Holland Suggestions (25 page)

I
CLIMBED OUT OF
there as though my long fear of heights had never existed. I jumped from the floor, caught the lowest rung of the ladder, and pulled myself up hand over hand. I moved quickly up the slimy shaft. Later I couldn’t remember much about the climb, even that most frightening part when the ledge had crumbled away at the top. I had to shimmy past the crack in the dark, while the damaged light from my headlamp flickered sporadically. I do remember the dark and the snow; the night was full when I came out of the lower cave, and snow was falling as I ran through the ankle-deep water and out into the valley. I had a hell of a time finding the jeep where Max had hidden it, but that was nothing compared to the job of driving over that mountain pass in blowing snow at night. By the time I reached the base of the mountain above Taylor’s Gulch the snow was so thick that I could hardly see ahead of me. The defroster was blowing out hot air full force, and still the window was fogging over. I felt dizzy, as though I were going into shock.

I decided that the best, quickest way out was to go to the inn. There, perhaps, I could lie down and think through what had happened; come to some conclusion about what it all meant and what I should do next. In truth, I would have made better time going back to the motel in town, but once I was on the Gold Creek road my head cleared and there was no turning around. I came to the rim and shuddered at the black outline of the old mansion. What really pulled me up short was light below me, in the inn. For a moment I hung there, uncertain and half afraid; then I decided to move in closer. I inched down the road, using only my parking lights, as I had done in this valley so many times before.

I came into the town and turned full face toward the inn. One light burned in an upper window, and there was light behind every window on the lower floor. The upper light came from Jill’s window, and then I saw her red Volkswagen parked in the street ahead. There were no other cars anywhere. I moved ahead cautiously, and I left the jeep’s motor running as I stepped into the snow and moved toward the door.

She met me there, coming at a run when she heard the jeep. “Jim!” There was alarm in her voice. “Where have you been? Where are the others?”

I must have looked a fright. I stared at her for several seconds, looking behind her into the room and half expecting to see someone else. Then I remembered that there was no one else. “Are you alone?”

“Sure I’m alone. Aren’t the others with you? I’ve been here all day, ever since this morning when I got back from Pueblo. I thought you must all be out in the woods, but then it got dark and then it started to snow and I didn’t know what to think. Tell me what’s been happening.”

I began to unwind. My breath came out in a gasp and my knees buckled and I almost went down. She jumped down from the boardwalk and put her arm across my shoulder. “You’re hurt. Here, come inside and let me see what I can do for you.”

Inside, I stretched out by the fireplace in Gould’s den. She ran out to shut off my motor, then came back and got a good fire going. Together we stripped off my wet clothes, all of them, and she wrapped me in blankets from one of the beds upstairs. Afterward she poured me a generous shot of bourbon from Gould’s liquor cabinet. Slowly I felt the tingle in my feet as the blood circulated through my toes.

I didn’t know what to say to her. She sat there watching me warm, and there were so many unanswered questions between us that I didn’t know where to begin. “Gould tried to kill me,” I said at last. That seemed about as good a place as any. “He did kill Max.”

She was speechless. I went on, giving her only the bare facts of the day. “I think we found the cave of gold. Gould seems to have known about it for a long time. He was waiting for us at the bottom, and he got us separated and bludgeoned Max. He almost did the same to me.”

“Where is he now?”

“Dead. We fought and he fell over a cliff. He couldn’t have survived.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“You can believe it. Look, I don’t want to talk about it now. I’m still not sure where you fit into this.”

“That’s why I came back. We’ve got to talk.”

“I don’t understand why you left in the first place.”

“I had to get away from here, to sort things out in my mind. And I wanted to consult with my boss. You’ve heard the name Leland Smith?”

“I guess I know about Leland Smith, if he’s the same Leland Smith who knew Robert Holland. I hope you’re not going to pretend you don’t know who Robert Holland was.”

“No, no more of that. I’m a psychologist, and yes, I work for the same Leland Smith who was once Robert Holland’s friend. Lee is a psychologist, based in New York. He runs a clinic there with another doctor named Lorenzen. I’ve been working with them for about two years. My assignment was to observe you in connection with an experiment that was started by Robert Holland just before he died. I have to tell you that none of us understood the full implication of that experiment until very recently. But because of the nature of my work, I couldn’t let you know who I was or why I was here. Then, a couple of nights ago, when you came into my room and found the book, I knew it was all over.”

