Quiet as the Grave (18 page)

He could have kept going. He could have moved down to her shoulders, so fragile under her cotton T-shirt, and all the way to her breasts, which had been driving him crazy for days.

But he didn't. He straightened and let his hands fall to the side.

She didn't turn around. “Mike,” she began.

“It's okay,” he said. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

She opened her mouth and awkwardly drew in a lot of air. “For what?”

“I'm not sure.” He wanted to touch her ponytail, from which her long, shiny hair was pulling free in all directions, the result of their sleepless night. “I guess for never changing. For still being you.”

She swiveled her head and gave him an odd look. Then she smiled. “I've tried, you know. I just haven't had much luck.”

He didn't let himself answer that. He would have said either too much or too little. The middle ground was hard to find.

So he turned toward the cliff face. “Okay, let's get serious. Let's start here, right under the stromatolite, and move out in opposite directions. We know more or less what we're looking for. The cave you found yesterday was small, but it probably was similar.”

She nodded. “If it's like the one yesterday, we'll have to be careful, or we'll miss it. From a distance, the opening just looks like a fold in the rock.”

They started shoulder to shoulder, under the angel's wings. He moved left, she moved right. After only about two minutes, she called out in excitement.

“Mike! Mike, come over here!”

He joined her in time to see her disappear behind a jutting rock. He followed, but bumped into her almost immediately. They were just inside the opening, in what he knew was called the dark zone.

It was like being closed off from the entire world. They couldn't even hear the lake lapping against the shore.

“It's so dark,” she said, as if to explain why she hadn't made it any farther. She shook her flashlight irritably. “And I don't know how this dumb thing works.”

He'd given her one of his. It had the usual kind of switch, so if she couldn't find it, that told him how nervous she must be. He flicked on his own and raised it over her shoulder. A large, circular area in front of her immediately turned an unnatural yellowy white.

“Here,” he said. “Let's switch.”

She took his, he got hers lit, and together they walked slowly through the narrow entryway. After a few feet it widened into a large opening. He ran his flashlight along the walls, surprised at how far back the place seemed to go.

It took a while, because he was traveling slowly, but finally he completed the circumference. The cave wasn't quite round—there were some odd pockets and angles, which perhaps led to further passages—but it must have been at least eighteen feet in diameter.

“Amazing,” Suzie whispered, as if someone could hear them. The sibilant sound seemed to bounce oddly, coming back at them from other places. She ran her fingers along the wall, which resembled a sheet of rippled gray ice.

“It's damp,” she said. “And very cold.”

Toward the back, a small stalactite hung from the ceiling, and Mike's flashlight caught hints of yellow and green in it.

He was getting oriented now, and he realized that, at evenly spaced intervals high along the jagged walls, cone-shaped smudges of black soot appeared.

That was odd. He brought his flashlight closer to one of them.

“Look,” he said. “Someone has drilled holes into the limestone here. And here.”

Suzie came over and peered at the wall. “Yeah,” she said. She touched her finger to the drill hole. “That couldn't possibly be natural.”

She ran to the next black smudge and found a similar pair of drill marks. Stepping back, she surveyed the room with a narrowed gaze, as if she were trying to picture what the various shapes and intervals added up to.

“These smudges—could they be from fire? Could someone have put sconces up along the walls to hold torches?”

There were six places with the same markings. In Mike's imagination, the room suddenly blazed with torchlight, which would have played on these rippling walls with a weird, dancing motion, finding every mineral deposit that had left strange colors in the rock.

“Yes,” he said. “That must be it. They needed light.”

They looked at each other in the gloom, both obviously processing this piece of information and coming up with the same answer. Whatever had happened to Loretta here had not been an isolated event—and it hadn't been an act of savage impulse.

It had been planned. Someone had prepared this room for her—and for God only knows how many others like her.

The room was empty now, though. Whatever had once decorated this secret place was gone. He wondered why the “owners” had moved out? Was it because, one night about two years ago, things had escalated out of control? Because someone had died?

For the next few minutes, he poked around in the nooks and passages. Nothing seemed to go very far back, and there was no sense of incoming air, except from the opening to the lake. Probably this was a self-contained room, with no other exit. That would make sense. They wouldn't have wanted Loretta to be able to escape.

But in one of the larger nooks at the back, an eighteen-inch-wide area about five feet high and eight feet long, he found something. Several very large pieces of plywood had been stuffed into the opening vertically, as if it were a slot at the lumber section of any home store.

“What do you suppose this is?”

Suzie joined him. She pulled one of the plywood pieces forward—it was too heavy to pick up—and ran her light over it, from corner to corner. “I have no idea,” she said.

But he'd seen something, or thought he had. He pulled the wood out the rest of the way and set it on the ground. Kneeling beside it, he used his light to study the surface.

There it was. Irregular smears along one side of the wood, as if something had been dragged across it, leaving a stain behind. It was dry now, and clearly old—the stain was an indeterminate shade of reddish brown.

He started to feel it, and then pulled his hand back. He didn't know what the stain was, but he knew he
didn't want to touch it. He knew he didn't want his fingerprints on it. He wished, now, that he'd worn gloves.

