P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Back to your question,” Carrie said. “I thumped the walls all around and didn’t hear anything that sounded like false wall. The floor is obviously hard-packed dirt.”

“Which leaves the ceiling,” I said, looking up at the floor joists and planks above our heads. Not, I noticed, very far above our heads. I wondered aloud if this room was lower than the basement. “Let’s go find some water,” I said.

We retrieved a large pitcher of water from the hand pump in the kitchen and went back downstairs. I stood at about four feet back from the entrance to the bunkroom and poured the water onto the floor. As I’d hoped, it immediately streamed across the floor and down into the bunkroom, where it puddled against the far wall.

“The ceiling it is,” Carrie said. It took us fifteen minutes to figure it out, and it was pretty ingenious. Pulling down in the middle of one floor joist at the left end of the bunkroom opened a trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor had boards nailed across it to serve as step risers, and at the top was a narrow black rectangle. We went back upstairs to tell John what we’d found and got ourselves a second lantern.

I went first, discovering that I had to crawl on my hands and knees once I got into the tunnel. It, too, had been cut out of hard-packed earth, and it seemed to drift slightly upward in a gentle left curve. The air was reasonably fresh, which made me think that it led to the outside.

After crawling for about a hundred feet I was finally able to stand up, albeit in a crouch. Carrie was right behind me. Ahead was a rough-cut wooden door, around whose seams I could feel air moving.

“Remember that nasty secret surprise the guys found when they opened the bunkroom door,” Carrie said quietly. I nodded and examined the door. It was locked on our side by a large bolt-and-hasp arrangement. I tried the bolt and it moved freely.

“Let’s get flat and then open it,” I said, and that’s what we did. There was no resistance when the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. Beyond there was an alcove of sorts, from which another tunnel led off to the left at about a ninety-degree angle to the one we’d been in. We stood up and stuck the lanterns into the alcove. The tunnel going left was wider than the original tunnel, and its ceiling had been reinforced with wooden beams and sheet metal. On the right-hand side of the alcove was a stone wall. Whoever had built the wall had been no mason, but it extended from floor to ceiling and felt solid. What cracks there were around the edges were dust-filled and looked undisturbed. As if to make the point, there were three solid beams standing in front of the door at regular intervals, one on each side and one in the middle.

“That may one of the abandoned mine tunnels,” I said. The air was coming in strong from our left. “If they used this to bug out, then the outside is thataway.”

“Outside would be good,” Carrie said. Apparently she did not care much for tunnels. For that matter, neither did I.

“Left it is,” I said, and we soon found ourselves walking up a moderate incline for about three hundred feet until we encountered another hard left turn and some crude wooden steps nailed to a plank going up to a small hole at the top. There was a fine trickle of water seeping down the side of the steps. When we pushed our way through the hole we found ourselves standing under that lone pine tree at the entrance to the Creigh-side crack in the backbone ridge. We left the lanterns down in the tunnel and climbed out.

We stood next to the tree and instinctively looked around for attacking dogs. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled for my shepherds, who came at the gallop across that big open space between the crack and the cabin. It felt good to have them nearby. I saw Carrie massaging her injured hand, remembering.

“Okay, so now we know how they got out,” she said. “But not where they went.”

“I’m having a problem visualizing Grinny Creigh getting through that first tunnel,” I said. “Nathan, maybe, the kids, no problem. But Grinny?”

“What’re you saying? She’s still down there somewhere?”

“Yeah, I think that’s a real possibility. They’ve had a hundred years to dig out all sorts of tunnels and chambers down there-just look at this tunnel. It had to have taken months to cut this thing by hand.”

“There was that one stone wall, at the junction,” she said. “Maybe we-”

“Hold up, there’s a vehicle coming,” I said, pointing down toward the cabin. We watched the Big brothers join up to see who was arriving. We could only see headlights until it stopped in front of the cabin, so we started down the hill. It turned out to be the Big Chief himself, Mose Walsh, driving a pickup truck with a cap on the back.

He was apparently on good speaking terms with the Bigs, who were talking to him when we made it back down to the cabin. He gave me a sideways look as we walked up, but greeted Carrie with a big grin.

“The glass hole,” he said. “I found out where that is.”

“Great,” Carrie said. “But what is it?”

“Well, actually, I’ve never seen it,” Mose replied. “Guy I know, likes to do cave diving? He says it’s the one vestige of volcanism in the Great Smokies on our side of the Tennessee line. According to him it’s on the edge of the park, right inside the boundary with your favorite county. The scientists who’ve seen it say it’s an ancient collapsed lava bubble.”

“Can you take us there?” I asked.

He hesitated. “I’ve got directions, so I can take you there. I don’t want to, because this involves the Creighs, but you said there are kids at risk. So…”

“How long would it take to get there?”

“Actually, we can drive most of the way, then it’s a five-, six-mile hike in and mostly up.”

“Is it someplace you could hide six kids?” Carrie asked.

“I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “According to my guy, it’s under water.”

We left in two vehicles early the next morning, Carrie and I in the Suburban, and Mose in his pickup truck. We’d shown the Bigs the escape route out of Grinny’s place, and they promised to pass that on to any further investigators, assuming there was going to be any further investigation.

Luke took Honey Dee’s bereft mother back to Rocky Falls. He promised to get a statement from her before the county social services system swallowed her up. We let them know where we were headed and why, which they duly noted. Neither of them seemed very encouraging. We told them that Grinny might be lurking in one of the abandoned mine tunnels, and all John could say was that meant we had her where we wanted her-underground. Carrie had wanted to explore that walled-off tunnel, but the kids were a more pressing issue.

I’d apologized to Mose for harassing him in the restaurant the previous night, but he waved me off. “When you mentioned the glass hole and captive kids, I knew I was screwed,” he’d said.

“You really think you never made a difference during your career?”

“I worked homicide,” he’d replied, with that wry grin. “By definition, my ‘clients’ always died.”

“How many killers did you put away?”

“Killers? Real killers? Maybe a half dozen. Mostly it was husbands who lost their tempers, druggies, gangster kids, like that.” He shook his head sadly. “Endless supply.”

“Well, this clan falls into the ‘real killers’ category. They might as well be killing these kids, considering what happens to them.”

He nodded. “I’ll take you up there,” he said. “But I’m not going to fight the Creigh clan for you. I really am too old for that shit.”

And by implication, so was I. We followed Mose out of Marionburg and into Robbins County. It felt strange not having to be on the lookout for cop cars and black hats now that Mingo was gone. I still couldn’t get his final words out of my mind, though. Wrong. Better. Had he been just babbling as his brain shut down? Or did those words mean something? And where the hell was Grinny Creigh?