“I must have been pretty clumsy.”

“The balcony was wet; your footprints were still on my floor when I came in. When I looked inside my suitcase I knew you had been through my papers too. I knew you would question me about the journal, so I decided to leave at once and try to persuade Lee to come out and explain it to you himself.”

“But he wouldn’t come.”

“He couldn’t. His work schedule just didn’t break for him. That’s why he sent me here in the first place; he just couldn’t come himself. And I botched it.”

“Botched it?”

Her cheeks reddened. “I got too close to my subject.”

“Is that what made you come back?”

“Partly. Lee and I talked it out on the phone; he convinced me that I should come back and level with you. I got here this morning, but the place was deserted and the door was wide open. I’ve been waiting for you ever since.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I said. “Right now I’m not sure what makes sense and what doesn’t. I’m tired and hungry and I’ve got at least a hundred questions.”

“Let’s take it slowly,” she said. “I’ll fix us a dinner and afterward we can talk some more.”

I must have dozed while she was cooking, because the next thing I remember was a meat-and-potatoes aroma coming from the kitchen. For a while I sat in the chair with my eyes closed, savoring the fact that I didn’t have any more mountains to climb. It was over at last. But it really wasn’t over, not yet, not quite. In my restlessness I began to look around the den. I looked with increased insight, and my looking became a new search for answers. I found the tiny door beside the liquor cabinet, quite effectively concealed by the surrounding paneling. I couldn’t open it; undoubtedly the key lay in Gould’s pocket, at the bottom of that terrible drop. On the back porch I found some tools, and it was a simple job to pry it open. Beyond was a narrow corridor which led up a creaking set of stairs to a secret room in the center of the inn. This was the room that Gould called home. There was one unmade bed in the corner and a lamp on a night table beside it that cast a dim light across the place. The room was no more than twelve feet square and there were no windows of any kind. The furniture was sparse and it was crude: a handmade dresser, the bed, an old filing cabinet, and that was all there was. On the top of the dresser I found a ring of keys. The largest key on the ring was an Oldsmobile key; an engraved key with a distinctive head that had come new with the black car from the factory. Beside the dresser I found the shotgun propped against the wall. The barrel was still blood-spattered and there was a long smear of blood across the stock.

Finding it was shocking in its own way, even after all that had happened. I let the significance of the room wash over me; then I propped the shotgun back in its place and pulled on the handle of the filing cabinet. It too was locked, but now I had neither the patience nor the inclination to look around for keys. I wedged the claw hammer into the drawers and pried them open. Only the top two drawers contained papers of any kind. The first folder was a record of correspondence between Gould and a Denver goldsmith, dating back to the early 1950s. The very first letter mentioned a “find of historical significance,” and subsequent letters told of transactions with Spanish coins and artifacts that had netted Gould, over the years, more than fifty thousand dollars. I recognized the goldsmith’s letterhead; I had once used it as a primer for a fire.

I heard a noise on the stairs and Jill pushed her way into the room. “This is where he lived,” I told her. “Look at that.” I pointed to a calendar above the bed, one of the old-fashioned semisexy kind showing a girl carrying groceries and trying to keep her skirt down in a wind. The year on the calendar was 1959.

“He killed them,” I said; “that’s the gun he used to kill them with.”

“Who?”

“Vivian. My wife. And the man she was living with.”

“The people on the hill?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Because I had found his cave of gold, and the man living with Vivian had followed me up to the cave. I didn’t tell you before, but there was a man camped on the mountain across from us the night of the snowstorm. That was the man Vivian was living with on the hill. He must have followed me up to the cave the next day and got a good location on the mine. Gould saw it all. He had to have been watching both of us from his jeep at the top of the lumber road. It must have set him off, pushed him over the edge, and he decided to kill us both. Vivian was there, so he killed her too. He probably dumped the bodies into one of those mineshafts.”

“You really think that’s how it happened?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Even though you never saw the bodies?”

