Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned (26 page)

Jacob looked at his brother, surprised. He’d been thinking the same thing. Remembering the book he’d found in Grandma Cowley’s cellar had brought her strange disappearing act into his mind.

“You think Taylor Junior dug a hole?” Jacob asked. “The ground is awfully hard. Rocky too.”

“It’s either that or he just disappeared.”

“Grandma Cowley’s cellar was already there and so was the trapdoor.”

“I don’t follow,” David said.

“A few days after we stumbled into those yellow jackets, I rode back to Yellow Flats to cover up the floor again. I don’t know why, maybe I didn’t want anyone else to know her secret. I took a closer look at the cellar. There was a good-sized crawl space under the entire floor. More than you usually see in the old desert cabins. The hiding place was dug at the same time the cabin was built.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Who knows,” Jacob said. “Maybe a place for men to hide during polygamist raids. Or maybe in case of Paiute attacks. Or maybe there was just a crawl space for hiding, and it was so useful that Grandma Cowley expanded it later, after she was widowed for the second time.”

“By herself?” David looked skeptical.

“Maybe, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. By the time she was an old woman, there was no one left who remembered her secret.”

“So what are you saying?” David asked. “That there was already a hiding place up here before Taylor Junior came? Like a cave or a sinkhole? Wouldn’t we have found it already?”

“Who said anything about a natural hiding place?”

“I’m still not getting it. Nobody lives up here. How could it be man-made?”

“Nobody lives up here
now.
Here, give me the binoculars.”

Jacob raised them to his eyes. He turned his attention to the steeper north wall of the box canyon. From the plateau to the bottom was at least three hundred feet. And sheer. Only a professional rock climber could climb that cliff, although there were a couple of places midway up where fissures had eroded and brush and scrubby trees clung to the wall. He focused on the larger of these two spots. A moment later, he lowered the binoculars in surprise.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

The others hurried over. “What are you talking about?” David asked. “Give me those.”

“One second.” Jacob looked one more time. It was still there. He turned the binoculars over to his brother, told him where to look. David let out a low whistle.

Abraham unslung his rifle and looked through the scope. “What is it? What do you see?” He stopped. “Well, I’ll be…”

“An Anasazi cliff dwelling,” Jacob said as David handed Sister Miriam the binoculars. “You can just see some stones there stacked in a line.”

“I don’t see—no, wait, there it is. But it’s right on the side of the cliff. Who did you say?”

“Anasazi. Ancient Pueblo people. Nobody knows why they built their homes in the cliffs. Defensive, I’d guess. In some places there are whole villages, but mostly it’s just a few buildings here or there. And some of them have never been discovered. Like that one, apparently.”

“I always thought they were Nephite ruins,” Father said, “from the final days of the Book of Mormon, before the Lamanites wiped them out. Final refuges from their enemies.”

“Except they’re about a thousand years too recent,” Jacob said. “Look at it. You could hike this canyon a hundred times and never spot it. I was searching and still almost missed it.”

“But how do we get there?” Miriam asked. “There’s no way up.”

“There’s got to be a way.”

The staircase, when Jacob discovered it, was obscured by erosion and by streaks of desert varnish—black mineral trails on the
rock—but presented a clear enough trail when you knew what to look for. They were nothing more than steps chipped from the rock, an inch or so deep. Handholds and footholds. Jacob looked up the sheer face dubiously, trying to imagine some Native American family carrying game, baskets of corn, or young children a hundred feet up the cliff with nothing more than a few niches in the rock to cling to.

“Here we go,” Jacob said. “Tighten the straps on your packs.”

“Jeez, are you sure?” David asked. His pale face turned ashen as he looked up the face of the cliff. Stephen Paul looked uncertain as well.

“You saw the footprints,” Jacob said. “This is how they left the canyon. It’s either this or give up. Well?” he asked when they continued to hesitate. “Do we abandon the chase?”

One by one they shook their heads until at last David sighed. “Let me go last. That way I won’t knock the rest of you down when I fall.”

“The stairway cuts across at an angle. If you fall, you’ll only kill yourself. Now isn’t that comforting? But don’t worry. Nobody is going to fall.”

