ceiling had fallen and covered the tunnel. A snake couldn’t have crawled through.”

Pia cringed. “There’s snakes down here?”

“No, no,” Kiki said. “That was just a figure of speech.”

“Huh?”

Kiki shook her head. “There are no snakes,
primo
.”

“Did you find the Boulevard of Chandeliers?” Monroe asked, his light on my happy face.

My grin continued to shine. “Better than that.”

We slipped into our backpacks and headed down the tunnel toward what was left of Woodrow Botine. When we came to the fissure in the wall where Pia and I had seen the bats, Monroe said that the presence of bats was conclusive proof of at least one other exit.

“What’s that nasty smell?” Kiki asked, scrunching her nose.

“Bat guano,” Monroe said, tilting his head and looking perplexed. “On the northern side of Bear Mountain grows a huge oak tree. Been dead for years. I’ve seen bats flying out of that hollow oak. Always thought the bats lived in that old tree,” he continued. “Guess the oak’s root system opens up into this cave.” He pointed his headlamp at the fissure in the wall. I could see the wheels turning in Monroe’s head. “Interesting,” he muttered.

We continued down the corridor and in a few minutes our lamps lit the corpse of the former Pinkerton detective.

Kiki recoiled at the sight.

“Doesn’t mean there’s a treasure,” Monroe said thoughtfully, shining his light on the man’s remains. “It says this Pinkerton man had a go at Jesse’s gold. It doesn’t say the gold exists.” Monroe stepped closer to the dead body and lifted the sign closer to his headlamp.

“Monroe,” Kiki said, her voice a little jumpy. “You have a bad habit for throwing a wet blanket—”

“I’m just telling you what it says,” Monroe said. “Besides, if I’d hidden a fortune in gold and silver I certainly wouldn’t advertise it.” His beam of light found Kiki. “Would you?”

Kiki had no answer.

Monroe released his grip on the tiny signboard. It fell gently against Woodrow Botine’s chest. It wasn’t much of an impact, really no more than a whisper-soft bump of the small wooden sign hitting the body, but it was enough to jar one of the decaying legs, which must have been hanging by a thread. The leg pulled away from the corpse and fell onto the cave floor with a quiet
thump
.

Pia gasped and stepped back.

Like a house of cards, the remaining pieces of the corpse began to crumble. The other leg had lost its hinge and was the next to go. It dropped to the floor too. Without the legs to prop it up, the torso was now top-heavy and had no sense of balance. It began to wobble forward before pitching onto the cold floor. It landed with a sickening
CLUMP
!

The impact caused the head to break away from the rotting torso, and it rolled along the tunnel floor toward us. The eyes suspended by rubbery tendons, they bounced up and down like twin yoyos with each rotation. The decaying head stopped a few feet short of where we stood.

Pia screamed first. Then Kiki.

The shrieks were as loud and sharp as a tornado siren, and I pushed the palms of my hands over my ears. It didn’t help much. I squeezed my eyes shut and wondered if the screeching would rip my eardrums open.

“STOP SCREAMING!” Monroe yelled at the top of his lungs, waving his hands in the air.

Pia and Kiki stopped, but their echoes bounced back for five or six seconds.

And then a deathly silence.

“Please, no more screaming, ladies,” Monroe said in an urgent voice, sucking in a big breath. “Please ….”

“I second that,” I gasped, popping my eyes open.

Leaving the Boulevard of Chandeliers, we proceeded toward the next destination on the map. The site called the Death Cake
.

I could see the uneasiness in the eyes of my sister and cousin. Pia kept looking back over her shoulder, and every few steps Kiki would give the tunnel ahead a complete 360 with her headlamp. To be honest, I was pretty tense too. I tried to imagine what in the world the mapmaker had meant by Death Cake. I couldn’t.

Maybe it was just meant to scare away treasure hunters,
I concluded
.

The tunnel we hiked in soon opened up into a winding passageway, one as wide as a four-lane highway and 60 feet in height. Boulders the size of houses lined either side of the underground freeway. Monroe said the boulders had pulled away from the walls.

Ten minutes after entering the big tunnel, Monroe slowed his pace and said, “I’ve found the treasure.” Although his light pushed back the darkness ahead of us, there was nothing but rock—walls, ceiling, floor.

“I must have missed something,” I said, my headlamp crisscrossing the gray rock.

“Yeah,” Kiki added. “Where was I when all this happened?”

