Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

I didn’t like the idea much, but I didn’t see any alternative. I felt gently around the base of the skull to see if it was still attached. And something icy crawled over my wrist. I recoiled, gasping. Then made myself try again. And then I saw it.

A strand of chain was tangled in the bones of the rib cage. Instantly recognizable. The older corpse was wearing a dog-tag chain. I traced the narrow wire into the silt with my fingertips and found the tabs in the mud. They were black in the pale glow of my headlamp, too corroded to be legible, pitted and discolored by the sulfide. An electrochemical bath might restore them. But it really didn’t matter. They’d obviously been down here a long time. And I was fairly sure I knew whose they were.

I took a last look at the trench where Jimmy Calderon and the other had come to rest. The drape lay just beyond them, tangled in some debris. Stable for now. The water was still too roiled to see much. I could search it more carefully when we came back to recover the bodies. It was time to go. But I didn’t.

I’d done all I could do for now, and God knows it was a terrible place to be. And yet I found myself oddly reluctant to depart. I think I just hated the idea of leaving Jimmy down here in this reeking pit under the earth.

I’d met him only once, briefly, and hadn’t liked him much. But God, he didn’t deserve to end like this. No one does. I’ll be back, I said to no one. I’ll get you out. And then I squared myself off with the current and began to work my way upstream.

Moving against the river was harder than I expected. River current is deceptive. You quickly adapt to the constant pressure and get on with what you’re doing. And you forget that every moment is a struggle. You unconsciously fight for balance and to maintain your position as the seemingly gentle current leaches away your strength and body heat. It happens so subtly that you don’t realize how much energy you’ve spent until you try to do something simple like swim upstream. It was all I could do to tug myself forward on the line a foot at a time.

It took me roughly ten minutes to make my way back to the mouth of the cave, and seeing the shimmer of diffused sunlight filtering into the milky water ahead was as fine as waking to a sunrise after a nightmare. I broke the surface and swam to the bank, clutched a trailing root, spat out my mouthpiece, and just hung on, head down, panting like a dog.

And when I looked up, Megan Lundy was there. Looking down at me. Her gaze as lifeless as one of her sculptures. She was dressed for running in her faded gray sweat suit and Nike headband. And she was holding an ugly, palm-sized automatic casually at her side. Not pointed at me. Just there.

“Come on,” she said. “You can’t stay there.”

I heaved myself up on the bank. She took a wary step back, but she needn’t have worried. I was physically drained and I was wearing nearly a hundred pounds of gear. I unsnapped my tank pack and eased it to the ground. She tossed a pair of handcuffs to me.

“Put these on.”

“A womyn in chains?” I said.

“Just do it.”

And I did. No alternative. She motioned me up the path with the gun.

“What about my gear?”

“Leave it. You can come back for it later. Let’s go.”

She followed me up the long earthen ramp to the rim of the hole, keeping a watchful distance between us. “Charlie will never buy another accident,” I said. “If something happens—”

“Shut up,” she said coolly. “I’m trying to think.”

“All I’m saying is—”

“If you don’t shut your mouth, I swear I’ll kill you, Mitch. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But I decided that if she tried to push me over the edge of the hole, I wasn’t going down alone, gun or no gun.

But she didn’t. At the top she just motioned me toward the old pickup. “You drive,” she said. She waited for me to get behind the wheel, then eased onto the seat beside me. I couldn’t see the gun anymore. Nor did I have to.

“Where to?” I said, firing up the truck.

“My place, I think,” she said. She sounded distant, lost in thought. I dropped the pickup into gear and started down the hill.

We rode in silence for several miles. I tried to catch sight of the gun, but she must have been holding it next to her thigh. With my hands in cuffs I had no chance even to try for it.

“Did you find what you were looking for down there?” she said abruptly. Her voice had changed. It was forceful now. More at ease. As though she’d made a decision. About me? God only knew.

“Yes,” I said warily, “I did. More than I was looking for, in fact.”

“You mean Walter? He’s still there?”

“Sort of.”

“I see,” she said slowly. “I thought by now... Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. He was a pig, you know, as sorry a bastard as ever walked the earth.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He found us together,” she said quietly. “Audrey and me. In bed. I was just a kid, really, twenty or so. In college. Unsure of my sexuality. And then I met her at a fund-raiser, and all my questions were answered. She was the first person I ever truly loved. She was married, and pregnant, and it didn’t matter. It was an incredibly sweet awakening, for both of us.

“Then Walter burst in on us in the middle of the night. He was on the run, half drunk, terrified. When he found us he went berserk. Attacked Audrey. She tried to get away, fell down the stairs. And I... killed him. Stabbed him with a pair of shears. Half a dozen times, probably, I don’t know.

“Audrey was badly hurt, bleeding. But she wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. She knew what would happen to me if I did. A gay woman, killing her lover’s husband? In those days I wouldn’t have had a chance. Or now either, for that matter. Not in this part of the country.

“I couldn’t drive, so she had to. Up into these hills. To a place she knew. And then all the way back to the house. And only then did she call an ambulance. She told them she’d fallen. And then she made me leave her.”

“My God,” I said softly.

“She did it for me,” she continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “She lost her baby, nearly lost her life, to protect me. She sent me off to school in New York. And I went on to have a career, and she... stayed behind in her chair.”

“A woman in chains,” I said.

“Very perceptive,” she said. “I know when you look at her now, the chair is what you see. A frail old woman who’s getting drifty, can barely turn her head. But to me, she was everything, is everything, my love, my art, everything. So when she called last week, half out of her mind, and said Walter was back—”

“Walter?”

“She was distraught, not making sense. But I heard shouting in the background. I didn’t know what to think. I grabbed a golf club, the first thing that came to hand. And I ran down the beach to the McClain house. I could hear him roaring as I ran up the porch steps. God, he even sounded like Walter. He was yelling at her, only an inch from her face. And she was in tears. I hit him from behind with everything I had...”

“And killed him?”

“I’m not sure I meant to — I mean, I didn’t even know who he was. But seeing him screaming at Audrey like that — I hit him. Hard. And I’d do it again. And then I loaded him into his car, drove him up into the hills, and pushed him over. And I ran his damned car into the river afterward. And to hell with him.”

“And his brother? To hell with him too?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I regret what happened to him. I gave him those sketches hoping he’d either get discouraged or stir up the locals enough that someone would drive him off. But he wouldn’t quit. I’ve been running in the hills, keeping track of him from a distance. And when he found the pit I waited for him on the road out of the hills and waved him down.”