Janet Evanovich - Wicked Business

The legend is that a tablet accompanied each stone and gave the name of another guardian family. It was the way families were able to find one another over the centuries if disaster struck.

My problem was that I flat-out did not want to go back underground. And I thought this whole search-and-rescue mission smacked of wild-goose chase. What were the chances of finding half of a tablet in the endless, dark, confusing tunnels?

“I wish you would stop sighing and harrumphing,” Diesel said. “It’s starting to creep me out.”

“Well, excuse me, but this moronic mission is creeping me out. And I’m not diving into that pool of black water. I’ll wait at the end of the tunnel. You can bring the tablet to me if you can find it.”

“We’re not going in that way. We’re going in the way we came out.”

“It was a maze. We’ll get lost and die. And there were rats! Remember the rats?”

“We won’t get lost. The tunnels were marked. We’ll be fine if we read the markings going in and going out. And I’ve taken precautions.”

“What kind of precautions?”

“Spray paint and rope.”

“Oh boy.”

We pulled into Hanover a half hour later. The sun had just set, but there was still lots of light. Students were on the move to and from dorms, going to eat, heading for the library.

Carl was making restless sounds in the back, anxious to get out of the car.

“What are you going to do with Carl while we’re in the tunnels?” I asked Diesel.

“He’s coming with us. I have a leash.”

“Eeep?” Carl said.

I contemplated my life choices and wished I had something calming and comforting. Catholics have rosaries and things they can chant, but I was raised Presbyterian, and we have bupkis. I guess there’s prayer, but that takes some thought. Smoking would be another way to go. Smokers always look so happy when they suck on a cigarette. I might even be willing to risk lung cancer, but the wrinkly, oxygen-deprived skin issue is a big turnoff. And I’d hate to smell like my Aunt Rose, who died with a Marlboro Light hanging from the corner of her mouth. Although they tell me she died smiling.

We found a parking place on the side street by the tennis courts and walked across Wheelock to the Sphinx. Diesel had his backpack filled with the rope and spray paint, and I had Carl. He was wearing his new harness, designed for a dog but it fit Carl just fine, and his leash was attached. We skirted the fire-smudged Sphinx on our way up the hill. The back door had been replaced and the small exhaust fan that was high on the back wall had also been replaced.

There were students talking by the bike racks in front of our target dorm. We kept our distance and walked around the end of the three-building cluster. We stopped a short distance from the basement door and watched the activity. No one was on this side of the building. Good thing for that, because it’s hard to blend in when you’ve got a monkey.

“Showtime,” Diesel said.

We casually crossed to the door, Diesel opened it, and we slipped inside and quickly walked through the revolving wall to the trapdoor. I went down the ladder first, Carl followed, and Diesel came last, closing the hatch, plunging us into darkness.

I felt something scurry across my foot, and in a flash Carl was off the ground and sitting on my head.

I could hear Diesel pulling things out of the backpack. He switched on a light and handed it to me.

“Put this on,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s a headlamp. Hikers use them. It’ll give you hands-free light.”

I put the headlamp on and watched while Diesel fixed one onto Carl.

“Where did you find one to fit Carl?” I asked him.

“Ace Hardware. They have everything.”

Diesel put his headlamp on and attached a Maglite to the waistband of his jeans. He coiled a long length of rope over his shoulder and grabbed a can of fluorescent yellow spray paint.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Stay close.”

Stay close was advice I didn’t need. As it was, I couldn’t get close enough. The only one more unhappy than me to be in the dark, dank tunnel was Carl. He was clinging to me with his monkey fingers curled into my shirt in a death grip.

In some ways, it had been better to blindly follow Diesel in the dark last time. I hadn’t seen the spiders hanging from webs above our heads or the dirt sifting down from rotting support beams. When we came to a fork in the tunnel system, Diesel looked for the letter chipped into the stone marker, and he spray painted the walls at the entrance to the tunnel we were about to exit, to make sure we’d make no mistake on the way out.

We came to the small chamber with the domed ceiling. No sunlight filtering through this time. The sun had set. Diesel moved through the room and took us into more tunnels.

If I looked around Diesel, I could see something reflecting light at the end of the current tunnel. Quartz crystals, I thought. We’d finally reached the large domed room where we’d found Hatchet. The room where the stone and the tablet had resided.

I stepped into the room and felt a sense of relief. It was still claustrophobic, but at least I wasn’t moving through narrow dirt tunnels.

Carl looked around and slowly climbed down. He stood for a moment, testing the dirt-and-stone floor.

“Eeh,” he said.

We’d emerged from the tunnel marked W , now spray painted yellow. There were five tunnel entrances opening into the room. We knew from Hatchet that the N tunnel had been booby-trapped.

Diesel went to the N tunnel and peered into the dark hole with his Maglite.

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“Nothing. No tablet on the ground that I can see. I’d say it’s around a twenty-foot drop.”

The floor of the domed room was littered with small brown rocks the same size and shape as the Luxuria Stone. Mixed with the small brown rocks were chunks of crystal like the ones embedded in the walls and ceiling. I picked up a couple of the prettier crystal chunks and put them in my sweatshirt pocket.

“She said she fell multiple times,” I told Diesel.

“Let’s hope she lost the tablet on the first fall.”

I went to the hole and looked in. “You might be able to drop down and only break one or two bones, but you have no way of getting out, other than wandering around for a couple days.”

“I’m not going down. That’s the genius of my plan. Carl’s going down.”

Carl’s eyes went wide open. “Eeeep!”

“I brought rope,” Diesel said, slipping the coil of rope off his shoulder. “I figure we tie the rope to Carl’s harness, and we lower him down. When he finds the tablet, we bring him back up.”

Carl was shaking his head no so hard I was afraid his eyes would pop out and roll around on the ground.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Diesel said to Carl. “I’ll have a good grip on you. It could even be fun. You’ll get to see a new tunnel.”

Carl gave Diesel the finger.

Diesel tied the rope to the back of Carl’s harness, picked Carl up by it, and bobbed Carl up and down like a yo-yo.

“Good to go,” Diesel said.

“He looks worried.”

Diesel hung him over the hole. “Nothing to worry about. What could go wrong?”

“Eeeeee,” Carl said, descending into the abyss, holding tight to his harness, feet dangling, his mini-headlamp shining into the darkness.

“Remember, you’re looking for the tablet,” Diesel called to Carl. “I’ll pull you up when you get the tablet.”

I stood back a couple feet and manned the Maglite. I was trying to illuminate the ground below, but it was difficult to get the beam of light past Carl.

“He’s on the ground,” Diesel said. “The rope went slack. I think he’s walking around. “Hey, Carl!” he called down. “How’s it going? Do you see the tablet?”