Jeff Rovin - Fatalis

"Yeah, and I didn't see much more," Caroline told her. "I came to the crash site. I stood on the road, I identified the truck, and then I was taken to a highway patrol car to answer questions about the driver."

"Weren't you asked to ID the driver?"

"No."

"Did you see him?"

Caroline said she did not.

"Then I'm not understanding this at all," Hannah said. "Who is the driver?"

"Hannah, I can't They'll know where it came from and Gearhart will give me and my drivers trouble-"

"I understand," Hannah said quickly. Screw Danza. She knew how to give a person room when they deserved it. "Can you tell me what kind of questions they asked you?"

"Routine stuff," Caroline told her. "The driver's background, who he hung out with, where be hung out, how long he was with us. The sheriff even wanted to know if he had a dog."

"A dog? Why?"

"Apparently, they found fur in the cab," Caroline said.

"Just fur? No paw prints in the blood?"

"Huh?" Caroline asked.

"I mean, a dog didn't come sniffing around after the accident?" Hannah asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Caroline said. "Listen, I'm getting motioned over by the deputy. I've got to deal with him and then talk to my insurance guy and also see if I can still get fish to my clients. If you need anything else, can we talk later in the day?"

"Sure," Hannah said. "Sorry to keep you and thanks again."

"You're welcome."

Caroline hung up. Hannah slipped her phone back in her pocket. The Wall shambled closer.

"Remember when we used to have to find a phone booth to do this?" the photographer asked.

"Yeah. But I'm not getting any more information than I used to."

"Technology. The great myth of our time."

"Not now, Wall," Hannah said She was looking back at the tent The other reporters were beginning to disperse. Then she looked back up at the mountains. "Something's not right here."

"What?"

"Something happened that they don't want us to know about."

"Maybe they don't know what happened," the Wall suggested. "Maybe that's what they don't want us to know."

"Possibly." Hannah glanced behind her, at the road and at the foothills. Helicopters from the search-and-rescue unit were visible in the distance. "But Sheriff Gearhart has to be thinking the same thing I am."

"Which is?"

"That this may be related to the disappearance of the engineers," Hannah said. "And if it is, there's something Gearhart may have missed."

Before the Wall could ask what that was, Hannah had her phone out again and was running to her Blazer.

It was seven o'clock in the morning when Jim Grand returned to the "volcano" cave. That's what he was calling it, since the volcano-the one with the serpent, not the dolphin-was the only image he could identify positively. He had a little more than six hours before his afternoon class and he wanted to use them productively.

The scientist had brought extra gear to explore the underground tunnels, including rubber boots and crampons for negotiating the sloping floors of the lower passageway. However, Grand knew when he got there that he probably wouldn't be needing any of it. The water runoff from the ledge was just a trickle now, not only because the rain had stopped but because the extensive drainage system built by the California Water Resources Department over the last twenty years was finally able to handle the overflow above ground. As a result, less of it was spilling into the caves.

After hammering a piton into the ledge, Grand tied a rope to the duffel bag and lowered the gear to the cave floor. Then he secured the other end of the rope to the piton and climbed down. Since he wasn't going to be studying the walls there was no reason to use the harness.

Grand spent nearly two hours exploring the fissure on the opposite side of the main cave. Before going back to the "white designs" tunnel and possibly descending deeper into the cave system, he wanted to see where the more accessible southern tunnels led. He also wanted to find out whether the Chumash had painted designs there. Driving up here he'd had a wild notion. If this complex of caves was as extensive as he thought, perhaps the Chumash had charted them and left the map on a wall. Though that would have been unprecedented for the Chumash, other ancient peoples had left similar designs on cave walls. It would be better to check before he went down rather than after.

There was nothing inside.

Unlike the tunnel on the north side, this section was extremely difficult to negotiate. Though it was dry in here- the slant of the ledge above sent the runoff to the north side-the runnel was also small, narrow, and unventilated. According to Grand's compass he was headed southwest. It didn't surprise him when, after nearly two hours, he came across chalk markings on the wall. Unfortunately, the designs weren't made by the Chumash. They were a pound sign and an arrow pointing away from that spot, a geologist's notation that the tunnel had been explored to that location from the direction in which the arrow was pointed. No doubt Dr. Thorpe had come this far from the other direction, from Painted Cave sinkhole-probably a good quarter-mile-looking for the two missing engineers. The geography would be right for her to have reached this spot. He could picture the world above. Behind him, in the northern tunnel, was where the ravine sinkhole had dumped the creek water into the lake.

Grand made a similar chalk notation pointing in the other direction. Then he returned to the main cave. He wondered, as he always did when he made markings on a cave wall, whether some future archeologist would find the chalk marks and wonder who made them and why.

Shortly after 10:00 A.M., after taking a water and granola-bar break, Grand was ready to go back into the north-side tunnel that led to the underground lake. During the long night Grand had spent with the Chumash archives, he'd developed an adversarial relationship with the mysterious images. He was looking forward to spending more time with them, wrestling with them, trying to figure out whether they were eyes or something else.

The floor of the tunnel was dry and he reached the lake in less than twenty minutes. There was very little water running in from the creek and the lake had shrunk to nearly half the size it had been the day before. Crisp stalagmites split the softly rippling surface and the waterfall leading to the lower cavern was a smooth and gentle flow.

Grand made his way along the ledge to the tunnel where he set down his duffel bag. He put away his flashlight, donned his night-vision glasses, and stepped into the mouth of the tunnel. He'd brought along the video camera but decided not to take it with him until he'd reconnoitered. If the ground was solid and the footing secure, he'd come back for it.

Grand looked at the paintings, but only for a moment. Something else caught his attention.

The waters in the lower cavern had also subsided, leaving just a small, still pool in the center. There was detritus on the surrounding stone floor. Among the smooth pebbles, soggy pieces of tree bark, and leaves that had washed down from the creek, he saw a pair of batteries. They had probably fallen from the flashlight he found the previous day. Before he did anything else. Grand decided to retrieve them and see if there was anything else that might have washed down from the engineer's backpack.

Grand squatted and started down the tunnel. He didn't need his crampons to get down the passageway, though he moved slowly and was extremely careful not to place his hands on any of the images.

As he descended. Grand glanced at the paintings. Looking at them, he was less and less sure that the images were eyes. While they looked exactly like the shapes he'd seen in Fluffy's eyes, they were extremely fuzzy. Chumash work was typically sharp-edged.