“Where is it, Mr. Huff?” Pia asked, gazing up at his Neanderthal face.

“This place,” Monroe said. “Jesse’s Cave. It’s treasure enough for me. The old gal has won my heart.”

“Fine by me,” Kiki chirped. “You can have the cave, Monroe. We’ll keep the treasure.”

Pia snickered.

“Good one, Kiki,” I beamed.

“Think about it,” Monroe said. “We’re probably the first people to set foot in this cave since the days of Jesse James. And it ranks right up there with the world’s great caverns.”

Monroe was now calling the place Jesse’s cave, and I smiled to myself. I was certain that it was only a matter of time before we found the treasure.

I dug out the map and studied it as we moved down the shadowy tunnel. If the map was right, the Death Cake was just ahead.

“That’s it!” I shouted, the beam from my headlamp showering the tunnel ahead with splatters of light. The tunnel opened up into a large chamber about the size of a gymnasium. A strange, platform-like mound occupied a space on the far side of the big gallery. The rock formation resembled a giant eight-layered cake. It didn’t look all that deathly.

“Is this what the map meant by the Death Cake?” Kiki asked, peering down the tunnel and into the chamber.

“Could be,” Monroe said, lengthening his stride.

“It doesn’t look very, uh … deadly,” Kiki observed, sketching it with her light.

“Awesome,” Pia said, her headlamp tracing the terraced knolls.

“I agree with Kiki,” I said. “I don’t see anything
deadly
about it.”

Everyone studied the Death Cake as we approached.

The chalky-colored limestone formation stood about 30 feet tall. Water spilled onto the “cake” from the ceiling and flowed over a series of eight terraces, each one bigger than the last.

Maybe the water’s poison,
I thought.
Or gives off a poisonous gas.

“It
does
look like a cake,” Pia observed, a happy skip in her voice. “Cool!”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed. “The map is right again!”

Eyes forward, I strode past Monroe toward the odd geological wonder. In one quick motion Monroe grabbed me by the arm, jerking me to a stop. “Whoa, Pablo!”

Monroe’s headlamp lit what should have been the cave floor before us. But there was no floor, only a dark pit separating the end of the tunnel from the large chamber housing the Death Cake. Another step or two and I would have tumbled into the black hole.

“Thanks,” I said, exhaling a great breath of air and gazing down into the dark emptiness. I could hear my heart:
thump! thump! thump!
My stomach had dropped down to my knees.

“Thank you, Mr. Huff,” Pia said, taking me by the sleeve and pulling me away from the pit. “Pablo, be careful,” she said, giving me her best scolding look.

“Almost lost you,
primo
,” Kiki observed cautiously. She looked at Monroe. “Now I know why the mapmaker labeled it Death Cake.”

“Yes, aptly named,” Monroe said.

We slipped out of our backpacks and examined the 12-foot-wide chasm.

“I’ll bet there’s more than one body at the bottom of that pit,” Monroe said, his light passing over the night-black hole. “Tricky old gal, Mother Cave. She gain’s a fellow’s eye with that beautiful cake, and the next thing he knows he’s flying with the bats.”

“Like a trap,” Kiki reflected.

“Precisely,” Monroe said. “Mother Cave is protecting her own.”

“A Death Cake,” I noted, eyeing the formation. It was so close, yet so far.

A rotting, makeshift ladder made from gnarly tree limbs about the size of a man’s arm stretched across the yawning hole. I stepped over to it and nudged it with one duct-taped sneaker. It wobbled unsteadily.

“It was probably strong enough to hold a man’s weight 130 years ago,” Monroe observed. “And it may still have some muscle to it.” He stepped to the edge of the pit and shined his light into it. The bottom was invisible in the darkness.

“Monroe, who do you think made this ladder?” Kiki asked, the beam from her headlamp tracing it.

“Are you asking me if I think Jesse James had something to do with it?” Monroe said.

“Uh-huh, I guess.”

“Let’s just say this old log ladder was made by someone. Maybe Jesse and his boys. Maybe not.”

“That hole looks scary,” Pia noted, leaning forward, her light glazing the pit walls.

“Scary and deep,” Monroe said. “Let’s see
how
deep.” Monroe opened his equipment pack and removed his rock hammer. He chiseled a chunk of limestone from the tunnel wall.

“How can you tell how deep it is?” I asked.