Then, without waiting to see if they were following, he started to climb the cliff wall. In another situation Jacob might have suffered second thoughts. He might have looked down and felt his stomach lurch at the sight of the ground receding beneath him. Might have realized that a single slip of the foot or misplaced grip on a crumbling shelf of sandstone meant a fall to his death. But with a little confidence the steps were placed for a quick and easy ascent. He imagined surprising Taylor Junior in the Anasazi ruins. Jacob would lift his rifle. Taylor Junior would rush him. A
gunshot. And then Taylor Junior, falling. The bullet wouldn’t kill him. He would still be alive until he hit the ground. It was a disturbingly satisfying image.

Before he knew it, he’d reached the clump of brush and a narrow ledge at the mouth of a shallow cave. The house was snugged into this natural fissure in the sandstone. Now that he was upon it, he could clearly see the stone walls, wedged in without mortar. There was a sort of porch or lip of stone in front of the doorway and a reed basket sitting outside the building as if set down moments earlier, but clearly ancient. He glanced inside to see that the basket was filled with tiny corncobs, preserved by the arid air and kept dry beneath an overhanging lip of stone, even if the kernels themselves had long since been nibbled away by rodents. But the doorway itself was a pair of boards that looked modern. He slipped out of the backpack and grabbed his rifle.

Jacob glanced down and was surprised to see that none of the others were more than halfway up. Miriam came next, followed by his father, then Stephen Paul, and finally David, who was taking his first, tentative steps up the eroded staircase. Why were they so far behind?

He turned back to the ruins. Some of the stones in the wall were of a different shade or were bare of the lichen that splotched their neighbors. It looked as if someone had gathered tumbled-down stones and repaired the house. The wall snugged parallel to the fissure of rock into which it had been built. He imagined how it had happened. Someone, hundreds of years ago, had wandered into this dry, desolate canyon, perhaps looking for a safe place to make a home. He had first eyeballed the crumbling ledge from below, then spent hours chiseling away at the rock until he’d made
a staircase halfway up the cliff. He had then spent untold hours more quarrying sandstone from the cliff, widening and deepening the fissure at the same time, then building this exterior wall. How many people did it hold? One family? Two?

Jacob caught the faint scent of flowers—geraniums, he thought. It was so distinct over the smell of juniper and sandstone that he stopped short. The smell came from inside. Had someone decorated the inside of the cliff dwelling with a pot of flowers? The thought was so absurd that a laugh escaped his mouth. It echoed across the canyon, harsh as a crow’s caw.

Quiet, you idiot.

There might be someone inside. He needed to knock down the makeshift door and finish it in a hurry. He crossed the ledge in two steps and reached out his hand.

* * *

It was time to give up, Eliza decided after they’d searched for a half hour. Thirty minutes of nothing. But Charity continued to insist it was along this ridge somewhere.

But where? They’d moved back and forth across the edge of the cliff three times already. The first time, they strolled for a hundred yards in every direction. Looking for what? Fayer suggested a rope ladder. It had to be tied to a rock or a tree. But that turned up nothing.

The second time they took it more slowly, Eliza and the two agents walking single file along the edge. They looked for footprints, for broken branches, or disturbed clumps of brush. But
most of the surface was slickrock, and they found nothing on the bare sandstone.

After some discussion, they decided to make a third and final pass. This time, they slowed to an agonizing trudge, moving at the pace of a desert tortoise, step after frustrating step. Fayer would stop periodically to drop to her belly and search along the edge of the cliff, while Krantz chewed his lip and Eliza burst with impatience. Nothing.

We can’t do this again. We have to find another way down.

At last, Fayer stepped back with a frustrated grunt and Krantz followed, looking relieved to put some distance between himself and the edge of the cliff. Eliza turned away, reluctant to give up. Fayer cleared her throat to say something—no doubt to suggest they continue on and try to find a path into the canyon the long way around—when something caught Eliza’s ears.

“Wait,” she said. “Shhh. I thought I heard someone.”

