Fatalis

"Ha

"CB, hi," Ha

"Sorry I couldn't talk before but I've been on the phone," Caroline said. "Plus there's a deputy with me. He's interviewing one of the packers now, so I was able to catch a break. It's been a bad morning."

"I know and I'm sorry," Ha

"You're asking the wrong person," Caroline said. "I don't know what the hell's going on."

"What do you mean?" Ha

"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," Ha

"Ha

"I understand," Ha

"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?" Ha

"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," Ha

"You're welcome."

Caroline hung up. Ha

"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," Ha

"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." Ha

"Which is?"

"That this may be related to the disappearance of the engineers," Ha

Before the Wall could ask what that was, Ha

Chapter Twenty-Three

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 tu

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" tu

There was nothing inside.

Unlike the tu

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 tu

The floor of the tu

Grand made his way along the ledge to the tu

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.