Michael Koryta - Last Words

Today, he was interested in the topographic maps, all of which were covered with pushpins and notations in red, blue, or black ink. Each red circle had an X in the center, meaning Ridley had explored the cave, or potential cave, and found that it didn’t suit his memory or his needs. Each black circle had a check, which meant that he’d been in the cave and thought it held possibilities. Each blue circle had a question mark, meaning that he wasn’t certain there was a cave there but the topography suggested it was likely.

Southern Indiana was a karst landscape, which meant that part of the state existed above a world honeycombed with caves, caverns, and crevices. The land was home to springs where water bubbled up from below, sinkholes where the surface was pulled underground, a river that vanished for miles at a time — countless collisions between worlds above and worlds below.

Because of this, southern Indiana, like Kentucky, was heaven for cavers. Unless you were looking for one particular place in a cave and you weren’t certain that it even existed. Then it felt a lot less like heaven and a lot more like hell.

Trapdoor itself had been viewed as nothing but a sinkhole, a pocket of stone that caught excess runoff when Maiden Creek spilled its banks. Then came a week of relentless rain, and the ground opened up and revealed the entrance to an extensive cave system, but exploration efforts had stopped once the cave was closed, leaving Ridley to peck away from the outside and forcing him to remind himself, time and again, that the locked gate put in place by the MacAlister family concealed only an entrance, not the entrance.

There were others.

There had to be.

The issue was patience. That thing his father had never been able to hold, Ridley must keep firmly in hand. He put his finger on one of the maps and traced from one pushpin to the next, crossing over two blue circles with question marks. It was a swale maybe a quarter of a mile long, a small depression, and it seemed to offer little hope. But he’d searched so many better options for so long. He had to keep at it.

But not today. Today he would cut boards in his tiny sawmill operation, the only thing that still brought him any money. People had stopped hiring Ridley for carpentry ten years ago. There were rules in Garrison, and one of them was that you didn’t let Ridley Barnes in your house. Particularly if you had daughters.

Still, the men who were hired remembered the way that Ridley could work wood. Cabinets built by his hands were in plenty of homes around the area, though the owners didn’t know it. The contractors waited warily outside while he loaded their trucks, and they passed him cash quickly, and they left in a hurry.

Probably some of them had daughters.

Before he left the hidden room, he turned and took Sarah Martin’s necklace down from the peg on which it hung. A simple silver chain with a blue stone — it was a sapphire, her mother’s birthstone — in a setting rimmed with diamond chips. The clasp was still solid, but the chain was broken. It had been snapped, torn off her neck. The way things tore when reaching hands grabbed at them in tight, dark places. Trapped places.

He handled it delicately, running his thumb over the sapphire, remembering the time the police had come in with a list of things missing from Sarah’s body, things remembered by her mother and her friends and her boyfriend, and searched his house. Both her mother and Evan Borders recalled the necklace. Her mother said she never took it off and Evan confirmed she was wearing it the last time he’d seen her.

The police had been thorough with their search, but they didn’t quite understand Ridley. If they had, they would have looked at the place with different eyes. Maybe they would search again. Because they were coming back, make no mistake. Novak would see to that.

Everything old was about to be new again.

As if in confirmation, a knock thundered at his door. It wasn’t the knock of a casual visitor; it was a pounding of anger and authority. Ridley let out a breath of relief at the sound, understanding that things were, finally, back in motion.

Mark had given up knocking — either Ridley wasn’t home or he was pretending not to be — and was considering the pros and cons of kicking the door open when he finally heard footsteps inside.

“Now, Markus,” Mark whispered to himself, “you’ve got to think about that temper. Got to anticipate it.” He was speaking in an affected Southern drawl, handling each word as if he were testing the flavor. “A question of willpower, that’s what you’ve got to figure out. That’s what defines you, Markus. Willpower.”

Not bad at all. He could do a pretty decent impression of Jeff London when he wanted to.

“Greetings,” Ridley Barnes called as he opened the door, and Mark kept the London impression in his voice when he responded.

“How y’all doing, Mr. Barnes?”

Sweet as syrup. Ridley cocked his head, aware that it was an act and not aware of the reason for it. On a porch chair beside the door was a coiled rope, dusted with frost; it looked like it had been left out to dry in the cold air and had frozen. Mark slipped it off the chair and ran it through his hands. Stiff, but not frozen. A fine rope, expensive. It was a static line, designed not to stretch. Ridley probably used it for rappelling. You wouldn’t want much stretch in a cave. Mark kept it in his hands as he walked away from the door and out into the yard. Ridley followed.

“What is this, seven-sixteenths?” Mark said.

“Good guess. You’ve done some climbing, I take it?”

“Not much. Spent some time with ropes, though. Trick stuff.” He slid the rope out of the coil with hands that were long out of practice but still far from forgetting, then looped and twisted a quick noose. “Poor man’s lariat,” he said. “With trick ropes, you use a metal piece called a honda. Brass, usually. But if all you have is the rope, you make do.”

Mark held the rope in his left hand, and with his right hand he flipped over the noose he’d created and gave it a clockwise spin, keeping it parallel to the ground. The rope wasn’t right for the task, and the absence of the honda was noticeable, but he could spin it well enough for the noose to stay open. He dropped his left hand from the rope and kept his right hand spinning it, mostly wrist action, almost like twirling a bicycle wheel. The noose spun in a circle about one foot above the ground. Mark walked with it, testing the feel.

“Impressive,” Ridley said.

“Not really. See that wobble? No good. It’s supposed to be flat.” Mark still hadn’t looked up at him. His eyes remained on the spinning rope.

“Not the sort of trick I’d expect a Florida boy to know,” Ridley said.

“Now, see, there’s your problem. You know that I came up from Florida, that I’ve got a suntan and don’t have a good winter coat, so you assume I’m a Florida boy. But that’s not the truth.”

“So where are you from?”

“Bozeman, Cooke City, Emigrant, Laurel, and Livingston, Montana. Cody, Casper, Bridger, and Sheridan, Wyoming. Ashton, Idaho.”

“Rodeo family or something?”

“Or something.” Mark lifted his gaze from the rope up to Ridley. “My uncle Larry, he was the trick-roper. Damn good at it. Let’s see if I still have any of his touch.”

He kept the rope spinning, the noose flatter now, but his eyes were on Ridley, assessing the distance. He twirled the rope in front of him, bringing it right to left across his body, and then brought it overhead, spinning it faster and a little wider.

Ridley smiled. “Nice. You look like a real cowboy. Question is, can you do that and ride a horse at the same time?”