How stupid could he be? How naive? But the truth was, he hadn't really believed they'd find anything out here. He'd just come looking because there was nothing else to do. He couldn't just wait for someone to come arrest him.

He slid the plywood back into its slot. What had the wood been used for? The dank air must be getting to him. He was starting to feel uncomfortably cold.

“Mike…look. What do you think went here?”

Suzie knelt in the center of the room, pointing her flashlight onto another drill hole in the rocky floor. “There are eight of them,” she said. “Four sets of two.”

She slid the beam across the ground, lingering at the four separate spots. He tried to imagine what had been bolted to the floor here. The four places described a rectangle about five feet long.

The pieces of wood were longer than that, so it wasn't where they had stood.

He had a disturbing thought.

“Hold this,” he said. He knelt down, and prepared to lie on the floor. But then he changed his mind. “No,” he said. “I'm too tall. You do it. Lie in the center of those four spots.”

She looked uncomfortable, but she did as he asked without question. She handed him both flashlights, then carefully arranged herself on the floor.

“It's cold,” she said. “What do you think…”

He put the flashlights down to free his hands, and their abandoned beams threw everything into bizarre combinations of sharp shadows and bright light.

He knelt beside her.

“I'm just going to move your arms,” he said. He
pulled the one nearest out and up, so that it stretched to about a forty-five degree angle from her head. Then he leaned over her and did the same with the other arm.

Oh, God
. Each wrist lined up squarely in the middle of two drilled holes.

“Move your legs,” he said. “Spread them apart.”

“I—” She began. But then she stopped. She did as he asked.

He looked. It didn't quite line up. “Can you make your legs go any farther?”

She frowned. “Not without a lot of pain,” she said.

There was a moment of silence.

“But yes,” she said finally. “They could go farther.”

She widened her legs another few inches. It still wasn't quite far enough, but it was close.

He picked up one of the flashlights and let it play over all four points. Her hands, her feet.

“They did it here,” he said. His voice sounded odd in this echoing place. “Manacles, probably. Some kind of restraint, anyhow.”

He put his index finger into the smooth, drilled hole in the limestone floor. He noticed his finger was shaking. “The bastards must have nearly torn her apart.”

Suzie didn't answer him. She lay there, frozen, for another minute. And then, slowly, as if her limbs were half paralyzed with horror, she closed her legs. She slid her arms back to her body.

And then she rolled over on her side, curled her feet up, and softly began to cry.

S
HE COULD HAVE SPIT
,
she was so mad at herself.

Once, ten years ago, she'd cried in front of Mike Frome, over a stupid encounter with a puppy. She'd been seventeen at the time, and she'd sworn she would never show him her weak side again.

But now look at her. Right when he most needed her to be strong, she started blubbering like a baby. If anyone had the right to cry over what they'd found in the cave, it was Mike, not Suzie. After all, it was his wife who might have died, spread-eagled and in pain, in this place.

Though Suzie's mind flinched from the idea of
anyone
being hurt here, at least Justine had admitted a preference for masochism. It was Loretta who broke Suzie's heart. Loretta who wanted to be a cowboy and slept with a Care Bear, and knew she should “be something,” but couldn't figure out what.

Suzie had always thought of herself as a pretty tough cookie. And, to be brutally honest, back in the old days she'd sometimes thought Mike was just a pampered little playboy.

Guess she'd been wrong on both counts.

Look at the two of them now. When things got unendurable, she was just lying here on the cold stone floor, useless and crying. But he was strong. He came
to her. He wrapped his arms around her, under her back and below her knees. He picked her up as if she were no more than a doll and carried her out of there.

She'd forgotten it was daylight outside. She'd forgotten there was such a thing as sunlight. When the brightness hit her eyes, she turned her head and hid her face in his chest.

He held her until her breathing evened out. And then, carefully, he shifted her balance and allowed her feet to drop to the sand.

He dug in his back pocket and handed her his handkerchief. She took it, thanked him, wiped her eyes and then blew her nose openly—what was the use of pretending she didn't need to?

“I'm sorry,” he said. “That was unforgivable. I was so focused on trying to figure it out….” He shook his head. “I can't believe I asked you to do that.”

Hoping she didn't look as swollen and blotched as she felt, she looked him straight in the eye.

“It doesn't matter. We had to know. And I'm not as fragile as I look. When I cry, it's usually because I'm so angry I can't deal with it. I'm angry now. What kind of sick son—”

“Don't think about it,” he said. “Not yet. Not while it's so fresh.”

She drew a bracing breath. “You're right. But I have to say one thing. You do know we can't tell the police about this place, right? Not yet.”

“We have to, Suzie. The police won't even try to find Loretta's abductors unless they see the cave. They don't believe it ever happened.”

“We
can't
. We don't know what's in there, Mike. They went through your boathouse, and they found a
two-year-old hair. Just a hair. Who knows what they'll find in that cave?”

He had to know what she meant. If he alerted the police to the cave, they would wonder how he'd found something so well hidden. What had his connection to the cave really been?