“But I did see the man’s body, only at the time I thought that Vivian had killed him. But no, Gould must have taken their Oldsmobile and dumped her body on that first trip, then come back for the man. He didn’t want to risk carrying a body in plain sight on the back seat, even in that deserted country, and he could only get one of them in the trunk because the man had loaded it with climbing gear.”

She looked puzzled, as though I were going too fast for her. I knew that she didn’t yet have all the pieces, but neither did I, and I didn’t want to lose my thought pattern explaining to her what was obvious to me. I went on: “There may have been others too. I wonder now about Kenneth Barcotti’s death…he wasn’t the kind of explorer to let a rope go bad on him.” I rummaged deeper into the filing cabinet and found a folder marked “Caverna.” Inside were yellow newspaper clippings telling of the legend and a wad of notes written in a scrawl that was impossible to read. Buried in the middle of the folder was a rough but detailed map of the cave, showing the entrance over the top and down the shaft. It had been drawn in pencil and was dated 1953. Drawn in much later, in very dark ink, was a floor-level mine that opened to the outside.

“He must have found the way in through the top, just like us, only twenty years ago, before his leg went bad. Later he found a mine on the floor that was almost clear; with a little digging he had it open, so he could walk in without all that climbing. It should be simple to find: all we have to do is find his jeep. He couldn’t do much hiking, so if we find the jeep we’ll find the mine too.”

I felt her hand on my shoulder. “Forget it for a while,” she said; “come on down to dinner.”

But there was no forgetting it. Once I had my teeth into it I had to push ahead to the end. We talked it out over dinner; I filled in some of the gaps for her and we hashed over some of the rough places. But when all the talk about Gould and his cave of gold was done, nothing had been settled between us.

Getting into it again was awkward. Finally I said, “I wish you hadn’t lied to me.”

“So do I. But listen, it wasn’t all that much of a lie. The part about MacDougald and Barnes wasn’t real, but I am an amateur writer and photographer. MacDougald and Barnes is the name of a law firm near Bridgeport. I worked there one summer, and it was a good summer, so when you asked me about it I just threw out MacDougald and Barnes. I can see now that I should have used the name of a real publisher. You checked it out?”

I nodded.

There was another long, awkward pause and I decided to move ahead to something else. “This whole thing started with a set of mountain pictures. Would you know anything about that?”

“We sent them to you.”

“We?”

“Lee sent them. If you want to be precise, your friend Robert Holland sent them fifteen—seventeen years ago. He was dying when he came to see Lee that last time. He gave Lee four sealed packages; two for you and one each for your former wife and Keith Barcotti.”

“Keith?”

“Kenneth Barcotti’s brother. Let me try to run it through for you. Robert Holland had just been fired from his job at the university because of some problem—”

“My little newspaper story.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. Lee never mentioned that part of it to me. But I do know that Robert Holland’s job was very important to him; by then hypnosis was his life. He would call Lee on the phone almost weekly to confer about one case or another. His big dream was to set up a clinic where hypnotic subjects could be studied scientifically. Lee knew all about you because Robert raved about the things you were into then. Robert said you were the best subject he had ever seen, but then he got fired and started drinking again. That was concurrent with Kenneth’s discovery of the cave.

“Kenneth called Robert from Denver, extremely excited. But then the last thing Robert wanted was to hear from an old friend, and he tried to brush Kenneth off. Kenneth had been looking for this lost cave for ten years then, and Robert had enough problems of his own. But this time Kenneth had found the cave; all he had to do was get the gold out and he’d be rich. But I guess that takes some doing.”

“You might say that.”

“Kenneth couldn’t do it himself without alerting the whole countryside; suddenly he had a lot of things to worry about. He was afraid of pirates, even the federal government, especially since the cave is on federal property. He offered a third split if Robert would come to Colorado and help him. At the same time Kenneth called his brother Keith, to get him in on the project. But Keith couldn’t be reached; he rents fishing boats out of Miami and was away at sea. So Kenneth sent Keith a letter explaining it and asking him to come to Gold Creek as soon as possible. By the time Keith did arrive, Kenneth was missing and Robert was on his way back east.