Michael Koryta - Last Words

“What do you mean, he tried to hire detectives to put him in the electric chair?”

“Ridley Barnes requested an investigation in Sarah Martin’s murder so that he might know whether or not he killed her. We’ve seen a lot of odd requests, but that was a first.”

Danielle MacAlister paused, then said, “Give us a few minutes, Cecil,” dismissing the caretaker without even glancing his way. He gave a sullen nod and shuffled off, casting one look back at Mark as if to say, I told you the police would be better. She told Mark to come inside, and only when the door was closed behind him did she speak again.

“Ridley Barnes wants the case reopened?”

“That’s right. I came up to discuss things. I knew nothing about what had happened here. It was preliminary talk, nothing more, at least until people began to involve me in elaborate lies and then tried to kill me. I owe your caretaker some gratitude, by the way. If he weren’t alert on the job, I would have frozen to death down there.”

She didn’t seem to register those words. “Ridley Barnes wants the case reopened,” she echoed, and then gave a bitter laugh. “That twisted bastard.”

“Tell me about him,” Mark said. “Please. Or put me in touch with your father so I can talk to him.”

“You won’t have any luck,” she said. “My father is not very lucid these days. He had a bad stroke two years ago and has been in assisted living ever since. He might tell you stories about Trapdoor, but they’re likely to be a product of his own imagination.”

“He won’t be alone in that regard.”

She considered him in silence for a few seconds and then said, “I shouldn’t be talking to you, but I’ll go this far, despite my better judgment. You tell me about Ridley, everything you know about him, and I’ll offer the same.”

“Fair enough,” Mark said, “but why so interested, Danielle?”

“My father was engaged to Diane Martin,” Danielle MacAlister said. “Sarah and I would have been stepsisters, Mr. Novak. Instead, by the next summer, Sarah was in a casket, and Diane had left my father. Meanwhile, Ridley Barnes is free and clear. Do you still have any questions as to why I’m so interested? ”

“No,” Mark said. “No, I don’t think so. Let’s talk about Ridley.”

He told her. Everything that she asked and that he could answer, he told her.

“I’ve got to defend myself against the lies that have been told,” he concluded when she seemed to have run out of questions. “But more than that? There are people who should pay for what happened here, but I’m not one of them. I won’t play that role.”

She listened to that in silence.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s what I can give you. Every answer I have, you’ve heard. Your turn. Tell me about the Ridley Barnes you know.”

She hesitated, then turned from him. “Follow me. I can show you Ridley. I can show you where the whole ugly mess began.”

The basement was unfinished with walls of rough concrete block, cool and dimly lit. Metal stools without backs sat before an old workbench with a set of steel vises. An ancient La-Z-Boy recliner was in the corner of the room beside a minifridge from the same era, unplugged. Twin file cabinets stood against one wall beneath a bare lightbulb with a pull chain that produced dim light. The walls were lined with maps.

“The basement was my father’s sacred ground,” Danielle said. “Where all the grand plans were made. Where he looked at those maps and dreamed of success.”

“What was success, in his mind?”

“Something bigger,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Isn’t that always the way? The small want to be big, the big want to be monstrous, and the monstrous...” She ran out of orders of magnitude, leaving monstrous to be the end of the growth cycle.

Mark walked to the wall and studied the hand-drawn maps.

“Chronological order, from left to right,” Danielle MacAlister said. “The first ones were done by a group. You’ll see the names on there. Then you’ll see what it turned into.”

Mark moved from left to right, passing across the years of Trapdoor. Many of the maps — most, even — were redundant, the only difference being changes to dimensions of chambers or passages, with few new discoveries. Most of the discovering in the early days had been done by Pershing MacAlister, Tyler Spatta, Dave Everton, and Joseph Anderson. Their names were noted on all the maps, and each was signed by the party who’d created the physical drawing — MacAlister had less skill but paid more attention to detail; Anderson had crafted far better images, but MacAlister had gone back through and corrected his measurements. The artist and the engineer working in tandem.

“Who were these three?” Mark asked. “Beyond your father, who are these guys?”

“Local cavers. When the place was first discovered, he recruited a team to help him explore it. Then he came across Ridley Barnes, who was supposed to be the best caver in the area and the most experienced with exploration teams. The others were willing to work with him, but Ridley had his own set of rules. He wasn’t going to volunteer for the job, like everyone else had, and he was going to work alone. I don’t know how much you understand about caves?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Okay. Well, cave exploration, or digs, the trips to try and find new passages, they’re incredibly dangerous if not done properly. People always work in teams. For a man to insist on working alone is beyond foolish. But that was Ridley.”

“Why did your father agree to it, then?”

She sat on one of the stools in front of the workbench. “He got protective.”

“Of what?”

“The potential, I suppose. He had a theory that there was something truly massive waiting to be found in there. Something that would make the existing tour cave portion look like child’s play. Ridley promised him secrecy — I’ve reviewed the confidentiality agreements and contracts they signed — but in exchange, he was paid for his work, and he was allowed to do it alone. For nine months, Trapdoor was Ridley’s full-time job. He said it was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. That ended two weeks before Sarah was killed.”

The final sets of maps were signed by Ridley and drawn with remarkable skill and attention to detail and scale; here, engineer and artist were combined in one man. Here, also, the rate of discovery accelerated. The original chambers and passages remained, but every so often an entirely new section would appear. Seeing the cave grow on the maps this way was a bizarre, fascinating thing, like watching a chronological series of fetal ultrasounds, except that the cave had always been there and needed only to be discovered.

Some of the chambers had names — the Funnel Room, the Chapel Room — and others did not. The stream flowing through the middle was labeled Greenglass River. Danielle, following his index finger as he traced along, said, “Ridley came up with that name. Most of the names are my father’s ideas. The Chapel Room and Greenglass River belong to Ridley.”

Outside the mouth of the cave, Greenglass River changed to Maiden Creek.

“Maiden Creek? That’s really what it’s called?”

“Yes,” Danielle said. “Supposedly named after a beautiful young pioneer girl who drowned in it while running from the Indians.”

Mark felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. His face must have showed it, because Danielle said, “Why is that a problem for you?”

Because when my mother decided to be an Indian, she named herself Snow Creek Maiden, he thought, so if I’m standing beside Maiden Creek in the snow, maybe Ridley is right. When dangerous things stop feeling like coincidences, what’s the term for that?