And now his fingerprints would be in there. If they found Loretta's blood or hair or DNA in there, too, that was bad enough.

But if they found Justine's…

“We were foolish not to call them first,” she said. She knew it was dumb to say that now, when it was too late.
Hindsight is whine sight
, her father used to say.
Deal with things as they are, not as they should have been
.

“We should have let them go in and check it out. They couldn't have tied you to it then, even if they'd wanted to. Now—”

“Now they can.” He didn't seem shocked. He must have thought of this already, but he still looked stoic. That scared her. She didn't want him being a martyr now.

“Mike,” she began.

“Suzie, I want you to think about this.”

“I am thinking! That's how I know we can't tell them.”

“No.” He took her by the shoulders. “You're feeling, not thinking. Two women are dead. If what we believe is true, terrible things happened to them in that cave. Whoever did that is still out there. He could do it again. Could you live with that?”

Damn it, he was going to make her cry all over again. She scowled to hold the weakness at bay. “I can't live with you getting arrested, that's what I can't live with.”

“Suzie.”

His hands massaged the tension in her shoulders. She wished he'd stop. Didn't he understand that the tension was what held her together when she felt like falling apart? If he was too gentle with her, she'd collapse again.

“It's going to be okay,” he said. “I'm not guilty. In the end, that will have to count for something.”

“Not if D.A. Quigley has anything to say about it.”

He smiled. Even he had to know that was true.

“And what about Gavin, Mike? Surely there's some way we can find Justine's killer without bringing all this out into the open. Do you want him to know that his mother—”

“Please,” he said, and his voice sounded exhausted. “Let's wait. I can't think straight about it just yet, not with those pictures in my head.”

She nodded. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Look, we're hungry, and we haven't slept in forty-eight hours. Let's eat our way through a stack of blueberry pancakes, grab a nap and we'll argue some more when we feel a little more human.”

He reached down and took her hand. She thought about pulling it away, just in case he was implying she was too weak to walk by herself. She wasn't weak, by God, in spite of that momentary crying fit. She could argue this police issue with him until they were blue in the face. He'd better get used to losing.

But his palm was warm, and his fingers wrapped around hers with just the right amount of pressure. She decided she liked it too much to relinquish it just for the sake of looking tough.

They didn't talk much on the way back around the lake. It seemed like a great effort just to wade through the sand, which was soggy from all the rain.

By the time they climbed the steps to his boathouse, she was so tired she wasn't sure she could even stay awake for the pancakes.

She was the first to see the blond-haired man standing just inside the boat slip. She didn't recognize him right away—she was busy confirming that he wasn't Quigley, or any uniformed officer with a warrant.

But then she recognized Rutledge Coffee, and, without warning, her infamous temper erupted.

“Oh, my God, look! I can't believe that jerk would come here. Debra probably finally kicked him out, and not a minute too soon. But if he thinks he's going to just come camp out at your house, he—”

She put her hand over her mouth. She glanced over at Mike. “I'm sorry. Argghh. I'm sorry. I have no business saying stuff like that. He's your friend. Besides, I'm just
camping out
here myself, and—”

Mike squeezed her hand to interrupt the flow of embarrassed guilt. “Hey,” he said. “It's okay. I'm mad at him, too. But, you know, he just
might
be here to talk about work. Back before all this happened, I did used to have a business.”

“I know,” she said, still flushing. “I know. God, will I ever learn to shut up?”

“I hope not,” Mike said. He gave her hand one last squeeze, then let go so that he could wave hello to Rutledge. They were almost at the slip now, and Suzie took one deep breath after another, trying to calm down. The guy made her skin crawl, but he was Mike's friend, and she had to try to behave.

When they reached the boathouse, Rutledge didn't look any happier to see her than she'd been to see him.

“I have to talk to you, Mike,” he said, rudely turning away from Suzie without even so much as a hello.

God, she wished she had a paint gun handy.

“It's not a good time,” Mike responded calmly. “We were up practically all night, and we're tired. Can't it wait?”

Suzie lifted her chin and stared at Rutledge, mentally defying him to react sarcastically to the news that she and Mike had kept each other awake all night.
Just do it, moron
, she telegraphed.
Say something. Anything. After the morning I've had, I'm so ready for you
.

To her surprise, though, he didn't even seem to hear that part. “No,” he said, his voice tense. “No, it can't wait. I'm sorry. It's really important.”

“Ledge, look—” Mike's tone was stiff, and his body language couldn't have been less inviting, but Rutledge seemed blind to all that.

“I'm sorry,” Rutledge said again. “I have to talk to you right now. It's about—” Finally he seemed to remember Suzie. He glanced at her, and she gave him a flat gaze that simply said,
yes, I'm here, deal with it
.

“About what?” Mike sounded so tired. What was wrong with this guy, that he couldn't take a hint?

But then she looked more closely and saw that Rutledge's eyes were red and bloodshot. He looked even more tired than they were.

No, not just tired. This guy looked wiped out.

“Ledge.” Mike got harsh.
“About what?”

The other man ran his hand through his hair. His fingers were shaking.

“About Justine.”