“Objects fall at a constant speed,” Monroe explained. “When I drop this rock into the hole and it takes two seconds to hit bottom, we know this pit is about 150 feet deep. Five seconds, 300 feet deep. And so on. It’s a formula spelunkers came up with years ago.”

Monroe stepped to the edge again, shined his headlamp on his wristwatch, and pitched the rock into the hole.

He counted aloud the seconds ticking by.

“One!”

“Two!”

“Three!”

No sound.

“Four!”

“Five!”

Silence.

“Six!”

“Seven!”

At eight seconds a faint splash rose from the deep pit.

The distant sound gave me a sudden chill.

“That’s not possible,” Monroe whispered, his deep-set eyes drawn together in confusion, his face folding into a frown. “That can’t be right.” He carved another rock from the wall and went through the drill a second time.

Again, eight seconds.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Monroe announced. “We have just discovered the deepest cave pit in North America. About 750 feet, if my calculations are correct. This is deeper than the Fantastic Pit in Georgia by more than 200 feet.”

“Any idea how we’re going to get across?” I asked. “That tree ladder doesn’t look all that stable.” I studied the limb ladder more closely. It might hold a person’s weight. Might. Might not.

Pia gave a sudden squeal, her light trained at her feet. She knelt down and snatched up something from the cave floor. “Ohmigosh!” she cried. “Look at this!” She held up a moss-green stone the size of a walnut.

Kiki examined the stone. “Awesome! It looks like an emerald.” Kiki’s headlamp filtered through the gem—it cast flickering green shafts of light on the gray walls.

The precious stone was passed among us.

“I’d say it’s real,” Monroe said.

“Where’d it come from?” Pia asked.

The answer came to me in a flash. “I’ll bet it was accidentally dropped when Jesse and his men were transferring their loot across this ladder bridge,” I said, the scene unfolding in my mind’s eye.

“Makes sense to me,” Kiki said. “The James Gang wasn’t real picky about what they stole, according to my book. Pia’s emerald may have hung around the neck of some rich old woman on a train or stagecoach.” A smile splashed across her face. “I’m liking more and more our chances of finding that treasure.”

“Yours to keep, Pia,” Monroe said, handing the emerald to her. “Find a safe spot for it.”

“Those Blood brothers aren’t going to steal this,” Pia declared, shoving the gem into the pockets of her coveralls.

Monroe aimed his light into the dark pit again. “We’ve got three choices,” he said, the bright beam coating the bumpy walls that extended to the ceiling on either side of the pit. “Cross over by scaling the adjacent walls, which I do not advise.” His light swung down to the ladder. “Try the ladder or …”

“Or what?” I asked.

“Or call it quits. Jumping is too risky.”

“I’m not calling it quits,” I announced, stepping to the edge of the pit and shining my light into it. “Even if I have to sprout wings, I’m going to get to the other side.”

“I’d pay to see that, Pablo,” Kiki said with a nervous grin.

Monroe rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “What do you weigh, Pablo?”

“About one twenty.”

“Kiki?”

“A hundred or so.”

Monroe played his lamp over the rotting ladder bridge. “I think it might support the weight of Pia or Kiki,” he said. “And it might even hold Pablo, but I doubt that it would support my 200 pounds.”

We stood beside the pit silently considering our choices and inspecting the manmade ladder. It looked pathetically frail.

I wanted to be the first to cross the ladder bridge, but Monroe insisted that Pia go first because she was the lightest. I didn’t like that idea, so Monroe said we’d play a guessing game to see who would cross first. He removed a notepad and pencil from his pack. He turned his back to us and wrote down a number.

“Each of you will guess what number I’ve written down,” Monroe said, turning back toward us. “The person who is closest will go first. The next closest will go second. It’s the only fair way to determine the order in which we cross. I will go last.”

Everyone agreed to the game.

“But why will you go last?” I asked.

“From the looks of the ladder,” Monroe said, “it might not hold me. I might have to jump.”

We picked numbers. Pia said 2. Kiki chose 5 and I picked 6.

Monroe showed us the notepad. He had written down 1.

Although Pia was excited that she would be the first to cross, I still wasn’t crazy about the idea.

As a precaution, Monroe tied one end of his nylon rope in a tight-fitting noose around Pia’s torso and beneath her arms. The other end he secured around his own waist. If she fell—and Monroe was certain the chances of that were slim—the nylon rope would save her.