She listened more carefully, and a moment later heard it again. Voices. When the wind died, some trick of acoustics in the canyon brought words to her ears. She could pick some of it out. “… hideaway…ruins.”

It was Jacob’s voice. A second voice—a woman’s—answered, but Eliza couldn’t parse the words. Sister Miriam? There was something about the way their words echoed through the canyon that made them sound simultaneously close and yet impossibly far away. And then her ears identified the origin of the sound. They were somewhere above the canyon floor.

“…pry open the door,” Jacob was saying. It sounded like he was trying to get into something, maybe a cave or shelter on the side of the cliff.

And then she remembered what Charity said about Taylor Junior setting snares for his enemies. A panic swept over Eliza, deeper than the fear of the cliff edge.

She rushed to the edge. “Jacob! Don’t open the door!”

From below came a woman’s high scream.

Jacob stopped before opening the door, suddenly cautious. But it was nothing more than two boards propped against the opening into the cliff dwelling to shield the interior from the weather. He glanced down at the ground and saw boot prints heading away from the door, pressed over the top of older prints that led inside.

Miriam called up to him from the staircase. “Did you find it? What is it?” She sounded close, as if watching Jacob disappear into the brush-obscured alcove had inspired her to pick up her own pace.

Her voice was loud enough to alert anyone hiding inside, but all was quiet.

He called over his shoulder. “Definitely Taylor Junior’s hideaway. Anasazi ruins. Someone repaired the wall and put up a door. There are boot prints. Coming, then going. Nobody is here now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, sure enough.” He wondered if the disappointment sounded in his voice, if Sister Miriam guessed that he’d hoped to confront Taylor Junior and finish it.

“Wait a minute, I’ll be right there.”

A sudden jealous feeling passed through him. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted to be the first to see the inside. He wanted that first glance, where he could see his enemy’s lair, his hidden sanctuary, and see into the mind of his quarry, and Jacob wanted to do it before the others arrived.

Just to be safe, he unstrapped his rifle and slipped out of his backpack. He flipped off the safety and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. He reached for the door.

“Jacob?” Miriam called. She was closer now. He could hear her panting from the exertion of the climb. A moment longer and she’d be over the edge. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

“I’m going to pry open the door.”

He reached between the two boards. Each was about four feet high, just tall enough to cover the short doorway. Taylor Junior must have climbed with them strapped to his back. Jacob started to pull.

A woman’s voice cried out, “Jacob! Don’t open the door!”

He started, pulled back his fingers as if he’d been burned. He whirled around with his rifle in hand to see Miriam just struggling over the ledge into the ruins, her fingers gripping the stone, a startled look on her face. What was she warning him about? But the voice had been distant and strangely pitched for Miriam. For a moment, he’d thought it was Eliza warning him, and from somewhere
above
him, if that were possible.

And then Miriam screamed.

What he’d taken for surprise was fear and alarm. Miriam’s fingers clutched at the side of the ledge. “Help me!”

She was slipping. Somehow, in the last scramble over the edge and onto the flat ground that served as the cliff dwelling’s front porch, she’d lost her footing on the stone staircase. The men scaling the cliff below her shouted in alarm. Jacob tossed the rifle to the ground and grabbed Miriam’s wrist as she started to fall. She pulled back, weighed down with her pack and too heavy by far, and he got a sudden, dizzying glimpse of the canyon floor. A vast, yawning distance. Pine trees dotted the bottom like miniatures in a child’s railway set. The two of them dangled for a long moment, Jacob losing his footing and the grip on her wrist. And then Miriam got her other arm over the edge and took some of the weight off. Jacob gave a final heave and got her body up and over, and then he got his hands under her shoulders and dragged her the rest of the way to safety.

Miriam lay heaving and shuddering. Gone was her cool, confident mask, her expression stripped to raw terror. Jacob could feel the same fear on his own face. His heart felt like a stone banging against his ribs.

“Jacob!” the woman’s voice cried again. “Are you all right?”

Jacob struggled to catch his breath. “Eliza, is that you?”

“It’s me! I’m with Fayer and Krantz.” She shouted something else that he couldn’t pick up.